Trump’s goose should have already been cooked even before the Mueller report was released. WIth it out now, he should been politically strung-up, drawn and quartered by now — but no, that’s not the case because there are packs of Republicans more than willing to throw every inch of their own relevance and credibility into the pyre of Trump protectionism.
It’s truly, pathetic and horrifying the lengths and the depths of not-logic that they will stoop too, without hesitation or a hint of remorse.
First case in point: Wherein Rick Santorum generates raucus laughter as he tries to claim that “No foreign government would offer dirt to Trump because he's shown he loves America so much.”
Is this guy fucking kidding us or trying to desperately delude himself?
Welcome to the ongoing Trump-Russia Corruption Timeline, it just keeps going, and going, and going...
In this CNN Panel discussion Santorum went on to make the following bogus claims:
Asked about the Trump comments, the former Republican senator rolled his eyes at the notion of Russians making overtures to presidential candidates.
“That is not how it would come,” Santorum asserted. “No foreign government could come to your campaign and say ‘I’m the Russian government –‘” he began before the entire panel exploded.
“THEY DID!”
[...]
“Again, someone who said that — oh, I’m representing the –,” the abashed Santorum began before stating, “You get people saying all sorts of crazy things in the campaign that come at you. And the idea that someone who said they represent the Russians actually does — they may or may not.”
In this sequence Jake Tapper did state the obvious: Rob Goldstone’s email to Don Jr. both mentioned the involvement of the Russian government and also that they were willing and eager to share “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. A foreign government came to Trump’s campaign and said they were part of the Russian government, and this link has been confirmed by Veselnitskaya is a former Federal prosecutor for Russia under the that offices corrupt leader Yuri Chaika. She has also admitted to being an informant for the Kremlin.
If Santorum's claim was that “normally” foreign agents aren’t so obvious about how they’re going to approach and try to co-opt someone — well “normally” that’s true, but apparently since Trump was already so favorable to Russia and Putin since they'd essentially been trying to recruit him for 30 years, they really didn't need to put on much pretense and they still don't.
in addition to meeting with Veselnetskaya — who brought a GRU associate Rinat Ahkmetshin with her by the way — you had Don Jr secretly meet with Russian banker Alexander Torshin, who was a former government official and apparently the “handler” for now convicted Russian spy Marina Butina. Also there was George Papadopouos, who met with Prof Mifsud and Russian Ministry Official Ivan Timofeev, who talked to him several times via Skype while he was trying to setup a direct meeting between Putin and Trump during the campaign. Roger Stone communicated directly with Guccifer 2.0, who were part of Russian Military Intelligence. He also received information from Wikileaks which apparently was provided by Russian State media outlet RT reporter Afshin Rattansi who had interviewed Julian Assange and reportedly shared inside information about his next dump of hacked emails with his associate Ted Malloch, who gave it to Jerome Corisi and then Roger Stone emailed the information to Steve Bannon. Later someone in the Trump campaign frantically contacted Stone the day of that the “Pussy Grab” video tape was about to drop who went back through his connections with Corsi and Malloch to get Wikleaks to drop their John Podesta emails that very same day. Which they did. Carter Page met directly with Russia Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich during his trip to Russia in the middle of the campaign. Jeff Sessions met then Russian Ambassador Kislyak at least 3 times. Michael Flynn and Kushner also met directly with Kislyak during the transition, After that on Kislyak's recommendation Kushner met with Russian banker and FSB Academy Graduate Sergei Gorkov, This apparently led to a meeting with Erik Prince and Russian Sovereign fund manager Kiril Dimitriev, Then of course you have Manafort, Gates, Van der Zwaan in communiation with former GRU asset Konstantin Kiliminick in order to attempt to do deals with Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska, Felix Sater and Michael Cohen were in communication with Russia Government Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov and lastly Cohen, again, was in communications with and oligarch Victor Vekselberg before and during the inauguration.
Mueller wasn’t able to prove this was all part of a single conspiracy because most of these people lied under oath about their contacts with Russians and some both obstructed justice and tampered with witness, however all the above is “Collusion” which isn’t a crime. But yeah sure, Rick, no foreign government officials would ever reach out directly to a campaign. Nope, never happen.
The protectionist who was even worse than Santorum was Intelligence Committee member Rep. Chris Stewart who literally tried to claim that it would be “foolish” for someone like Trump to NOT accept help from a foreign nation on his campaign even though it’s flat. out. illegal.
“It depends on who it is and the circumstances and how credible it is,” Stewart told Scuitto.
“There might be valuable information that comes from one of our allies,” he said. “If they look at it, and it’s credible, I think it would be foolish not to take that information.”
[...]
“I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening,” Trump said.
This is simply put: Nuts.
And I say that because Stewart made this claim on the 15th, which was a day after FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub tweeted this:
“I would not have thought that I needed to say this… Let me make something 100 percent clear to the American public and anyone running for public office: 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,”
It doesn’t “depend”. The circumstances don’t matter. Their credibility doesn’t matter. “Illegal” means illegal. “Anything of value” means anything of value. Foreign governments don't get to interfere with our campaigns. Period, Full stop.
