Tag: Trump

  • The dignity of the office

    We’re going full-schoolyard now, it seems.

    The Post reports that Pelosi said today she wished his family would do an intervention. (Don’t we all? One that entails his immediate permanent incarceration in a facility of their choice?)

    Speaking at the White House Thursday afternoon, Trump dismissed the comment as a “very sort of a nasty type statement,” argued he was calm at the Wednesday session and called Pelosi “crazy Nancy.”

    “She’s not the same person. She’s lost it,” he said.

    It will be hair-pulling and biting next.

  • Hamburg is in Germany??

    Trump this morning.

    Let’s pause to remember just one thing. The guy who composed that tweet is the guy who decided to make Rex Tillerson Secretary of State. If Tillerson was indeed totally ill-prepared and ill-equipped to be Secretary of State, then why did Trump decide to appoint him Secretary of State?

    From that question, another follows. Clearly Trump didn’t think of that when he composed the tweet. Trump somehow managed to compose and post a tweet saying the guy he first appointed Secretary of State was totally ill-prepared and ill-equipped to be Secretary of State without realizing how that would reflect on him. How can you be that stupid and remember how to breathe?

    I don’t know. Sarah Sanders refuses to discuss it.

    Sarah Sanders declined to answer Thursday why President Donald Trump appointed Rex Tillerson as secretary of state despite saying he was “totally ill prepared” for the job.

    And ill qualified. Don’t forget that part.

    Tillerson has spoken little about his time in the administration since leaving last year. However, reports Wednesday claimed that Tillerson had met with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and told them that Trump was, according to The Washington Post, out-prepared by Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

    Therefore, as sure as eggs is eggs, Trump retorted publicly on Twitter, blithely failing to notice that he was admitting gross incompetence.

    Minuted later Sanders appeared for an interview on CNN and was asked why, if Tillerson was so “ill prepared and ill equipped,” the president nominated him in the first place.

    “Look, the President’s meeting with Putin went extremely well,” Sanders responded, declining to answer the meat of the question. “The president has made clear that having a relationship with the president of Russia is better than not having one.”

    Look, that wasn’t the question. Look, you can’t hide the fact that you’re not answering the question by answering a different question that nobody asked. Look, it doesn’t make you any more credible to start your non-responsive response with “Look.” Look, you’re a lying hack and should go back to Arkansas, never to be seen again.

  • No one ever even sat down

    How this morning went:

    Interesting. Democrats arrive for a meeting so Trump’s people summon reporters to the Rose Garden. Is there a flower ceremony?

    Trump has called an impromptu presser just as Democrats arrive for a meeting? And if it’s impromptu, how can there be signs ready?

    Dems have arrived to discuss infrastructure, while reporters are summoned to an “impromptu” presser featuring graphics about the Mueller investigation. None of this makes sense.

    Ah. So it wasn’t impromptu at all. It was fake-impromptu. Real tantrum, fake impromptu press gathering.

    Planned childish display of rudeness and refusal to do his one job.

  • Trump is backing them into a corner

    If they’re just going to keep ignoring subpoenas…

    The Washington Post’s Rachael Bade and Mike DeBonis report that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) argued to Pelosi Monday night that Congress should open an impeachment inquiry into Trump.

    …

    And it’s not just Nadler coming around to the idea that Congress may have no choice but to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump. On Monday, five members of Pelosi’s leadership team also urged her to consider impeachment proceedings.

    There are pragmatic reasons for doing so, in addition to or instead of the obvious He’s A Criminal one.

    Instead, these influential lawmakers see two more practical reasons to open impeachment inquiries: 1) saying the “i” word would help them make their case to the courts to get key information in their investigations, and 2) Trump is backing them into a corner by blocking all those investigations.

    To break those down a bit:

    Trump is blocking every investigation of significance that Congress has into him and his administration. (Twenty so far, a Washington Post analysis finds.) Congress is going to the courts — already with some success — to get what they want. But they are at risk of losing some key court fights such as the one to get the unredacted Mueller report. Congress could strengthen its hand by starting impeachment proceedings. Grand jury information, which makes up much of the redactions in the report, is typically kept secret except for judicial proceedings. Impeachment is a trial, so saying the “i” word would turn Congress into a judiciary body (instead of a legislative one) and thus strengthen its case for why it needs to see the underlying grand jury testimony that makes up the Mueller report.

