Month: April 2019

President Donald Trump challenged statements on Friday that White House employees made, as detailed in the Robert Mueller report.

“Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the ‘Report’ about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad),” Trump wrote on Twitter.

Trump did not detail which statements by which people he was challenging, but it was clear he was upset by parts of the report that included meeting notes. He challenged them as “fabricated & totally untrue.”

The report reveals that Trump was correctly suspicious of notetaking by his White House counsel, Don McGahn, and others.

The report shares a conversation between McGahn and his habit of taking notes:

The President then asked, “What-about these notes? Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.” McGahn responded that he keeps notes because he is a “real lawyer” and explained that notes create a record and are not a bad thing. The President said, “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.

Notes from Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff, Jody Hunt, revealed in the report that Trump was deeply disturbed by the news that a special counsel was appointed to the Russia investigation.

The report reads:

According to notes written by Hunt, when Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.” The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, “How could you let this happen, Jeff?”

On Twitter, Trump cast doubt on the veracity of the notes.

“Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” he wrote:

Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue. Watch out for people that take so-called “notes,” when the notes never existed until needed. Because I never….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2019

…agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the “Report” about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad). This was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened, a…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2019

TIME magazine’s 2019 list of the world’s 100 Most Influential People, published on Wednesday, includes the self-professed “proud” anti-semitic prime minister of Malaysia, who has publicly disparaged Jews as “hook-nosed.”

The magazine praised PM Mahathir Mohamad, who took office on May 2018, for coming out of retirement after ruling Malaysia for 22 years, adding:

The formidable old warhorse dazzled during a grueling campaign, gathering vast crowds; his reliance on core values united electoral groups, and his age inspired trust in a grand man of politics.

Citing the PM’s decision to liberate the 71-year-old former leader of the opposition Anwar Ibrahim, who is expected to replace Mohamad, TIME credits him with re-establishing democracy “in a country that almost teetered into totalitarianism.”

In an October 2018 interview with BBC, Mohamad described Jews as “hook-nosed” and denied the Holocaust that killed millions of them.

“There are many races in this world, I have said nasty things about them but they never accused me of being anti-this or anti-that,” he declared in response to criticism about his anti-semitic tendencies.

Asked about his derogatory comments, he doubled down, saying, “They are hook-nosed.”

“If you are going to be truthful, the problem in the Middle East began with the creation of the State of Israel, that is the whole truth,” the Malaysian prime minister also said. He again went on to cast doubt to the Holocaust.

The Malaysian PM has on multiple occasions welcomed the anti-semite moniker, saying he is glad to be one.

In Kuala Lumpur in 2003, the PM reportedly proclaimed, “I am glad to be labeled anti-Semitic.”

“How can I be otherwise, when the Jews who so often talk of the horrors they suffered during the Holocaust show the same Nazi cruelty and hard-heartedness towards not just their enemies but even towards their allies should any try to stop the senseless killing of their Palestinian enemies?” he asked at the time.

As Prime Minister, he banned Israel from participating in a Paralympic swimming qualifier taking place in his country for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics before his government announced that Malaysia would no longer host any event that invites the state of Israel to participate at all.

 

In September 2018, some at the United Nations applauded the PM after his tirade against Israel during the General Assembly, the world’s biggest stage for peace and diplomacy.

Muhamad told the U.N.:

The world does not care even when Israel breaks international laws, seizing ships carrying medicine, food, and building materials in international waters. The Palestinians fired ineffective rockets which hurt no one. Massive retaliations were mounted by Israel, rocketing and bombing hospitals, schools and other buildings, killing innocent civilians including school children and hospital patients.

…

The world rewards Israel by deliberately provoking Palestine by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It is the anger and frustration of the Palestinians and their sympathizers that cause them to resort to what we call terrorism.

Attempting to arouse more friction between Palestinians and Jews, he argued that the creation of the Israeli state is the “root cause” of Islamic terrorism.

The majority of countries at the U.N. are pro-Palestine.

The full Mueller report is rather like a Rorschach test of your political inclinations. Conservatives tended to believe the report (mostly) exonerated President Trump, although it depended on whether you bought Attorney General William Barr’s explanation of what constituted obstruction of justice or whether you were more inclined to look at Robert Mueller’s more expansive definition of obstruction. Liberals certainly were prone to agree with Mueller’s definition.

