Jul 6, 2016 9:56 AMThe presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, plans to get together with some of the party’s top donors this weekend in Southampton, and to try to achieve unity with some former rivals.
Mr. Trump is expected to meet with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus at the fundraiser, which will take place on Saturday, July 9, at billionaire investor Wilbur Ross’s home in Southampton.
Bloomberg Politics reported that, according to an invitation, Pepe Fanjul, a Florida sugar baron and longtime patron of U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, is on the host committee for the fundraiser.
Bloomberg also reported that Hunter Global Investors Founder Duke Buchan III and his wife, Hannah, who backed Jeb Bush early in the campaign, are among the event’s co-hosts.
Lunch with Mr. Trump and Mr. Priebus will cost $25,000 per person, or $100,000 for a couple, with the donation also netting a spot on the host committee.
Also listed as host committee members are New York Jets Owner Woody Johnson, who backed Mr. Bush previously but now endorses Mr. Trump, and Richard LeFrak, a billionaire New York real estate developer and friend of Mr. Trump.
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Donald Trump
Republican Presidential candidate
"I'm self-funding my own campaign."
in a campaign rally in Iowa – Monday, February 1, 2016 http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/10/donald-trump/donald-trump-self-funding-his-campaign-sort/
He did not specify which campaign he would be self funding. He reversed his original statement on May 4.
"Facing a prospective tab of more than $1 billion to finance a general-election ...more run for the White House, Donald Trump reversed course Wednesday and said he would actively raise money to ensure his campaign has the resources to compete with Hillary Clinton’s fundraising juggernaut."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-wont-self-fund-general-election-campaign-1462399502
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/trumps-self-funding-lie/482691/
That was part of his appeal, the unbought "billionaire" who could self-fund his campaign. He's also made statements in the past that he would release his ax returns if he ran for office, now, probably not. He doesn't want the world to know the details about his phony claims.
Will Wilbur be picking up the overtime tab for the added police needed?
"Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men."
~ Plato
What has happened to this country where we have this criminal running for President and still receiving so much support? How is it that so many Americans are still asleep after all that is known about Hillary? Mainstream media cannot be believed and will not report the things people need to know.
We surely will be sorry! I hope America wakes up NOW OR NEVER!
If this election has proven anything, you can't reason with liberals, they never had an open mind. All you can do is vote them out at the ballot, and they deserve to be voted out in droves.
Your boy Trump? $3,294,908.00 of outside money, $63,055,659.00 of candidate committee money. Source: OpenSecrets.org
Surprise, surprise...
EXCLUSIVE: Security Source Details Bill Clinton Maneuver to Meet Loretta Lynch
Former president delayed Phoenix takeoff to snare '20-25 minute encounter' with Attorney General
By Ken Kurson • 07/01/16 2:05pm
The people are not stupid! This is the beginning of the end for Hillary...Really, do you delay two Secret Service details for 45 minutes. stalk a private jet just to talk about golf and grandkids? That is as lame as 30,000 emails about wedding plans, yoga and recipes.
Had enough cake yet?
Then HHS Said : to joe hampton:
More washerwoman rubbish from the extreme Right-Wing. If it eliminated prejudicial gossip, innuendo and implication from its discourse, it would be mute.
We STILL wait in hope for it to produce ONE OBJECTIVE FACT that supports its fantasies. (In ten years, we will STILL be waiting.)
By highhatsize (2758), East Quogue on Jul 2, 16 9:02 AM
Now I say your wait may be over... like by next week ! She is screwed
Your are manically delusional (as are your extreme Right-Wing colleagues on this forum), a characteristic of the true believer. In FACT, nothing will come of your inferential allegations because there are no FACTS behind them - - - just devotional yearning. Your prediction of Hillary's imminent demise is truly hilarious (while disturbingly indicative of the tortuous cognition of the extreme Right-Wing.)
Here's what can be predicted on the basis of objective fact:
...more
The FBI investigation of Hillary will find no actionable conduct and the Donald will keep opening his big mouth and planting his foot in it.
The inevitable culmination of his opera buffa campaign will be the election of President Clinton and the return of the U.S. Senate to Democratic control.
(((Patrick Ruffini)))
@PatrickRuffini
19 minutes after Trump's anti-Semitic dog whistling tweet, and it's still up. #NewTrump
Why The New Child Rape Case Filed Against Donald Trump Should Not Be Ignored
06/29/2016 01:17 pm ET | Updated 1 day ago
Lisa Bloom
Legal analyst for NBC News and Avvo, attorney and bestselling author
MIKE SEGAR / REUTERS
An anonymous “Jane Doe” filed a federal lawsuit against GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump last week, accusing him of raping her in 1994 when ...more she was thirteen years old. The mainstream media ignored the filing.
If the Bill Cosby case has taught us anything, it is to not disregard rape cases against famous men. Serious journalists have publicly apologized for turning a blind eye to the Cosby accusers for over a decade, notwithstanding the large number of women who had come forward with credible claims. And now history is repeating itself.
In covering a story, a media outlet is not finding guilt. It is simply reporting the news that a lawsuit has been filed against Mr. Trump, and ideally putting the complaint in context. Unproven allegations are just that - unproven, and should be identified that way. (Mr. Trump’s lawyer says the charges are “categorically untrue, completely fabricated and politically motivated.”) Proof comes later, at trial. But the November election will come well before any trial. And while Mr. Trump is presumed innocent, we are permitted - no, we are obligated — to analyze the case’s viability now.
No outsider can say whether Mr. Trump is innocent or guilty of these new rape charges. But we can look at his record, analyze the court filings here, and make a determination as to credibility - whether the allegations are believable enough for us to take them seriously and investigate them, keeping in mind his denial and reporting new facts as they develop.
I have done that. And the answer is a clear “yes.” These allegations are credible. They ought not be ignored. Mainstream media, I’m looking at you.
1. Consider the Context: Mr. Trump’s Overt, Even Proud Misogyny
The rape case must be viewed through the lens of Mr. Trump’s current, longstanding and well documented contempt for women. Men who objectify women are more likely to become perpetrators of sexual violence, just as one with a long history of overtly racist comments is more likely to commit a hate crime.
Mr. Trump has relished calling women “dogs,” “slobs” and “pigs,” and cyberstalked and derided journalist Megyn Kelly for having the temerity to ask him to defend his own words. He threw out the most misogynist of attacks, attempting to undermine her professionalism by accusing her of menstruating. He’s cruelly ridiculed the appearance of a female opponent (Carly Fiorina) and an opponent’s wife (Heidi Cruz). His campaign even openly acknowledged that it disqualified all women for consideration as his vice-president.
Mr. Trump has a long history of debasing women he’s worked with, crossing the line on a regular basis. He’s taken lifelong joy in objectifying women, including his proclamation: “Women, you have to treat ‘em like shit.”
This cannot be ignored. Decades of abusive language does not make him a rapist. But it does show us who the man is: a callous, meanspirited misogynist who no sane person would leave alone with her daughter. As Dr. Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they really are, believe them.”
2. More context: two prior sexual assault court claims have been made against Mr. Trump
But Mr. Trump has been accused of worse than just misogynist language. Two prior women have accused Mr. Trump, in court documents, of actual or attempted sexual assault. (Mr. Trump denies all the allegations.)
Under oath, Ivana Trump accused Mr. Trump of a violent rape.
First was Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first wife, who said under oath in a 1989 deposition that he had violently attacked her, ripped out her hair and forcibly penetrated her without her consent. According to the Daily Beast, she claims he was wildly angry that she’d referred him to a cosmetic surgeon who had botched a “scalp reduction” job (to cover a bald spot) and caused pain in his scalp - hence the vindictive yanking on her hair. At the time Ms. Trump said she felt “violated” by the alleged “rape.”
A few years later, after their divorce was settled, Ms. Trump claimed that she did not mean the word “rape” in a “literal or criminal” sense.
Note: virtually every settlement of a case involving a high profile person paying money to a former spouse - or anyone - requires the person receiving the money to agree in writing to ironclad nondisparagement and confidentiality. In plain English: you promise to be quiet and not say anything bad about the party paying you money. This has been the case in hundreds of settlement agreements I have worked on over the years. Ms. Trump was almost certainly contractually prohibited after she signed from saying anything negative about Mr. Trump. And it is also common to attempt to “cure” prior negative statements with new agreed-to language - like, I didn’t mean it literally. (You didn’t mean forcible penetration literally?)
A business acquaintance accused Mr. Trump of sexual harassment and “attempted rape”.
A second woman accused Donald Trump of sexual assault, in 1997. According to The Guardian, then thirty-four year old Jill Harth alleged in a federal lawsuit that Trump violated her “physical and mental integrity” when he touched her intimately without consent after her husband went into business with him, leaving her “emotionally devastated [and] distraught.” The lawsuit called the multiple acts “attempted rape.” Shortly thereafter she voluntarily withdrew the case when a parallel suit against Mr. Trump brought by her husband was settled. When The Guardian reached the woman in 2016 to ask whether she stood by her sexual assault allegations, she responded, “yes.”
In a court filing, according to a report, Ms. Harth alleged that while she and her husband were trying to do a business deal with Mr. Trump regarding a beauty pageant, he repeatedly propositioned her for sex and groped her, culminating in this frightening alleged incident:
Trump forcefully removed (Harth) from public areas of Mar-A-Lago in Florida and forced (her) into a bedroom belonging to defendant’s daughter Ivanka, wherein (Trump) forcibly kissed, fondled, and restrained (her) from leaving, against (her) will and despite her protests.” In the court document, she said that Trump bragged that he ”would be the best lover you ever have.”
Recently Donald Trump issued a statement that women’s claims of sexual harassment, documented in a lengthy New York Times investigation which included Ms. Harth’s lawsuit, were “made up.”
Jill Harth responded angrily on Twitter last week: “My part was true. I didn’t talk. As usual you opened your big mouth.”
In other words, she is standing by her story.
3. The new Jane Doe child rape claim against Mr. Trump is consistent with verifiable facts about Mr. Trump and his friend Jeffrey Epstein, and has a powerful witness statement attached to it.
A third woman accused Mr. Trump of rape very recently. According to the Daily Mail, a woman filed an April 2016 lawsuit claiming that when she was thirteen years old she was held as a sex slave to Mr. Trump and his friend Jeffrey Epstein. The woman claimed to have a witness, “Tiffany Doe,” to the incidents. She filed the case in pro per, that is, without the assistance of a lawyer.
The case was dismissed by the court for technical filing errors. She then obtained a lawyer and the case was modified and refiled in New York federal court, against Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein.
