Trump's Rump

:lol: The GA legislature has introduced a new amendment to the state constitution to prevent a Fulton Cty Grand Jury from being convened. The new amendment will say that if any election is investigated, then any grand jury must be convened with members from all over that state and not from a single county. Fulton Cty is a predominantly minority county. Whoda figured....
 
Rachel Maddow's whole show tonight is about all of the cases involving Trump and his cronies that are still in the works.
 
Lexicus said:
Maybe this is the disconnect. Trump is a private citizen, were you under impression he still held public office?
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No disconnect. Having public office is less relevant than being popular. If someone is popular enough that someone becomes effectively untouchable, never mind the rules they break. So long as that doesn't lower they popularity past the critical threshold the rules don't apply. That's a constant of human society, no exceptions. The only variable is the threshold.

Birdjaguar said:
Yes, time will tell. The most likely paths for guilty verdicts are the GA investigations and the NY state investigations. Popularity is no protection from attorneys. NY is not in love with Trump.
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Oh yes it is. Even in NY. Wasn't that the city that elected the now-infamous lawyer working for Trump? People are fickle. And politicians know it. They know when to play for theatrics and when they can really bite. That prosecutor can't bite, so he's doing the other think that comes with the job: he's playing.

All the actors in this are playing. And you're falling for it, again, despite having had 5 years to watch and learn how the game is played!
The media gets its ratings, its advertisement eyeballs to sell, higher by stroking division, and Trump is gold for them.
The whole ecosystems of parasites living off campaign contributions clustered around both the republican and the democratic parties get their consultancy fees from political donations fed by division, and Trump is gold for them. I mean, what was the Lincoln project but a bunch of con men who found that they could easily fleece the supporters of the other party also? But those are not special conmen, they're a sample of the kind of people involved in doing the "professional" politics.

The media profits from keeping Trump in the limelight. Trump profits, he remains untouchable, no matter how many enemies he has. And he's possibly out for revenge by now, it got personal, so I very much doubt a voluntary exit from the stage in on the cards The people who actually pull most of the strings in both parties profit. So the media and political circus around Trump will continue. Judicial suits will be part of it, party dramas will be party of it, inter-party dramas, it will just keep going. The only way he could be pushed out prematurely would be if he became yesterday's news, no longer give attention. But the other players in this act are very much interested in keeping Trump on stage! So you're stuck with him. And you're unhappy with it but actually cheering for those players :crazyeye: I'm telling you again: they have you fooled.

Birdjaguar said:
Rachel Maddow's whole show tonight is about all of the cases involving Trump and his cronies that are still in the works.
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You know, Rachel Maddow predicted the end of Trump more times than Jehovah's Witnesses predicted the end of the world...
 
innonimatu said:
No disconnect. Having public office is less relevant than being popular. If someone is popular enough that someone becomes effectively untouchable, never mind the rules they break. So long as that doesn't lower they popularity past the critical threshold the rules don't apply. That's a constant of human society, no exceptions. The only variable is the threshold.
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In these United States, it's not not about popularity, it's about money, dear boy!
 
innonimatu said:
You know, Rachel Maddow predicted the end of Trump more times than Jehovah's Witnesses predicted the end of the world...
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Another President would have been already impeached, convicted and gaoled
But you know how it is Americans cared more about some blow job, then starting wars or thousands dying daily.
 
FriendlyFire said:
Another President would have been already impeached, convicted and gaoled
But you know how it is Americans cared more about some blow job, then starting wars or thousands dying daily.
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John Oliver did an interview of Edward Snowden, where he joked to Snowden that the mistake he made in his whistleblowing stunt ie releasing all that secret/classified material... was that Snowden grossly overestimated how much the American public would be alarmed about surveillance in general.

What Snowden should have done, according to Oliver, was stress to the American public that the government was possibly surveilling their sexual activities, more specifically, that the government could and was looking at their penises/dic-pics. If he had stressed that the government was able to watch and pass around peoples nudes and pics of their genitalia, the public would have been outraged and there would have been overwhelming calls for the surveillance to stop immediately and for those responsible to be held to account.

