Apparently the old adage “When it rains, it pours” is true to an order of magnitude when you’re as much of a mendacious fraud as one Donald John Trump, starting first and foremost with the thermonuclear revelations and allegations this week from Michael Wolff’s upcoming book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, some of which include:
- Steve Bannon predicts special counsel Robert Mueller will “crack Don Jr. like an egg” over his infamous 2016 meeting with Russian officials, which Bannon also described as “treasonous.”
- Trump didn’t seem to know who former House Speaker John Bohener was. When former Fox boss Roger Ailes recommended Trump consider Boehner to be his chief of staff, Trump reportedly asked, “Who’s that?”
- First Lady Melania Trump was horrified by Trump’s win — and she cried “tears — and not of joy” on the night of her husband’s victory.
- Former campaign aide tried to tutor Trump in governance by teaching him about the Constitution — and failed miserably. [by the time he reached the 4th Amendment]
- 21st Century Fox boss Rupert Murdoch called Trump “a f*cking idiot” after the two had a discussion on H1-B visas. Trump drew Murdoch’s ire after he seemingly didn’t understand that helping Silicon Valley tech companies secure more of H1-B visas would be breaking his own campaign promising.
- Ann Coulter warned Trump against hiring his children — and then he did it anyway. “You just can’t hire your children,” Coulter told Trump during the presidential transition. Shortly afterward, he hired both daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner to key White House advisory positions.
- Trump didn’t want former United Nations ambassador John Bolton to be secretary of state because of his mustache.
- Trump also allegedly referred to then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates as a “c*nt.”
- Hope Hicks, Trump’s 28-year-old director of strategic communications, was forced to leave the room in distress. after she expressed sympathy Corey Lewandowski and asked “What they could do for [him]’” to which Trump replied: ”‘Why? You’ve already done enough for him. you’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have.”
- Donald Trump used his Trump Tower secretary to trick his buddies’ wives into sleeping with him.
Since some of the most salacious and potentially damaging comments from the book were attributed to Steve Bannon—ignoring the fact that there were many other comments from many other Trump insiders referenced by Wolff—the full weight of Trumpdom has come smashing down upon the house that Breitbart and Mercer built.
And it is quite delicious to observe.
Within a few hours Trump lawyers had threatened to have a cease and desist order issued against Bannon stating that he should refrain from “disparaging” Trump.
In the letter, attorney Charles Harder, accused Bannon of breaking his nondisclosure agreement, “by, among other things, communicating with author Michael Wolff about Mr. Trump, his family members, and the Company [the campaign], disclosing Confidential Information to Mr. Wolff, and making disparaging statements and in some cases outright defamatory statements to Mr. Wolff about Mr. Trump, his family members.”
This betrays a basic misunderstanding which seems common in Trumpland. Bannon didn’t suddenly “turn against” Trump in the last few days—the quotes and comments attributed to him and many others by Wolff didn’t just happen, they were stated candidly months ago while Bannon was still working in the White House. It’s far too late for him to “cease” or “desist”—he’s already down on the record for all of his statements, and other reporters are making it clear that what Bannon is quoted to have said is very likely accurate because Wolff has many of them on tape.
Jonathan Swan, a national political correspondent for Axios, appeared Thursday on “Morning Joe,” where he explained the website’s reporting on author Michael Wolff’s research for Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
Wolff spent hours at a time in private areas of the West Wing, according to Axios, where he recorded dozens of hours of tapes with a variety of sources, and hosted a dinner for six that included White House strategist Steve Bannon and former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, whose conversations are quoted at length in the book.
…
“It is a question that people close to him can’t understand, and I think it’s incredibly stupid,” Swan told MSNBC. “It’s something he has been saying privately by the way — none of this is stuff he wasn’t saying privately for months. The new thing is he said it on the record.”
Of course Trump’s lawyers didn’t stop with trying to gag Bannon—far too late and far too little—they’re also trying to have Wolff’s entire book shut down.
The president’s attorneys have sent a cease-and-desist letter Thursday morning to author Michael Wolff and publisher Henry Holt, reported the Washington Post‘s Carol Leonnig.
The letter demands they stop publication of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and issue an apology to the president for “defamatory statements made thus far.”
Since Wolff was specifically granted permission to be embedded in the White House, to put their comments on the record and to record them, I for one am not that confident that this suit will work out all that well for them.
What we’re hearing from Bannon and others in Wolff’s book are not examples of them “turning against Trump”—in fact just one day before the Wolff report Bannon called for Trump to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. Yes, Really.
On the December night that Roy S. Moore lost the Alabama special election—handing Democrats their first Senate seat in that state in more than two decades—I sat down with Stephen Bannon in a Montgomery motel room for a wide-ranging conversation that ranged from Silicon Valley to North Korea. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, supported Moore in the special election, and has vowed to run anti-establishment candidates in the 2018 midterm election. He calls himself a Trump “wingman” waging necessary battle against Republicans disloyal to the president, not to mention Democrats who, in many cases, want Trump removed from office. Others, however, see Bannon as a troublemaker who could squander Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress.
