Think the end is finally coming for the Chumph’s Mob Capos. Here, Uncle Ben gets roasted by Elizabeth Warren. The simple fact is the Chump’s appointees are the most ideologically bent, least competent, and most corrupt in the history of the US. Which is why the turnover is setting records.
The Penguin quits!
Trey Gowdy a Tea Party political hack Benghazi freak is resigning.
Guess he finally got to read all the evidence of the Chumph-Russia collusion. This is two in a row quickly resigning from the House Oversight Committee.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) announced his retirement from Congress shortly after some of his Republican colleagues were in a train wreck involving a garbage truck.
The South Carolina Republican abruptly announced Wednesday he will not seek re-election in November but will instead return to the justice system.
“Whatever skills I may have are better utilized in a courtroom than in Congress, and I enjoy our justice system more than our political system,” Gowdy said. “As I look back on my career, it is the jobs that both seek and reward fairness that are most rewarding.”
The 53-year-old Gowdy, a former district attorney and federal prosector, has represented South Carolina’s 4th congressional district since 2011, when he was elected as part of the Tea Party wave.
Gowdy chaired the United States House Select Committee on Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi from 2014 to 2016, and he called for the prosecution of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
He has chaired the House Oversight Committee since the abrupt resignation of former GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT).
Uncle Ben Carson had a tough day in Congress between the Chumph’s obscene Puerto Rico comments, and the Chumph Budget cuts….
Rwanda has become the jewel of East Africa in terms of economic development and growth. A landlocked country which has the highest population per square mile in the world, the country is working to solve a lot of problems including the lack of basic infrastructure. It has been a while since the genocide which has left an indelible mark on the country – but it is moving forward with an sustained economic growth of about 5% a year.
It also is the only country in Africa whose Congress is majority woman. This has led to policies decidedly more vested in the growth and development of the country than the traditional “Strongman” governments on the continent.
The Congress and the male President Kagame, often clash over policies.
The last thing his supporters want is for a woman to run against him for his job.
Hopefully the end of this pathetic saga… And these clowns will get on with fixing the problems they caused in Obamacare trying to insert poison pills when the first Bill was passed.
Been saying for a while that the Russian hacking and collusion treason went far beyond just the Chumph and his merry band of morons and nitwit children.
Here, Digby begins asking the right questions at least.
Leading Republicans knew about Russian hacking long before Trump’s nomination. They said nothing and did nothing
Despite Europe’s clear disdain for President Trump it seems as though he’s over there every other week. In fact he’s arriving in France on Thursday at the invitation of President Emmanuel Macron to help celebrate Bastille Day and have dinner at the Eiffel Tower. Considering that Trump has implied repeatedly that Paris is nothing but a hellhole these days, it’s a testament to just how desperate he is to get out of Washington. The heat is on and he wants out of the kitchen.
You have certainly heard that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer to get some promised dirt on Hillary Clinton that was represented as being part of a Russian government program to help Trump get elected. Now we know their breathless protestations that they didn’t know nothin’ about no Russians were lies, and we also know that this particular tawdry scheme reached into the highest levels of the campaign. We’ll have to wait for the next shoe to drop. There is always another shoe.
There was one new story on Wednesday that added an interesting detail to the saga and points to a possible larger conspiracy. McClatchy reported that House and Senate investigators as well as the Justice Department are looking at the Trump campaign’s digital operation, one of Jared Kushner’s pet projects (financed by big-daddy benefactor Robert Mercer), to determine if it may have worked with Russia’s sophisticated micro-targeting and propaganda program during the 2016 campaign.
McClatchy also reported that the Justice Department is looking into “whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton.” That’s an issue I’ve written about previously here on Salon, based on some post-election investigative reporting by the New York Times.
This raises once again the question of just what was going on in the Republican Party during this period. After all, it wasn’t just Donald Trump who benefited from Russian hacking. The GOP-dominated House majority was a major beneficiary as well.
Remember, the congressional leadership knew in 2015 that it was happening. Reuters has reported that the so-called Gang of Eight (Republican leaders in Congress) was told that Russian hackers were attacking the Democratic Party but that the information was so top secret they could not share it. As we know, hackers attacked the Democratic National Committee and the personal email of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. But they also hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and information gleaned from that hack was put to use in some 2016 campaigns for Congress.
