TBR News December 9, 2018

Washington, D.C. December 9, 2018: “As the Anaconda tightens its grip on Trump, he becomes more and more manic to the point where even the backwoodsmen and their families who support him will begin to slowly scratch their heads in bewilderment, Now Trump has been telling the world, the huge dissident crowds in Paris have been chanting his name in reverence. That this did not happen does not disturb our President because he lives in a world no one else can see. White House Secret Service personnel, well-acquainted with the habits of the President, have howlingly funny stories to tell about his behavior. The betting inside the Beltway is not if Trump will not finish his term but when he will depart. Bets are being made and bottles of vintage champagne are being put away to celebrate Departure Day.. One will hear the cheering as far away as Baltimore.”

The Table of Contents 

• Falling for “Les Fake News,” Trump Spreads Lie French Protesters Chant His Name
• France: More than 1,200 in custody after ‘yellow vest’ riots
• Some of the Crazy Things That Trump Believes
• Trump’s Aides Tried to Conceal His Crazy, Racist Beliefs From the Country
• 19 outlandish conspiracy theories Donald Trump has floated on the campaign trail and in the White House
• Is There Anything Trump, Cohen, and Manafort Didn’t Lie About?
• Trump ‘at center of massive fraud against Americans’, top Democrat says
• Renters forever? 89% of US millennials want to own a home but student debt is stopping them – survey
• Top 10 US cities where residents struggle the most to pay rent
• Ron Hubbard as war hero
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

Falling for “Les Fake News,” Trump Spreads Lie French Protesters Chant His Name

December 8, 2018

by Robert Mackey

The Intercept

Donald Trump is so vain he really thinks the protests in Paris are about him. As about 8,000 anti-government protesters wearing yellow safety vests dodged tear gas in the French capital on Saturday, the president of the United States fell for a social-media hoax, claiming that the demonstrators were chanting his name.

Writing on Twitter, the president claimed, falsely, that the protests had been inspired by his opposition to the Paris climate accord and the phrase “We want Trump” rang out on the streets.

In fact, the president was misled by a viral hoax, in which video of British white supremacists chanting his name last year was posted on Twitter this week with a false caption, incorrectly describing the scene as one unfolding in France.

As reporters like Samuel Laurent of Le Monde and Ryan Broderick of Buzzfeed News have explained, there is a Trumpian aspect to the unrest in France though, since “les fake news” has helped fuel the wave of protests over the past month. That’s because the yellow-vest movement has galvanized support for protests via social networks, particularly Facebook, with a potent mix of genuine stories of suffering caused by real failings of the French government and a raft of conspiracy theories and hoaxes — including the viral rumor that a non-binding United Nations pact on migration would soon put France under UN administration, so that millions of migrants could be resettled to replace the native-born population.

While the yellow-vest protests were initially triggered by complaints that an eco-tax on fuel placed an unfair burden on the working poor for tackling climate change, the demonstrations have continued since that tax increase was paused because they are driven by broader concerns about income inequality, austerity and underfunded public services.

As reporters on the ground in Paris noted on Saturday, beyond widespread calls for President Emmanuel Macron’s resignation, just 18 months after his election, protesters voiced a range of demands from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Some protesters called for support for a borderless European Union, while others demanded Frexit, or a French exit from the bloc.

Amid skirmishes between the riot police and violent protesters known as “casseurs,” or “breakers,” which led to more than 700 arrests, there were also calls for non-violence, demands for taxes to be halved and social spending to be doubled, anti-vaccine activists, snatched selfies and eloquently simple slogans scrawled on vests, like one woman who just wrote, “I’m under pressure.”

There were also widespread displays of solidarity from protesters with a group of high-school students who were arrested this week in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, and forced by the police to kneel in the mud with their hands on their heads.

Trump’s false claim that the protesters were inspired by his hatred of the Paris climate agreement was also undermined by the presence of many yellow vests at a climate march in another part of the French capital, where more than 20,000 people demanded action.

At the climate march, Stéphane Mandard of Le Monde noted that one of the yellow vests was emblazoned with a slogan that seemed to offer one answer to the two struggles: “Make the rich pay for the environmental transition.”

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the radical-left France Unbowed party, attended a climate rally in Bordeaux with members of the yellow vest movement.

Loïc Prud’homme, one of the party’s representatives in parliament, told Le Monde that the two problems had to be tackled together. “We can not have climate justice without social justice,” he said.

 

France: More than 1,200 in custody after ‘yellow vest’ riots

Paris and other French cities are cleaning up after some 125,000 people took to the streets in sometimes violent protests. Unrest sparked by proposed fuel tax hikes has morphed into a general anti-government revolt.

December 9, 2018

DW

French authorities said on Sunday they had arrested more than 1,700 people amid nationwide “yellow vest” anti-government protests the day before that caused widespread damage, particularly in the capital, Paris.

The Interior Ministry said 1,220 of those arrested had been retained in custody.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said 135 people were injured in the Paris protests, after demonstrators clashed with tear gas-wielding police. He estimated the number of protesters at 10,000 in Paris and 125,000 across the country.

Local media put the number of injured higher, at 264, including 39 security personnel. Some 89,000 police were deployed.

Widespread damage

In Paris, cars were set on fire and store windows smashed, causing damage that city authorities said was much greater than that during similar protests on December 1.

