08.20.2020, 03:32 PM | #8581 |
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Steve Bannon has been arrested on fraud charges. Has a president ever surrounded himself with as many crooks as this one has?
Swamp well and truly being drained, right?
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08.20.2020, 03:33 PM | #8582 | |
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Good thing I haven't been holding my breath for a reply!
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08.20.2020, 06:50 PM | #8583 |
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The Steve Bannon story is absolutely hilarious. It’s just a bunch of idiots and jerks getting comeuppance all around. Loving this one.
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08.20.2020, 11:46 PM | #8584 |
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From the forthcoming book HOAX: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth by Brian Stelter, via Vanity Fair:
"Hannity Has Said to Me More Than Once, 'He's Crazy'": Fox News Staffers Feel Trapped in the Trump Cult Inside the network staffers are cringing, and even Trump's "shadow chief of staff" has his doubts. "If you were hearing what I'm hearing, you'd be vaping too," Sean Hannity told a colleague during Trump's early days.
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08.21.2020, 02:34 AM | #8585 | |||
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CRICKETS h8kurdt, I’m 100% sure this doesn’t represent what you and so many others are desperately hoping it represents! I’m sure you are beyond tired of sucking from your straws of emptiness......but there is nothing of substance here! No collusion in 2016 between Trump campaign and Russia: Senate Intelligence Committee report “The fifth and final volume of the panel’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election largely mirrored the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, which also failed to show a Trump-Russia conspiracy.” “As this report proves — yet again — there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign,” said campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh. “The report does remind Americans that there was, however, political reliance on foreign assistance in 2016, since Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC paid for the bogus Steele dossier assembled by a foreign operative using Russian disinformation.” First and foremost, do the free minded freethinkers understand that the Senate Intelligence Committee has no power or authority? The Committee led by Mark Rubio didn’t have the threat of bringing charges or arrest......Robert Mueller had the authority to indict! However, the Senate Intelligence Report CONCLUSIVELY confirms the Mueller report that there was NO collusion!!! But as I’ve been repeating since April 22, 2018......collusion isn’t illegal!!! Quote:
Let’s get something straight, in no way am I defending Paul Manafort. I’m sure he has dealings in his past that aren’t on the up and up......but just like those individuals who pled guilty to tax evasion or whatever during the Mueller investigation, NONE OF IT was linked to conspiracy with Russia! Regarding Mr. Kilimnik: “Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian businessman who once worked for Manafort, was identified in the Senate report as “a Russian intelligence officer.” “The senators said Manafort’s top-level campaign access and willingness to share information with Mr. Kilimnik represented “a grave counterintelligence threat,” the report said. (this is the peanut butter and jelly = the good stuff!) The committee said it was “unable to determine why” Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data and campaign strategy with Mr. Kilimnik or whether Mr. Kilimnik passed along that information.” June 6, 2019 (last summer = more good stuff : ) Key figure that Mueller report linked to Russia was a State Department intel source “In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence. But hundreds of pages of government documents - which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 - describe Kilimnik as a "sensitive" intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters. Why Mueller's team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller's Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.“ Guess what, Kilimnik was an Intelligence source for the Obama and Bush Administrations! Why would Mueller’s team OMIT that part of the Kilimnik narrative.....? Remember my July 31, 2020 recap: Quote:
......everyone have a great weekend! |
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08.21.2020, 03:21 AM | #8586 |
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No collusion!!!