The funniest part was, joking aside, I agree with Oliver... and Snowden seemed to agree as well. There was a moment where you kind of see him reflect and think... "Wow... that's exactly what I should have done... that would have totally worked"
 
I think you're right that there would have been pubic outrage in that case.
 
Do we get to chant: "LOCK HIM UP!!!"
 
Birdjaguar said:
Do we get to chant: "LOCK HIM UP!!!"
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I believe those are civil cases. If dominion succeeds and it certainly appears that they have an very high chance it will likely open up the avenue for Trump himself and others to be sued for damages as well
But I wouldnt count on Trump ever seeing the inside of a prison cell. Most likely someone else will take the blame for the numerous civil crimes Tax fraud, bank fraud, stealing from children charity and whatever else is dug up during the investigations
 
New York City Tax Agency Subpoenaed In Trump Criminal Probe
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has subpoenaed a tax agency as part of an investigation into Trump’s company.


The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has subpoenaed a New York City property tax agency as part of a criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s company, the agency confirmed on Friday, suggesting prosecutors are examining the former president’s efforts to reduce his commercial real-estate taxes for possible evidence of fraud. The subpoena issued to the New York City Tax Commission is the latest indication that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. is looking at the values Trump assigned to some commercial properties in tax filings and loan documents.

Along with information already subpoenaed from creditors, the tax agency documents would help investigators determine whether Trump’s business inflated the value of his properties to secure favorable terms on loans while deflating those values to lower tax bills for those same properties. New York City Tax Commission President Frances Henn confirmed the subpoena in response to an inquiry from Reuters.

The subpoena likely would compel the agency to provide detailed income and expense statements the Trump Organization would have filed as part of an effort to lower tax assessments on some of its commercial properties, according to people familiar with the commission’s operations. Trump’s holdings include Trump Tower and Trump Plaza.

Those filings typically would include valuations submitted by the company to challenge the market values assigned to Trump’s property by the city’s tax assessors, they added. Subpoenas also have been issued to at least two creditors that helped finance Trump’s real-estate holdings, Deutsche Bank AG and Ladder Capital Finance LLC, Reuters has previously reported.

Vance’s office declined to comment on the tax commission subpoena. Deutsche Bank also declined to comment. Ladder Capital did not respond to a request for comment. A representative for Trump and a lawyer for the Trump Organization also did not respond to requests for comment. Vance has not commented specifically on the focus of his investigation but noted in court filings that his office is exploring “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct” at the Trump Organization, including possible falsification of records as well as insurance and tax fraud. Vance’s investigation is the only known criminal probe of Trump’s real-estate business. New York State Attorney General Letitia James is leading a separate civil probe into whether Trump’s company falsely reported property values to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.

The tax commission is New York City’s forum for adjudicating appeals of tax assessments set by the city’s Department of Finance, which manages property tax bills and collections. A spokeswoman for the New York City mayor’s office said the department had not been subpoenaed.

The tax assessments are based on a property’s market value, as determined by the department, so challenges require detailed documentation to show that the assigned value is not accurate, including revenue and occupancy data.

If Trump’s business claimed a substantially lower value for a property in its tax filings than it did in documents it submitted to creditors, the discrepancy could help back up a fraud charge, according to Daniel J. Horwitz, a white-collar defense lawyer who previously prosecuted tax and complex fraud cases during more than eight years in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

If there’s a “material difference” between the property values claimed in tax filings and the values claimed in loan documents, he added, “that’s fairly compelling.”
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@ Those who said Trump was anti-war

Trump ally Erik Prince violated Libya arms embargo

Confidential report finds Prince supplied renegade Libyan general Khalifa Haftar with weapons and foreign mercenaries.

The confidential report to the Security Council, obtained by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and partly seen by Al Jazeera, said on Friday that Prince deployed a force of foreign mercenaries and weapons to renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar, who has fought to overthrow the UN-recognised Libyan government, in 2019.

