The Trump thread: All things Donald

[Athos_131]

What a presidential president would say about campaign dirt from a foreign foe

“I THINK you might want to listen; there isn’t anything wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, ‘We have information on your opponent,’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it,” President Trump said in a Wednesday interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “You don’t call the FBI. . . . Give me a break — life doesn’t work that way.”

When Mr. Trump made objectionable remarks in the past, we wrote editorials imagining what a decent president would have said. We haven’t done that in a while; it is pointless to expect him to act presidential. But this instance is so disturbing that we think it is worth reminding ourselves once again of how a normal, law-respecting president would speak. Here is what a presidential president might have said:

If there is one thing the past three years have shown, the only good answer to a foreign country offering dirt on your political opponent is to decline and immediately report the offer to the FBI. Our country is still enduring the fallout from Russian interference in 2016. It has cast a pall on my presidency and led to the indictment of former senior government and campaign officials. The last thing any president should do is encourage foreign meddling in our next presidential election.

That is why I denounce and renounce any foreign government seeking to aid my campaign, and I will not use any material they dig up, even if it might benefit me. I have instructed Republican campaign committees to spurn any scandal-mongering from foreign sources and to excise any such information from any campaign material. I also will insist that nonparty groups, such as super PACs, do not seek information or otherwise cooperate with foreign actors.

It is important for me to be clear on this, because it is not only a question of me or my campaign potentially breaking the law. It is also a matter of principle. Our political differences matter less than our commitment to one another as citizens loyal to the same constitutional order and committed to defending it in a world in which other states, friendly or unfriendly, pursue their own national interests. As president, I will defend this principle from the same erosion of other norms we have seen as our politics have gotten sharper.

Moreover, as president, I have a unique responsibility to act in the best interests of the nation, not in the interests of a foreign government to whom I am indebted — and not to my family company’s bottom line. That is why I did my best at the outset of my presidency to divest from businesses and other interests that could raise conflict of interest concerns. That is why I released my tax returns and, beyond that, issued a thorough report on my remaining financial holdings. That is why I removed myself and my family members from decision-making roles in my business, turning it over to an executive whom I do not consult. Americans deserve better than a president who takes money from foreigners and lobbyists at a hotel one day, then hands out government favors to them the next.

The country is going to have enough argument and disagreement over the next year and a half of campaigning. We don’t need any foreign “help” making it worse.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Republican Leader Insists Trump Definitely Didn't Say the Thing He Definitely Said

During his weekly press conference on Thursday, House Minority Leader Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy used reason and logic to argue that President Donald Trump definitely doesn’t want to do the thing he clearly stated he wanted to do just one day earlier.

After Trump told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he’d willingly accept information about political rivals from foreign powers and only “maybe” hand it over to the FBI, a visibly annoyed McCarthy nevertheless insisted “the president has been clear...that he does not want foreign government to interfere in our elections.”

“I’ve watched the president,” McCarthy continued. “I believe the president would always do the right action.”

As a reminder, here’s what Trump told Stephanopoulos during their interview:

Stephanopoulos: Your campaign this time around, if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on opponents, should they accept it or should they call the FBI?

Trump: I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen, there’s nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, “We have information on your opponent.” Oh, I think I’d want to hear it.

Stephanopoulos: You want that kind of interference in our elections?

Trump: It’s not an interference, they have information. I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI. If I thought there was something wrong. But when somebody comes up with oppo research, right, they come up with oppo research. Oh, let’s call the FBI. The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it, but you go and talk honestly to congressmen, they all do it, they always have. And that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo research.

Earlier in his conversation with Stephanopoulos, Trump also said that: “If somebody comes into your office with oppo research— they call it oppo research—with information that might be good or bad or something, but good for you, bad for your opponent, you don’t call the FBI.”

And there’s plenty of evidence in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report that the Trump 2016 campaign did, in fact, “expect it would benefit electorally from information” stolen by Russian officials to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign—something the president encouraged, at one point publicly asking, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Clinton’s email server.

So what Trump was talking about with Stephanopoulos isn’t a hypothetical situation at all. It’s something he’s done and, by all indications, hopes to do again this time around.

When asked if he, personally, would notify the FBI if a “foreign adversary” presented him with information about a political opponent, McCarthy admitted that he would “submit it to the authorities.”

Cool!

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[_priapism]

Is Donald Trump Jr. Guilty of Treason?

[joan1984]

Is Donald Trump Jr. Guilty of Treason?

And the answer is:  NO!

[_priapism]

[Athos_131]

Treason, as in giving levying war against the US or giving aid and comfort to the enemy?

No.  

Lying to Congress, lying to the FBI, campaign violations, tax evasion, and money laundering?

Probably.

Even Michael Flynn -who someone claimed around here needed to be "made whole" despite his pleading guilty to crimes- isn't guilty of "Treason".

Treason in the legal sense is punishable by death.  Mostly one person has been tossing that term around indiscriminately, and as usual Donnie Sr. doesn't know what it actually means.

The party of law and order, indeed.

#Resist

[joan1984]

Treason, as in giving levying war against the US or giving aid and comfort to the enemy?

No.  

We agree, as does virtually everyone who thinks it through.
Including former SC Robert Mueller. Including the US Attorney General.

Those who wish to toss around click bait terms, can always stretch language to mean whatever their twisted small brains wish, which is Fake News.
------------
"...Lying to Congress, lying to the FBI, campaign violations, tax evasion, and money laundering?

Probably...."

None of which is Treason, first of all. None of which has been charged by those employed to research such charges, and the Democrat lawyers hired by SC, and the Department of Justice. None of which has been 'charged' by anyone of responsibility in the Legislative Branch, in a formal manner.

Opinions of various Congress 'folk' is not relevant, without formal charges, and none of the above amounts to Treason, even if it were in some way true.

Click Bait = Fake News.

[Jed_]

Click Bait = Fake News.

True, but it is unusual for someone to admit the flaws in their own sources with labels like that.

[Athos_131]

Treason, as in giving levying war against the US or giving aid and comfort to the enemy?

No.  

We agree, as does virtually everyone who thinks it through.
Including former SC Robert Mueller. Including the US Attorney General.

Those who wish to toss around click bait terms, can always stretch language to mean whatever their twisted small brains wish, which is Fake News.
------------
"...Lying to Congress, lying to the FBI, campaign violations, tax evasion, and money laundering?

Probably...."

None of which is Treason, first of all. None of which has been charged by those employed to research such charges, and the Democrat lawyers hired by SC, and the Department of Justice. None of which has been 'charged' by anyone of responsibility in the Legislative Branch, in a formal manner.

Opinions of various Congress 'folk' is not relevant, without formal charges, and none of the above amounts to Treason, even if it were in some way true.

If you are going to debate the special counsel that thread is here:

http://www.kristensboard.com/forums/index.php?topic=65332.msg542459#msg542459

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump sycophants jump to cover the president’s claim that he’ll break the law

The Trump administration presents a series of unanswerable moral riddles. What’s worse — President Trump’s outrageous acts? His gaslighting? His followers’ eagerness to join him in coverups and lies? All three were on display this week, as they have been pretty much every week since Jan 20, 2017.