    Which, I guess, would at least mean Trump’s people would have to stop repeating “no legitimate legislative purpose” until we all scream.

    Some of these Democrats on the Judiciary Committee argue that if Congress wants to assert its constitutionally mandated oversight authority over this president — and future presidents —- it has no choice but to launch an impeachment inquiry. On Tuesday, former White House counsel Donald McGahn ignored a subpoena and didn’t show up to a House hearing. He’s a key witness in the Mueller report about Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel and then lie about it. Rep Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), a Judiciary Committee member who agrees with those who made their case to Pelosi, told The Post Monday: “If the answer is, ‘No, you can’t talk to anyone, you can’t have anything, we’re simply not going to cooperate,’ then at that point the only avenue that we have left is the constitutional means to enforce the separation of powers, which is a serious discussion of impeachment.”

    Which doesn’t mean they actually want to impeach him, which many of them don’t, because they fear the political blowback.

    Why it isn’t glaringly obvious to everyone that this dangerous criminal maniac needs to be bundled out of there as soon as possible is simply beyond me.

  • A slap in the face to everyone who didn’t commit war crimes

    Jake Tapper on Trump’s pardoning war criminals:

    Precisely.

  • But executives at Deutsche Bank looked the other way

    Bang: now there’s a lede:

    Anti-money laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.

    Oh really. Then what happened?

    The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.

    But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government.

    We’ve heard before that DB covered for Trump, but this is quite specific.

    Real estate developers like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner sometimes do large, all-cash deals, including with people outside the United States, any of which can prompt anti-money laundering reviews. The red flags raised by employees do not necessarily mean the transactions were improper. Banks sometimes opt not to file suspicious activity reports if they conclude their employees’ concerns are unwarranted.

    But former Deutsche Bank employees said the decision not to report the Trump and Kushner transactions reflected the bank’s generally lax approach to money laundering laws. The employees — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their ability to work in the industry — said it was part of a pattern of the bank’s executives rejecting valid reports to protect relationships with lucrative clients.

    Well…”lucrative”…but Trump defaulted on DB loans repeatedly. They loaned him billions and he didn’t pay it all back. It’s hard to see quite what’s so “lucrative”…

    Trump’s people and Kushner’s people say it’s all lies, New York Times, fake news, squirrel, ice cream.

    Read on. It’s all incredibly sleazy.

  • On charges of shooting unarmed civilians

    What fresh horror is this?

    Donald Trump has asked for files to be prepared on pardoning several US military members accused of or convicted of war crimes, including one slated to stand trial on charges of shooting unarmed civilians while in Iraq, the New York Times reported.

    War crimes. My god. What next? Is he going to try to overturn the Nuremberg convictions? Declare sainthood for Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler? Hang portraits of Milošević and Mladić in the East Room? Erect statues of Stalin and Pol Pot in the Rose Garden?

    According to the Times, which cited two unnamed US officials, Trump requested the immediate preparation of paperwork needed, indicating he is considering pardons for the men around Memorial Day on 27 May.

    Assembling pardon files normally takes months but the justice department has pressed for the work to be completed before the holiday weekend, one of the officials said.

    One request is for Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher of the Navy Seals, who is scheduled to stand trial in coming weeks on charges of shooting unarmed civilians and killing an enemy captive with a knife while deployed in Iraq.

    Also believed to be included is Major Mathew Golsteyn, an Army Green Beret accused of killing an unarmed Afghan in 2010, the Times said.

    Reuters could not immediately identify a way to contact Gallagher and Golsteyn.

    This is monstrous. It’s evil. It announces to the world that we consider ourselves entitled to murder anyone anywhere in the world who gets in our way. It turns the whole country into the reeking den of cruelty and crime that is the Trump syndicate.

    Image result for viet man shot

  • Reminding him of the president’s fondness for Flynn

    The reason for Trump’s sudden new panic about Flynn, and his deranged threats to imprison Obama and Sally Yates and anyone else who warned him about Flynn while he didn’t listen, is even more startling than the panic and threats. It’s because a federal judge ruled yesterday that that part of the Mueller report must be made public.

