mar-a-lago

SEE JACK SMITH

no merri

bak 4 23

somewhat belated, this refers in general to rich ppl at any trump club, but specifically Fla VA graft:

also see trump 14 on FBI raid(recall Chinese spy/asset arrested w/ gear]

congrats primary on covid

e g nyt

And groups affiliated with the Republican Party continue to hold events at Trump-family properties. A weekend gathering in early November at the Mar-a-Lago club was sponsored by the Republican Attorneys General Association, along with its most important corporate donors, who had contributed at least $125,000 each.

-=-=

THOM AN 10 26

...

Somebody seems to have misplaced fifty million dollars, and nobody in Trump’s orbit is in any hurry to find it. A decade ago, Congress set aside money for an America 250 celebration of our anniversary, but Trump ignored that (other than taking the money) and created his own, privatized “Freedom 250” celebration as a new grift to squeeze millions out of major donors like Chevron, United Airlines, and the defense giant RTX.

Now documents uncovered by the watchdog group PEER discovered that the events cost $128 million and at least $114 million of that came from our tax dollars, even though The Wall Street Journal says the “donors” kicked in at least $50 million and (my guess) probably much more. Trump passed out that money to his contractor friends with no competitive bidding whatsoever, and now refuses to say who gave him money, or how much, or even where the money went. Democrats suspect he just turned it into another slush fund for himself and his family; perhaps they should look for piles of cash in the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago?

...

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AN 3 26

New revelations have emerged in President Donald Trump's classified documents case, per a "damning" memo obtained by MS NOW, showing that he seemingly intended to profit from illegally retaining the sensitive materials.

According to the report published Friday, special counsel Jack Smith determined that Trump had retained "secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests," revealing a key potential motive for his dogged efforts to hang onto them. Trump held the documents, often in questionable places, at his Mar-a-Lago resort, after departing the White House in 2021, later insisting that he had the right to retain them and that he had declassified them with his mind before leaving office. He was indicted on 32 felony counts related to his retention of the materials, and an additional eight charges for conspiracy to obstruct justice, but the case was halted after his reelection.

The revelations about Trump's business motive originate from a January 2023 progress memo produced by Smith's office, though the specific businesses and how they relate to the classified information were not disclosed.

“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” the memo explained. “We must have those documents.”

As MS NOW's report explained, Trump's motive for retaining the materials had, up until now, been largely uncertain. Trump himself has long insisted that he had every right to retain the documents, likening them to the materials kept on hand by his predecessors for their presidential libraries. Some reports indicated that Trump seemed to show off the documents to impress people who visited Mar-a-Lago, while other critics warned that he may have been attempting to sell the sensitive information.

"Trump’s reason for taking hundreds of pages of classified documents when he left office in January 2021 — and then concealing them when the Justice Department subpoenaed him for their return in May 2022 — has been one of the larger mysteries of the case," MS NOW explained. "FBI agents conducting an unannounced search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 discovered hundreds more pages of top-secret records that Trump and his lawyers had failed to return to the government after claiming they had fully returned all classified materials."

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin cited this memo in a scathing letter to Attorney General Pam Bondion Tuesday, accusing the agency of covering up Trump's misdeeds while scrambling to find incriminating evidence against Smith.

“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests,” Raskin wrote “This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”

The congressman further added: "Apparently blinded by the frenzied search to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and distorted to level an attack against Special Counsel Smith (despite constantly coming up empty-handed), you have, quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon."

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AN 12 25

Former special counsel Jack Smith spoke to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday after many House Republicans made public allegations about him and his work investigating President Donald Trump.

In an effort to set the record straight, Smith said he would testify and answer questions before the committee, but only in a public hearing. Republican committee leaders refused to allow for this, instead holding the hearing behind closed doors.

New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush posted on Xthat Smith, in his opening statement, said, “The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions…”

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power," Smith continued.

Smith worked on two main cases. First, the allegations that Trump stole documents from the White House upon leaving office, including classified materials, and refused to return them. The second case involved investigating Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Smith told the members that he gathered “powerful evidence” for the classified documents case from Trump's Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida. He also said that he uncovered evidence showing efforts to obstruct that investigation as well.

“I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 election,” Smith said, according to the AP. “We took actions based on what the facts and the law required — the very lesson I learned early in my career as a prosecutor.”

If asked whether he would “prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or Democrat," said Smith.

Trump told reporters at the White House, “I’d rather see him testify publicly. There’s no way he can answer the questions.”

According to CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane, Smith also stated, "Exploiting that violence, [President] Trump [and] his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election. I didn’t choose those Members; President Trump did”

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AN 12 25

President Donald Trump is urging U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to block any release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his investigation into the president’s alleged mishandling of hundreds of classified documents, in a case that had been charged in part under the Espionage Act.

On Tuesday, Trump argued in a court filing that Smith’s report should never be made public, in what would be a deviation from previous practice, Politico reported.

The president urged Cannon, whom he nominated to the bench, “to extend her 11-month-old order blocking the Justice Department from releasing the full report, which Smith submitted shortly before Trump’s second inauguration.”

In the court document, Trump’s attorney, Kendra Wharton, wrote that allowing the report to become public would “perpetuate Jack Smith’s unlawful criminal investigations and proceedings.”

Politico noted that the president’s filing “is infused with the typical disdain Trump has expressed for his former prosecutors, labeling Smith a ‘so-called special counsel’ and saying the case was ‘marred by numerous deficiencies and repeated abuses of office.'”

Smith dropped all charges against Trump after the U.S. Supreme Court, in a highly controversial ruling, found that presidents have extensive immunity from prosecution for official acts.

“Trump’s request is a break from the Justice Department’s handling of all special counsel reports in recent decades,” Politico added. “Typically, those reports are provided to Congress and made public, even when they have included damaging findings about the incumbent administration.”

The day after Trump was inaugurated, Judge Cannon denied the U.S. Department of Justice’s request to share Smith’s report on his investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents with Congress. Her order came just hours after Trump signed an executive order to hold former government officials accountable for “unauthorized disclosure” of “sensitive” information, and “for election interference.”

Cannon refused to allow members of Congress to review Smith’s final report. Trump was investigated for alleged unlawful removal, retention, and refusal to return sensitive, classified, and top-secret documents, reportedly including nuclear and defense secrets. The FBI executed a lawful search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence to retrieve some of the documents.

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AN 11 25

A " handful"of documents found by the FBI during their raid of President Donald Trump's Palm Beach country club were "so sensitive that even a senior Justice Department official didn’t have authorization to see them," according to an explosive new book excerpted by MSNBC.

“Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department,” written by MSNBC's senior investigative correspondent Carol Leonnig and Washington Post's Aaron Davis, details how the surprise FBI raid on Mar-a-Lagoin 2022 revealed a national security threat so severe that they'd have gotten "American operatives killed if the information fell into the wrong hands."

The book details how assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen was so shocked by what was found, he asked his top Justice Department expert on the mishandling of classified records, Julie Edelstein what they should do next and her answer was stunning.

"If it was anybody else, we would arrest him tomorrow,” Edelstein said. "Knowingly taking classified documents outside of a secure government facility was a crime, plain and simple," she explained.

But worse than that, the book writes, was Trump's attempts to concealthem after receiving a May subpoena to return all classified records.

IFrame Content

Trump, "made the crime far worse, she argued." Unfortunately, according to the book, "Olsen’s team knew that with Trump, all bets were off. The Justice Department would invariably treat the former president more gingerly."

Most recently, Trump announced that he is seeking approximately $230 million in total damages from the Department of Justice (DOJ) through two administrative claims related to past federal investigations, including the search of Mar a Lago, claiming it violated his civil rights.

"But these new revelations from an unprecedented probe run counter to Trump’s insistence that he was mistreated and that he engaged in no criminal wrongdoing in withholding top-secret documents at his private social club," MSNBC explains.

Following the raid, Trump posted on Truth Social, "“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents."

According to the book, FBI’s chief spokesperson, Cathy Milhoan, was about to issue a statement of her own until she was stopped because it would look "political."

FBI assistant director Alan Kohler "was stunned. It was standard FBI procedure to publicly explain that a court had approved a search," the book says.

As they dug through the "handfuls" of documents, the FBI was stunned, according to the book, which explains that "Some of the documents were so restricted that top Justice Department security officials reacted with surprise to the code names: They had never heard of them before. Some involved special access programs that required the president or a cabinet member to grant approval to view."

Not even Olsen was authorized to look at these documents, they write.

"A handful of documents stored in boxes throughout Trump’s club were so sensitive that even he didn’t have authorization to look at them," they say.

Trump's reaction to the raid also put the FBI agents in grave danger, they write.

"The same day as the attack, the FBI agents who signed the paperwork for the Mar-a-Lago search warrant were evacuated temporarily from their homes for their own safety," the book says.

"Documents with their names had begun to circulate online. The agents’ identities had been redacted from filings on the court’s website, but a copy of the original paperwork was left at Mar-a-Lago. FBI officials surmised that Trump’s team had leaked their names, endangering the agents and their families," they write.

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JACK SMITH DID LONG INTERIEW // COMEY INDICT? 10 25

MMA

Eric Trump attacks Jack Smith for “planting” evidence during Mar-a-Lago search that predated Smith’s service as special counsel

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/15/25

Eric Trump is using a series of right-wing media appearances to baselessly accuse former special counsel Jack Smith of “planting” evidence that the FBI uncovered during its search of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence.

MAGA figures have baselessly accused the FBI of planting evidence since the agency executed its warrant in August 2022. But Eric Trump’s version of the conspiracy theory introduces a glaring new flaw: Smith was prosecuting war crimes overseas at the time of that search and didn’t take over the federal probe of the then-former president’s handling of classified documents until more than three months later.

Trump, who is overseeing his father’s business holdings alongside his brother, Don Jr., theoretically holds no position in the administration. But he has been on a tour of right-wing media in recent days making the case that the politically motivated indictments of Trump enemies are justified and promoting his new memoir, which positions the Mar-a-Lago search as proof that “America itself was under siege.”

The FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, after developing evidence countering a Trump lawyer’s statement that all classified documents that had been stored on the premises were turned over in response to a subpoena. The agents reportedly “left with 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified, comprising scores of additional documents. One set had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.” Trump ultimately faced 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information, among other federal charges, but the case was dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge.

Trumpists have proposed two different versions of a baseless theory that the FBI had “planted” evidence. First, Trump and his right-wing media allies suggested immediately after the search that the FBI might have brought classified documents to Mar-a-Lago to frame Trump for possessing them improperly (a judge ultimately protected him from having to try to prove the charge in court). Then, after the Justice Department included a photo of documents with classification markings seized in that search in an August 30, 2022, filing, Trump’s supporters suggested that it was somehow improper for agents to take the documents out of the boxes in which they were stored and lay them on the floor so that the folders with classified markings could be seen in the photos. (Classified documents were reportedly found at Mar-A-Lago in locations including “a shower, an office, a bedroom and a ballroom.”)

Eric Trump, in three separate interviews with right-wing media figures, seemed to toggle between which interpretation he was trying to get across — but in either case, he specifically blamed Smith.

“These are the biggest criminals in the world, back to Jack Smith — he was planting classified folders on my father’s office at Mar-a-Lago,” he told Steve Bannon on October 7.

“And then in the aftermath, we find out that Jack Smith was planting classified folders, you know, on the carpet,” he Megyn Kelly on October 10. “You remember those perfectly orchestrated photo shoots where everything's fanned out? Like my father just leaves classified folders just perfectly fanned out on a beautiful carpet in the middle of his office.”

“Jack Smith, he dug so deep that we found out that he was actually planting classified folders in Mar-a-Lago,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on October 14.

Whichever argument Eric Trump is trying to make, his specific claim that Smith “was planting classified folders” during the August 8, 2022, search, is obviously and absurdly false. Smith did not become special counsel and take over the classified documents case until November 22, 2022. At the time of the Mar-a-Lago search, he wasworking in the Netherlands as chief prosecutor for a special court investigating war crimes stemming from the 1990s war in Kosovo.

