TBR News December 2, 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8 

Washington, D.C. December 2, 2018: 10 May 1924          “Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone appoints J. Edgar Hoover Acting Director of the Bureau of Identification. Calvin Coolidge is President.

22 Oct 1934   Notorious bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd dies of multiple gunshot wounds in the back, after a shootout with the FBI at the Conkle Farm in East Liverpool, Ohio.

2 May 1972   J. Edgar Hoover dies in his sleep.

19 Oct 1982   Maverick carmaker John DeLorean is arrested in Los Angeles with $24M worth of cocaine in his suitcase. The case is later thrown out of court when a judge rules that the FBI sting operation constituted entrapment. DeLorean dealers nationwide discontinue “snow tires” as an option.

14 Jul 1986    Former FBI counterintelligence agent Richard W. Miller is convicted of espionage. He receives 20 years for passing state secrets to the Soviet Union.

23 Jun 1996  Former FBI agent Eugene Bennett, armed and wearing a ski mask, enters the Prince of Peace Church in Manassas, Virginia. Then he handcuffs Reverend A. J. Edwin Clever to a chair and holds the priest hostage until Bennett’s wife (another former FBI agent) arrives and scares away her spouse by shooting at him.

18 Dec 1996  FBI agent Earl Edwin Pitts is arrested at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia for conspiracy to commit espionage, attempted espionage, communication of classified information, and conveyance without authority of government property.

22 Dec 1999  Former FBI agent John Connolly is arrested in his Lynnfield, Massachusetts home for conspiring with Mobsters.

9 Oct 2000     Former FBI agent John Connolly is charged with fingering Mob informants who were helping authorities investigate a 1981 mob hit against business executive Roger Wheeler.

18 Feb 2001  FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen is arrested for espionage.

25 Jun 2001  Former FBI agent Michael Levin pleads guilty to stealing and selling Bureau files.

16 Jul 2001    FBI agents arrest Russian software programmer Dmitry Skylarov in Las Vegas for violating the DMCA.

4 Sep 2001    Former FBI security analyst James Hill pleads guilty to conspiracy to sell Bureau files.

11 Sep 2001  Former FBI counterterrorism expert John P. O’Neill is killed in the World Trade Center attacks. During his final years at the Bureau, O’Neill was preoccupied with capturing Osama bin Laden.

1 Mar 2002    In a case of mistaken identity, FBI agent Christopher Braga shoots unarmed 20-year-old Eagle Scout Joseph Charles Schultz in the face during a traffic stop in Pasadena, Maryland.

May 2002      The Professional Association of Diving Instructors voluntarily furnishes the FBI with a list of the roughly 2 million Americans who learned how to scuba dive over the preceding 3 years.

21 May 2002  FBI agent Colleen Rowley sends a 13-page memo to Director Robert Mueller criticizing the Bureau’s response to terrorism.

28 May 2002  A jury finds former FBI agent John Connolly guilty of racketeering and obstruction of justice.

16 Sep 2002  Former FBI agent John Harrison shoots himself and two coworkers in his office at the Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance building in New York.

9 Apr 2003    Former FBI agent James J. Smith is arrested for careless handling of government secrets around the Chinese double agent he was fucking.

15 May 2003  At the Barbary Coast casino in Las Vegas, FBI agent John T. Hanson III walks into the kitchen and fires two rounds into the walk-in freezer. Hanson later pays $12,517 in restitution to the casino and a $105 fine for discharging a weapon in public.

17 Jun 2003  Former FBI metallurgist Kathleen Lundy pleads guilty to falsifying evidence for a Kentucky murder trial.

17 Jul 2003    FBI translator Mario Castillo is arrested for making false statements, illegally accessing Bureau computer files, and personally profiting from the contents.

19 Sep 2003  Former FBI translator Mario Castillo pleads guilty to illegally accessing Bureau computer files and personally profiting from the contents.

9 Oct 2003    Former FBI agent H. Paul Rico is arrested at his Florida home for arranging a 1981 mob hit against business executive Roger Wheeler.

16 Oct 2003   FBI Director Robert Mueller publicly acknowledges that the identity of several of the 9-11 hijackers is in doubt.

13 Nov 2003  Justice Department inspector general Glenn Fine releases a report outlining instances of FBI managers perpetrating inappropriate sexual behavior and questionable racial and sexual comments, who generally received light reprimands.

12 Feb 2004  In a Ft. Worth, Texas courtroom, retired FBI agent John H. Conditt, Jr. receives 12 years for molesting a 6-year-old girl at least 10 times in 2002.

18 Feb 2004  Senator Charles Grassley releases a four-year-old report revealing that one in 1,000 FBI agents between 1986 and 1999 were fired for misconduct.

18 May 2004  In Washington, DC, former FBI crime lab scientist Jacqueline A. Blake pleads guilty to making false statements. In doing so, Blake admits having falsified more than a hundred reports regarding her DNA tests over a three-year period.

24 May 2004  Portland, Washington SAIC Robert Jordan apologizes for having detained Muslim attorney Brandon Mayfield for two weeks under the 1984 Material Witness Act, based on a fingerprint mismatch. “The FBI regrets the hardships that this has placed on Mr. Mayfield and his family.”

2 Jul 2004     Former FBI agent Eugene Harding pleads guilty to receiving stolen personal data from Social Security and IRS computer databases. Harding had been employed as a security consultant to some Las Vegas hotel resorts at the time.

11 Aug 2004  Former FBI employee Rosana Frederick is arrested in Brooklyn for allegedly scamming 11 immigrants out of $43,500. Frederick stands accused of offering to obtain green cards and U.S. citizenship for the alleged victims. Previously, Frederick had been convicted of extorting money from immigrants in December 1992, for which she received 18 months in prison.

 

The Table of Contents 

• Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 95
• As the Mueller Probe Heats Up, Donald Trump’s Lies Are Giving Way to the Truth
• ‘Mueller knows a lot’: Manafort and Cohen moves put Trump in line of fire
• A foreign intelligence evaluation of Donald Trump’s work with Moscow
• “State of insurrection” as fuel tax riots engulf central Paris
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

 

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 95

August 8, 2018

by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief

The Toronto Star, Canada

The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.

Last updated: Aug 8, 2018

• Jul 30, 2018

“Earlier this year, with Robert’s help, we passed Veterans Choice. That was the one I wanted so badly, that we all wanted so badly. This eluded us for 40 years? 50 years? I mean, it’s eluded us forever. Forever. If the veterans can’t get care, and the kind of care that they need at a VA facility, they have the right to go immediately and see a private doctor and we pay for it.”

