Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

WASHINGTON—Donald Trump made 60 false claims in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, shattering his old record for false claims in a single speech.

At 2 hours and 2 minutes, Trump’s speech to CPAC was also by far the longest of his presidency. If you’re counting false claims per minute, Star editor Ed Tubb notes, Trump made almost an identical amount to CPAC, 0.49 per minute, as he did in the Pennsylvania rally speech in August at which he set his old record of 36, 0.46 per minute.

But still: man, 60 false claims in a single speech.

Six of them were on the subject of his crowds. One of those was a lie he told even though hundreds of his supporters could see it was a lie.

When Trump seemed to be a couple minutes from finally reaching his conclusion, journalists including myself and hundreds of conference attendees watched dozens of people walk out of the room...

… after which, Trump said, “And, by the way, I’m watching those doors. Not one person has left, and I’ve been up here a long time…But not one person. So if you hear tomorrow, when they read ‘people left’ — nobody left early. There hasn’t been one person that’s left. But when you read it, you just say ‘fake news.’”

I’m skeptical of grand theories of Trump’s dishonesty; I think he often lies simply because that’s how his brain works. But there’s a school of thought that he tells extremely obvious lies as a demonstration of his power over people — to show that he can deny reality to people who know he is denying reality and still retain their fealty. It seemed like that might be what he was doing at CPAC.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WASHINGTON—Donald Trump made 60 false claims in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, shattering his old record for false claims in a single speech.

At 2 hours and 2 minutes, Trump’s speech to CPAC was also by far the longest of his presidency. If you’re counting false claims per minute, Star editor Ed Tubb notes, Trump made almost an identical amount to CPAC, 0.49 per minute, as he did in the Pennsylvania rally speech in August at which he set his old record of 36, 0.46 per minute.

But still: man, 60 false claims in a single speech.

Six of them were on the subject of his crowds. One of those was a lie he told even though hundreds of his supporters could see it was a lie.

When Trump seemed to be a couple minutes from finally reaching his conclusion, journalists including myself and hundreds of conference attendees watched dozens of people walk out of the room...

… after which, Trump said, “And, by the way, I’m watching those doors. Not one person has left, and I’ve been up here a long time…But not one person. So if you hear tomorrow, when they read ‘people left’ — nobody left early. There hasn’t been one person that’s left. But when you read it, you just say ‘fake news.’”

I’m skeptical of grand theories of Trump’s dishonesty; I think he often lies simply because that’s how his brain works. But there’s a school of thought that he tells extremely obvious lies as a demonstration of his power over people — to show that he can deny reality to people who know he is denying reality and still retain their fealty. It seemed like that might be what he was doing at CPAC.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

We now have concrete confirmation that Donald Trump Jr. signed checks reimbursing Michael Cohen for payments he made as part of a criminal scheme on President Trump’s behalf. The New York Times has obtained eight of the checks from Trump’s accounts reimbursing hush-money payments made by Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer.

The signature of Trump’s eldest son is on two of them.

The eight checks bolster the outlines of the story Cohen has told. He recently testified that during the campaign, Trump knowingly entered into a conspiracy with him to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels about an alleged affair, a criminal violation of campaign finance laws at Trump’s direction, and then reimbursed Cohen throughout 2017, while Trump was president.

Two of the checks came from a trust and thus were signed by Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg and Trump Jr.

In a remarkable coincidence, the Times reports that one of the checks signed by Trump Jr. was issued on the same day that a Trump aide confirmed that the president had helped dictate a statement by Trump Jr. falsifying the rationale behind the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting. At that meeting Trump Jr. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-s-emails-about-meeting-a-russian-government-attorney-annotated/ (eagerly tried to conspire with Russia) to corrupt our election on his father’s behalf.

That confluence of events neatly captures the seamy role that Trump Jr. has played throughout this whole affair, on multiple fronts.

 

[Big_paul]

The federal budget deficit ballooned rapidly in the first four months of the fiscal year amid falling tax revenue and higher spending, the Treasury Department said Tuesday, posing a new challenge for the White House and Congress and they prepare for a number of budget battles.

The deficit grew 77 percent in the first four months of fiscal year 2019 compared with the same period one year before, Treasury said.

The total deficit for the four month period was $310 billion, Treasury said, up from $176 billion for the same period one year earlier.