The protests will have a severe impact on the French economy, the country’s finance minister said on Sunday.

“We must expect a new slowdown of economic growth at year-end due to the “yellow vest” protests,” said Bruno Le Maire.

Cleanup operations on Sunday were complicated by fierce winds and rain that hit the capital overnight. Two major landmarks, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum, reopened after being shuttered the day before amid the protests.

Diffuse protest demands

The yellow vest movement, named for the security jackets donned by the protesters, began a month ago as protests over a proposal to raise taxes on fuel, but it has since developed into an expression of general anger at high living costs and particular discontent with President Emmanuel Macron, seen by some as elitist.

The government’s decision last week to abandon the fuel tax rise seems to have done little to dampen the ire of protesters, who continue to call for Macron’s resignation along with a motley assortment of other demands.

The president, who has said little about the protests so far, is expected to address the nation early in the week in a bid to calm tensions.

There were also clashes in other French cities, including Marseille, Toulouse and Bordeaux, and in neighboring Belgium. Protesters at the French border with Italy caused huge traffic jams on both sides of the frontier.

Russian disinformation?

According to news agency Agence France-Presse, French authorities are looking into US and British media reports that false social media accounts originating from Russia had sought to escalate the tensions that led to the protests.

The British Times newspaper, citing analyses by the cybersecurity company New Knowledge, said some 200 Twitter accounts had spread disinformation, among other things using pictures of injured protesters from other events to bolster claims of brutality against French security forces.

 

 

Some of the Crazy Things That Trump Believes

August 10, 2018

by Nancy LeTourneau

Washington Monthly

Some of the Crazy Things That Trump Believes By now we know that the U.S. president isn’t concerned with cumbersome things like facts, truth and logic. He believes whatever is utilitarian for him to believe in the moment. While that tendency has gotten more pronounced since he was elected, it has been true of Donald Trump for a long time.

Recently, we learned that the EPA is going to allow asbestos to once again be used in the manufacturing industry. Perhaps you are like me and know people who died because of their exposure to asbestos. That makes this a rather terrifying decision. We don’t know all of what is feeding into this move, but it is very likely that the president’s bizarre beliefs about asbestos played a role. Here’s an excerpt from The Art of the Deal:

I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal. Great pressure was put on politicians, and as usual, the politicians relented. Millions of truckloads of this incredible fire-proofing material were taken to special ‘dump sites’ and asbestos was replaced by materials that were supposedly safe but couldn’t hold a candle to asbestos in limiting the ravages of fire.

Ramping up the bizarre, in 2012, Trump tweeted that if we hadn’t removed the asbestos from the World Trade Center, it wouldn’t have burned down. So, lives could be threatened because this guy believes some made-up conspiracy theory about asbestos and the mob.

Trump has long believed that exercise is dangerous and sleep puts you at a disadvantage, so it should come as no surprise that he has come up with the crazy idea that tariffs will bring down the national debt.

Jim Tankersley explains why that one is absurd.

For this fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office projects the federal budget deficit will be $800 billion. Mr. Trump’s own Office of Management and Budget projects the deficit will top $1 trillion in 2019.

That means that to pay down any of the debt — let alone “large amounts” — tariffs will need to bring in at least $800 billion this year.

As it happens, the Treasury Department tracks how much revenue the United States collects from tariffs. By its calculations, that amount is going to clock in at about $40 billion as of 2018. That amount includes $35 billion that the Treasury has already taken in from tariffs over the past two years. So the additional amount coming in this year, as a result of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, is about $5 billion, or 1/160th of what Mr. Trump needs to begin retiring debt.

It is based on that kind of ignorance that this president is initiating trade wars that are weakening our economy.

In light of the fact that the Mueller investigation is closing in on Trump, while more of his close associates are brought up on criminal charges, it is understandable that we can lose sight of the fact that on almost every issue, this president is either lying or doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. A lot of us have known that for a while now, but we should never lose sight of just how shockingly ignorant this man is, because what he does as president out of ignorance is often very dangerous.

 

Trump’s Aides Tried to Conceal His Crazy, Racist Beliefs From the Country

August 16, 2017

by Jonathan Chait

the national interest

Donald Trump’s aides have been angry with him frequently — indeed, usually — since the beginning of his presidential campaign. But they have rarely registered their dismay as nakedly as they did Tuesday night, when he spontaneously altered a plan to deliver remarks on infrastructure without taking questions into a free-form defense of white supremacists. One official told NBC News that Trump had “gone rogue.” Mike Allen reports that chief economic adviser Gary Cohn is “between appalled and furious,” and that there is a danger one or more high-level officials could resign. Chief of Staff John Kelly’s disgust was registered on his face.

It is impossible to recall a presidential aide contemporaneously broadcasting his disgust with his own president.

But it is important to understand the precise nature of their distress. It is emphatically not because they are shocked to learn their boss is a racist, a fact that has been established through numerous episodes, such as Trump’s insistence a Mexican-American judge was inherently biased against him, his call for a Muslim immigration ban, his slander of Ghazala Khan, and so on. They are angry that Trump revealed beliefs they wish to keep hidden. “Members of the president’s staff, stunned and disheartened, said they never expected to hear such a voluble articulation of opinions that the president had long expressed in private,” reports the New York Times.