I’ve carefully reviewed this federal complaint. It is now much stronger than the one she filed on her own, which makes sense because she now has an experienced litigator representing her. Jane Doe says that as a thirteen year old, she was enticed to attend parties at the home of Jeffrey Epstein with the promise of money modeling jobs. Mr. Epstein is a notorious “billionaire pedophile” who is now a Level 3 registered sex offender - the most dangerous kind, “a threat to public safety” — after being convicted of misconduct with another underage girl.
Jane Doe says that Mr. Trump “initiated sexual contact” with her on four occasions in 1994. Since she was thirteen at the time, consent is not an issue. If Mr. Trump had any type sexual contact with her in 1994, it was a crime.
On the fourth incident, she says Mr. Trump tied her to a bed and forcibly raped her, in a “savage sexual attack,” while she pleaded with him to stop. She says Mr. Trump violently struck her in the face. She says that afterward, if she ever revealed what he had done, Mr. Trump threatened that she and her family would be “physically harmed if not killed.” She says she has been in fear of him ever since.
New York’s five year statute of limitations on this claim - the legal deadline for filing — has long since run. However, Jane Doe’s attorney, Thomas Meagher, argues in his court filing that because she was threatened by Mr. Trump, she has been under duress all this time, and therefore she should be permitted additional time to come forward. Legally, this is calling “tolling” - stopping the clock, allowing more time to file the case. As a result, the complaint alleges, Jane Doe did not have “freedom of will to institute suit earlier in time.” He cites two New York cases which I have read and which do support tolling
Two unusual documents are attached to Jane Doe’s complaints - sworn declarations attesting to the facts. The first is from Jane Doe herself, telling her horrific story, including the allegation that Jeffrey Epstein also raped her and threatened her into silence, and this stunner:
Defendant Epstein then attempted to strike me about the head with his closed fists while he angrily screamed at me that he, Defendant Epstein, should have been the one who took my virginity, not Defendant Trump . . .
And this one:
Defendant Trump stated that I shouldn’t ever say anything if I didn’t want to disappear like Maria, a 12-year-old female that was forced to be involved in the third incident with Defendant Trump and that I had not seen since that third incident, and that he was capable of having my whole family killed.
The second declaration is even more astonishing, because it is signed by “Tiffany Doe”, Mr. Epstein’s “party planner” from 1991-2000. Tiffany Doe says that her duties were “to get attractive adolescent women to attend these parties.” (Adolescents are, legally, children.
Tiffany Doe says that she recruited Jane Doe at the Port Authority in New York, persuaded her to attend Mr. Epstein’s parties, and actually witnessed the sexual assaults on Jane Doe:
I personally witnessed the Plaintiff being forced to perform various sexual acts with Donald J. Trump and Mr. Epstein. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were advised that she was 13 years old.
It is exceedingly rare for a sexual assault victim to have a witness. But Tiffany Doe says:
I personally witnessed four sexual encounters that the Plaintiff was forced to have with Mr. Trump during this period, including the fourth of these encounters where Mr. Trump forcibly raped her despite her pleas to stop.
Tiffany Doe corroborates, based on her own personal observations, just about everything in Jane Doe’s complaint: that twelve year old Maria was involved in a sex act with Mr. Trump, that Mr. Trump threatened the life of Jane Doe if she ever revealed what happened, and that she would “disappear” like Maria if she did.
Tiffany Doe herself says that she is in mortal fear of Mr. Trump to this day:
I am coming forward to swear to the truthfulness of the physical and sexual abuse that I personally witnessed of minor females at the hands of Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein . . . I swear to these facts under the penalty for perjury even though I fully understand that the life of myself and my family is now in grave danger.
Given all this, and based on the record thus far, Jane Doe’s claims appear credible. Mr. Epstein’s own sexual crimes and parties with underage girls are well documented, as is Mr. Trump’s relationship with him two decades ago in New York City. Mr. Trump told a reporter a few years ago: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it, Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
Powerfully, Jane Doe appears to have an eyewitness to all aspects of her claim, a witness who appears to have put herself in substantial danger by coming forward, because at a minimum Mr. Epstein knows her true identity.
Jane Doe has not granted any interviews, and we don’t know anything about her background, or Tiffany Doe’s, or the details of their stories. Much information needs to be revealed to fully assess this case. Perhaps they will be discredited on cross-examination. Perhaps they will recant. But if we’re going to speculate in that direction, we should speculate in the other direction as well. Perhaps Jane Doe and her lawyer will have more evidence and witnesses to corroborate her claim. Perhaps witnesses from Mr. Epstein’s notorious parties will come forward. We just can’t know any of that at this point.
But based on what we do know now, Jane Doe’s claims fall squarely into the long, ugly context of Mr. Trump’s life of misogyny, are consistent with prior sexual misconduct claims, are backed up by an eyewitness, and thus should be taken seriously. Her claims merit sober consideration and investigation.
We live in a world where wealthy, powerful men often use and abuse women and girls. While these allegations may shock some, as a lawyer who represents women in sexual abuse cases every day, I can tell you that sadly, they are common, as is an accuser’s desire to remain anonymous, and her terror in coming forward.
What do you call a nation that refuses to even look at sexual assault claims against a man seeking to lead the free world?
Rape culture.
We ignore the voices of women at our peril.
Is that crickets I hear on the "right"?
Meanwhile, it seems the prospective nominee and ol' Slick Willie share a similar relationship with the man.
I'd laugh, if it weren't so pathetic.
Just for reference, I'm no defender of Hillary Clinton. However, given the choice between two bowls of ****, I'll take the least offensive ...more smelling one. The lesser of two evils, if you will. And a pathological liar running on nothing but hyperbole and empty rhetoric who is simply a narcissistic, infantile misogynist that wants another trophy (read: name in the history books) ain't it.
How about all those pledged charitable donations? Oops, it looks like he's no Stanley Druckenmiller. He's not even the biggest donor to his own charitable organization.
Quote:
"The calling card of every flummoxed lib- everyone that doesn't possess his beliefs must be delusional. How convenient. Besides slinging insults and hope, you got a thing else little drummer boy?"
-------------------------------------------------------
Like joe hampton, you eschew the tedium of rational argument and choose, rather, spontaneous twaddle and childish provocation. Nonetheless, should either of you ever resolve to go to the trouble ...more of substantiating his basely prejudiced beliefs, I will be pleased to refute them. (I'll take time out from watching the flying pigs.)
Your comments about Jay Epstein (supra) epitomize what passes for Right-Wing "thought". You are all so enamored of innuendo and implication that you find them as convincing as actual fact. Unfortunately for your cause, normal people do not. Your habitual recourse to baseless defamation merely degrades further your virtually nonexistent credibility.
What are you advocating exactly? Personal intimidation of people who's politics you disagree with?
Quote:
“Your inane word salads says more about you than anyone else. If you were half as elevated as you thought you were, you could express a thought succinctly without all the superfluous sugar candy.”
----------------------------------------
QUESTION: What does the fact that Right-Wingers on this forum are so impaired in comprehension, so incapable of rational discussion, so devoted to ad hominems, so addicted to gossip, and so blind to ...more irony SAY about them?
ANSWER: The Brock University study.*
* “Intelligence Study Links Low I.Q. To Prejudice, Racism, Conservatism” by Rebecca Searles (The Huffington Post, February 1, 2012)
Great post, SlimeAlive!
I couldn't have asked for a better illustration of the unfortunate Right-Wing character defects that I describe in my preceding post. You meet all five listed criteria - - - and in such a short paragraph!
Nice to have you.
The presumptive Republican nominee is literally recycling White Supremacist propaganda. And we're inured to it.
9:34 AM - 3 Jul 2016
P.S. Sheriff's stars have rounded points...
Quote:
"Your heavy reliance on dopey stereotypes as a way to make this complex world easier for you to comprehend is all anyone needs to see. Anti-Semitic libs on the inter webs who think everyone but them are dumb are a dime-a-dozen. And, you found a link on the internet that makes you FEEL right? Welcome to 1992."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Yet another eructation of silly, puerile opinion. Do you have another ...more gear? Perhaps one in which REASON is engaged instead of naked assertion?
We are well aware, by now, of your specious, prejudiced beliefs. It would be nice to see you make a stab at authenticating them (or, at least, ONE of them.) It would also be a FIRST!
Comey says there is no intent. Like some pathetic clown in a pants suit, Hillary doesn't mean to screw things up. She's just inept and incompetent. Benghazi; the Russian Restart; Syria; her email mess; she didn't intend to screw all these things up and cause so much damage. This is just Hillary being Hillary; nearly everything ...more she touches explodes all over her like some comical pie in the face - only it is rarely funny - and then she scrambles like a child to hide what she has broken.
Comey has pretty much attested to the fact that Hillary doesn't intend to do wrong, but she's far too incompetent to be put in charge of anything significant, and when something goes wrong under her watch, she will lie like a rug to avoid any responsibility.
The liberal media has gotten out of control bet they call Hilary the winner by 6p.m EST on Nov 8 even before the votes are counted.
Hard to believe but unless he's elected President, this country will be too corrupt to save.
~ Donald Trump
Wow. He must be taking stupid pills. Again.
Asinine waste of taxpayer dollars.
Folsom Naval Reservist is Sentenced After Pleading Guilty to Unauthorized Removal and Retention of Classified Materials
U.S. Attorney’s Office July 29, 2015
SACRAMENTO, CA—Bryan H. Nishimura, 50, of Folsom, pleaded guilty today to unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, United States Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner announced.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Kendall J. Newman ...more immediately sentenced Nishimura to two years of probation, a $7,500 fine, and forfeiture of personal media containing classified materials. Nishimura was further ordered to surrender any currently held security clearance and to never again seek such a clearance.
According to court documents, Nishimura was a Naval reservist deployed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. In his role as a Regional Engineer for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Nishimura had access to classified briefings and digital records that could only be retained and viewed on authorized government computers. Nishimura, however, caused the materials to be downloaded and stored on his personal, unclassified electronic devices and storage media. He carried such classified materials on his unauthorized media when he traveled off-base in Afghanistan and, ultimately, carried those materials back to the United States at the end of his deployment. In the United States, Nishimura continued to maintain the information on unclassified systems in unauthorized locations, and copied the materials onto at least one additional unauthorized and unclassified system.
Nishimura’s actions came to light in early 2012, when he admitted to Naval personnel that he had handled classified materials inappropriately. Nishimura later admitted that, following his statement to Naval personnel, he destroyed a large quantity of classified materials he had maintained in his home. Despite that, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched Nishimura’s home in May 2012, agents recovered numerous classified materials in digital and hard copy forms. The investigation did not reveal evidence that Nishimura intended to distribute classified information to unauthorized personnel.
This case was the product of an investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Assistant United States Attorney Jean M. Hobler prosecuted the case.
It's a lose/lose with this election cycle.