There are also those like Lindsay Graham, Devin Nunes and Tom Cotton who are trying to draw a false equivalence between the hundreds of contacts by Russians and the Trump campaign and their associates and supposedly Hillary Clinton hiring the DNC to hire Chris Steele to have Russian government officials come up with a “bunch of lies” about Trump. [Santorum and Stewart also brought this up , so the Steele Dossier what-aboutism is a pattern and a talking point.]
When “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked Cotton if he was okay with Trump’s comments, the Republican senator tried to pivot to the Clinton campaign and Christopher Steele.
“What people should not do is what Hillary Clinton and the Democrats did, which is hire a foreign spy to recruit Russian spies to fabricate lies about their political opponents” he said.
“Is Tom Cotton’s answer the question ‘maybe’ when it comes to offering you and your campaign dirt?” asked Brennan.
“I would report those contacts to the FBI,” Cotton replied.
Except that is not what happened. Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS testified before the Senate and House that he sought out Perkins Coie after his contract with the Washington Free Beacon expired. They didn’t seek him out under the direction of Hillary Clinton and the DNC — who frankly knew nothing about him and Christopher Steele and never actually received a report from them at all.
Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager Robby Mook said on Friday evening that he did not know who funded the controversial, unverified dossier about President Trump, despite revelations that the law firm representing the campaign sponsored the document.
"I didn't know that we were paying the contractor that created that document," Mook told CNN's Anderson Cooper.
"When we started to look into Donald Trump's business dealings, it was this massive tree of LLCs and shell companies. We were overwhelmed, we were on it, frankly," he continued.
"I asked our lawyer and I gave him a budget allocation to investigate this, particularly the international aspect. My understanding is that dossier is the product of not just research that was funded by our campaign, but also by Republican donors," he said.
And the reason they didn’t know was because Steele decided they had take what they found to the FBI. just like Cotton says that he would do, but absolutely none of Trump’s people did.
Further, Fusion GPS is an American company so having the DNC contract with them isn’t illegal and Fusion subcontracting to Christopher Steele and Orbis is legal too. The information they provided wouldn’t have been against campaign finance laws because it wasn’t a “gift” or donation to the campaign it was a campaign expenditure that they paid for.
It’s exactly as legal as the Trump campaign hiring the British based company Cambridge Analytica to provide them campaign information except for the fact that they STOLE THAT INFORMATION from the private accounts of 87 Million Facebook users without their knowledge.
Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that did work for the Trump campaign and harvested raw data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles, is shutting down.
…
Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix actually reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about the emails that were hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s servers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
But the more important part of this story is how Cambridge Analytica got its data from Facebook. And according to a former Cambridge Analytica employee, the firm got it through researcher Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian American who worked at the University of Cambridge.
….
Kogan built a Facebook app that was a quiz.
It not only collected data from people who took the quiz, but as my colleague Aja Romano writes, it exposed a loophole in Facebook API that allowed it to collect data from the Facebook friends of the quiz takers as well.
As Romano points out, Facebook prohibited the selling of data collected with this method, but Cambridge Analytica sold the data anyway.
So we should be upset about Chris Steele and the DNC, all of which was legal, but never mind the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica that stole the personal information of 87 Million Americans using technology that was paid for by Russian Oil Company Lukoil, which has a security cooperation deal with the FSB who funded a Russian-American professor located in England who also had offices in St. Petersburg, and whose stolen data was later illegally accessed from his St. Petersburg Offices in Russia.
Damian Collins, the Conservative MP leading a British parliamentary investigation into online disinformation, told CNN that a British investigation found evidence that the data, collected by Professor Aleksandr Kogan on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, had been accessed from Russia and other countries. The discovery was made by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), Britain's data protection authority, Collins said.
[….]
Kogan denies handing over the Facebook data he gathered for Cambridge Analytica to any Russian entity, saying it is possible that someone in Russia could have accessed data from his computer without his knowledge. "On my side, I am not aware of any Russian entity with access to my data," he added. He didn't rule out that he may have inadvertently exposed the data while in Russia.
[...]
Collins couldn't say specifically how the data was accessed, what was in it, and how it may have been used, if at all, saying, "...there will be a lot of interest now to see to what extent were people in Russia benefiting from the work Kogan was doing with his colleagues in Cambridge in the U.K.," Collins said.
Lastly, as I’ve proven myself by going over all 56 allegations from the Steele Dossier — at least 73% of his claims have proven completely or at least partially true. I’ve shown my work in detail with references to the Press reports and relevant parts of the Mueller report and even the claim that Steele’s info came from the “Russia government” isn’t true, some of it came from sources who were apparently inside the Trump campaign too.
The only thing that appears to be outright “false” was the claim that Michael Cohen travelled to Prague to pay-off Russian hackers. Mueller says that Cohen didn't make that trip, although he did request $50,000 from the Trump campaign for “IT Services” even those he wasn’t working for the Campaign, he has a habit of implementing payoffs, two associates of Michael Flynn, Peter W. Smith and Barbara Ledeen did hire hackers to search for Hillary Clinton’s emails and there was a hacker who was arrested in Prague just a few weeks after this reported “trip” that Cohen didn’t make, but one of his cellphones reportedly “pinged" a tower in the area. Mueller decided he didn’t have a crime to pursue here, but it is all highly odd. The intel community might have made some better sense of this, but that’s not part of of Mueller’s report.