But as we’ve seen over the past few weeks, Republicans are unconcerned with how thin the allegations are as long as they can be used to target their political foes — and Smith is clearly one such target.

### The right's flailing attacks on the Mar-a-Lago search have aged terribly

:{08/31/22

### The fabricated claim that the FBI “planted evidence” at Mar-a-Lago is taking the right by storm

:{08/10/22

### Blaming the left for Trump's weaponization of law enforcement means pretending his first term didn't happen

10/14/25

---

Highly-classified intel on Putin and Russia went missing in Trump’s final White House days - Alternet.org

he thot exonerate? 10 inch thick binder meadows?

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/ten-months-rights-apocalyptic-rants-about-trump-documents-case

mma 6 23

no lnx vid twt

ten months of the right’s apocalyptic rants about the Trump documents case

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 06/13/23 7:33 AM EDT

The federal criminal indictment against former President Donald Trump functions as a crushing repudiation of the apocalyptic rhetoric his right-wing media allies have deployed since August, when the FBI discovered a trove of highly classified documents while serving a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago residence and resort. Their doomsaying and demagoguery, replete with warnings that the United States has become a lawless banana republic, has stoked the fury of an increasingly violent right-wing movement — and there’s little sign they plan to stop.

Fox News hosts cheered when Trump picked Bill Barr to become attorney general in December 2018 because they believed he could turn their conspiracy theories into federal investigations while protecting Trump and his allies from the law. In office he fulfilled that promise, shielding Trump from special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, launching an inquiry into the origins of that investigation, and forestalling legal accountability for the then-president’s cronies.

But even Barr isn’t willing to make excuses for Trump’s conduct after Friday’s unsealing of the 37-count indictment. Prosecutors led by special counsel Jack Smith allege in the indictment that Trump had personally overseen the removal of government documents from the White House; knowingly retained highly classified documents, including ones containing information “regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries” and about “United States nuclear programs”; kept boxes of such documents stored at times in unsecured locations including Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom and a bathroom; and conspired to prevent their return to government custody. Trump will be arraigned on Tuesday in a Miami, Florida, courtroom.

“I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly,” Barr said on Fox News Sunday two days after the indictment's unsealing. “And so, the government's agenda was to get those -- protect those documents and get them out. And I think it was perfectly appropriate to do that. It was the right thing to do, and I think the counts under the Espionage Act that he willfully retained those documents are solid counts.”

Barr added of the indictment, “If even half of it is true, then he's toast. I mean, it's a pretty -- it's a very detailed indictment, and it's very, very damming. And this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here -- a victim of a witch hunt is ridiculous.”

“Witch hunt” would actually qualify as a fairly mild critique of the Trump documents investigation on the network where Barr offered his comments.

Fox propagandists, the carnival of Trump lackeys and lickspittles they’ve trotted out to comment, and the motley competitors angling for the network’s market share have spent the last 10 months bombarding their audience with unhinged attacks on the Trump documents probe. They’ve described the FBI and Justice Department as fascist shock troops targeting Trump at the whim of a tyrannical President Joe Biden, and warned that the legal action against the former president is merely the first step in terminating the American republic — and coming after his supporters.

After Mar-a-Lago search, Trumpists denounced the Justice Department and FBI …

Newt Gingrich, Fox contributor: “The FBI has been totally corrupted. Now, it could actually be called the American Stasi because its behavior is more like the German secret police than like the traditional FBI.” [Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 8/9/22]

Laura Ingraham, Fox host: “We all see the Justice Department's leadership now for what it is. It's not the image of Lady Justice operating with a blindfold, but this is a Praetorian Guard that shields all of those who hold the real power in this town.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/8/22]

Victor David Hanson, conservative pundit: “This is something like the East German Stasi in the Cold War. It really is. It's an ideological investigative group that is hired out by the left for particular retrieval services.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/8/22]

Sean Davis, The Federalist co-founder: “After you impeach and remove [Attorney General Merrick] Garland, you need to eliminate the FBI in its entirety, root and branch, and salt the earth where it stood. It is a corrupt, criminal enterprise that exists to terrorize anyone and everyone deemed a political enemy of the current regime.” [Media Matters for America, 8/9/22]

Steve Bannon, right-wing streamer: “The FBI right now is the Gestapo.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/8/22]

Bannon: “I do not think it's beyond this administrative state and their deep state apparatus to actually try to work on the assassination of President Trump. … I wouldn't put it past him to have planted stuff – that – this is a criminal. The FBI and the DOJ are essentially lawless criminal organizations.” [Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 8/9/22]

Buck Sexton, talk radio host:“This is undermining our faith in the not only the peaceful transfer of power, but in the executive arm of the government under an opposition party. Not to act like the Stasi, not to act like the secret police that we've seen in totalitarian regimes.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/8/22]

… called the probe an attack on America that is destructive to the rule of law …

Sean Hannity, Fox host: “A dark day for our republic, the Department of Justice, the rule of law, what looks to be potentially a shocking overreach — we'll find out in due time — that will have serious ramifications potentially for many, many years to come. … DOJ is now being used as a weapon against Biden’s top political rival. That’s the former president of the United States of America, Donald Trump.” [Fox News, Hannity, 8/8/22]

Mark Levin, Fox News host: “This is the worst attack on this republic in modern history, period.” [Fox News, Hannity, 8/8/22]

Dan Bongino, then-Fox host: “This is some Third World bullshit right here. Let me say it again: Third World bullshit.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/8/22]

Sexton: “[I]t almost feels like a preemptive coup. We've heard so much about the insurrection and the coup, but this is preventing this is meant to prevent Donald Trump from being able to run again. ... This is the Rubicon being crossed. This is something we've never seen before.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/8/22]

Gingrich: “You really are now seeing the ugly face of a tyranny. And the left is so desperate, so frightened.” [Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 8/9/22]

… warned that Trump’s supporters are next …

Tucker Carlson, then-Fox host:“These are acts of aggression and hostility aimed at Americans. No American president has ever done this. No American president has ever explicitly declared war on his own population. … And just in case you missed the theme here, they're hiring another 87,000 armed IRS agents just to make sure that you obey. Got it?” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/15/22]

Ingraham:“The real target of this investigation isn't Trump. The real target of this investigation is you or anyone who dares to call out and take on the rank corruption of the D.C. establishment.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/8/22]

Sexton: “They're sending a message now to President Trump and his supporters that they'll come for you if you stand against the machine.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/8/22]

Levin: “It's not just an attack on Donald Trump. It's an attack on everybody who supports him. It's an attack on anybody who dares to raise serious questions about Washington, D.C., and the establishment in both parties.” [Fox News, Hannity, 8/8/22]

Lara Trump, then-Fox contributor: “If this is what they're able to do to the former president of the United States, think about what they could do to you, to anybody in America.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/8/22]

Gingrich: “If they can, if the FBI can send 30 agents to the home of a former president, they can do it to you, to me, to everybody listening to us today. This is a direct threat to freedom.” [Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 8/9/22]

… and demanded action — sometimes even violence — in response.

Jesse Watters,Fox host: “I think there is going to be some more action you are going to see out on the streets from the base after they see this break tonight. ... There are just a lot of honest Americans that've had it with what this corrupt government and what the FBI has done.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/8/22]

Will Cain, Fox host: “A day after the FBI’s raid on former president Donald Trump we are starting to see what a permanent national split looks like. A divorce. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but it’s true. And this is not simply a break between Democrats and Republicans. No, that’s too simple. What we are seeing is a divide between people who are willing to use the power of the state to silence their opponent and those who are unwilling.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/9/22]

Pete Santilli, radio host: “We will have to arm up and surround Mar-a-Lago to protect it, to protect life, liberty, and property if the governor fails and refuses to do that.” [The Pete Santilli Show, 8/9/22]

Fox News screengrabs

Screengrabs from Fox News coverage following the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago.

The Trump indictment news brought more fever dreams of the end of U.S. democracy.

Hannity: “It is a dark day in America. … There is no equal justice. There is no equal application of our laws. … Our system of justice has now been weaponized beyond belief and this country is in serious trouble." [Fox News, Hannity, 6/8/23]

Stephen Miller, former Trump aide: “History will record today as the day that we ceased to be a democratic republic and we became a people ruled by an unelected government bureaucracy.” [Fox News, Fox News Tonight, 6/8/23]

Tim Pool, streamer: “The federal indictment by the Biden DOJ is direct election interference. It is subversion of the United States election. … I don’t see how the United States stands and continues to function when you’ve got the sitting president filing an indictment against his chief rival.” [Timcast, 6/8/23]

Matt Whitaker, former acting attorney general for Trump: “It's really a sad day … and it's the stuff of banana republics, quite frankly.” [Fox News, Fox News Tonight, 6/8/23]

Levin: “Let me say this. Today — what is today's date? June 8? June 8 is the day of insurrection, not January 6. … We have never seen anything like this in the United States. We saw it under Stalin. We have seen it in other autocracies, Marxist regimes, fascist regimes. The Third World. … You have crossed the Rubicon twice, which has never been done. And we will never forgive you. Never, ever!” [Fox News, Hannity, 6/8/23]

Bongino: “We live in the police state, Rob. The police state’s here. …The idea that you live in a constitutional republic — take it, wipe your rump with it, and flush it down the toilet bowl, cause that’s gone.” [NewsmaxTV, Rob Schmitt Tonight, 6/8/23]

Joe diGenova, Trumpist lawyer: “Think Panama, think banana republic. You are looking at a thug. He is not the president of the United States. He is a thug and Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray are complicit in the thuggery that led to this indictment today. This indictment today is an embarrassment to the rule of law in the United States, and I hope that the American people understand clearly and unequivocally that what happened today is an assault on the Constitution of the United States.” [NewsmaxTV, Rob Schmitt Tonight, 6/8/23]

Matt Walsh, Daily Wire podcaster: “I'm not sure where we go from there because that really is truly a collapse of the republic kind of situation. It just is. For all the talk of the attacks on our democracy, this would be an attack unlike anything we've seen yet. An actual attack on our democracy. And it's an attack on our democracy because it's an attempt to circumvent and subvert the will of the people heading into an election.” [The Daily Wire, The Matt Walsh Show, 6/8/23]

Trump’s March indictment by a New York grand jury over his alleged role in paying off an adult film actor to boost his 2016 presidential campaign and his subsequent arraignment brought a similar frenzy, with right-wing pundits warning that “there’s no coming back from this moment,” offering comparisons to authoritarian states, and calling for retribution. Indictments from the ongoing federal and Georgia probes related to Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection would surely lead to more of the same.

The extreme rhetoric on Fox and other right-wing media bastions to the Trump documents probe is part of a violent, radical response that has law enforcement and experts on the far-right sounding the alarm and recalling the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The New York Times reports:

The federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump has unleashed a wave of calls by his supporters for violence and an uprising to defend him, disturbing observers and raising concerns of a dangerous atmosphere ahead of his court appearance in Miami on Tuesday.

…

The calls to action and threats have been amplified on right-wing media sites and have been met by supportive responses from social media users and cheers from crowds, who have become conditioned over several years by Mr. Trump and his allies to see any efforts to hold him accountable as assaults against him.

Experts on political violence warn that attacks against people or institutions become more likely when elected officials or prominent media figures are able to issue threats or calls for violence with impunity. The pro-Trump mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was drawn to Washington in part by a post on Twitter from Mr. Trump weeks earlier, promising that it would be “wild.”

The Washington Post adds:

Federal and local authorities on Sunday ramped up security preparations ahead of Donald Trump’s first appearance in federal court on criminal charges here, monitoring online threats and potential gatherings of far-right extremists while marshaling more police officers to be on duty.

Escalating violent rhetoric in online forums, coupled with defiant statements from the former president and his political allies, have put law enforcement officials on alert for potential disruptions ahead of Trump’s court appearance.

…

Authorities were monitoring plans for pro-Trump rallies in Miami, including one outside the federal courthouse on Tuesday purportedly organized by a local chapter of the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, some leaders of which were found guilty of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

There’s little indication that the Trumpist right will change course, even after the release of the damning indictment. Fox hosts are still rallying behind the former president, while his congressional allies plot to use their offices to aid his legal defense. They’ve all spent years defending Trump’s indefensible actions and training their supporters to reflexively ignore them.