However, I will not squander my vote on an infantile misogynist who sees a trophy, not public service. The guy hired Paul Manafort to run his campaign. He damned himself in my eyes completely after that.
It's deja vu all over again!
Not defending Hillary, but in '07 millions of e-mails were disappeared during the Bush administration. E-mails required by federal law to be kept. Research the incident for yourselves. And notice in that situation there was definite INTENT, the criteria upon which prosecutions are built.
James Comey is out of line when he goes beyond providing the results of an investigation and asserts his opinion whether or not an indictment should come down. Upon reflection, ...more had Hillary been indicted, Bernie Sanders would have been in a catbird seat with perhaps Joe Biden somehow also made viable which perhaps Comey, as a Republican, wouldn't want.
Bottom line, however, the law, which is supposed to be the great equalizer in American life has become a two-tiered system of justice which ensures the political and financial class immunity while the powerless are imprisoned with great ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world.
How on earth is there no conflict of interest for Trump should, God forbid, he be elected when his business empire, dependent on government regulation, is simultaneously in existence (and having his kids run his business does nothing to remove the fact)? And how is it that 40 whatever % it is of Americans don't see that he's nothing more than a talented used car salesman? And corrupt (read Jonathan Chait's New York Magazine piece outlining his business shenanigans) and racist ( a white, chauvinistic supremacist is to be made president of all the people?), and a sexual pervert and predator. Guilty of raping his wife (who was silenced with money after her report of the incident in a court of law), and has a history, like Bill Clinton, with convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.
It occurs that maybe considering the world situation, only the least desirable or qualified would even want the job of president. Very sad that we have become so divided, and that we've lost so much ground in so many areas, but I keep hoping for something providential to alter the horror of our current reality.
Notice the presidential podium there? Thought it was her party???
and btw, is "careless" with information pertinent to the security of the USA on your list of traits you want in a potus?
How dumb are you right wingers?
Donald Trump may not be perfect but at least it's a fresh start and a chance to clean up this corruption. The circus is going on long enough 8 years of the most non transparent group Washington hasever seen.
it's really very disgusting!
Trump supporters appear to be rather hypocritical...
The Washington Post
By Dana Milbank
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, had a message to deliver.
“Hillary Clinton is the epitome of the establishment; she’s been in power for 25 years,” he informed Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday.
When Trump, Manafort added, “says he’s going to bring real change to the country, voters believe him ...more — unlike Mrs. Clinton, who has been saying that for 25 years and in those 25 years, the only changes that have happened have made people’s lives worse.”
But then, at the tail end of the interview, Manafort slipped when discussing evangelicals’ support for Trump. “In my 40 years in politics, I have never seen such a broad-based base of support within that community for one candidate.”
Forty years in politics? But it’s Clinton’s 25 years that make her the “establishment”?
If that weren’t enough, Manafort was giving the interview from the Hamptons — playground of the eastern elite.
This is the hypocrisy at the heart of the Trump campaign, now under Manafort’s undisputed control. Manafort’s inspiration, which Trump has embraced, is to portray Clinton as the embodiment of the establishment. But Manafort (not unlike Trump) has been the voice of the wealthy and the well-connected for four decades, building a fortune by making common cause with the world’s most avaricious.
Among Manafort’s boasts: representing kleptocrats Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi, defending Saudi Arabia’s interests against Israel’s and Pakistan’s against India’s, and making the case for a Nigerian dictator, a Lebanese arms dealer and various and sundry Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. He successfully lobbied to arm a Maoist rebel in Angola, needlessly extending fighting that killed thousands.
It’s Manafort’s right to represent dictators and thugs and regimes that torture. He has, for decades, helped autocrats who battle human rights and democracy. But now this man, who made his fortune helping the rich and powerful get more so, is setting up a general-election campaign that portrays Trump as a man of the people and Clinton as the captive of special interests.
Manafort has been widely credited with this week’s speech by Trump laying out his general-election theme: that Clinton is the defender of the big-money interests and the “rigged” economy.
“Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft. She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund, doing favors for oppressive regimes,” Trump argued. “Hillary Clinton wants to bring in people who believe women should be enslaved and gays put to death. . . . Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States.”
And the man who led Trump to deliver such accusations? Here’s what my Post colleagues Steven Mufson and Tom Hamburger reported in April:
“In one case, Manafort tried unsuccessfully to build a luxury high-rise in Manhattan with money from a billionaire backer of a Ukrainian president whom he had advised.
“In another deal, real estate records show that Manafort took out and later repaid a $250,000 loan from a Middle Eastern arms dealer at the center of a French inquiry into whether kickbacks were paid . . . ”
“And in another business venture, a Russian aluminum magnate has accused Manafort in a Cayman Islands court of taking nearly $19 million intended for investments, then failing to account for the funds . . . ”
Manafort has been a paragon of the Washington Republican establishment for two generations, working on Gerald Ford’s reelection in 1976 before helping Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. He started two lobbying firms, and he has used his contacts in attempts to enrich himself. His lobbying firm recruited veterans of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, then lobbied for $43 million in subsidies for a housing project, while holding an option to buy a stake in the project.
Manafort is steeped in the racial politics Trump has exploited. As Franklin Foer writes for Slate, Manafort ran Reagan’s Southern operation in 1980; the candidate kicked off his general-election campaign outside Philadelphia, Miss., scene of the murder of civil rights activists in 1964. Manafort later became a business partner of Lee Atwater, who gained fame for Bush’s Willie Horton campaign in 1988.
Introduced to Trump by Roy Cohn, lawyer to Joe McCarthy, Manafort helped Trump fight Indian casinos by alleging that the Native Americans had a crime problem; Trump and his associates paid a $250,000 fine after secretly funding advertisements besmirching the Indians.
Now Trump is engaged in a general-election campaign to portray Clinton as the candidate of the establishment. That’s fair enough: She has been atop the country’s elite for a quarter-century. But the man leading this effort spent a much longer career benefiting the wealthy and powerful, including Trump, at the expense of the poor and weak. That’s rich.
Twitter: @Milbank
Shes done
Paul Manafort
Comey's definition of intent is worse then Bill's "It depends on your definition of is 'is' when he was impeached.
There's No Investigation Needed Hillary Committed Perjury!
AND GOT AWAY WITH IT - AGAIN !!!
FBI director James Comey would not comment Thursday when asked directly by Congress, under oath, whether his department is still investigating Hillary Clinton in connection with possible corruption related to the Clinton Foundation.
Alternatively, Right-Wing true believers could just accept that fact that their implications, inferences and predictions about Hillary (and the "inevitable" criminal charges) have proven to be the poop that every normal human ...more being always told them they were (like all their other ideological fantasies.)
But then, with nothing to whine about, what would they live for? Whining is better. It's either that or psychotherapy. (It's all a massive conspiracy, Boyos. I'll bet the Pope is involved. Keep on grousing!)
I wonder who the Vice-President will be. My personal choice is Elizabeth Warren, but there are plenty of acceptable alternatives. I like Warren because she is well-placed to continue Democratic control of the presidency after Hillary's second term is completed in 2024. Let's hope that by that time demographic change has ridden us of the scourge of mean-spirited Republican psychopathy for all time! (Perhaps the GOP could consider changing its name to more appropriately reflect it's ideology? How about, "The Nativist Party". [There's a place for everyone at the US democratic table.])
Considering his appalling poll numbers, do you suppose that The Donald could be convinced, for patriotic reasons, to concede the race in advance of the election? It would save so much divisive antagonism and expense. If not, his candidacy is, at least, free entertainment that "I", certainly, am enjoying.
What a satisfying experience this political season is proving to be!
People who believe in fairy tales really shouldn't vote.
I think I can live with that being the final takeaway going into the weekend
Thanks SlimeAlive
TUESDAY, JAN 6, 2015, 10:53 AM
The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People, Not ‘Serve and Protect’
BY SAM MITRA
In most of the liberal discussions of the recent police killings of unarmed black men, there is an underlying assumption that the police are supposed to protect and serve the population. That is, after all, what they were created to do.
If only the normal, decent relations between the police and the community could be re-established, this problem could be resolved. Poor people in general are more likely to be the victims of crime than anyone else, this reasoning goes, and in that way, they are in more need than anyone else of police protection. Maybe there are a few bad apples, but if only the police weren’t so racist, or didn’t carry out policies like stop-and-frisk, or weren’t so afraid of black people, or shot fewer unarmed men, they could function as a useful service that we all need.
This liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do.
The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid- to late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.
This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate.
Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols.
Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods.
Class conflict roiled late-19th century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization (by which they meant bourgeois civilization) from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late 19th century echoes down to today—except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers.
Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted, and had to yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control. This is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking, and why they hired so many immigrant police officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions, businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were increasingly isolated from democratic control, and established their own hierarchies, systems of governance, and rules of behavior.
The police increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms; establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion and firing; working to build a unique esprit des corps and identifying themselves with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency, they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns, buildings, and money to establish a police pension out of their own pockets.
There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law,” or came anywhere close to that ideal. (For that matter, the law itself has never been neutral.) In the North, they mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy throughout the nineteenth century. This meant that the police could arrest anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems.
The violence the police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but were the consequences of careful policies designed to mold the police into a force that could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of a wage-labor economy.
For instance, in the short, sharp depression of the mid-1880s, Chicago was filled with prostitutes who worked the streets. Many policemen recognized that these prostitutes were generally impoverished women seeking a way to survive, and initially tolerated their behavior. But the police hierarchy insisted that the patrolmen do their duty whatever their feelings, and arrest these women, impose fines, and drive them off the streets and into brothels, where they could be ignored by some members of the elite and controlled by others.
Similarly, in 1885, when Chicago began to experience a wave of strikes, some policemen sympathized with strikers. But once the police hierarchy and the mayor decided to break the strikes, policemen who refused to comply were fired. In these and a thousand similar ways, the police were molded into a force that would impose order on working class and poor people, whatever the individual feelings of the officers involved.
Though some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples—and neither is it today.
Much has changed since the creation of the police—most importantly the influx of black people into the Northern cities, the mid-twentieth century black movement, and the creation of the current system of mass incarceration in part as a response to that movement. But these changes did not lead to a fundamental shift in policing. They led to new policies designed to preserve fundamental continuities. The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system which continues to play the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system—who in our society today are disproportionately poor black people.
A democratic police system is imaginable—one in which police are elected by and accountable to the people they patrol. But that is not what we have. And it’s not what the current system of policing was created to be.
If there is one positive lesson from the history of policing’s origins, it is that when workers organized, refused to submit or cooperate and caused problems for the city governments, they could back the police off from the most galling of their activities.
