All Things Trump: the story continues...

[Scot Dutchy]

Total corruption will take over. It will make Johnson's Chumocracy look like a kids game.

[Brian Peacock]

The financial sector 'owns' most Western political parties theses days.

[Scot Dutchy]

Some more than others depending on the country.

[Tero]

Trump postmaster Louis DeJoy (still in his post) no longer sending US mail to Australia
https://www.smh.com.au/national/consume ... 58wb8.html

[JimC]

Oh no!

How will we cope?

[Tero]

SCHIFF: There have been a whole host of troubling public reports about what was going on at the Willard hotel, about the possibility of granting mass pardons to people who might be engaging in the illegal activity, and we’re going to investigate all of it and work up a report, expose any malefactors to public scrutiny. If there are prosecutable crimes, that will be up to the Justice Department to decide. But in Congress, if any misconduct involves members, we have remedies of censure around ethics violations, and expulsion from the House.

Whether it’s people working for the campaign or the administration or playing some kind of dual role, we’re going to get to the bottom of it. There’s no daylight between Democrats and Republicans on the Select Committee when it comes to our quest for the truth. We’ve cast a wide net, and we want to make sure that we’re aware of everything that went on. And we’re determined to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

GAZETTE: Does there need to be a special counsel?

SCHIFF: I haven’t opined on whether we need a special counsel or not. But I do think that the Justice Department needs to investigate any potential criminal misconduct, whether it’s by the former president or by others. I am concerned that I don’t see that going on with respect to one thing in particular, which I consider deeply troubling, and that is: the former president’s efforts to get the secretary of state of Georgia to find 11,780 votes that don’t exist, to essentially demand the secretary defraud the people of Georgia and in so doing, defraud the people of the United States. I don’t think you can ignore that. And I think if anybody else had been on the phone and recorded making that kind of demand, they might be indicted by now.

We cannot have a system where a current president can’t be prosecuted, and then, because we don’t want to look backward, the former president can’t be prosecuted; that they’re somehow too big to jail. Because, if we get to that point, then the president really does become above the law. That’s a dangerous proposition in the abstract; it’s even more dangerous, given the fact that Donald Trump is running for president again.

GAZETTE: If we take a step back, is Jan. 6 just one chapter in a much broader effort to stop Joe Biden from becoming president?

SCHIFF: It is. It begins with the effort to get Ukraine to smear Joe Biden, first by the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and others, and then by the president directly on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, trying to coerce Ukraine into initiating this bogus investigation of Joe Biden to help them cheat in the election. And then it continues with the withholding of military aid to further extort Ukraine into helping his misconduct succeed.

The failure of that led to other ways to cheat in the election, by first trying to persuade the country that any votes that came in after the polls were closed were somehow illegitimate because Trump felt the absentee vote was going to go against him. Then, all the bogus litigation and all the fraudulent filings in court. And when that didn’t succeed, efforts to corral and corrupt local elections officials, and then state legislators, and secretaries of state. And then, finally, that violent assault on the Capitol.

But even then, people need to understand that Jan. 6 was not the end; Jan. 6 was just a violent wave point because the efforts to use the “Big Lie” continue. And it continues to usher in a new generation of Jim Crow laws around the country and to strip independent elections officials of their duties and give them over to partisan boards and partisan legislatures.

It seems what the former president learned from the failed insurrection was that next time he needed to be sure that he could find the secretary of state who would find 11,780 votes. If Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wouldn’t do it, he seems intent on replacing him and every other one around the country with someone who will.

GAZETTE: The House voted to hold Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt for refusing to turn over documents or appear for a deposition earlier this month. Bannon cited the former president’s likely invocation of executive privilege as his rationale. What level of cooperation is the committee receiving from the others who’ve been served, particularly former chief of staff Mark Meadows, advisers Dan Scavino and Kash Patel, who missed their subpoena deadlines, but whom the committee said it was “engaging” with, or can’t you say?

SCHIFF: I can’t say. I can say that there are a great number of people who are cooperating with us, who are providing us important information.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/ ... 6-assault/

[Tero]

The FBI was mean and nevertrumpers! No collusion with Russia.

Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI during a September 2016 conversation in which he relayed concerns about potentially suspicious cyber contacts between a Trump Organization server and the server of a Russian bank. The indictment alleges Sussmann told the FBI’s then-general counsel, James Baker, that he was not bringing the concerns to the FBI on behalf of any particular client when he was actually representing the Hillary Clinton campaign and a technology executive.

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump ... ef79913455

MSNBC ran a story. There was communication between Russian bansks and Trump servers. There is a record in the FBI.