The bottom line is that Santorum, Stewart, Nunes, Cotton and others like Lindsay Graham, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis who also played this Steel Dossier card are simply going to keep spouting ridiculous fucking nonsense to protect Trump and by extension the Republican party that is now dependent upon Trump’s success and his survival. This is blood sport. This is no holds barred. No fact is sacred. Any convenient lie is viable.
Sen. Mark Warner had a bill on making it a requirement for a campaign to report foreign contacts to the FBI and Marsha Blackburn blocked it. They don’t freaking CARE, people.
They aren’t going to stop with the bullshit, so Dems and the media have step up their fracking game and catch them at every lie, every exaggeration, every distortion and drive. the. truth. home.
Here are this week’s detailed events.
June 13th —
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DOJ plans to interview members of the CIA about their investigation into Russia election rigging and the Trump campaign.
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Trump says Michael Flynn’s new wingnut Fox lawyer isn’t just good, “She’s Great.”
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Trump’s media protection squad are having a hard time spinning his willingness to violate campaign finance law.
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Brian Kilamead: “You don’t want a foreign government or foreign entity giving you information because they will want something back,” [Yeah, no shit.] If someone wants information they want influence. I think the President’s got to to clarify that…He opened himself wide up to attacks.”
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Ingraham: What about this notion of accepting foreign intel about an opponent? “Is that a risk for President Trump, getting pulled back into Mueller? Again, why he was put in that situation is beyond me.”
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Trump is mad about the contempt vote against Barr and Ross: The GOP will remember. [Is that a threat?]
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House Intelligence issues subpoenas for Rick Gates and Michael Flynn.
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Even Lindsay Graham wants to strip Trump of emergency powers to sell weapons to the Saudis.
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Pelosi says “At best, Trump doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong.” [Or law and crime.] But she also punts on calling for Impeachment right now. [It’s still too soon, if would flop like a dead fish in the Senate.]
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Office of Special Counsel recommends that Kellyanne Conway be “terminated from Federal Service” for repeated violations of the Hatch Act.
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GOP Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TX) says Trump’s videoed comments about accepting foreign help in elections are “fictitious”, and claims he never said exactly what he said.
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WH Counsel Pat Cipillone lashes out at the OSC for recommending that Kellyanne Conway be terminated for repeatedly violating the Hatch Act calling it “outrageous” and accusing the watchdog agency’s chief of acting out of emotion. “If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work,” Conway said. “Let me know when the jail sentence starts.” [First comes the indictment, and the statute of limitations goes way past 2020.]
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OSC Chief Henry Kerner says Conway’s behavior is “unprecedented” and “sets a bad example.”
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Some Republicans admit that taking foreign campaign help is a crime, kinda.
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Lindsay Graham says “I think it is a mistake. I think it is a mistake of law,” he told reporters Thursday. “I don’t want to send a signal to encourage this.” [It's a crime!] Then he tries to draw false equivalency with Chris Steele who gave his information to the FBI not the DNC or Clinton campaign, and was working for a US company at the time who had been legally hired by the DNC, and weren't offering a campaign gift.
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Mitt Romney says if he had received information from a foreign power in his presidential or senate campaigns, he would’ve alerted the FBI. [The way that Chris Steele did, while Papadopoulos, Junior, Manafort, Page, Stone, Corsi, Malloch, Flynn, Kushner, Gates, Prince and Van Der Zwaan didn’t?]
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Kevin McCarthy reassured reporters that he felt Trump would always “do the right” thing in the face of foreign dirt. [He already failed that test, multiple times.] “The President would always do the right action,” he told reporters Thursday. “I’ve watched this president, I’ve listened to this president. He doesn’t want foreign governments interfering in our election. He’s been very strong about that. … He’s been so strong about Russia.” [No, he hasn't been — he said “I don’t know why it would be.. Russia.]
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Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) took a page from Graham’s book and blatantly pivoted to attack Clinton over her campaign’s handling of the infamous Christopher Steele dossier instead. [Not a campaign gift, they didn’t use it, the info went to the FBI.]
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Sarah Huckabee-Sanders plans to leave the WH Press office at the end of the month. [Good Fucking Riddance!]
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Devin Nunes tries to hijack a hearing on election security to whine about the Steele Dossier.
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Trump lashes out at Senator Kamala Harris for saying we should would prosecute him for obstruction.
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Joe Napolitano on Trump accepting foreign campaign aide: “He would be committing a felony.”
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Shep Smith on Trump accepting foreign election interference: It’s a crime.
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Prosecutors are asking to submit classified information in the case against Chinese National and Mar-A-Lago infiltrator Yujing Zhang — who had a ton a malware on her cellphone — which suggests there is a national security component to her case.
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Former Acting FBI Diretor Andrew McCabe says that Trump’s acceptance of foreign influence justifies their investigation of Russia’s election rigging operation.