Their efforts make it harder for Trump’s Republican opponents to dethrone him from his position at the head of the party and more difficult to walk the GOP — and the country — back from the abyss.

https://www.mediamatters.org/mark-levin/foxs-mark-levin-classified-documents-are-safer-mar-lago-national-archives

4 23

bad an 3 23

Legal experts are blasting the Federal Bureau of Investigation after a bombshell Washington Post exclusive report reveals some FBI agents were “afraid” to raid Mar-a-Lago and some wanted to simply shut down the criminal investigation, delaying for months the retrieval of classified documents that **Donald Trump** had unlawfully retained and refusal to return.

“Months of disputes between Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents over how best to try to recover classified documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and residence led to a tense showdown near the end of July last year,” The Post reports.

“Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute,” and the “FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, recovering more than 100 classified items, among them a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.”

Two senior FBI officials wanted to ask Trump’s permission to go to Mar-a-Lago to search the ex-president’s resort and residence, despite having video evidence that appeared to show a trove of presidential documents being moved from a storage room after Trump was directed to return the items, including classified documents, that had been taken from the White House.

Foreign policy and intelligence expert John Sipher, who spent 28 years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, said in response to the Post’s report, “Trump bullying worked.”

Noted national security attorney Brad Moss, a frequent political commentator, observed: “This extensive piece once again makes clear a simple fact: the FBI, traumatized from the Trump era assaults on it, treated Trump with kid gloves.”

Criminal law professor Carissa Byrne Hessick said The Post’s story “confirms not only that the FBI is applying different (and more favorable) standards to Trump’s potentially criminal behavior, but also that this deference can be traced in part to Trump’s repeated attacks against the FBI.”

The Washington Post’s Tom Jackman, who runs the paper’s “True Crime” blog, tweeted, “Timid and conservative FBI agents did not want to search Mar-a-Lago for classified docs, led by DC SAC Steven D’Antuono, who said ‘We’re not the presidential records police.'”

USA Today opinion columnist Michael J. Stern observed, “Trump keeps getting away with it because law enforcement keeps letting him.”

Attorney, legal and national security analyst, and former FBI special agent Asha Marie Rangappa leveled perhaps the heaviest criticism: “The FBI has a problem, and it’s coming from inside the house.”

an me 1 23

A new analysis is criticizing Rep. James Comer's (R-KY) blatant double standard regarding former President Donald Trump's classified documents.

Like many Republican lawmakers, Comer has had difficulty seeing Trump and President Joe Biden's situations through an unbiased lens. However, MSNBC's Steven Benen is explaining how the two cases differ vastly.

"There are obviously a handful of ongoing controversies surrounding national officeholders and alleged mishandling of classified materials, but by any sensible measure, the controversy surrounding Donald Trump is qualitatively different," Benen wrote.

He continued:

After all, the former president, unlike President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence, ignored requests to return the relevant documents, and failed to comply with a federal subpoena," he explained. "And stands accused of obstructing the retrieval process. And reportedly proposed a possible trade in which he said he’d consider returning materials, but only if officials gave him something else in return. And launched a months-long crusade against federal law enforcement, literally equating the FBI with 'the Gestapo.'

Despite Trump’s track record of misconduct, Benen notes that the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Comer, does not appear to have any interest in investigating the former president.. Expounding on the issue, Benen wrote, "The Republican chairman of the panel, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky has not only defended the former president’s actions, he’s also dismissed the scandal’s importance."

"Comer is, however, deeply interested in pursuing the Biden story, despite the fact that it appears far less serious. How does the GOP chairman explain the double standard? He’s still working on that," Benen wrote.

Referencing Comer's Sunday night discussion with CNN’s Pamela Brown, Benennoted that the Republican lawmaker was asked one compelling question: "Does he have evidence of influence peddling surrounding Biden and classified documents?"

Comer responded saying, “We don’t know. We want to look.”

To that answer, Benen offered a critical assessment, writing, "It was like watching a snake eat its own tail."

Following that interview with CNN's Brown, Comer appeared the National Press Club while in Washington, D.C. where he explained his reason for not putting energy into the Trump classified documents investigation.

“Well, there’s a special counsel,” Comer explained. “There’s a special counsel and I am confident that that special counsel is looking into everything.”

However, Benen has pushed back with a detailed argument explaining why Comer's explanation falls flat. "It was not a good point," Comer noted.

"As the chairman of the House Oversight Committee really ought to know, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to scrutinize the Biden matter, too," Benen wrote. "If the existence of a special counsel investigating Trump leads Comer to believe he should focus his attention elsewhere, then the existence of a special counsel investigating the Biden story should lead him to the same conclusion."

an 9 22

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/donald-trump-special-master-rebukes/

an 10 22

After FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, August 8, former President Donald Trump was quick to rail against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and claim that that the federal government was way out of line. And Trump’s devotees in MAGA media outlets saw the search as proof that the “Deep State” never rests.

When Trump filed a lawsuit against the federal government, the case was assigned to a Trump-appointed federal judge: Aileen Cannon. Much to the chagrin of Trump’s critics, Cannon granted his request for a special master in the case. Cannon’s Trump-friendly rulings have drawn a great deal of criticism from Trump’s detractors in the legal world, and an article written by the Daily Beast’s José Pagliery and published on October 18 focuses on how she ended up being assigned to the case.

“Questions continue to swirl over how exactly Trump managed to get Cannon, who has shocked legal scholars by issuing mind-boggling orders that always favor Trump,” Pagliery explains. “She has temporarily halted the FBI investigation, appointed a ‘special master’ to slow down the probe, and kept the case far from its natural home in Washington, D.C.”

According to Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School, Trump’s legal team went “judge shopping.”

Levinson told the Beast, “They clearly made the correct calculation, because Judge Cannon’s rulings legally don’t make sense. They only make sense if you’re trying to help the former president.”

Some South Florida attorneys interviewed anonymously by the Beast find it odd that Trump’s legal team filed in person in the case instead of doing it electronically.

One of them commented, “I don’t know anybody who files in person.” Another attorney told the Beast, “I find it bizarre,” and a third said, “People don’t do this anymore. It’s extremely odd. I guess you could do this if you wanted to get a particular judge — or avoid getting a particular judge.”}:

According to Pagliery, “The Daily Beast contacted a court employee with direct knowledge of how the Trump lawsuit filing was handled, and this person said the case was placed into the federal court system’s automatic random judge ‘assignment wheel.’ (Angela E.) Noble, the head of that office, also said that the proper procedure was followed on their end — and that this is backed up by a log that ‘is not publicly available.’ She said the Trump lawsuit was placed on the West Palm Beach civil wheel, which consists of nine judges. Cannon is in a neighboring division, so she can occasionally get West Palm Beach cases.”

Pagliery continues, “Theoretically, that would give Trump a 1-in-9 chance of getting Cannon on the case. However, The Daily Beast analyzed new case assignments in West Palm Beach in the week preceding Trump’s lawsuit and found that Cannon actually got a much higher share, nine of the 29 new complaints — roughly a third of all cases. But the system still appears random.”

an 10 22

swap docs

...The report states, "Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims," before adding, "In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla."

The Times reports that the former president's aides "never pursued" his plan, and that the episode "...demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show."

The report adds, "Mr. Trump floated the idea of offering the deal to return the boxes in exchange for documents he believed would expose the Russia investigation as a 'hoax' cooked up by the F.B.I. Mr. Trump did not appear to know specifically what he thought the archives had — only that there were items he wanted."...

an 10 22

**Donald Trump** on Tuesday petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in his classified documents case, and reverse a ruling from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed the U.S. Dept. of Justice access to the more than 100 classified and top secret documents federal agents recovered from his Mar-a-Lago residence and resort.

Trump is asking the nation’s highest court to order a special master to continue to inspect the 103 classified documents, despite the special master emphatically stating the government, not Trump, gets to decide what is classified and what is not, especially when Trump refused to provide a list of what he considered declassified.

The lawsuit, which is a massive 240 pages, mostly made up of other documents including the now infamous FBI photo of the classified documents on the Mar-a-Lago rug, is addressed to “The Honorable Clarence Thomas, Circuit Justice for the Eleventh Circuit,” and refers to the former president as “President Trump.”

The lawsuit also mentions the contents that federal agents took, including “89 empty envelopes,” while not noting they were classified document envelopes.

“As part of the 11th Circuit’s decision, the panel allowed the criminal investigation to use the seized documents, something [Judge] Cannon had previously barred,” The Washington Post notes. “Trump’s filing seeks only to reverse the appeals court’s ruling on the special master’s access to the documents, not the part of the decision concerning the investigation.”

an 9 22

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, appointed by Donald Trump in November of 2020, has granted the former president his request for a “special master” to review the more than 11,000 documents the FBI seized when executing a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago August 8.

“In addition to granting the appointment of a special master, Cannon enjoined the government from reviewing and using the seized materials for ‘investigative purposes’ until the special master’s review is complete or a separate court order is given, though she did not pause the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s review at this time,” LawFare reports.

The special master, an “independent third party will examine ‘the seized property for personal items and documents and potentially privileged material subject to claims of attorney-client and/or executive privilege,’ Cannon wrote in an order issued in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida,” CNBC reports.

Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu and other legal experts have stated appointing a special master is inappropriate. Wu calls it “a completely unnecessary obstacle to holding the former president accountable.”

He adds that Judge Cannon “has no business trying to oversee a federal criminal investigation.”

This is a breaking news and developing story.

an 922

nonsensical ruling ~ 11th 3 panel 2 trumpers

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/aileen-cannon-2658322985/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/donald-trump-proof-fbi-evidence/

judge dearie

Jeanine Pirro says the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago was “a blatantly political move” meant to influence the midterm election

08/31/22 mma

https://www.mediamatters.org/mar-lago-search/charlie-kirk-says-fbi-intentionally-placed-time-magazine-cover-says-knock-knock-doj

rww 8 22

ben Jacobs @ Vox: The DOJ’s latest filing has even more damning claims against Trump.
Alex Griffing @ Mediaite: Trump Lawyer Complains DOJ is Seeking to Charge Ex-President Under ‘Mundane Statutes: Espionage and Two Others.’
Areeba Shah @ Salon: Republicans react to damming DOJ filing of found Mar-a-Lago docs with cries of “staged” evidence.
Charles Homans @ The New York Times: The Extremely Online Rise of Doug Mastriano.
Matt Gertz @ Media Matters: Fox’s disingenuous meltdown over Biden’s “semi-fascism” comment.
David Gilbert @ Vice News: How LibsOfTikTok Is Helping the Kremlin Boost Anti-LGBTQ Disinformation.
Hemant Mehta @ OnlySky: Texas lawmaker: Those Arabic ‘In God We Trust’ posters don’t count!
Will Sommer @ The Daily Beast: Gavin McInnes Allies Believe Proud Boys Founder Faked Arrest.

Tags: Doug Mastriano Gavin McInnes Round-Up Fox News Channel

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/phony-rothschild-heiress-donald-trump/

punked infiltrated

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-says-fbi-seizing-top-secret-documents-mar-lago-what-we-fought-revolution

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/trump-nominated-judge-special-master/

an 8 22

Former President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Jenna Ellis claimed on Sunday morning's edition of Newsmax'sWake Up America that the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Florida on Monday, August 8th because Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) lost her primary race to Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman.

The Cheney-Hagemen contest occurred on Tuesday, August 16th, more than a week after the FBI recovered hundreds of extremely sensitive documents from Trump's estate.

"This is yet another next thing in the line of what the Democrats are targeting President Trump with," Ellis, a constitutional law attorney, griped without providing any supporting evidence.

"Look, we're not hearing anything about January 6th anymore," Ellis proclaimed. "The timing of this is so suspicious because right after Liz Cheney loses her primary, and everything about the January 6th Committee is going away, now this raid happens."