First, the misconduct: Having claimed that he did not collude with Russia in 2016, Trump now proudly advertises his willingness to collude with any foreign government in the future. If a regime offered him useful information, he told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, “Oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

“I would not have thought that I needed to say this,” responded Ellen L. Weintraub, chair of the Federal Election Commission: “It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election.”

Next came the gaslighting. Trump indignantly tweeted: “I meet and talk to ‘foreign governments’ every day. I just met with the Queen of England (U.K.), the Prince of Wales, the P.M. of the United Kingdom, the P.M. of Ireland, the President of France and the President of Poland. We talked about ‘Everything!’ Should I immediately call the FBI about these calls and meetings? How ridiculous! I would never be trusted again. With that being said, my full answer is rarely played by the Fake News Media. They purposely leave out the part that matters.”

Actually, the media didn’t leave out any part of his answer. It was the president who, in his ham-handed attempt at cleanup, left out the truth. Stephanopoulos wasn’t asking him whether, as president, it was proper for him to have diplomatic exchanges with foreign heads of state. He was asking whether Trump, as a candidate, would accept help from a foreign government. So Trump is, as usual, throwing out absurdities and falsehoods to distract from what he said and to give his followers — some cynical, others credulous — an excuse to claim that it was all fake news.

Trump’s trucklers did not disappoint. On Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution said the lesson was that “you shouldn’t ever talk to George Stephanopoulos,” and Ingraham was perturbed that someone (perhaps a 400-pound coach potato?) put Trump “in that situation — I don’t get it.” On “Fox & Friends,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt said it was ridiculous for Trump to report foreign assistance to the FBI: “What’s the FBI going to do?” Uh, stop the election interference?

A common trope among the Trumpkins was that criticism of their idol for making use of foreign election assistance was hypocritical because, as Sean Hannity argued: “Hillary Clinton literally empowered a foreign agent who produced a dossier for the Russian lies.” This whataboutism was echoed by the likes of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who should be smart enough to know better.

In reality (remember that quaint concept?), there is nothing illegal or unethical about the Clinton campaign paying a U.S. research firm, Fusion GPS, which employed a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, who talked to actual Russians to probe Trump’s suspicious Russia links. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee admitted as much: This is standard opposition research. It is not remotely equivalent to the Russian government helping Trump win. It’s actually similar to the Trump campaign hiring Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm. Moreover, Steele did go to the FBI — something that Trump boasts about never having done.

Few Republicans were willing to defend Trump’s egregious comments outright. Instead, they deflected and minimized. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made it sound as if the real problem was Democrats “trying to keep the 2016 election alive.” Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that this was not one of Trump’s “best statements” (please cite Trump’s best statement, Senator), but he praised Trump for his “refreshing habit of saying what he thinks.” I can think of many ways to describe the president bragging about breaking the law, but “refreshing” isn’t one of them. I suppose that’s one reason I’m not a Republican member of Congress.

The final indignity came when Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) led Republicans’ successful effort to block a bill sponsored by Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) to require campaigns to disclose any foreign offers of assistance to the FBI. This is of a piece with McConnell blocking a raft of other bills designed to defend U.S. elections from foreign interference. The most benign explanation is that Republicans are afraid of embarrassing Trump and incurring his wrath. The more sinister explanation is that they are secretly rooting for Russian help again in 2020. The two explanations are not, of course, incompatible. Either way, Republicans are putting partisan self-interest above the nation’s interest.

Beyond the issue of foreign election interference, this sordid episode shows how an utterly amoral president in league with power-hungry Republicans and the ratings-driven conservative media-industrial complex has hijacked U.S. politics. Considerations of truth, justice and the national interest are utterly alien to our new overlords. All that matters is “owning” the “libtards” — and enjoying the spoils of power.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

‘Absolutely unprecedented’: Trump upends long-held views with openness to foreign assistance

With his declared willingness to accept help from a foreign government in an election, President Trump upended long-held views that such outside assistance is anathema in American campaigns, both because of laws prohibiting foreign contributions and widely embraced norms of fair play.

Trump blew through those notions this week, telling ABC News that if a foreign government offered him information on a political opponent, “I think I’d want to hear it.”

“It’s not an interference; they have information — I think I’d take it,” he continued. “If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI, if I thought there was something wrong.”

He added that his own FBI director, Christopher A. Wray, was “wrong” when he said during congressional testimony that campaign aides should always report offers of assistance from foreign entities to the bureau.

Trump’s comments came less than two weeks after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said he wasn’t sure if he would report a future offer of foreign assistance to the FBI, calling questions regarding it “hypotheticals.” And Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been openly gathering information in recent weeks from Ukrainian officials that he says he hopes could be used in a 2020 race against former vice president Joe Biden, whose son Hunter sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” said Giuliani, who canceled an information-gathering trip to Kiev after public criticism. “Somebody could say it’s improper.”

It is illegal to accept a campaign contribution from a foreign national, though there is debate over the extent to which information, rather than money, can be counted as such a contribution. It is also illegal to conspire with a foreign government to affect a U.S. election by breaking other laws, such as stealing documents or acting as an agent of a foreign government without registering with the U.S. government.

Legal experts said the attitude of Trump and his allies toward foreign election assistance could hurt national security by depriving law enforcement of tips about foreign interference in U.S. affairs — such as Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 campaign.

The president’s comments — an echo of his 2016 “Russia, are you listening?” request for help finding Hillary Clinton’s emails — could also serve as a message to foreign governments that their assistance would be welcomed, not punished, by the commander in chief, they said.

“It’s critical when any candidate receives offers of assistance from foreign powers, that they should report. If they don’t, our law enforcement and intelligence community is deprived of key leads that would help them address potential election interference,” said Jennifer Daskal, a former senior Justice Department official who now teaches law at American University.

On Capitol Hill, Trump’s comments drew outrage from Democrats, who called for the passage of legislation requiring candidates to report offers of foreign help in elections.

While some Republicans emphasized that they would notify the FBI if approached by foreign entities offering opposition research, they also sought to highlight the fact that Democrats financed the work of former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who compiled a dossier about Trump and his alleged ties to Russia.

Kayleigh McEnany, a spokeswoman for Trump’s reelection campaign, told CBSN’s “Red & Blue” Thursday night that the campaign viewed the president’s words as a “directive” to deal with offers of foreign assistance on a “case-by-case basis.”

“He said he would likely do both: Listen to what they have to say, but also report it to the FBI,” she said.

Candidates have historically shied away from foreign associations, governed in part by federal election law, which prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to U.S. campaigns or making election expenditures. Those restrictions are built on a long-standing principle, dating back to the country’s founding, that elections should be free from foreign influence, historians said.

George Washington, the nation’s first president, warned of the “insidious wiles of foreign influence” as he left office in 1796.

“The jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government,” he said.

Founder Alexander Hamilton was specifically worried about a foreign power’s effort to cultivate a president or other top official, warning in the Federalist Papers of “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”

While the Russian government interfered in the election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” including by breaking U.S. laws, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found, he could not establish that anyone associated with Trump criminally conspired in those efforts.

