The Trump thread: All things Donald

[Athos_131]

Trump demands action to reduce deficit, pushes new deficit spending

In total, government debt has risen roughly $2 trillion since Trump took office, and the federal government now owes $21.7 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. The president’s agenda has contributed to that increase and is projected to continue to do so, both through the GOP tax cut and with bipartisan spending increases.

When former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn’s staffers prepared a presentation for Trump about deficits, Cohn told them no. It wouldn’t be necessary, he said, because the president did not care about deficits, according to current and former officials.

Trump also repeatedly told Cohn to print more money, according to three White House officials familiar with his comments.

“He’d just say, run the presses, run the presses,” one former senior administration official said, describing the president’s Oval Office orders. “Sometimes it seemed like he was joking, and sometimes it didn’t.”

Chief of Staff John F. Kelly has told others about watching television with Trump and asking the president how much the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff earns. Trump guessed $5 million, according to people who were told the story by Kelly, startling the chief of staff. Kelly responded that he made less than $200,000.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

GM Cuts Jobs And Plants To Deal With Changing Tastes And Trump Tariffs

Higher costs, due in part to the Trump administration steel tariffs, have already cost GM $1 billion, and those costs will persist and rise as long as they are in place.

Merry Christmas to 14,700 families who are going to be looking for work.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

A Path Forward for Post-Trump Reforms

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[Athos_131]

Mueller says Manafort lied after pleading guilty, should be sentenced immediately

Oh dear.

#Resist

[Lois]

[Katiebee]

I am just so depressed.

[Athos_131]

Just imagine how bankrupt Trump could be after all this.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

Except that repeated (Corporate) bankrupsies is part of his business model.  He hides the embezzled money, runs up a debt, then declares Chapter 11.  Then, the debts are absolved, the company is dissolved, and he can bring the profits back to accrue Interest at a high corporate (With another temporary company) rate.  Rob Peter, hide the money, then declare Chapter 11 so you never have to pay Paul.

Rinse, repeat...  Hes done this at least 5 times.  (There's some debate over exactly how many times, but more than the 3 it takes to derive a pattern of behavior.)  It's exactly how he's running the Executive branch, into the ground.  All he needs is a massive interstate real estate project to embezzle from, through his subsidiaries.  Like say developing a strip of land stretching from Brownsville to Tijuana.

[Athos_131]

Trump’s false claim that Obama had the same family separation policy

Time keeps passing by and the president is still shifting blame, refusing to acknowledge the scope of his family separations, defending them with falsehoods and peddling unsubstantiated claims about criminals in the migrant caravan. The administration has had ample time to find something, anything, to support these claims. But the tank remains empty, and Trump earns another Four Pinocchios.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy, sources say

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[Athos_131]

Mueller has emails from Stone pal Corsi about WikiLeaks Dem email dump

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[Athos_131]

The Latest: US nixed FBI checks for teen migrant camp staff

The memo, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press, says the former director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement personally signed off on sidestepping requirements for child abuse and neglect checks at the tent city in Tornillo, Texas.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, pleads guilty to lying to Congress about Moscow project

As part of Cohen’s plea, he admitted to falsely claiming that efforts to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow ended in January 2016, when in fact discussions continued through June of that year, the filing said. Among the people Cohen briefed on the status of the project was Trump himself, on more than three occasions, according to the document.

During the campaign, Cohen acted as Trump’s point person in an attempt to build the Trump development in Moscow. He has said the project was in its early stages in fall 2015, as Trump’s presidential campaign heated up.

Cohen previously said the project stalled in January 2016, prompting him to email a top aide to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin seeking help. Cohen previously said that he never received a response and that the project was halted that month.

In fact, according to the filing, the Russians did respond and Cohen discussed the project for 20 minutes on the phone with an assistant to Dmitry Peskov, a senior aide to Putin. At the time, Cohen was seeking help with both securing land and financing. Peskov didn’t immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment.

Prosecutors seemed to make a point in the document of emphasizing how Cohen had talked with Trump himself — whom they didn’t name — about the project. The document said Cohen lied because he hoped his testimony would limit the ongoing Russia investigations.

Prosecutors also said that Cohen continued to have contact into summer 2016 with Felix Sater, the Russian-born developer who was assisting with the project. Some of those contacts were first reported by The Washington Post.

