Tag: Donnie Twoscoops

  • The ambassador’s residence was being painted

    Corrupt at every opportunity, that’s Trump’s motto. He’s so corrupt he has Mike Pence staying at his Irish golf hotel on the far side of Ireland from where Pence needs to be to do the job he’s supposed to be doing. All to put more $$$$$ in Donnie Two-Scoops’s pocket.

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    Pence spent both Monday and Tuesday nights at Trump International Golf Links & Hotel in Doonbeg, in a small town on Ireland’s southwest coast, returning to the village after meetings with Ireland’s top elected officials.

    Southwest coast. Dublin is on the east coast. Yes Ireland is a small country but it’s not so small that that’s a sensible way to do things.

    Pence defended that decision — which required him to fly to Dublin and back on Air Force Two — by saying that he wanted to visit Doonbeg so that he could have dinner with his family at Morrissey’s, a pub here owned by a distant cousin.

    At our expense. No, that’s not how that’s supposed to work, even if it were true, which it isn’t.

    For Pence, the choice to stay in Doonbeg meant about four hours in transit. On Tuesday, he spent one hour in a motorcade from the golf resort to Shannon Airport, then another hour or so on the 140-mile flight to Dublin, then took another motorcade to his meetings. Then he did it all over again, in reverse, that evening.

    When he could have stayed at a hotel in Dublin, as a normal person would have.

    For Trump, however, that itinerary meant more revenue, as U.S. taxpayers paid for rooms for Pence and his traveling party.

    Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, said that Trump himself had suggested that Pence stay at the Trump hotel, after hearing about Pence’s trip.

    “It’s like when we went through the trip, it’s like, ‘Well, he’s going to Doonbeg because that’s where the Pence family is from,’ ” Short said Tuesday. “It’s like, ‘Well, you should stay at my place.’ ”

    “It wasn’t like a, ‘You must.’ It wasn’t like, ‘You have to,’ ” Short said. He added that the government had negotiated room rates with Trump’s hotel.

    It’s still grotesquely corrupt and not how they are supposed to do things. It’s indefensible! “It’s like, ‘Well, you should stay at my place’ ” and spend lots and lots of money at my shitty golf resort hours away from where you’ll be conducting government business. Or, actually, not.

    Trump himself visited the Doonbeg golf course earlier this year, during a trip to Europe to commemorate the anniversary of the D-Day landings. Trump skipped Dublin altogether and instead met with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar at an airport close to Doonbeg.

    That means twice in one year, American leaders have now visited a quiet village in County Clare and stayed at a once-obscure golf resort that Irish business filings show has not turned a profit in years.

    Because Trump is that greedy and that indifferent to the rules.

    Representative Ted Lieu:

    Hey @VP @mike_pence: You took an oath to the Constitution, not to
    @realDonaldTrump. Funneling taxpayer money to @POTUS by staying at this Trump resort is sooooooo corrupt.

    Also, I hope you don’t encounter bedbugs. Many people say there are lots of bedbugs at Trump properties.

    This isn’t even one of those tacit norms, it’s written down.

    The Constitution bars presidents from taking “any other Emolument from the United States” beyond the presidential salary. Trump’s critics have charged that he is violating that provision when his hotels take payments from the federal government.

    …

    The last vice president to visit Dublin was Joe Biden, in 2016: He stayed at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, according to news coverage.

    Considerably cheaper, and didn’t enrich his boss.

  • The Trump administration has hired dozens of former lobbyists

    They gave up on one fight while Donnie Twoscoops was out of town.

    The White House unexpectedly backed down Friday in a confrontation with the government’s top ethics officer, announcing it will publicly disclose waivers that have been quietly handed out since January to let certain former lobbyists work in the administration.

    The reversal came after the White House wrote last week to the Office of Government Ethics and asked its director to suspend his request for copies of the waivers. Such waivers are needed when officials want to work on policies or other government issues that they were directly involved in recently as private-sector lobbyists or industry lawyers.

