The Indictment Thread (Trump Admin Meltdown Thread Part II)

[EnochRoot]

His handlers need a shock collar for when his eyes stray from the TelePrompTer.

The gaslighting of America.

[P.D.X.]

One of those Murderball dudes could mess Cadet Bone Spurs up.

[Pruitt]

I missed it the first time. Just insane.

[Pruitt]

What does it mean now that Trump's buddy's rag is going after Cohen?

[rass]

You Can't Bully These Motherfuckers

[brian]

I doubt I could ever get enough of people dunking on Chris Cillizza.

I liked this from yesterday also:

[mister d]

This whole thing is too infuriating to even delve into but someone in the comments nailed it: "It’s all a game to these people. Cillizza views Trump and his Goon Squad the same way the Pelicans view the Warriors. Sure, they’re the opponent for a little while, but after it’s all over we should be cordial."

[Pruitt]

You Can't Bully These Motherfuckers

Fantastic quote:

What history will remember about Sanders is that she is the scum of the fucking earth, and not the jokey means by which one comedian pointed out this inarguable fact—and that’s only if the senile rageaholic pissbaby moron on whose behalf she shames herself on television every day doesn’t annihilate the human race, first.

This whole thing is too infuriating to even delve into but someone in the comments nailed it: "It’s all a game to these people. Cillizza views Trump and his Goon Squad the same way the Pelicans view the Warriors. Sure, they’re the opponent for a little while, but after it’s all over we should be cordial."

That's what makes the whole Correspondents Dinner so offensive - and it was offensive under Clinton, Bush and Obama as well. It makes it all look like one big show. A democratic circus where everyone involved knows their role and hey, it's just a gig...

Seeing boxers hug and be cordial after 12 rounds of trying to kill each other is one thing - mutual respect. Seeing media members cozying up to government officials is something else entirely. the stakes are high for the country and the world, and how dare you pretend that these people are on the same side, or at least the side that the media is supposed to be on.

And what kind of a douchebag "journalist" (and there are a lot more than this Cillizza guy doing this) act as if Sarah Huckabee respects them or their station. She's the mouthpiece of an administration that has declared the media to be an enemy of the people. Guys like this would complain that the press should be "respectful" when commenting on the Khmer Rouge's activities.

Quislings, all of them.

[brian]

One of the things I really took to heart from journalism school and my time in the business is the maxim that the job of the journalist is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

If nothing else, I'm glad this whole shitshow happened just to prove to the American people (the ones paying attention at least) that the White House press corps -- most likely just about the whole damn lot, but certainly the vast majority -- doesn't give two fucks about the American people.

So there's that.

[degenerasian]

Taibi nails it as well

[Rex]

Gotta admit, Ty Cobb replaced by "Emmet Flood" is a very '18 headline

[Pruitt]

Gotta admit, Ty Cobb replaced by "Emmet Flood" is a very '18 headline

From the Times...

It was not clear what prompted Mr. Flood to sign on.

Am I wrong in assuming that it is a paid position?

[brian]

Gotta admit, Ty Cobb replaced by "Emmet Flood" is a very '18 headline

From the Times...

It was not clear what prompted Mr. Flood to sign on.

Am I wrong in assuming that it is a paid position?

If Trump in fact pays you, yes.

[sancarlos]

Gotta admit, Ty Cobb replaced by "Emmet Flood" is a very '18 headline

From the Times...

It was not clear what prompted Mr. Flood to sign on.

Am I wrong in assuming that it is a paid position?

If Trump in fact pays you, yes.

Probably also impresses well-heeled potential future clients who support Trump.

[The Sybian]

You Can't Bully These Motherfuckers

Fantastic quote:

What history will remember about Sanders is that she is the scum of the fucking earth, and not the jokey means by which one comedian pointed out this inarguable fact—and that’s only if the senile rageaholic pissbaby moron on whose behalf she shames herself on television every day doesn’t annihilate the human race, first.

This whole thing is too infuriating to even delve into but someone in the comments nailed it: "It’s all a game to these people. Cillizza views Trump and his Goon Squad the same way the Pelicans view the Warriors. Sure, they’re the opponent for a little while, but after it’s all over we should be cordial."