Murdering individual police officers, as happened in in Chicago on May 3, 1886 and more recently in New York on December 20, 2014, only reinforced those calling for harsh repression—a reaction we are beginning to see already. But resistance on a mass scale could force the police to hesitate. This happened in Chicago during the early 1880s, when the police pulled back from breaking strikes, hired immigrant officers, and tried to re-establish some credibility among the working class after their role in brutally crushing the 1877 upheaval.
The police might be backed off again if the reaction against the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and countless others continues. If they are, it will be a victory for those mobilizing today, and will save lives—though as long as this system that requires police violence to control a big share of its population survives, any change in police policy will be aimed at keeping the poor in line more effectively.
We shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not. We ought to know that origins matter, and the police were created by the ruling class to control working class and poor people, not help them. They’ve continued to play that role ever since.
~ Sam Rayburn
Quote:
"The problem with Hillary isn't that she's a lying, incompetent dirt bag; everyone knows that. The problem is that her fans don't care"
-------------------------------------
The real problem is that true believers won't credit any reality that conflicts with their belief. In FACT, the extreme Right-Wing's beliefs have been proven WRONG, over-and-over-and-over again. Nevertheless, they dismiss objective fact in preference for their cultish ...more FAITH. "Everybody knows", as They call me proclaims, that what has been shown to be false is really true, as they "reason", so they just keep repeating their endless litany of baseless lies.
Why, one wonders they bother. The only people who pay attention to their petulant bellyaching are their fellow cult members.
"Son, if you can't take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and then vote against 'em, you don't deserve to be here."
~ Sam Rayburn
Nick Penzenstadler, USA TODAY 3:04 p.m. EDT July 7, 2016
Posted By Tim Hains
On Date July 8, 2016
Hillary Clinton rejects FBI director James Comey's characterization that she was "Extremely Careless" while handling classified material as Secretary of State.
Isn't it sad that on a day of national tragedy Hillary Clinton is answering softball questions about her email lies on CNN?
Donald J. Trump July 8, 2016
How? by going on the Clinton News Network and throwing Comey under the bus? Comey takes one for Team Clinton and is repaid with misinformation and mis characterization of his finding that kept her out of jail.
Hillary's strategy... Deny the cold hard facts. deny, deny, deny, lie, lie, lie.
She got a get out of jail free card. High Hat knows she should be going to prison, and he still does pretends. ...more
Comey layed out the results of a meticulous investigation and all some do is still deny. lol
~ Sam Rayburn
Stiffs his contractors, clueless re: the first thing about governance and the Constitution of the US (referred to Article XII last week which doesn't exist), more lawsuits than any business of comparable size, has no record of philanthropy, refuses to submit his tax returns, stokes hatred, speaks like a third grader with a monkey mind, raped his wife, lusts after his daughter, hangs with Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe has the worst character of any American, and that's who you want representing ...more us? Says everything about you. Trust me, he won't win or serve if elected--hinted as much last week. How could there not be a conflict of interest for someone running a business empire while holding the highest public office?
TRUMP 2016 !
thats all
.
.
No matter that the existing PC strangle-hold will be replaced by an even more deadly one?
Doh!
Lemmings to the sea . . .
"Not only can't you defend the con, you most likely don't even realize you're being conned. Trump has no "magic wand", can't act autonomously, and belongs nowhere near the Oval Office. You're going to be soooooo disappointed. But maybe not for long b/c another conman ...more will come along having observed so much gullibility and zero discernment ability in the country."
Fasten seat belts.
.
.
.
"My name is Karl Glocken and this is a ship of fools! I am a fool. You’ll meet more fools as we go along. This tub is packed with them. Emancipated ladies and ballplayers. Lovers. Dog lovers. Ladies of joy. Tolerant Jews, Dwarfs. All kinds. And who knows—if you look closely enough, you may even find yourself on board."
Where are the life preservers ...more . . . ?
Another dean of Trump reporting, David Cay Johnston, came up with 21 questions journalists should be asking Trump about his business history. And referring to the lack of press scrutiny of this candidate for the highest office ...more in the land, Johnston says, "If DT were to become president", he is the first person I know of who would be in the White House in modern times with deep, continuing associations with mobsters, con artists, drug traffickers, convicted felons gratuitously involved with these folks. That deserves enormous inquiry."
Its what he is saying not how much money he has. At least he earned his money. Just how Hillary and Bill have made the money they have we will never know.
But somehow you seem ok with that ?
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
<------------------
Have to laugh when Undocumented says he supports Trump b/c of "what he says". All I've heard is that ...more he's going to ban an entire world religion from entering the US which is unconstitutional and ridiculous; that he's going to build that damn wall which will never happen and also ridiculous; that he favors torture which, until Bush the Cretin dabbled in it, was never US policy and violates the Geneva Conventions; that women who have an abortion need to be "punished"; a disparagement of every category of humanity except white males; and no specifics on the HOW on these or any other unmentioned-by-him (child care, family leave, care for the elderly, e.g.)issues that concern the governed. Not to mention that these followers are oblivious to the fact that no Congress will go along with any of this, and that no president is a dictator. My observation is that everything he says is PUNITIVE which should surprise no one coming from a bully.
Sounds like he's posting on 27east... ^^^^^^^
POLL: HILLARY DRAMATIC DROP!
Words more true have never been said on this board and I have been here for 10 years !
Daily Wire
Lyin' Donald: 101 Of Trump's Greatest Lies
AP Photo/Mike GrollAP Photo/Mike Groll
BY: HANK BERRIEN APRIL 11, 2016
39919 4835 547 Comments 69807
Donald Trump has repeatedly labeled his political opponents liars. He dubbed Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) Lyin' Ted when it became clear that Cruz was a serious rival for his nomination; he called Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) an "even bigger liar" than Cruz. He dubbed Dr. Ben Carson a "pathological liar" and said former ...more Florida Governor Jeb Bush's lies were almost as bad as Cruz's. Trump has termed virtually every mildly adversarial media member a liar, too.
But there's only one truly massive liar in this race: Donald Trump. When Politico attempted to measure how many lies Trump told over the course of 4.6 hours of speeches, they found that he lied, on average, once every five minutes. When Huffington Post catalogued his lies over the course of just one town hall event, they came up with 71 lies.
Which made it relatively easy to come up with this not-even-close-to-complete list of 101 lies from Donald Trump.
1. March 30: Trump claims MSNBC edited their released version of his interview with Chris Matthews in which Trump stumbled on abortion: “You really ought to hear the whole thing. I mean, this is a long convoluted question. This was a long discussion, and they just cut it out. And, frankly, it was extremely — it was really convoluted.” Nope; that was a lie.
2. March 29: Trump lies that Wisconsin’s effective unemployment rate is 20%, saying, ""What? Is it 20 percent? Effective or regular? I mean just -- effective unemployment rate, 20 percent. Hey, this is out of the big book." According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The U-3 official unemployment rate in Wisconsin was 4.6 percent in 2015; Wisconsin’s U-6 rate for 2015 was 8.3 percent.
3. March 29: Told Sean Hannity, “You know, I look at what’s happening in Wisconsin with the numbers, the job numbers, the trade numbers, how it’s a stagnant economy, how they owe $2.2 billion in terms of their budget.” As Factcheck.org reported, Wisconsin’s general fund is currently projected to have a positive balance when its current two-year budget cycle ends next year, according to an analysis by nonpartisan budget experts.
4. March 29: Trump alleged that when Michelle Fields "found out that there was a security camera, and that they had her on tape, all of a sudden that story changed." Absolutely untrue.
5. March 29: Trump said the Secret Service was worried about Fields, alleging, "She went through the Secret Service, she had a pen in her hand, which Service Service is not liking because they don't know what it is, whether it's a little bomb…” As Katie Pavlich of Townhall noted, “All reporters at campaign events, like regular attendees, go through Secret Service security before being allowed into a venue. The security is thorough, with a back check, wanding and a metal detector walk through. Fields wasn't carrying a knife, she was carrying a pen and if the Secret Service thought it was dangerous, they would have taken it from her at the security checkpoint before entering the room.”
6. March 27: Trump claims Cruz bought the rights to the ad featuring a nude Melania Trump: Debunked.
7. March 26: Trump lies, "There’s a tremendous tax that we pay when we (American businesses) go into China, whereas when China sells to us there’s no tax." China’s tariffs are higher than those imposed by the United States, but the Chinese exporters are taxed when they sell in the United States.
8. March 23: Trump accuses Cruz of coordinating with Super PAC in its ad featuring a nude Melania Trump. Tweeting, “Lyin' Ted Cruz denied that he had anything to do with the G.Q. model photo post of Melania. That's why we call him Lyin' Ted!” Debunked.
9. March 21: Trump lies, "Out of 67 counties (in Florida), I won 66, which is unprecedented. It's never happened before." Nope. In 2004, John Kerry won all 67 counties for the Democrats; in 2000, Al Gore won all 67 for the Democrats and. George W. Bush won all 67 for Republicans. In 1996, Bob Dole took 66 of 67 counties for the GOP primary and the 67th was a tie between Dole and Pat Buchanan in Washington County.
10. March 19: Trump said the 2016 federal omnibus spending bill "funds illegal immigrants coming in and through your border, right through Phoenix." Nope. The omnibus bill does not fund undocumented immigrants "coming in and through" the border; it funds the very agency tasked with keeping undocumented immigrants out, U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
11. March 17: Trump on Fox News denied that he ever accused President George W. Bush of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “I didn’t say lie. I said he may have lied.” That’s false. Trump said in a February that Bush “lied.”
12. March 13: Trump states that the man who rushed the stage in Dayton, Ohio, "had chatter about ISIS, or with ISIS" in his social media posts. Trump was fooled by a hoax video; the claim is ludicrous.
13. March 11: Lying about Cruz’s count of the states he had had won: “Wasn’t that funny last night when Cruz said, ‘I’m the only one that can beat Donald Trump. I have demonstrated that I can beat him. I won five states.’” Cruz correctly stated he won eight states, not five.
14. March 10: Trump, the expert economist: "GDP was zero essentially for the last two quarters." GDP grew at an annual rate of 1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, and 2 percent in the third quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
15. March 10: Trump claims Michelle Fields made up the story about being grabbed by Corey Lewandowski, blustering, "This was, in my opinion, made up. Everybody said nothing happened. Perhaps she made the story up. I think that's what happened."
16. March 9: “Eight weeks ago, they signed a budget that is so bad. It funds ISIS.” As POLITICO noted, “The omnibus spending bill, passed in December, is not strictly a budget, and it’s not clear what part of it Trump thinks gives money to ISIS.”
