MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
- Start date
President Trump's personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, has some explaining to do.
The Washington Post reported Monday night that https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-dictated-sons-misleading-statement-on-meeting-with-russian-lawyer/2017/07/31/04c94f96-73ae-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html (the president himself was responsible for the drafting of Donald Trump Jr.'s misleading statement) after the New York Times revealed that the younger Trump had arranged a meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016. Sources say White House advisers had decided to be transparent about the meeting, but the president changed the game plan at the last minute to misleadingly suggest that the meeting was about adoption. The full truth soon came out that the meeting was arranged to discuss compromising information, supposedly from the Russian government, about Hillary Clinton.
The problem for Sekulow? He denied at least twice, pretty unequivocally, that the president played any role in the drafting of that statement.
America is on its way to a full-blown constitutional crisis.
Over just a few days last week, President Trump and his allies stepped up attacks on Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the campaign’s connections to Russia. They tried to push Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of office. They thought out loud about whether the president can pardon himself.
This all points to the same conclusion: Mr. Trump is willing to deal a major blow to the rule of law — and the American Republic — in order to end an independent investigation into his Russia ties.
It is tempting to picture the demise of democracy as a Manichaean drama in which the stakes are clear from the start and the main actors fully understand their roles: Would-be dictators rail against democracy, hire violent thugs to do their bidding and vow to destroy the opposition. When they demand expanded powers or attack independent institutions, their supporters and opponents alike realize that authoritarianism has arrived.
There have, in fact, been a few times and places when the villains were quite as villainous, and the heroes quite as heroic. (Think Germany in the 1930s.) But in most cases, the demise of democracy has been far more gradual and far easier to overlook.
In their first years in office, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orban in Hungary claimed that they wanted to fix, rather than cripple, democratic institutions. Even as it became clear that these strongmen sought to consolidate power, most of their opponents told themselves that they were saving their courage for the right moment. By the time the full extent of the danger had become incontrovertible, it was too late to mount an effective resistance.
In some ways, the United States seems far from such a situation today. The Trump administration, after all, appears weak: It is relatively unpopular, mired in scandal and divided by infighting — Anthony Scaramucci’s 10-day tenure is just the latest example. And it faces determined opposition from courts, the news media, state and local governments and ordinary citizens. If Mr. Trump’s presidency ends in humiliation, future generations may well conclude that it was bound to fail all along.
But in other respects the United States is already well on the way to what I have, in my academic work, called “democratic deconsolidation.” Mr. Trump is increasingly emulating the playbook of popularly elected strongmen who have done deep, lasting damage to their countries’ democratic institutions.
The Fox News Channel and a wealthy supporter of President Trump worked in concert under the watchful eye of the White House to concoct a story about the murder of a young Democratic National Committee aide, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The explosive claim is part of the lawsuit filed against Fox News by Rod Wheeler, a longtime paid commentator for the news network. The suit was obtained exclusively by NPR.
Wheeler alleges Fox News and the Trump supporter intended to deflect public attention from growing concern about the administration's ties to the Russian government. His suit charges that a Fox News reporter created quotations out of thin air and attributed them to him to propel her story.
Fox's president of news, Jay Wallace, told NPR Monday there was no "concrete evidence" that Wheeler was misquoted by the reporter, Malia Zimmerman. The news executive did not address a question about the story's allegedly partisan origins. Fox News declined to allow Zimmerman to comment for this story.
The story, which first aired in May, was retracted by Fox News a week later. Fox News has, to date, taken no action in response to what it said was a failure to adhere to the network's standards.
Still waiting on a smidge of evidence trump colluded with russia to sabotage our election and or democracy.
Twitterdum ... Twitterdee ...
President Donald Trump's tweets and "emotional venting" aimed at China over the weekend can't serve as a substitute for substantive policy discussions, the country's state news agency said late Monday.
Xinhua New Agency responded critically following repeated statements by Trump on China's unwillingness to help fix the current standoff with North Korea.
"Trump is quite a personality, and he likes to tweet,” Xinhua said in an editorial, as reported by The New York Times. “But emotional venting cannot become a guiding policy for solving the nuclear issue on the peninsula.”
After North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile Sunday, Trump wrote on Twitter that he is "very disappointed with China."
"Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet... .they do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk," Trump wrote Sunday. "We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem!"
Xinhua's rebuke of Trump warns against using using China as a scapegoat for America's foreign policy challenges.
President Donald Trump's tweets and "emotional venting" aimed at China over the weekend can't serve as a substitute for substantive policy discussions, the country's state news agency said late Monday.
Xinhua New Agency responded critically following repeated statements by Trump on China's unwillingness to help fix the current standoff with North Korea.
"Trump is quite a personality, and he likes to tweet,” Xinhua said in an editorial, as reported by The New York Times. “But emotional venting cannot become a guiding policy for solving the nuclear issue on the peninsula.”
After North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile Sunday, Trump wrote on Twitter that he is "very disappointed with China."
"Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet... .they do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk," Trump wrote Sunday. "We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem!"
Xinhua's rebuke of Trump warns against using using China as a scapegoat for America's foreign policy challenges.
In an audio-only White House press gaggle on May 16, then-presidential spokesman Sean Spicer fielded a question about the murder of Seth Rich, the former Democratic National Committee staff who was killed in Washington last summer.
Spicer tripped a bit over his words, but his aim was clear: Distance and lack of knowledge.
“I’m not aware . . . I generally don’t get updates on former DNC staffers,” Spicer told a reporter who had asked what the White House had to say about a news report that Rich was in email contact with WikiLeaks before his murder. Then he said it was inappropriate to comment on it.
Now, though, we know that Spicer was indeed aware that Fox News was cooking up a story that would eventually be amplified and twisted into a huge, baseless conspiracy theory.