In June 2016, Sater invited Cohen to attend an economic conference in St. Petersburg, assuring Cohen that he could be introduced to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, top financial leaders and perhaps Putin, The Post reported. An attorney for Sater did not immediately comment.

According to the criminal information filed by prosecutors, Cohen sent a two-page letter to the committee in which he “knowingly and deliberately” made false statements, including that the Moscow project “ended in January 2016 and was not discussed extensively with others in the company”; that Cohen “never agreed to travel to Russia in connection with the Moscow project and ‘never considered’ asking Individual 1 to travel for the project”; and that Cohen “did not recall any Russian government response or contact about the Moscow Project.”

The document does not identify “Individual 1,” but according to people familiar with the case, that person is Trump.

“Cohen discussed the status and progress of the Moscow Project with Individual 1 on more than the three occasions Cohen claimed to the committee, and he briefed family members of Individual 1 within the Company about the project,” according to the information.

The document also says that Cohen discussed in May 2016 the possibility that he might travel to Russia before the Republican National Convention and that Individual 1 might travel there after the convention, but a month later, he told “Individual 2” that he would not be making such a trip. The document does not identify Individual 2, but people familiar with the investigation said that it is Sater.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

No talk of ‘the Resistance’ or opinions about impeachment at work, federal employees are warned

This might not stand up to a First Amendment challenge.

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[Athos_131]

Trump says he ‘lightly’ did business in Russia, after years of obscuring how hard he tried to

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[Athos_131]

How to Read Michael Cohen's Latest Plea and Its Revelations About the Trump Organization

In effect, Cohen admitted in court on Thursday that even as Russian operatives were hacking Democratic emails and getting ready to dump emails through Wikileaks, even as Trump was publicly praising Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, even as the Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. took place in the summer of 2016, the Trump Organization—with Trump and his family very much in the know—was negotiating to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The Trump Organization was negotiating—or, at least, trying to negotiate—this deal with the Kremlin itself. And Cohen has admitted that he lied to Congress about this history to protect Trump politically.

The primary point is that this is all utterly unacceptable. That a large swath of the public, and the legislative branch, has chosen to accept it does not make it more reasonable that a man seeking to be president of the United States would at the same time publicly cozy up to a foreign dictator and negotiate with his regime over a potential business opportunity—and then cover it all up.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump has flouted the rules before. But his dealing in Russia is a new level of brazenness.

“My focus was running for president,” Trump said, “but when I run for president, that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to do business.”

But if it’s really no big deal, he might want to tell that to 2016 Trump.

“I have nothing to do with Russia,” Trump assured in July 2016.

“Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” he tweeted in January 2017.

“I don’t deal there,” he said in an October 2016 debate, after Hillary Clinton suggested he was praising Russia because he wanted to do business there.

These comments may be defensible and even technically true — there was no ultimate deal, after all — but they were clear attempts to mislead by a candidate who just that year had been pushing for a big deal in Moscow. The statements suggest, at the very least, that Trump was trying to obscure his longing to do business in Russia. As The Post’s Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger have detailed, Trump has been trying to build properties in Russia for more than 30 years. He knew this would be a problem. It was all a coverup, as Cohen’s plea deal makes clear.

It’s not just that he was pursuing Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 primaries; he was also doing it with the assistance of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office. According to Cohen’s plea deal — and contrary to the Kremlin’s previous denials — an assistant to Putin’s top spokesman spoke with Cohen, an attorney for Trump at the time, for 20 minutes after Cohen reached out in January 2016.

By May 2016, after Trump was the presumptive GOP nominee, a Russian associate of Cohen’s relayed an invitation from that top Putin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, that included a potential introduction to Putin or Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. This was an effort that was clearly serious and involved the Russian government, and Trump did nothing to rein it in. It was only shelved the day The Washington Post reported that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee.

This is a massive appearance problem, at best. Here was a man running to become U.S. president — and actually winning — who was apparently seeking, through an emissary, to leverage that to secure favors from a foreign government. Even if you accept that Cohen might have been freelancing, the fact that he was briefing Trump would seem to suggest he told Trump about these contacts and even about possibly traveling to Russia at Peskov’s invitation.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

There's a Lot Going On in Michael Cohen's Sentencing Memo

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[Athos_131]

The president’s misleading statements on Trump Tower Moscow: A timeline

"Well I told you, General Flynn obviously was dealing [with Russia]. So that’s one person. But he was dealing, as he should have been. . . . Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia. I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”

— President Trump, in a news conference, on Feb. 16, 2017

President Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts to secure a real estate deal in Moscow for the Trump Organization in 2015 and 2016, while his boss was campaigning for president.