That's what makes the whole Correspondents Dinner so offensive - and it was offensive under Clinton, Bush and Obama as well. It makes it all look like one big show. A democratic circus where everyone involved knows their role and hey, it's just a gig...

Seeing boxers hug and be cordial after 12 rounds of trying to kill each other is one thing - mutual respect. Seeing media members cozying up to government officials is something else entirely. the stakes are high for the country and the world, and how dare you pretend that these people are on the same side, or at least the side that the media is supposed to be on.

And what kind of a douchebag "journalist" (and there are a lot more than this Cillizza guy doing this) act as if Sarah Huckabee respects them or their station. She's the mouthpiece of an administration that has declared the media to be an enemy of the people. Guys like this would complain that the press should be "respectful" when commenting on the Khmer Rouge's activities.

Quislings, all of them.

This entire "controversy" is so tiresome and predictable. I saw the coverage of WHCD before seeing the actual footage, and I was shocked at how tame it was. I felt like Wolf and the prior speakers made a great effort to go easy on Trump. I thought they went after Rachel Maddow harder than Huckabee-Sanders. Trump and his acolytes were going to claim the media was mean and attacking them no matter what. Meanwhile, they cry about a comedian's jokes at a roast, while calling Liberals snowflakes because Liberals stand up to racism and misogyny. If you are the spokeswoman for the President who publicly called out his female primary opponent as too ugly to be President, and all the rest of the disgusting shit he says constantly, you gave up the right to be offended by a comedian making fun of you at a roast. There is sooo much material they could have used to go after Huckabee-Sanders, and Wolf went super soft. Wolf could have gone after her father and brother who tortured and killed dogs, that would have been fun.

I think the entire point of the WHCD is a symbolic show of celebrating the First Amendment. It's a fundraiser to provide scholarships to journalism students, but the show is about roasting government officials and those in power, celebrating our Right to criticise the government. Lets imagine how Trump's heroes Duterte, Putin, Kim Jong Un, or his historical role models like Mussolini, Stalin, or Saddam would have responded to a televised roast of them by the media? Well, bad example since Trump refuses to attend and attacks the media and comedians who criticise him, but under previous Administrations, the concept worked. I get the calls for ending the WHCD, or nixing the roast portion, but I think with this wanna-be dictator with a raging narcissistic personality disorder in power, it would be a huge concession to end the tradition while Trump is in office. Remember, this is the guy who constantly attacks the press, threatens to jail critics, calls for his crowds to turn on them, makes threats to change defamation laws so he can sue the press for criticising him, and has 40% of the population convinced that all negative stories against him are "fake news." Now more than ever, the press needs to stand up to Trump and continue to hold him accountable.

As for the members of the press criticizing Wolf or the WHCD, I think it's dangerous. The media is so afraid of being labeled as having a Liberal bias, they try to split everything down the middle. Trump claims the media hates him and attacks him more than any other President in history. While this may be true, he earns the criticism. The amount of negative press on any specific Trump scandal is miniscule compared to what it would have been if any other President did the same thing. Whitewater would have been a 1 day story if it was Trump's scandal. Trump deserves a 10 hour long roast, no holds barred, headlined by Lisa Lampanelli with a dozens of comedians and an open mic for people Trump has fucked in business, and women he assaulted.

[The Sybian]

Gotta admit, Ty Cobb replaced by "Emmet Flood" is a very '18 headline

From the Times...

It was not clear what prompted Mr. Flood to sign on.

Am I wrong in assuming that it is a paid position?

If Trump in fact pays you, yes.

Probably also impresses well-heeled potential future clients who support Trump.

Strongly disagree. No lawyer can walk away from that shit show looking good. No matter how good the lawyer is, Trump will call in to Fox and Friends and blow up your strategy by admitting guilt.

[Pruitt]

Giuliani = Genius!!

Mr. Giuliani said that what might have seemed to some viewers — including, perhaps, Mr. Hannity — like a slip of the tongue, was actually a planned disclosure.

“That removes the campaign finance violation, and we have all the documentary proof for it,” Mr. Giuliani said, explaining that the president and his other lawyers were well aware of what Mr. Giuliani intended to say on the program.

So it only took America's Mayor a few days to solve the problem.

[Nonlinear FC]

Pretty convinced Giuliani had a stroke at some point in the last few years. Or he's just hit an age where his mental facilities are jacked up to the point that he really is unhinged.