Cheney is the Vice Chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, which revealed its findings in eight public hearings over the summer. While future proceedings have not yet been scheduled, the bipartisan panel is continuing its probe into Trump's role in the deadly insurrection.

Ellis added that the Justice Department's criminal pursuit of Trump "is the next mantra. This is the next thing that [Representative] Eric Swalwell [D-California] is tweeting, saying, 'the walls are closing in.'"

Watch below or at this link.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/trump-supporters-threatening-national-archives/

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/08/28/ex-gorsuch-law-clerk-shreds-the-reasons-behind-intelligence-czars-review-of-mar-n2612325

townhall BS

ex-Gorsuch Law Clerk Shreds Reasoning Behind Intelligence Czar's Review of Mar-a-Lago Documents

Matt Vespa Matt Vespa| @mvespa1|Posted: Aug 28, 2022

The circus over the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago on August 8 continues with this latest development: our intelligence czar told Congress her office would review the seized documents. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines announced yesterday that the records taken from the home of the former president would undergo a thorough classification process (via CBS News):

The director of national intelligence is preparing to review the items recovered during the FBI search of at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month, CBS News has learned.

In a letter sent to congressional leaders Friday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said her office would conduct a "classification review of relevant materials."

"The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are working together to facilitate a classification review of relevant materials, including those recovered during the search," Haines wrote. "ONDI will also lead an Intelligence Community assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents.

This raid has become an ever-degrading hurricane in the news cycle.

Federal agents ransacking the home of a former president over the fact that he wasn’t turning over documents to the National Archives fast enough is a historic moment. The obstruction of justice allegations is once again proven false. Trump’s lawyers worked with government officials to review and send records back. They sent 15 boxes to the agency in January. The allegations that nuclear secrets were strewn about the residence were also false. At least there’s no mention in the affidavit that provided probable cause for the raid.

Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, has been active and informatory about classification, the presidency, and how the liberal media is focusing on things that don’t matter in this case. He’s continued to inform the public that the classification statutes and regulations do not apply to the presidency's office, that government always over-classifies materials of any post-presidency, and that Trump taking the documents is a declassifying action. Trump already declassified documents relating to Crossfire Hurricane—the FBI spy operation against his campaign.

This storm is starting to dissipate as every new update either makes the Biden Justice Department flaunt its rogue and extrajudicial roots or drops nothing remarkable regarding any criminal intent that comes with Trump holding onto these documents. Until Trump’s team filed a motion for a special master to review the documents, something a judge seems intent on appointing, the most recent stories about what led up to the raid is a monotonous stream of emails between Trump lawyers and the National Archives. Liberal writers, like Matt Taibbi, noted how the media is reticent on anything regarding this raid. He likened it to an accidental missile launch.

Recommended

Judge Might Grant Something ‘Special’ for Trump Following FBI Raid

Matt Vespa

“Are we really being softened up for the DOJ ending this story without ever explaining what it had at the time of the raid? That would be bananas,” Taibbi wrote.

Davis added that Mar-a-Lago has Secret Service protection. Former presidents are afforded staff to handle these issues—the documents were secure. They were also potentially legal for Trump to have as he is a former president. He is the ultimate authority on declassifying such records. In just a few tweets, the man seems to have gutted the core reasoning for the DNI review. Unlike Hillary, Trump can and did declassify sensitive information. Again, these updates are a tortured production that teases something big to drop but remains incapable of showing why we need an army of FBI agents to raid Melania Trump’s closet and bust open the residence’s vault, which the affidavit provided no probable cause. It’s Russian collusion Part 5,000 regarding the pervasive updates that proved nothing.In this case, all the new developments post-raid are rendered meritless as the media pushes for a mishandling of classified materials story involving Trump. No president can ever be charged with that violation.

an 8 22

Former President Donald Trump and his inner circle of allies continue to circulate claims that declassified documents were removed from Mar-a-Lago during the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search of his estate.

In fact, according to HuffPost, former Trump official Kash Patel recently echoed that same argument during an interview with Fox News' Mark Levin.

“In October of 2020, President Trump put out for the world to see, a sweeping declassification order, and he did it via social media — every single Russia-gate doc, every single Hillary-gate doc, everyone,” Patel said on Sunday.

On Oct. 6, 2020, Trump actually did tweet, “I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

However, previous remarks debunking that claim are now circulating again on social media. Per HuffPost, later that month Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff under Trump, "conceded in a sworn declaration to a federal court that Trump’s tweet was not an order to declassify or release those records."

In a sworn statement, the former Trump White House chief of staff wrote, “The president indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were no self-executing declassification orders, and do not require the declassification or release of any particular documents."

Meadows added that "the tweets 'related to authority' the president had delegated" to U.S. Attorney General William Barr pertaining to records.

The sworn statement was written after a judge demanded that an explanation be provided on why the former president's tweets appeared to contradict the White House stance on declassifying Russia-related documents.

In addition to recalling Trump's tweets, Patel – who stepped in as acting chief of staff after Meadows' departure — also claimed that he "had witnessed Trump declassify 'whole sets of documents' in December 2020 and January 2021 while Trump was 'on his way out.'”

However, HuffPost notes that he previously said "the administration 'failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings.'” Declassification is not a process that can be completed in secret.

Watch Patel's Fox News appearance below or at this link:...

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-erroneously-claim-biden-facilitated-search-mar-lago

https://www.mediamatters.org/cnn/cnn-reports-tom-fitton-has-been-advising-trump-he-should-not-have-returned-any-documents-and

no lnx

cNN reports that Tom Fitton has been advising Trump that he should not have returned any documents and should not give back any more

Gabby Orr: Fitton advised Trump “that he never should have returned the documents to the Archives in the first place, and if the Archives came knocking again, that he shouldn’t turn over any more”

WRITTEN BY MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

PUBLISHED 08/25/22

Video

CitationFrom the August 25, 2022, edition of CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper

JAKE TAPPER (HOST): Despite Donald Trump's public claims that he's been cooperating with the National Archives, he's been increasingly listening to outside legal advice to do the exact opposite. And now, Trump allies are becoming increasingly concerned about a potential indictment. CNN's Kristen Holmes and Gabby Orr are part of the team breaking this new reporting. Gabby, tell us about this legal advice Trump is getting about cooperating with the Archives.

GABBY ORR: Well Jake, we know some of the folks who have been helping him navigate these matters for the past couple of months. You know, Christina Bobb, Jim Trusty, Evan Corcoran, those are familiar names but what we now know is thatTrump began taking advice from Tom Fitton, who is the head of a conservative legal activism group, Judicial Watch, earlier this year, shortly after he returned those 15 boxes to the National Archives in January.

And what Fitton was telling Trump behind the scenes is really interesting, because he was essentially saying, in his belief, Trump had full authority over the documents that he brought from the White House to Mar-A-Lago at the end of his presidency, that he never should have returned the documents to the Archives in the first place, and that if the Archives came knocking again, that he shouldn't turn over any more documents.

Now, we know that Trump didn't always listen to Tom Fitton, because in June during that meeting with federal investigators his attorneys did turn over additional documents. But this is -- it really speaks to sort of the behind the scenes advice that he was getting from people outside his legal team.

THE LATEST

CNN reports that Tom Fitton has been advising Trump that he should not have returned any documents and should not give back any more

CNN

Tom Fitton

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton repeatedly pushed conspiracy theories targeting Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic

02/25/21 3:02 PM EST

Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton urges state legislators to appoint new electors and overturn election results

01/04/21 6:28 PM EST

Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton calls for states “to appoint a clean slate of electorsthat supports President Trump” to overturn the popular vote

11/06/20 6:21 PM EST

Lou Dobbs and Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton call on Trump to “just pardon everybody, you know, just have a field day”

04/16/18 8:25 PM EDT

Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton instructs Trump toform “transparency strike teams” to storm government buildings and take documents

10/09/20 5:55 PM EDT

How Tom Fitton and conservative media spread debunked “voter fraud” disinformation about the Iowa caucuses

02/04/20

msnbc every time they get what demanded, it gets worse for trump?

https://www.mediamatters.org/john-solomon/john-solomon-representative-trump-national-archives-many-his-claims-about-case-are

no lnx many vids

John Solomon is a representative for Trump to the National Archives. Many of his claims about the case are false.

Trying to gain control of the story, Solomon himself released a May 10 letter from acting National Archivist Debra Wall and immediately misled about what it said

WRITTEN BY JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES

PUBLISHED 08/25/22

John Solomon, former President Donald Trump’s official representative to the National Archives and Records Administration, released a letter that reveals in plain detail that Trump and his legal team did not cooperate with the National Archives, and that the August 8 Mar-a-Lago search occurred only after they repeatedly sought to delay the FBI’s involvement. Despite these facts, Solomon has made numerous appearances in the right-wing media, including on Fox News, to spread misinformation and spin about the letter.

Dated May 10, the letter from acting National Archivist Debra Wall to Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran details the back-and-forth between Trump’s lawyers and the National Archives in retrieving over 700 pages of classified material from Mar-a-Lago. It clearly lays out how Trump did not fully cooperate with the National Archives and the Department of Justice, outlining the five-month process to retrieve the documents.

Solomon’s website Just the Newswas the first to publish the damning document late on August 22.The next morning, he appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room:Pandemic to put a confusing pro-Trump spin on the story.

Video

CitationFrom the August 23, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic

In Solomon’s version, the FBI mysteriously heard that the National Archives retrieved documents from Mar-a-Lago and wanted to look through them. The bureau asked President Joe Biden, who told the DOJ and the FBI to go right ahead and look through the documents, completely ignoring that Trump maintains executive privilege over them.

This is completely false. Here’s a breakdown:

CLAIM: “The White House counsel's office authorized the National Archives to send information they had gotten in the boxes of Trump – voluntarily returned to the archives – and send it to the FBI. That launches a criminal investigation.”

REALITY: Solomon conveniently leaves out that the Presidential Records Act not only allows, but requires this course of action.As Wall details in the letter, the National Archives’ initial review of the documents returned in January found “items marked as classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials” – a label given to the most sensitive secrets in government. This prompted the agency to inform the DOJ. The Presidential Records Act empowers the National Archives, the president, and the DOJ to oversee the handling of presidential documents, including the power of “the Archivist and the Attorney General [to] jointly investigate the unlawful removal or destruction of government and presidential records.”

CLAIM: Next, Solomon says that “President Trump would have had the right … to go to court and say, I have executive privilege, I might have declassified these documents,” but “the current president waives the executive privilege of the past president.” He repeated this point again later on in the interview.

REALITY: His argument that Biden and the DOJ should have allowed Trump to take his executive privilege claim to the courts is debunked by the letter itself. Wall consulted the Office of Legal Counsel, which advised her that “there is no precedent for an assertion of executive privilege by a former President against an incumbent President to prevent the latter from obtaining from NARA Presidential records belonging to the Federal Government where ‘such records contain information that is needed for the conduct of current business of the incumbent President’s office and that is not otherwise available.’”

The precedent that Solomon and other Trump allies refer to when they argue this point applies only to congressional or judicial oversights, not executive branch examination and investigation. To be clear, a former president cannot exert executive privilege claims over a current president, the head of the executive branch itself, when the information pertains to the current business of the administration.

Then, referring to the same case as Solomon, Wall laid out what it actually means for Trump:

“To the contrary, the Supreme Court’s decision in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977), strongly suggests that a former President may not successfully assert executive privilege “against the very Executive Branch in whose name the privilege is invoked.” … The Court specifically noted that an “incumbent President should not be dependent on happenstance or the whim of a prior President when he seeks access to records of past decisions that define or channel current governmental obligations.”

The Office of Legal Counsel advised that Trump had no privilege over these documents. There was no need to start a court fight to rehash the same issue; as Wall’s letter noted, “the question in this case is not a close one.”

CLAIM: Solomon claims that on May 8, “the Biden White House says it's over, we're passing privilege. We're giving the documents to the FBI.”

