All Things Trump: Is it over yet?

[Tero]

Apple agrees to play games with Trump

Apple is boosting its commitment to the American workforce, part of a push to invest hundreds of billions into the U.S. economy.

In a major announcement on Monday, Apple said it will build its redesigned Mac Pro in Austin, Texas.

The move comes three days after U.S. trade officials approved exemptions that allow Apple to import key Mac Pro parts from China without them being subject to tariffs.

They make what...90%?..of their income on China made phones.

[Scot Dutchy]

Yeah but what is the point? The same 40% will vote for him again, except he has lost a few crucial percent in Wisconsin and PA etc. He is never going to add to STUPID vote, it is already at the max.

Yep the Russians will do the rest.

[Seabass]

The motherfucker tried this shit with Australia, too.

Trump Pressed Australian Leader to Help Barr Investigate Mueller Inquiry’s Origins

WASHINGTON — President Trump pushed the Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Attorney General William P. Barr gather information for a Justice Department inquiry that Mr. Trump hopes will discredit the Mueller investigation, according to two American officials with knowledge of the call.

The White House restricted access to the call’s transcript to a small group of the president’s aides, one of the officials said, an unusual decision that is similar to the handling of a July call with the Ukrainian president that is at the heart of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump. Like that call, the discussion with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia shows the extent to which Mr. Trump sees the attorney general as a critical partner in his goal to show that the Mueller investigation had corrupt and partisan origins, and the extent that Mr. Trump sees the Justice Department inquiry as a potential way to gain leverage over America’s closest allies.

And like the call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the discussion with Mr. Morrison shows the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests.

President Trump initiated the discussion in recent weeks with Mr. Morrison explicitly for the purpose of requesting Australia’s help in the Justice Department review of the Russia investigation, according to the two people with knowledge of the discussion. Mr. Barr requested that Mr. Trump speak to Mr. Morrison, one of the people said. It came only weeks after Mr. Trump seemed to make military aid to Ukraine contingent on Mr. Zelensky doing him the “favor” of helping Mr. Barr with his work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/us/p ... eller.html
https://thehill.com/policy/internationa ... to-mueller

[Tero]

The Biden thing is a logical step, if there was dirt to find. This is because Trump will lose to Biden. It's already affected Biden. Trump can only win against Warren or some other Dem not Biden.

[Tero]

CNN
support for impeachment and removal has risen 11 points to 46% among independents and 8 points to 14% among Republicans.

[L'Emmerdeur]

No doubt but for a flounce by a certain numeral, he'd have regaled this site with a faithful version of this noxious bullshit.

'GOP Shows Russian Trolls How It’s Done With Whistleblower Smear'

The Atkinson smear comes amid a broad GOP campaign seemingly calculated to discredit the whistleblower report as unreliable, partisan hearsay, despite it having already been corroborated by an IC IG review and confirmed by the White House’s own transcript of Trump’s call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. It began late Friday with a story from the conservative website The Federalist headlined “Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement Of First-Hand Whistleblower Knowledge.” The article claimed “the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.”

“It seems like they are jumping to a lot of conclusions based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the law, the regulatory framework, and the language on one form,” said Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.

The kernel of fact near the center of the conspiracy theory is that there is, indeed, a new version of Form 401 dated August 2019.

A question on the form explicitly anticipates tips based on secondhand information, and asks the whistleblower to check a box: “I have direct and personal knowledge,” or, “I heard about it from others.” The Federalist used a screenshot of that field to illustrate its story.

What the article didn’t mention or screenshot is a nearly identical field gracing Form 401 since at least May 2018, making it impossible that it was added as an easement for Trump’s whistleblower. The major difference in the fields is that the old form includes three options instead of two, subdividing secondhand sources into outside source and “other employees.”

There’s a reason the form has allowed secondhand reports all along. The requirement for firsthand whistleblowing only is completely made up.