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08.21.2020, 06:13 AM | #8587 |
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lololololololololol
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08.23.2020, 02:51 AM | #8588 |
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Trump's sister in secret audio recordings:
"You can not trust him!" (That's a Washington Post article which I can't read, because it requires a subscription. I just read an article in a Dutch newspaper that's quoting that Wash Post article) Here's a CNN article about it: Trump's sister bitterly criticizes him in conversations secretly recorded by her niece Mary Trump
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08.23.2020, 03:38 AM | #8589 | |
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I don’t pay for access to anything, but the story opened when I clicked the link so I thought I would be neighborly and play well with others: “August 22, 2020 at 8:51 p.m. CDT Maryanne Trump Barry was serving as a federal judge when she heard her brother, President Trump, suggest on Fox News, “maybe I’ll have to put her at the border” amid a wave of refugees entering the United States. At the time, children were being separated from their parents and put in cramped quarters while court hearings dragged on. Support our journalism. Subscribe today. “All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.” Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president. “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.” Lamenting “what they’re doing with kids at the border,” she guessed her brother “hasn’t read my immigration opinions” in court cases. In one case, she berated a judge for failing to treat an asylum applicant respectfully. “What has he read?” Mary Trump asked her aunt. “No. He doesn’t read,” Barry responded. In the weeks since Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her uncle has been released, she’s been questioned about the source of some of the information, such as her allegation that Trump paid a friend to take his SATs to enable him to transfer into the University of Pennsylvania. Nowhere in the book does she say that she recorded conversations with her aunt. In response to a question from The Washington Post about how she knew the president paid someone to take the SATs, Mary Trump revealed that she had surreptitiously taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry in 2018 and 2019. She provided The Post with previously unreleased transcripts and audio excerpts, which include exchanges that are not in her book. Barry has never spoken publicly about disagreements with the president, and her extraordinarily candid comments in the recordings mark the most critical comments known to have been made about him by one of his siblings. No one else in the family except Mary Trump has publicly rebuked the president. The transcripts reveal the depths of discord between the president and his sister, illuminating a rift that began when she asked her brother for a favor in the 1980s, which Trump has frequently used to try to take credit for her success. At one point Barry said to her niece, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.” Mary Trump, 55, told The Post recently that her uncle is unfit to be president and she plans to do “everything in my power” to elect Joe Biden. Her father, Fred Trump Jr., died of an alcohol-related illness when she was 16 in 1981. In her book, she says Donald Trump and his father mistreated her father. The Post sought comment about the tapes from Barry and White House officials on Friday and Saturday and did not receive a response. After this story posted online Saturday night, the White House issued this statement from the president that said in full: “Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people. Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!” 'He was a brat' The allegation that the president paid someone to take his SATs, which was one of the most publicized allegations in Mary Trump’s book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man,” stems from a conversation that Barry had with her niece on Nov. 1, 2018. Barry told how she tried to help her brother get into college. “He was a brat,” Barry said, explaining that “I did his homework for him” and “I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college.” Then Barry dropped what Mary considered a bombshell: “He went to Fordham for one year [actually two years] and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.” “No way!” Mary responded. “He had somebody take his entrance exams?” “SATs or whatever. . . . That’s what I believe,” Barry said. “I even remember the name.” That person was Joe Shapiro, Barry said. Donald Trump was friends with a person at Penn named Joe Shapiro, who is deceased. Shapiro’s widow and sister told The Post last month that he never took a test for anybody, including Trump. Mary Trump has said it was a different Joe Shapiro, but that person has not surfaced. During a Post Live interview last month, Mary Trump was asked whether the source of her information was Barry. “I prefer not to say who it is,” she responded. “It’s somebody who would have absolutely no reason to make it up.” Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump, said that she began taping conversations in 2018 with Barry after concluding that her relatives had lied about the value of the family estate two decades earlier during a legal battle over her inheritance, in which she received far less than she expected. Under New York law, it is legal to tape a conversation with the consent of one party, which in this case was Mary Trump. The inheritance dispute was settled privately in 2001, but Mary Trump has said she was duped into an agreement because the family said the estate was worth $30 million and she later believed the value was closer to $1 billion. Bastardi said she recorded the conversations with Barry to gain information that would show she had been misled by the family about the estate’s value. “She hoped to prove this, as is often done, by recording words contrary to their sworn statements. She never expected to learn much of what she heard,” Bastardi said. He said that Mary believed the information was particularly relevant given the federal charges that have been brought this year against prominent individuals who took “unethical steps to get their children into college.” The president has said he got into what was then called the Wharton School of Finance at Penn — which he called one of “the hardest schools to get in to” — because he is a “super genius.” The Post reported last