The $80m operation included plans to form a hit squad to track and kill Libyan commanders opposed to Haftar – including some who were also European Union citizens, The New York Times said.
Prince, a former Navy SEAL and brother of Trump’s education secretary Betsy Devos, drew infamy as the head of the Blackwater private security firm, whose contractors were accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
Four who were convicted were pardoned by Trump last year.
The accusation exposes Prince to possible UN sanctions, including a travel ban, the Times said.
Prince did not cooperate with the UN inquiry and his lawyer declined to comment to The New York Times, it added.

Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey, reporting from Washington, DC, said the report’s findings go deeper than just Prince’s actions.
“The UN report raises the question not only of whether or not a close associate of the [former] president violated an international arms embargo, but also of whether or not the president himself was complicit in defying stated US policy,” she said.

Anas el-Gomati, director of Libyan think tank Sadeq Institute, told Al Jazeera that using private military contractors can allow leaders to deny involvement in conflicts where they cannot be seen to be complicit for diplomatic or legal reasons.
“[In these situations] people like Erik Prince’s currency goes right up. And the real aspect here, as we’ve seen with Russia and the [private military firm] Wagner Group – and how they’ve been deployed in several theatres including Libya – is that they offer a beautiful, eerie, and in fact disastrous kind of deniability to any government,” he said.
“You can outright refuse that you have any knowledge of what is going on,” he said.
El-Gomati said the report raised two important questions.
“To what degree did Trump help facilitate this war alongside Erik Prince? And more importantly, whether or not Erik Prince was coordinating with Russian Wagner Group mercenaries in Libya and has helped them establish a foothold in the way he helped the United Arab Emirates establish a foothold in Libya,” he said.
​
 
innonimatu said:
I was right about st. Mueller's investigation turning out not even a rat.
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Were you now ....

The Special Counsel investigation uncovered extensive criminal activity
  • The investigation produced 37 indictments; seven guilty pleas or convictions; and compelling evidence that the president obstructed justice on multiple occasions. Mueller also uncovered and referred 14 criminal matters to other components of the Department of Justice.
  • Trump associates repeatedly lied to investigators about their contacts with Russians, and President Trump refused to answer questions about his efforts to impede federal proceedings and influence the testimony of witnesses.
  • A statement signed by over 1,000 former federal prosecutors concluded that if any other American engaged in the same efforts to impede federal proceedings the way Trump did, they would likely be indicted for multiple charges of obstruction of justice.

Russia engaged in extensive attacks on the U.S. election system in 2016
  • Russian interference in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic.”[1]
  • Major attack avenues included a social media “information warfare” campaign that “favored” candidate Trump[2] and the hacking of Clinton campaign-related databases and release of stolen materials through Russian-created entities and Wikileaks.[3]
  • Russia also targeted databases in many states related to administering elections gaining access to information for millions of registered voters.[4]


The investigation “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” and established that the Trump Campaign “showed interest in WikiLeaks's releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton”
  • In 2015 and 2016, Michael Cohen pursued a hotel/residence project in Moscow on behalf of Trump while he was campaigning for President.[5] Then-candidate Trump personally signed a letter of intent.
  • Senior members of the Trump campaign, including Paul Manafort, Donald Trump, Jr., and Jared Kushner took a June 9, 2016, meeting with Russian nationals at Trump Tower, New York, after outreach from an intermediary informed Trump, Jr., that the Russians had derogatory information on Clinton that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”[6]
  • Beginning in June 2016, a Trump associate “forecast to senior [Trump] Campaign officials that WikiLeaks would release information damaging to candidate Clinton.”[7] A section of the Report that remains heavily redacted suggests that Roger Stone was this associate and that he had significant contacts with the campaign about Wikileaks.[8]
  • The Report described multiple occasions where Trump associates lied to investigators about Trump associate contacts with Russia. Trump associates George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen all admitted that they made false statements to federal investigators or to Congress about their contacts. In addition, Roger Stone faces trial this fall for obstruction of justice, five counts of making false statements, and one count of witness tampering.
  • The Report contains no evidence that any Trump campaign official reported their contacts with Russia or WikiLeaks to U.S. law enforcement authorities during the campaign or presidential transition, despite public reports on Russian hacking starting in June 2016 and candidate Trump’s August 2016 intelligence briefing warning him that Russia was seeking to interfere in the election.
  • The Report raised questions about why Trump associates and then-candidate Trump repeatedly asserted Trump had no connections to Russia.[9]