Source: Speech at swearing-in of Robert Wilkie as Secretary of Veterans Affairs

in fact: The Choice program was originally passed and implemented under Obama. Trump’s new version has not yet come into force, and even when it does, veterans are unlikely to be allowed to see a private doctor “immediately.” At the Associated Press explained: “Under the newly expanded Choice program that will take at least a year to implement, veterans will still have to meet certain criteria before they can see a private physician. Those criteria will be set in part by proposed federal regulations that will be subject to public review. Currently, only veterans who endure waits of at least 30 days for an appointment at a VA facility are eligible to receive care from private doctors at government expense. A recent Government Accountability Report found that despite the Choice program’s guarantee of providing an appointment within 30 days, veterans waited an average of 51 days to 64 days.”

Trump has repeated this claim 8 times

“There’s nothing wrong with meeting. We met, as you know, with Chairman Kim. And it — you haven’t had a missile fired off in nine months.”

Source: Joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

in fact: “Nine months” is an exaggeration. North Korea’s last known missile test prior to this comment was on November 28, 2017, when it launched an intercontinental ballistic missile that landed in the Sea of Japan. That is just over eight months.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“But you had 10 regulations for every point, in some cases. It was ridiculous. It would take many years to get a highway or a road approved. We have that way down. We have it down to two years, and it will hopefully be down to one.”

Source: Joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

in fact: There is no current evidence that Trump has already succeeded in reducing the standard approval time frame for a highway or road to two years, although he says this is his intention. His Department of Transportation reported a median approval time of 3 years, 10 months in 2017.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“We’ve had record — we’ve had numbers that nobody believed possible, especially if you look at one particular fact that was not reported very much. Trade deficit — $52 billion reduction in the trade deficit for the quarter…I think nobody would have thought that would be possible so quickly: $52 billion reduction in the trade deficit for the quarter.”

Source: Joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

in fact: The U.S. trade deficit is actually higher so far in 2018 than it was at this point in 2017. (Earlier in July, for example, Trump’s Bureau of Economic Analysis issued a report, for May, that said: “Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $17.9 billion, or 7.9 per cent, from the same period in 2017. Exports increased $84.5 billion or 8.8 per cent. Imports increased $102.4 billion or 8.6 per cent.”) Trump was making a more unusual kind of comparison: he was pointing to a decline from the trade deficit in the first quarter of 2018 to the trade deficit in the second quarter of 2018. However, as FactCheck.org, the Washington Post and others have explained, he was doing even this inaccurately. The president was simply taking the raw numbers in the report — $902.4 billion for the first quarter, $849.9 billion for the second quarter — and subtracting the second-quarter number from the first, which gave a result of $52 billion. There are two problems here: these are not actually quarterly numbers; they are expressed on an annual basis. And they are not in today’s dollars; they are expressed in inflation-adjusted terms. To do an accurate version of Trump’s quarter-by-quarter comparison, experts told both outlets, you have to make sure you’re using the current-day version of the figures; divide them by four, for the four quarters; and then, only then, do the subtraction Trump did right away. When you do that, you get a $21.7 billion decline, not a $52 billion decline.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“The United States was treated very, very unfairly. Because we’re shouldering anywhere from 70 to 90 per cent of the cost of NATO. That’s not fair.”

Source: Joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

in fact: The U.S. is not paying anywhere near 90 per cent of the “cost of NATO,” and there is no valid way to measure NATO spending that results in such a finding. According to NATO’s 2018 annual report, U.S. defence spending represented 72 per cent of alliance members’ total defence spending in 2017. Of NATO’s own organizational budget, the U.S. contributes a much smaller agreed-upon percentage: 22 per cent.

Trump has repeated this claim 14 times

“And if you speak to Secretary General Stoltenberg, I think he’s the biggest fan of Trump, because he said, ‘We couldn’t collect money until President Trump came along.’ And he said, ‘Last year, we collected $44 billion, and this year the money is pouring in.'”

Source: Joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

in fact: NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg actually said the increase was $41 billion, not $44 billion, since Trump took office: “In fact, since President Trump took office, European allies and Canada have added an additional $41 billion to their defence spending.” Stoltenberg also did not say that the alliance “didn’t collect money until President Trump came along.” He said: “There is a new sense of urgency due to President Trump’s strong leadership on defence spending.”

“And NATO in particular — I went to NATO, and NATO was essentially going out of business, because people weren’t paying and it was going down, down, down. You just have to look at the line. I came along last year, and in a fairly nice tone, I said, you got to pay. And they paid $44 billion more. And this year, I said it in a little bit stronger tone, and they’re paying hundreds of billions of dollars more over the years.” And: “Great meeting with NATO. I just explained NATO. I just explained NATO. Hundreds of billions of dollars more money will be paid into NATO, the coffers of NATO.”

Source: Joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

in fact: There is no evidence that NATO countries agreed at this meeting to spend hundreds of billions more on their militaries. The countries merely agreed to a declaration in which they reiterated their 2014 commitment to spend 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence by 2024: “We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to all aspects of the Defence Investment Pledge agreed at the 2014 Wales Summit, and to submit credible national plans on its implementation, including the spending guidelines for 2024.” French President Emmanuel Macron explicitly rejected Trump’s claim about significant additional commitments: “The communique is clear. It reaffirms a commitment to 2 per cent in 2024. That is all,” he said.

Trump has repeated this claim 6 times

“And NATO in particular — I went to NATO, and NATO was essentially going out of business, because people weren’t paying and it was going down, down, down. You just have to look at the line. I came along last year, and in a fairly nice tone, I said, you got to pay. And they paid $44 billion more.”

Source: Joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

in fact: NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the increase was actually $41 billion, not $44 billion: “In fact, since President Trump took office, European allies and Canada have added an additional $41 billion to their defence spending.”

Trump has repeated this claim 6 times

“And NATO in particular — I went to NATO, and NATO was essentially going out of business, because people weren’t paying and it was going down, down, down. You just have to look at the line.”

Source: Joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

in fact: NATO spending was increasing, not decreasing, before Trump took office. Spending by non-U.S. members rose by 1.84 per cent in 2015 and 3.08 per cent in 2016, official NATO figures show. Clearly, the alliance was not “essentially going out of business.”

Trump has repeated this claim 6 times

“We have to end these horrible catch-and-release principles, where you catch somebody, you take their name, and you release them. You don’t even know who they are. And then they’re supposed to come back to a court case, where they want us to hire thousands of judges.”

Source: Joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

in fact: At the time Trump spoke, there was no mainstream proposal to hire thousands more immigration judges. Congress had allocated money for 484 immigration judges; fewer than 400 were actually in place. Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz had recently proposed to hire 375 more, while other Republican senators were proposing to hire 225 more.

Trump has repeated this claim 12 times

“A highly respected Federal judge today stated that the ‘Trump Administration gets great credit’ for reuniting illegal families.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump slightly altered this quote to put his own name in it. Judge Dana Sabraw actually said, “the government deserves great credit” for reuniting separated children and parents, without saying the words “Trump administration.” (Sabraw also criticized the government. The second part of the quote, according to U.S. news outlets: “The government is at fault for losing several hundred parents in the process, and that’s where we have to go next – identifying and finding those parents who have been removed without children or who are in the interior and not presently located so that they can be reunified.”)

