This week Judiciary committee Chairman Jerold Nadler openly and verbally admits that his is in the midst of official impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump.
He said the Judiciary Committee will decide likely by the end of the year whether to recommend bringing articles of impeachment to the House floor.
“This is formal impeachment proceedings,” Nadler told CNN’s Erin Burnett Thursday evening. “We are investigating all the evidence, gathering the evidence. And we will [at the] conclusion of this — hopefully by the end of the year — vote to vote articles of impeachment to the House floor. Or we won’t. That’s a decision that we’ll have to make. But that’s exactly the process we’re in right now.”
[...]
“The fact is, we are doing an investigation. We are investigating the facts, investigating the evidence,” Nadler said. “We are going into court to get witnesses all with a view toward deciding and recommending to the House whether to impeach the President.”
Which is a relief, but not really news since this had already been stated by the committee in their lawsuit to gain access to the Mueller grand jury information back on July 27th. On the 28th Adam Schiff said Congress is in the “preliminary stages” of impeachment while the number of House Dems supporting an Impeachment inquiry has now reached 122.
There is still the problem of the WH subpeona and question stonewall, but the House has also finally submitted a lawsuit to compell Don McGahn to abide by the subpoena that was issued for his testimony. Winning that lawsuit is key to breaking the logjam for testimony from any former White House employee or even Corey Lewandowski who WH lawyers would chaperone question by question just as they did with Hope Hicks and blocked over 150 questions from being answered. Along with the contempt filings against AG Barr and Wilbur Ross, these are all significant steps but all depend on what happens in court and we won’t have much movement on any of these issues until this goes through the appeals court and reaches the SCOTUS.
However, both Congress and New York AG Letitia James have both already received piles of documents on Trump and Russia financial deals from Deutche Bank and Capitol One — even though that lawsuit and subpoena is still pending.
Also, Racism.
While this has been going with contempt charges and subponea lawsuits — both Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and FBI Agent Peter Strzok have both sued the DOJ and FBI for wrongful termination based on their criticisms of Donald Trump. In his suit McCabe actually used Trump’s own tweets to prove that his termination was done to retaliate against his admitting he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016.
“Trump’s decision was motivated by his unconstitutional desire to punish Plaintiff for his refusal to pledge partisan allegiance to Trump, for Trump’s misperception of Plaintiff’s partisan affiliation, and for Plaintiff’s lawful exercise of his First Amendment-protected rights of expression and association,” McCabe alleged.
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According to the lawsuit, Trump ramped up his calls for McCabe to be fired after McCabe, upon questioning by Trump, admitted to not voting for Trump in the 2016 election. The lawsuit alleged that FBI Director Chris Wray was instructed to fire McCabe as soon as Wray was sworn in.
“On or about this date, Sessions, acting at Trump’s urging, asked Defendant Wray to fire Plaintiff,” the lawsuit said. “Wray refused on the basis that he would not allow personnel decisions at the FBI to be politicized. Wray suggested that he would resign if Sessions continued to apply such pressure.”
When Sessions eventually removed McCabe, who at that point was already on pre-retirement leave from the FBI, the attorney general pointed to an inspector general report that found that McCabe had lacked candor in the inspector general’s review of a Wall Street Journal story that McCabe helped facilitate.
McCabe’s lawsuit alleged that the disciplinary proceeding that followed that report was inappropriately rushed in response to Trump’s claim that McCabe was trying to “rac[e] the clock” until his retirement benefits kicked in.
McCabe was fired by Sessions just two days before he would have become vested for his maximum retirement level, while he was riding out the last of his available vacation time and had already left his job — so we’re talking about a totally vindictive action here.
In Peter Strzok’s lawsuit he argues Trump applied pressure that overrode the disciplinary deal that he already taken and that the Inspector General violated his privacy by leaking his personal texts before his report was completed and still to this day hasn’t issued a report on the leakers who were providing inside anti-Clinton information to Rudy Giuliani through former NYC FBI Supervisory Agent James Kallstrom.