17. March 8: Trump brags that the Trump winery is the “largest winery on the East Coast.” "That’s not correct," said Michael Kaiser, spokesman for the National Association of American Wineries. Wine industry analysts calculate a winery’s size by the volume of wine produced. Trump Winery is not even the largest in Virginia. The top producers in the state are the Williamsburg Winery and Chateau Morrisette in Floyd County. In terms of sheer size in acreage, both the Wagner Vineyards Estate Winery in the Finger Lakes region of New York and Pindar Vineyards on New York’s Long Island are larger.
18. March 8: On Trump-branded water and Mitt Romney: “He talked about the water company. Well, there’s the water company. I mean, we sell water.” Well …
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
Zeke Miller ✔ @ZekeJMiller
According to the label, Trump Water is actually bottled by this company http://www.villagespringswater.com/contents.php?subaction=showfull&id=1266607598&archive=&start_from=&ucat=& …
10:07 PM - 8 Mar 2016
84 84 Retweets 40 40 likes
19. March 8: “Upstate New York I poll higher than anybody ever.” Hillary Clinton would slaughter Trump 56 percent to 33 percent in upstate New York, according to a Siena College poll.
20. March 8: Trump: “Trump steaks, where are the steaks? Do we have the steaks? We have Trump steaks.” Once sold briefly by The Sharper Image, the company’s website reads, “Unfortunately, Trump Steaks are no longer available, but their legacy endures.
21. March 8: Lying about how much was spent in one week against him: “So many horrible, horrible things said about me in one week. $38 million worth of horrible lies.” According to The Tracking Firm, every Republican dollar spent by Trump’s opponents on TV and radio from March 1 through 7 amounted to $10.57 million, and not all of it was directed against Trump.
22. March 8: Trump held up a magazine, claiming it was Trump magazine: "This comes out and it's called The Jewel of Palm Beach and it all goes to all of my clubs. I have had it for many years. It's the magazine. It's great. Anybody want one?" Trump Magazine folded in 2009.
23. March 7: Lying about his popularity after the Paris attacks: “After Paris, all of a sudden it started changing. We started getting polls in. And everybody liked Trump from the standpoint of ISIS, from the standpoint of the military. Less than 42% of respondents in a Washington Post-ABC poll said Trump was the best candidate to best handle the threat of terrorism.
24. March 7: “You have Japan, where the cars come in by the hundreds of thousands, they pour off the boats. ... [W]e send them like nothing. We send them nothing, by comparison, nothing.” The United States exported $62 billion worth of goods to Japan last year.
25. March 7: “I’ve spent the least money and I’m by far number 1. So I’ve spent the least.” As of Jan. 31, Trump’s campaign had spent $23.9 million, more than John Kasich’s campaign, which has spent $7.2 million, or $19.5 million if you include outside groups supporting him.
26. March 7: Trump says you don’t see “Made in the USA” anymore. As POLITICO reported: “The U.S. Economics and Statistics Administra’ in 2014 that found that U.S. manufacturers sold $4.4 trillion of goods that classify as ‘Made in the U.S.A.’”
27. March 7: “I’m self-funding my campaign. I’m not taking money. ... I’m not taking. I spent a lot of money. I don’t take.” As of Jan. 31, his campaign had accepted $7.5 million from donors not named Donald J. Trump.
28. March 7: Boasting he had spent $30 million on his campaign: “I’m already in for $30 million cash.” According to POLITICO, “As of then he had only contributed $250,318, plus the loan of $17.5 million.
29. March 7: “I think I have $50 million of negative ads against me in Florida. $50 million. Somebody said $50 million.” As of March 11, outside groups had spent $15 million in Florida.
30. March 3: Trump claims the wives of the 9/11 hijackers "knew exactly what was happening" and returned to Saudi Arabia two days before the attacks to watch their husbands on television flying the planes. The 9/11 Commission report stated that none of the hijackers had a wife, girlfriend or family member in the United States during the days or months leading up to the hijackings.
31. February 28: Trump claims that the New York Times can write a false story without being sued, snapping, “I think it's very unfair when the New York Times can write a story that they know is false, that they virtually told me they know it's false, and I say, why don't you pull the story, and they say, we're not going to do that, because they can't basically be sued.” the unanimous 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision in New York Times vs. Sullivan states that the First Amendment does not protect statements made with "actual malice.”
32. February 29, after his Nevada win: Trump brags that he is “number one with Hispanics.” Except 93 percent of the Latinos in Nevada did not support Trump. A Washington Post-Univision poll in February found that 80% of registered Hispanic voters viewed Trump unfavorably.
33. February 28: "We (Trump University) have an ‘A’ from the Better Business Bureau." In reality, BBB received multiple consumer complaints about Trump university, which sank to a D-minus in 2010. The reason Trump University rose to an A in July 2014 was that as the company looked to be closing after 2013, no new complaints were reported. Complaints over three years old automatically rolled off of the business review, according to BBB policy. Further, Trump University was never been a BBB-accredited business. When debate moderators were given a document by the Trump campaign, it could not have been an actual Better Business Bureau accreditation notice for Trump University.
34. February 28, with Chris Wallace: Trump claimed that “many of” the university’s instructors were “handpicked” by him. That’s not true. In a 2012 deposition, a top executive for Trump University said that “none of our instructors” was picked by Trump himself.
35. February 28, with Wallace: Trump said that “98 percent of the people that took the courses … thought they were terrific.” A class-action lawsuit against Trump alleges that the surveys were not anonymous and were filled out during or immediately after sessions when participants were still expecting to receive future benefits from the program.
36. February 28: “I don’t know anything about David Duke,” to Jake Tapper. Trump not only has mentioned Duke in the past but actually repudiated him during a Bloomberg interview in August 2015. Fifteen years ago, when Trump was considering running for president as a Reform Party candidate, he named Duke a cause for concern. “Well, you’ve got David Duke just joined — a big racist, a problem. I mean, this is not exactly the people you want in your party,” he said.
37. February 25, on Trump University: “I’ve won most of the lawsuits.” Not true, as The Washington Post has noted.
38. February 25 debate: Lying about his support for national health care. Cruz says, “Donald, true or false, you’ve said the government should pay for everyone’s health care.” Trump: “That’s false.” Cruz: “But you’ve never stood on this debate stage and says it works great in Canada and Scotland and we should do it here?” Trump’s response? “No, I did not. No I did not.” Trump told 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley in September 2015 that he’d “take care of everybody” and that the government would pay for it. In the first Republican debate of the election season, Trump stated, “As far as single payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland.”
39. February 25 debate: Trump accused Cruz of lying regarding his support for toppling Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, saying, “He said I was in favor in Libya. I never discussed that subject. I was in favor of Libya? We would be so much better off if Gaddafi would be in charge right now.” Buzzfeed published a 2011 video of Trump in which he called to get rid of Gaddafi.
40. February 23: Trump says he won the youth vote in Nevada. Not true.
41. February 21: Trump said a “recent poll” showed 25 percent of blacks support him in a hypothetical race against Hillary Clinton. That “recent poll” was from September., Fox News, Feb. 15-17: 10 percent. USA Today/Suffolk, Feb. 11-15: 7 percent. Quinnipiac University, Feb. 10-15: 12 percent; Morning Consult: Feb. 3-7: 11 percent. Public Policy Polling, Feb. 2-3: 4 percent. Quinnipiac University, Feb. 2-4: 4 percent to 12 percent.
42. February: Trump calls Cruz a liar for running an ad accusing Trump of letting the federal government stay in charge of the state lands they own and not return them to the states. Of course, Cruz was telling the truth, as you see here.
43. Trump claims he “lost hundreds of friends” on 9/11. That lie may have been the most cynical one; as The Daily Beast reported, “If he has hundreds of friends, he should be able to tell us about them,” said a Port Authority police officer who never talks about how many comrades he lost. “If he can tell us about the hundreds of friends he lost, who they were, what kind of person they were, I might have some respect for him.”
44. February 13; "I'm the only one on this stage that said, ‘Do not go into Iraq. Do not attack Iraq.’” There is no known public record of Trump taking a clear stance against the war before it began.
45. February 7: "If we competitively bid drugs in the United States, we can save as much as $300 billion a year.” As the Washington Post pointed out,“Total spending in Medicare Part D (prescription drugs) in 2014 was $78 billion. So Trump, in effect, is claiming to save $300 billion a year on a $78 billion program. That’s like turning water into wine."
46. February 5: Donald Trump claimed that the loan rates Ted Cruz received during his 2012 Senate run were “lower than you could get, lower than anybody could get.” Evidence shows the interest rates Cruz reported were attainable at the time.
47. February 2: Trump lies about the crowd size at an event in Arkansas, claiming, 'So we broke the record, and I asked the fire marshal, 'Please come up because nobody's going to believe me. Please come up'” He later tweeted, 'THANK YOU to everyone in Little Rock, Arkansas tonight! A record crowd of 12K.” But the Daily Mail reported: But the Barton Arena has just 7,150 seats, according to the fair's website, and room for another 3,045 in floor seating, for a total of 10,195. While Trump's fans were standing, not sitting, the floor was less than one-half full and some sections of seats remained mostly empty – suggesting the crowd was perhaps half of what was announced from the stage.”
48. January 31: Trump tweeted: “@bobvanderplaats asked me to do an event. The people holding the event called me to say he wanted $100,000 for himself.Phony @foxandfriends.” The Des Moines Register's chief political reporter Jennifer Jacobs contacted the group to whom Trump spoke, who confirmed that Vander Plaats was correct in replying to Trump that Trump himself was paid $100,000 to speak at Iowa's Land Investment Expo, directly contradicting Trump’s claim.
49. January 28: On the morning of the Fox News/Google debate which Trump boycotted, he retweeted a bogus graphic showing Fox News host Megyn Kelly posing with Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and his sister. The image is fake.
50. January 22: Trump releases ad saying Cruz is pro-amnesty Ironically, Cruz is not pro-amnesty, as Jeff Sessions has testified, but Trump has been:
Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Congress must protect our borders first. Amnesty should be done only if the border is secure and illegal immigration has stopped.
2:08 PM - 29 Aug 2013
1,488 1,488 Retweets 1,393 1,393 likes
51. Taped January 16: Trump denied saying that Americans detained by Iran would “never” be released during the Obama administration. In September, Trump said that “frankly they’re never going to come back with this group.”
52. Also taped January 16: Trump claimed “all of the latest polls have me No. 1 in Iowa.” The Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll released Jan. 13 showed him behind Ted Cruz by three points.
53. January 15: "We’re losing now over $500 billion a year in terms of imbalance with China." The 2014 trade deficit totaled $343 billion.
54. January 15 GOP debate: Trump denied ever telling the New York Times he had called for a 45% tariff on Chinese goods. He lied.
55. January 15: Trump said the terrorist attacks in Paris last year happened despite the city having "the strictest no-gun policy of any city anywhere in the world." In France, private gun ownership, while heavily regulated, is permitted. France has the twelfth most guns per capita in the world.