“We must have Border Security, get rid of Chain, Lottery, Catch & Release Sanctuary Cities – go to Merit based Immigration. Protect ICE and Law Enforcement and, of course, keep building, but much faster, THE WALL!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Contrary to the clear suggestion in Trump’s phrase “keep building” here, construction on his border wall has not started. When he has made this claim in the past, Trump has appeared to be referring to a project in which a 2.25-mile stretch of existing wall in California is being replaced by a taller wall. That project was proposed in 2009, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Border Patrol spokesperson Jonathan Pacheco told reporters in March: “First and foremost, this isn’t Trump’s wall. This isn’t the infrastructure that Trump is trying to bring in. … This new wall replacement has absolutely nothing to do with the prototypes that were shown over in the San Diego area.” The $1.6 billion Congress allocated to border projects in 2018 is not for the type of giant concrete wall Trump has proposed: spending on that kind of wall is expressly prohibited in the legislation, and much of the congressional allocation is for replacement and reinforcement projects rather than new construction.

Trump has repeated this claim 20 times

• Jul 31, 2018

“Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump is right that there is no crime specifically called “collusion,” but legal experts have noted that the act of colluding with Russian interference in the election could be considered several kinds of crimes. Regardless, the claim that Clinton or Democrats more broadly colluded with Russia is simple nonsense: the word “collusion” — in common language, a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose” — just does not apply to Democrats’ Russia-related activities. The accusation is based on the fact that the British ex-spy who produced a research dossier on the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia, which was funded in part by Clinton’s campaign, used Russian sources in compiling his information. That does not come close to meeting the definition of “collusion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 22 times

“In December, I recognized Israel’s true capital, Jerusalem. And in about five months we opened already the American embassy in Jerusalem. And people had that scheduled for anywhere from five to ten years and you all know the story. We took an existing building. We played around with it. We renovated it. We fixed it up. We use Jerusalem stone, one of the finest stones actually in the world, Jerusalem stone. So, instead of spending $1 billion and the papers were right in front of me — ‘Sir, would you please approve this?’ ‘What is it?’ ‘This is for the embassy in Israel, American, sir.’ I said, ‘How much?’ ‘$1 billion, sir.’ ‘$1 billion!’ I immediately called our great ambassador to Israel, David Friedman — very successful man, great lawyer, one of the most successful lawyers in the country before he decided to do what he’s doing. I said, ‘David, they want us to pay a billion dollars for the embassy. I don’t want to pay a billion dollars.’ I said, ‘Study it — do you have any buildings that we own?’ We own so much we don’t even know what the hell we own. ‘Find some building in a great location. Call me back.’ Called me back two days later. He said, ‘Mr. President, sir, we own the best site in Jerusalem. It’s big. It’s beautiful and it’s got a building on it. I can take that building and renovate it. I can do it for $140,000.’ I said, ‘David, how good is the site?’ ‘We could never buy a better site.’ They were willing to spend tens of millions for a site. They wanted to buy a site which was so bad. It was totally inferior to what we already had. Don’t forget, we get there first, right? You know, we have good sites. And I said, ‘David, do me a favor, don’t make it $140,000. Sounds too cheap. Make it like $400,000. That’s okay too, David.’ So we saved almost a billion dollars. I could tell you these stories all day long, airplane purchases. I could tell you all day long. And we started working — and for $400,000, we actually have a very beautiful American Embassy in Jerusalem — really beautiful. Now, that’s one I guarantee no other president is doing.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: Trump has told various versions of this story; in some versions, he has signed his first name, Donald, on the embassy documents, only to have an epiphany about the supposed $1 billion cost before deciding to sign the Trump. Whether or not any version is even remotely true, the renovations required by the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem will cost far more than either $140,000 or $400,000. ABC News reported in July: “Documents filed with the official database of federal spending show that the State Department awarded the Maryland-based company Desbuild Limak D&K a contract for $21.2 million to design and build an ‘addition and compound security upgrades’ at the embassy. These updates will be made to the former consular building in Jerusalem — the embassy’s temporary location.” The ABC article continued: “A State Department official told ABC News today that President Trump’s estimates only factored in that first phase of modifications to the former consular building, not this second round of renovation.”

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“I also withdrew the United States from the horrible, one-sided, $150 billion was paid — $1.8 billion in cash — the Iran nuclear deal, it’s a horror show.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: The “$150 billion” figure has no basis. Experts said Iran had about $100 billion in worldwide assets at the time; after the nuclear deal unfroze Iranian assets, Iran was able to access a percentage of that $100 billion, but not all of it. PolitiFact reported: “The actual amount available to Iran is about $60 billion, estimates Garbis Iradian, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew pinned it at $56 billion, while Iranian officials say $35 billion, according to Richard Nephew, an expert on economic sanctions at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.”

Trump has repeated this claim 19 times

“Really important for those who love our military, we have secured a record $700 billion for our military with another $716 billion next year all approved.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: Neither of these military spending bills is a record, even if you ignore inflation. As the New York Times noted, Obama signed a $725 billion version of the same bill in 2011.

Trump has repeated this claim 11 times

“Over $300 billion poured back into the United States in the first quarter, and we expect to be taking back because of our new tax cut and reform plan that passed bigger than anything ever in our country. We expect to be taking back from overseas over $4 trillion. That’s a lot of money — could never have come back before.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: The first figure is correct: according to the U.S. government, corporations repatriated more than $300 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2018. The second figure, however, is incorrect. Four experts contacted by the Star said they were not aware of any estimate as high as $4 trillion for the amount of corporate profits not repatriated from overseas. The U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation released an estimate of $2.6 trillion overseas in August 2016, and experts said they were not aware of a massive jump in the following two years. (An October 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) pegged the number at $2.6 trillion, while Goldman Sachs pegged it at $3.1 trillion the same month.) “Until there is some legitimate report showing otherwise, my guess continues to be that President Trump is arbitrarily inflating” the accurate number, ITEP senior policy analyst Richard Phillips said in July 2018. “I haven’t seen any reliable estimate that the number is that high,” said Edward Kleinbard, former chief of staff for the U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation and now a chair at the University of Southern California’s law school.

Trump has repeated this claim 32 times

“And by the way, the evangelicals and Paula White, Pastor Paula White, the evangelicals have been so amazing to us. They came out and they voted 84 per cent and doubled and tripled the numbers that ever voted in an election before.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: Though we do not know exactly how many evangelical Christians turned out in the 2016 election, there is no basis for the claim that they “doubled and tripled the numbers that ever voted in an election before.” Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, said in an email: “It was certainly a record, at least in recent elections, and turnout was higher than usual. But the double or triple is almost certainly incorrect.” (Trump is also wrong if he was suggesting he received double and triple the white evangelical support of previous Republican candidates. Trende noted: “In 2012, Romney received 78% among white evangelicals, McCain received 74%, and George W. Bush in 2004 received 78%. So, no, not double or triple previous record.”)