He, apparently, blindsided just about everyone in the WH including his legal team, by going on Fox (multiple times at this point) and essentially admitting to multiple criminal offenses ranging from campaign finance violations to federal financial disclosure violations.

They are simply banking on the fact that the American public won't understand what this latest round of revelations mean, that Congress won't do anything about any of this, and that the Feds simply can't do anything about it because you can't indict a sitting president.

We're all numb to it, at this point. But this is really historically criminal activity by a sitting president, out in the open for all to see.

They've been out warning voters that the Dems will move to impeach if there is a blue wave in the mid-terms... But they can't help themselves from keeping this steady drum beat of incompetence and borderline criminality in the news EVERY DAY. There are polls out saying that white suburbanites are just getting fatigued by it all and will either stay home, or flip their vote.

I know I've been saying this for almost two years, but you simply can't fuck with the minds of voters like this and think it's going to be OK. It's not sustainable in any form.

People are tired of this shit.

[DaveInSeattle]

Reading the comments (yeah, I know...never read the comments) on the various NYTimes stories/op-eds about Rudy 'Own Goal' Guiliani, so many of them say 'Rudy is so smart! We had him as mayor! He knows what he's doing!', and I can't help but think 'Yeah, but that was 20 fucking years ago, and he wasn't that smart then'.

[Pruitt]

The President and his adviser...

[mister d]

Reading the comments (yeah, I know...never read the comments) on the various NYTimes stories/op-eds about Rudy 'Own Goal' Guiliani, so many of them say 'Rudy is so smart! We had him as mayor! He knows what he's doing!', and I can't help but think 'Yeah, but that was 20 fucking years ago, and he wasn't that smart then'.

What if we just give every terrorist a bus ticket to South America?

[rass]

[Pruitt]

GIULIANI: I don’t know — I don’t know how you separate fact and opinion.

[Avram]

totally believeable and I hope that it is true

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... roidy.html

[Nonlinear FC]

totally believeable and I hope that it is true

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... roidy.html

I completely believe that take. It's consistent with what is becoming a track record for everyone involved, including the incurious media.

[The Sybian]

totally believeable and I hope that it is true

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... roidy.html

I completely believe that take. It's consistent with what is becoming a track record for everyone involved, including the incurious media.

Incurious, or overwhelmed? With 100+ scandals all in play simultaneously, who can keep up?

[Nonlinear FC]

The flags this guy is raising are pretty glaring. This Broidy guy has a history of bribing officials, including paying off a girlfriend in very similar circumstances. Trump has a history and stated desire to have unprotected sex with Playmates and we all know there's another one out there very publicly.

It's really not all that complicated and it's pretty surprising not one editor said "hey, wait a minute, isn't this leak kind of suspicious and convenient?"

[The Sybian]

The flags this guy is raising are pretty glaring. This Broidy guy has a history of bribing officials, including paying off a girlfriend in very similar circumstances. Trump has a history and stated desire to have unprotected sex with Playmates and we all know there's another one out there very publicly.

It's really not all that complicated and it's pretty surprising not one editor said "hey, wait a minute, isn't this leak kind of suspicious and convenient?"

I agree with you, but if/when someone breaks this story, nobody will be surprised, and it will be one more scandal with no consequences. I'm just so jaded at this point. Yes, it's important and probably not all that difficult to get to the bottom of this, but I'm much more concerned with exiting the Iran agreement, North Korea, elections, the Mueller probe...; and much more entertained by Rudy Giuliani at the moment to care about this.

[Shirley]

I think the most convincing argument in that piece was asking why this guy would immediately fess up as soon as he asked about. I mean, he supposedly paid $1.6 million to keep her quiet! Who blows that up the first time he's asked about it? It's not like a guy who cheated on his wife with a Playmate, got her pregnant, paid for an abortion, and then paid her $1.6M would suddenly be too honest to lie about doing all the above.

[Nonlinear FC]

Yeah, especially because, as the piece points out, there were TONS of scenarios where at the very worst case this doesn't come out anytime soon, all the way to the likely more plausible that this doesn't come out because it doesn't have anything to do with Trump or the Mueller investigation. I mean, under the scenario that this wasn't all a bribe/coverup.