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Former Al Gore aide Thomas Downey (D-NY) talks about how he went to the FBI in 2000 when they received a stolen briefing book from the Bush campaign.
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Pelosi talks about Trump attacking her during the D-Day celebration: “I felt sorry for him.” [I feel sorry for America.]
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2 Tankers in the Gulf of Oman are mysteriously damaged. Pompeo says that Iran is responsible after a video showing them remove a unexploded mine is released.
June 14th —
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Trump appointed FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub tweets: “I would not have thought that I needed to say this… Let me make something 100 percent clear to the American public and anyone running for public office: 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,” [Mic drop — BOOM!]
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Myka and Morning Joe argue over whether Trump is “Evil or just Demented”. [Not. Mutually. Exclusive!]
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Don Lemon airs detailed takedown of SHuckabee’s lies to America.
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Mnuchin’s wife Louise Linton: It’s sucks being hated. [It usually only happens to those that deserve it.]
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Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., failed in his attempt to unanimously pass a bill that would require candidates to report election assistance offered by foreign governments to federal officials because it was was blocked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who had been part of the Trump transition team, she claimed the bill was “over-broad” would have caused to many reporting requirements for candidates and wasn’t “bi-partisan.” [How much more bi-partisan can you get than unanimous consent?]
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Mitch McConnel on taking foreign campaign help: We got the Mueller report so stop picking on Trump. [The Mueller report said this was a crime too, they just didn’t think they could get a conviction — but then they didn’t talk to Trump about it, and he just basically confessed he'd do it again.] Then McConnel asks the Dems if they’re going to anything other than “harass” Trump. [Um, they’ve passed about 150 Bills on Vets, Election Security, Prescription Drugs and more that you’ve been ignoring Mitch!! You’re the one who hasn’t done shit, other than make excuses for Trump.]
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Trump tries to spin his previous spin on illegal foreign contribution with a 45 min call to Fox and Fools:
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Option 1) “If I don’t listen, you are not going to know." [If it’s foreign campaign aid — you don’t need to fracking know, it’s illegal.]
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Option 2) “If I thought anything was incorrect or badly stated I’d report it to attorney general, the FBI, I’d report it to law enforcement absolutely.” [It doesn’t matter if it’s “correct or badly stated” it’s illegal, they don’t get to have an opinion on our elections. You didn’t report shit to the Attorney General or the FBI. You fired the FBI Director for investigating Flynn who lied about talking to Russians, you tried to get AG Sessions to unrecuse himself because he was part of the campaign and had talked to Russians. You tried to fire Mueller using McGahn then tried to get him to lie about it and then tried to use Corey Lewandowski to get Sessions to fire Mueller instead. This is bullshit!]
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Option 3) “I don’t think anybody would present me with anything because they know how much I love the country,”. [They already FUCKING DID — and you took it from them via the GRU, DCLeaks, Wikileaks, RT, Sputnik News and the Russian Troll Farm.]
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He responds to Pelosi’s comment that he’s involved in a criminal cover-up: “It’s a fascist statement, it’s a disgraceful statement,” [No, it’s apt.] And I’ll tell you what, for her to make a statement like that, is outrageous. Her party got caught spying!” [No, they didn’t — they were doing their job to protect this nation from a foreign agent; You.]
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He also says he has no intention of firing Kellyanne: “She’s been loyal” and he says that his campaign has no internal polls showing him losing to Joe Biden. “Those polls don’t exist. How could I be losing to Biden in Texas?”
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More from Trump’s interview with Stephanopoulos drops where he suggests Don McGahn lied to Mueller under oath in order to pretend to be a "good lawyer.” [What the hell?}
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Former FBI and CIA officer Phil Mudd says after Trump accuses McGahn of lying under oath “I think McGahn is going to appear publicly at some point and it won’t go well for the president,’
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Rawstory reports that at least a dozen Republicans used material stolen from Democrats in the 2016 Election. Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain received $7.35 million in contributions from Ukranian-born oligarch Leonard "Len" Blavatnik who reportedly has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In September of 2018, House Republicans backed out and refused to sign a pledge not to utilize stolen or hacked information in House elections.
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Jennifer Rubin trashed Trump's claim that he “loves his country” by pointing out all the times he’s betrayed America. “He loves America so much that he’d lie about doing a real estate deal during the campaign,” she scoffed. “He loves it so much that he encouraged Russia to release Clinton emails and proclaimed his love for the Russian cutout WikiLeaks. He loves it so much that he wouldn’t dissolve his businesses or stop taking foreign monies. He loves it so much that he never expressed outrage that former members of his campaign committed felonies.”
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MSNBC Host Hallie Jackson grilled Sean Spicer: “Did you set a precedent for lying for the WH?” “No,” Spicer responded with a laugh. “No? None? Not at all? None of the things you said that weren’t true, you regret none of them?” the MSNBC host followed up. “No, I didn’t say that. You said, do you regret setting the precedent. Did I make mistakes, Hallie? Of course I did. And when I did, I tried my best to make up for those,” [No, no you didn’t. You never even corrected the false claim that Trump Inauguration crowd was the “biggest ever!”]