    A federal judge on Thursday ordered that prosecutors make public a transcript of a phone call that former national security adviser Michael Flynn tried hard to hide with a lie: his conversation with a Russian ambassador in late 2016.

    U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington ordered the government also to provide a public transcript of a November 2017 voice mail involving Flynn. In that sensitive call, President Trump’s attorney left a message for Flynn’s attorney reminding him of the president’s fondness for Flynn at a time when Flynn was considering cooperating with federal investigators. . . . Sullivan also ordered that still-redacted portions of the Mueller report that relate to Flynn be given to the court and made public.

    Uh oh. “Reminding him of the president’s fondness for Flynn” – that’s witness tampering.

    Jennifer Rubin explains:

    The voice mail was from John Dowd, President Trump’s former personal lawyer who, according to The Post, “tried to learn whether Flynn had any problematic information about the president after Flynn’s attorney signaled his client might begin cooperating with Mueller’s investigators.”

    The kicker: “In one of the previously redacted filings released Thursday, prosecutors said Flynn described multiple episodes in which ‘he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could have affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation.’ ”

    This may be the most significant revelation since we learned of the president’s efforts to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Even Attorney General William P. Barr conceded in his infamous memo to the Justice Department, “Obviously, the President and any other official can commit obstruction in this classic sense of sabotaging a proceeding’s truth-finding function. Thus, for example, if a President knowingly destroys or alters evidence, suborns perjury, or induces a witness to change testimony, or commits any act deliberately impairing the integrity or availability of evidence, then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction.” Barr also told Senate Judiciary Committee members during his confirmation hearing that it would be illegal for a president to coach a witness or persuade a witness to change testimony.

    The disclosure, of course, raises serious questions as to why Barr redacted this material in the report, and why evidence that Trump did precisely what Barr said was illegal did not convince him that the president had obstructed justice.

    Good god. These people.

    Even if we are not talking about criminal liability, the episode points to Trump’s unfitness for office. Former prosecutor Joyce White Vance tells me, “Knowing that the President’s lawyers sought to discourage Flynn from cooperating with prosecutors underscores how fundamentally flawed this presidency is. Mob bosses try to keep their associates from helping law enforcement uncover crimes, not presidents.”

    But if you make a guy who has always operated like a mob boss president, then you get a mob boss president. And here we are.

  • Too scared to tipe all the words rite

    It appears that Donnie Two-scoops is sweating.

    All of Twitter, with one voice:

    YOU WERE TOLD

  • A President Like No Other

    More “I can do anything I want to” from President Crook:

    President Donald Trump has granted a full pardon to Conrad Black, the former press baron and one-time society fixture who was found guilty of fraud and obstruction of justice in 2007.

    …

    …Black is a personal friend and the author of pro-Trump opinion pieces as well as a flattering book, Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.

    Oh he’s like no other all right.

    Sanders described Black, who also once owned the Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post and The Telegraph in London, as “an entrepreneur and scholar” who “has made tremendous contributions to business, as well as to political and historical thought.”

    She also cited support for Black from Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state; Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host and a frequent golf partner of the president’s; and musician Elton John.

    Well with endorsements like that…

  • For what is essentially a law-enforcement purpose

    Trump’s lawyers are claiming that Congress can’t investigate Trump’s corruption.

    Lawyers for President Donald Trump and the House clashed Tuesday in federal court over the extent of Congress’ power to investigate him in the first legal test of Trump’s effort to block sprawling probes of his finances and private business.

    Trump wants a judge to prevent a congressional committee from obtaining financial records from his longtime accountant, Mazars USA.

    He’s the president, dammit! He’s busy! He has a lot of Fox to watch, a lot of golf to play, a lot of ice cream to gobble, a lot of insult-tweets to tweet. He can’t be worrying about Congress finding out exactly how crooked he is.

    Trump and his namesake businesses filed a lawsuit last month asking U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to revoke a subpoena issued by the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Trump’s lawyers accused the Democratic-controlled committee of abusing their power and said there was no legislative purpose for the request.

    …

    Trump’s personal lawyer, William Consovoy, argued repeatedly that Congress was seeking the president’s financial information for what is essentially a law-enforcement purpose – which was outside its authority – rather than to work on legislation. The subpoena sought Trump’s financial records to look for inconsistencies in his financial disclosure forms, and whether he misstated his holdings for loans that could leave him beholden to foreigners.

