All Things Trump

[Forty Two]

[Forty Two]

The media's view on what the most important story of the year is.... https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/bi ... s-10-weeks

[Brian Peacock]

Is anybody disputing that Israeli forces were shooting indiscriminately into the crowd of protesters behind the Palestinian side of the face across the half a kilometre exclusion zone? Does anyone dispute that what has become to be know as 'the Palestinians' are historic refugees from the land now occupied by Isreal and that they've been protesting their forced removal from that territory for the last 70 years?

Israel in red. Palestine in black and yellow. And the current US administration is on the sidelines.

[Forty Two]

Yes, of course those points are in dispute. Firing indiscriminately into crowds? Were they doing that, there'd be a lot more than 58 people dead.

And, your characterization of the people who left Israel to get out of the way of the incoming Arab forces attacking to destroy the nascent Israeli nation, is a bit simplistic. There was a war, of course people fled. But Israel didn't start the war.

What should have happened was the Arabs should have accepted partition, and built their State. As always, the reason they did not was because they don't like Jews and they don't think that Israel should be a Jewish State. It's not out of a liberal opposition to religion and state - it's because they want Muslim based State, and they want to expel the Jews.

[Animavore]

And ths coward Trump still hasn't said a word or acknowledged what he did here.

[Forty Two]

The riots were not because of the embassy. These were Nakba Day riots, that occur all the time and they had special riots planned long before the announcement of the embassy move in order to show their displeasure for the 70th anniversary of Israel's existence.

Also, there is no genocide here. I mean, that's fucking ridiculous. You've got Hamas organizing attacks on the border fence and on Israeli soldiers, throwing molotov cocktails and such, and the problem is Israel?

[Seabass]

Crazy goddamn evangelicals.

[Animavore]

Where as Trump has no thought process as complex as that. He just wants Muslims dead.

[Sean Hayden]

The Muslims just need to learn how to win wars again, then America will love them and they wont be a problem.

--//--

I shit you not, one my favorite definitions of terrorism --by experts-- includes the idea that for an organization to be classified as terrorists they must have no hope of achieving their goal. I fucking love that shit man.

[Animavore]

By that definition the IRA aren't terrorists.

They did get a lot of US funding now that I think of it.

[Seabass]

Terrifying.

[pErvinalia]

Yes, of course those points are in dispute. Firing indiscriminately into crowds? Were they doing that, there'd be a lot more than 58 people dead.

Why would there? What kind of logic is that?

And, your characterization of the people who left Israel to get out of the way of the incoming Arab forces attacking to destroy the nascent Israeli nation, is a bit simplistic. There was a war, of course people fled. But Israel didn't start the war.

What does it matter what coloured person started the war? The Israeli's are occupying Palestinian land and houses.

[Scot Dutchy]

Here we go. Bolton wrecking the talks but blame will be placed at Kim's door.

Trump faces North Korea dilemma after Bolton infuriates Pyongyang

Trump is keen to keep his appointment in Singapore but the row involving his national security adviser presents a serious hurdle

Ambiguity is not Bolton’s style, however. In his own, competing, TV appearances, he was adamant that North Korea would have to take all its weapons apart and ship the fissile material to the US. It was this, coupled his earlier reference to the “Libya model” – which for Pyongyang summons up the memory of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutalised body being paraded on a truck – that got the regime’s attention.

“It was quite deliberate. We all know how Gaddafi died,” said Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia nonproliferation programme at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies of Monterey. “You don’t bring up a man’s grisly murder as an inducement.”

[L'Emmerdeur]

Ho hum. When will these people get it through their heads that 'government ethics' is a waste of time in the era of Il Douche? Trump's impeccable accountants say that this particular financial liability was not required to be reported, so the fact that they reported it a year late should be no big deal and anyway nobody cares about his financial arrangements except horrible, horrible reporters, amiright?

'Office of Government Ethics Called Out Donald Trump for Disclosing $130,000 Michael Cohen Payment 1 Year Late'

In his annual disclosure of personal finances, President Donald Trump revealed for the first time that he paid his personal lawyer Michael Cohen between $100,000 and $250,000 last year, as reimbursement for payment to a third-party. The disclosure was made as a footnote in a section on a section outlining the president’s liabilities. (You can read the report HERE.)

The footnote reads as follows:

In the interest of transparency, while not required to be disclosed as ‘reportable liabilities’ on Part 8, in 2016 expenses were incurred by one of Donald J. Trump’s attorneys, Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement of those expenses and Mr. Trump fully reimbursed Mr. Cohen in 2017. The category of the value would be $100,001 – $250,000 and the interest rate would be zero.

The disclosure caught the attention of David Apol, the acting head of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), who sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in case it is “relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing.”