This raises the question once again of why they are working for Trump at all. A legitimate public rationale can be made for serving the administration in certain roles. The federal government plays a vital role in domestic and global security, Trump is a dangerous and erratic figure, and somebody needs to try to steer him away from decisions that would provoke unalterable tragedy. That justification covers serving Trump as a foreign-policy adviser, or as homeland security and disaster-response officials.

But what justification can the domestic and political advisers offer? Any benefit they can get by helping produce what they regard as better policies is surely offset by the cover they (and their policy successes, should they produce any) provide him.

Suppose yesterday’s remarks had gone off as planned. Suppose Trump had pushed his message of infrastructure. Suppose further every subsequent step also worked as planned — Trump manages to build political support for the huge infrastructure build-out he campaigned upon, and created millions of jobs and the backdrops for several powerful reelection campaign ads. All they would have done is fulfill Steve Bannon’s dream of a worker’s party uniting economic populism with ethnonationalist grievance. “Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up,” he told Michael Wolff after the election, “We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

Trump certainly has revived certain aspects of the political excitement of the 1930s: Nazi torchlight parades, presidential attacks on the media as enemies of the people, and street battles between armed extremist factions. He has not yet revived the infrastructure build-up that supplied a great deal of the Nazi party’s political capital. The apparent objective Trump’s domestic advisers hope to achieve is to create a political constituency for a president they consider racist, while concealing his racism as best as they can.

A West Wing official tells the Times that Trump has “expressed sympathy with nonviolent protesters who he said were defending their ‘heritage.’” (This is a rally that began with chants like “Jews will not replace us.”) Preventing Trump from doing something damaging is a legitimate and even noble calling. But that admirable motivation can easily mutate into rationalization. Are Trump aides really working to protect the country from him? Or are they working to keep the country from seeing his real nature?

 

 

19 outlandish conspiracy theories Donald Trump has floated on the campaign trail and in the White House

September 13, 2018

by Maxwell Tani, Michal Kranz and John Haltiwanger

Business Insider

In May 2011, reporters swarmed now-President Donald Trump as he exited the Hyatt in Washington, DC, after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Many wanted a response from Trump, who had just watched President Obama deliver jokes that night about Trump’s constant questioning of the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate.

Years later, Trump is  still not convinced of the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate. But this was perhaps the first of numerous debunked or unverified conspiracy theories that Trump has entertained during his time in the political spotlight.

Throughout the 2016 campaign and while in the White House, Trump has floated theories fueled by the conspiratorial-minded corners of supermarket tabloids and the internet, something unprecedented in modern politics. He’s often used them as weapons against his opponents.

Here are some of the most notable conspiracy theories Trump has entertained:

• Questions about Ted Cruz’s father’s potential ties to President John F. Kennedy’s assassin.

On the eve of the Indiana primary, Trump attempted to undermine former Republican presidential rival Ted Cruz’s father’s legitimacy by parroting an unverified National Enquirer story.

It claimed Rafael Cruz was photographed in the early 1960s handing out pro-Fidel Castro leaflets with President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Cruz campaign denounced the piece as “garbage.”

• Questions about President Obama’s birth certificate.

While mulling a potential 2012 presidential bid, Trump became the most high-profile figure to promote the rumors suggesting that President Obama was not born in the US.

Trump claimed he’d deployed private investigators who “could not believe what they’re finding” about Obama’s place of birth.

He also repeatedly clashed with reporters who pushed him on the issue. During one contentious interview, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he’d been “co-opted” by “Obama and his minions” when the anchor tried to push back on Trump’s claims.

When Obama eventually released his long-form birth certificate, Trump  questioned the document’s authenticity.

Trump has since continued to push the conspiracy theory in recent months during his presidency, according to advisors who spoke with  the New York Times. One sitting US senator echoed these reports.

“[Trump] has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States,” the senator told the Times.

• Questions about a former Bill Clinton aide’s suicide

After Vince Foster, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, was found dead in 1993, various law-enforcement agencies and independent counsels determined he committed suicide.

But Foster’s death spawned conspiracy theorists who questioned whether the Clintons themselves were involved in Foster’s death.

In an interview with  The Washington Post, Trump suggested Foster’s death was “very fishy.”

“He had intimate knowledge of what was going on,” Trump said of Foster’s role in the White House. “He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”

He added: “I don’t bring [Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it. I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”

• Questions about whether Syrian refugees are ISIS terrorists

Trump has, in part, justified his plan to temporarily bar Muslim immigrants from entering the US by claiming that refugees coming from Syria “could be a Trojan horse.”

“It could be one of the greatest coups of all time,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity last year. “They could be ISIS. It could be a plot. I mean, I don’t want to think in terms of conspiracy, but it could be a plot.”

But the process for vetting refugees typically lasts 18 to 24 months, and immigration experts maintain it is one of the most difficult ways for terrorists to attempt to enter the US legally.

“It is extremely unlikely that someone who is a terrorist will be sent through the refugee resettlement program,” Greg Chen, the director of advocacy at the American Immigration Lawyers Association,  told Business Insider.

He added: “It takes a great deal of time, and it wouldn’t make sense for someone who is a terrorist for someone to go through that process. There are going to be easier ways for a terrorist to try to infiltrate, rather than going through the refugee resettlement program.”

• Questions about whether an ISIS-linked terrorist attempted to charge at Trump on stage.

After an attendee at Trump’s March 2016 rally in Dayton, Ohio, attempted to charge the stage, Trump  claimed a video he retweeted proved the attendee was a terrorist linked to ISIS.