Take this sub-headline from Wired: “If Donald Trump isn’t guilty of obstruction of justice, who ever could be?”

This depends on whether or not you believe Trump was trying to stop an investigation into Russian collusion for corrupt purposes. Given that the investigation ended up finding absolutely zero evidence of that, good luck there.

The Democrats are obviously going to try said luck; freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan (she of “we’re gonna go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherf—–!” fame) has pledged to try and impeach the president, with fellow freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being the biggest name to sign onto Tlaib’s resolution.

That’s in the Democrat-controlled House, of course. The Senate is controlled by Republicans, who’ve indicated they plan to look into how the Obama administration handled the Russia probe when it was in their hands, both in terms of preventing election interference from happening and investigating it — including getting surveillance warrants against a Trump campaign official using a dossier that had been assembled as opposition research as evidence.

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In a statement issued by the Republican National Committee on Thursday, after the full Mueller report had been released, the GOP made it clear they were targeting how the last administration handled the threat.

“Now that the entire Mueller report has been released, it’s clear how much President Obama and his administration completely dropped the ball on Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign,” Steve Guest, the GOP’s rapid response director, wrote in a blog post Thursday.

“Well before the 2016 election, the Obama admin was aware of Russia’s intentions to interfere in the 2016 [election], and decided to do absolutely nothing about it.”

Guest noted that the Obama administration was aware of potential Russian interference as early as 2014 — more than a year before President Trump announced his presidential campaign, as the Independent Journal Review pointed out.

“In July 2016, CIA Director John Brennan arranged an interagency sharing of information with top officials concerning the Russian election interference plans. By that time, officials in the Obama admin had ‘no question’ that Russian state-sponsored hackings were behind the cyberattacks and release of stolen Democrat materials,” Guest wrote.

“Obama chose not to ‘strike back’ because he wanted Russia to cooperate with the Iranian Nuclear deal.

“Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice even told two of her subordinates to ‘stand down’ and ‘knock it off’ in response to Russia meddling.”

Guest cited The Washington Post, which reported in June 2017 that the Obama administration retaliated by instituting “economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic.”

“It used to not be a partisan issue to criticize the Obama administration’s response,” Guest wrote.

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“Rep. Adam Schiff said the ‘Obama administration should have done a lot more’ about Russia’s actions. The Washington Post reported a senior Obama official described the Obama admin’s response to Russia as ‘the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend. I feel like we sort of choked.’ And Obama’s ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said, ‘The punishment did not fit the crime.’

“Bottom line: Not only did Mueller confirm that there was no collusion, we also learned the full extent of how much the Obama administration failed to act while Russia messed with America’s electoral process.”

In terms of returning this to the days of being a non-partisan issue, good luck with that. Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee has, according to his Twitter account, “formally invited Special Counsel Mueller to testify on the counterintelligence investigation,” saying that, “(a)fter a two year investigation, the public deserves the facts, not Attorney General Barr’s political spin.”

The House Intelligence Committee has formally invited Special Counsel Mueller to testify on the counterintelligence investigation.

After a two year investigation, the public deserves the facts, not Attorney General Barr’s political spin. pic.twitter.com/PWIXvl7MLv

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) April 18, 2019

The Post, meanwhile, was busy with headlines like “Paranoia, lies and fear: Trump’s presidency laid bare by Mueller report” and “Report paints a damning portrait of the Trump presidency.” Mentions of the Obama administration’s response, you might imagine, were in short supply.

Republicans, meanwhile, seem to be following the party’s lead on this one and focusing on investigating the Obama administration’s failings.

“Now that the Special Counsel investigation is completed, the American people have a right to know whether the initial investigation was in keeping with long-standing Justice Department standards — or even lawful at all,” Vice President Mike Pence said in a statement. “We must never allow our justice system to be exploited in pursuit of a political agenda.”

As for the Senate, Sen. Lindsey Graham has proposed a special counsel to look at how the former administration acted during the 2016 election process — including dealing with the Russian threat, getting a FISA warrant on Carter Page and the decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her email server.