56. December 18, on Morning Joe: “Our country is falling apart, frankly. Our infrastructure is a disaster. Our bridges are falling down. Sixty-one percent of our bridges are in danger.” As of 2014, according to the agency, about 61,000 of the country’s 611,000 bridges were rated as "structurally deficient," which works out to 10 percent.
57. December 2: Claimed he had predicted Osama bin Laden’s ascension in his book The America We Deserve, blustering, "I said in that book that we better be careful with this guy named Osama bin Laden. I mean I really study this stuff … And now people are seeing that, they’re saying, “You know, Trump predicted Osama bin Laden.” The America We Deserve makes one reference to bin Laden. It doesn’t write “we better be careful with this guy named Osama bin Laden,” or that the U.S. “better take him out.” All Trump wrote was this: “One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”
58. November 23: Trump claimed 81 percent of murdered white people are killed by black people. The truth? 84 percent of murdered white people are murdered by other white people. Trump cited the “Crime Statistics Bureau—San Francisco,” which doesn’t exist except in the mind of a white supremacist on Twitter.
59. November 21: Trump: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” There is no evidence to support that claim.
60. November 14: Trump: "Our president wants to take in 250,000 from Syria." Nope, more like 10,000.
61. November 9, on Putin. This one was hilarious. Trump: “I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes … We were stablemates, and we did very well that night.” The two men were interviewed separately in different countries thousands of miles apart.
62. October 31: Trump claimed that John Oliver's program "Last Week Tonight" had invited him to appear on the show "four or five times." Oliver’s response? "Who's he trying to impress with that lie?"
63. October 26: The lie of omitting all the details of his financial rise, only stating, “My father gave me a small loan of $1 million.” Fred Trump — along with the Hyatt hotel chain — jointly guaranteed a $70 million construction loan from Manufacturers Hanover bank, “each assuming a 50 percent share of the obligation and each committing itself to complete the project should Donald be unable to finish it,” according to Trump: The Deals and the Downfall.
64. October 25, tweeted: “Word is that Ford Motor, because of my constant badgering at packed events, is going to cancel their deal to go to Mexico and stay in U.S.” One problem: Ford made that decision four years ago. The company stated, “We decided to move the F-650 and F-750 medium-duty trucks to Ohio Assembly in 2011, long before any candidates announced their intention to run for U.S. president.”
65. October 4: Trump: “You know that was a gun-free zone in Oregon where they had no guns allowed, no nothing. So the only one that had the gun was the bad guy, and everybody was sitting there and there was nothing they could do. Not a thing they could do.” Rebecca Redell, UCC’s vice president and chief financial officer: The student misconduct policy regarding firearms does not apply to students with a valid concealed weapons permit. There is a general prohibition against the possession of weapons on campus that would apply to College patrons, but this, similarly would not apply to those with valid concealed weapon permits pursuant to Oregon law
66. September 30: “The state of Florida had sanctuary cities while Jeb Bush was governor. Nobody said anything.” According to a report from the Congressional Research Service issued in August 2006, when Bush was governor, there were 32 cities and counties nationwide that had “sanctuary policies.” None of those on the list is in Florida.
67. September 29: Trump op-ed on his tax plan in WSJ: “With moderate growth, this plan will be revenue-neutral.”said his tax plan is revenue neutral. The pro-business Tax Foundation estimated the Trump plan would reduce revenues to the Treasury by more than $10 trillion over 10 years, even assuming his plan would create economic growth.
68. September 16: "Just the other day, 2 years old, 2½ years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic." There is no evidence a link exists between recommended vaccines and autism
69. September 16: Trump said Mexico doesn’t have a birthright citizenship policy. It does.
70. September 16: Trump lies that he didn’t want casino gambling in Florida during the GOP debate. Jeb Bush: “The one guy that had some special interest that I know of — that tried to get me my views on something, that was generous and gave me money — was Donald Trump. He wanted casino gambling in Florida." Trump: "Totally false." In the late 1990s, Trump tried to build a multimillion-dollar casino with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, according to CNN.
71. August 25: Trump said at a press conference that under Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker the state is “borrowing to a point that nobody thought possible.” The rate of borrowing has slowed under Walker. It was 5.8 percent over his first four years in office compared with 31 percent over the previous four-year period.
72. August 6, GOP debate: Megyn Kelly: “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals. Your Twitter account …” Trump: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” Not true.
73. July 19, on John McCain: “He's done nothing to help the vets. And I will tell you, they are living in hell." McCain has a long record of supporting veterans' issues in Congress. He was instrumental in a landmark law approved last year to overhaul the scandal-plagued Department of Veterans Affairs. McCain worked with the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as well as Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House veterans panel, to help win passage of the law, which aims to alleviate long delays veterans faced in getting medical care.
74. July 1: “I write a book called The Art of the Deal, the No. 1 selling business book of all time, at least I think, but I’m pretty sure it is.” Not even close. "Trump is full of B.S.," said Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of business management at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. "The best selling/most important business books would have to be In Search of Excellence by (Thomas) Peters and (Robert) Waterman that started the genre, Built to Last by Jim Collins, The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey."
75. July 1: Trump described an audience of 15,000 people in Phoenix; the city fire department said capacity for the North Ballroom was 4,200 people. The doors were closed at 4,169 attendees, said Phoenix Fire Department spokeswoman Shelly Jamison.
76. Mid-July: Trump’s campaign says he’s worth $10 billion; Forbes, which has been tracking his finances for more than 30 years, estimates that his net worth is closer to $4.1 billion, less than half of Trump's figure.
77. June 15 announcement speech: "The last quarter, it was just announced, our gross domestic product … was below zero. Who ever heard of this? It's never below zero.” That is ridiculous, as shown clearly here.
78. June 15, on ISIS: “They've become rich. I'm in competition with them. They just built a hotel in Syria. Can you believe this? They built a hotel." Nope. ISIS took over a hotel.
79. June 15: Trump: “Even our nuclear arsenal doesn't work.” "Over and over, the nuclear weapons laboratories, the Air Force, the Navy, and the Secretary of Defense have certified that the nuclear arsenal does work," said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear specialist at the Harvard Kennedy School.
80. Trump boasted to Larry King that he got paid $1 million for a speech. King: “For the Learning Annex.” Trump: “Yes, that's true. It's actually more than that.” Nope. $400,000.
81. As The New York Times reported: Trump lied even about nursery rhyme-themed tiles in his daughter’s room being made by a young Walt Disney.
82. Numerous celebrities who have played with Trump assert that he cheats at golf.
83. Trump lies about his debt level; as National Review has pointed out: “Was Trump actually $9 billion in debt in the 1990s, as he said in two of his books? No. The New York Times reported that Trump later declared the claim a “mistake”: “I don’t know how it got there.”
84. Trump lied about how he avoided the draft for Vietnam, claiming he got a high draft number. Not only did he get four deferments in college, but draft numbers were not even used until December, 1969, a full year after he received his final deferment, a medical one in September 1968. Trump’s campaign later claimed he couldn’t go because of bone spurs.
85. Trump has consistently lied that he is beating Hillary Clinton in polls.
86. Trump has lied that he has won the debates in every poll.
87. Trump lied that Cruz stole the Iowa caucuses from him.
88. Trump lied about Cruz stealing delegates from him in Louisiana. As Aaron Bandler of The Daily Wire pointed out, “Trump is indirectly accusing Cruz of cheating here, but Cruz didn't cheat – he just knows the rules better than Trump. These rules that Trump has been complaining about have actually benefited him.”
89. Trump accused Cruz of coordinating with a Super-PAC for Cruz’s huge win in Wisconsin: Trump released a statement reading, "Not only was he propelled by the anti-Trump Super PAC’s spending countless millions of dollars on false advertising against Mr. Trump, but he was coordinating `with his own Super PAC’s (which is illegal) who totally control him.” As Bandler of The Daily Wire noted: “The Trump camp's supposed evidence of this is that Cruz appeared at campaign events that were put on by the Keep the Promise Super PAC. But this is not a violation of federal law, as the The Washington Post explains:
A close reading of FEC regulations reveals that campaigns can do more than just publicly signal their needs to independent groups, a practice that flourished in the 2014 midterms. Operatives on both sides can talk to one another directly, as long as they do not discuss candidate strategy. According to an FEC rule, an independent group also can confer with a campaign until this fall about “issue ads” featuring a candidate. Some election-law lawyers think that a super PAC could share its entire paid media plan, as long as the candidate’s team does not respond.
90. Claims he has given $102 million to charity. He has not released records to prove that assertion, but he has been reckoned the least charitable billionaire in the United States by a TSG review of his foundation’s Internal Revenue Service returns.
91. Trump lied that he could not get enough American workers to staff all the seasonal jobs his resort required during the busy season. When confronted with the fact that he had staffed a wrecking crew with undocumented Polish workers, Trump admitted he had lied.
92. After Marco Rubio brought up the size of Trump’s hands, Trump flailed that no one had ever mentioned the size of the hands before. That was a lie, as ABC reported:
Nearly 30 years ago, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, described Trump in Spy magazine as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” In an editor’s letter in "Vanity Fair" last November, Carter said that he wrote the Sky magazine comment in 1988 "just to drive him a little bit crazy." And according to Carter, it still does.
"Like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer," Carter wrote in November.
"To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers," Carter wrote. "I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby." "The most recent offering arrived earlier this year, before his decision to go after the Republican presidential nomination," Carter continued. "Like the other packages, this one included a circled hand and the words, also written in gold Sharpie: 'See, not so short!' I sent the picture back by return mail with a note attached, saying, 'Actually, quite short.'"
93. Trump repeated a lie his campaign made up about former Senator Tom Coburn, saying Coburn said of Cruz, “without a doubt, one of the most dishonest people in DC.” Coburn was furious, saying, “It’s an absolute fabrication. I’ve never said that, period.”
94. Trump bleated, “I'm the only one on this stage that said, ‘Do not go into Iraq. Do not attack Iraq.’... Nobody else on this stage said that. And I said it loud and strong. And I was in the private sector. I wasn't a politician, fortunately. But I said it, and I said it loud and clear, ‘You'll destabilize the Middle East.’” Absolutely false, as shown here.
95. Trump: “I will totally protect Israel.” But then again, “Let me be sort of a neutral guy. I don’t want to say whose fault it is. I don’t think it helps.”
96. Trump says that the Bible is his favorite book. But he can’t even quote a verse from it. When he was asked to name his favorite verse, he declined. Some favorite book.
97. Trump said: “I will endorse the 2016 Republican presidential nominee regardless of who it is. I further pledge that I will not seek to run as an independent or write-in candidate nor will I seek or accept the nomination for president of any other party.” But Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos he would consider it months ago.