“He was playing Arabic music. He was dragging the flag along the ground, and he had internet chatter with ISIS and about ISIS. So I don’t know if he was or not,” Trump said. “But all we did was put out what he had on his internet. He’s dragging the flag, the American flag, which I respect obviously more than you.”

He added: “What do I know about it? All I know is what’s on the internet. And I don’t like to see a man dragging the American flag along the ground in a mocking fashion.”

Multiple news outlets and  fact-checkers debunked the video’s authenticity. No government agency has said the man was connected to ISIS or other terrorist groups.

• Questions about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

Law enforcement determined there was  no evidence of foul play in Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death this year.

Asked about the circumstances of Scalia’s death, Trump said he was unsure about what caused Scalia’s death. Trump noted a pillow was found over the justice’s face, a claim  authorities rebutted.

“I’m hearing it’s a big topic,” Trump said  in a radio interview. “It’s a horrible topic but they’re saying they found the pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.”

He added: “I can’t give you an answer. It’s just starting to come out now.”

• Questions about whether childhood vaccines cause autism.

At a Republican presidential debate in 2016, CNN host Jake Tapper asked Trump about his position that vaccines can cause autism.

“We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic,”  Trump said.

Shortly after Trump’s assertion, former presidential candidate and neurosurgeon Ben Carson corrected the real-estate mogul, pointing out that overwhelming medical evidence suggests that there’s no link between autism and vaccines.

A 2013 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found no connection between vaccines and an increased risk of autism.

• Questions about whether Muslims in New Jersey were cheering after 9/11.

For weeks last year, Trump emphatically claimed he saw televised news reports of Muslims cheering in New Jersey after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down,” Trump said during an ABC interview.

He added: “I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well-covered at the time.”

However, there is no evidence to suggest there were any American celebrations aired on television following the attacks.  Some media reports at the time cited rumors of celebrations in New Jersey. But reports were never substantiated, and there’s no evidence these protests were broadcast on national television.

• Questions about whether wives of 9/11 hijackers fled to Saudi Arabia before the attacks.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee repeatedly stated last year that the terrorists who carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks moved their families out of the US to Saudi Arabia several days before the hijacking.

“When you had the World Trade Center go, people were put into planes that were friends, family, girlfriends, and they were put into planes and they were sent back, for the most part, to Saudi Arabia,” Trump said. “They knew what was going on. They went home and they wanted to watch their boyfriends on television.”

The 9/11 commission report, the most extensive investigation into the events surrounding the attacks, determined that few of the hijackers kept in contact with their families, and none had family members living in the US.

PolitiFact also called the claim false.

• Questions about the legitimacy of climate change.

Though many Republican leaders remain skeptical of climate change, Trump has taken his skepticism a step further. In 2012 he suggested that climate change is a “total, and very expensive hoax” perpetuated by China’s government.

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” Trump tweeted in 2012.

Trump  backed off the tweet, telling Fox News in January that his comment was a “joke.” Still, the real-estate mogul has  repeatedly maintained that climate change was a hoax, and said climate-change studies are “done for the benefit of China.”

According to NASA, 97% of publishing climate scientists believe that human activities such as burning of fossil fuels have caused climate change.

• Questions about whether asbestos is a “great con.”

In a  1992 interview with New York magazine, Trump suggested the mob’s “strong lobby” in New York may be responsible for asbestos.

“One of the great cons is asbestos,” Trump said. “There’s nothing wrong except the mob has a strong lobby in Albany because they have the dumps and control the truck.”

Trump has more recently embraced the reality.

Last year, the real-estate mogul cited how he increased the valuation of one of his properties by millions after embarking on a massive asbestos-removal operation.

• Questions about Marco Rubio’s presidential eligibility.

Trump has a long history of speculating whether potential presidential rivals are constitutionally eligible to serve.

In February, the former reality-TV star  retweeted a supporter who claimed Rubio was ineligible to run because his parents were not natural-born US citizens, a claim that  no major constitutional experts support.

When confronted on ABC’s “This Week” about whether he believed Rubio was not constitutionally permitted to occupy the presidency, Trump, whose mother was born in Scotland, refused to disavow the tweet.

“I’ve never looked at it, George,” Trump said of the tweet. “I honestly have never looked at it. As somebody said, he’s not. And I retweeted it. I have 14 million people between Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and I retweet things and we start dialogue and it’s very interesting.”

He added: “I’m not sure. Let people make their own determination.”

• Questions about Fox News being owned by a Saudi billionaire.

Trump’s war with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly recently reached a detente.

But during the peak of Trump’s rhetorical battle with Kelly, he perpetuated a prominent outlandish theory from one of his Twitter followers.

In January, the real-estate mogul retweeted a photo purportedly showing Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal with Kelly. The photo claimed the prince was a partial Fox News owner, which  multiple outlets found was untrue. Alwaleed’s investment company owns a small share of 21st Century Fox.

• Questions about the legitimacy of the “Access Hollywood” tape

Toward the tail end of his presidential campaign, the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape featuring Trump apparently admitting that he likes to grab women “by the p—-” received broad coverage, and Trump  apologized for his comments shortly afterward.

More recently though, after various allegations of sexual harassment in media and politics have begun to surface, Trump has  walked back these comments.