    If Consovoy’s theory is correct then we might as well admit that we’re a dictatorship right now.

    At one point, Mehta asked whether Congress could investigate if the president was engaged in corrupt behavior in office.

    “I don’t think that’s the proper subject of investigation as to the president,” Consovoy said, although executive agencies could be investigated.

    Mehta sounded incredulous, asking whether Congress could have investigated Watergate, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation, and Whitewater, which led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

    That’s what they’re aiming for: total immunity from all investigations and checks of any kind. The rules of course will change if ever a Democrats manages to get elected despite all the gerrymandering and ballot-misplacing.

  • Perfectly

    Now it’s Wray’s turn.

    Donald Trump told reporters Tuesday he “didn’t understand” FBI Director Christopher Wray’s “ridiculous” answer that the FBI didn’t spy when looking into then-candidate Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election.

    “I didn’t understand [Wray’s] answer,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn. “I thought the attorney general answered it perfectly. So I certainly didn’t understand that answer. I thought it was a ridiculous answer.”

    Trump has claimed the FBI “spied” on his campaign and that subsequent investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, including by special counsel Robert Mueller, were part of an “attempted coup” against him. Attorney General Bill Barr has also pushed that narrative, telling lawmakers last month that “spying did occur.”

    “Well, it’s not the term I would use. Lots of people have different colloquial phrases,” Wray said during testimony before a Senate appropriations subcommittee. “I believe that the FBI is engaged in investigative activity, and part of investigative activity includes surveillance.”

    Barr is Wray’s boss, but on the other hand Barr is now thoroughly compromised. He can fire Wray but he can’t salvage his reputation. He must not care about the reputation.

    Other former FBI officials have backed Wray’s stance. Former FBI Director James Comey told CBS This Morning earlier this month that the bureau “doesn’t spy” and that he “had no idea” why Barr used that language to describe agents’ investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign.

    “I have no idea what [Barr’s] talking about. The FBI doesn’t spy. The FBI investigates,” Comey said.

    No idea? None at all? I bet he does. Barr is talking about whatever it takes to shield Trump.

  • More filth

    Barr is doing what Trump hired him to do.

    Attorney General William P. Barr has tapped John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to investigate the origins of the special counsel’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

    Barr picked Durham in recent weeks to work on the review, which is designed to ensure the U.S. government’s “intelligence collection activities” related to the Trump campaign were “lawful and appropriate,” a person familiar with the decision said.

    That is, to search for some excuse to pretend that the U.S. government’s “intelligence collection activities” related to the Trump campaign were not “lawful and appropriate.”

    In the weeks since the release of the report, Trump and his allies have launched a new rallying cry: “Investigate the investigators.”

    Trump’s campaign is publicly calling for criminal investigations into former FBI officials and is making “spygate” fundraising pitches, seeking to turn the tables and transform the Russia investigation into a political asset instead of a liability.

    And the new Attorney General is helping Trump and his allies and his campaign to do that. You wouldn’t think that would be the job of the US Attorney General, but in Trump world it is.

  • Today’s “great honor”

    For today’s adventure in trending authoritarian we have Trump snuggling up to Orbán.

    The Guardian adds:

    So what’s so special about that Orbán meeting? Well for one thing it fits into a pattern of Trump cosying up to authoritarian leaders – see Vladimir Putin, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, to name but three.

    Orbán, the far-right Hungarian prime minister, has been accused of attacks on the media, minorities and the courts. He was snubbed by both Barack Obama and George W Bush, while last year the European parliament voted to bring disciplinary proceedings against Hungary for putting the rule of law at risk.

    As the New York Times put it: “[Orbán’s] welcome at the White House is seen by Mr Trump’s critics as emblematic of the president’s preference for strongman leaders who seek to undermine the liberal international order.”

    Putin, Bolsonaro, MsB, also Xi, Kim, Netanyahu, Erdoğan, not to mention Joe Arpaio.

  • He’s already telegraphing it

    David Frum writes that if Trump had been smart – gosh these wild hypotheticals, huh? – he would have embraced the Mueller report, apologized for mistakes, promised to learn from them, condemned Russian interference, moved on.

    But that is not the Trump way. The Trump way is to escalate, always.