“There’s never been a requirement that a whistleblower have firsthand knowledge of what they’re reporting,” said Irvin McCullough, an investigator at the nonprofit Government Accountability Project (and the son of a former IC IG). “They need to have a reasonable belief. The firsthand information is usually gathered by the inspector general, as I believe did occur here.”

... Trump’s whistleblower didn’t go through some shady “deep state” backdoor. He or she followed the process, and government investigators found the firsthand evidence themselves.

“Complainant was not a direct witness to President’s telephone call with the Ukrainian President on July 25, 2019,” the IC IG wrote on Aug. 26. “Other information obtained during the preliminary review, however, supports the Complainant’s allegation that, among other things, during the call the President ‘sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President’s 2020 reelection bid.’”

[Joe]

That's good because Anthony Scaramucci has tweeted that there are more whistle-blowers to come.

Scaramucci?!? What's he know?

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

[Joe]

So, maybe the Mooch was on to something.

There’s another whistleblower complaint. It’s about Trump’s tax returns.

Hey, have you heard about this whistleblower complaint?

An unnamed civil servant is alleging serious interference in government business. If the allegations are true, they could be a game-changer. They might set in motion the release of lots of other secret documents showing that President Trump has abused his authority for his personal benefit.

Wait, you thought I meant the whistleblower from the intelligence community?

Nope. I’m talking about a completely different whistleblower, whose claims have gotten significantly less attention but could prove no less consequential. This whistleblower alleges a whole different category of impropriety: that someone has been secretly meddling with the Internal Revenue Service’s audit of the president.

In defiance of a half-century norm, Trump has kept his tax returns secret.

We don’t know exactly what he might be hiding. His bizarre behavior, though, suggests it’s really bad.

Not that you’d know it from the administration’s stonewalling, but Congress actually has unambiguous authority to get Trump’s returns. In fact, it has had the authority to get any federal tax return, no questions asked, for nearly a century. Under a 1924 law, Treasury “shall furnish” any tax document requested by the House Ways and Means or Senate Finance Committee chairs.

That’s exactly what the House Ways and Means chairman, Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), did in the spring. The statute doesn’t require him to state any legislative purpose for his request, but he provided one anyway: He said that committee needed to make sure the IRS, which it oversees, is properly conducting its annual audit of the president and vice president, as the IRS manual has required post-Watergate.

Still, from an optics standpoint, this IRS-audit-oversight rationale seemed a strange one for Neal to cite. Especially because it was the primary rationale offered, and there was no reason at the time to believe the IRS was actually being bullied. So, for the first time in history, the administration refused a Ways and Means tax request, on the grounds that Neal’s stated legislative purpose was “pretextual.”

But now, in retrospect, Neal’s stated purpose looks either extremely ingenious — or extremely lucky.

That’s because this summer an anonymous whistleblower approached the House committee to say its concerns had been justified. The whistleblower offered credible allegations of “evidence of possible misconduct,” specifically “inappropriate efforts to influence” the audit of the president, according to a letter Neal sent to the treasury secretary.

We don’t know the complaint details, including who allegedly meddled with the audit or how, and whether the IRS complied. The complaint hasn’t been released, and Neal said last week that he’s still consulting with congressional lawyers about whether to make it public.

What can I say but

[JimC]

You ain't just whistling Dixie...

[Tero]

Newsweek
The Quinnipiac University National Poll found that 41 percent of voting Americans approve of the way Trump is handling the presidency against 53 percent who disapprove.

And 47 percent of voters think Trump should be impeached and removed from office. The figure is the same for those who think he should not. However, this is a ten point movement on both in just five days.

The most recent poll was conducted on September 30. Five days earlier, another Quinnipiac poll showed support for Trump's impeachment at 37 percent and opposition at 57 percent, suggesting the Ukraine-Biden affair is shifting the dial among voters.