“We don’t think that was my voice,” Trump reportedly told a senator, according to The New York Tiimes.

The Times’ sources did not elaborate on why Trump has begun to doubt the authenticity of the tape’s audio.

• Claims that Joe Scarborough killed one of his interns

In a tweet Trump sent Wednesday morning, he made references to a  conspiracy theory that claims MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough of “Morning Joe” murdered one of his staffers in Florida in 2001.

“So now that Matt Lauer is gone when will the Fake News practitioners at NBC be terminating the contract of Phil Griffin?” the tweet read. “And will they terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the ‘unsolved mystery’ that took place in Florida years ago? Investigate!”

While Scarborough was serving as a Republican congressman in Florida’s 1st district, one of his interns, Lori Klausutis, was found dead in the office. A coroner found no evidence of foul play, and indicated that the death occurred because of a heart problem that caused the intern to fatally hit her head on her desk.

• Claims that Obama had wiretapped Trump’s phone

In March 2017, Trump sent a  tweet accusing Obama of wiretapping his phones in Trump Tower.

“Terrible!” Trump wrote, “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

PolitiFact and other outlets have  debunked the claim. An Obama spokesman also issued a response to the allegation, saying: “Neither Barack Obama nor any White House official under Obama ever ordered surveillance of any U.S. citizen.”

• Claims that voter fraud in the 2016 election cost him the popular vote

In a  tweet sent shortly after the November 2016 election, Trump wrote: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

This unsubstantiated claim was repeated by Kris Kobach, the chairman of Trump’s panel on voter fraud, in July. The fact-checking site Snopes has  debunked the claim entirely, citing “zero evidence.”

In November 2017, Trump caused  diplomatic havoc by retweeting three videos posted by Jayda Fransen of the ultra-nationalist, anti-Muslim organization Britain First that purportedly showed Muslims in Europe committing crimes and destroying Christian icons.

Britain First has  frequently targeted mosques and Muslims in the UK in order to brand all Muslims as violent extremists, and Trump’s retweet of the videos was widely seen as a tacit endorsement of the group’s efforts.

Although the authenticity of the videos has been called into question, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has maintained this  doesn’t matter.

“Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real,” she told reporters.

• Claims 3,000 people didn’t die in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and that Democrats inflated the death toll.

In a tweet on Thursday morning, Trump claimed 3,000 people didn’t die in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and accused Democrats of inflating the death toll to make him “look as bad as possible,” rejecting the findings of a government-funded study in the process.

“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” he said. “When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…”

He then added: “This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!”

A study commissioned by the Puerto Rico government that was released in August found that 2,975 people died in the wake of the storm.

Trump has been widely criticized for his response to Hurricane Maria, particularly by San Juan Mayor Carmin Yulín Cruz.

In response to Trump’s claims on Thursday, Cruz tweeted, “This is what denial following neglect looks like: Mr Pres in the real world people died on your watch. YOUR LACK OF RESPECT IS APPALLING!”

 

Is There Anything Trump, Cohen, and Manafort Didn’t Lie About?

December 9, 2018

by James Risen

The Intercept

The latest batch of documents from two different court cases made public late Friday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller includes potentially devastating new information about Trump’s ties to Moscow, bringing the case against Trump and his associates into sharper focus and exposing a dizzying number of lies told by Trump, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort.

In documents from the case of Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, Mueller reveals that Cohen has provided new insights into how Trump personally orchestrated efforts to establish contacts with Russian officials as early as 2015, just when his presidential campaign was gearing up.

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to congressional investigators probing the Trump-Russia matter, and is due to be sentenced on December 12. In a footnote in a sentencing memorandum in Cohen’s case released Friday, Mueller revealed that Cohen volunteered information about a long-forgotten radio interview he did in September 2015. During the interview, Cohen suggested that Trump should meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during his upcoming visit to New York for the United Nations General Assembly session. Mueller says that Cohen had previously insisted that his comment during the radio interview was spontaneous, but he now has admitted to Mueller that was false and that “he had in fact conferred with Individual 1 (Trump) about contacting the Russian government before reaching out to gauge Russian interest in such a meeting.” The meeting didn’t take place, but Cohen’s new disclosure shows that Trump was personally driving efforts to connect with Putin from the very beginning of his campaign.

Two months after Cohen’s radio interview, he again sought to establish close ties between Trump and Putin’s regime, he has now admitted. In November 2015, Cohen received the contact information for and spoke with a Russian, who is not identified in the court documents, who claimed to be a “trusted person” in the Russian Federation and who could offer the Trump campaign “political synergy” and “synergy on a government level.” The Russian repeatedly proposed meetings between Trump and Putin, and suggested that such a meeting could help Trump politically as well as in his business. Putin could make sure that a Moscow real estate development proposal Trump was pursuing,  identified in the documents as the “Moscow Project,” could happen.  The Russian told him that there is “no bigger warranty” for a development in Moscow than having Putin’s consent.  Cohen said he didn’t follow up on this invitation.

At the heart of Cohen’s lies to Congressional investigators in 2017 was his effort to downplay the significance and the chronology of the proposed Moscow Project. He had originally lied to Congress by saying that the project had been abandoned by January 2016, before the Iowa caucuses – leaving the impression that the project was dead long before it became obvious that Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. In fact, the Moscow project was still in the works as late as June 2016, and Mueller now discloses that the project could have meant “hundreds of millions of dollars” in licensing fees and other revenue sources for Trump’s business.