“And by the way, the evangelicals and Paula White, Pastor Paula White, the evangelicals have been so amazing to us. They came out and they voted 84 per cent…”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: Trump received 81 per cent of the white evangelical Christian vote, according to 2016 exit polls — not 84 per cent, and not 80-plus per cent of the entire evangelical vote. As Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, noted in an email: “We should be careful to note the exit numbers are actually among *white* evangelicals. There are plenty of nonwhite evangelicals, and the numbers are probably different there.”

“Remember I said it’s awfully early to be thinking this, but I always think it, remember the attack on Merry Christmas, they’re not attacking it anymore. Everyone is happy to say Merry Christmas, right? Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. That was under siege. You have these big department stores they say, ‘Happy Holidays.’ I say, ‘Where is the Merry Christmas?’ Now they’re all putting up Merry Christmas again and that’s because — only because of our campaign.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: There is no evidence that big department stores and other businesses that said Happy Holidays before Trump’s presidency are now saying Merry Christmas. Even Trump’s own family members continue to say “Happy Holidays”: daughter and aide Ivanka Trump and son Eric Trump both used that phrase instead of “Merry Christmas” on Twitter in December 2017.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“You know, if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID. You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture. In this country, the only time you don’t need it in many cases is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman, it’s crazy, it’s crazy.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: Americans do not need photo identification to buy groceries or to buy most other products.

“Now a lot of people don’t know it but we’ve already started the wall. We got $1.6 billion and we’ve started large portions of the wall…”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: Construction on Trump’s border wall has not started. When he has made this claim in the past, Trump has appeared to be referring to a project in which a 2.25-mile stretch of existing wall in California is being replaced by a taller wall. That project was proposed in 2009, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Border Patrol spokesperson Jonathan Pacheco told reporters in March: “First and foremost, this isn’t Trump’s wall. This isn’t the infrastructure that Trump is trying to bring in. … This new wall replacement has absolutely nothing to do with the prototypes that were shown over in the San Diego area.” The $1.6 billion Congress allocated to border projects in 2018 is not for the type of giant concrete wall Trump has proposed: spending on that kind of wall is expressly prohibited in the legislation, and much of the congressional allocation is for replacement and reinforcement projects rather than new construction.

Trump has repeated this claim 20 times

“Their new platform, what they want to do — the Democrat Party, they want to abolish ICE. So in other words, they want to let MS-13 rule our country.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: This is an exaggeration. There is new Democratic momentum behind the movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but that is not the position of “the Democrat Party” as a whole. While a smattering of Democratic House members and two prominent senators, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren, have joined the call for abolition at the time Trump spoke, the party’s leadership remains opposed to the proposal. Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters: “Look, ICE does some functions that are very much needed. “Reform ICE? Yes. That’s what I think we should do. It needs reform.” Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi, through a spokesperson, has called for a “drastic overhaul of its immigration functions,” but has not endorsed abolition.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“They just came out with a poll — did you hear? The most popular person in the history of the Republican Party is Trump. Can you believe this? So I said, ‘Does that include Honest Abe Lincoln?’ You know, he was pretty good, right?…One of these guys, when that poll came out — most popular — and it was in the 90s.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: This ranking does not include Abraham Lincoln; there was no scientific opinion polling when Lincoln was in office in the 1860s. Polls show that Trump is more popular with Republican voters at this point in his presidency than almost all previous Republican presidents who served in the era of polling, but not all of them: Trump’s 90 per cent approval among Republicans in Gallup polling in June is behind George W. Bush’s 95 per cent approval among Republicans at that point in Bush’s first term.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“Of course, if the fake news did a poll, they’re called suppression polls. You know, polls are fake, just like everything else. If the fake news did a poll, it would show that I’m only getting 25 per cent with the 401K people, even though they’re up 44 per cent.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: There is no evidence that any pollster has manipulated their numbers to suppress Trump’s vote.

Trump has repeated this claim 4 times

“U.S. Steel just announced that they’re building six new steel mills. And that number’s soon going to be lifted, but I’m not allowed to say that, so I won’t.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: U.S. Steel has not announced that it is building six new mills, though Trump has made this false claim for a month and a half. At the time Trump spoke, U.S. Steel had only announced a major development at one facility since he introduced his steel tariffs: it said it was restarting two shuttered blast furnaces at its plant in Granite City, Illinois. Chuck Bradford, an industry analyst who follows U.S. Steel, said he was “not aware” of the company opening any other facilities. U.S. Steel told the Washington Post: “To answer your question, we post all of our major operational announcements to our website and report them on earnings calls. Our most recent one pertained to our Granite City ‘A’ blast furnace restart.”

Trump has repeated this claim 13 times

“American steel mills are back open for business, we are starting to set new records and nobody believed it could happen this quickly.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: Trump was vague, but steel production and steel employment are not setting any new records industry experts are aware of. Though some mills have reopened in the Trump era and though some companies have announced new mills, U.S. production remains well below the levels of the 1970s and early 1980s. ‘”To call it record numbers…I’m not so sure that’ a valid statement to make, really,” said Chris Plummer, managing director of industry consulting and research firm Metal Strategies.

“And I have tremendous respect for President Xi of China. But this has been too many years of abuse, $500 billion a year — $500 billion.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data. The deficit was $337 billion in 2017, $375 billion if you only count trade in goods.

Trump has repeated this claim 51 times

“If you go back to Election Day and then move back five years, so five years before Election Day, soybeans dropped 50 per cent in price.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: We’ve let some of Trump’s previous claims about an Obama-era drop in soybean prices slide, but in this case he is inaccurately describing what happened between two specific dates. Between Nov. 8, 2011, five years before election day, and Nov. 8, 2016, soybean prices dropped 16 per cent, from about $12 per bushel to about $10 per bushel, according to historical data from Markets Insider and from Macrotrends.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“Just last week, it was announced that the U.S. economy grew at 4.1 percent last quarter. It was a number that everybody said was not reachable. And I would never want to say it during the campaign, even though I believed it. I believed it, because they would not have given us the break. Fake news, fake news.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: Trump repeatedly promised growth of 4 per cent and higher during his campaign. His campaign’s “Contract with the American Voter” said he had “an economic plan designed to grow the economy 4% per year.” In 2015, the year he launched his campaign, he said, “”We’re looking at a 3 per cent, but we think it could be 5, it could even be 6. We’re going to have growth that will be tremendous.”