In short, the GOP seems determined to flip the script and use the Mueller report to seek answers from the Obama administration. Whether they get them is another matter.

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The immigration system as it stands now is a honeycomb of loopholes and second chances, with illegal immigrants using an amazing array of tactics to avoid being sent back to their home countries, never having to stop until they win.

The latest tactic is pretty ugly. According to the Daily Caller:

A longtime conservative operative is calling on the Trump administration to reform the country’s visa laws after he was falsely accused of a crime he said an illegal alien charged likely in order to score a visa.

A woman in late 2016 claimed Codias Brown harassed and exposed himself to her over a two-week period and said he was seeking her out in public places, according to an arrest affidavit. The accuser, Rosa Patino-Herrera, claimed she encountered Brown — someone she didn’t know personally — around eight different times and believed he was seeking her out around the city of Austin, where he also lived.

The forensic data proved to be a game-changer. Disclosure of Brown’s phone location data showed he was nowhere near any of the locations Patino-Herrera claimed the events took place, according to court documents reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The charges were ultimately dismissed — but not until April 2018.

During the court proceedings, Patino-Herrera admitted she was an illegal immigrant. Work from a private investigator also discovered she was actively seeking a U-visa. Brown’s legal team believes she accused him in order to obtain a U-visa.

So what we are seeing is conservatives becoming attractive targets to lawbreakers seeking to win personal benefits. That was what Jussie Smollett did, seeking to win attention for himself in Chicago, by filing his false police reports smearing conservatives. He wanted a benefit from that, which is why he went to the bother of it in that sub-zero Chicago weather and faked the hate attack by what he claimed were MAGA-hat wearing conservatives, and now we see illegal immigrants now following in his footsteps.

Conservatives have a target on their backs so long as illegal immigrants can file false charges, get the benefits they want under the Violence Against Women Act (which is the rationale for forking out visas to people who would otherwise need to be deported), and get off scot-free for obviously lying. The poor conservative activist, according to the report, didn’t even know the woman.

Call it the Smolletting of America, because now even illegal immigants are doing it.

Just don’t call it justice. 

Image credit: Sister Circle Live, via YouTube, Wikimedia // CC BY-SA 3.0

The immigration system as it stands now is a honeycomb of loopholes and second chances, with illegal immigrants using an amazing array of tactics to avoid being sent back to their home countries, never having to stop until they win.

The latest tactic is pretty ugly. According to the Daily Caller:

A longtime conservative operative is calling on the Trump administration to reform the country’s visa laws after he was falsely accused of a crime he said an illegal alien charged likely in order to score a visa.

A woman in late 2016 claimed Codias Brown harassed and exposed himself to her over a two-week period and said he was seeking her out in public places, according to an arrest affidavit. The accuser, Rosa Patino-Herrera, claimed she encountered Brown — someone she didn’t know personally — around eight different times and believed he was seeking her out around the city of Austin, where he also lived.

The forensic data proved to be a game-changer. Disclosure of Brown’s phone location data showed he was nowhere near any of the locations Patino-Herrera claimed the events took place, according to court documents reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The charges were ultimately dismissed — but not until April 2018.

During the court proceedings, Patino-Herrera admitted she was an illegal immigrant. Work from a private investigator also discovered she was actively seeking a U-visa. Brown’s legal team believes she accused him in order to obtain a U-visa.

So what we are seeing is conservatives becoming attractive targets to lawbreakers seeking to win personal benefits. That was what Jussie Smollett did, seeking to win attention for himself in Chicago, by filing his false police reports smearing conservatives. He wanted a benefit from that, which is why he went to the bother of it in that sub-zero Chicago weather and faked the hate attack by what he claimed were MAGA-hat wearing conservatives, and now we see illegal immigrants now following in his footsteps.

Conservatives have a target on their backs so long as illegal immigrants can file false charges, get the benefits they want under the Violence Against Women Act (which is the rationale for forking out visas to people who would otherwise need to be deported), and get off scot-free for obviously lying. The poor conservative activist, according to the report, didn’t even know the woman.

Call it the Smolletting of America, because now even illegal immigants are doing it.

Just don’t call it justice. 

Image credit: Sister Circle Live, via YouTube, Wikimedia // CC BY-SA 3.0