Cohen’s lies obscured the fact that the Moscow Project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government.

In the sentencing memo, Mueller underscores the significance of the fact that the Moscow Project was still secretly being discussed in the midst of the 2016 campaign. “Cohen continued to work on the project and discuss it with (Trump) well into the campaign…” at the same time that there were “sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.”

In a separate case involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Mueller also revealed an intriguing new line of inquiry. Mueller has charged that Manafort violated his plea agreement by lying rather than cooperating fully, and issued a heavily redacted document in the case late Friday. Among other things, the court filing accuses Manafort of lying about his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked with Manafort in Ukraine. Mueller has previously alleged that Kilimnik has ties to Russian intelligence.

The significance of Mueller’s new filing about Manafort is that it raises new questions about connections between Trump’s campaign manager and a figure with ties to Russian intelligence. Many of the details are frustratingly redacted in the Mueller filing, but it suggests that Kilimnik plays a more important role in Mueller’s investigation than previously believed.

What is obvious is that, despite Trump’s denials, he and his campaign were involved in repeated, serious efforts to develop deep connections to Vladimir Putin’s regime from the very beginning of Trump’s run for the presidency.

 

Trump ‘at center of massive fraud against Americans’, top Democrat says

• Incoming House chair Nadler promises investigations
• Payments to women ‘would be impeachable offenses’

December 9, 2018

by Erin Durkin in New York

The Guardian

New court filings show Donald Trump was “at the center of a massive fraud” against the American people, the incoming chair of the House judiciary committee said on Sunday.

Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat set to take over the panel in January, said Trump would have committed impeachable offenses if it is proven that he ordered his lawyer to make illegal payments to women to keep quiet about alleged sexual encounters.

“What these indictments and filings show is that the president was at the center of a massive fraud – several massive frauds against the American people,” Nadler said on CNN’s “State of the Union”.

Federal prosecutors said in court filings on Friday that Trump directed his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to commit two felonies: payments made to women who said they had sex with Trump in return for their silence, in an effort to influence the 2016 election.

“They would be impeachable offenses,” Nadler said, though he added it would still be a judgment call for lawmakers whether the offenses were important enough to warrant impeachment proceedings, which should only be launched in the gravest circumstances.

“Whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question,” he said. “But certainly, they’d be impeachable offenses, because even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.”

After Democrats take control of the House, Nadler said, they will aggressively investigate what happened during the campaign.

“The Republican Congress absolutely tried to shield the president,” he said. “The new Congress will not try to shield the president. It will try to get to the bottom of this in order to serve the American people and stop this massive fraud on the American people.

“What did the president know and when did he know it about these crimes?”

Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said Trump’s alleged actions were “things that cannot and should not be ignored”.

“We want to know everything, and we will know everything that has happened here at some point,” Rubio said, also on CNN. “If someone has violated the law, the application of the law should be applied to them like it would be to any other citizen in the country.”

Appearing on CNN, ABC and CBS on Sunday morning, Rubio repeatedly said that a presidential pardon for Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair whose links with Russia were detailed in court filings on Friday, would not be a good idea. Trump has publicly declined to take the idea off the table.

“I believe it’d be a terrible mistake,” he told ABC’s This Week. “Pardons should be used judiciously. They’re used for cases with extraordinary circumstances.”

 

Renters forever? 89% of US millennials want to own a home but student debt is stopping them – survey

December 9, 2018

RT

Achieving the American dream seems unattainable to many millennials, with 48 percent lacking any savings for a home down payment. Many have student loan debt to blame, which has reached a collective $1.3 trillion in the US.

Although there’s no denying that millennials are different from older generations in many ways, 89.4 percent of them share the same dream that their parents and grandparents had – they want to become homeowners, according to a new study from Apartment List.

Achieving the American dream seems unattainable to many millennials, with 48 percent lacking any savings for a home down payment. Many have student loan debt to blame, which has reached a collective $1.3 trillion in the US.

Although there’s no denying that millennials are different from older generations in many ways, 89.4 percent of them share the same dream that their parents and grandparents had – they want to become homeowners, according to a new study from Apartment List.

And of those who said they do plan on purchasing a home at some point, 30 percent said they wouldn’t be able to do so until five or more years have passed. That response was the most common of the survey participants, with just four percent saying they planned on doing so within the next year.

While some respondents admitted that they would be relying on financial help from their family to meet the down payment threshold, the survey found that those who make the best salaries will receive the most help. In other words, those who need the most assistance expect to receive the least amount.

For example, when millennials who make more than $100,000 a year were asked how much money they expect to receive from family, the average came to more than $50,000. Those who make less than $25,000 expected to receive an average of $4,300 in assistance.

A total of 6,4000 millennials were polled for the survey by Apartment List, a website of rental listings across the United States.

 

 

Top 10 US cities where residents struggle the most to pay rent

September 8, 2018

RT

Property prices in the US have been growing much more rapidly than Americans’ incomes with increasing mortgage rates constantly making the housing market more expensive.

The median US rent currently takes 28.4 percent of the median income, up from the historic average of 25.8 percent, according to online real estate database company Zillow Group. Low-income renters have to bear the worst financial burden. Price of renting in Los Angeles makes up more than 100 percent of average income for the lowest-earning residents.