Also recall that one month before Donald Trump Jr. took that meeting with the Russian lawyer, House Majority Leader Kevin “loose lips” McCarthy was talking about Trump’s connections to Vladimir Putin in a room full of Republicans:
A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. […]
It is about time!
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) on Wednesday formally filed articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.
According to a statement, Sherman and Rep. Al Green (D-TX) are filing for impeachment over what they believe is obstruction of justice in the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, as well as revelations from the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia.
“Every day Democrats, Republicans, and the entire world are shocked by the latest example of America’s amateur President,” the statement reads. “Ignorance accompanied by a refusal to learn. Lack of impulse control, accompanied by a refusal to have his staff control his impulses. We’re no longer surprised by any action, no matter how far below the dignity of the office—and no matter how dangerous to the country.”
“Filing Articles of Impeachment is the first step on a very long road,” Sherman adds. “But if the impulsive incompetency continues, then eventually—many, many months from now—Republicans will join the impeachment effort.”
Sherman has indicated that he may invoke the “privileged motion” of impeachment filing — a parliamentary rule that requires the entire House to vote regardless of whether the House Judiciary Committee chooses to take it up.
“I would hope that the Article, once submitted, would receive expeditious consideration by the Judiciary Committee. However, if it becomes clear that such consideration is not forthcoming, I (after consultation with colleagues and leadership) will make a privileged motion that the entire House of Representatives immediately debate the Article,” he wrote.
“Bleeding Kansas” , the open war between anti- and pro- slavery groups started when Pro-slavery forces moved into Kansas and attempted to steal the vote to make Kansas a slave state.
It marked a turning point because Abolitionists who were the victims of slaver violence and terrorism began to fight back resulting in virtual Civil Wars along the Kansas Missouri border.
Substitute pro-slavery for today’s Republicans – and see if this doesn’t sound familiar –
Through the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Congress kept a tenuous balance of political power between North and South. In May 1854, the Kansas–Nebraska Act, created from unorganized Indian lands and territories of Kansas and Nebraska, permitted residency by U.S. citizens, who were to determine their state’s slavery status and seek admission to the Union. Immigrants supporting both sides of the question arrived in Kansas to establish residency and gain the right to vote. However, Kansas Territory officials were appointed (1854) by the pro-slavery administration of PresidentFranklin Pierce (in office 1853–1857), and thousands of non-resident pro-slavery Missourians entered Kansas with the goal of winning elections. They captured territorial elections, sometimes by fraud and intimidation. In response, Northern abolitionist elements flooded Kansas with “free-soilers.” Anti-slavery Kansas residents wrote the first Kansas Constitution (1855) and elected the Free State legislature in Topeka; this stood in opposition to the pro-slavery government in Lecompton. The two Territorial governments increased as well as symbolized the strife of Bleeding Kansas…
It was rumored in the South that thousands of Northerners were arriving in Kansas. Believing these rumors, in November 1854, thousands of armed pro-slavery men known as “Border Ruffians” or “southern yankees”, mostly from Missouri, poured into the Kansas Territory and swayed the vote in the election for a non-voting delegate to Congress in favor of pro-slavery candidate John Whitfield.[4] The following year a Congressional committee investigating the election reported that 1729 fraudulent votes were cast compared to 1114 legal votes. In one location only 20 of the 604 voters were residents of the Kansas Territory. In another 35 were residents and 226 non-residents.
Not much different from the situation America is in today.
John Brown, who had led anti-slavery forces in Kansas led a raid against the Harper’s Ferry West Virginia Armory in 1859. While the raid failed, and John Brown was executed…It established that Abolitionists would no longer tolerate slaver abuses and crimes, and would strike back.
In America today there are several hate attacks by Trump’s supporters against minorities, LBGT people, immigrants, and progressives. Peaceful protests are increasingly met with violence.
From the headlines as of the last two weeks –
A good summary of the attacks by Trump supporters and right wing haters is here.
This just in…
Ray Tensing trial: Jury deadlocks, mistrial declared in Ohio cop’s murder retrial
This list doesn’t include those not charged, or those attacks on whites by alt-right and neo-nazi Trump white wingers. Right wing sites continually use language encouraging violence against the left.