He also analyzed whether prosecutors could argue that Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer, who he was told had damaging information about Clinton, amounted to acceptance of an illegal in-kind campaign contribution.

Mueller found that a foreign entity that provided free opposition research to a campaign about an opponent could exert a “greater effect on an election, and a greater tendency to ingratiate the donor to the candidate.”

Still, Mueller wrote that no judicial decision had ever treated the “voluntary provision of uncompensated opposition research” as a thing of value akin to a campaign contribution. He said it was “uncertain” how a judge would view that contention and worried it could have free-speech implications, particularly if the information amounted to the recitation of accurate facts.

That view has been rejected by some campaign finance lawyers, who argued courts have ruled in other settings that a contribution can be a thing of intangible value rather than just money and who worried that Mueller’s analysis had opened the door to a new attitude that foreign assistance is acceptable.

“A contribution is anything of value. Opposition research is clearly something of value,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission. “If a campaign tells a foreign government it would accept opposition research they’ve gathered, it is soliciting a foreign contribution, which is illegal. If the campaign accepts the opposition research, it is accepting a prohibited foreign contribution.”

A criminal violation of the foreign contribution ban occurs when a person accepts the illegal donation “knowingly and willfully.” Mueller wrote that it would be difficult to prove that Trump Jr. took the meeting with the Russian lawyer knowing it was illegal.

Trevor Potter, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who has advised Republican presidential campaigns, said Trump should understand that the Mueller investigation and the experience of the past two years would mean that prosecutors will assume he and his campaign aides now understand the law and would be more likely to assess that any violations of the foreign contribution ban in the future were made knowingly.

One close adviser to the White House said there were two key reasons for Trump’s comments: He would never concede that his campaign did anything wrong, and he did not want to implicitly criticize Trump Jr., who had testified on Capitol Hill that day.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said he talked to Trump about his comments Thursday morning and told him he couldn’t take help from a foreign government. Graham said he advised Trump that he would probably be approached by other groups with information, calling it “routine.”

“We need to send clear signals here: If somebody is trying to provide you information from a foreign government, you don’t take it,” he said.

But Graham said he thought Trump had no intention of actually accepting foreign help and instead was trying to convey that he didn’t believe his son did anything wrong.

“He was trying to make a greater point inartfully,” Graham said.

Graham and other Republicans worked to pivot from Trump’s remarks to the dossier commissioned by Democrats from Steele.

“What’s most amazing about the pearl clutching over Trump’s ‘foreign oppo’ comment — we’ve got a complete paper trail of Hillary Clinton and the DNC *paying* for info from Russian agents in 2016,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) tweeted. “But that doesn’t matter, apparently. It’s only a problem when Trump is involved.”

However, it is not illegal for a campaign to pay foreigners market rate for campaign assistance, as in the Steele case. The Trump and Ted Cruz presidential campaigns had contracts with Cambridge Analytica, which has roots in the United Kingdom.

“The Trump campaign could have legally paid a foreign national to collect opposition research on Clinton. That’s why the comparison to the Clinton campaign paying Steele, a foreign national, for investigating Trump and producing the dossier fails,” Noble said.

Steele also repeatedly presented his information to the FBI, insisting that law enforcement needed to be made aware of his findings, a decision some Republicans view skeptically.

Lawrence Jacobs, an expert in presidential power at the University of Minnesota, said the idea that a presidential candidate might openly seek or accept foreign assistance “is absolutely unprecedented.”

“Usually there is a competition among presidential candidates to see who can be toughest on our adversaries,” Jacobs said. “Here, the president is openly welcoming the assistance of foreign powers.”

Still, Jacobs noted there were moments in history in which secret communications with foreign leaders may have provided a benefit to a campaign. For example, he said that there is continued suspicion that Reagan campaign officials communicated with Iranian authorities in 1980 signaling they could get a better deal if they delayed release of American hostages until Jimmy Carter left office.

Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican campaign strategist who advised five presidential campaigns, said he found Trump’s comments “mind-boggling.” In 2000, Stevens was helping run debate preparation for then-GOP nominee George W. Bush when a campaign aide for Bush’s opponent, Al Gore, anonymously received stolen internal documents from Bush’s campaign. The Gore aide immediately reported the episode to the FBI.

“They handled it completely the way you should handle it,” he said.

Stevens said he worries that Republican candidates, forced to defend Trump, will now believe they too could accept foreign assistance or benefit from stolen material.

“It’s incredibly corrosive,” he said. “I mean, if the president can do it, why can’t everyone do it?”

#Resist

[_priapism]

[Athos_131]

Trump still owes D.C. $7 million in inauguration costs as he plans July Fourth gala

President Trump’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the Fourth of July is expected to drive up security costs for an annual event that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to the nation’s capital.

But the president has still not fully paid the bill for the last time he addressed a massive crowd on the Mall: his 2017 inauguration.

The Trump administration and Congress owe D.C. more than $7 million in expenses from Trump’s inauguration, according to federal and city financial records. The total cost of the four-day celebration, which culminated with a parade and gathering of roughly 600,000 people on the Mall, was $27.3 million.

As a result, the District has been forced to dip into a special fund that covers annual security costs for protecting the city from terrorist threats and hosting other events such as demonstrations, state funerals and the visits of foreign dignitaries. That fund, which for years was adequately replenished by federal dollars, is now on track to enter the red by this fall, records show.

The situation is riling local officials, who say the federal government is not shouldering its fair share of security costs in the Trump era, which has seen an influx of demonstrators to the nation’s capital. The Fourth of July is shaping up as yet another logistical trial, with a reconfigured fireworks display, increased security for the president and at least one group of activists already planning a protest.

“We have and will continue to work closely with our federal partners regardless of administration because ensuring the safety of our residents and visitors is paramount,” John Falcicchio, chief of staff to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), said in a statement. “Our commitment to this function is iron clad, and all that we ask of our federal partners is continued cooperation and the resources to carry out these activities.”

A senior Trump administration official said the city was given what it originally requested from the federal government, and that when inauguration costs were greater than expected, the administration “worked closely with D.C.” and decided to use unspent money in the city’s security fund. He added that District officials have not asked for additional money for the inauguration in subsequent budgets.

City officials disputed the White House account on Friday, saying they had lobbied for additional funding both before the inauguration — when it was already clear the federal reimbursement would be insufficient — and afterward.

Congress originally appropriated roughly $20 million for Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, records show. Although the event was more sparsely attended than either of President Barack Obama’s inaugurations — famously leading to a dispute between White House officials and the Washington press corps over the size of the crowd at Trump’s inaugural address — the costs of hosting it were still formidable.

Most of the expense, about $14 million, came from D.C. police deployments. Among the other line items were fire and emergency medical services, which cost $3.6 million, and transportation services — such as repaving Pennsylvania Avenue for the motorcade — that came to $2.2 million.

The end result was a $7.3 million overrun for the event. That was not unusual: Barack Obama’s second inauguration, in 2013, went over budget by $8.9 million.