REALITY: This is false. Biden delegated the decision to Wall; he did not make it himself. From the letter:

The Counsel to the President has informed me that, in light of the particular circumstances presented here, President Biden defers to my determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, regarding whether or not I should uphold the former President’s purported “protective assertion of executive privilege.”

As Politico’s Kyle Cheney explains, “there was no way a former president's claim could override an incumbent administration's need for the review. … Trump allies touted portions of this letter that were revealed by Solomon earlier in the evening, saying it showed Biden had been involved in the process. That's a requirement of any NARA matter involving privilege.”

CLAIM: Solomon argues that “there's an escalation driven by the Biden White House against its likely rival in 2024. … I think most Americans are going to be troubled to find out the current president [was] siccing the FBI on the former president,and I think that’s the way these documents read when you look at it. ”

REALITY: The letter makes clear that the “escalation” came only after numerous attempts by the Trump legal team to delay an FBI investigation. After being granted an initial delay until April 29, the Trump team requested an additional delay based on executive privilege claims, which the National Archives and the Office of Legal Counsel found to be legally unfounded. As the letter painstakingly explains, “The Executive Branch here is seeking access to records belonging to, and in the custody of, the Federal Government itself, not only in order to investigate whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner but also, as the National Security Division explained, to ‘conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported and take any necessary remedial steps.’”

CLAIM: Solomon says that “in mid-April, there's a discussion – the FBI hears from the National Archives that they got the boxes. They want to see what's in the boxes.”

REALITY: Solomon’s word choice is misleading. Rather than implying that a nosy FBI “want[s] to see what’s in the boxes,” it would be more accurate to say that the bureau needed to investigate the documents, as is procedure per the Presidential Records Act. Nonetheless, this is not what the letter says. It says that the National Archives informed the DOJ, “which prompted the Department to ask the President to request that NARA provide the FBI with access to the boxes at issue so that the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community could examine them.” The FBI heard “from the National Archives that they got the boxes,” because the National Archives and DOJ needed the bureau to investigate whether the boxes contained classified documents.

Under federal law, “The Archivist is not authorized to independently investigate removal or recover records.” Engaging the FBI was a necessary step.

CLAIM: Solomon claims that Trump’s team asked for time to sort out privileged materials and “within a few days of that, those conversations going on, the National Archives came back and said ‘We don’t care about your privilege claims.’”

REALITY: He is putting a false spin on the timeline here. Trump’s lawyers were advised on April 12 that the National Archives would allow the FBI to examine the returned records. They sought and were granted a delay until April 29.

The rejection he’s referring to is the second request for a delay on April 29, two and a half weeks after Trump’s lawyers were notified that the FBI needed to examine the documents. At the time of writing the May 10 letter, Wall noted, “It has now been four weeks since we first informed you of our intent to provide the FBI access to the boxes so that it and others in the Intelligence Community can conduct their reviews.”

CLAIM: Solomon closes by arguing, “This is a chilling potential fact for not only former presidents, but any future president – if any future president knows that the guy who beats him at the polls or succeeds him at the polls can then turn around and release all the documents that a prior president might have considered privileged because he got important advice to do his job, who's going to put anything on paper? Who's going to want to get that advice knowing that could happen?”

REALITY: Solomon ignores that the documents the FBI was sent to recover still legally belong to the federal government, not Trump. Rather than trying to “turn around and release all the documents that a prior president might have considered privileged,” Wall’s letter said that the classified documents in question would need to be reviewed by national security officials to assess “the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported” by the former president.

Responding to the Trump team’s objections, she explained that “there is no reason to believe such reviews could ‘adversely affect the ability of future Presidents to obtain the candid advice necessary for effective decisionmaking.’ … To the contrary: Ensuring that classified information is appropriately protected, and taking any necessary remedial action if it was not, are steps essential to preserving the ability of future Presidents to “receive the full and frank submissions of facts and opinions upon which effective discharge of [their] duties depends.”

Further, what Solomon complains about has been possible since 1978; any president since the Presidential Records Act was put in place could release such documents. Trump does not hold executive privilege over the executive branch itself.

Nonetheless, Solomon was not the only pro-Trump figure on War Room spinning the National Archives letter.

Former Trump adviser Boris Ephsteyn also appeared on Bannon’s August 23 show and claimed that Politico’s coverage of the letter somehow exonerates Trump:“The only thing that matters in the Politico article is that it proves once and for all, fully proves that A) there was full cooperation and compliance, as we've been saying consistently, and B) that the Biden administration absolutely and fully participated in this plan to raid and attack Mar-A-Lago. There's no two ways about it.”

Video

CitationFrom the August 23, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic

The Trump team was not in “full cooperation and compliance.” They sought to delay the investigation at least twice and submitted challenges with no legal basis. The May 10 letter shows that the Biden administration, as Cheney again points out, was remarkably detached from the investigation: “The language about consultation with the White House shows Biden was *more hands off* with the Mar-a-Lago docs than he was with the Jan. 6 records held by NARA. In both cases, archivist consulted with OLC, but in latter Biden delegated privilege decisions to NARA.”

The previous day, president of the Article III Project and regular War Room guest Mike Davis complained that before ordering the Mar-a-Lago search on August 8, Attorney General Merrick Garland did not “take the time to go to the Office of Legal Counsel within his own Justice Department,” whose opinions “are binding on the executive branch.” Davis asserted this meant that Garland knew the Mar-a-Lago search was “unlawful” and “unnecessary.”

Of course, we now know that the Office of Legal Counsel was consulted by the National Archives before the May 10 letter, and its “binding” legal opinion rejected Trump’s defenses. But these facts haven’t stopped right-wing media from spreading other pro-Trump spin and misinformation around the Mar-a-Lago search.

In an August 23 article, Fox News adopted the same false framework with the headline “Biden signed off on FBI review of Trump records, National Archives letter reveals.”

And Solomon has introduced a dubious new line of attack blaming former President Barack Obama.

Video

CitationFrom the August 23, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's Just the News

JOHN SOLOMON (JUST THE NEWS): Joe Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, actually managed to change the rules. After 9/11, George Bush had put a rule into place that a prior president got to protect his own privilege. If he and the president couldn’t – the sitting president – couldn’t agree on the release of records, that the prior president’s claim to executive privilege was predominant. Barack Obama came in in 2009 and he got rid of that and said, I, the incumbent president, I get the only say on this. … Barack Obama actually set in motion the raid that ultimately ended up in a raid at Mar-a-Lago on Donald Trump’s property.

THE LATEST

Right-wing media erroneously claim Biden “facilitated” search of Mar-a-Lago

08/25/22 2:05 PM EDT

Gov. Greg Abbott refused to connect Texas’ recent devastating rain and flooding to climate change. National TV networks largely stayed silent as well.

08/25/22 2:01 PM EDT

4chan users baselessly claim Google Maps is showing a trafficking operation

08/25/22 1:54 PM EDT

Steve Bannon rails against student debt forgiveness then brags about his Ivy League degree

08/25/22 1:52 PM EDT

Right-wing organization Today is America is fueling an extremist network of young conservative influencers

08/25/22 12:37 PM EDT

Right-wing media claim Trump can declassify documents with a “magic wand”

08/24/22 5:14 PM EDT

The gang’s back together! Sean Hannity welcomes disgraced journalist John Solomon back to Fox to defend Trump’s handling of top secret documents

08/19/22 3:33 PM EDT

Right-wing media claim Trump’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated in Mar-a-Lago search

08/22/22

rww 8 22

JCN President Carrie Severino criticized the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson in a March 2022 Fox News appearance.

Just days after FBI agents carried out a search warrant for secret documents wrongly being held at former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, a right-wing dark-money group that helped secure a far-right majority on the Supreme Court launched a $1 million digital and cable ad campaign attacking Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The Judicial Crisis Network has been at the core of the massive and secretly funded dark-money campaign by right-wing funders and groups like the Federalist Society to secure ideological domination of the Supreme Court and federal judiciary. The group backed former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s abuse of power to prevent the Senate from considering former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Garland to the Supreme Court, and then spent tens of millions promoting confirmation of Trump’s nominees. More recently, JCN led attacks on the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and dishonest smears against several of President Joe Biden’s Justice Department nominees.

The new JCN ad seeks to undermine Garland’s credibility, accusing him of “cowering to the woke mob.” A press release announcing the ad buy claimed that Garland has “consistently bowed to the radical left’s agenda.” In a statement, the group’s president Carrie Severino repeated a false right-wing talking point accusing Garland of “calling concerned parents ‘domestic terrorists.’”

The ad also claims that Garland has betrayed his former judicial colleague Brett Kavanaugh by not stopping activists from protesting outside the Supreme Court justice’s home. As CNN noted, the rarely enforced law that JCN and right-wing politicians are demanding Garland use against protesters could also be interpreted to forbid the kind of protests at the Supreme Court that anti-abortion groups mobilized for years. The JCN ad notably does not mention that Garland supported recent legislation to beef up security for Supreme Court justices and their families.

Right-wing media outlets have given JCN’s campaign a boost, with Fox News reporting JCN’s assertion that the Garland ad is part of a broader $10 million campaign attacking Democrats over the court that will include “paid advertising, earned media, research, grassroots activity, and a coalition enterprise.”

We need your help. Every day, Right Wing Watch exposes extremism to help the public, activists, and journalists understand the strategies and tactics of anti-democratic forces—and respond to an increasingly aggressive and authoritarian far-right movement. The threat is growing, but our resources are not. Any size contribution—or a small monthly donation—will help us continue our work and become more effective at disrupting the ideologies, people, and organizations that threaten our freedom and democracy. Please make an investment in Right Wing Watch’s defense of the values we share.

Tags: Carrie Severino Donald Trump Donald Trump Supreme Court Judicial Crisis Network

8 22 an

Trump is threatening he is about to file a “major motion pertaining to the Fourth Amendment,” which prevents unreasonable searches and seizures. In a post on his Truth Social social media platform, which currently appears to be down, the former president who has been fundraising over the FBI’s execution of a legal search warrant on Mar-a-Lago nearly two weeks ago, is calling that action an “illegal Break-In.”

“A major motion pertaining to the Fourth Amendment will soon be filed concerning the illegal Break-In of my home, Mar-a Lago, right before the ever important Mid-Term Elections,” Trump says, according to a screenshot of his post.

"My rights, together with the rights of all Americans, have been violated at a level rarely seen before in our Country,” he continues, which, if referring to the FBI executing that search warrant and capturing 20 cartons of White House records that belong to the National Archives, including 11 sets of classified documents, he is incorrect.

“Remember, they even spied on my campaign,” Trump adds, which is false. “The greatest Witch Hunt in USA history has been going on for six years, with no consequences to the scammers. It should not be allowed to continue!”

1m$ maralago BS

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/trumps-fundraiser/

Weeks prior to the Federal Bureau of Investigation' (FBI) search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, a former official for the U.S. Department of Defense vowed to publish classified documents, a new report reveals.

According to ABC News, Trump loyalist Kash Patel planned to "retrieve classified documents from the National Archives and publish them on his website."

On June 22, Patel appeared on a far-right podcast where he made the remarks. "I've never told anyone this because it just happened," Patel said during the podcast interview. "I'm going to identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified at the National Archives, and we're going to start putting that information out next week."

However, Patel failed to explain how he would be able to legally obtain copies of those records. "White House counsel and company disobeyed a presidential order and implemented federal governmental bureaucracy on the way out to basically send the stash to the National Archives, and now that's where it's at," Patel said.

A report published around the same time also indicated that Trump had penned a letter instructing the National Archives to grant access to concealed administration records. Access to those records was to be granted to Patel along with conservative journalist John Solomon.

In addition to the June 22 interview, Patel had also spoken about classified documents on other occasions insisting Trump had declassified a substantial amount of "Russiagate documents" during his final days in office.

"I know what's there" in the Archives, said Patel. "I can't still talk about them, but the whole process is going to be: Identify the documents, whether it's Russiagate, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Jan 6th -- and put them out."

In wake of the latest report, Erica Knight, a spokesperson for Patel, spoke to ABC News as she insisted that the former DoD official was acting as "a representative on behalf of President Trump to work with the National Archives to get them to disclose information."