The rise of the Second KKK in the US only abated when the victims began to shoot back,
Was the shooting of Republican Scalese our “John Brown” moment?
I hope so.
It is very hard for a government to take away a “right” already granted.
When you look at Revolutions in Third World countries, you find some common themes. The Governments of those dictatorships or quasi-dictatorships are controlled by a group representing the interests of a small minority of the population, typically the wealthy. The Government uses increasingly Draconian measures to force the population’s compliance. Here in America, Republicans are doing just that. Examples of those measures to suppress dissent include laws in several state which allow Chumph supporters to run down and murder protesters, and an attempt by Republicans in some states (including DC, which the Republican majority House now controls) to criminalize dissent though the abuse of felony laws to punish protesters for nonviolent protest.
When you start locking up your detractors in prisons…you have paved the way for violent revolution. When facing a felony conviction or death for waiving a sign on the public streets – there is very little difference in the punishment for blowing up buildings. The white-wing Republican government in America isn’t far from that line.
The Trump(don’t)care legislation is another example of abuse of the majority for the benefit of the rich. A lot of those folks who will be getting abused voted Republican. While the Second Amendment whackos are too consumed by racism to care…There are a lot of poor Republican Soccer Moms and caretakers of the sick and elderly out there who do.
Democrats have one chance to get this right. They need to do smething to stop this steamroller besides pretty speches.
Here is a guy who has already lied to Congress. And by all rights should have been tried and convicted of perjury and kicked out of office.
In the never-ending Chumph reality show…They are going to let him on the stand to lie his ass off …Again.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions reportedly wants his Tuesday testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee to be open to the public.
Following allegations that Sessions failed to disclose a third meeting with Russian officials, the attorney general canceled his Appropriations Committee testimony and agreed to testify in a closed session to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Democratic lawmakers scolded Sessions for refusing to answer questions in a session open to the American people. And on Monday, the former Alabama senator relented.
In a statement, the Department of Justice said that Sessions is calling for his Tuesday testimony to be available to the public.
“He believes it is important for the American people to hear the truth directly from him,” a spokesperson said.
The Vote yesterday in Puerto Rico in a non-binding referendum to become a State is a bit misleading. 77% of the voters chose to sit out.
After years of fiscal mismanagement the “Colony” finds itself in dire straits. The vote, such as it was, is a pleas for help.
The likelihood that a Republican dominated US Congress would move forward to make Puerto Rico a state is nil. Much less the “Bigot in Charge” actually signing any bill to that effect being less than zero. It is not only driven by the fact that most Puerto Ricans vote Democrat, but the core racism of the Republicans in not wanting a Spanish language, ethnically Hispanic state to join the Union. Ergo, as we saw during the Chumph “election” – racism always wins with the white-right.
With schools shuttered, pensions at risk and the island under the authority of an oversight board in New York City, half a million Puerto Ricans voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to become America’s 51st state, in a flawed election most voters sat out.
With nearly all of the precincts reporting, 97 percent of the ballots cast were in favor of statehood, a landslide critics said indicated that only statehood supporters had turned out to the polls. Opposition parties who prefer independence or remaining a territory boycotted the special election, which they considered rigged in favor of statehood.
On an island where voter participation often hovers around 80 percent, just 23 percent of registered voters cast ballots. Voting stations accustomed to long lines were virtually empty on Sunday.
Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo A. Rosselló of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, said he planned to take the victory to Washington and press Congress to admit Puerto Rico to the union.
“From today going forward, the federal government will no longer be able to ignore the voice of the majority of the American citizens in Puerto Rico,” he said in a brief televised speech after the voting results were announced.
But his political opponents who do not want statehood argued that heading to Congress with such lopsided results would actually hurt the governor’s cause.
“A 97 percent win is the kind of result you get in a one-party regime,” former Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá said in an interview. “Washington will laugh in their faces.”
Puerto Rico has been a United States territory since 1898, when the island was acquired from Spain after the Spanish-American War. Sunday’s nonbinding referendum was the fifth time during Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States that Puerto Ricans voted on their future. They have generally chosen from statehood, independence and remaining a territory.
But the process is usually marred, with ballot language phrased to favor the party in office. In 1998, “none of the above” was the top winner. In 2012, 61 percent of counted votes went to statehood — and half a million ballots were left blank.