98. One of the great ones: Trump: “Nobody respects women more than I do.” Tell that to all the women he has insulted.
99. Trump brags about his relationship with God, but as Kevin Williamson of National Review cogently points out, Trump explicitly rejects the fundamentals of Christianity, i.e. man’s fallen state and his need for reconciliation with God. When asked about that, Trump made it clear that he doesn’t believe he needs to be forgiven for anything, that he just needs to — in his words — “drink my little wine and have my little cracker.” As Trump put it, “Why do I have to ask for forgiveness if you’re not making mistakes?”
100. Trump has boasted that he is a conservative, but then tweeted, “Remember, it was the Republican Party, with the help of conservatives, that made so many promises to their base, but didn’t keep them.” For a comprehensive list of why Trump is not a conservative, see here.
101. Trump: "I don't condone violence.” Trump: "I'd like to punch him in the face.”
That's not even a complete list. Trump's dishonesty is so awe-inspiringly pervasive that it would be nearly impossible to catalogue those lies in comprehensive fashion. But be assured: if Trump's talking, there's a solid shot he's not telling the truth.
Amazing how gullible the public is sometimes, when a bully with a way with words mouths the right words to suck them in . . .
Be careful what you wish for . . .
There is no shortage of dumb on the "right"...
Brand New Rasmussen Poll , Thursday, July 14, 2016
White House Watch: Trump 44%, Clinton 37%
BREAKING NEWS:
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Donald Trump and Kids Named In $250M Tax Scam
The lawsuit, unsealed Thursday, describes the scheme as simple, telling the judge “there need be no fear of complexity, for there is none.”
Four Donald Trump-licensed real estate developments are at the center of a huge income tax evasion scheme, according to a lawsuit unsealed Thursday afternoon by a judge in Manhattan.
The presumptive Republican nominee is not ...more personally accused. He is described as a “material witness” in the evasion of taxes on as much as $250 million in income. According to the court papers, that includes $100 million in profits and $65 million in real estate transfer taxes from a Manhattan high rise project bearing his familiar name.
However, his status may change, according to the lawyers who filed the lawsuit, Richard Lerner and Frederick M. Oberlander, citing Trump’s testimony about Felix Sater, a convicted stock swindler at the center of the alleged scheme.
Trump received tens of millions of dollars in fees and partnership interests in one of the four projects, the Trump Soho New York, a luxury high rise in lower Manhattan. His son Donald Junior and his daughter Ivanka also were paid in fees and partnership interests, the lawyers said, and are also material witnesses in the case.
Trump and Sater traveled extensively together and were photographed and interviewed in Denver and Loveland, Colo., Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale and New York. The two Trump children were also with Sater in Moscow, Alan Garten, the Trump Organization general counsel, has said.
Trump has testified about Sater in a Florida lawsuit accusing the two of them of fraud in a failed high-rise project. Trump testified that he had a glancing knowledge of Sater and would not recognize him if he were sitting in the room.
Sater controlled an investment firm named Bayrock, with offices in Trump Tower, and sought to develop branded Trump Tower luxury buildings in Moscow and other cities. Court papers show his salary in 2006 was $7 million, but it alleges that was a pittance compared to his real income.
Sater then moved into the Trump Organization offices. He carried a business card, issued by the Trump Organization, identifying him as a “senior adviser” to Trump.
The tax fraud lawsuit included 212 pages of documents, among them a flow chart showing how the scheme worked. The lawsuit describes the tax fraud scheme as simple, telling the judge “there need be no fear of complexity, for there is none.”
real estate, tax fraud Trump
Handout
The four developments were all handled as partnerships. Partnerships are not taxed and are rarely audited because the profits are supposed to be reported as going to the partners personally. The lawsuit says the profits simply were not reported when Sater and others took their partnership profits and other income from the deals.
The state tax fraud lawsuit is known as a qui tam case in which citizens file as private attorneys general on behalf of the government. In effect Lerner and Oberlander are acting as prosecutors in the alleged tax fraud.
Eric Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, learned of the case soon after it was filed in state court last August and declined to intervene. His office confirmed that stance Thursday after the lawsuit was unsealed.
The suit says Sater and other defendants owe at least $7 million in New York state income taxes, a sum that would be tripled if they prevail.
If the federal government were to intervene the federal taxes would come to about $35 million.
New York state tax law closely aligns with federal tax law in defining income, deductions and taxes due.
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The case was unsealed after Sater filed an action in Israel against a rabbi who says he was cheated in a $40 million stock swindle. That was enough to persuade a federal judge to unseal another lawsuit against Sater, Bayrock and others earlier in July. And in turn that disclosure prompted the state Supreme Court (trial court) judge in Manhattan to unseal the tax evasion lawsuit.
Sater secretly pled guilty to the stock swindle in 1998. The $40 million flexed from investors went to him, the Genovese and Gambino crime families and others.
In 1998 Sater pleaded guilty in federal court, but the plea was kept secret. Sater was sentenced in secret in 2009 to probation and a $25,000 fine with no jail time and no requirement to make restitution.
That was an extraordinarily light sentence, especially given Sater’s violent past. In 1991 he admitted to shoving the broken stem of a margarita glass into a man’s face and was sentenced to two years.
Court papers, testimony by Trump and a book by one of Sater’s confederates—The Scorpion and the Frog, “The True Story of One Man's Fraudulent Rise and Fall on the Wall Street of the Nineties”—all tell how after his arrest Sater became an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, supposedly buying missiles on their way to terrorists, which may explain the light sentence.
As to Trump, every president starting with Richard Nixon and major party candidate since has made public some or all of their tax returns. He has not, even as Hillary Clinton has released her complete tax returns going back more than three decades.
Trump has explained his refusal to make his income tax returns public by claiming that the ones he has filed for 2012 and since are under routine audit. Mark Everson, a former commissioner of Internal Revenue has said there is no reason to hold the returns back, even assuming they are being audited.
He has offered no explanation for not releasing his returns for 2011 and earlier, years on which he has said the audits are closed.
Documents made public by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission show that despite living a lavish lifestyle, Trump did not pay income taxes in 1978, 1979, 1992 and 1994. He also paid no income taxes in 1984, by far his most lucrative year in his career to that point, according to state and city tax tribunal proceedings I reported on previously.
Anybody remember Pence's Indiana fiasco re: LGBT rights legislation last winter? And the press conference that followed? Probably on YouTube. Jaysus. Also has worked against female reproductive rights for years. What a guy. Polling about as well in Indiana as Christie is in NJ. Soon he'll be out of work as he'll never be VP, and Indiana won't re-elect. Might have to go back to radio where he started.
DRIVER MOWS 90 PLUS BODIES FOR MILE
Obama expected to call for new ban on trucks
"And then, America should grow up."
1.) Vote for Trump
2.) Vote for the terrorists.
What's it going to be?
DJT wants the job.
Refugee screaming 'Allahu akbar' attacks German train passengers with axe...
Time to ban axes with out a license
CRUZ SMITES NOMINEE AT CONVENTION...
CROWD BOOS HIM OFF STAGE...
'WE WANT TRUMP!'
MUST NOT HAPPEN.
If Michael Bloomberg Gives This Speech, He Can End The Trump Candidacy
07/25/2016
Paul Abrams
BLOOMBERG ...more VIA GETTY IMAGES
My Fellow Americans:
Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Michael Bloomberg. I have been a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent. I have been Mayor of New York City for three terms.
Before I was Mayor, I was a businessman. I started a financial information service that grew into a full-blown news service. When I started it, no one gave me a chance. There were already three major news services (UPI, Reuters and AP) that covered the globe and all the important news.
I have worked hard, had a great team of people working with me, and I have been very successful financially. Unlike Donald Trump, I was not handed $1 million by my father (incidentally, $1 million then is the same as being handed $6 million in today’s money). Nor did I know that I would inherit anything, much less the $40-200 million that Donald Trump knew he would inherit.
Unlike Donald Trump, I have not been involved in 3,500 lawsuits, I do not have small businesses that I have cheated out of money, I have not defrauded vulnerable people of their life savings with phony get-rich-quick schemes, I have not left investors stranded while I drained millions of dollars from the failing businesses they funded.
I have never said horrible things about groups of people defined by their gender, sexual orientation, skin color or heritage. Nor have I attacked people with childish nicknames when they did not agree with me.
Donald Trump did all those things.
He is still doing them.
Nonetheless, my net worth is about 10 times greater than Donald Trump’s The only reason I even mention it is that Donald Trump has told the American people that his net worth — that he exaggerates — somehow proves he has the wisdom and knowledge and judgment to lead our great nation.
Well, if that is true, than my wisdom, knowledge and judgment must be 10 times better than his. [Donald Trump has sued people for alleging his net worth was lower than he said. But, those were uneven matches. I dare him to sue me over this statement. C’mon, Donald. Let’s see how tough you really are].
Let me be the first to tell you that great wealth does not make you wise or knowledgeable or capable. Running a government, as I have in New York City, does benefit somewhat from having business experience, but not ones like Donald Trump’s, in which he schemed, tricked, conned and bullied people, is based on selling a brand-name, and has a long string of failures. [ Hint: You can tell how much of a con it is when he will not release 10 years of his tax returns so you can judge for yourselves. Did Trump, for example, receive amnesty for offshore abusive tax shelters? If someone will not show you, you ought to be very careful about believing anything he tells you].
Being wealthy does not enable someone to address problems he knows nothing about, as Donald Trump has shown again and again in this campaign.
And, remember, I am 10 times wealthier than Donald Trump. So, if you use his standards, you can take it with 10 times more certainty from me that Donald J Trump would be a clear-and-present danger to this country and this world if he somehow were able to con and lie his way into the White House.
He will, in a word, be a disaster.
Do not let it happen.
Bernie Bernie Bernie
NEVER HILLARY CORRUPT B*
STORM MORNING MASS
ISIS CELEBRATES
Dems give 61 speeches on Day 1 -- mention ISIS zero times...
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: CLINTON DELEGATE EXPLAINS HOW DEMOCRATS WILL BAN SECOND AMENDMENT GUN RIGHTS
Democrat operative says Hillary would support total gun ban
TRUMP 45.6
HILLARY 44.7
CNN ORC 7/22 7/24 Trump 48 Hillary 45
CBS News 7/22 7/24 Trump 44 Hillary 43
RCP AVERAGE TRUMP + 9
Press Don't Ask Chelsea About Dad's Treatment Of Women -- But Ask Ivanka Constantly...
Why in gods name ?
PASS THE BATON
AND $20 TRILLION IN DEBT
TRUMP 2016 !
