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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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In 1976, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in an attempt to clear up this danger by defining executive authority more clearly and subjecting emergencies to congressional renewal. Instead, the act served to institutionalize presidential authority over emergencies, with Congress exercising only a https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=89100712300007207010009102301912206412305003107400400410406812407710012002200012307012002502012501502302812312202806603110212700501204902003200500910802406910310400404703507307410908311607901711602912207012311906 (whisper of its legally mandated oversight) once in the past 42 years. Dozens of national emergencies remain open and in place, weakening the system and setting it up for abuse.
Two key differences make Trump’s plan particularly risky. The first is that no actual emergency exists — no equivalent to Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or even economic collapse. Instead, Trump threatens an emergency to punish another branch of the government for constitutionally exercising its authority.
The second difference relates more directly to the president himself. U.S. courts have often left space for presidents to respond quickly to events threatening the country’s stability, with the assumption that the executive branch is considering all the available intelligence and will have the most informed perspective, a premise that simply does not apply to Trump.
Totalitarianism rises out of a process, not a single event. Declaring a state of exception in response to a political impasse would be a big step toward degrading an already vulnerable system. A fake emergency could trigger a real catastrophe — one that a split Congress would be unlikely to resolve and that a Supreme Court sympathetic to an imperial presidency might even worsen. We have more than a century of precedents at home and abroad to demonstrate all the ways things could go wrong.
Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who in 2016 met with Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower, was charged on Tuesday in a separate case that showed her close ties to the Kremlin.
Ms. Veselnitskaya was charged by federal prosecutors in New York with seeking to thwart a Justice Department civil fraud investigation into money laundering that involved an influential Russian businessman and his investment firm.
The case was not directly related to the Trump Tower meeting. But a federal indictment returned in Manhattan seemed to confirm that Ms. Veselnitskaya had deep ties to senior Russian government officials.
The indictment charges that after the Justice Department asked the Russian government to assist its investigation, the Russian government refused, responding with a letter that purported to exonerate Russian officials and the firm’s personnel.
Istanbul, Turkey (CNN)US National Security Advisor John Bolton made "a serious mistake" telling reporters that the United States would only pull out of Syria if Turkey pledged not to attack its Kurdish allies there, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Tuesday.
"Bolton's remarks in Israel are not acceptable. It is not possible for me to swallow this," Erdogan said during a speech in parliament. "Bolton made a serious mistake. If he thinks that way, he is in a big mistake. We will not compromise."
The eyes of the country are fixed upon the U.S.-Mexico border. Controversy over President Donald Trump’s policy of separating the children from parents accused of illegal entry -- a practice he didn’t begin, but temporarily scaled up with a so-called zero-tolerance policy toward asylum-seekers -- has caused a flood of outrage. Whether Trump’s apparent reversal of that policy, and his return to Obama-era practices, will mollify critics remains to be seen.
But the larger issue of illegal immigration from the south remains unsolved. Trump and his advisers, particularly Stephen Miller, have portrayed illegal entry across the Mexican border as a mounting crisis, necessitating dramatic action. Nothing could be further from the truth; the problem has slowly been resolving itself, and will likely continue to do so.
There was also a clearly unprecedented reason not to carry the speech: namely, that nearly everything Trump says on this topic is intentionally inflammatory and either carelessly or deliberately untrue. Politics always involves spin and selective emphasis, but the networks would know for sure ahead of time that they were using their resources to advance untruths.
But the networks said yes, they’ll presumably air the speech, and the question now is what else they can do to cope with the reality of an office holder who doesn’t care that he lies.
Below I make the case that the networks and other news organizations must themselves break precedent, to keep up with what Trump is trying to do. Knowing that Trump is going to attack the truth this evening, they must take active measures to defend it. They have this day to prepare. A commitment to real-time, onscreen fact-checking is at this point the most feasible goal for a speech mere hours away. In the longer run, all major media need to think about how to deal with the endless skein of choices like this they’ll face in the next two years.
Paul Manafort shared presidential campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian employee whom the FBI has said has ties to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing from his defense attorneys.
The former Trump campaign chairman on Tuesday denied in a filing that he broke his plea deal by lying repeatedly to prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
But in doing so, he exposed details of the dispute that were apparently meant to be redacted, including that the special counsel alleges he “lied about sharing polling data with Mr. Kilimnik related to the 2016 presidential campaign.”
The unredacted filing in D.C. federal court says Manafort also discussed a Ukrainian peace plan with Kilimnik, a former employee of his consulting firm who the FBI assessed as having ties to Russian intelligence.
In his filing, Manafort’s lawyers said any inconsistencies in those interviews were unintentional and in part attributable to his months in solitary confinement at the Alexandria jail in Virginia, which they say has “taken a toll on his physical and mental health.”
“There is no support for the proposition that Mr. Manafort intentionally lied to the Government,” defense attorneys wrote in a Tuesday court filing. “Mr. Manafort provided complete and truthful information to the best of his ability.”
Prosecutors accused Manafort of telling “multiple discernible lies” over the course of 12 interviews with investigators and two grand jury appearances since his guilty plea in September in Washington to conspiring to defraud the United States and conspiring to obstruct justice through his undisclosed lobbying for a pro-Russian politician in Ukraine.