[Rush2112]

Well, at least Cohen had some money coming in too!

Not that AT&T cared about net neutrality or anything.

[Pruitt]

Mo Rubles, Mo Problems

[tennbengal]

So are we all now in agreement that Trump and his people actually did collude with Russia in the run-up to the election? And that Russia has blackmail material on Trump? Are we are all there now?

Here's Chait on the latest:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... ssion=true

For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer — who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian “peace plan” with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017 — by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.

Perhaps even more alarming has been the response of the political system to this crisis. The House of Representatives has assigned Devin Nunes, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as its point man to defend Trump against the Mueller investigation. The Department of Justice has a long-standing policy of keeping Congress out of acting investigations, for the obvious reason that elected officials have a powerful incentive to interfere. Nunes has demanded the virtually unlimited right to get inside the Mueller probe. Officials in the Department of Justice have come to suspect his goal is to compromise the investigation by handing information from the prosecutors over to Trump.

[P.D.X.]

+ the developing story that one of the Russian oligarchs was literally just dumping $ into Cohen's slush fund. You know, the one that is used to "fix" things for DJT.

[The Sybian]

+ the developing story that one of the Russian oligarchs was literally just dumping $ into Cohen's slush fund. You know, the one that is used to "fix" things for DJT.

I'm very confident Trump has been laundering money for Russian and Kazakhstani oligarchs and gangsters for more than a decade. It's amazing how little effort Trump and his cronies put into hiding any of these activities, and even more amazing he was able to get elected with all of this out there. The only way this was possible is because his insanity, lies, narcissism, racism... threw out so much horribleness for us to get angry over, it's taken 2 years to root out the barely below the surface criminal shit.

[P.D.X.]

Yeah it kills me. A friend of Putin straight up giving cash to Trump's lawyer. But, but but... WITCH HUNT!

[The Sybian]

Yeah it kills me. A friend of Putin straight up giving cash to Trump's lawyer. But, but but... WITCH HUNT!

When I walked into the gym locker room this morning, some meathead was going on a rant about how Democrats all turned into Alinskyites, following the Rules for Radicals, and relentlessly attacking the person, not the policy, because Democrats know the majority of the country are Center Right to Right, and Dems can't win on policy. He explained to the poor guy stuck talking to him that Dems attack Trump and his Cabinet on baseless personal attacks to deflect from the fact that they have no ideas.

I cranked up the volume on my headphones, but I really wanted to respond. That is the definition of Trump. He attacks a team of Republicans, many he appointed or directly hired, and attacks them for being Democrat partisan hacks on a witch hunt. They never try to disprove any of the allegations against Trump, they try to destroy the credibility of the investigators, the entire FBI, the CIA, the "Deep State" out to get him, the Steele dossier being "paid for by Dems"... I've never once heard a refutation of any facts in the dossier other than "I'm a neat freak, so I wouldn't like being pissed on," but they attack Steele personally, imply it's not accurate because Dems paid for the investigation, somehow argue it's collusion with Russia because Steele interviewed Russian citizens, argue that since some of the facts in dossier are not corroborated by the FBI, all of the facts are somehow proven false. Yet, nobody addressed a single issue, just attacked the people and the process.

Fuck, I hate the political climate we are living in, and if the Dems take both Houses, I fear it will become even worse.

[Pruitt]

Novartis & Korean Aerospace Industries Also Clients

Looks like Cohen's funnel was pretty wide.

[Joe K]

Novartis & Korean Aerospace Industries Also Clients

Looks like Cohen's funnel was pretty wide.

Yup. Pretty blatant pay-for-access going on there. AT&T has essentially admitted it paid Cohen to get favorable treatment on net neutrality and antitrust issues. FWIW, a lot of Russian oligarchs have big investments in American companies, so it’s not clear that their motives were part of an election-related conspiracy as opposed to the same kind of garden-variety, legalized corruption going on with these other companies paying Cohen.

[DaveInSeattle]

Novartis & Korean Aerospace Industries Also Clients

Looks like Cohen's funnel was pretty wide.

Novartis paid him $1.2million, met with him once, and then decided he 'couldn't provide the services we wanted', but didn't cancel the payments, because it wasn't 'for cause'.

Yeah...that's not fishy at all.