[Tero]

[Tero]

Via Washington Post/Reddit:
When William P. Barr was being confirmed as attorney general, some Democrats took solace in the idea that he was at least a mainstream Republican and not necessarily a Trump loyalist. In doing so, they overlooked past commentary that suggested he favored conspiracy theories involving the Clintons and the Russia investigation.

When Barr appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to look into President Trump’s allegations about the origins of that Russia probe, those same Democrats took solace in the fact that Durham had a reputation as a respected, nonpartisan straight shooter. In doing so, they set aside Barr’s comments about the FBI having “spied” on Trump, along with Durham’s past skepticism of the FBI’s methods.

It’s getting difficult for them to find solace in much of anything involving Barr.

The Washington Post’s Devlin Barrett, Shane Harris and Matt Zapotosky reported Monday that Barr has been traveling overseas to seek help from top allies for Durham’s probe, visiting Britain and making multiple trips to Italy. The Trump administration has also made requests of Australia, whose officials played a key role in alerting U.S. officials to Russian interference. Signs indicate that the Aussies have proven a receptive audience.

The new disclosures recall last week’s news that Trump pressured Ukraine’s president to launch two investigations that carried potential political benefits for him — including one involving the Russia probe’s origins — yet they are somewhat different. It’s one thing to lean on a country to launch its own probes; it’s not quite the same thing to seek its cooperation with an American investigation.

But the news appears to fill out the picture of an attorney general who was suspicious of the Russia probe’s origins from long before he took office, has honed his talking points about them in a very Trumpian direction, and now appears to be spending significant time pressing top allies to give the administration what it wants.

Just because he’s asking for it, of course, doesn’t mean those allies will give him damning evidence to support his and Trump’s suspicions. It’s entirely possible that this will be handled aboveboard, with Durham asserting himself as the staid and reasonable prosecutor he is reputed to be.

But Barr’s involvement portends all kind of uncertainty and lends itself to suspicion. The mere fact that he’s apparently taking such an interest in this — to the extent that he has made repeated overseas trips — suggests this is a topic of significant concern for him. It perhaps indicates that it’s not something he is pursuing just to mollify Trump and check a box for the president who appointed him.

Of course, that should not really be a surprise, given that Barr has been barking up this tree since 2017. Long before many Republicans were questioning the origins of the Russia investigation, Barr told the New York Times that there was more reason to investigate “various ‘national security’ activities carried out during the election” than there was to investigate potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. (He said the same of the Clinton Foundation and a debunked conspiracy theory involving the Clintons and Uranium One.)

Barr told The Post around the same time, “I don’t think all this stuff about throwing [Clinton] in jail or jumping to the conclusion that she should be prosecuted is appropriate.” Then he added: “But I do think that there are things that should be investigated that haven’t been investigated.”

He now appears to be facilitating one of those investigations — hard. The risk of such high-profile involvement from Barr is that top allies see him as applying pressure on behalf of Trump to get the answers Trump wants, rather than simply making sure they cooperate with the things Durham asks them to do. Barr is clearly not erring on the side of looking like he has completely outsourced this whole thing to Durham and is a passive player.

Trump has frequently thrown his weight around on the world stage in efforts to get allies to do his bidding — most recently, we’ve found out, in the case of Ukraine — and it’s very difficult to separate this from that. The danger is that these countries that rely upon their alliance with the United States get the same message the whistleblower alleged Trump sent to Ukraine: They had better “play ball,” or else.

None of it is a signal of an attorney general just checking a box and/or straining to avoid proving his detractors correct; it’s a signal of an attorney general who has taken the kind of keen interest in this subject that his public comments should have made plainly obvious.

[Brian Peacock]

...
Scaramucci?!? What's he know?

Scaramucci? Scaramucci? Can he do the fandango?

[Joe]

...
Scaramucci?!? What's he know?

Scaramucci? Scaramucci? Can he do the fandango?

I believe he did for about 10 days in July of 2017.

[laklak]

...
Scaramucci?!? What's he know?

Scaramucci? Scaramucci? Can he do the fandango?