But while the Obama White House reimbursed the city’s extra costs through a plan submitted to Congress, the Trump administration has not done so, federal budget documents show. To make up the shortfall, the District tapped its Emergency Planning and Security Fund.

That account is also filled with federal money, but the dollars are supposed to be used for the other security costs the city endures year-round as the nation’s capital. Money for presidential inaugurations typically comes on top of federal payments into the fund.

In the past, the fund has been well-stocked, regularly carrying over unspent money from year to year. But for the past several years, the federal government has been placing less money into the account than the city is spending — in fiscal year 2017, for example, $14.9 million was added to the fund while $24.4 million was spent.

Costs have risen because of various events, including the heavily attended 2017 Women’s March, a confrontation between protesters and police after a gathering of white supremacists last summer, and the December funeral of former president George H.W. Bush.

In the first quarter of the 2019 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, the District had already burned through $4.4 million of the $14 million in the fund. At that rate the fund could be running a multimillion-dollar deficit by fall.

“The point now is that the account has been drained, and being careful with the money has not been enough to make up for not being reimbursed” for the inauguration, said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), the city’s nonvoting representative in Congress.

The fund could go even further into the hole as warm weather brings more demonstrators and other public gatherings to the nation’s capital — and as the city potentially deals with new costs stemming from Trump’s address to the nation on July 4.

The president’s appearance on the Mall is expected to bring with it a host of new security expenses and logistical headaches, requiring security for his movements and potentially cutting off visitors’ access to nearby Metro stations.

No estimate has been produced of the added costs, though National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst said security expenses would be shared by the White House, the Park Service and U.S. Park Police.

Norton said the federal government’s failure to repay the city for millions in inauguration costs is one more reason Washingtonians should be leery of Trump’s involvement in the Independence Day celebration.

“We still have not been reimbursed,” Norton said. “And now they’re talking about yet another event of a kind we’ve never had before.”

Am I right to assume all residents of Washington D.C. want to see this bill paid so their city is not on the hook for exorbitant expenses charged to their taxpayers?

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

Well, this just in:  Trump has declaired himself to be "Winning everywhere" over a year before the next Election, despite the lowest entry polls, and approval ratings in American History.

"FAKE NEWS!"

Oh yeah, this is what "Winning" looks like.  So much "Winning" we're sick of it.  Maybe he's just spelling the word whining wrong?

Here's a catchphrase you might remember, from your day job:

"You're fired."

~D. Trump.

[Jed_]

Well, this just in:  Trump has declaired himself to be "Winning everywhere" over a year before the next Election, despite the lowest entry polls, and approval ratings in American History.

"FAKE NEWS!"

Oh yeah, this is what "Winning" looks like.  So much "Winning" we're sick of it.  Maybe he's just spelling the word whining wrong?

Here's a catchphrase you might remember, from your day job:

"You're fired."

~D. Trump.

It’s not true that Trump’s internal pollsters have found he is losing in key states, not true at all.

So yep, those pollsters that never said that have been fired.

[Athos_131]

The Youngest Child Separated From His Family at the Border Was 4 Months Old

The text messages were coming in all day and night with only two data points: Gender and age. With each one that arrived, the on-call caseworker at Bethany Christian Services in Michigan had 15 minutes to find a foster home for another child who was en route from the border. On a brisk winter day in February 2018, Alma Acevedo got a message that caught her breath: “4 months. Boy.”

Since the summer of 2017, the 24-year-old social worker had been seeing a mysterious wave of children arriving from the border, most of them from Central America. Those who were old enough to talk said they had been separated from their parents. “The kids were just inconsolable, they’d be like, ‘Where’s my mommy? Where’s my daddy?’” Ms. Acevedo said. “And it was just constant crying after that.”

None of them had been this young, and few had come this far. When he arrived at her office after midnight, transported by two contract workers, the infant was striking, with long, curled eyelashes framing his deep brown eyes. His legs and arms were chubby, seeming to indicate that he had been cared for by someone. So why was he in Michigan?

Ms. Acevedo went to her computer and pulled up the only document that might help answer that question, a birth certificate from Romania naming the baby, Constantin Mutu, and his parents, Vasile and Florentina. She searched a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency database that showed the baby’s father was in federal custody in Pearsall, Tex.

Constantin was ultimately the youngest of thousands of children taken from their parents under a policy that was meant to deter families hoping to immigrate to the United States. It began nearly a year before the administration would acknowledge it publicly in May 2018, and the total number of those affected is still unknown. The government still has not told the Mutus why their son was taken from them, and officials from the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment for this story.

In Constantin’s case, it would be months before his parents saw him again. Before then, his father would be sent for psychiatric evaluation in a Texas immigration detention center because he couldn’t stop crying; his mother would be hospitalized with hypertension from stress. Constantin would become attached to a middle-class American family, having spent the majority of his life in their tri-level house on a tree-lined street in rural Michigan, and then be sent home.

Now more than a year and a half old, the baby still can’t walk on his own, and has not spoken.

***

Though the vast majority of families streaming across the border from Mexico in recent months have come from Central America, running from poverty, drought and violence, the Mutus came from much further away — Romania, where a small but steady number of asylum seekers fleeing ethnic persecution have for years made their way to the United States.

As children growing up in their small hillside village, Vasile and Florentina Mutu helped their parents beg for money for food. They are members of the Roma minority group, which originated in India. In Romania, the Roma were enslaved for more than 500 years. Violent attacks against them persist throughout Europe. Exclusion from schools, jobs and social services is commonplace, and human rights groups have documented the practice of forced sterilizations.

A decade or so ago, as the Mutus recall, the first Roma family from their village announced that they were leaving for the United States. Word made its way back that the family had found great success — their children learned to speak perfect English, and they had become rich, though it wasn’t clear how. Over the years, more than a dozen other families followed, including Florentina’s older brother, who left a few years ago with his wife and three children. He had posted pictures on Facebook of palm trees, luxury car dealerships and American cash.

By the time their fifth child was born, the Mutus had settled into a system where they raised money elsewhere in Europe, begging and doing menial work, then came back for a few weeks at a time to Romania, where the money stretched further. They had occasional run-ins with police. Once, Mr. Mutu said, he was arrested for stealing cable from a construction site.

Though most of their children had been born at home, Constantin had to be delivered by C-section. Vasile sold two pigs and a cow to pay a doctor to do the procedure. In a haze of pain while she was in labor, Florentina signed documents that she couldn’t read. When she returned to the hospital for an appointment to check on her recovery, a hospital employee told her that the doctor had also performed a tubal ligation. She and her husband had planned to have more children, as is traditional in their culture. They were devastated.

Soon after, in between middle-of-the-night feedings of Constantin and while the rest of their children slept, Vasile and Florentina formed a plan: They would try to seek asylum in the United States with their two youngest children and send for the others when they were settled.

Within weeks, the Mutus had sold their home to pay a man who would arrange to get them into America through Mexico. Florentina packed a suitcase with diapers, a change of clothes for each of them, holy oil and dried basil — a Romanian good luck charm. On the plane, Constantin started to run a fever.