“That leaves few options to realistically afford rent and other expenses on a typical income, outside of a housing subsidy, doubling up with roommates or taking on a second or even a third job to help make ends meet,” Zillow said in its report.

Here’s the list of top ten US cities, where the share of income exceeds the overall national level of 28.40 percent. The ranking is based on Zillow’s data for the second quarter of 2018.

• Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, California. Here the median income reaches $55,151 with residents having to pay 46.90 percent of it to rent a home.
• Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Living in one of the most populous counties in the US requires 40.30 percent of the median income which amounts to $41,645.
• To rent a home in San Diego, California takes 40.30 percent of the city’s median income of $68,117.
• Living in San Francisco, California requires 39.20 percent of the median income of $87,701.
• New York, New York. With a median income of $55,191 residents of the city have to pay 37.70 percent of it for rent.
• Being a resident of Riverside, California takes 36.80 percent of the city’s median income, which reportedly amounts to $58,979.
• To live and work in the Californian city of San Jose requires 35.60 percent of an average income that reportedly reaches $90,303.
• Boston, Massachusetts. Bostonians spend 32.70 percent of their income of $58,516 on rent.
• Renting property in the Californian capital of Sacramento takes 32.40 percent of a median income of $52,071.
• Denver, Colorado. Being a resident of this metropolis eats up 32 percent of an average income, which is reportedly $56,258.

 

Ron Hubbard as war hero

A year and a half before Pearl Harbor, as a civilian Ron had already begun fighting the Nazis. He was piloting a boat up the Alaskan coast when he stopped off at Ketchikan. There he met the owner/operator of KGBU radio. Evidently the area had been experiencing mysterious interference in the station’s transmissions. Ron immediately had a hunch: it was none other than the work of a German spy, out to disable America’s communication systems to prevent the prompt relaying of emergency information. Hubbard made a full report to the FBI, thus thwarting the plot. For some reason, the government still denies that this ever took place, but then they deny a lot of stuff we know to be true.

Ron volunteered for the Naval Reserves in 1941, where he distinguished himself with a brilliant military career. In August 1942, Lt. Hubbard was assigned to the YP-422, a patrol boat at the Boston Navy Yard. After a single training exercise, the Navy decided that Hubbard’s talents were being wasted on such an insignificant task. Somehow the Axis had infiltrated the Navy Yard, because the Commandant stripped Hubbard of his command after only a single training exercise. Or maybe he was simply intimidated by the young officer’s complete and utter mastery of leadership and sailing skills.

Hubbard got shuffled around to a couple of desk jobs before managing to convince the Navy of his value as a commanding officer. So in May 1943 he took charge of a submarine chaser, the PC-815. As luck would have it, on the very first day of its maiden voyage, Hubbard’s subchaser encountered sonar contacts off the Oregon coast. He spent the next several hours hunting two submarines, dropping depth charges and shooting at surface debris with deck guns. The next day, four other ships and two Navy blimps were brought in to aid in the hunt. Evidently Hubbard’s quick thinking ruled the day, because no trace of the submarines could be found. No doubt, they were both lying wrecked on the ocean floor.

It was Hubbard’s bad luck that the battle took place directly over a known magnetic deposit, which made it impossible for instruments to distinguish between the wreckage and the minerals in the seabed. Which is of course precisely what made it the ideal spot for enemy subs to hide. But the Navy brass refused to acknowledge the heroic feat. So they scapegoated Hubbard, claiming that he had simply become confused by the geological feature and wasted all his ammunition on phantoms. They were probably just worried about inciting panic among the populace.

He was admonished and then ordered to take his ship to San Diego, where it was to remain for a two-year assignment. On June 28, after a day of training exercises off the coast, Lt. Hubbard ordered his men to practice firing at a practice target floating near some uninhabited islands. They unloaded all kinds of ammo into the thing, including four 50-caliber artillery rounds. At least two of those rounds missed the target and struck the island.

After the crew returned to San Diego the next morning, they were surprised to learn a few things:

1.the island was called South Coronados

2.South Coronados island actually belonged to Mexico

3.South Coronados island was actually inhabited, by Mexicans

4.the Mexican government had, in fact, filed a formal complaint about the shelling

Evidently bowing to Mexican pressure, the Navy brass showed no mercy. They formally reprimanded Lt. Hubbard and stripped him of his command. According to the comments in his fitness report, L. Ron would never again captain a naval vessel:

Consider this officer lacking in the essential qualities of judgement, leadership and cooperation. He acts without forethought as to probable results. He is believed to have been sincere in his efforts to make his ship efficient and ready. Not considered qualified for command or promotion at this time. Recommend duty on a large vessel where he can be properly supervised.

In November he was assigned to serve as the Navigation Officer on a freighter, the SS Algol. There he spent nine months trying not to die of boredom. Finally, he was accepted into a three-month Military Government course at the Navy Training School on the campus of Princeton University. It is really astonishing that Hubbard managed to make it through the course, because he soon wound up in a VA hospital, where he spent two years recovering from extensive war injuries. As he put it:

Blinded with injured optic nerves, and lame with physical injuries to hip and back, at the end of World War II, I faced an almost non-existent future. […]

And so there came a further blow — I was abandoned by family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple and a probable burden upon them for the rest of my days. Yet I worked my way back to fitness and strength in less than two years, using only what I knew about Man and his relationship to the universe. I had no one to help me; what I had to know I had to find out. And it’s quite a trick studying when you cannot see.