"The GSA has their own policies and procedures for how presidential records must be handled," Knight said, "which Patel is in full cooperation with."

an 8 22

'We will not stand by and we will not stand down': Armed Trump supporters protest at Phoenix FBI office

Image via Screengrab / News2Share [confed flag patch]

Lauren Sue and Daily Kos August 14, 2022

Video captured by the independent media site News2Share shows supporters of former President Donald Trump armed with guns, waving confederate and American flags outside of the FBI office in Phoenix, Arizona on Saturday.

"We're here in support of Trump, for what happened to him, the unlawful search with the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago home," someone at the demonstration told News2Share. "We are sick and tired of this tyrannical government called the Biden regime. We will not stand by and we will not stand down.

"We're gonna take the fight to the FBI if need be."

The latest in a string of Republican rantings, the demonstration is in response to the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday—an act that has led to the seizure of 11 sets of classified documents, including those related to nuclear weapons, according to The Washington Post.

Somehow though, Trump apologists still maintain the former president’s rights were violated while they go about the business of threatening the federal judge who signed the warrant and any other official they see fit to accuse without a shred of evidence of widespread election fraud.

In Gillespie County, Texas, a county about 80 miles west of Austin, elections administrator Anissa Herrera said she resigned from her work due in large part to threats she faced, according to the Fredericksburg Standard.

“After the 2020 (election), I was threatened, I’ve been stalked, I’ve been called out on social media,” Herrera told the newspaper. “And it’s just dangerous misinformation.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray condemned such threats in a statement on Thursday. “Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others,” he said. “Violence and threats against law enforcement, including the FBI, are dangerous and should be deeply concerning to all Americans.

They are to Democrats. Many tweeted their outrage at the double standard propagated when a group of white men and women were allowed to threaten federal officials while armed.

Warning: This video contains disturbing footage of violence that may be triggering to viewers.

A social media user who goes by Jason V. tweeted on Sunday, that the "armed domestic terrorists" probably haven't been taken down yet "because they're not black or brown."

Shannon Watts, founder of the grassroots movement for public safety Moms Demand Action, pointed to a trend of recent violence following GOP reaction to the search of Trump’s home.

The most recent of which is a Capitol Police report that a man started firing in the air then drove his car into a vehicle barricade in a fiery crash early Sunday at East Capitol Street and Second Street.

”When our officers heard the sound of gunfire, they immediately responded and were approaching the man when he shot himself,” Capitol Police said in a news release. “Nobody else was hurt.

“At this time, it does not appear the man was targeting any Members of Congress, who are on recess, and it does not appear officers fired their weapons.”

No other injuries were reported in the incident, and investigators are still looking into the man’s background. But for many, the incident is an example of violence spiraling out of control as Republicans instigate a greater divide between Trump supporters and the rest of the country.

Regarding the protest outside of the Phoenix FBI building, Democrat Eric Smith tweeted congressional candidates of North Carolina:

“This is a Declaration of War & as such the Federal Government will be well within its rights to use all the firepower at its disposal to put these traitors down & down for good”

Majid Padellan, a blogger and influencer who goes by "Brooklyn Dad" on social media, tweeted on Sunday:

"Not a single Republican leader has called upon the armed trumpers at the Phoenix FBI to stand down. Any blood will be on their hands."

In another tweet, Padellan laid out a series of actions and statements by Trump that created the kind of climate in which his supporters would feel emboldened to threaten federal officials. "First he told domestic terrorists to ‘Stand back and stand by,’” Padellan said. “Then he refused to call the National Guard on January 6th.

“Then he wouldn't call off his armed supporters outside the Phoenix FBI. Donald trump is a pathetic, cowardly traitor."

Read the full redacted search warrant obtained for Trump’s Mara Lago home:

an ah 8 22

On Thursday, August 11 — three days after the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in South Florida — a Donald Trump supporter was killed during a violent confrontation with law enforcement. The armed suspect, identified by the Washington Post as42-year-old Ricky Shiffer, unsuccessfully tried to breach an FBI field office in Cincinnati; after fleeing the premises, he was pursued by law enforcement agents and died during a shootout near Wilmington, Ohio.

The FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago were looking for classified government documents. Shiffer, according to the Post, had posted anti-FBI messages on Trump’s social media platform Truth Social before the attack — writing “kill the enemy” and “If you don't hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I." In an official statement on August 11, the FBI’s Cincinnati office noted, “The subject shot at law enforcement officers. During the incident, law enforcement also fired their weapons.”

Criminologist Brian Levin discussed the potential for more violence during a Friday night, August 12 appearance on CNN. Levin, who serves as director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, fears that violent attacks by Trump supporters could escalate if the former president faces some type of indictment.

Levin told CNN’s Kim Brunhuber, “As this heats up, where there's a certain event, an indictment — we're not saying it's happening — but if it does, that will cause this fire to burn more. The kindling is already out there, and we are quite concerned because this kind of stuff heats up and gets more directed as we go down that trail as to what's going to happen with respect to a possible criminal prosecution of the former president.”

Brunhuber noted all the angry, over-the-top rhetoric that has been coming from Republican politicians and far-right media figures following the FBI’s August 8 search at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump has been living since leaving the White House on January 20, 2021. When Brunhuber asked Levin if “right politicians and media figures…. just don't care about the consequences of stoking political violence,” Levin responded, “I don't think they care. And we had reams of data showing that both hate crimes, extremist plots and including homicides, go up downstream around this kind of rhetoric.”

Levin continued, “What this does is it labels certain groups and individuals as legitimate targets of aggression. But sometimes, that aggression is manifest as what we're seeing online in this firehose of insults, epithets and conspiracy theories…. For some, they're gonna act on it either individually or in a more organized fashion.”

Levin added that according to FBI data, the “worst day for hate crimes” occurred in 2019 after the U.S. House of Representatives indicted then-President Trump on articles of impeachment.

rww 8 22

Just days after FBI agents carried out a search warrant for secret documents wrongly being held at former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, a right-wing dark-money group that helped secure a far-right majority on the Supreme Court launched a $1 million digital and cable ad campaign attacking Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The ad also claims that Garland has betrayed his former judicial colleague Brett Kavanaugh by not stopping activists from protesting outside the Supreme Court justice’s home.As CNN noted, the rarely enforced law that JCN and right-wing politicians are demanding Garland use against protesters could also be interpreted to forbid the kind of protests at the Supreme Court that anti-abortion groups mobilized for years. The JCN ad notably does not mention that Garland supported recent legislation to beef up security for Supreme Court justices and their families.

Right-wing media outlets have given JCN’s campaign a boost, with Fox News reporting JCN’s assertion that the Garland ad is part of a broader $10 million campaign attacking Democrats over the court that will include “paid advertising, earned media, research, grassroots activity, and a coalition enterprise.”

an 8 22

...Others have attempted to defend the former president. Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said, “You can say nuclear weapons, but there are things that are highly, highly classified, there are things that are not extremely classified."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is now selling merchandise on her website in support of a call to "defund the FBI" while Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) tweeted, "I will support a complete dismantling and elimination of the democrat brown shirts known as the FBI."

an 8 22

On August 20, 2022, Donald Trump will have been gone from the White House for 19 months. But Trump, unlike other former presidents, hasn’t disappeared from the headlines by any means — and on Monday, August 8, the most prominent topic on cable news was the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in South Florida. Countless Republicans, from Fox News hosts to Trump himself, have been furiously railing against the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). And in an article published by Politico on August 11, reporters Kyle Cheney and Meridith McGraw describe the atmosphere of “paranoia” and suspicion that has become even worse in Trumpworld since the search.

“A wave of concern and even paranoia is gripping parts of Trumpworld as federal investigators tighten their grip on the former president and his inner circle,” Cheney and McGraw explain. “In the wake of news that the FBI agents executed a court-authorized search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, Trump’s allies and aides have begun buzzing about a host of potential explanations and worries. Among those being bandied about is that the search was a pretext to fish for other incriminating evidence, that the FBI doctored evidence to support its search warrant — and then planted some incriminating materials and recording devices at Mar-a-Lago for good measure — and even that the timing of the search was meant to be a historical echo of the day President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974.”

It was on August 8, 1974 that Nixon, overwhelmed by the Watergate scandal, announced his resignation. The following day, Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as president. And right-wing pundit Monica Crowley, on Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” claimed it was no coincidence that the FBI chose August 8 to execute the search warrant.

Crowley told “War Room” listeners, “There are no coincidences when it comes to the Deep State. They could have done this raid a couple of days before or tomorrow, but they chose August 8 for a reason.”

Cheney and McGraw stress that while Trumpworld is “deeply suspicious, even conspiratorial” to begin with, the Mar-a-Lago raid has made their “paranoia” even worse.

“Trump allies have begun pushing conspiracies to explain away the probe,” according to Cheney and McGraw. “The chatter was fed, in part, by two articles, one in Axios the other in Newsweek, that suggested someone high up within Trump’s orbit had flipped and was cooperating with the government and that detailed the belief among some Trump hands that they had a mole. By late Wednesday afternoon, it had become an openly discussed topic on Fox News. And a story in the Wall Street Journal indicated that, in fact, a witness had been aiding investigators, telling the FBI that not all classified records had been disclosed during early negotiations and helping investigators pinpoint the location of missing records.”

The Politico reporters continue, “But the more aggressively pushed theory by Trump allies, at least in public, was the idea that evidence might have been planted by the FBI on the premises. Trump himself floated the idea in a post on his social media site, and it was amplified bySen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), as well as Fox News hosts like Jesse Watters, and even Trump’s own lawyer.”

A new report is shedding more light on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) findings during the search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. According to CNN, new about the FBI gaining access to Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage.

During Wednesday's segment of CNN's "At This Hour" with host Kate Bolduan, Katelyn Polantz offered a brief update on what transpired at the former president's estate on Tuesday, August 9.

"There were new details about FBI's Florida home," Bolduan said. "CNN has learned from investigators that the former president or his team did not return the government documents that were taken when they left the White House."

Polantz chimed in with further details about what was retrieved during the search. "It's been two days since the search and we are learning more about what prompted it in Mar-a-Lago on Monday," Polantz explained.

"So, law enforcement had serious concerns about what was happening there on the Trump side," she noted. "Back in January, the national archives went to Florida to reclaim 15 boxes of records from the Trump presidency that were not Trump's to keep. So, we knew that."

Polantz added, "And then that incident launched this criminal investigation into the handling of classified records. Then this week, of course, the DOJ goes back in with a search warrant for more boxes and documents and those records, if they had gotten out, could have national security implications and that's according to our sources now."

The CNN correspondent went on to share details about the surveillance videos the FBI gained access to at the former president's estate. "So we also know in this investigation that federal authorities subpoenaed and received access to Mar-a-Lago's surveillance videos so that they were able to understand the security around these documents in recent weeks," she said.

"On top of that, sources tell Pamela Brown, Caitlin Collins, and I that they weren't being entirely truthful with them in recent months as law enforcement was working on the problem where Trump still had these presidential records in his possession," Polantz said, adding, "So, on the Trump side of things, we now understand that advisers around him thought the investigation until essentially Monday was stalled out; that it had gone silent."

She also noted the angle Trump's team may take in an effort to defend him. "Now their argument, we believe, will be that Trump didn't keep documents with national security secrets at Mar-a-Lago because when he was president they're saying he declassified them," she said.

Polantz concluded with a small disclaimer as she emphasized that direct details about the nature of the investigation still remain unknown. "But just a reminder here, we don't fully know what the Justice Department is investigating. That's how these things work. Investigations take time and happen in secret and we are looking for more, but right now most of those details are under seal."

Watch the video below or at this link.

kremer insurrection bus tour started doral fla?

AG Paxton’s campaign spent $50,000 at Mar-a-Lago: report

Alex Henderson

January 20, 2022

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has not been the type of Republican who is known for reaching out to the center. From his anti-Obamacare activities to a lawsuit that tried to throw out the election result...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-sister/

Friday morning, filtering his media diet to only include yahoos promoting conspiracy theories and baseless election fraud claims, Donald Trump found a heartwarming story. Posted by a Wayne Dupree, the title clearly caught Donald's eye: "Trump's Alleged Sister Issues Rare and Bold Statement on 2020 Election and Proves How Much She Believes in Her Brother." You might want to grab tissues, especially if you cry when you laugh really hard.