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Mayor De Blasio says “Trump should be impeached for Treason” and Breitbart screams “DEMS RACHET UP HATE.” [Only because Trump is ratcheting up his admissions to crime, although we technically need to be at war for Treason to count.]
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Breitbart also accuses Facebook of implementing “Political segregation” because have begun internally labeling some users as Hate Agents. [It only appears that way because so many righties share hate-based memes about Democrats]
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A devastating thread appears on Twitter posted by the friend of an Migrant Aide worker who says that asylum seekers in Texas are being held in outdoor pens called the “Dog Pound” which is exposed to the elements with dirt floors, and from their they are moved to “The Freezer” which is kept at 55 degrees, while they are provided access to baby-formula, bathrooms or clean clothes.
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CNN reports that ICE is now holding 5,200 people in quarantine because of an outbreak of mumps and chicken pox in 39 detention facilities.
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Former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan has been named Immigration/Border Czar.
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Appeals court finds against Trump admin attempts to prevent migrant minors from access to abortion.
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ABC News releases the polls that Trump told Stephanopoulos “didn’t exist” and they do show him trailing Joe Biden by double digits in several key swing states. Also Texas. Brad Parscale now claims those polls are “ancient” and Trump was “correct” because current internal polls show him ahead of Biden.
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The OLC releases an opinion that says that the Treasury Dept doesn’t have to obey a law that says they “shall” provide tax returns to Congress because they are only making the request as a “pretext” which is not a valid legal standard. [This would be the exact opposite of the Muslim Ban ruling by the SCOTUS which didn’t allow for the motives and “pretext” beyond the pages of the ban to be taken into account.]
June 15th —
June 16th —
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Trump accuses the NYTimes of committing a “virtual act of Treason” because they report that the US Cyber Command has stepped up cyber attacks against the Russian power grid as a warning shot against future election meddling, but the real news at that this attack was planned and implemented without Trump’s involvement because the Intel Community didn’t think Trump could be trusted with the information.
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More from the Stephanopoulos interview is revealed :When asked if a POTUS can obstruct justice Trump dodged and said he can “Run the Country.” He says that a lot of “great lawyers” say that under Article 2, he can’t obstruct justice. [Sounds like he’s using the Deshowitz interpretation that being able to pardon someone means he can shutdown any prosecution he might want. This theory has not been tested.] He also scolds Mick Mulvaney for coughing during his interview and tells him to get out. [Apparently he thinks people who cough or sneeze are “weak.”]
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Pompeo snaps at Fox News Chris Wallace for asking if accepting Foreign Dirt is “right or wrong?” “Chris, you asked me not to call any of your questions today ridiculous,” Pompeo responded. “You came really close right there… “I came on to talk about foreign policy and I think the third time you’ve asked me about a Washington piece of silliness, chased down the story that is inconsistent with what I’ve seen President Trump do every single day.” [Sillyness? Holy crap!]
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AOC says progressive Dems frustration with Pelosi on Impeachment “is quite real” [Yeah, you bet it is.] She also says “we’re going to fight to repeal the Hyde Amendment.”
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Former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance says that Trump’s Article 2 defense against obstruction is nonsense. “Even Bill Bar wont’ go that far.”
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Sisters Tadrint and Micah Washington have sued the Charlottesville alt-Right leaders for $10 Million due to injuries they received during the “Unite the Right” rally. Those listed in the suit include Anthony Fields, Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer, Identity Evropa, Vanguard America, The League of the South and Chris Cantwell.
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Pete Butigieg proclaims that if he's elected: “The Rule of Law” will catch up to Trump. [So that makes three advocates for prosecution after Beta and Kamala.]
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Trump tweets screams that voters will “Demand” he remain for a third term if he’s re-elected in 2020. [Never mind that pesky 22nd Amendment.] Then he fires his pollsters — the ones who generated and leaked those “non existent” internal polls that show him losing in 11 battleground states.
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Max Boot: It’s reality that’s pushing for impeachment.
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Laughter explodes on a CNN panel when former Senator Rick Santorum rolled his eyes in response to the issue of Russia offering dirt to politicians. “That is not how it would come,” Santorum asserted. “No foreign government could come to your campaign and say ‘I’m the Russian government –‘” he began before the entire panel exploded. [Yeah, they did exactly that with Don Jr, to offer him dirt on Hillary from Veselnitskaya, and again with Don Jr and Alexander Torshin, also Papadopouos, Mifsud and Timofeev, Roger Stone and Guccifer 2.0, Page and Dvorkovich, Flynn, Kushner and Kislyak, Kushner and Gorkov, Erik Prince and Dimitriev, Manafort, Gates, Van der Zwaan, Kiliminick and Deripaska, Sater, Cohen and Peskov and lastly Cohen and Vekselberg.] “Again, someone who said that — oh, I’m representing the –You get people saying all sorts of crazy things in the campaign that come at you. And the idea that someone who said they represent the Russians actually does — they may or may not.” [They were.]
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Jake Tapper says the Russians participated in “Voter Discouragement” against Dems [Yes, they did — This is mentioned in the Mueller report.] when this is brought up by Jennifer Granholm calling it voter “suppression.” [That’s how Republicans win.]