    Over the four weeks between the Barr letter and the release of the redacted Mueller report, Trump kept insisting that the Mueller report said more than it did. It said, in effect: We didn’t find sufficient evidence to charge your campaign with conspiracy, and our internal Department of Justice policies forbid us from charging you with obstruction. He wanted it to say: You did nothing wrong. He wanted it to say: Actually Donald, you were the real victim here—and Hillary Clinton the true criminal conspirator.”

    Trump has tried to close that gap by lying about it—and by demanding that other people lie, too. When they don’t and won’t, Trump gets angry. And when Trump gets angry, he takes to Twitter.

    Trump got extra angry Sunday night. Uncheered by Mother’s Day, the president launched into a sequence of rage tweets that included the line: “The FBI has no leadership.” Trump has fired one FBI director, James Comey, for looking into the Russia matter. He fired an acting director, Andrew McCabe, for the same apparent reason. Apparently, he is now gunning for the present director, Chris Wray.

    Just keep firing and firing and firing until you get one who will obey. It’s slow work, but it’s got to be done.

    What Trump means by leadership is compliance. He wants an FBI director who serves him personally the way Attorney General Barr has served him personally. So long as the FBI retains its integrity, Trump feels unsafe. He cannot close the case, because he keeps hearing scratching sounds from inside. He cannot move on, because he keeps looking back in fear. His next move? He’s already telegraphing it: another attack on the independence of law enforcement.

    He doesn’t seem to realize that it makes a difference that we can see him doing it, because he keeps announcing that he’s doing it.

  • Dear Diary, it’s McGahn’s turn

    Whoops, it’s McGahn’s turn under the bus.

    He was though. He tried to fire Robert Mueller, and failed only because the people around him prevented him. One of those people was McGahn.

    Also if Trump has never been a big fan, why did he make McGahn his White House counsel? Besides the fact that nobody any good would touch it with a bargepole?

    But Trump has such a rich array of worst instincts that he still had plenty of them to work with.

  • Trump will create a new constitutional norm

    Jeffrey Toobin points out that our constitutional system wasn’t set up to deal with a Trump.

    The Framers anticipated friction among the three branches of government, which has been a constant throughout our history, but the Trump White House has now established a complete blockade against the legislative branch, thwarting any meaningful oversight. The system, it appears, may simply be incapable of responding to this kind of challenge.

    So the framers didn’t plan for assholes, aka malignant narcissists, aka psychopaths. Bit of a mistake, that.

    Federal judges deal with disputes between Congress and the White House one case at a time, but that won’t do with this blockade.

    But this approach by the courts—adjudicating one Administration claim of defiance at a time—will miss the point in the current era. There has never been a President who directed an open campaign of total defiance against another branch of government. It is simply misleading to consider these claims in isolation from one another, because the President has acknowledged that they are part of a coördinated campaign. The law has no clear mechanism for adjudicating these claims together—but they belong together. Trump is leading a political campaign, and it calls for a political, not just judicial, response.

    The most obvious political response to Trump’s defiance of Congress—and thus of the norms of constitutional history—is impeachment. One article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon accused him of failing “without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas.” But the Trump Administration is likely to fight all subpoenas in court and wait for resolution there; only then will it be possible to say whether the resistance to all subpoenas is “without lawful cause.” And these cases will drag on. Indeed, Administration lawyers know that bad arguments, as well as good ones, can tie up the courts for months, if not years. (The litigation over Holder and the Fast and Furious documents just ended—after seven years.) Democratic leaders in the House are already skeptical, for political reasons, of pursuing impeachment, and lingering, unresolved disputes in the courts will make a push to remove the President even less likely.

    So, after nearly two and a half centuries, Trump will create a new constitutional norm—in which the executive can defy the legislature without consequence.

    Fabulous.

  • Only the beginning

    Paul Waldman on Rudy’s junket:

    There are some news stories so jaw-dropping that you have to read them two or three times to make sure you’re not hallucinating. So it is with a story in the New York Times in which Rudolph W. Giuliani announces to the world that he is going to Ukraine to pressure that country’s government to use its official resources to assist in President Trump’s reelection effort — by mounting an investigation he hopes will produce dirt on Joe Biden.