I became used to being told it was all impossible, that there was no way, no hope. Yet I came to see again and walk again.

As inspiring as Hubbard’s recovery was, it was even more amazing that he had made it through the entire government class at Princeton both blind and crippled. Once again, if you heard this story about anyone other than L. Ron, you would be right to question it. Especially given the fact that Lt. Hubbard’s medical records include nothing more serious than an ulcer. Which is troublesome, until you discover that Hubbard wound up making some very powerful enemies near the end of his life, who would like nothing more than to discredit him and his work.

And today, our White House is occupied with another L. Ron Hubbard but this one is dangerous in his lunacy. He launched a missile attack on a Syrian air base under the erroneous impression that secret gas bombs were launched from there. The US was not at war with Syria at the time and while Trump was planning this, the Secret Service reported he had locked himself into his bedroom in the White House and was spending hours talking to himself, laughing loudly and dancing in his bathroom in a pink silk bathrobe.

Sic transit gloria mundi indeed

 

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

December 9, 2018

by Dr. Peter Janney

 

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

 

Conversation No. 95

Date: Wednesday, July 30, 1997

Commenced: 11:05 AM CST

Concluded: 11:15 AM CST

 

GD: Good morning, Robert. Anything new to report?

RTC: Quiet here. Pleasant to have quiet after the constant uproar at the office but there are times when I really miss it.

GD: Noise and uproar never bothered me at all. Bad food does, however, I had a chicken paprikash last night and it did not sit well.

RTC: Paprikash?

GD: Hungarian  chicken with paprika. Cook it in a pan with butter, onions and paprika. I developed a liking for it when I was living in Munich but this one was not good. Stringy chicken. Could have been cat but I won’t eat there again.

RTC: That’s right. You lived in Munich, didn’t you?

GD: Yes, for a long time, there or nearby.

RTC: We had a large base there. Dealt with the Czechs.

GD: I know about your operations there. Christ, you people were about as subtle as a fart in a space suit. You had Radio Free Liberty or whatever out at Holzkirchen and by the English Garden. And at Stachus….sorry, Karlsplatz, you had a export office that everyone from the whores to the cab drivers knew was the CIA office. Once paid a wino to crap on their doorstep. Oh, and the Hungarian fellow. I should tell you about that one. I knew this very nice, very old- family lady. I mean a real lady, old family. Anyway, she met this Hungarian who was selling gold coins and whatnot and the long and the short of it was the asshole stiffed her for a lot of money for fake gold coins and jewelry. She went to the police but they did nothing. I knew one or two very senior police people so I spoke very seriously with one of them. Told me they knew all about the swine but couldn’t touch him because he was a top CIA person. Maybe they couldn’t touch him but I certainly could. Critchlow…I think it was that one…anyway, I set out to get back the money. I met this slimy crud in a coin shop, not by accident, and struck up a nice conversation with him. I should tell you that I know more about gold than he ever could but I let him think I was a dumb, rich American. He was incorrect on two of the three impressions. Oh my, he did get interested in me. I also went to his apartment to deal with him and then, armed with my information, I went to see some Turkish friends. Turks, Robert, can be very mean and my friends were no exception. Details are not necessary here but I told the Turks this jerk was on to their smuggling operations and was going to have them arrested so they went after him. As I recall, though I was having dinner with my police official at the time, he was walking across the bridge down by the German Museum when some bad person came up behind him, cut his throat and chunked him over the parapet and down into the Isar. I should have added that it was winter and the river was frozen on the surface but the Budapest Kid went right through the ice. They found him in the spring, down by the dam. I must confess that after dining with the police gentleman, I spoke briefly with one of my really keen Turkish friends and we broke into the Hunky’s pad and stripped it. I got a lot of gold, some folders with interesting papers, a small radio, two silenced pistols and other things we really don ‘t need to discuss. The Turk got quite a bit of gold and some awful Japanese pornography. I don’t think ten year old Asian girls being banged by well-hung Negros is really nice but the others thought so and who can dispute tastes after all? He and his cousin came back later with a truck and took all the furniture and even the toilet and a washbasin. I know about this because later, my police friend asked me about the terrible vanishing of the CIA man and the rape of his apartment. Of course I knew nothing but I did give the lady all of her money back with a warning to her son, who was in their foreign office, to keep a good watch on his mother in future. I told him what happened and he and I had a good laugh  I knew him for years and we used to go shooting together and I had no problem telling him about it. Such a fuss from your people. They thought the Russians had kidnapped him. But in the spring, they found him stuck in the dam grill, all mixed up with a few equally rotting dead pets and an aborted fetus or two. Closed coffin and a nice ceremony.

RTC: You mentioned finding some papers. I don’t care about the silenced pistols but the fate of the papers interests me. From a purely abstract but professional point of view, you understand.

GD: Oh, I understand your abstract interest. As an abstract answer, I sold them to interested parties. Kept me in rent and food money for a number of months, I must say. My lady friend was happy and so were my pleasant Turkish friends. The Hungarian was not happy but the Hungarian was a lying, thieving sack of shit and much better off dead and bobbing around deep in the cold river. The Turks found his bed very comfortable but I never enquired about the fate of the toilet. There are some things best left strictly alone. And so much for my Hungarian adventures.

 

(Concluded at 11;15 AM CST