year, however, that Mary’s father, Fred Jr., was close friends with a Penn admissions official. That official, James Nolan, told The Post that Fred Jr. asked him to interview his brother for admission, which he did. He was granted a place at the school, which Nolan said was “not very difficult” because more than half of applicants at the time were accepted, compared with last year’s 7.4 percent rate. The Trump siblings have been publicly supportive of the president. The president’s other sister, Elizabeth, has stayed out of the public eye. The president’s younger brother, Robert, who died on Aug. 15, said in 2016 he supported his brother “one thousand percent.” In 1999, when family patriarch Fred Sr. died, Barry joined with Donald and Robert in a lawsuit to prevent Mary from getting a larger amount of the inheritance. Mary had said in a probate case that she and her brother should have received an amount closer to what would have gone to their father, if he had lived. On another matter apparently related to Fred Sr.’s will, Barry told her niece that she and Donald had a rift so serious that “he didn’t talk to me for two years.” Barry received her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College, a master’s from Columbia University and a law degree from Hofstra University. After being a homemaker for 13 years, and having eschewed the Trump family’s real estate business, she became one of only two women out of 62 lawyers in the office of the United States Attorney in New Jersey, where she worked from 1974 to 1983. Barry has avoided talking publicly about her brother’s presidency while she was on the federal bench. In a rare public appearance, she used empathetic language far removed from her brother’s tough rhetoric. “Success can be as simple as the warm feeling you get when you smile at a stranger, someone you know must be lonely, and having that stranger return your smile,” Barry said in a speech to graduates of Fairfield University in Connecticut in 2011. The president, meanwhile, has publicly spoken glowingly of his sister, saying in 2016 that, “We do have different views a little bit,” while adding, “She's a very, very highly respected judge.” |
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08.23.2020, 03:39 AM | #8590 |
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CONTINUED
‘I will level you' In one of the taped conversations, however, Barry revealed how a deep animosity developed between her and her brother. She recalled how she turned to him for help when she wanted to be nominated by then-President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. She believed that help could come from his attorney: Roy Cohn, who had played an infamous role in the 1950s as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Cohn was “like kissing buddies” with Reagan, she said. “He had Roy Cohn call Reagan about needing to appoint a woman as a federal judge in New Jersey,” Barry told Mary. “Because Reagan’s running for reelection, and he was desperate for the female vote.” Then, she said, “I had the nomination,” and Donald Trump never let Barry forget it. According to a recent documentary film, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” Cohn had been in regular touch with Reagan. Donald Trump met with Reagan at the White House on Aug. 4, 1983, according to presidential records. Reagan talked with Barry on Sept. 13, 1983, and nominated her the following day, according to Reagan’s daily diary. “He once tried to take credit for me,” Barry said of her brother, quoting him as saying, “Where would you be without me?” Barry said she told her brother: “You say that one more time and I will level you.” She told Mary that it was “the only favor I ever asked for in my whole life.” She said that she deserved the nomination “on my own merit” and that she was subsequently elevated to higher judicial posts without her brother’s intervention. “Donald is out for Donald, period,” Barry said. Mary questioned Barry about what he had accomplished on his own. “I don’t know,” Barry said. “Nothing,” Mary responded. “Well he has five bankruptcies,” Barry said. (Trump’s companies filed for six corporate bankruptcies but he has never declared personal bankruptcy.) “Good point. He did accomplish those all by his self,” Mary said. “Yes, he did. Yes, he did. You can’t trust him,” Barry said. Maryanne said on another occasion that her brother kept asking about Fox News. One day, Barry said, the president called her and said, “Did you watch Fox News?” “No,” Barry said she told the president. “Why not?” he said. “I don’t watch much television at all,” Barry said she responded. “What do you do?” the president asked. “I read,” Barry replied. “What do you read?” the president said. “Books,” Barry said. The president was incredulous. “You don’t watch Fox?” Around the same time the conversations were being conducted, an internal investigation was underway of whether Barry violated judicial conduct rules regarding her role in working with her siblings in determining their tax liability. The investigation stemmed in part from an action that Mary Trump had taken: She had provided boxes of family tax records to the New York Times, which published a Pulitzer Prize-winning report in 2018 that found the president had engaged in suspect tax schemes that increased the family wealth. Barry retired shortly after the investigation was launched, which ended the probe. One of the most emotional conversations between Mary and her aunt occurred when they discussed the 1999 funeral of the family patriarch, Fred Sr., at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City. During that ceremony, Donald spoke more about his own accomplishments than his father’s life, Barry said. “Donald was the only one who didn’t speak about Dad,” Barry said. She told Mary that “I don’t want any of my siblings to speak at my funeral. And that’s all about Donald and what he did at Dad’s funeral. I don’t know. It was all about him.” “I remember,” Mary responded. Mary Trump said she has not talked to her aunt since the book was published. She said in the Post Live interview that she would not be surprised “if she never contacted me, and I think that’s fair. I understand why she would not want to.” Alice Crites contributed to this report. |
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08.24.2020, 12:24 AM | #8591 |
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Kellyanne leaves the administration. George leaves the Lincoln Project. (Clearly a transaction there.) And Claudia, their 15-year-old daughter, wants to leave them both and work for AOC. You cannot make this up.