Special Counsel Mueller declined to exonerate President Trump and instead detailed multiple episodes in which he engaged in obstructive conduct
  • The Mueller Report states that if the Special Counsel’s Office felt they could clear the president of wrongdoing, they would have said so. Instead, the Report explicitly states that it “does not exonerate” the President[10] and explains that the Office of Special Counsel “accepted” the Department of Justice policy that a sitting President cannot be indicted.[11]
  • The Mueller report details multiple episodes in which there is evidence that the President obstructed justice. The pattern of conduct and the manner in which the President sought to impede investigations—including through one-on-one meetings with senior officials—is damning to the President.
  • Five episodes of obstructive conduct stand out as being particularly serious:
    • In June 2017 President Trump directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to order the firing of the Special Counsel after press reports that Mueller was investigating the President for obstruction of justice;[12] months later Trump asked McGahn to falsely refute press accounts reporting this directive and create a false paper record on this issue – all of which McGahn refused to do.[13]
    • After National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was fired in February 2017 for lying to FBI investigators about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, Trump cleared his office for a one-on-one meeting with then-FBI Director James Comey and asked Comey to “let [Flynn] go;” he also asked then-Deputy National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland to draft an internal memo saying Trump did not direct Flynn to call Kislyak, which McFarland did not do because she did not know whether that was true.[14]
    • In July 2017, the President directed former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to instruct the Attorney General to limit Mueller’s investigation, a step the Report asserted “was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President’s and his campaign’s conduct.”[15]
    • In 2017 and 2018, the President asked the Attorney General to “un-recuse” himself from the Mueller inquiry, actions from which a “reasonable inference” could be made that “the President believed that an unrecused Attorney General would play a protective role and could shield the President from the ongoing Russia Investigation.”[16]
    • The Report raises questions about whether the President, by and through his private attorneys, floated the possibility of pardons for the purpose of influencing the cooperation of Flynn, Manafort, and an unnamed person with law enforcement.[17]


Congress needs to continue investigating and assessing elements of the Mueller Report
  • The redactions of the Mueller Report appear to conceal the extent to which the Trump campaign had advance knowledge of the release of hacked emails by WikiLeaks. For instance, redactions conceal content of discussions that the Report states occurred between Trump, Cohen, and Manafort in July 2016 shortly after Wikileaks released hacked emails;[18] the Report further notes, “Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming,” but redacts the contextual information around that statement.[19]
  • A second issue the Report does not examine is the fact that the President was involved in conduct that was the subject of a case the Special Counsel referred to the Southern District of New York – which the Report notes “ultimately led to the conviction of Cohen in the Southern District of New York for campaign-finance offenses related to payments he said he made at the direction of the President.”[20]
  • The Report also redacts in entirety its discussion of 12 of the 14 matters Mueller referred to other law enforcement authorities.[21]
  • Further, the Report details non-cooperation with the inquiry by the President, including refusing requests by the Special Counsel for an interview; providing written responses that the Office of the Special Counsel considered “incomplete” and “imprecise” and that involved the President stating on “more than 30 occasions that he ‘does not recall’ or ‘remember’ or ‘have an independent recollection.’”[22]


 
Still this? So you decided to copy and paste allegations from the report. Instead of that tell me, which case was presented to a judge for prosecution, with appropriate evidence, and carried to to judgement?