Mexico City was a whirl of chaos and noise. They couldn’t understand the voices or signs in Spanish. Beggars banged on the window to their taxi to ask for money; though they had done the same themselves in Europe, it somehow seemed scarier. They met a smuggler who led them to a crowded bus headed for the border.

The Mutus found seats out of sight from one another, and for the next several hours, took turns caring for Nicolas, their 4-year-old, and Constantin, who was getting warmer. As they approached the border, they got off at a stop and split up to look for medicine. Mr. Mutu had settled into the last leg of the journey on the bus when Constantin started crying on his lap. Mr. Mutu stood up, shimmying toward the back of the bus to get a bottle.He spotted the seats where his wife and son had been sitting, which were now empty.

Mr. Mutu looked around frantically and pulled out his phone to call his wife, but both of them had drained their minutes by making calls back to Romania to check in with their other children. Unsure of what else to do, he paid a cabdriver to take him and Constantin to the foot bridge into the United States, thinking that he could call his wife when they reached the other side. It was dark outside when he reached an immigration officer stationed outside the American border. He told the officer that he wanted political asylum and was taken in to be interviewed with the help of an interpreter on the phone. Mr. Mutu explained that he had lost his wife and son, and that they were fleeing persecution in Romania.

A handful of officers entered the room. They took Constantin, placed him on a chair, and shackled Mr. Mutu’s hands and feet.

“The police wiped the floor with me,” he said through a translator, explaining that he was dragged out of the room while Constantin stayed behind with some of the officers. “I started crying because I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I couldn’t speak English. I told them, ‘I don’t understand. Why?’”

Florentina Mutu was still at the bus stop with Nicolas, crying on a bench since she had discovered that the bus had pulled away without her, when she got a call from her mother. Border officials had reached her in Romania and explained that she would also be arrested if she crossed the border. The relatives quickly scraped together money to get them home.

***

Constantin was placed with a foster family in Michigan while Ms. Acevedo worked to connect with his parents. She got a phone number for his mother in Romania and made a video call during what was the middle of the night there. A disheveled woman answered, sitting in darkness, looking like she had just been woken up. She spoke frantically, but Ms. Acevedo couldn’t understand, so she pulled up Google Translate on her computer and typed a message about Constantin in English, which she then played in Romanian.

Florentina Mutu started to sob. She repeated her full maiden name, which was listed on Constantin’s birth certificate, over and over. “She said it like 20 times,” Ms. Acevedo said “She said, ‘Florentina Ramona Patu,’ and I said ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ I just wanted her to know that he was somewhere. He wasn’t lost or disappeared or something. I wanted her to know that he was with people.”

Ms. Acevedo started making weekly video calls between Constantin and his mother, propping the baby up on the couch. Ms. Mutu would mostly cry as she spoke desperately to him in Romanian.

Vasile Mutu, still in detention, sank deeper into depression. He couldn’t sleep and refused most of the food that he was offered. Occasionally he was handed documents in English or Spanish, which he couldn’t read. He cried so much that his cell mates started beating him to make him be quiet. He thought about committing suicide. “No one was telling me anything. They kept telling me to wait and wait.”

Two months into his detention, an immigration officer came to Mr. Mutu with an offer. As he understood it, if he gave up his claim for asylum, he would be deported back to Romania with Constantin. He agreed, and on June 3, 2018, he was released from his cell and loaded into a van.

He looked everywhere for Constantin and asked the officers where his son was, but was not given a clear answer. At the airport, he refused to board without the baby. The immigration officers, he said, told him that Constantin would be handed to him once he had taken his seat. But the plane lifted off and the baby never came.

When Mr. Mutu arrived home, it felt more like walking into a funeral than a celebration.

***

While the months dragged on waiting for his day in immigration court, Constantin settled into a routine with his foster family, in their comfortable brick house on a hilly road in rural Michigan. The family, which had started fostering immigrant children a year earlier after a life-changing experience doing missionary work in Ethiopia, asked not to be identified in this story because it would violate the terms of their contract with the federal government. Their three daughters immediately became enamored with Constantin and would argue over who could pull him out of his crib when he woke up from a nap.

The baby’s foster mother meticulously documented his developments for Ms. Mutu, keeping in mind how hard it would be to miss moments like when he first scooted across the living room floor or developed the belly laugh that shook his whole body. “He would do new sounds or something, and they only do it for a short amount of time, and so you want his mom to be able to hear that,” she said. “And she always wondered if he had teeth yet, and so when he would smile, you could see. So I just wanted her to see that.”

She poured herself into caring for Constantin while she struggled to fathom how he had come into their home. “I can’t imagine being the person who grabs a hold of a child and takes them. I don’t know where you have to go in yourself to be able to do that job,” she said. “If we were in that situation, I would want someone to take care of my child. I would want them in a home, in a bed. I would want someone asking them, ‘What snack do you want before you go to bed at night? Do you want a pink toothbrush or a green toothbrush?’” she said. “Or rocking them in the middle of the night, helping them go back to bed when they have bad dreams.”

Constantin was still in diapers when he appeared in federal immigration court in Detroit, four months to the day after he had arrived in Michigan, on June 14, 2018. During the five-minute proceeding, he babbled on his foster mother’s lap as she sat on the defendant’s bench. His pro bono legal representative requested that he be returned to Romania as soon as possible at government expense.

A lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security argued against the request, stating that as an “arriving alien,” Constantin was not eligible for such help. The judge quickly ruled against her, questioning the idea “that the respondent should be responsible for making his own way back to Romania as an 8-month-old.” The judge granted the request made on behalf of Constantin, giving the government three months to either appeal or send him home.

By the time Constantin’s travel plans were booked for July — a few weeks after President Trump, facing a wave of public outrage, had rescinded the family separation policy — he was 9 months old and had spent the majority of his life in the custody of the United States government.

Florentina and Vasile Mutu didn’t sleep the night before the reunion. They were standing at baggage claim at the airport in Bucharest when they finally spotted Constantin, hours behind schedule, bobbing toward them in his foster mother’s arms. She handed the baby to his mother, but he screamed and reached back in the other direction, his face crumpling into a knot of terror.

The Mutus had to stop several times on their way home to console Constantin, who bucked and wailed to the point of hyperventilation. For weeks afterward, his mother struggled to get him to eat or sleep and exchanged text messages with his foster mother, who offered advice on how he liked to be cuddled and fed. In the suitcase she had packed, she included $200 in cash — the daily allowance that Bethany Christian Services’s foster children receive — along with clothes, pacifiers, toys and books that Constantin liked, and his favorite blue-and-green striped blanket.

Florentina Mutu struggled with conflicting feelings of gratefulness and guilt. “He’s been spoiled,” she said. “He lived comfortably there, in a decent house. Not like we live here.”

The Mutus, who are pursuing a claim for damages against the United States, are back in the village where they grew up, crammed temporarily into a small house they share with another family — one bathroom with no shower shared among 11 people. They bathe with cups of water warmed on the stove and keep their clothes in an attic, climbing a rickety ladder every few days in order to change them.