“We won every farm state, you’re going to see that middle of that map — wasn’t even the middle, it was about everything but a little corners of each side. But you have to see, that is all red, Republican red, beautiful, Republican red.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: The definition of “farm state” is subjective, but Trump did not win all of the top 10 states for agricultural revenue, nor all of the top 10 states for number of farms. Three of the states on both lists — California (the state that generates the most agricultural revenue), Illinois and Minnesota — went for Clinton.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“Sorry about this, women, but the employment rate has reached the lowest level in only 65 years. It’ll be history soon. It’ll be. It’ll be history soon. Give us about two more weeks.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: This was no longer true at the time Trump spoke. It was true as of the previous month: the women’s unemployment rate for May, reported in June, was 3.6 per cent, the same as in 1953, 65 years prior. But it rose to 4 per cent in June, which was merely the lowest since 2017 — or, if you’re only counting pre-Trump years, the lowest since 2000, 18 years ago.

Trump has repeated this claim 14 times

“The Asian unemployment rate has reached the lowest level in history.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: The most recent Asian-American unemployment rate at the time Trump spoke, for June, was 3.2 per cent. This was higher than the rate in Obama’s last two full months in office: 3 per cent in November 2016 and 2.8 per cent in December 2016. The Asian-American unemployment rate was also lower than 3.2 per cent in multiple months of George W. Bush’s second term.

Trump has repeated this claim 9 times

 

“And by the way, outside, if you want to go, we set up, for the first time, a tremendous movie screen, because we have thousands and thousands of people outside that couldn’t get in. So we have a big screen and big loudspeakers, and I hope you’re all happy out there.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: There was no screen at all set up outside this Trump rally in Tampa, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Various news reports put the number of people who stood outside during the rally as “hundreds,” though it is possible that several thousand were initially turned away at the door.

“Just last week, it was announced that the U.S. economy grew at 4.1 per cent last quarter. It was a number that everybody said was not reachable.”

Source: Campaign rally in Tampa, Florida

in fact: While there was widespread skepticism that Trump could achieve the 4 per cent annual growth he promised, it is false that everybody said 4 per cent (or 4.1 per cent) growth in a single quarter was “not reachable.” As CNBC’s John Harwood noted, there were four quarters of stronger growth in the Obama era: 5.1 per cent in the second quarter of 2014, 4.9 per cent in the third quarter of 2014, 4.7 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2011, 4.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“That’s like, with the vets — we signed Choice, and we did something that nobody thought. That’s when you stand in line for weeks and weeks and weeks trying to see a doctor, and you can’t; they’re just not there. And you’re able to go outside — immediately go outside — to a private doctor. And you get it done, and we pay for the vets’ bill.”

Source: Remarks on workforce development in Tampa, Florida

in fact: The Choice program was originally passed and implemented under Obama. Trump’s new version has not yet come into force, and even when it does, veterans are unlikely to be allowed to see a private doctor “immediately.” At the Associated Press explained: “Under the newly expanded Choice program that will take at least a year to implement, veterans will still have to meet certain criteria before they can see a private physician. Those criteria will be set in part by proposed federal regulations that will be subject to public review. Currently, only veterans who endure waits of at least 30 days for an appointment at a VA facility are eligible to receive care from private doctors at government expense. A recent Government Accountability Report found that despite the Choice program’s guarantee of providing an appointment within 30 days, veterans waited an average of 51 days to 64 days.”

Trump has repeated this claim 8 times

“Unemployment recently fell to the lowest level in a half a century.”

Source: Remarks on workforce development in Tampa, Florida

in fact: This claim was more accurate a month prior: the 3.8 per cent unemployment rate for May, announced in June, had not been beaten since 1969, nearly 50 years prior. (It had been matched in 2000, 18 years prior.) But the rate at the time Trump spoke, the June rate announced in July, was 4.0 per cent, was beaten multiple months in 2000.

“And very importantly, a number that people aren’t talking about, because most people don’t quite get it, but we had a $52 billion trade deficit reduction — which, people, is — you know, I will tell you, that’s a lot. That’s for the quarter.”

Source: Remarks on workforce development in Tampa, Florida

in fact: The U.S. trade deficit is actually higher so far in 2018 than it was at this point in 2017. (Earlier in July, for example, Trump’s Bureau of Economic Analysis issued a report, for May, that said: “Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $17.9 billion, or 7.9 per cent, from the same period in 2017. Exports increased $84.5 billion or 8.8 per cent. Imports increased $102.4 billion or 8.6 per cent.”) Trump was making a more unusual kind of comparison: he was pointing to a decline from the trade deficit in the first quarter of 2018 to the trade deficit in the second quarter of 2018. However, as FactCheck.org, the Washington Post and others have explained, he was doing even this inaccurately. The president was simply taking the raw numbers in the report — $902.4 billion for the first quarter, $849.9 billion for the second quarter — and subtracting the second-quarter number from the first, which gave a result of $52 billion. There are two problems here: these are not actually quarterly numbers; they are expressed on an annual basis. And they are not in today’s dollars; they are expressed in inflation-adjusted terms. To do an accurate version of Trump’s quarter-by-quarter comparison, experts told both outlets, you have to make sure you’re using the current-day version of the figures; divide them by four, for the four quarters; and then, only then, do the subtraction Trump did right away. When you do that, you get a $21.7 billion decline, not a $52 billion decline.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

 

As the Mueller Probe Heats Up, Donald Trump’s Lies Are Giving Way to the Truth

November 30, 2018

by James Risen

The Intercept

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is closing in on Donald Trump, and as one shoe after another drops in the Trump-Russia investigation, the pressure sometimes prompts the president to inadvertently blurt out the truth. Or at least as close to the truth as a serial liar like Trump can get.

On Thursday, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty in federal court to lying to Congress about a deal to build a Trump-branded skyscraper in Moscow. Most notably, he admitted that he had misled lawmakers when he told them that discussions about the project had ended by January 2016 when, in fact, the project was still under active consideration by Trump and his business organization just as the Republican Party was about to nominate Trump as its presidential candidate in the summer of 2016.

Cohen said that he lied in order to help Trump avoid the likely political fallout from the disclosure that the candidate was still trying to cut a business deal with people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin just as he clinched the Republican nomination.

Cohen’s latest admissions, including that he talked to Trump about the proposed deal more frequently than he had previously acknowledged and discussed it with others in Trump’s family, are very significant because they shed new light on the relationship between Trump and Russia during the height of the presidential campaign.

Cohen now admits that Trump Moscow was still being considered as late as June 2016, the same month that the infamous Trump Tower meeting occurred in New York. During that meeting, Trump’s oldest son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, then his campaign chair, met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others, including Rob Goldstone, a publicist for Emin Agalarov, a Russian singer and son of Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire with close ties to Putin. Aras Agalarov had hosted Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow at a concert hall he owned; he had also been involved in discussions with Trump about building the skyscraper in Moscow. During the Trump Tower meeting, Veselnitskaya claimed to have derogatory material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Faced with Cohen’s admissions in court on Thursday, Trump at first tried to bully his way out of the corner by saying that Cohen was a “weak person and not a very smart person.” But he quickly switched gears and effectively confirmed what Cohen had said. “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”

Trump’s comments show the coarse, cynical approach he takes toward public service. But more ominously for him, they also reveal that he had much deeper connections to Russia in the midst of the campaign than he has ever previously acknowledged. It suggests that Trump will lie about his Russian connections until he realizes he can no longer get away with it, and then will quite casually admit that he has been lying all along.