Strzok alleges that the decision to fire him — which came after an agreement he made with the FBI’s disciplinary office that would have allowed him to stay at the bureau — violated his due process rights and his right to political speech.
Under the deal he had accepted from the Office of Professional Responsibility, he would be demoted and put on a 60-day suspension, in exchange for him agreeing not to appeal the move, according to the lawsuit.
A day after the disciplinary office’s decision — and allegedly under the pressure of President Trump and his allies —Deputy Director David Bowdich overruled the deal and terminated Strzok, according to the lawsuit. Strzok was also not able to appeal Bowdich’s decision, which is normally allowed under FBI protocol for disciplinary moves, the lawsuit said.
“But for the intervention of the President and his political allies and their insistence on punishing Special Agent Strzok for the content of his protected speech, the FBI would have imposed the lesser discipline decided upon by Assistant Director [Candice] Will [of the Office of Professional Responsibility], and Strzok would not have been discharged,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants discharged Strzok because of his protected speech in violation of the First Amendment.”
The lawsuit also alleged that the Justice Department violated the Privacy Act by leaking Strzok’s anti-Trump texts to the media.
The Trump claim has always been that McCabe and Strzok were part of a “deep state” pack of partisan haters who were out to “get him” — however the leak that McCabe was fired for supposedly lying about was an argument he’d had with a member of the DOJ who had wanted the FBI to drop the investigation into the Clinton Foundation, but McCabe had refused and continued to investigate anyway. The inspector General had argued that McCabe was “less than candid” when he was later asked about his involvement in this leak when he said he had nothing to do with it — however he himself voluntarily came forward to correct this statement saying that he'd simply forgotten about ordering Lisa Page to share his conversation with Devlin Barret of the Wall Street Journal.
McCabe’s attorney has previously stated rather than deliberately trying to hide his authorization of the leak, McCabe had sent an email to james Comey admitting that he was the source for that leak which was intended to correct the false narrative that was being generated by leakers linked to Kallstrom and Giuliani.
But Michael Bromwich, McCabe’s attorney, told The Washington Postthat claims of email evidence “clearly show that Mr. McCabe advised Director Comey that he was working with colleagues at the FBI to correct inaccuracies before the stories were published, and that they remained in contact through the weekend while the interactions with the reporter continued.”
Similarly, even though the Inspector General had essentially cleared by Peter Strzok and Lisa Page of doing anything in their official capacity to defend Hillary Clinton in that investigation he was still fired. The IG report actually says that Strzok and Page were two of the most aggressive members of the Clinton investigation specifically requesting for more subpoena and interviews than other members, while Strzok was also on record as stating his opinion of the Trump/Russia investigation that there was “no big there there.”
An FBI agent who served on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, and who has been accused by Republicans of anti-Trump bias, said in a text message prior to joining the investigation into President Donald Trump and Russia that “my gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there.”
All of Trump’s accusations of bias against McCabe and Strzok simply don’t make sense. They may not have liked him personally or voted for him, but that doesn't mean that they personally tilted any investigations either for or against him during the election or after. If they had, it would have been a violation of the Hatch Act, and there have never been any substantiated allegations of that by anyone, including from the inspector General. Also the fact that nearly two years after they started their original leak investigation the IG has still said literally nothing about the orginal leaks — the ones which were given to Giuliani — which is highly strange, while there have been IG reports on both McCabe and Strzok and the IG recommended that McCabe be prosecuted for “lying.”
We do know that the FBI talked to Giuliani about the leaks, but it wasn’t a very extensive interview.
WASHINGTON ― Rudy Giuliani says FBI agents interviewed him in his room at the Trump International Hotel earlier this year regarding his 2016 remarks predicting a “surprise” in the closing days of the presidential race that would benefit then-Republican nominee Donald Trump.
“That’s all they asked about. What was I talking about in terms of ‘surprise’?” Giuliani told HuffPost Tuesday. “What was I talking about when I was talking about new information?”
Giuliani told HuffPost that he spoke with Kallstrom as well as one other former FBI official he would not identify.