2016
Gaps in Melania Trump's immigration story raise questions
A racy photo shoot is prompting fresh scrutiny of the would-be first lady's early visits to the United States.
By BEN SCHRECKINGER and GABRIEL DEBENEDETTI 08/04/16 05:22 AM EDT Updated 08/04/16 12:17 PM EDT
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Nude photographs published this week are raising fresh questions about the accuracy of a key aspect of Melania Trump’s biography: her immigration ...more status when she first came to the United States to work as a model.
The racy photos of the would-be first lady, published in the New York Post on Sunday and Monday, inadvertently highlight inconsistencies in the various accounts she has provided over the years. And, immigration experts say, there’s even a slim chance that any years-old misrepresentations to immigration authorities could pose legal problems for her today.
While Trump and her husband, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, have said she came to the United States legally, her own statements suggest she first came to the country on a short-term visa that would not have authorized her to work as a model. Trump has also said she came to New York in 1996, but the nude photo shoot places her in the United States in 1995, as does a biography published in February by Slovenian journalists.
The inconsistencies come on top of reports by CBS News and GQ Magazine that Trump falsely claimed to have obtained a college degree in Slovenia but could be more politically damaging because her husband has made opposition to illegal immigration the foundation of his presidential run.
Representatives of the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization did not address detailed questions about the timing and circumstances of Melania Trump’s arrival in the country, but campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks responded to the emailed questions by stating, “Melania followed all applicable laws and is now a proud citizen of the United States.”
In a statement issued hours after POLITICO published this report, Trump reiterated on Thursday that she had been “at all times in compliance with the immigration laws of this country.” But her statement conspicuously avoids addressing multiple reports and photographs that place her in the United States and working as a model in 1995, as well as her multiple past statements that she would return every few months to Europe to renew her visa. (Other news outlets, including Bloomberg View, have also noted the inconsistencies in her account.)
Melania Trump issued a statement following POLITICO's reporting that avoided the questions raised in the story.
Melania Trump statement on immigration status dodges key points
By BEN SCHRECKINGER
Although she may be a proud citizen, Trump’s own statements suggest she may not have followed all applicable laws, immigration experts say.
In a January profile in Harper’s Bazaar, Trump said she would return home from New York to renew her visa every few months. “It never crossed my mind to stay here without papers. That is just the person you are,” she said. “You follow the rules. You follow the law. Every few months you need to fly back to Europe and stamp your visa. After a few visas, I applied for a green card and got it in 2001.”
In a February interview with Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Trump repeated that characterization of her early years in the United States. “I never thought to stay here without papers. I had visa. I travel every few months back to the country to Slovenia to stamp the visa. I came back. I applied for the green card. I applied for the citizenship later on.”
The Trump campaign and Trump Organization representatives did not address questions about the type of visa Trump first used to enter the country, but it has been widely reported that she came here on an H-1B work visa. Writer Mickey Rapkin, who interviewed Melania for a May profile in the luxury lifestyle magazine DuJour, said she confirmed as much to him. “When I interviewed Melania, I mentioned that she’d come to New York on that H-1B visa, and she nodded in agreement,” Rapkin wrote in an email to POLITICO.
Trump’s tale of returning to Europe for periodic visa renewals is inconsistent with her holding an H-1B visa at all times she was living in New York — even if it was the lesser-known H-1B visa specifically designed for models — said multiple immigration attorneys and experts. An H-1B visa can be valid for three years and can be extended up to six years — sometimes longer — and would not require renewals in Europe every few months. If, as she has said, Trump came to New York in 1996 and obtained a green card in 2001, she likely would not have had to return to Europe even once to renew an H-1B.
Instead, Trump’s description of her periodic renewals in Europe are more consistent with someone traveling on a B-1 Temporary Business Visitor or B-2 Tourist Visa, which typically last only up to six months and do not permit employment.
If someone were to enter the United States on one of those visas with the intention of working, it could constitute visa fraud, according to Andrew Greenfield, a partner at the Washington office of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy, a firm that specializes in immigration law.
“It's quintessential,” he said. “If you enter the United States with the intention of working without authorization and you present yourself to a border agent at an airport or a seaport or a manned border and request a visa, even if there is not a Q&A — knowing that you are coming to work — you are implicitly, if not explicitly, manifesting that you intend to comply with the parameters of the visa classification for which you sought entry and were granted entry."
160802_paul_ryan_getty_1160.jpg
CONGRESS
Trump acolytes campaign to defeat Ryan
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and RACHAEL BADE
“There are quirky exceptions to people on a B-1 visa who are able to work — certain domestic servants who are entering the country to accompany their employers who are in the country temporarily,” added Greenfield. “But I can’t imagine that would apply to models.”
“If Melania was traveling to the U.S. on a B-1 business visa, there is a potential problem,” said a Washington-based partner of a major national immigration law firm. “She would not have been authorized to work in the U.S. while on a B-1 visa. In fact, if a customs agent encounters someone entering the U.S. on a B-1 visa and they know that the individual intends to work for a U.S. employer, the individual will usually be denied admission. In order to avoid being sent back to Slovenia, she may have had to lie about the purpose of her trip.”
Visa fraud would call into question a green card application and subsequent citizenship application, said immigration lawyers — thus raising questions about Melania Trump’s legal status, even today, despite her marriage to a U.S. citizen.
Violations of U.S. visa law are hardly unusual, particularly in the modeling industry. It was a common practice in the 1990s in New York for less scrupulous agencies to bring in foreign models to work illegally on temporary business and tourist visas, according to Sara Ziff, founder of the Model Alliance, a group that advocates improved labor standards for fashion models.
The timing of Trump’s arrival in New York remains hazy, and representatives of the Trump campaign and Trump Organization did not address questions about that timing. In a previously unpublished portion of an April interview conducted for a profile in GQ, Trump told POLITICO’s Julia Ioffe that she lived with Matthew Atanian, her first known roommate in New York, only for a few weeks. “I was busy and I was traveling a lot. And then after that, after a month of two, I found my own place,” Trump said.
But in an interview for the same profile, Atanian told Ioffe that they shared the apartment for a period that spanned 1995 to 1996, and Atanian told POLITICO this week that he and Trump shared the apartment for a total of a year to a year and a half. He said he recalled Trump leaving the country to travel home for holidays during that period.
Trump has said she came to New York in 1996, but multiple reports indicate she first started doing work there in 1995. Her personal website was taken down last month in the wake of reports that its biography section falsely credited her with earning a college degree. (Trump tweeted that the website was taken down “because it does not accurately reflect my current business and professional interests.”) An archived snapshot of that bio page describes Trump as “settling in New York in 1996,” and she told Brzezinski in January, “I came to New York 1996.”
But according to “Melania Trump: The Inside Story,” a biography published in February by two Slovenian authors — journalist Bojan Požar and publicist Igor Omerza — Trump “began moving to New York in 1995.” The book also states that Trump first met a close friend, the model Edit Molnar, “in New York in the middle of 1995.”
“In 1995 she started coming to the USA according to the jobs she was getting at fashion agencies,” wrote Požar in an email to POLITICO. “We don’t know the exact dates of those before she officially settled in New York but her visits prior to that were temporary business opportunities that she had as a model.” Požar said he learned of these first jobs in America from two fashion agents, one in Italy and the other in Vienna, and that such trips abroad were common for Eastern European models but not “technically” legal.
Požar’s timing is consistent with the New York Post’s report. The nude photos were taken in New York in 1995 for the January 1996 issue of France’s now-defunct Max Magazine, according to the tabloid.
Alé de Basseville, the photographer who shot the photos, told POLITICO that the shoot took place in a private studio near Manhattan’s Union Square. He declined to name the owner of the studio and said that he encountered Trump through Metropolitan Models, a Paris-based agency with a New York office that was then representing Trump.
To carry out the 1995 New York photo shoot legally, Trump would have required a working visa, likely an H-1B, even if she were not yet living in the United States, as her native Slovenia was not part of the State Department’s visa waiver program until 1997.
Paolo Zampolli, an Italian businessman who was then a partner in Metropolitan and is credited with sponsoring Trump’s entry into the United States and introducing her to her future husband, said that he did not recall that particular shoot or the exact timing of Trump’s first arrival in New York.
Donald Trump listens at an event announcing Trump University in 2005.
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Zampolli said the models he worked with would have entered the country on either an H-1B or an O-1, a visa for foreigners who possess “extraordinary ability.” O-1 visas are frequently given to star scientists, athletes and entertainers, but because Melania Knauss (her maiden name) was an obscure model who mostly posed for advertisements and catalogs in the mid-’90s, it is highly unlikely she qualified for an O-1, which comes with an initial stay period of up to three years, said immigration attorneys. An O-1 visa would also not have required her to leave the country periodically.
Zampolli said he first met Trump in Milan and that models he worked for moved across international borders legally. “Every model we represented, we did a visa,” he said. “It’s just part of the rules.”
Even Melania’s use of the H-1B program would stand in contrast to her husband’s position today. Trump, who has made his opposition to illegal immigration the centerpiece of his campaign, has also vowed to crack down on the use of H1-B visas as president. In March, he said he would “end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/melania-trump-immigration-donald-226648#ixzz4GOzYNonX
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The documents were released by Judicial Watch, which is suing to recover Clinton’s emails under Freedom of Information Act laws.
In an April 2009 email to Clinton’s State Department aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, President ...more Clinton’s former body man, Doug Band, the founder of corporate consultant Teneo, urgently asked them to set up a meeting with an ambassador for a major donor to the Clinton Foundation.
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“We need Gilbert Chagoury to speak to the substance person re lebanon. As you know, he’s key guy there and to us and is loved in lebanon.”
“Its jeff feltman,” Abedin wrote back, referring to Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, America’s former top diplomat to Lebanon. “I’m sure he knows him[.] Ill talk to jeff.”
Less than 20 minutes later, Band replied, “Better if you call him. Now preferrable. This is very important.”
Chagoury is a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire and a Clinton Foundation donor, giving somewhere between $1 million and $5 million.
The construction magnate has financial interests around the world and was convicted in Switzerland in 2000 for money laundering. He paid $66 million in a plea deal.
The emails also show Clinton’s closest aide, Abedin, left her boss’s daily schedule in an unlocked hotel room in Trinidad and Tobago, where the secretary of state was attending a conference.
“Hi Huma,” aide Melissa Lan wrote in an email to Abedin. “Would it be possible to get one of the Secretary’s day book binders back for tomorrow’s product?”
Abedin replied, “Yes its [sic] on the bed in my room. U can take it. My door is open. I’m in lobby. Thx.”
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement: “No wonder Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin hid emails from the American people, the courts and Congress. … They show the Clinton Foundation, Clinton donors, and operatives worked with Hillary Clinton in potential violation of the law.”