Cohen isn’t Trump’s only problem. In fact, in the weeks since the midterm elections, a series of new disclosures has suggested that the Trump-Russia investigation is intensifying. And one sure sign that the president is worried about Mueller’s probe is the increased frequency with which Trump is now publicly attacking Mueller.

Until Thursday, in fact, it seemed that Trump’s biggest post-election nightmare was Paul Manafort.

On Monday, Mueller’s team said that Manafort has been lying to them in violation of a plea agreement he had reached with the prosecutors. Mueller’s team now wants a federal judge overseeing the case to set a sentencing date for Manafort, at which prosecutors say they will detail “the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies.” (Manafort has already been convicted of eight counts of bank and tax fraud, so presumably the “crimes and lies” to which Mueller’s team is referring are in addition to those we already know about.)

Mueller’s get-tough approach suggests that he thinks Manafort is still withholding critical information on the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia. Meanwhile, Manafort’s previous life as a longtime consultant to the pro-Russian leader of the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his financial ties to a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, have raised questions about whether he acted as an intermediary between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

In addition to Cohen and Manafort, the role of the incendiary Roger Stone has come under further scrutiny. There is new evidence, including in a draft court document, that Mueller is continuing to probe whether Stone served as an intermediary in 2016 between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign. Russian intelligence operatives hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee and stole emails that were later released by WikiLeaks and proved highly damaging to Clinton. The Mueller investigation has also raised questions about whether conservative author Jerome Corsi had warned Stone ahead of time that WikiLeaks planned to release materials that would hurt Clinton’s campaign. Corsi said on Monday that he has rejected a plea agreement with Mueller.

To top it off, George Papadopoulos, the onetime Trump campaign foreign policy aide, finally reported to prison this week. He had pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with Mueller in exchange for a very light sentence of just two weeks in prison. He had lied to investigators about his contacts with Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious professor who had told Papadopoulos that the Russians had thousands of emails with derogatory information about Clinton well before their existence was publicly known.

Given all this, it’s fair to say that the thrashing the Republicans took in the midterm elections wasn’t the worst thing that has happened to Donald Trump this month.

 

‘Mueller knows a lot’: Manafort and Cohen moves put Trump in line of fire

The striking subtext of the ‘bombshell’ week was the realization of just how much evidence the special counsel has collected

December 1, 2018

by Tom McCarthy

The Guardian

Special counsel Robert Mueller marked a return to an “active” public phase in the Russia investigation this week, with a rapid-fire series of court filings and document releases that followed a quiet period around the midterm elections and the Thanksgiving holiday

But the striking subtext of the week’s headline developments – which included the disintegration of a plea deal with former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and the unveiling of a new deal with former top aide Michael Cohen – was the realization of just how much evidence Mueller has collected about activity inside the Trump Organization and presidential campaign.

“A lot of people are trying to give false information to the American public and to the investigation, and the Mueller team is not being derailed,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former prosecutor on the international criminal court. “They are uncovering false statement after false statement, because they are able to prove what actually happened.

“That strikes me as the unifying theme, that the Mueller team knows a lot.”

Andy Wright, a law professor and founding editor of the Just Security blog, called it a “bombshell” week.

“In an investigation full of blockbuster surprises, this week the tempo and the gravity of what’s been happening outstrips anything we’ve seen so far,” he said. “At least rivals it, when we’re talking about the week that Manafort got indicted.

“Presumably there are going to be some more indictments in short order.”

Trump appeared to be feeling the heat. As he left Washington on Thursday for the G20 summit in Argentina, the president yelled denials over the roar of helicopter rotors. He then abruptly canceled meetings with Russian president Vladimir Putin and other world leaders. Before dawn on Friday, Trump tweeted that he had “lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia” during the campaign but it was all “very legal & very cool”.

Congress may yet have the opportunity to judge whether Trump’s Russia ties were wholly legal. In a couple of years, voters might have the opportunity to register a verdict on whether they were cool.

Mueller, meanwhile, has advanced towards filling in the blanks in the story of Trump campaign contacts with Russian operatives and the significance of those contacts.

One major document to emerge was a draft statement of offense against conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, whom Mueller accused of having acted as a link between Trump adviser Roger Stone and WikiLeaks, which published emails stolen by Russia in a way seemingly timed to sway the election.

Corsi has denied contacting WikiLeaks on behalf of Stone, but Mueller’s apparent readiness to charge the case indicated that the special counsel had gained a good window on the flow of information between Trump associates and entities tied to election tampering, analysts said.

“I think it remains to be seen what the truth is regarding co-ordination with WikiLeaks,” said Barb McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former US attorney. “But if the truth could be found, I think Robert Mueller will find it, and President Trump could find himself in trouble either related to the alleged collusion or obstruction to impede the investigation.”

In retracting Manafort’s plea deal, Mueller signaled an equally robust knowledge of the former campaign chairman’s ties in the former Soviet bloc, accusing Manafort of lying to investigators when he was supposed to be co-operating. Mueller’s team said a “detailed” submission “that sets forth the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies” would be filed next Friday.

“There’s just a lot of other information that’s going to come tumbling out here that we know of, over the next weeks and months,” said Wright.

‘It does feel like we are moving to the end’Trump and his allies have tried to downplay the false statements charges, saying there was no underlying crime. Republican senator Lindsey Graham called the new guilty plea by Cohen “a process crime”.

“That really misses the point,” said Whiting, “because first of all, we’re not talking about ordinary day-to-day citizens who are caught up in making false statements: we’re talking about public officials who are making false statements to other branches of the government and to the American public, so in themselves these are pretty serious charges.

Mueller also signaled that he has evidence of communications between the Trump Organization and campaign and the Kremlin, by persuading Cohen to admit on Thursday to lying to Congress about plans for a tower in Moscow. That evidence could be bad for Trump, many analysts pointed out, if the president’s written statements on the subject, submitted to Mueller earlier in November, were less than truthful.

“Second, it’s a common tactic in an investigation [to prosecute false statements]. Third, it underscores how much the Mueller team knows and how inept the lies are – how ineffective the lies are.”

That sense might be sinking in for Donald Trump Jr, who last year made several statements to a Senate committee that have been flagged as possible lies, including denying awareness that Cohen contacted the Kremlin to negotiate the Moscow deal. It was revealed on Thursday that Cohen had “briefed family members of [Trump] within the company about the [Moscow] project”.