He wrote:

"Today I certified President Trump’s financial disclosure report signed on May 15, 2018 (for calendar year 2017). OGE has concluded that, based on the information provided as a note to part 8, the payment made to Mr. Cohen is required to be reported as a liability. OGE has determined that the information provided in that note meets the disclosure requirements for a reportable liability under the Ethics in Government Act.

I am providing both reports to you because you may find the disclosure relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing regarding the President’s prior report that was signed on June 14, 2017."

[L'Emmerdeur]

More on Cohen and his shady shenanigans:

'Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records'

Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.

The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a “suspicious-activity report” filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

The report also refers to two previous suspicious-activity reports, or sars, that the bank had filed, which documented even larger flows of questionable money into Cohen’s account. Those two reports detail more than three million dollars in additional transactions—triple the amount in the report released last week. Which individuals or corporations were involved remains a mystery. But, according to the official who leaked the report, these sars were absent from the database maintained by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or fincen. The official, who has spent a career in law enforcement, told me, “I have never seen something pulled off the system. . . . That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” The official added, “That’s why I came forward.”

Seven former government officials and other experts familiar with the Treasury Department’s fincen database expressed varying levels of concern about the missing reports. Some speculated that fincen may have restricted access to the reports due to the sensitivity of their content, which they said would be nearly unprecedented. One called the possibility “explosive.” A record-retention policy on fincen’s Web site notes that false documents or those “deemed highly sensitive” and “requiring strict limitations on access” may be transferred out of its master file. Nevertheless, a former prosecutor who spent years working with the fincen database said that she knew of no mechanism for restricting access to sars. She speculated that fincen may have taken the extraordinary step of restricting access “because of the highly sensitive nature of a potential investigation. It may be that someone reached out to fincen to ask to limit disclosure of certain sars related to an investigation, whether it was the special counsel or the Southern District of New York.” (The special counsel, Robert Mueller, is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. The Southern District is investigating Cohen, and the F.B.I. raided his office and hotel room last month.)

...

Banks are legally mandated to file suspicious-activity reports with the government in order to call attention to activity that resembles money laundering, fraud, and other criminal conduct. These reports are routed to a permanent database maintained by fincen, which can be searched by tens of thousands of law-enforcement and other federal government personnel. The reports are a routine response to any financial activity that appears suspicious. They are not proof of criminal activity, and often do not result in criminal charges, though the information in them can be used in law-enforcement proceedings. “This is a permanent record. They should be there,” the official, who described an exhaustive search for the reports, said. “And there is nothing there.”

Cohen set up the First Republic account for Essential Consultants in October, 2016, shortly before the Presidential election, in order to pay the adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford, who performs under the name Stormy Daniels, a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in return for signing a nondisclosure agreement about her alleged affair with Donald Trump. First Republic’s compliance officers later began flagging Cohen’s transactions in the account as possible signs of money laundering. Among other potential violations, the documents cite “suspicion concerning the source of funds,” “suspicious EFT/ wire transfers,” “suspicious use of multiple accounts,” and “transaction with no apparent economic, business, or lawful purpose.” (A spokesperson for First Republic Bank declined to comment.)

By January of this year, First Republic had filed the three suspicious-activity reports about Cohen’s account. The most recent report—the only one made public so far—examined Cohen’s transactions from September of 2017 to January of 2018, and included activity totalling almost a million dollars. It alludes to the two previous reports that the official could not find in the fincen database. The first report that the official was unable to locate, which covered almost seven months, appears to have listed a little over a million dollars in activity. The second report that the official was unable to locate, which investigated a three-month period between June and September of 2017, found suspect transfers totalling more than two million dollars.

A substantial portion of this money seems to have ended up in Cohen’s personal accounts. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney filed a separate sar showing that, during that same three-month period, Cohen set up two accounts with the firm, into which he deposited three checks from his Essential Consultants account, two in the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and one in the amount of five hundred and five thousand dollars. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney marked those transactions, which added up to more than a million dollars, as possible signs of “bribery or gratuity” and “suspicious use of third-party transactors (straw-man).”

Cohen appears to have misled First Republic repeatedly regarding the purpose of the Essential Consultants account. In paperwork filed with the bank, he said that the company would be devoted to using “his experience in real estate to consult on commercial and residential” deals. Cohen told the bank that his transactions would be modest, and based within the United States. In fact, the compliance officers wrote, “a significant portion of the target account deposits continue to originate from entities that have no apparent connection to real estate or apparent need to engage Cohen as a real estate consultant.” Likewise, “a significant portion of the deposits continues to be derived from foreign entities.” David Murray, a former Treasury official focussed on illicit finance, told me, “There are a ton of red flags here. The pattern of activity has indicators that are inherently suspicious, and the volume and source of funds do not match the account profile that was built when the account was opened.”