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On Am Joy guest Tiffany Cross from The Beat responds to Jonathan Capehart’s idea of Steve Cortez as SHuckabees replacement: “He’s a nut.”
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Schiff states that it’s “most disturbing” that Cyber Command and other elements of the military are afriad to tell Trump about their projects involving Russia.
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Sen. Tom Cotton defends Trump’s “Dirt” comments by pivoting to Clinton: “What people should not do is what Hillary Clinton and the Democrats did, which is hire a foreign spy to recruit Russian spies to fabricate lies about their political opponents” [Clinton and the DNC didn’t know anything about it, Glenn Simpson solicited them — not the reverse. Steele was retired, some of his soures were inside the Trump campaign as well as officials — not spies — in the Russian government, and he was at least 73% accurate.]
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Netanyahu creates a fake town to name after Trump.
June 17th —
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Dems shift witness strategy to call people who never worked in the White House like Corey Lewandowski and Chris Christie.
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RedState pushes an article that claims the Mueller “tweaked” his report to cover up the conspiradcy theory that former DNC employee Seth Rich performed the hacks not Russia. “Calling this a Russian hack rather than an inside job fits their narrative. This is not over.”[Which doesn’t explain the DCCC hack which happened earlier, the Podesta hack or the attacks on at least 37 State election systems. Roger Stones lawyers have made the same bullshit “inside job” argument in their fillings.]
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Trump whines that he’s treated “worse than Lincoln” [Lincoln was assasinated following a Civil War that started in opposition to him winning the electoral college] Then he misquotes AOC on twitter on the subject of Impeachment and she slams him right back. He claims she said Democrats will lose the 2020 election to Trump if they try to Impeach, but she actually said they would lose “if we don't have a presidential candidate that's fighting for true transformational change in lives of working people in the United States" and she’s previously said “Opening an impeachment inquiry is exactly what we must do when the President obstructs justice, advises witnesses to ignore legal subpoenas, & more” so having a good candidate isn’t mutually exclusive to Impeachment.
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Protests featuring children in cages appear in Geneva speaking out against Trump’s border refugee policies. “The action today is about creating more pressure and more exposure of just how terrible and dehumanising this policy of the American government is towards children,” said Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, which helped organise the protest. “What the Trump administration is doing is both lawless and immoral, and because it is so focused on children, it is unconscionable,”
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Brian Isaack Clyde, a 22 year-old army vet, right-wing White Supremacists and apparent would be mass shooter is killed by Dallas police outside a Federal Court Building.
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SCOTUS upholds double-jeapordy exception that allows States to prosecute crimes that are similar to Federal crimes based on the same incident. [This makes a pardon for Stone, Manafort or Flynn now ineffective.]
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Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Don Breyer (D-VA) call for Kushner to be investigated for Hatch Act violations because of reports that he has been involved in fundraising for Trump while working in the White House.
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Trump demands that the NYTimes release the names of their sources on the story that Cyber Command has planted internet bombs inside Russia’s electrical grid — because he apparently doesn't know how to pick up a phone and talk to the DoD.
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Mitch McConnell says he doesn’t get why Jon Stewart is “bent out of shape” over healthcare funding for 9/11 responders. Then Schumer explains to him on twitter that it’s because 22 of them recently died due to lack of funding that his turtle ass is holding up.
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RedState takes down the Seth Rich conspiracy post. Then they remove another Mueller-conspiracy post by the same author, Elizabeth Vaughn, which also claimed that his report was a cover-up for the “inside job” theory involving Rich and a flashdrive.
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Pentagon releases pictures with allegedly “prove” Iran is responsible for the tanker attacks, but they don't because how exactly did these mines get attached several feet above the water line? Did they jump or fly?
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GoFundMe Border Wall members reach out to the Oath Keepers and right-wing militias.
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Harvard recinds admission to a Parkland survivor Kyle Kashuv who supports Gun rights for repeatedly using the N-Word online two years ago when he was younger and the right wing loses it’s mind arguing this is “political retribution.” [Harvard has done the exact same thing several times previously because they have a morals clause, but apparently righties think that it’s horrible he’s losing his chance to go to Harvard but they didn’t much care when 14 of their classmates lost all their chances at living. Also Laura Ingraham celebrated when David Hogg was initially rejected from Harvard with a 4.1 GPA, although he was later accepted]
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Court documents show that Alex Jones sent child pornography to the attorneys for the Sandy Hook parents who had sued him for defamation. The images had been contained in the metadata of emails sent to Jones which had been turned over to the lawyers as part of discovery. They had turned the emails and images over the FBI and that cause Jones to blow up on air claiming the images were “planted” and to issue death threats against the firm.
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Showing that he is indeed a Right-wing troll Kavanaugh inserts the Dennis Prager coined Ayn Randing phrase “the bigger the government, the smaller the individual” into a majority conservative opinion on the first amendment and a public broadcasting company. Yes, really really small ineffective governments are working out just swell for Somolia, El Salvador and Guatemala.
June 18th —
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Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen steps in to save Manafort from going to Rikers Island by keeping him in Federal lockup instead, even though he’s now facing State charges.