Constantin has acclimated slowly. He’s sensitive to loud noises, and crowds make him cry, which is a problem, says his mother, because both are part of Roma culture. “He is not the same as he would be if we had raised him,” she said.

At 18 months old, he still can’t walk without holding onto someone’s hand. He babbles and squeals, but as far as words go, she said, “He says absolutely nothing.”

After Constantin’s return to Romania, his foster parents took two months off from fostering to adjust to him being gone. Ms. Acevedo quit her job after all of the separated children on her caseload were reunited with their parents. “I just couldn’t get over it,” she said. “So if I couldn’t get over it, imagine the kids.”

The Mutu family has returned to traveling through Europe to earn enough money to buy a new home. In the last few months, they have lived in a trailer and picked produce in Sicily, and gone to Ukraine and Poland to rummage for secondhand clothing that they can resell — Constantin and his siblings always in tow.

Both of the parents still dream out loud about returning to the United States. “I’d have to get to Canada,” Mr. Mutu said recently. ”From Canada, I could take a taxi to America, and pay seven or eight or ten thousand dollars to prepare the documents that I would need.”

Ms. Mutu’s brother, who has since returned from Florida, said he thinks they are deluded. He hated the United States, he said; it was full of struggling immigrants and other poor people. By then, he had admitted to them that he had ended up in a cramped, three-bedroom apartment shared with several other families, struggling to make the rent. The only food he could afford to eat, he said, was worse than what they had in Romania. “The laws are very strict there,” he said. “You can’t even beg there.”

“That’s not true,” Vasile Mutu shot back at the idea later. He had grown up looking at Americans — on television and now on social media — and saw their privilege not only in the way they dressed, but also how they moved and spoke, and in their expressions. The only poor people in America he saw were the ones who were detained with him at the border, hoping to get in.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

As Trump’s defense pick withdraws, he addresses violent domestic incidents

In the months that he has served as President Trump’s acting secretary of defense, Patrick Shanahan has worked to keep domestic violence incidents within his family private. His wife was arrested after punching him in the face, and his son was arrested after a separate incident in which he hit his mother with a baseball bat. Public disclosure of the nearly decade-old episodes would re-traumatize his young adult children, Shanahan said.

On Tuesday, Trump announced in a tweet that Shanahan would not be going through with the nomination process — which had been delayed by an unusually lengthy FBI background check — “so that he can devote more time to his family.”

Shanahan spoke publicly about the incidents in interviews with The Washington Post on Monday and Tuesday.

“Bad things can happen to good families . . . and this is a tragedy, really,” Shanahan said. Dredging up the episode publicly, he said, “will ruin my son’s life.”

In November 2011, Shanahan rushed to defend his then-17-year-old son, William Shanahan, in the days after the teenager brutally beat his mother. The attack had left Patrick Shanahan’s ex-wife unconscious in a pool of blood, her skull fractured and with internal injuries that required surgery, according to court and police records.

Two weeks later, Shanahan sent his ex-wife’s brother a memo arguing that his son had acted in self-defense.

“Use of a baseball bat in self-defense will likely be viewed as an imbalance of force,” Shanahan wrote. “However, Will’s mother harassed him for nearly three hours before the incident.”

Details of the incidents have started to emerge in media reports about his nomination, including a USA Today report Tuesday about the punching incident in 2010.

In an hour-long interview Monday night at his apartment in Virginia, Shanahan, who has been responding to questions from The Post about the incidents since January, said he wrote the memo in the hours after his son’s attack, before he knew the full extent of his ex-wife’s injuries. He said that it was to prepare for his son’s initial court appearance and that he never intended for anyone other than his son’s attorneys to read it.

“That document literally was, I sat down with [my son] right away, and being an engineer at an aerospace company, you write down what are all of the mitigating reasons something could have happened. You know, just what’s the list of things that could have happened?” he said.

As he wrote in an ongoing custody battle stemming from their divorce, Shanahan said Monday that he does not believe there can be any justification for an assault with a baseball bat, but he went further in the interview, saying he now regrets writing the passage.

“Quite frankly it’s difficult to relive that moment, and the passage was difficult for me to read. I was wrong to write those three sentences,” Shanahan said.

“I have never believed Will’s attack on his mother was an act of self-defense or justified. I don’t believe violence is appropriate ever, and certainly never any justification for attacking someone with a baseball bat,” he said.

Kimberley Shanahan, who has since changed her name to Kimberley Jordinson, has not responded to repeated efforts by reporters since January to contact her via email, text, phone and social media seeking comment about the incidents.

Patrick Shanahan’s response when his family was split by acts of domestic violence — including steps he took to manage his son’s surrender to police and attempt to keep him out of jail — is detailed in court filings that have not been previously reported. Court records also contain an earlier episode in which both Shanahan and his wife alleged they were assaulted by one another, and she was arrested.

The Defense Department has long struggled with its own responses to domestic violence, and it has faced a fresh wave of criticism since shortly after Shanahan became deputy secretary of defense in July 2017.

In November of that year, an airman who had been court-martialed for assaulting his wife and stepson killed 26 people and wounded 22 others in a Texas church. A Defense Department investigation later faulted the Air Force for repeatedly failing to submit the serviceman’s fingerprints to a civilian database, which it said should have prevented him from purchasing the firearms used in the mass shooting.

Last month, the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General admonished the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, saying they failed for decades to consistently follow policies requiring military police to thoroughly process crime scenes and interview witnesses following allegations of nonsexual domestic abuse. The watchdog said that in 180 of 219 cases it reviewed, the branches failed to submit criminal histories and fingerprints of offending servicemen to civilian authorities.

Shanahan said his personal experience with domestic violence has taught him there are no simple policy prescriptions. He said domestic violence rates in the military will improve only if the services can change the way they talk about the stresses of serving in the armed forces in a more honest and natural way.

“There’s not one size that fits all — I mean, it’s a very complicated issue,” he said. “It’s not as simple as take this training class or apply these resources or, you know, look for these kinds of symptoms. I mean, it’s not that simple. There are all sorts of dimensions, whether it’s mental health or addiction or stress in the home. It’s a very toxic concoction.

“The thing that’s probably, like a lot of other issues . . . is having a buddy system of people who really care about you and can intervene,” he said. “What I’ve learned is extremely important.”

‘I was seeing stars’
Patrick Shanahan, 56, climbed the ranks at Boeing over more than two decades, becoming vice president and general manager of the corporation’s commercial airplane program in 2008. An exacting, hard-charging executive who worked grueling hours, he earned the sobriquet “Mr. Fix It” for his ability to turn around sputtering projects worth billions of dollars, such as the aerospace giant’s delayed 787 Dreamliner program.

By 2010, Shanahan was earning more than $935,000 annually in salary and bonuses, court records show.

But there was turbulence in Shanahan’s personal life with his wife of 24 years. Shanahan and two of his children interviewed by The Post said Kimberley Shanahan was growing more erratic. One Thanksgiving, she threw the entire dinner on the floor, saying the family did not appreciate her efforts, they said. A birthday cake his daughter baked for Patrick Shanahan was similarly destroyed, they said.