Trump retweeted the story, writing "Thank you Elizabeth, LOVE!" The tweet highlighted by Mr. Dupree is one posted on Nov. 18 from an account @TheBettyTrump, and reads "This election inspired me to break my silence and speak out on behalf of my family. My brother Don won this election and will fight this to the very end. We've always been a family of fighters. We are all so very proud of him and the job he has done for our country. 4 MORE YEARS!" I guess she waited until two weeks after the election to retrofit this inspiration? Well, it turns out that this account ain't Donald Trump's sister.

If one clicked through to the Dupree article, he writes an update saying "This tweet was widely shared online and covered by other publications. While this has not been officially "fact-checked" by social media executives and professionals, we're hearing from many others that this is not actually the account of Ms. Elizabeth Trump, but is actually a parody account." The account seems to have been set up two days ago and is filled with succinct attacks on just about everyone from Michelle Obama to Chris Wallace and Tucker Carlson.

Here are a couple of examples.

Barack Obama is a homosexual.

— Betty Trump (@TheBettyTrump) November 19, 2020

Michelle Obama is a man.

— Betty Trump (@TheBettyTrump) November 19, 2020

So, while this is a parody account and Donald Trump is a dangerous fool, the message is painfully the same as most MAGA accounts.

[twt]

pathetic.

Elizabeth Trump Grau, has stayed out of the press for the most part during her life. By most accounts she has been frequently seen at Trump's Mar-a-Lago, appearing in photos with massage parlor owner and Chinese CEO liaison, Li Yang.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/new-report-details-how-trump-uses-presidency-to-hand-out-favors-to-those-that-support-his-businesses/

hunter kos

New York Times continues its reports on Donald Trump's taxes, this time with (more) clear proof that Trump has been making money off the U.S. presidency.

The shortest possible summary of the Times' latest story is that Donald Trump Is A Crook. Not only have "customers" of Trump, in the form of lobbyists, interest groups, and foreign governments funneled roughly $12 million into Trump's pockets by booking events at Trump's properties, buying memberships into Mar-a-Lago and his other properties, and just generally hanging out at Trump's for-profit establishments with the expectation of meeting either Trump, his sons, his toadies, or his allies, but Trump has responded in kind by doing his paying customers favors that can only be fulfilled using the office of the presidency.

If you pay for a Mar-a-Lago membership, you get to meet Trump during one of his many Florida weekends and bring up ways the government could do your company or group significant favors. If you do make those requests, it's very possible that Trump will respond, reports the Times, by calling over one of his associates and telling them to get it done.

The reverse is also true. If you're seeking favors from Donald Trump, reports the Times, Donald Trump or one of his closest associates and/or family members may contact you to point out that you have been appearing an awful lot at Mar-a-Lago, for example, without ponying up for a quarter-million dollar membership—and that Donald has personally noticed that.

The Times lays out its case solidly, with examples. Those that pay into Trump's companies are frequently awarded with White House meetings, such as when he invited restaurant-owning billionaire Tilman Fertitta. After hearing Fertitta's personal request—a new pandemic relief fund for "the larger private restaurateur"—Trump turned to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with a directive: "Do the best you can" on that.

And so on, and so on. "Just 60 customers with interests at stake before the Trump administration brought his family business nearly $12 million" during Trump's first two years in office, reports the Times. "Almost all saw their interests advanced, in some fashion, by Mr. Trump or his government."

It's blatant corruption, of course. The payment of cash to the privately held businesses of a sitting president in exchange for that president personally bending government decision-making in your favor is definitively corrupt. It's not even the usual method of brazen American corruption, forking over huge "campaign" donations in an attempt to curry such favors; nope, this money is going into Donald Trump's pockets. He keeps it. Trump is making personal bank off the powers voters gave him.

Not that that's in any way surprising. Trump has proven time and time again to be completely disinterested in governing, in it solely for self-promotion and self-enrichment. His extortion of the legitimate Ukrainian government, withholding congressionally approved military aid to pressure the Ukrainian president into inventing a specific Trump-demanded campaign boost, was a near-perfect mirror to Trump's strong-arming of Mar-a-Lago supplicants to either pony up or get lost. Trump's demand that disaster relief be blocked after California fires, as well as the White House's disinterest in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic under the mistaken and psychopathic impression that the pandemic was doing the most damage in states that voted against him in the 2016 elections, show his eagerness to use the tools of government to punish those who Trump sees as personal enemies.

As usual, though, perhaps the only surprising discovery is that Trump really is an astonishingly petty crook. Corrupting the whole of U.S. government for $12 million dollars is dreadfully small-ball stuff; once again we see how Donald Trump, handed everything by his father and coming back for more, could manage to bankrupt even a casino. He's supposedly worth billions of dollars, and is handing out favors based on who has or hasn't purchased a $250,000 Mar-a-Lago membership? He's supposedly ultra-super-rich, and his idea of "using the most powerful office on Earth for self-enrichment" is wink-nod pressuring of supplicants to maybe rent out hotel rooms in his hotel when they're in town?

It's pathetic. He's corrupting the presidency for peanuts.

But he may have to, in his mind, if the Times' previous reporting on Trump's taxes is accurate. Trump is personally on the hook for almost half a billion dollars in loans coming due in the next few years, and there seems little chance "billionaire" Donald Trump can come up with that sort of money. He is, and always has been, a fraud. His claims of wealth are the words of a con artist.

Now he's up to his eyeballs in debt, yet again, and he clearly has used the presidency as he used his campaign: As publicity stunt, a personal brand boost, and nothing more. Even the presidency doesn't seem like it will pay out enough to keep Trump from going bankrupt in the near future.

He's just that bad at business. And that cheap in his ambitions. The world at his fingertips, and the man spends most of his time obsessing over how he can use it to boost golf club memberships and hotel room fees.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/new-report-shows-how-trump-businesses-took-money-from-the-government-even-while-they-closed-down/

when Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, he insisted that if he won the election, there would be a strict separation between the federal government and his business interests — that he would be “completely isolating” himself from his businesses. But according to Washington Post reporters David A. Fahrenthold and Josh Dawsey, the president’s high-end properties have “charged the U.S. government more than $1.1 million in private transactions since Trump took office” in January 2017.

Documents showing $1.1 million in charges, Fahrenthold and Dawsey report in the Post, were released by the U.S. Secret Service after the Post filed a public-records lawsuit. Those documents included receipts and invoices from Trump’s businesses, and the Post reporters note that “$188,000 in previously unknown charges” increases the Post’s “running total of payments to Trump’s properties related to the presence of Secret Service agents.”

One of those businesses is the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, which “charged the Secret Service more than $21,800 to rent a cottage and other rooms” while it was closed to the public because of the coronavirus pandemic. President Trump, according to Fahrenthold and Dawsey, did not visit his Bedminster property while it was “closed and otherwise off limits to guests,” but his daughter, White House Senior Adviser Ivanka Trump, reportedly did.

Fahrenthold and Dawsey explain, “The family visited the club in April to celebrate Passover, a period that overlaps with several of the largest Secret Service charges. At the time, both the District of Columbia — where Ivanka Trump lives — and New Jersey had imposed ‘stay-at-home’ orders, telling residents to avoid travel except under limited circumstances." the Post reporters, however, note that the Secret Service does not appear to have violated New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s stay-at-home order, which employees of the federal government were exempt from.

Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of the government watchdog group Public Citizen, finds it “appalling” that Trump’s businesses are profiting at the expense of taxpayers — especially in light of the toll that the coronavirus pandemic has taken on state budgets.

Gilbert told the Post, “The waste inherent in this is appalling…. They’re nickel-and-diming the American people at a moment when every penny counts.”

The Fahrenthold/Dawsey article published on Thursday isn’t the first time the Post has reported on the Bedminster business making money from taxpayers, but the Post reporters point out that “the new documents show that the rentals lasted much longer than previously known. Instead of lasting only for the summer months, when Trump usually visited, the rentals stretched from May to the end of October, the new documents show.”

According to a former Trump official, the Secret Service chose to rent out rooms for six months at a time because the president did not announce his travel schedule far in advance. That source, presumably interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the Post, “We always had space reserved at Bedminster weeks before the president arrived, just in case. If he came in the Oval on, let’s say, on a Wednesday, and said, ‘I want to go this weekend,’ you have to be ready.”

dn stone also lives here/

Palm Beach, Florida, far-right activist Laura Loomer has won the Republican primary for the U.S. House district that’s home to President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Loomer was banned from Twitter and Facebook in 2018 over her racist attacks on Ilhan Omar, one of three Muslim members of Congress. She was also banned from Uber and Lyft after making Islamophobic comments about drivers. Donald and Melania Trump cast absentee ballots in Tuesday’s primary, and after Loomer’s victory, the president tweeted his congratulations to her

bolsonaro dad and pr guy mar A LAGO COVID POSITIVE?

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-uses-coronavirus-fears-to-advance-bannons-far-right-agenda/

When President Donald J. Trump delivered his latest market-rattling remarks on the coronavirus pandemic from the Oval Office on Wednesday night, political reporters collectively scratched their heads over the president’s announcement of a ban on travelers from Europe and cargo coming from the continent. (The cargo ban was later walked back.)

8/20 see esper on mil rx?

an 220

trump endorsed a risky antidepressant for veterans. Lawmakers want to know if his Mar-a-Lago pals had a stake in the drugmaker

Isaac Arnsdorf / ProPublicaFebruary 27, 2020

House Democrats requested emails and financial records as they investigate why the president told the VA to “corner the market” on a Johnson & Johnson drug.

c ded v an 120

...Is Mar-a-Lago a nexus for Trump’s apparent influence peddling and corruption?

Anywhere Trump shows up is a nexus for his influence peddling and corruption. It could be his golf courses or Mar-a-Lago or somewhere else. Gift-giving is a form of currency, influence-buying. Certainly Trump knows that he can buy loyalty from people. And what’s a better way to buy loyalty than if you’re president of United States and you know you’re going to assassinate the No. 2 guy in Iran and that it’s going to move markets.

On Jan. 2, the markets were up big. Soleimani was assassinated at one in the morning, Baghdad time, after the markets here had closed. There was some night trading, which was obviously going to make the markets go down the next day. Killing Gen. Soleimani was going to make the Middle East much more unstable. And what better way to reward your buddies — who were already your buddies, because they’re at Mar-a-Lago, to begin with, on New Year’s Eve — than with this little gift? It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on.

How would one send those signals? How does insider trading work?

Who are the people who know what is going to happen? Who knows about the trade docs? Steve Mnuchin, Robert Lighthizer, Wilbur Ross. Larry Kudlow, Donald Trump, Trump’s kids, Trump’s son-in-law. These people who do have knowledge of certain events are either giving gifts to friends or trying to continue to buy loyalty. What I think is more likely is that there are surrogate traders who are making these trades with inside information. They make the money and then stash it in some sort of account to be gotten back to after they leave office. But again, I don’t know. The people who would know are not cooperating. The head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange said that my article in October should have been written in crayon because it was so childlike.

To reiterate: The people who were supposed to be watching and regulating are somehow complicit, looking away, indifferent, etc.?..

With yet another Mar-a-Lago trip, the taxpayer bill for Trump’s stays at his own resorts tops $118 million

So he's making at least a few bucks off that.…

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/pay-to-play-all-day-report-reveals-gop-groups-and-campaigns-have-spent-a-staggering-19-million-at-trump-properties-since-2015/

no lnx

‘Pay-to-play all day’: Report reveals GOP groups and campaigns have spent a staggering $19 million at Trump properties since 2015

Written by Alex Henderson November 11, 2019

Before Donald Trump ran for president of the United States, politicians spent money at his properties. But it was only a fraction of what it is now. And a report by the consumer rights organization Public Citizen shows just how much spending at properties owned by the Trump Organization has skyrocketed in the last four years.