“If you’re somebody close to Trump and you’ve made statements to the Congress or you’ve made statements to the investigation and you see the Cohen information and you realize how much Mueller knows, that’s going to make you think twice,” Whiting said. “Should I start co-operating with the investigation?”

Last month, citing an unnamed friend, Politico reported that Trump Jr believes he could be indicted.

“It does feel like we are moving to the end of the investigation, because we are now getting to the heart of the matter,” said McQuade.

“There aren’t that many people higher in the organization left to be charged. And so that means they must be focusing on people like Roger Stone, maybe Trump Jr, maybe Trump himself.”

 

A foreign intelligence evaluation of Donald Trump’s work with Moscow

December 2, 2018

by Christian Jürs

Any competent trial lawyer will explain that there are two types of evidence: direct and circumstantial. And he will also explain that of the two, circumstantial is by far the strongest and most convincing.

There is a growing and very strong belief, not only in official Washington’s investigative agencies and in foreign capitals as well that American President Donald Trump is a bought and paid for asset of Vladimir Putin and the Russian SVR.

That Trump has been transparently corrupt for many years is not a state secret and would hardly be a revelation to Russia.

Their intelligence system is probably the world’s most efficient and the Russians are well-known to exploit character weaknesses in potential targets.

Herewith is an overview of Donald Trump and his background taken and translated from a German intelligence report. This came, with copies of official stamps and all, from a very reliable German newspaper official.

S T R E N G   G E H E I M

Hintergrundbericht über den amerikanischen Präsidenten Donald T R U M P

– NICHT STEMPELN –

– NICHT UNTERZEICHNEN –

– NICHT BESCHRIFTEN –

– NICHT MARKIEREN –

Translation from the German

• Trump is not an honest man by any stretch of imagination. He has a long record of bankruptcies, business failures, very dubious business practices and extraordinarily negative behavior to staff and other employees. To catalogue the full sweep of a flood of patently dishonest business allegations against Donald Trump would require thousands of words and lump together the trivial, the blatently criminal with the truly scandalous.
• Certainly, the psychological personal profile of Donald Trump could hardly be better tailored to being easily turned by a hostile intelligence agency.
• The concept of Trump taking bribes from the Russians (or the PRC) is completely understandable if one applies the concept of Occam’s Razor to the tumult and disruption he is deliberately causing both domestically and in foreign areas.
• Russian intelligence agencies are known to have highly compromising and often bizarre sexual material on him going back more than 30 years and they have used Trump and his elaborate network of business entites as a funnel for laundering dirty money from the Russian mafia and from post-Soviet oligarchs. The Russians are well-known tohave more than enough compromising material on Trump to bend him to their will.
• Trump has constantly been engaged in bribings and manipulations and does this through second parties such as Cohen his former lawyer or Manafort, his recently convicted campaign manager during the election.
• Following Mr.Trump’s bankruptcies in the 1990s he borrowed very large sums of operating capital from Russian sources. He also obtained large loans from the Deutsche Bank (over 640 million dollars)
• Other big banks, domestic and foreign, have long refused to lend to him, coining the term “the Donald risk” to refer to his repeated bankruptcies and failures to repay loans. However, Deutsche Bank, whose real-estate division continued to lend him hundreds of millions of dollars to finance his projects, seemed to have a greater risk appetite. There is a solid connection and on-going business between this bank and two Russian-based banks.
• 1,300 Trump condominiums have been sold to Russian-connected buyers. Even a cheap Trump condo costs over a million dollars, so there over 1,300 condos that meet all the criteria for what is normally called money laundering. Russian intelligence is using Trump real estate to launder money
• In 2008 his son, Donald Trump Jr., said that Russia was an important source of money for the Trump businesses.
• Trump and his entourage have made a significant number of trips to Russia in the past (a list of these along with Russian personages he was in contact with can easily be found on Google), seeking financing and permission to build luxury hotels in that country
• Russian intelligence owns Wikileaks entirely and released the damning, and authentic, ‘Podesta papers’ concurrent with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in coordinated agreement with the Trump people. This did serious damage to her campaign and was a major contributory factor to her narrow defeat and Trump’s election to the presidency.
• Trump’s actions, as President, are deliberate efforts to alienate both the putative allies of the US such as Germany, France, and Canada and, to a lesser degree, Mexico. Also, the tariffs suggested by Trump against China would result in retaliation by that country and many retail outlets in the United States would be forced to close because they would be unable to purchase Chinese-made goods, the bulk of their stock.
• Trump has deliberately launched pointless, and destructive, attacks against Mexican and Muslim immigrants, as well as Canadian, Chinese and German imports. All this has done is to create a highly negative image of his persona primarily and secondarily, the global image of the United States. This is only to the benefit of Putin’s Russia, not the United States.
• Trump’s tariffs, and threats of tariffs, have engendered counter-tariffs that will, when implemented, create serious economic problems for American businessmen and, eventually, the American public.
• Trump’s politically foolish but calculated support of the Israeli far right has done, and is doing, serious damage to the US image in the Middle East. It should be noted that Russian influence in the Shiite areas of the Middle East, is growing. Also note that Iran, and parts of Iraq, both Shiite, have extensive oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni state, once America’s primary source of badly-need oil, is running dry. Further, his aggressive support of Israel is resulting in increasing antisemitism in the United States.
• The Middle East areas where Russia now has growing influence, have oil and if Russia sets itself up as major oil merchandising source, this will give them tremendous economic leverage vis a vis the United States which is the world’s largest consumer of oil and its by-products.
• By alienating America’s allies and disrupting that country’s social structure, Trump benefits only Russia and its interests.
• When he is caught at this, and it is common knowledge that the FBI was deeply interested in his Russian connections long before he ran for President, either the American public will have to deal with another Dallas or Trump will suffer a fatal heart attack. Vice-President Pence, a Christian fanatic, would then have to be told to mind his manners or suffer similar terminal problems.
• Trump is very well aware of the ongoing and growing official investigation into his denied but completely genuine Russian connections and is certainly also well aware of what they can find, and probably have already uncovered, so he initially fired the head of the FBI and even now, according to a very reliable source, is determined to replace the FBI with the cooperative CIA (their former head, Pompeo, is now Secretary of State) as the sole foreign and domestic intelligence agency. He, and his Russian intelligence handlers, want to nip any FBI revelations in the bud so that Trump can continue on his course of castrating the United States as a global power to the benefit of Putin’s Russia.
• There was a full page ad that he took out in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post in 1988, putting forth foreign policy points that could have been dictated by Vladimir Putin. It was an assault against NATO, and the European Union, both anathema to Russia
• In 2015, Western European intelligence agencies in France and Germany began picking up solid evidence of communications between the Russian government and people in Donald Trump’s orbit. In April 2016, one of the Baltic States shared with then–CIA director John Brennan an audio recording of Russians discussing funneling money to the Trump campaign. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of the U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief Brennan on intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russia.
• During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly was known to be bugged
• Throughout his career, Trump has always felt comfortable operating at or beyond the ethical boundaries that constrain typical businesses. In the 1980s, he worked with La Cosa Nostra, which controlled the New York cement trade, and later employed Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, both of whom have links to the Russian Mafia. Trump habitually refused to pay his counter parties, and if the people he burned (or any journalists) got in his way, he bullied them with threats. He also used LLCs which he created for the purpose of swindling firm who, for example, laid new carpet in one of his hotels. The vendor billed the LLC which promptly went bankrupt. This has been a favorite gambit of Trump.
• Trump continually acts like a man with a great deal to hide: declining to testify to anything under oath, dangling Presidential pardons to keep potential witnesses and former employees from incriminating him, publicly chastising his attorney general for not quashing the whole Russian investigation, and endorsing Russia’s claims that it had nothing to do with the election. (“Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” he tweeted last month, contradicting the conclusion of every U.S. intelligence and counter-intelligence agency.) Trump’s behavior toward Russia looks exactly like that of an accessory after the fact.
• When, and not if, it becomes public knowledge that the President of the US is an agent of a foreign power, it would be the worst scandal in American history, far surpassing Tea Pot Dome or Watergate.
• In conclusion, it is clearly obvious that President Trump was jobbed into his office with the full cooperation of Russian intelligence and that he is currently engaged in efforts to carry out their political global programs which, if allowed to continue, will wreak economic and political havoc on the American government, business community and public.
• And consider that the United States has been harassing Vladimir Putin’s Russia economically and causing considerable problems for that country. Mr. Putin’s reactive countermeasures aganst the United States are certainly in response to these actions and in the long view, far more effective than sanctions and hysterical threats.