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Trump attacks Fox News for posting a poll that has him falling behind Biden by 10 points. THen he claims that the crowd for the Florida kick-off of his 2020 is the biggest you can get unless you play guitar. [Who is he comparing himself to Travis Tritt?] And he claims that ICE will be deporting "Millions” of undocumented migrants starting next week, although ICE says they don't know anything about that and critics say it’s a “crime against humanity.” [Because it is.]
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Pentagon sends 1000 Troops to the middle-east in response to the Oil tanker attack in the gulf of Oman.
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One of the polling companies that Trump just fired for leaks was started by Kellyanne Conway.
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Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) who is from an Orange County swing district comes out in support of an Impeachment Inquiry with a “Heavy Heart”.
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Jon Stewart hits back at McTurtle’s confusion over his 9/11 comments. “Listen senator, I know that your species isn’t known for moving quickly,” Stewart began. “You love the 9/11 community when they serve your political purposes,” Stewart continued. “But when they’re in urgent need, you slow-walk, you dither, you used it as a political pawn to get other things you want, and you don’t get the job done completely,”
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The Mercers have bailed on funding Trump due to all the scrutiny. [They fracking own Breitbart and they don't like getting too much press?]
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FBI’s background check on SecDef nominee Shanahan dredges up a violent domestic dispute with his now ex-wife which apparently involved his son beating her with a baseball bat.Then he pulls himself out of the nomination. [Gee, if only someone had thought to investigate Trump or anything, amiright?] Shep Smith is “stunned” we still don’t have an actual Defense Secretary after nearly a year since Mattis quit.
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A Florida GOP Rep. posts about running over Trump protestors as his colleges scoff. [Here we go again.]
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CNN’s Jim Acosta says fTucker Carlson and Sean Hannity get their scripts from the WH. [I’m not sure it’s vice versa sometimes, the situation may be fluid.]
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Pompeo says he doesn’t want War with Iran although Trump just said that he would.
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Schumer calls out Mitch McTurtle for blocking Election Security Legislation.
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The wingnuts start to lose their shit because AOC says we have “concentration camps” on our southern Border. [Actually those are private prison located all over the country, on the border we have the Dog Pound and the Freezer for temporary holding.] Border Patrol Agent Art Del Cuerto slams AOC by saying that the Kids get to “Play outside their cells.” [Facepalm!] AOC does make a crucial distinction that she's not saying these are “Death Camps." [No, that happens out in the open in the desert when people try to get around the existing barriers on foot.]
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Rep. Liz Cheney goes after AOC suggesting her “concentration camp" claim was Anti-Semitic and “disrespectful” to the Holocaust. AOC responds with “Hey Rep. Cheney, since you’re so eager to “educate me,” I’m curious: What do YOU call building mass camps of people being detained without a trial? How would you dress up DHS’s mass separation of thousands children at the border from their parents?” [Uh Yeah,]
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Fox News argues that Kyle Kushuv was bounced by Harvard for “espousing conservatism.” [He did that by using the N-Word 11 times? Whose version of “conservatism” is that exactly?]
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Former GOP Rep. David Jolly says that Kushuv’s racist and anti-semitic online posts are “exactly like what we see with mass shooters.”
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Ben Shapiro claims “not using the N-word is nearly impossible.” [What the fuck?!]
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Tomi Lahren has a melt down over Netflix’s “Knock Down the House” documentary about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tliab and several other Democratic women running for Congress in 2018. “What the hell is going on?” [Democracy is going on.]
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A Connecticut Judge sanctions Alex Jones for his threatening on-air rant against the Sandy Hook attorneys after they reported his emails contained kiddie porn to the FBI.
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Steve Cortez rails that AOC should resign over her Concentration Camp statements, but Angela Rye blast him for it.
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Mitch McTurtle says he doesn't support Reparations because “we elected an African-American President.” [Oh, so One President is the same as 400 years of racial terrorism?]
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Trump fans waiting in line for hours for his initial campaign kickoff in Orlando are told to seek shelter because they’re in the path of an impending storm; “Where?” [How about under Trump’s hair helmet, there’s plenty of space under there.]
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Trump spends the rally trotting out all his golden oldies of grievance against Hillary Clinton sprinkled with lies about millions of immigrants who will soon be deported and that “400 miles of wall will be built soon.” He also says that “America will never be socialist”, then he says he’ll defend Medicare and Social Security. [So Medicare is great, but not great enough for everyone to have it?]
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Longtime Anti-Islamicist Katherine Gorka, wife of proto-Nazi Sebastian Gorka, who had been involved in cancelling a $400,000 DHS grant to an anti-White Supremacy group is tapped as the CBP Press Secretary.
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Chairmen of the House Judiciary, Oversight and Homeland Security Committees — Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Bennie Thompson (D-MS) respectively — question if Trump’s pick for acting head of USCIS, former Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli, was selected illegally in violation of the Federal Violations Reform Act because he hasn’t been Senate confirmed and also hasn’t worked within the Administration for at least 90 days.