https://news.google.com/stories/CAAq...S&ceid=US%3Aen
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08.24.2020, 12:27 AM | #8592 | |
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08.24.2020, 08:15 PM | #8593 |
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lmao @ repuke roll call, bunch of old farty white dudes
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08.25.2020, 07:19 AM | #8594 |
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lolololololololololol
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08.25.2020, 09:00 AM | #8595 |
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Opinions
A rotten way to start convention week for Republicans Opinion by Jennifer Rubin Columnist August 25, 2020 at 7:45 a.m. EDT Convention week got off to a miserable start for Republicans. I don’t just refer to the whiny first appearance by President Trump, who launched a rambling, incoherent and fact-free rant on Monday, wherein he lied by saying “They’re trying to steal the election from Republicans. Just like they did it last time, with spying.” (This is, of course, based on the crazy, false allegation that the Obama administration “spied on him.”) The bad-news avalanche started even before the Republican National Convention roll call’s resembling a hostage video — a far cry from the uplifting video trip around the country put on by the Democrats last week. And, yes, it started before Vice President Pence hilariously promised to “Make America Great Again, again” (because they sure have wrecked things since 2016?). For starters, Trump is deeply unpopular. A new Associated Press-NORC poll shows his approval down to a paltry 35 percent, and approval for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic even worse at 31 percent. While the president repeatedly hypes a phony figure of more than 90 percent approval among Republicans, this poll pegs it at a mediocre 79 percent. Moreover, the poll found that “just 23% think the country is heading in the right direction, while 75% think it’s on the wrong path. . . . The federal government as a whole has also taken a hit with the public, with approval down from 38% in March to 23% now.” For a party banking on a cult of personality, it might want to find a more popular personality. Moreover, the sleaziness of the Trump world is on full display. Last week, former Trump campaign strategist Stephen K. Bannon was arrested on charges of defrauding Americans in connection with a private build-the-wall scheme (Bannon has pleaded not guilty). We then learned of yet another investigation into Trump’s finances. The Post reports that New York Attorney General Letitia James “is investigating whether President Trump’s company misled lenders and taxing authorities by improperly inflating the value of his assets, according to a court filing on Monday.” James’s investigators are looking into “Statements of Financial Condition” that Trump sent to lenders in summarizing his assets and debts and have tried to subpoena Trump’s son Eric Trump, who has refused to show up. More from The Post: “ ‘The Trump Organization has stalled, withheld documents, and instructed witnesses, including Eric Trump, to refuse to answer questions under oath,’ James wrote on Twitter. ‘That’s why we filed a motion to compel the Trump Organization to comply with our lawful subpoenas for documents and testimony.’ ” Eric Trump is scheduled to speak Tuesday at the Republican convention. The Post reports that implicated in this investigation are three Trump properties: a golf course in Los Angeles, an office building on Wall Street in Manhattan and a country estate known as Seven Springs in Westchester County, N.Y. The charges appear to stem from his former attorney Michael Cohen’s allegations that Trump provided phony evaluations of properties. The Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, said in a statement that “The Trump Organization has done nothing wrong.” This is separate, presumably, from yet another investigation overseen by New York City District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. Meanwhile, Trump is increasingly isolated. White House adviser Kellyanne Conway is departing (she says to attend to her family), and a tape of Trump’s sister attesting to Trump’s untrustworthiness and cruelty has emerged. (His niece, Mary Trump, similarly released a tell-all book in an effort to warn Americans not to reelect a narcissistic and toxic personality such as Trump.) More than 20 former Republican officeholders have signaled their support for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, while former Arizona senator Jeff Flake, a rock-ribbed Republican, spoke eloquently as to how Trump has trashed conservative ideals and why he now supports Biden: https://mobile.twitter.com/JeffFlake...43151035002880 One thing Flake did not mention was the deterioration in the GOP’s adherence to supposed “family values.” With the resignation from Liberty University of Jerry Falwell Jr., an early Trump supporter, as the result of a sex scandal, we are once more reminded that the GOP really does not stand for much of anything. To sum up, the Republican Party has dropped any pretense of a policy platform, throwing its lot in with a racist, xenophobic and compulsively dishonest man who creates chaos and dysfunction and is the subject of multiple investigations relating to his finances. Many decent Republicans are abandoning him in favor of his opponent. This is not five-dimensional chess. It’s a multicar pile-up. |
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08.25.2020, 09:36 PM | #8596 | |
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Good, I guess, but merely symbolic. Spineless motherfucker did nothing concrete against Trump when he was in the Senate; just empty speeches. He was among those who blocked Merrick Garland to even get a hearing, and voted to confirm Kavanaugh, among other atrocities. As useless as Susan Collins. Fuck him.