[Tero]

It won't give me a direct link, but the Alpha Bank story is one of the videos here
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show

[Tero]

Tucker Carlson now the only strong Trump supporter left? Pushing false flag operation for Jan 6.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/20 ... cumentary/

Carlson said the three-part series will air as a “Tucker Carlson Original” on the streaming service Fox Nation starting Monday. “We believe that it answers a lot of the remaining questions from that day,” he said, arguing that the U.S. government has “launched a new war” on American citizens by prosecuting participants in the insurrection who ransacked the building and attacked law enforcement officers.


Asked about the criticisms from Cheney, Kinzinger and Rivera, Fox News representatives did not respond. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that Carlson’s tweet containing the trailer did not violate the platform’s civic integrity policy.

*it probably had so many lies fox news decided not to air it.

Redditt:

heyilikethistuff

that shit hits home, ive watched my parents and friends parents go from conservative but reasonable to these incredibly hard line conspiracy theory toting nuts, people that never subscribed to ANY conspiracy theory previously somehow believe any crackpot theory that makes trump look like a hero now

taumaturgo

Give it time. First, the white supremacist fringe will embrace it, then the pseudo-right-wing journalists will headline it, then CNN and MSNBC will both side the issue and they'll invite GQP Congressmen and Senators to neatly wrap a pile of shit to further confuse the American public. The Democrats? Stuck in Trump is evil. Clueless.

[Tero]

Pillow guy not involved!

[pErvinalia]

It's like the second coming of Jesus.

[JimC]

It's like the second coming of Jesus.

...which made Mary Magdalene very happy...

[Tero]

Rudy will do jail/probation in place of Trump:

The high-profile federal criminal investigation of Rudy Giuliani in recent days has zeroed in on evidence that in the spring of 2019 three Ukrainian government prosecutors agreed to award contracts, valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to Giuliani and two other American attorneys as a way to gain political and personal influence with the Trump administration.
Guardian

[Tero]

But who has the pee pee tapes?

Special counsel Robert Mueller ultimately found questionable ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, but not sufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges. Democrats have lambasted the Durham probe as politically motivated, but the Biden administration has not stopped it.

The Justice Department's inspector general has faulted the FBI and the Justice Department for their handling of the dossier. Danchenko — who was not identified by name in the watchdog report — had told FBI investigators during a 2017 interview about the dossier's origins and veracity that there were “potentially serious problems with Steele’s descriptions of information in his reports.”

But those qualms from Danchenko were omitted from the final three surveillance applications, making the dossier appear more credible than even one of its own sources thought it was, according to the report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

Danchenko has himself suggested that the information he offered to Steele was not meant to be portrayed as indisputable fact.

"Even raw intelligence from credible sources, I take it with a grain of salt,” Danchenko told The New York Times last year. “Who knows, what if it’s not particularly accurate? Is it just a rumor or is there more to it?”

The indictment is the third criminal action from Durham.

https://news.yahoo.com/ap-source-analys ... 21368.html

[Tero]

Trump, China and reality

A U.S.-China Business Council member survey taken in May and June showed 87% of respondents had no plans to shift production out of China. Only 4% said they’re planning to move operations to the U.S., largely due to lagging consumer demand in China, while 11% said they’re shifting production to alternatives like Thailand and Mexico.

As for factory jobs, gains there flatlined after Trump started imposing tariffs on China in 2018. While there was a small bump in employment for some companies thanks to the administration’s protectionist moves, that was “more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” a study by Federal Reserve staff showed.

The reality on the ground shows little has changed. About the same share of American companies operating in China reported in 2020 that their businesses were hindered by IP infringements as before Trump took office, according to a survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai taken in June and July.

The U.S.-China Business Council survey separately showed 13% of its members reported that they were asked to transfer technology in 2020, versus 5% in 2019. While China made commitments on this front in the Trump administration’s phase one trade deal in January, as well as in the adoption of a new foreign investment law, “it is unclear how this will reasonably be enforced,” the business group said.

Shrink the Deficit
Trump the candidate called for “eliminating America’s chronic trade deficit,” in a 2016 campaign document that listed China, Canada, Germany, Japan and South Korea as the main culprits. Reducing the gap was described as Trump’s “primary goal.”

Monthly deficits with China have averaged slightly bigger since Trump took office than during Barack Obama’s second term in the White House -- $30.3 billion compared with $28.7 billion. The gap widened considerably in the run-up to the application of tariffs, then narrowed in 2019 before climbing again during the Covid-19 crisis this year.

Meantime, countries including Vietnam have seen their surpluses with the U.S. expand as some supply chains diverted away from China to avert the tariff hikes.

It might have taken a toll, with criticism of China even becoming a rare issue uniting Democrats and Republicans in Washington. The proportion of Americans viewing China unfavorably has soared almost 20 percentage points since Trump took office, according to the Pew Research Center. Some 73% of Americans had a negative evaluation of the country in a survey Pew published this month.

“We’re all China hawks now,” Navarro regularly proclaims. And that may be the most durable change Trump achieved on China policy.

https://m.economictimes.com/news/intern ... 949811.cms