For three decades, Trump had angled to strike a real estate deal in Moscow, but he could never cinch it, even after his Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow in 2013. In a recent court filing, prosecutors laid out extensive contact on a possible deal through 2016 between Cohen, then an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman with a checkered past, and numerous Russian nationals, including the press secretary for the president of Russia.

Trump has repeatedly claimed he had “nothing to do with Russia,” whether in his business affairs or the 2016 campaign. During a 2017 news conference, three days after Michael Flynn resigned his post as national security adviser, Trump went a step further. He told reporters “to the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with” has anything to do with Russia.

We’ve previously outlined the connections between members of Trump’s campaign and Russia. But Cohen was technically not part of the campaign, even though he was a close adviser. Because the president’s business and political worlds are intertwined, as a reader service, the Fact Checker compiled a timeline of what happened, what the president knew and what he said publicly about contact between his staff and Russia.

The Facts

Trump announced he was running for president in June 2015. He spent the next several months on the campaign trail in advance of the Iowa caucuses in February 2016.

At the same time, Cohen was working toward a deal that would license Trump’s name to a skyscraper in Moscow. According to court documents, Cohen updated Trump and Trump’s family on the project more than three times between September 2015 and June 2016, but it is not clear exactly when these briefings took place. The timeline below outlines how the campaign and the Moscow project intersected.

September and October 2015: Cohen and Sater, who had worked on previous real estate proposals for Trump in Russia, began discussions about a potential deal. According to The Washington Post, “an unidentified investor planned to build the project and, under a licensing agreement, put Trump’s name on it.” Sater believed that, with Trump’s publicity from the campaign, it would be perfect timing. He began to contact former contacts in Russia and put together a licensing deal for the Moscow project fairly quickly.

Oct. 28: Trump personally signed the letter of intent for the Moscow project. This was the same day as the third Republican debate.

December: Negotiations for Cohen to go to Moscow heated up, but by the end of the month, Sater and Cohen’s relationship had frayed significantly, according to BuzzFeed. Despite particularly testy text messages, Cohen continued to respond to Sater.

Dec. 2: Reporters from the Associated Press asked Trump about his relationship with Sater. Trump said, “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it. I’m not familiar with him."

Trump was leading in the polls by Christmas 2015.

Jan. 14-16, 2016: Cohen emailed Dmitry Peskov, a top aide and spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, to enlist his help “to secure land and permits,” according to documents submitted to Congress.

Jan. 20: Cohen heard back from Peskov’s office and spoke with his assistant for 20 minutes. During that call, according to court documents, Cohen outlined the Moscow project and asked for assistance to move it forward. Cohen initially told Congress that he had never heard back from Peskov. Peskov corroborated this false claim in August 2017 when he said he had received an email but “left it unanswered.” (After Cohen’s new admission, Peskov displayed the emails to reporters and confirmed that Russian officials contacted Cohen by phone.)

“Michael had a lengthy substantive conversation with the personal assistant to a Kremlin official following his outreach in January 2016, engaged in additional communications concerning the project as late as June 2016, and kept [Trump] apprised of these communications,” according to a sentencing memorandum filed by Cohen’s team.

Jan. 21: Sater told Cohen, “It’s about [the President of Russia] they called today.”

On Feb. 1, Trump finishes second in the Iowa caucuses.

Spring 2016: “[Cohen] and [Trump] also discussed possible travel to Russia in the summer of 2016, and Michael took steps to clear dates for such travel,” according to the memorandum filed by Cohen’s team. Cohen also discussed this “potential business travel to Russia” with a senior campaign official, according to court documents.

On May 3, Trump becomes the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party after Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Trump’s remaining challengers, withdraw from the contest.

May 4-6: Cohen and Sater discuss the possibility of a trip to Russia that would include Trump. They debate whether it would be better for him to visit before or after the Republican National Convention in July. On May 5, Sater relays a message that a Russian official would like to invite Cohen to the “Davos of Russia” in June where he would be introduced to Putin and/or Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Cohen agrees to the trip. According to the sentencing memorandum filed by Cohen’s team, he continued to update Trump through June.