    The debate over the waivers — which were routinely made public during the Obama administration — has drawn heightened attention as the Trump administration has hired dozens of former lobbyists and lawyers, and is frequently placing them into jobs that overlap with the work they did for paying clients.

    Like this guy for instance:

    Michael Catanzaro, who until early this year worked as a lobbyist for a coal-burning electric utility and an oil and gas company, among other clients. He is now the top White House policy official overseeing the rollback of the same environmental protection rules he had lobbied against. So far this year, the Trump administration has not said if Mr. Catanzaro was given a waiver, as it was keeping them confidential.

    Scuzzy enough? Companies that make money from coal, oil and gas don’t like environmental protection rules that cut into their profits, so lobbyists for such companies should not move to government jobs that have to do with those environmental protection rules. When they go to work for the government they should be working for the public good, not the private good of companies that make money from coal, oil and gas.

    Walter M. Shaub Jr., the head of the Office of Government Ethics, said Friday evening that he was glad that the White House had changed its position, as it will allow his agency, and the public at large, to better evaluate if Trump administration officials are complying with the ethics rules.

    But he also made clear that there should not have been a need for a confrontation before these waivers were made public.

    “This really is routine stuff, and I am glad we are back on track again,” said Mr. Shaub, who is in the final year of a five-year appointment overseeing the agency, which does not have subpoena power.

    It should be routine, but when you have a scuzzy corrupt real estate hustler as president, anti-corruption rules are no longer routine.

    Norman Eisen, who served as the White House ethics adviser at the start of the Obama administration, said this represented a clear reversal of the earlier position, which he said had clearly implied to federal agency heads that they should hold off from complying.

    Mr. Eisen and other ethics lawyers said they believed that the Trump administration — even after promising to “drain the swamp” — had instead looked for ways to place former lobbyists and industry lawyers into jobs from which they could help former clients get special favors, be it in the energy industry or on Wall Street.

    “It’s a victory for checks and balances, the rule of law and the independent oversight of the Office of Government Ethics, and the news media,” Mr. Eisen said. ”With any bully, when you punch them in the nose, they back down.”

    Or else they take to Twitter and accuse you of crimes.

    Former senior officials with the Office of Government Ethics said that in the 39-year history of the agency, which was created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, they could not remember an instance in which the White House had similarly tried to block, or even to discourage, an effort to collect ethics compliance data.

    Trump is special that way.

  • That promise? Not doing it.

    Oh and that thing about the Trump Organization donating the profits from its DC hotel to the Treasury Department? It’s not going to do that. It doesn’t want to.

    In early January, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer promised that the Trump Organization would donate hotel profits from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury. It was Trump’s way of trying to relieve concerns about receiving foreign emoluments without giving up his stake in his company. “This way it is the American people who will profit,” the lawyer said.

    Less than six months later, the Trump Organization has said it does not plan to fulfill that promise. The announcement comes by way of a newly released pamphlet from the Trump Organization that implicitly calls the original promise a big dumb idea.

    Why? Because you’d have to ask them, and they wouldn’t like that. They’re there to have a Luxury Experience and to bribe the president, and they don’t want to be bothered with a lot of questions from people at the front desk. It would ruin the brand.

    So instead, the Trump Organization will only include obvious payments from foreign governments when making its donation. Profits that are more difficult to link to a foreign government — those from state-owned businesses that isn’t obviously state-owned, for example — would remain with the Trump Organization. The burden of flagging payments from foreign governments, the Trump Organization appears to be suggesting, is on foreign governments, not the company itself.

    As Maryland representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, wrote in a letter to the Trump Organization, that’s a woefully inadequate setup. “Under the policy outlined in this pamphlet, foreign governments could provide prohibited emoluments to President Trump, for example through organizations such as RT, the propaganda arm of the Russian government,” he wrote. “Those payments would not be tracked in any way and would be hidden from the American public.”

    Yes but the brand. The brand is everything. The brand brings in millions just by being the brand. Have some respect.