But this time, the vote came a few weeks after Puerto Rico declared a form of bankruptcy in the face of $74 billion in debt and $49 billion in pension obligations it cannot pay. More than 150 public schools are being closed as a mass exodus of Puerto Ricans head for the mainland and those who remain brace for huge cuts to public services. Decisions are now in the hands of a bankruptcy judge.
Voters said that Puerto Rico needed the United States now more than ever.
“If there’s an earthquake in Puerto Rico, who is going to send the help? The Americans! This is their land!” said Gladys Martínez Cruz, 73, a retired tax clerk in San Juan’s Barrio Obrero neighborhood. “We need someone who is going to support us, send us money. There’s a lot of hunger in Puerto Rico, even with the help we get.”
Many Puerto Ricans, like Ms. Martínez, live off food stamps, public housing vouchers or other federal programs and worry that a change in political status could affect that aid. A huge publicity campaign warned voters that their citizenship could be at risk.
“I want my children and grandchildren to keep their American citizenship,” said Maira Rentas, a cardiac nurse in San Juan. “Little by little, with whatever votes we get, we have to try to become a state.”
Ana Velázquez, 50, a hospital secretary, said Puerto Rico’s economic problems were so great that they overshadowed other considerations, such as the language, culture and identity that could be lost if the island became a state.
“I don’t want to lose my hymn, my coat of arms, my flag. My beauty queen would no longer be ‘Miss Puerto Rico,’” Ms. Velázquez said. “I don’t see myself ever singing the United States national anthem. I really don’t. But Puerto Rico is in really bad shape, and it needs help.”
So she arrived at the same conclusion as many other Puerto Ricans: She did not vote.
Héctor Ferrer, the head of the Popular Democratic Party, which had urged a boycott, emphasized that eight out of 10 Puerto Rican voters chose to spend the day at church, on the beach or with their families. He argued that the governing party had manipulated the ballot language and even election law to fix the results.
“It was rigged, and not even with trickery could they win,” Mr. Ferrer said.
The ballot option asked voters who wanted to remain a United States territory to say they wished for Puerto Rico to stay “as it is today, subject to the powers of Congress.”
“The title of the law that made this plebiscite is ‘process to decolonize Puerto Rico,’ and one of the alternatives is ‘colony’ as defined by them,” Mr. Ferrer said.
Mr. Ferrer’s party complained about the ballot choices to the Justice Department, which withheld $2.5 million in funding for Sunday’s voting and had urged the Puerto Rican government to hold off until the ballot could be reviewed. Puerto Rico made changes but moved forward without money or approval from the Justice Department.
Another Chumph man under investigation. This time his private Lawyer.
The Man in the Middle
One of President Donald Trump’s closest confidants, his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, has now become a focus of the expanding congressional investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 campaign.
Cohen confirmed to ABC News that House and Senate investigators have asked him “to provide information and testimony” about any contacts he had with people connected to the Russian government, but he said he has turned down the invitation.
“I declined the invitation to participate, as the request was poorly phrased, overly broad and not capable of being answered,” Cohen told ABC News in an email Tuesday.
After Cohen rejected the congressional requests for cooperation, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to grant its chairman, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, and ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, blanket authority to issue subpoenas as they deem necessary.
“To date, there has not been a single witness, document or piece of evidence linking me to this fake Russian conspiracy,” Cohen added. “This is not surprising to me because there is none.”
While much of the media focus in recent days has fallen on Russian contacts made by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, there are few people closer to the president than his longtime lawyer. Insiders consider Cohen to be Trump’s pit bull or consigliere for his role in threatening legal action against Trump critics, gaining notoriety for threatening and browbeating reporters investigating Trump’s background.
He was quoted in 2015 telling Daily Beast reporters, “I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know … So I’m warning you, tread very f—ing lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting.”
In a 2016 appearance on CNN that went viral, the stone-faced attorney flashed anger when anchor Brianna Keiler said the Trump campaign was “down.”
“Says who?” he challenged. When she cited polls, he countered, “Which polls?” She replied, “All of them.” His final response in that exchange proved prescient: “You’re going to all be very surprised when he polls substantially higher than what you all are giving him credit for.”