 

S T R E N G   G E H E I M

 

“State of insurrection” as fuel tax riots engulf central Paris

November 30, 2018

by Leigh Thomas and Emmanuel Jarry

Reuters

PARIS (Reuters) – Rioters ran amok across central Paris on Saturday, torching cars and buildings, looting shops, smashing windows and clashing with police in the worst unrest in more than a decade, posing a dire challenge to Emmanuel Macron’s presidency.

The authorities were caught off guard by the escalation in violence after two weeks of nationwide protests against fuel taxes and living costs, known as the “yellow vest” movement after fluorescent jackets kept in all vehicles in France.

In Paris, police said they had arrested almost 300 people while 110 were injured, including 20 members of the security forces. Police fired stun grenades, tear gas and water cannon at protesters at the top of the Champs-Elysees boulevard, at the Tuilleries Garden near the Louvre museum and other sites.

In some areas there was virtually no police presence at all, as groups of masked men roamed in the shadows of the capital’s fabled landmarks and through its fanciest shopping districts, smashing the windows of designer boutiques.

Macron, in Argentina for a G20 summit, said he would convene ministers to discuss the crisis upon his return on Sunday. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe canceled a trip to Poland.

“We are in a state of insurrection, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Jeanne d’Hauteserre, the mayor of Paris’ 8th district, near the Arc de Triomphe.

The popular rebellion erupted out of nowhere on Nov. 17 and has spread quickly via social media, with protesters blocking roads across France and impeding access to shopping malls, factories and some fuel depots.

On Saturday, some targeted the Arc de Triomphe, chanting “Macron Resign” and scrawling on the facade of the towering 19th-century arch: “The yellow vests will triumph.”

Addressing a news conference in Buenos Aires, Macron said no cause justified the looting of stores, attacks on the security forces or torching of property. The violence, he said, had nothing to do with the peaceful expression of legitimate grievances.

“I will always respect differences. I will always listen to opposition, but I will never accept violence,” Macron said.

Protesters smashed the windows of a newly opened flagship Apple Store (AAPL.O) and luxury boutiques of Chanel and Dior, where they daubed the slogan “Merry Mayhem” on a wooden board.

Close to the Place Vendome, Christmas trees decorating the streets were upended, piled in the middle of an avenue and set ablaze, prompting chanting from scores of protesters.

Order appeared to have been restored late in the evening, although small groups were still at odds with police near the Champs Elysees.

Authorities said violent far-right and far-left groups had infiltrated the yellow vests movement. Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said most of those arrested were regular protesters who had been egged on by the fringe groups.

The protests began as a backlash against Macron’s fuel tax hikes, but have tapped into a vein of deep dissatisfaction felt towards the 40-year-old’s economic reforms, which many voters feel favor the wealthy and big business.

Unrest erupted in several towns and cities across France, from Charleville Mezieres in the northeast to Marseille in the south. In the Riviera city of Nice trucks blocked access to the airport, and in the central town of Puy-en-Velay the police headquarters was set on fire.

The protests are taking a toll on the economy. Parts of central Paris that should have been packed with tourists and Christmas shoppers resembled battle zones, as smoke and tear gas hung in the air and debris littered the ground. Hotels and department stores in the capital stand to lose millions, and shelves have run empty in some supermarkets.

MACRON STANDS FIRM

The protests have caught Macron off-guard just as he was trying to counter a fall in his popularity rating to 20 percent. His unyielding response has exposed him to charges of being out of touch with ordinary people, particularly in rural villages and the provincial hinterlands.

Some peaceful protesters held up a slogan reading, “Macron, stop treating us like idiots!”

Macron on Tuesday said he understood the anger of voters outside France’s big cities over the squeeze fuel prices have put on households. But he insisted he would not be bounced into changing policy by “thugs”.

Despite the unrest that has accompanied the protests, the “yellow vests” have widespread public support, even in cities.

“I am totally behind the ‘Gilets Jaunes’,” said George DuPont, a resident in Paris’ upscale 16th arrondissement. “The state has stolen money from the French people. It’s time to give it back.”

Assistant teacher Sandrine Lemoussu, 45, who travelled from Burgundy to protest peacefully, said people were fed up with Macron.

“The people are in revolt,” she said. “The anger is rising more and more, and the president despises the French. We aren’t here to smash things, but the people have had enough.”

Many on the outskirts of smaller provincial towns and villages have expressed anger, underlining the gap between metropolitan elites and working class voters that has boosted anti-establishment politics across the Western world.

“Mr Macron wrote a book called Revolution. He was prophetic because it is what he has managed to launch, but not the revolution he sought,” Far-left La France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Melenchon told reporters ahead of a protest in Marseille.

Reporting by Thierry Chiarello, Antony Paone, Sudip Kar-Gupta, Bate Felix, Luke Baker, Sybille de la Hamaide, John Irish, Celia Mebroukine, Antoine Boddaert, Lucien Libert, Stephane Mahe, Caroline Paillez in Paris, Jean-Francois Rosnoblet in Marseille and Johanna Decorse in Toulouse; Writing by John Irish and Richard Lough; Editing by Mark Heinrich, Hugh Lawson and Peter Graff

 

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

December 2, 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 inquired 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