  • Just so you understand

    Look at this imbecile.

    After an appearance alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, President Donald Trump paused to push back against reports that he had disclosed highly classified information to the Russians.

    “Just so you understand, I never mentioned the word or the name ‘Israel’,’” Trump told reporters in Jerusalem. “Never mentioned it during that conversation. They were all saying I did. So you had another story wrong. Never mentioned the word ‘Israel’.”

    He told them it using his tiny stunted repertoire of gestures – the pinch on “never mentioned,” the point on “during that conversation.” The two little hands pushing at the invisible barrier on “Never mentioned the word ‘Israel’.” The gestures always underline how stupid he is.

    The story Trump was reacting to was this one, which ran a week ago in the Washington Post. And the thing about that story is that, well, the word “Israel” is never mentioned. Not one time.

    Of course it’s not. If it had been I wouldn’t have guessed Saudi Arabia. The fact that it was Israel was kept under wraps for some hours after the story appeared.

    In a follow-up story, the New York Times reported — citing anonymous sources — that the information that Trump had passed along had come to the United States from Israel. But even in that piece there is no allegation that Trump mentioned the word “Israel” in his Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

    Trump is the denying an allegation that, literally, no news organization made. He’s also implicitly confirming that, yes, he did talk to the Russians about classified information.

    But that’s ok, because he’s Trump, and his “base” will think he made a meaningful point, and it will go on this way until he kills us all.

  • Magic moments

    Keep pressing it. Don’t let go. Whatever you do, don’t lose contact. Grab it. Grab it hard. Grab it like a president.

    Image result for trump orb

    Via the Post.

    Updating to add one more, that captures his innocent awe and wonder:

    Image result for trump orb

  • Who you calling a nut job?

    I’ve been away for a few hours – anything new?

    Not much – just Trump telling Lavrov and Kislyak that Comey is a “nut job” and a White House official being a suspect in the Russia investigation. Just another day in the world of Donnie Twoscoops. (Double meaning there, geddit?)

    The Times scoop:

    President Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office this month that firing the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a document summarizing the meeting.

    “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

    Trump calls Comey a nut job. In Trump world, Trump is reasonable and Comey is a nut job.

    Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”

    The conversation, during a May 10 meeting — the day after he fired Mr. Comey — reinforces the notion that Mr. Trump dismissed him primarily because of the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives. Mr. Trump said as much in one televised interview, but the White House has offered changing justifications for the firing.

    Which helps its credibility a lot.

    The White House document that contained Mr. Trump’s comments was based on notes taken from inside the Oval Office and has been circulated as the official account of the meeting.

    So they’re proud of it then.

    Spicey didn’t dispute the story.

    In a statement, he said that Mr. Comey had put unnecessary pressure on the president’s ability to conduct diplomacy with Russia on matters such as Syria, Ukraine and the Islamic State.

    “By grandstanding and politicizing the investigation into Russia’s actions, James Comey created unnecessary pressure on our ability to engage and negotiate with Russia,” Mr. Spicer said.

    Wtf? What is this “grandstanding” crap? I hate what Comey did in October and I hate it that he says he’d do it again, but how is investigating Russian meddling in our election “grandstanding” as opposed to doing his job?

    A third government official briefed on the meeting defended the president, saying Mr. Trump was using a negotiating tactic when he told Mr. Lavrov about the “pressure” he was under. The idea, the official suggested, was to create a sense of obligation with Russian officials and to coax concessions out of Mr. Lavrov — on Syria, Ukraine and other issues — by saying that Russian meddling in last year’s election had created enormous political problems for Mr. Trump.

    Oh, please.

    The president has been adamant that the meddling did not alter the outcome of the race, but it has become a political cudgel for his opponents.

    He can be as adamant as he likes, it makes no difference. He can’t possibly know that the meddling did not alter the outcome of the race. Insisting on it doesn’t make it true.

    With all the glass he broke in that one meeting, just imagine what he’s going to get up to on this trip he just started. We may be at war by Sunday.