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Trump claims that there are “both sides” in the Central Park 5 — now known as the Exonerated 5 — case arguing that former NY Sex Crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein still desputes the $41 Million settlement they received for being wrongly prosecuted. [Fairstein has recently lost her book deal because of the new Netflix miniseries on the Exonerated 5 by Ava Duvernay “When They See Us” which documents their case and the fact that all the physical evidence including footprints, drag marks and DNA, including blood on the victims shirt, all pointed to another single suspect.]
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Judge Barbara Bellis has sanctioned Alex Jones for rant last Friday accusing the Sandy Hood families attorney of being child molestors when their lawyers revealed that some of his emails which he shared as part of discovery had child porn in the metadata, during the video he screamed “You fucking child molesters! I’ll fucking get you in the end!” and pounding his fist on a photo of the lawyer. The judge said Jones’ actions during the taping were “indefensible,” “unconscionable,” and even “possibly criminal,” CNN reported.
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Russian-Ukrainian oligarch Pavel Fuks, a real estate developer who had been part of one of the previous Moscow Tower projects files a lawsuit that he was scammed for $200,000 tickets to Trump’s inaugural by lobbyist Yuri Vanetik which never materialized. No car from Dana Rohrabacher’s office arrived to pick them up, they had to try and walk to the inauguration in the rain, ending up watching it on TV in their hotel.
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Brad Pascale says Trump will win 2020 in an “Electoral Landslide” despite polls which show him trailing just about every Democratic opponent.
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Federal Judge George Hazel is scheduled to rule today on how to handle the new evidence that the citizenship question was added to the census for discriminatory reasons.
June 19th —
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NBC News reports that the WH had already known about Shanahan’s domestic family violence issues for months, even before he was nominated for Defense Secretary. Trump claimed ignorance of the issue just yesterday on his way to his Florida rally.
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Dems rain down questions on Hope Hicks behind closed doors about obstrution but — on advice from a WH attorney — she refuses to answer any questions about her time in the Administration, including where her office was located, claiming “absolute immunity” which is a theory that failed before the SCOTUS in 1974 when Nixon tried to use it to block the release of the smoking gun tapes. Even though she did Trump a solid here, she reportedly hasn’t been returning his calls.
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Nadler vows to “Destroy” the WH “absolute immunity” claims in court.
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Dems call Hicks obstruction and absolute immunity claims “ridiculous” because most of questions that asked involved events that are public knowledge and were covered in the Mueller report, where she is mentioned 184 times.
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Trump flips out about the closed door Hicks hearings which he calls “Rigged.”
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SHuckabee considers running for AK Governor.
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Trump’s attorneys shift from the “no legitimate legislative purpose” argument to tell the appeals court that Congress has “no power to inform the public about the activities of the President.”
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The Daily Beast reports that fTucker Carlson has been advising Trump not to go to war with Iran.
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Meghan McCain explodes on The View again whining that she’s a “Sacraficial Republicans” and then slurs Joy Behar who was just asking her “what are the things that Trump and his supporters both hate together? — She instead responded “Being the sacrificial Republican every day,” she said. “I’m just trying to — don’t feel bad for me, bitch. I’m paid to do this, okay? Don’t feel bad for me.” [I get that the audience is against her everyday and that's stressful, she’s not a Trump fan at all, but she seems to have been badly infected by Fox News delusion -itis.]
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Ta-nehisi Coates receives a standing ovation after he explains the long history of American racism for Mitch McTurtle’s edification during Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s hearing on reparations.
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Economist Juliane Malvauex explains during the Reparations Hearing that Black America were closing the wealth gap on their own until White Americans rioted and burned their businesses and property by explaining the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK and how such events used to be done by Democrats, they are now done by Republicans.
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Soledad O’Brien rips the media — which isn’t new, she’s constantly doing that — when USA Today calls Trump’s reaction to the Exonerated 5 a “controversial stance” rather than what it really is, a blatant fucking Lie.
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The US suicide rate has soared in 2017 to over 47,000 Americans, and a large portion of them are middle-aged rural Whites without a college degree right in the middle of Trump’s base who have a rate twice that of urban whites, including men who have three and a half times the rate of women suicides. [This may be part of the answer to what Meghan McCain was trying to explain, these people see Trump as the solution to the massive depression and stress they're under due to widening prosperity gap since he finds so many handy scapegates — immigrants, Democrats — to blame. Except that his policies and tax cuts are actually making the wage and prosperity gap even worse for them and everyone else.]
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Judge Hazel decides he wants another crack at the Census case because of the revelations that it was part of a voter discrimination plot.
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NYTimes reports that the FBI is conducting a criminal probe into Deutsche Bank Money Laundering.
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GOPers are furious at AOC for for calling the border detention centers “Concentration Camps” even though historians say that she’s absolutely correct.
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Fox’s Howard Kurtz is infuriated that the other cable networks CNN and MSNBC didn’t carry Trump initial 2020 campaign rally live from start to finish. [Aww, too bad.]
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Fox’s Greg Gutfield goes on an insane anti-LGBT rant: Activist are trying to make kids transgender by "eliminating gays.” [Er, what?]
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Reports surface that Congress will be interviewing Felix Sater soon, but they refuse to confirm it, yet.
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Most Republicans admit to being “exhausted and embarrassed” by Trump’s non-stop nonsense comments — but not enough to stop supporting him.