Things culminated with a physical dispute in August 2010. According to Patrick Shanahan, the incident began when he was lying in bed, following an argument with his wife about their oldest child.

Shanahan said he had his eyes closed, trying to fall asleep, when his wife entered the bedroom and punched him in the face before landing blows to his torso.

“I was seeing stars,” Shanahan said, but he didn’t react, saying he believes that only further enraged his wife.

She then began throwing her husband’s clothes out of a window, according to police and court records, and tried to set them on fire with a propane tank she couldn’t dislodge from a barbecue grill, attempting again later by burning paper towels.

Another physical altercation ensued, with police records indicating that Kimberley Shanahan swung at Patrick Shanahan. She called the police and claimed he punched her in the stomach, an allegation he denies.

When officers arrived, they found him with a bloody nose and scratches on his face, police records show. Authorities charged his wife with domestic violence.

Patrick Shanahan soon filed for divorce and dropped the charges. The file would grow to more than 1,500 pages.

‘It was a hard time to see your son’
Kimberley Shanahan won custody of the children and moved to Florida. Patrick Shanahan remained in Seattle, but the couple’s eldest daughter would soon rejoin him to attend college.

Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011, Kimberley Shanahan and William got into “a verbal dispute” over her suspicion that the 17-year-old was in a romantic relationship with a 36-year-old woman, according to a police report.

According to police, just after 1:30 a.m., William “shoved and pinned his mother against a bathroom wall” before grabbing a $400 Nike composite baseball bat “to swing at her head,” striking her multiple times.

“I attempted to run away from Will, but as I reached the laundry room, he struck me with the bat in the back of my head,” Kimberley Shanahan wrote in a court filing in the custody case. “The last thing I remember from before I lost consciousness is the impact of the bat, and blood gushing everywhere.”

William, Sarasota police wrote, struck several blows to his mother’s head and torso and left her “to lie in a pool of blood” and then “unplugged the landline phone cord depriving the victim and [the younger brother] the use of 911 to render aid.”

As William fled the home, situated in an exclusive barrier-island development called Bird Key just outside Sarasota, he “tossed a bottle of rubbing alcohol” to his younger brother and told him “you clean her up,” according to the police report.

The younger brother called 911 from a neighbor’s phone, according to police records.

Within hours, William contacted his father, who immediately booked a predawn flight to Florida, according to court records and documents provided by Shanahan.

Kimberley Shanahan was hospitalized early that morning and later required surgery, she wrote in a filing. Among her injuries were a fractured skull and elbow, according to the police report.

While she was in the hospital, authorities began to search for William, according to records released to The Post by Sarasota police.

Police distributed a photo of William to patrol cars on Bird Key. They tried to track the young man’s cellphone, but it appeared to be turned off, police wrote. They canvassed a local park and bridges to the mainland. They searched a local yacht club. But there was no trace of him, according to records.

Patrick Shanahan landed in Florida just before 5 p.m. on Wednesday. He arranged to stay with William in a hotel.

“Mr. Shanahan’s response when he learned of the assault was to book Will a hotel room,” Kimberley Shanahan wrote.

Patrick Shanahan said it’s a bit of a blur.

“It was a hard time to see your son — hopefully you’ll never be in that spot someday,” he said. “I wasn’t hiding. We got a hotel and talked to the attorney, and we just camped out.”

Shanahan did not visit the hospital where his ex-wife was taken, she later wrote in a custody filing. Instead, over four days that included Thanksgiving, he worked to assemble a defense team and enlist family members and friends to attend an initial hearing to try to persuade a judge to let his son stay out of jail while he fought the charges.

Derek Byrd, head of a well-known Sarasota defense firm hired by Patrick Shanahan to represent his son in the criminal case, said in an interview that the elder Shanahan acted appropriately by not contacting police until his son could consult a defense attorney, a process that was delayed by the Thanksgiving holiday.

Byrd also said that Patrick Shanahan was not aware that police were searching for his son in the days after the attack.

“I don’t think Pat handled that time frame inappropriately,” Byrd said in an interview. “I think he was just doing what a reasonable dad should probably do. I’m sure the timeline looks bad on paper, but he didn’t do anything that I consider out of the ordinary, and he wasn’t hiding Will.”

Byrd said Patrick Shanahan first contacted his firm within a day of arriving in Florida, either Wednesday night or Thursday, which was Thanksgiving. He said a lawyer from the firm could not meet with the Shanahans until Friday morning, after the holiday.

Later on Friday, another attorney from the firm contacted the detective handling the case, Kenneth Halpin.

According to the detective’s report, the attorney said he would arrange for the younger Shanahan to turn himself in — after two more days, on Sunday evening, Nov. 27.

“Detective Halpin trusted us to do that,” Byrd told The Post. “He said, ‘Fine.’ ”

Halpin told The Post that he could not recall the conversation but probably would have cast it differently:

“If someone calls and says they’re going to turn in a suspect on a Sunday night, and he’s already lawyered up with someone who has a reputation like Byrd, for being on TV, what can you do? You can’t force an attorney to turn in his client,” Halpin said, adding: “I’m sure I would have also told him that there’s paper out for him, so they’re still going to snatch him up if he’s found.”

That Sunday night, Patrick Shanahan drove William to a police station to surrender, according to police records and a timeline of events prepared by a Shanahan spokesman.

His mother attended his court appearance the next morning.

“My neighbor took me to the court hearing, and both of us were shocked to see Pat in the courtroom,” she wrote in the filing, saying she had believed until then that he had been in Seattle.

‘He doesn’t believe in violence’
Patrick Shanahan and Byrd came to the hearing prepared to plead for the younger Shanahan to remain out of custody, citing his baseball career at an exclusive youth sports academy and prep school attended by sons and daughters of major league athletes.

“He’s a college baseball prospect. He has dreams. He has a future. His father is an executive of Boeing,” Byrd said, according to an audio recording that the court released to The Post. “If he has to sit in jail for 21 days, not only is that going to traumatize him, he’s not going to finish the semester, probably get kicked off the baseball team . . . everything is going to be over for him.”

Patrick Shanahan also vouched for his son.

“He doesn’t believe in violence,” he told the judge. “I’ve never seen him act aggressively toward his brother or any other family members, so it’s a shock to me what has happened.”

The judge declined to release William Shanahan, calling pictures of the crime scene “horrendous.”

He was initially charged with two felonies, aggravated battery and tampering with a victim, and faced up to 15 years in prison.

In the custody filing is the four-page memo Patrick Shanahan wrote at the time.

It lists “mitigating circumstances” that should be considered in evaluating the alleged assault.

A Shanahan spokesman provided a copy of the email containing the memo retained by Shanahan’s brother-in-law, showing it had been sent on Dec. 8, 2011, two weeks after the attack, and 10 days after Patrick Shanahan was present at the court hearing with his injured ex-wife.

First, Patrick Shanahan wrote, his 17-year-old son had “acted in self-defense.”

“She fueled the situation by berating him repeatedly in his room in a manner that escalated emotionally and physically,” he wrote.