I will spare you the trouble of looking it up: ZERO. But feel free to search high and low for one. "declined to exonerate": that's a bullcrap way of admitting they found no evidence for an accusation. And unless you're a fan of guilty until proven otherwise you have to admit innocence. That is why no prosecution went to judgement. A candidate searching for dirt on its opponent is not a crime, if it were Clinton could be Trump's cellmate. Now that would be a sight...

In the end was something to see from the Mueller report: a witch hunt that would not have made McCarthy and Cohn proud only because is was so incompetently pulled off. Congratulation, his team managed to prove Trump right when the played the victim.
 
How do you think a jury hearing obstruction charges against Trump would react to finding out people investigating him repeatedly lied to fisa courts to spy on him? And how would that jury respond when they found out the people Trump wanted to fire were possibly compromised by the fraud the Obama DoJ perpetrated on the courts?

Mueller testified he didn't know much of anything about the Steele Dossier. He didn't even know his mandate was fraudulent. He didn't know there was a concerted effort from the Democrats to smear Trump as a traitor. Trump wanted them removed from the investigation. That is not obstruction. These 1000 prosecutors are probably assuming there was no malfeasance too, they're wrong. A defense atty would show the jury Trump's 'obstruction' was tied to that malfeasance. He wanted partisan hacks removed from the investigation and Mueller even had to fire some people.

As for that attack on our democracy, how much did "Russia" spend on ads to influence the election? I remember seeing the CEO of google admit it was a few thousand dollars. Course it aint about the ads, we already know the Clinton campaign had been red baiting the Trump crowd months before the election, and months before that they were red baiting Sanders and Stein. That was the narrative and it became policy under Obama.
 
Berzerker said:
As for that attack on our democracy, how much did "Russia" spend on ads to influence the election? I remember seeing the CEO of google admit it was a few thousand dollars. Course it aint about the ads, we already know the Clinton campaign had been red baiting the Trump crowd months before the election, and months before that they were red baiting Sanders and Stein. That was the narrative and it became policy under Obama.
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Google ads were a tiny amount of ads (~$4,000). There were facebook ads ($46,000-$100,000) and twitter ads ($247,100).
But it was more than just buying ads:

In 2016, Russian agents posted just under 30,000 times on Facebook, yet the operation generated almost 13 million shares, 15 million likes and 1.3 million comments, according to a research team at Oxford University.".
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'Red-baiting'? Sounds like what Trump has been doing since....forever.

Another report in The Daily Beast said Russians impersonated a Muslim group in the U.S. to smear Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Hillary Clinton on Twitter and Instagram.

And yet another report from Politico told of Russian-bought ads creating divisions among political candidates, including Clinton, Jill Stein and the ultimate victor, Donald Trump.
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https://time.com/5573537/mueller-report-russia-election-interference/
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.co...-twitter-facebook-ads-20170928-htmlstory.html
 
Bamspeedy said:
Google ads were a tiny amount of ads (~$4,000). There were facebook ads ($46,000-$100,000) and twitter ads ($247,100).
But it was more than just buying ads:

'Red-baiting'? Sounds like what Trump has been doing since....forever.
Click to expand...

I dont recall Trump red baiting anyone until after the Democrats did it to him. And even then his criticisms were of Biden family connections to Chinese money which do indeed exist. Red baiting includes fabricating connections to paint someone as disloyal, not exposing actual ties. Hillary did it to Tulsi Gabbard too.

Thx for the other numbers. What I haven't seen is analysis of the ads. Aaron Mate said a majority of ads were bought after the election and he described them as mostly click bait from troll farms. I would be interested to see how many ads could be fairly described as politically partisan. With a political budget in the billions 300k is hardly an assault on democracy (ads are undemocratic?), I'd bet it pales in comparison to the $$$ pouring in from other countries.

I believe the Clinton Foundation got millions from Russia. Internal polling showed that to be a weakness for Hillary so they turned it around on Trump, the guy who couldn't even get a hotel built in Moscow.

Ziggy Stardust said:
Seven guilty pleas and five people sentenced to prison
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Weren't these for lying about things they didn't need to lie about and unrelated matters like Manafort's tax/money troubles?
 
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