On Trump’s domestic policy: “Look at the Trump agenda. The Trump agenda is working. He is making America great again. He is getting the animal spirits flowing in America.
“This working-class, middle-class program, is a winning program. We've proved that. Now you have to deliver on it. That's why I'm so proud of President Trump. President Trump should be eligible for the Nobel Prize in Economics. He just, he's proven that economic nationalism works.”
Here's the difference between Trump's job creation brags and reality:
The Trump administration likes to brag about the economy. A lot. During a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham on Nov. 2, Trump boasted about the economic gains during his first year in office, calling it “one of the greatest [economic revivals] in the history of our country.” He added: “I’m not getting enough credit for it.”
...
Trump inherited low unemployment numbers from Obama. Since 2011, the unemployment rate has steadily declined from a high of 9.6 percent following the Great Recession. It was 4.8 percent in January, when Trump took the oath of office, and it was 4.1 percent in the December employment report. Below are the yearly averages since 2011.
But neither Trump nor Bannon have been people who ever let facts or maths stand in their way. And for once, that tendency is beginning to come home to roost as their various supporters begin to eat each other alive while lining up on opposite sides of the same point of view.
In an explosive statement, the president suggested that Bannon had "lost his mind" and was a source of leaks in his White House — comments that came after excerpts of a forthcoming book landed, quoting Bannon making stunningly critical comments about the Trump family and the investigation into the campaign's connections to Russia.
The new rift between Trump and Bannon creates an awkward and uncomfortable dynamic for GOP candidates who have courted Bannon for months, seeing his nod as the ultimate in pro-Trump credentials — a reputation that Trump shredded on Wednesday.
But in the hours after Trump issued his statement, there was little appetite for a total break with Bannon, now the head of the hard-right outlet Breitbart. Certainly some GOP candidates criticized the reported comments or downplayed the significance of their previously coveted Bannon endorsements.
Certainly there will be people who will dispute certain claims and quotes made by Wollf. Some of that has already started, but at the same time much of the general gist of what he describes seem quite obvious. The complaints that Trump insiders make about him aren’t much different from what clear-eyed outsiders have been saying for months, if not years.
What Wolff has actually exposed is that despite the shiny, happy face that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway try to project, the truth is the White House is filled with people who hate Trump and hate each other.
New York Times national political correspondent Nick Confessore, who has questioned the accuracy of some passages in Wolff’s book, said he was not surprised by many of the revelations — although he was astonished by the viciousness of the quotes.
“I have never seen anything in presidential politics that is remotely like that anywhere, it’s astonishing,” Confessore said. “This is a president, in Wolff’s telling, who is surrounded by people who hate him and hate each other and don’t respect him. It is hard to imagine the first six months or a year in the White House, with that much open disdain for a guy in the Oval Office. It is impossible for a presidency to function in those conditions, and we are seeing this presidency does not function in an orderly way.”
“It’s very good news for Bob Mueller, by the way, and if he wants to kind of kind of peel these people apart, he has a lot to work a lot to work with,” Confessore added.
So Bannon’s people are now off the Trump bandwagon and Trump has called open season on Bannon. All off this Sturm and Drang over Melania’s and Hope Hick’s tears are missing a much larger issue that has been brought about by Wolff’s allegations; specifically that the spokesman for one of Trump’s lawyers decided to quit immediately after the drafting of a false statement personally by Trump claiming that Don Jr. Kushner and Manafort had met with Russians in Trump Tower to talk “about adoptions.” In this segment below by Rachel Maddow, she points out—since she already has a copy of Wolff’s book and has bothered to pay attention to what matters in it—that this person, Mark Corallo, quit because he felt Trump was committing Obstruction of Justice.
The former spokesman for President Donald Trump's private legal team quit this summer because he believed a statement dictated by the president aboard Air Force One may have obstructed justice, an explosive new book claims.
…
"Mark Corallo was instructed not to speak to the press, indeed not to even answer his phone," Wolff writes. "Later that week, Corallo, seeing no good outcome — and privately confiding that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice — quit."
The statement the president reportedly dictated concerned the purpose of a June 2016 meeting between Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., senior advisor Jared Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer.
So forget about collusion. Never mind the unemployment rate. It really doesn’t matter that Trump is a mean despicable boss to his employees. Forget even about “Treason” as Bannon has suggested, particularly since he wasn’t even a member of the Trump campaign when this meeting took place, and I don’t believe he was on Air Force One during the trip to Europe when this statement was drafted, so he really wouldn’t know what really happened first hand.
This revelation right here is real potential criminal witness, on top of Comey, his notes and Andrew McCabe, to a conspiracy to obstruct justice spearheaded by Trump himself with the help of his attorneys, Hope Hicks and Jared Kushner that could bring this administration crashing down around his ankles.
And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
unday, Jan 7, 2018 · 7:49:01 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
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