The memo continues, alleging a history of substance abuse, emotional abuse and violent tendencies by Kimberley Shanahan. “Over the last 7+ years I have worked as much as possible, partially out of a desire to avoid inevitable conflicts with Kim,” Shanahan wrote. It casts his ex-wife as the instigator in conflicts with him and their children. “It appears that when I was not around to yell at, she started becoming intensely focused on berating, terrorizing and beat them down emotionally.”

Kimberley Shanahan disputed those characterizations.

“I have always been a very loving and dedicated mom,” she wrote in a court filing responding to the memo, “and I have never emotionally abused any of my children for any period of time.”

Kevin Cameron, Kimberley Shanahan’s brother, said he was not bothered by Patrick Shanahan’s memo because he believed Shanahan wrote it before he had all of the facts about the assault.

“If anything, I believe Pat fully understands and is better equipped to deal with domestic violence than most people,” Cameron wrote in a letter to The Post. “He has seen it. He has lived it. He understands that domestic violence is real and prevalent. He understands that it can impact anyone of any age, gender, race and socioeconomic status.”

‘We moved on’
Kris Roberts, a police officer who assisted in the search for William Shanahan, recalled that after the arrest, his father was a “hindrance” in a follow-up matter, as police investigated whether there had been an inappropriate relationship between the adult woman and William. Under Florida law, William was too young at the time to have had a consenting sexual relationship with the woman. Roberts, a retired detective with the Longboat Key Police Department, said the father, whom she could not remember by name, would not turn over his son’s cellphone.

After the surrender to police, “his father would not talk to me; he wasn’t helping,” Roberts said. “I remember he had a West Coast address, Seattle maybe, and when he left, the son’s cellphone was just gone.” Roberts said she believes Patrick Shanahan took his son’s cellphone back to Seattle with him.

Roberts said that without the cooperation of the father, the investigation fell apart. “We only had one love letter between them, but it didn’t speak to anything sexual,” Roberts said. The adult woman “soon lawyered up, too, and we moved on.”

Byrd, the attorney for William Shanahan; an attorney who represents Patrick Shanahan in Seattle; and a Shanahan spokesman said they were not aware of a formal request for the cellphone.

Prosecutors would go on to charge William as an adult with one felony: aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. He pleaded down to a third-degree felony, and in 2012, a state prosecutor agreed to a “withhold of adjudication,” curtailing the length of the sentence and probation. The post-sentencing maneuver is not recognized outside of Florida, and William’s record could not be sealed or expunged in the state because it involved a violent domestic assault.

William was ordered to spend 18 months at a Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranch and sentenced to four years’ probation. Both penalties were later reduced.

The following year, in 2013, William enrolled at the University of Washington, according to his LinkedIn page. His father had recently joined the university’s board of regents. The family had other ties to the school. Patrick Shanahan’s father, Michael, had served as police chief for the university for more than two decades.

William graduated last June with a degree in political science, a university spokesman said.

Kimberley Shanahan lost custody of the couple’s youngest child in 2014, when a judge wrote that she had “engaged in abusive use of conflict that is seriously detrimental” to the child. According to multiple accounts, she is now estranged from all three of her children. At his last confirmation hearing, to become deputy secretary of defense in June 2017, all three children were sitting behind Patrick Shanahan.

None of the senators asked him about domestic violence.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The troubling questions raised by Shanahan’s aborted nomination

Patrick Shanahan’s bid to become defense secretary has been withdrawn, and The Post’s Aaron C. Davis and Shawn Boburg have the big story about why. Reports about two incidents of domestic violence — one in which Shanahan’s then-wife was charged with assaulting him and another in which his then-teenage son hit her with a baseball bat in the head — have led President Trump to announce Shanahan’s withdrawal.

The first, inescapable emotion one has to have while reading the story is sadness. It’s an extremely messy family situation that sounds awful and painful.

But thing I felt is curiosity: How is it possible Shanahan thought he could become secretary of defense without this being publicized and litigated? And beyond that, how was he picked for the job in the first place, and how was he previously confirmed as deputy secretary of defense?

There are certainly many questions here — of Shanahan, of the White House that picked him, of the FBI that conducts background checks, and of the Senate, which confirmed him in the deputy position.

From Shanahan’s perspective, it’s important to emphasize that he was never charged with becoming violent himself, though his wife did accuse him of that. But in interviews with The Post, he admitted fault for having suggested his son’s assault of his mother was justified as an act of self-defense. He had initially suggested she had drawn the attack by harassing him over a period of hours. “I was wrong to write those three sentences,” he said of a memo in which he made that case.

Shanahan would surely have been forced to account for that situation and others. Now he has pulled out before he could even really attempt to.

But why was he in contention in the first place? In the vetting process, the first things to check are divorce records, police records and court records. The Post’s reporting relied upon all three. The White House has never been big on actually vetting its nominees — even for top Cabinet posts — but is it really possible it didn’t check these very basic boxes? And it would seem very likely that an FBI background check was done that would provide such information to the White House counsel. Was that done? Either someone was negligent, or someone turned a blind eye.

And even setting that aside, did the GOP-controlled Senate dig into these things when it was confirming Shanahan as deputy defense secretary in July 2017? Shanahan was confirmed 92-7, despite some concerns about installing a former Boeing executive into a top Pentagon post. As Davis and Boburg noted, all three of his children sat behind him at the hearing; domestic violence didn’t come up once.

At least one Democratic senator, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, is already raising the prospect that Shanahan might have withheld this information on his disclosure forms.

“I feel there was a deliberate concealment here,” Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Service committee, told reporter Matt Laslo. “This is potentially a violation of criminal law.”

This is merely the latest vetting failure from the White House. It previously employed Rob Porter as staff secretary despite two ex-wives having accused him of physical abuse. It nominated and then withdrew Ronny L. Jackson for Veterans Affairs secretary despite some very serious accusations that quickly came to light. Trump’s first labor secretary nominee, Andy Puzder, quickly succumbed to accusations of domestic violence and employing an undocumented worker. And you could even throw now-Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in there; even though he wound up winning confirmation, it was much more difficult than it needed to be due to sexual assault allegations made against him.

In some of these instances, it’s perhaps somewhat understandable how these things could have slipped through the cracks; Kavanaugh had never been accused publicly, for example, and Jackson’s reputation was solid from when he served in the Obama White House. In the case of Shanahan, these are public records. The Washington Post has been asking Shanahan about these incidents since January, when he became acting secretary, and he was still nominated last month.

It’s a remarkably sad story — and one that many people involved probably should have prevented from ever needing to be told in the context of a Cabinet nomination.

#Resist

[joan1984]

https://www.cbsnews.com/live/video/20190619001032-president-trump-kicks-off-his-official-2020-campaign-with-rally-in-orlando-florida/  
President Donald J. Trump announced the beginning of the
Campaign, Trump 2020, and the crowd chose the slogan, by
acclimation, as Make America Great, when asked to weigh the
new, versus the existing and revered current slogan, MAGA, or
Make America Great Again.

The President told his overflow crowd of supporters that his
Administration will continue to go forth, Making America Great
Again for communities across the Nation, and will as well commit
to Keep America Great for all Americans.

Thank you, President Trump.