But Giuliani said he told the FBI agents who interviewed him that he had neither inside knowledge of the Clinton probe’s status nor advance warning of Comey’s Oct. 28 announcement. He was merely speculating that FBI agents were so upset by Comey’s earlier decision not to charge the Democratic nominee with any crimes that they would “revolt,” either by leaking damaging information about her or by resigning en masse.
“Did I get any leaks from the FBI? I said no,” Giuliani said, adding that the “surprise” that he promised in 2016 was a 20-minute national television ad he was urging Trump to buy to deliver a speech “hitting very hard on the Comey decision.”
“They said they were satisfied,” Giuliani said of the two agents who interviewed him. “If they want to interview me all over again? They can interview me all over again. ... Maybe they’ll come raid my office like Michael Cohen.”
Still, Just where the hell are Jim kallstrom’s text and email messages? Why has the IG given him and his NYC cohorts a pass but come down on McCabe and Strzok like a ton fo bricks?
It’s not exactly reassuring.
Here are the detailed events for this week in the Trump/Russia Timeline.
August 3rd —
August 4th —
August 5th —
August 6th —
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Obama releases a statement criticizing “leaders who promote hate.” [For some reason, Turmp takes that personally and whines about it then he promotes a conspiracy theory from Fox and Fools about a Google employee who claims he was singled out for his “conservative views” but really, he’s yet another fracking White Supremacist asshole.]
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Mika unloads on Trump’s racism. “He just seems to want these things to happen.” [That’s because he does.]
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Trump will visit El Paso on Wednesday [tomorrow]— Beto says that one person asked him “Why is he coming here since he hates us?’ He also still owes the city $500,000 for a previous rally he held there. And a secret memo indicates Trump has been carrying out long-time GOP strategies since Day One.
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Paul Krugman: it’s not just Trump, the entire GOP is enabling White Supremacy. [Uh yep.]
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Frank Figliuzzi points out that Trump “fooled everyone” into thinking he condemned White Supremacy — he didn’t. [Uh, nope.]
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AOC says that “Trump's rhetoric is responsible for the El Paso attack.” [The shooter’s manifesto claims he already felt a hatred for immigrants before Trump, but it's arguable that he didn’t shoot anybody back then.]
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Brian Kilmeade insist that calling southern immigration an “invasion” isn’t anti-hispanic racism. [And the N-word doesn't mean anything either. How about calling it an “infestation?”]
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Toni Morrison dies at 88.
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Ohio Governor Mike Dewine pushes for Background checks and Red Flag laws.
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Biden argues for a return of the assault weapons ban and a buy-back program. Sen. Pat Toomey opposes this because “assault rifles are really popular.”
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TX police apologize for leading an arrested black suspect down the street tied to a horse by a rope.
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Appeals court revives Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against the NYTimes.
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House Dems request WH Kavanaugh docs from 2002-2006 that were withheld during his confirmation.
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The Dayton shooter had been a Bernie and Warren fan, so Kellyanne Conway his hopping mad that they aren’t calling out Warren’s rhetoric “hateful” for inciting violence. [Uh, because it’s seriously not, and didn’t?]
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Hogan Gidley says that Obama’s condemnation of racism “took us to a dark place.” [I think we were already there, pal.]
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Trump's ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman finally quits.
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Trump plans to visit Dayton and El Paso even though he hasn’t paid the city back for the $500k he owes them for his last hate rally there, he doesn’t make any plans to visit the other White Supremacist mass murder in Gilroy, CA, instead his personal attorneys sue California over their new law to require he reveal his tax returns to be on the ballot in 2020.
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NYAG targets the NRA board of directors.
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Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown won’t meet with Trump in Dayton.
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Former FBI Agent Peter Strzok sues the FBI for wrongful terminatiom because he criticized Trump and violation of his privacy for releasing his text messages. [Since the IG found that he didn't violate the Hatch Act, he might have a point, and exactly what were the texts messages leaked from the IG when the IG was supposed to be investigating leaks?]
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DOJ sides with Trump (Shocker) over the attempt by Reps. Cummings and Neal to subponea his financial information.