May 21: Then-advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos suggest to the campaign that Trump travel to Russia. Papadopoulos forwards a May 4 email exchange to newly minted campaign chairman Paul Manafort, saying, “Russia has been eager to meet Mr. Trump for quite some time and have been reaching out to me to discuss.” Manafort then forwards this email to his deputy, Rick Gates, writing, “We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips.” Gates agreed and passed the exchange along to “the person responding to all mail of non-importance,” aiming to avoid a response from a senior official.

On May 26, Trump secures the needed number of delegates for the Republican nomination for president.

June 3: Rob Goldstone, a music publicist, emails Donald Trump Jr., offering “very high level and sensitive information” that could “incriminate Hillary” and is part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Goldstone represents Emin Agalarov, whose father is a major real estate developer close to Putin. Agalarov asks Goldstone to pass this along for his father, who was offered the information by the “Crown prosecutor of Russia.” Trump Jr. promptly responds: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

June 7: Trump promises a “major speech about Hillary Clinton’s crimes.”

June 9: Trump Jr., Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others at Trump Tower. At least eight people attend this meeting, including two other Russian associates. Since the meeting was first reported, reports have surfaced that Veselnitskaya may have been working on behalf of the Kremlin at that time.

June 9-14: Sater tried to contact Cohen to confirm his upcoming trip to Russia. Court documents say Sater sent “multiple messages” to Cohen and “included forms” for him to complete.

On June 14, The Washington Post reveals the Democratic National Committee had been hacked. The following day, the DNC and CrowdStrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack, said, “Two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016.”

June 14: Cohen met Sater in the lobby of Trump Tower to inform him that he would not “be traveling at [that] time.” Cohen had initially agreed to a trip to St. Petersburg in June.

June 15: Trump releases a statement: “We believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader. Too bad the DNC doesn’t hack Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails.”

On July 21, Trump officially becomes the Republican nominee for president. The next day, WikiLeaks releases nearly 20,000 DNC emails obtained through Russian hacking operations. U.S. officials have said Russian intelligence used intermediaries to give the email cache to WikiLeaks.

July 21-27: In several television appearances, tweets and a news conference, Trump and his campaign officials deny any connections to Russia, despite previous and ongoing meetings and communications.

July 24: “Are there any ties between Mr. Trump, you or your campaign and Putin and his regime?” George Stephanopoulos asked Manafort on ABC News’s “This Week.” “No, there are not,” Manafort says. “It’s absurd, and there’s no basis to it.”

July 24: In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Jake Tapper asked Trump Jr. about the suggestion that Russians had hacked the DNC network to help Trump and hurt Clinton. Trump Jr. calls the claims “lies.”

July 25: Trump responds: “The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

July 26: Trump tweeted “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia.”

July 27: Trump said, “What do I have to do with Russia? You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach.”
 
Sater told BuzzFeed that after Trump’s July 26 tweet, he knew the deal was off.

Oct. 9: During the second debate with Clinton, Trump says: “I know about Russia, but I know nothing about the inner workings of Russia. I don’t deal there. I have no businesses there. I have no loans from Russia.”

Oct. 26: During a campaign rally in Kinston, N.C., Trump declares: “First of all, I don’t know Putin, have no business whatsoever with Russia, have nothing to do with Russia.”

Jan. 11, 2017: Trump tweets: “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” In a news conference that day, Trump says: “I tweeted out that I have no dealings with Russia. I have no deals that could happen in Russia because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia.”

May 11: In an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, Trump says: “I am not involved in Russia. No loans. No nothing.”

Aug. 27: The Washington Post reports for the first time that when Trump was running for president, his company pursued a plan to develop a massive Trump Tower in Moscow.

Nov. 29, 2018: After the announcement of Cohen’s guilty plea, Trump tells reporters: “He’s lying about a project that everybody knew about. I mean, we were very open with it. … This deal was a very public deal. Everybody knows about this deal. I wasn’t trying to hide anything.”

That’s false because it was not disclosed until The Washington Post report in August 2017, almost one year after the election.

#Resist

[Jed_]

So Michael Avenatti has decided today not to run for President.  After mulling this over, I too have decided not to seek the nomination.