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08.26.2020, 01:36 AM | #8597 |
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Nice that one can still come to this thread to simply marvel at batshit insanity... and laugh it off? Hmm. From The Daily Beast:
RNC Speaker Cancelled After Boosting QAnon Conspiracy Theory About Jewish Plot to Enslave the World Mary Ann Mendoza, an "angel mom," was set to speak on Tuesday night. But then she took to Twitter to encourage followers to read a thread about the Rothschilds. Keep in mind that this person is a member of the Trump campaign's advisory board. Noice...
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08.26.2020, 07:16 AM | #8598 |
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last night melanoma pretended to admit racism exists
but in april 2011: "It's not only Donald who wants to see [Obama's birth certificate], it’s American people ... They want to see that." https://mobile.twitter.com/ErickFern...-racism-rnc%2F lmfao |
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08.27.2020, 10:51 AM | #8599 | |
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melanoma...ha! ha! ha!...I see what you did there. Her actual name is Melania and you changed it to melanoma...how clever of you! |
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08.27.2020, 11:15 AM | #8600 |
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Room rentals, resort fees and furniture removal: How Trump’s company charged the U.S. government more than $900,000
By David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Dawsey and Joshua Partlow August 27, 2020 at 9:26 a.m. MDT Add to list The Secret Service had asked for a room close to the president. But Mar-a-Lago said it was too late. The room was booked. Would agents like a room across the street from the president, instead? “I do have a Beach Cabana available,” a staff member at President Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla., wrote in March 2017 to a Secret Service agent seeking rooms for the upcoming weekend. “Across the street at the Beach Club, North end of the pool.” The next time, the Secret Service didn’t take the same risk. It paid Mar-a-Lago to book rooms for two weeks at a time — locking them up before the club could rent them to others, according to newly released records and emails. For Trump’s club, it appeared, saying no to the Secret Service had made it a better customer. The agency was paying for rooms on nights when Trump wasn’t even visiting — to be ready just in case Trump decided to go, one former Trump administration official said. Trump has now visited his own properties 270 times as president, according to a Washington Post tally — with another visit planned for Thursday, when he is scheduled to meet GOP donors at his Washington hotel. Through these trips, Trump has brought the Trump Organization a stream of private revenue from federal agencies and GOP campaign groups. Federal spending records show that taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $900,000 since he took office. At least $570,000 came as a result of the president’s travel, according to a Post analysis. Now, new federal spending documents obtained by The Post via a public-records lawsuit give more detail about how the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service — a kind of captive customer, required to follow Trump everywhere. In addition to the rentals at Mar-a-Lago, the documents show that the Trump Organization charged daily “resort fees” to Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Pence in Las Vegas and in another instance asked agents to pay a $1,300 “furniture removal charge” during a presidential visit to a Trump resort in Scotland. In addition, campaign finance records have provided new details about the payments the Trump Organization received from GOP groups, as a result of the 37 instances in which Trump headlined a political event at one of his properties. Those visits have brought the company at least $3.8 million in fees, according to a Post analysis of campaign spending records. Since taking office, Trump has taken other actions that have shattered his early promise to “completely isolate” himself from the Trump Organization. He tried to award the massive Group of Seven summit to his Doral resort in Miami, dropping the idea after a public backlash. He filmed video messages for big-spending private clients at Mar-a-Lago. He suggested that Pence visit a Trump property in Ireland, according to the vice president’s chief of staff. Pence then shuttled back and forth across Ireland, at U.S. taxpayer expense, to do government business on one coast and stay at Trump’s hotel on the other. But the most frequent way Trump is known to have helped his properties has been just to visit them, with the vast, big-spending presidential entourage in tow. “One would think that if he was trying to completely isolate himself from his businesses, he wouldn’t talk about his business, he wouldn’t promote his business, he wouldn’t go to his businesses,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Instead, Bookbinder said, “his businesses have been a constant presence in his presidency. No. The idea that he was going to isolate himself completely — it’s been quite the opposite.” etc etc... https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...aking-news-bar drain the swamp? he’s the swamp itself lolololololo |
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