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Pence says “spend more time on your knees than on the internet.” [I’m pretty sure he doesn't get how that sounds.]
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Homeland Security Committee wants to have the owner of 8Chan testify about extremists using the site.
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Outrage flairs from the Left over the NYTimes headline that suggests that Trump pitted “Unity vs Racism” in his El Paso statement. [He seriously didn’t.] Thousands of NYT subscriptions are cancelled, and an alternate version of the headline is used later in the day.
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Outrage flairs from the Right — and Maggie Haberman of the NYT — over Joaquin Castro publishing a list of San Antonio corporations that donated to Trump. [Yeah, this is like public information about public companies, so — what is the problem?]
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An Israeli probe crashes dumps a bunch of tardigrades onto the surface of the moon. [Now we know how the Spore Drive works!’]
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Don Jr. responds to the House request for Kavanaugh WH Docs by saying this “makes Dems the party of Antifa” [Uh, what the fuck — how's that skip logic work? Is he saying that Kavanaugh is a Fascist because he helped cover up Bush’s torture or what exactly?]
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fTucker Carlson claims that “White Supremacy is a Hoax, just like the Russia Hoax.” [*Spittake* ????!!!!!]
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WaPo Op-Ed: Hispanics are under attack in America.
August 7th —
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Mulvaney admits to the ulterior motive to ship the USDA Scientist group out of DC. [Climate Change?]
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Senate GOP considers gun control legislation, but doesn't consider cutting their August vacation short.
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Mika slow cooks Ivanka over a spit for tossing off a flippant exaggerated inaccurate tweet about “shootings in Chicago” because then her Dad refused to take a call from the Mayor of Chicago to correct the claim.
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Biden speech: “Trump has aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation.” [Yep.]
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Trump mocks Beto’s “phony nickname” before heading to El Paso and tells him to “Be Quiet.” [Stay Classy, shithead.] Trump liked the original NYT headline about his El Paso response, [even though it was a lie.] Then he proves that his call for “Unity” was a lie by attacking Warren and Sanders over the Toledo Dayton shooter. [Exactly when did they have a “Shoot Your Sister!” chant at their rallies?] He claims that his rhetoric “brings people together.” [Yes, mass murdering White Supremacist people.] and then he rants about Illegal Immigrants after a reporter challenges him on the fact his “Invasion” terminology was the same as the El Paso Terrorists [not to mention his 2,000 facebook ads that mention “invasion” and all his “Invasion tweets” that he didn’t delete] and he says that visiting El Paso is a great chance to congratulate “some police *and* law enforcement.” [What kind of law enforcement isn’t police?]
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George Will says Trump’s incitement of violence shows he’s “Weak and a National Embarrasment.” [Uh huh.]
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An Interacial Ohio Couple's home in Northeast Ohio is blown up and covered in Swastikas. [Nope, no “White Supremacy” anywhere to be found.]
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Don Jr. compares Joaquin Castro's list of Trump donors to the Dayton shooter’s “Kill list.” [You are expecting what — Antifa to go after these companies with a stick and some salty language?]
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Trump visits first responders and victims at the Hospital in Dayton. Protestors scream “Do Something" at him.
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Huffpo reports that Trump's “Invasion” rhetoric comes from long-standing NRA propaganda and also Trump has been deliberately weakening existing gun laws.
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Reversing an Obama-enacted regulation requiring Americans designated in Social Security rolls as mentally unable to manage their own affairs be registered in the national background check database.
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Narrowing the federal definition of "fugitive" in such a fashion as to keep Americans who fled from active warrants elsewhere in their states off the background check lists and able to purchase firearms.
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Reversing firearms bans on federal lands, expanding hunting areas but frustrating already-taxed park officials. (Also in the works: lifting weapons bans on Army Corps of Engineers land.)
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Enabling efforts to boost gun exports by cutting State Department officials out of the loop—part of Trump's wider interest in expanding U.S. weapons sales abroad.
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Joining a Supreme Court fight to overturn New York City restrictions on transporting handguns.