This is what happens when wealth is concentrated in the 1% who don't pay their fair share of taxes

 

[Michael Scally MD]

(CNN)Michael Cohen on Wednesday provided the House Intelligence Committee with new documents showing edits to the false written statement he delivered to Congress in 2017 about the Trump Organization's pursuit of the Trump Tower Moscow project into the 2016 campaign season, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

The documents Cohen provided are intended to further explain his public testimony last week, in which Cohen said that President Donald Trump's then-personal lawyer Jay Sekulow made changes to his statement to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and that it was reviewed ahead of time by lawyers like Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the President's daughter and son-in-law who are both White House advisers.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

(CNN)Michael Cohen on Wednesday provided the House Intelligence Committee with new documents showing edits to the false written statement he delivered to Congress in 2017 about the Trump Organization's pursuit of the Trump Tower Moscow project into the 2016 campaign season, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

The documents Cohen provided are intended to further explain his public testimony last week, in which Cohen said that President Donald Trump's then-personal lawyer Jay Sekulow made changes to his statement to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and that it was reviewed ahead of time by lawyers like Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the President's daughter and son-in-law who are both White House advisers.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WINGDALE, N.Y. — One morning last May, Eric Trump sent a text message to the caretaker of the shooting range he and his brother own in Upstate New York. The weather was getting warmer, and it was time to plant crops to attract deer that the Trumps and their friends could hunt.

“Juan — how are the fields coming along,” Eric Trump wrote to Juan Quintero. “They need to be planted in the next week or so in order to make the season. Hope you are great.”

“I’m working in it,” Quintero replied in his limited English.

Quintero, 42, was so trusted by the Trumps that he had not one but two jobs working for the family. He was a greenskeeper at the Trump National Golf Club Hudson Valley in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., where he would work eight-hour shifts on weekdays. Then he would put in five more hours each day as a contractor at the 171-acre hunting retreat called Leather Hill Preserve, which serves as a private weekend playground for President Trump’s sons and the property’s co-owners.

He also was an immigrant from Mexico who had crossed the border more than two decades ago and was working illegally in the United States.

In January, Quintero lost his golf course job after 18 years of employment — part of a purge of undocumented workers from Trump’s businesses amid revelations that the company relied on illegal labor for years, well into Trump’s presidency. Gone, too, was his side job at the hunting retreat.

“All of the years you give them, and they just let you go,” Quintero said in a recent interview at his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. “They do not say, ‘Let’s do something, let’s try to help you.’ They simply said, ‘Your documents are not valid,’ and that is it.”

Quintero said he never directly told Eric Trump about his immigration status. But he said he remained employed by the hunting lodge for more than a year after not providing the owners with a Social Security number when they sought to issue him a debit card.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Senorman]

This is what happens when wealth is concentrated in the 1% who don't pay their fair share of taxes

Add a $1,500,000,000,000 tax cut (over 10 years) to the mix and guess what happens. This is just the beginning. Once our next recession hits, tax collections are going to drop through the floor. Poor people (ironically, mostly Trump voters) will get hit the hardest.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

In the weeks following the federal raids on former Michael Cohen’s law office and residences last April, President Donald Trump's former lawyer and confidant was contacted by two New York attorneys who claimed to be in close contact with Rudy Giuliani, the current personal attorney to Trump, according to sources with direct knowledge of the discussions.

The outreach came just as Cohen, who spent more than a decade advocating for Trump, was wrangling with the most consequential decision of his life; whether to remain in a joint defense agreement with the president and others, or to flip on the man to whom he had pledged immutable loyalty. The sources described the lawyers’ contact with Cohen as an effort to keep him in the tent.

...

The sources familiar with the contacts said the two lawyers first reached out to Cohen late in April of last year and that the discussions continued for about two months. The attorneys, who have no known formal ties to the White House, urged Cohen not to leave the joint defense agreement, the sources told ABC News, and also offered a Plan B. In the event Cohen opted to exit the agreement, they could join his legal team and act as a conduit between Cohen and the president’s lawyers.

At one point in the discussions, one of the attorneys sent Cohen a phone screenshot to prove they were in touch with Giuliani, the sources said.

During the time of the conversations, Cohen and attorneys for the president and the Trump Organization were engaged in a cooperative, court-supervised effort to examine millions of files seized from the Cohen raids looking for items potentially covered by attorney-client privilege.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Swiper]

This is what happens when wealth is concentrated in the 1% who don't pay their fair share of taxes

the one percenters pay 37.3% of all federal income tax revenue. it’s not fair, they pay too much

 

[Michael Scally MD]

"The Trump administration can't keep track of the children they've separated from their parents at the border, but are tracking journalists who report on the border?"




Documents obtained by NBC 7 Investigates show the U.S. government created a secret database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers tied to the migrant caravan and in some cases, placed alerts on their passports.

At the end of 2018, roughly 5,000 immigrants from Central America made their way north through Mexico to the United States southern border. The story made international headlines.

As the migrant caravan reached the San Ysidro Port of Entry in south San Diego County, so did journalists, attorneys, and advocates who were there to work and witness the events unfolding.

But in the months that followed, journalists who covered the caravan, as well as those who offered assistance to caravan members, said they felt they had become targets of intense inspections and scrutiny by border officials.