After the 2016 campaign, Cohen left the Trump Organization to become the president’s personal attorney, a job he still holds. From that post, he has continued to weigh in on Trump’s behalf on Twitter and during occasional television appearances.
After Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey, for example, Cohen tweeted, “I believe @POTUS was justified in terminating #Comey as @FBI director. #RT if you agree with me!”
Cohen was also made a deputy national finance chairman of the Republican National Committee — a position that gives him some sway on how money will be allocated to Republican candidates. And in April he announced he formed a “strategic alliance” with the powerful D.C. lobbying firm Patton Boggs, a firm whose clients include Russia’s third-largest bank, Gazprombank. The arrangement enables him to work out of Squire Patton Boggs’ offices in New York, Washington and London, according to the announcement.
The emergence of Cohen as a subject of the Senate probe brings renewed attention to a strident Trump advocate who was named in the unverified dossier prepared by a former British intelligence agent during the 2016 campaign and provided by the FBI to Sen. John McCain, which contains a number of unconfirmed allegations that Cohen played a role in working with the Russians on the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers during the campaign.
In January, Cohen told ABC News the allegations in the dossier were “laughably false.” His wife is Ukrainian, and he once worked with her family in Ukraine to establish an ethanol business. ABC News was able to debunk some references to him in the unverified document, such as the assertion in the that his Ukrainian-born father-in-law had a vacation home, or dacha, near Russian President Vladimir Putin’s.
“I don’t even think my father-in-law has ever been to Moscow,” Cohen told ABC News earlier this year. “I wonder who’s living in the dacha.”
Another suggestion in those documents — that Cohen supposedly met with the Russians in Prague last August — is also false, he said. Then-President-elect Trump pushed back against the claim in a wide-ranging news conference held in January, saying that he saw Cohen’s passport.
“I said, ‘I want to see your passport.’ He brings his passport to my office. I say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. He didn’t leave the country. He wasn’t out of the country.’ They had Michael Cohen of the Trump Organization was in Prague. It turned out to be a different Michael Cohen,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace what took place. It’s a disgrace, and I think they ought to apologize to start with Michael Cohen.”
Democrats in Congress have argued it is conceivable he entered Europe through another country — he was in Italy on vacation around the time the dossier alleges he was in Prague — and his passport would not receive a stamp for crossing the border, but no proof of any such trip has been produced.
“I’ve never actually walked the land in Prague,” Cohen told ABC News. “And last August I was not in Prague.”
Congressional investigators involved in the widening probe have already identified four Trump campaign advisers as people of interest because of their interactions with Russian officials. Only one of them, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, has received a subpoena for records. Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser, declined to provide them, citing his Fifth Amendment rights.
Lawmakers have also asked former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, informal adviser Roger Stone and former foreign policy adviser Carter Page to voluntarily hand over relevant records. All three men have said publicly they are producing records and cooperating with investigators.
It wasn’t just the Chumph colluding with the Russians. This collusion was offered as a package which was taken by over 40 Republican candidates.
This is why the GOP is trying so hard to quash the Chumph Treason trial.
The Russian hacker who helped President Donald Trump win the 2016 election also allegedly collaborated with a Republican consultant in Florida.
A Wall Street Journal report published on Thursday revealed that Republican operative Aaron Nevins made a plea last year to Guccifer 2.0, the same hacker who is accused of helping Trump by revealing stolen Democratic National Committee emails.
According to the Journal:
Learning that hacker “Guccifer 2.0” had tapped into a Democratic committee that helps House candidates, Mr. Nevins wrote to the hacker to say: “Feel free to send any Florida based information.”
Ten days later, Mr. Nevins received 2.5 gigabytes of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee documents, some of which he posted on a blog called HelloFLA.com that he ran using a pseudonym.
The report said that the hacker then sent Trump ally Roger Stone a link to the blog post.
During conversations with the Guccifer 2.0, Nevins observed that the documents were “probably worth millions of dollars.”
“Hmmm,” the hacker replied, “ok u owe me a million :)”
In an interview with the paper, Nevins defended his actions as standard political practice.
“I just threw an arrow in the dark,” Nevins explained, noting that when he analyzed the documents, he “realized it was a lot more than even Guccifer knew that he had.”
“If your interests align,” the operative concluded, “never shut any doors in politics.”
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