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China ends purchases for all US Agricultural products. [If this is supposed to be a big bold game of “chicken” — he doesn't seem to be winning it.]
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WaPo’s Margeret Sullivan blasts fTucker: “Carlson’s nightly show does a great deal to portray nonwhites as the dangerous ‘other,’ a force to be beaten back to save America,” she argues. “His denials and rhetoric must be called out for the lies that they are.”
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Joe Biden gives a blistering speech blasting Trump for “fanning the flames of White Supremacy” and Trump tweets that Biden was “boring” and that he “got better ratings” with his Dayton visit. Trump heads to El Paso as protestors state: "No one wants him here.”
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Twitter locks out the McConnell campaign for posting a video of a protestor cursing him out.
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House sues to enforce the McGahn subpeona to testify.
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Sens Johnson and Barr: FBI hasn’t said how they plan to combat Domestic Terrorism. [Give them a Domestic Terrorism statute.]
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Trump attacks Dayton Mayor and Sen. Sherrod Brown (who did meet him at the hospital) for being “nasty” to him in a press conference after the visti even though they didn't say anything negative, he considers commuting the sentence for former Gov Rod Blagojevich. [Because auctioning off a Senate seat sounds like good business to him?], he visits the Hospital in El Paso — but none of the recovering shooting survivors agree to meet him, so they do a photo op with the staff while bragging about his rally in February being bigger than Beto’s [although it wasn't] while the one baby who lost both her parents is brought back to the Hospital so Melania can hold it while he does a thumbs up and goofy grin like he’s taking a fan photo then and as soon as he says he open to more gun background checks [after he threatened to Veto the House bill, and removed the restriction for mentally ill persons] the NRA slaps him back down again.
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ICE carries out it’s largest raid in a decade in Mississippi arresting 680 migrants who work for Koch Food’s chicken plant on the first day of school leaving their children on the lurch when they return to empty houses. Supposedly this is part of a criminal investigation of Koch for generating false or invalid visas, but nobody in Koch management is arrested.
August 8th —
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CNN reports that the WH repeatedly refused to take suggestions from DHS to make White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism a higher priority.
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fTucker Carlson takes a vacation.
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WSj reports that Bank of America, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo have handed over hunderds of Trump’s financial docs and emails to NYAG Letitia james and the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees.
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Trump goes after “Juaquin” Casto for his sharing public donor information.
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Top Latin America diplomat Kimberly Breier angrily resigns after a ugly email scolding by with Stephen Miller.for not defending the (illegal) third country asylum deal with Guatemala stronly enough.
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Dayton Mayor still doesn't know why Trump attacked her.
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Maggie Haberman reports that Trump’s WH staff privately think his 2 city mass murder tour was “a debacle.” [Yep.]
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In an interview AG Bill Barr says he thinks “Justice done right” is Dirty Harry and Death Wish. [Holy Shit!! Those are both serial killing vigilante fantasies — besides "Enough” with Jennifer Lopez and “The Brave One” with Jody Foster are better and more honest.]
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State Dept suspends Foreign Affairs Officer Mathew Gebert for being a “deeply involvedin the the White Nationalist movement” [Could we try that with Drumpf?’] including admitting that he’d attended the “Unite the Right” rally on a podcast “I came back in one piece. Un-doxxed. Knock on wood,” [I think you’re doxxed now, pal.]
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Andrew McCabe sues the FBI and DOJ for wrongful termination — just one day before he qualified for full benefits — and retaliation using Trump’s own tweets as examples. He also questions the fact that the Inspector General recommended he be fired but the actual anti-Clinton leakers from the FBI New York Office who were supposed to be his targets haven't been touched yet, two years later. [It’s not like they don't know who those frackers are, they’re all linked to Rudy Giuliani and former NYC Supervisory Agent James Kallstrom.]
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Dan Coats DNI Deputy Sue Gordon suddenly resigns, and then Trump selects retired Admiral Joseph Maguire as the new DNI. [CNN analysts say this guy is a “yes, man” who will manipulate the Intel Community to Trump's whims, unlike Coats]
August 9th —
Augus 10th —