    Yes, Trump is trying to collude with a foreign government in an attempt to aid his campaign by creating negative stories about a potential opponent. Again.

    Well, it worked the first time, so why wouldn’t they do it again? Apart from laws, rules, norms, customs, ethics, morality, scruples, conscience, what possible reason could there be?

    This is like a crew of bank robbers stopping on their way into the bank to hold a news conference to announce that they’re going to hold the customers at gunpoint, tie up the tellers, blow the door to the safe, grab the money, then escape through the back entrance where their getaway car is waiting. Any questions?

    It’s like that but with the addition that the majority of the cops belong to the political party that is pro-bank robbers.

    I’ve argued that Trump is going to mobilize the resources of the federal government to destroy his eventual opponent. Trump has already told Sean Hannity that Attorney General William P. Barr is looking into what he called “incredible” charges involving Ukraine and Hillary Clinton, no doubt at his suggestion. This is only the beginning of what Trump is going to pull, and there’s every reason to think that he feels utterly unrestrained by law or ethics.

    Like the fact that he tells us so every day, often in a raucous shout.

  • Rudy’s trip to Kiev

    Giuliani’s travel plans are raising eyebrows.

    Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, is encouraging Ukraine to wade further into sensitive political issues in the United States, seeking to push the incoming government in Kiev to press ahead with investigations that he hopes will benefit Mr. Trump.

    Mr. Giuliani said he plans to travel to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in the coming days and wants to meet with the nation’s president-elect to urge him to pursue inquiries that allies of the White House contend could yield new information about two matters of intense interest to Mr. Trump.

    One is the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The other is the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.

    Mr. Giuliani’s plans create the remarkable scene of a lawyer for the president of the United States pressing a foreign government to pursue investigations that Mr. Trump’s allies hope could help him in his re-election campaign. And it comes after Mr. Trump spent more than half of his term facing questions about whether his 2016 campaign conspired with a foreign power.

    Giuliani, when asked, says it’s perfectly fine, nothing to see here, totally normal.

    Mr. Giuliani’s planned trip, which has not been previously reported, is part of a monthslong effort by the former New York mayor and a small group of Trump allies working to build interest in the Ukrainian inquiries. Their motivation is to try to discredit the special counsel’s investigation; undermine the case against Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s imprisoned former campaign chairman; and potentially to damage Mr. Biden, the early front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

    In other words it’s mob boss shenanigans, but involving a foreign country, with the (implied? explicit?) endorsement of the US president.

    A new administration is taking over in June, and Giuliani is hoping to coax them into being Trump’s stooges.

    He said his efforts in Ukraine have the full support of Mr. Trump. He declined to say specifically whether he had briefed him on the planned meeting with Mr. Zelensky, but added, “He basically knows what I’m doing, sure, as his lawyer.”

    The White House is ignoring questions on the subject.

  • 11 is not 91

    When he wasn’t giggling joyously at the plan to shoot immigrants at the border, Trump was lying about Puerto Rico. Of course he was.

    President Donald Trump spent the opening minutes of a campaign rally in Panama City Beach, Florida on Wednesday attacking hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico for not sufficiently appreciating his administration’s relief efforts—which critics have decried as grossly inadequate—and attempting to use a bar graph to bolster his repeatedly debunked claim that the island has received a record amount of storm aid.

    “I brought a chart. Would you like to see a chart?” Trump said, pulling a piece of paper from his jacket pocket to cheers from the audience.

    “That’s Puerto Rico and they don’t like me,” said the president, pointing to a section of the bar graph purporting to show that Puerto Rico has received $91 billion in hurricane relief funding.

    As The Associated Press reported, Trump’s “number is wrong, as is his assertion that the U.S. territory has set some record for federal disaster aid. Congress has so far distributed only about $11 billion for Puerto Rico, not $91 billion.”

    Well what’s a little difference of 80 billion dollars between friends? A mere blip.

    As Common Dreams reported in March, over a million U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico have faced large cuts to food stamps and other services in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria as a relief package—which also includes disaster aid to Florida and other states—remains stalled in Congress due to opposition from Republicans and the Trump administration.

    Even in the face of the island’s devastating circumstances, Trump has reportedly said that he “doesn’t want another single dollar” going to Puerto Rico.

    How long will it be before he cheers on suggestions to shoot them?