Boy, the rules are sure different for people who are card-carrying members of the Trump inner sanctum and those who are excommunicated from same. Night and day doesn’t even begin to describe it. In May, 2018, Rudy Giuliani was quoted as saying about Michael Cohen, “He doesn't have any incriminating information about the president or himself. The man is an honest, honorable lawyer." That morphed into, “He’s lied all his life,” in July, and that became, “He is a career criminal liar. He is demonstrably unable to tell the truth,” in the past 24 hours, as part of a series of tweets to the Daily Beast:
“[I] just pointed out the numerous articles saying he and his father-in-law were alleged to be associated with organized crime,” Giuliani added, defending his salvos against Cohen’s family. “Also they allege there were allegations about his wife. If there was a threat then [it was] not from President [Trump] or me but if true from organized crime.”
“I never heard of a lawyer surreptitiously taping his client to whom he now claims he was loyal,” Giuliani texted, unprompted, roughly an hour and a half after Cohen’s statement. He went on to allege that Cohen could have “doctored” recorded audio of a conversation with Trump—a theory the president trotted out on Twitter last year.
“Also there are a number of people who can testify that [Michael Cohen] was relentlessly seeking a government position and was very upset he did not get one,” Giuliani wrote, contradicting Cohen testifying that he wasn’t seeking a job in the Trump White House. “Another area of provable perjury.”
Cohen hasn’t been sitting idle through all this. He called Giuliani Trump’s “TV lawyer,” in his opening remarks to the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, thereby incurring Giuliani’s wrath, which was swift in coming.
Meanwhile, somehow Tom Steyer has become the new George Soros. I guess when deflection is the name of the game, you throw everything at the wall and pray that the law of gravity has been repealed and something, somehow is going to stick, because it’s got to.
Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Jody Hice (R-Ga.), suggested, without evidence, that billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer had somehow played a role behind-the-scenes for Cohen’s hearing or paid for his legal fees. This was also echoed by talk radio host and Trump cheerleader Rush Limbaugh, who said, “one of the Democrat donors that’s heavily involved in orchestrating this whole thing today is Tom Steyer, who is a Democrat billionaire from California who is a gigantic participant in the worldwide man-made climate change hoax.” (Steyer tweeted during the hearing that he had never paid for Cohen’s legal fees.)
While all this has been going on, Newt Gingrich was quoted as saying, “The Cohen hearing was specifically planned to stop the coverage [of North Korea] and step on the president.” And Ronna Romney McDaniel charged that Cohen’s appearance before Congress was merely a publicity play, “in an effort to distract from the historic progress President Trump is making overseas with North Korea.”
The only thing historic about Trump’s relations with North Korea is that he is egregiously naive and ill informed about U.S. relations, at a level never heretofore seen in the annals of American diplomacy. Former CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash says that Trump is going to Korea in a dream world of his own and not grounded in facts. Alternet:
“In some ways, the president is just trying to speak of his own reality. It’s kind of like what he’s doing with the wall: ‘The wall is being built.’ Well, actually, no, it’s not. ‘They’re giving up their nuclear weapons.” Well, no, they’re not. In both cases, incredibly dangerous to be so naive and to be so false about the facts.”
“The president is zero for 20 — by a conservative estimate — in getting rid of the real threat from nuclear weapons from North Korea,” he explained. “So he goes into this summit, and we would think — under normal circumstances — that therefore the bar should be raised, we should be tougher on Kim Jong-un. We should drive a harder bargain. And I think what’s really worrying John Bolton, what’s really worrying the experts inside our government and around Washington, is that the president is actually going to cave further. He’s going to actually be more eager to please. He’s going to be more interested in the bromance, the embrace, the pageantry, and America’s going to get a much worse deal.”
Bromance, pageantry, and he even got his hair done to please this dictator. We.Are.So.F*cked.
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[cross-posted to PolitiZoom]