Although Public Citizen’s report hasn’t been released yet, Politico obtained a copy. Politico’s Anita Kumar reports that between 2012 and 2014, political campaigns and groups spent a total of $69,000 at Trump-owned businesses — compared to a total of $19 million spent at Trump-owned properties since he officially launched his first presidential campaign in June 2015.

For example, Kumar notes, the Republican groupProtect the House(which supports Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives) spent $154,500 to rent out part of Trump’s Washington, D.C. hotel in 2017.

Politico quotes Alan Zibel, research director of Public Citizen’s Corporate Presidency Project, as saying, “The unceasing parade of foreign governments, politicians and corporations holding events and spending their dollars at Trump’s properties has become normal in Trump’s America. That doesn’t make it right or legal.”

Amounts spent at Trump properties, according to Public Citizen’s report, include $1.6 million by the Republican National Committee (RNC), $991,000 by Trump Victory (a fundraising alliance of the RNC and Trump’s 2020 campaign) and $238,000 by Vice President Mike Pence’s Great America Committee. And some of the top spenders at Trump properties, Public Citizen reports, include groups or campaigns representing Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Rep. Greg Pence (VP Pence’s brother) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Politico, “President Trump has perfected the financial shakedown of people seeking political influence as a way of life. This is now standard operating procedure in Washington. It’s pay-to-play all day.”

3/19

year’s keynote speaker is Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi will be the emcee.

Conservative activist James O’Keefe is listed as a special gueston the event website. O’Keefe founded Project Veritas, an organization that uses deceptive tactics against the mainstream media to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

Barnett said that O’Keefe is not speaking at the event but that organizers wanted guests to know he will be there. He added that O’Keefe spoke at the Palm Beach GOP’s annual Lobsterfest two years ago and was a hit.

“He’s very popular in conservative circles,” Barnett said. “We wanted to highlight his presence at the dinner.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/billionaire-mar-a-lago-member-accused-of-spying-for-the-chinese-government

guy

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-payday-lenders-spent-1-million-at-a-trump-resort-and-cashed-in

In mid-March, the payday lending industry held its annual convention at the Trump National Doral hotel outside Miami. Payday lenders offer loans on the order of a few hundred dollars, typically to low-income borrowers, who have to pay them back in a matter of weeks. The industry has long been reviled by critics for charging stratospheric interest rates — typically 400% on an annual basis — that leave customers trapped in cycles of debt.

The industry had felt under siege during the Obama administration, as the federal government moved to clamp down. A government study found that a majority of payday loans are made to people who pay more in interest and fees than they initially borrow. Google and Facebook refuse to take the industry’s ads.

On the edge of the Doral’s grounds, as the payday convention began, a group of ministers held a protest “pray-in,” denouncing the lenders for having a “feast” while their borrowers “suffer and starve.”

But inside the hotel, in a wood-paneled bar under golden chandeliers, the mood was celebratory. Payday lenders, many dressed in golf shirts and khakis, enjoyed an open bar and mingled over bites of steak and coconut shrimp.

They had plenty to be elated about. A month earlier, Kathleen Kraninger, who had just finished her second month as director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had delivered what the lenders consider an epochal victory: Kraninger announced a proposal to gut a crucial rule that had been passed under her Obama-era predecessor.

Payday lenders viewed that rule as a potential death sentence for many in their industry. It would require payday lenders and others to make sure borrowers could afford to pay back their loans while also covering basic living expenses. Banks and mortgage lenders view such a step as a basic prerequisite. But the notion struck terror in the payday lenders. Their business model relies on customers — 12 million Americans take out payday loans every year, according to Pew Charitable Trusts — getting stuck in a long-term cycle of debt, experts say. A CFPB study found that three out of four payday loans go to borrowers who take out 10 or more loans a year.

This year was the second in a row that the CFSA held its convention at the Doral. In the eight years before 2018 (the extent for which records could be found), the organization never held an event at a Trump property.Now, the industry was taking credit for the CFPB’s retreat. As salespeople, executives and vendors picked up lanyards and programs at the registration desk by the Doral’s lobby, they saw a message on the first page of the program from Dennis Shaul, CEO of the industry’s trade group, the Community Financial Services Association of America, which was hosting the convention. “We should not forget that we have had some good fortune through recent regulatory and legal developments,” Shaul wrote. “These events did not occur by accident, but rather are due in large part to the unity and participation of CFSA members and a commitment to fight back against regulatory overreach by the CFPB.”

Asked whether the choice of venue had anything to do with the fact that its owner is president of the United States and the man who appointed Kraninger as his organization’s chief regulator, Shaul assured ProPublica and WNYC that the answer was no. “We returned because the venue is popular with our members and meets our needs,” he said in a written statement. The statement noted that the CFSA held its first annual convention at the Doral hotel more than 16 years ago. Trump didn’t own the property at the time.

The CFSA and its members have poured a total of about $1 million into the Trump Organization’s coffers through the two annual conferences, according to detailed estimates prepared by a corporate event planner in Miami and an executive at a competing hotel that books similar events. Those estimates are consistent with the CFSA’s most recent available tax filing, which reveals that it spent $644,656 on its annual conference the year before the first gathering at the Trump property. (The Doral and the CFSA declined to comment.)

“It’s a way of keeping themselves on the list, reminding the president and the people close to him that they are among those who are generous to him with the profits that they earn from a business that’s in severe danger of regulation unless the Trump administration acts,” said Lisa Donner, executive director of consumer group Americans for Financial Reform.

The money the CFSA spent at the Doral is only part of the ante to lobby during the Trump administration. The payday lenders also did a bevy of things that interest groups have always done: They contributed to the president’s inauguration and earned face time with the president after donating to a Trump ally.

But it’s the payment to the president’s business that is a stark reminder that the Trump administration is like none before it. If the industry had written a $1 million check directly to the president’s campaign, both the CFSA and campaign could have faced fines or even criminal charges — and Trump couldn’t have used the money to enrich himself. But paying $1 million directly to the president’s business? That’s perfectly legal.

The inauguration of Donald Trump was a watershed for the payday lending industry. It had been feeling beleaguered since the launch of the CFPB in 2011. For the first time, the industry had come under federal supervision. Payday lending companies were suddenly subject to exams conducted by the bureau’s supervision division, which could, and sometimes did, lead to enforcement cases.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/theres-a-new-fbi-probe-of-foreign-ties-to-trumps-campaign-but-this-time-it-isnt-about-russia-report

There’s a new FBI probe of foreign ties to Trump’s campaign — but this time, it isn’t about Russia: report

written by Jen Hayden / Daily Kos May 10, 2019

Who could’ve ever guessed New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft getting arrested for soliciting prostitution would lead to the FBI investigating whether the Chinese have been funneling money to the Trump re-election campaign? But, here we are.

To recap, after Kraft was arrested, the Miami Herald noted the spa’s founder, Cindy Yang, was a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and had been photographed with Donald Trump at the private club on several occasions. She used these photos to prove she had access to the president and others could as well, for a price. The grift began from the moment Donald Trump took office. Yang hosted an event at Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., and those funds have never been accounted for to this day. From The Palm Beach Post:

But there’s no trace of the money raised that night, as required by law, The Palm Beach Post has found.

That includes donations by their biggest listed sponsors. Among them: an embattled Saipan-based casino later raided by the FBI, a Guam-based shipyard and a handful of Pacific Island hotel operators, all of which benefited from a foreign labor bill signed into law by Trump a year later.

Yang pivoted out of the spa business and into the influence business, also known as the business of corruption. Taking money, promising access … and getting access through events at Donald Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago. Not just to Donald Trump, Yang peddled access to his children, cabinet members and other influential deplorables hanging around the scene. This is precisely what national security experts repeatedly sounded the alarm about when Trump announced he would still be a frequent guest at his private club. The Trump Organization even doubled the club fee after he won. It’s shockingly blatant corruption.

But who was buying access from Yang? The FBI is now taking a look. From the Miami Herald:

Investigators obtained a federal grand jury subpoena Tuesday seeking records from Bing Bing Peranio, an employee of Yang’s family’s spa business who last year contributed a maximum $5,400 to President Donald Trump’s re-election effort, according to a source familiar with the probe. Yang came to Peranio’s workplace and helped her write the check, Peranio told reporters from The New York Times, who first reported the contribution. Peranio told The Times she didn’t “say no.”

The subpoena asked for any records related to that March 5, 2018, donation and possibly other contributions between 2014 and the present, said the source, who asked for anonymity to discuss an ongoing federal investigation.

Does a spa employee donating the maximum to a presidential re-election committee sound suspicious? The FBI is investigating whether that employee was reimbursed.

FBI agents based in West Palm Beach are trying to determine if Yang reimbursed Peranio for that contribution or delivered “anything of value” to her over that period to benefit the Trump campaign. Reimbursing someone for a political contribution without disclosing the original source is illegal, as is making a contribution in someone else’s name.

Agents are seeking records from Peranio, a potential witness in the investigation, that are linked to Yang, Yang’s husband, their businesses, as well as Trump campaign entities and the Republican National Committee.

“… as well as Trump campaign entities and the Republican National Committee.” Sounds like this investigation is just getting started and may widen significantly.

It is absolutely shocking this story isn’t front page headlines in every major newspaper in this country. These allegations and investigations would sink any other president before Trump. Today, it’s barely moving the news needle. Just one more data point showing how far we’ve strayed from normative behavior and press coverage.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/behind-the-robert-kraft-arrest-lies-a-tangled-web-of-sex-money-and-corruption-with-trump-at-the-center/

It has seemed odd from the very beginning that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a billionaire several times over, would patronize a massage parlor called the Orchids of Asia for a little quickie on his way to the AFC championship game. After all, men like Kraft can easily hire high end escorts and they often have mistresses on the side. Why go to a cheap strip mall?

But Kraft wasn’t the only vastly wealthy john who got caught in the sting that has put him in the headlines. Private equity mogul John Childs and former Citigroup president John Havens were also arrested. There is obviously more to this sordid story of Chinese sex trafficking to come out in the days to come. With the recent re-evaluation of the extremely disturbing Jeffrey Epstein case from the previous decade, it seems that an illegal sex trade has been thriving in the ultra-rich enclaves of South Florida.

A woman named Cindy Yang founded the “day spa” where all these wealthy powerful men went to release their … stress. Although Yang no longer owns the specific business where Kraft was videotaped receiving oral sex, it was known for offering the same “services” in her time. Her family still operates several similar enterprises that are also under suspicion for sex trafficking and prostitution. And wouldn’t you know it, Yang is a big-time Republican who now owns a company that sells access to another wealthy and powerful man with a big presence in South Florida: the president of the United States.

The Miami Herald first reported that Yang had attended a Super Bowl gathering at Mar-a-Lago, and produced a selfie of Yang and President Trump posing together at the party. The Herald also published pictures of other events showing Yang and Trump’s adult sons, along with a trio of Florida Republicans — Sen. Rick Scott, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Rep. Matt Gaetz — as well as onetime vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel.

According to the Herald, Yang had shown no interest in politics prior to 2016 — she never even voted — but “has now become a fixture at Republican political events up and down the East Coast.” These gatherings all charge big donations to attend, although much of the money collected at Mar-a-Lago affairs goes straight into Trump family coffers to pay for the event. It’s a tidy form of double dipping — and, at least in general terms, not illegal.

Yang and her family have been generous to Trump and the GOP, giving more than $42,000 to the Super PAC Trump Victory and more than $16,000 to the Trump 2020 campaign in 2017 alone. As David Corn, Dan Friedman and Daniel Schulman of Mother Jones reported last Saturday, that’s just the cost of doing business for Yang’s company, which was started a year into Trump’s presidency. Yang and her husband, Zubin Gong, started GY US Investments LLC, which they describe as an international consulting firm, in 2017. Displaying pictures of Mar-a-Lago, it openly markets access to Trump to Chinese business representatives.

For obvious reasons, national security experts were alarmed by this report. This startling combination of sex trafficking, prostitution and politicians presents a perfect opportunity for espionage and blackmail. In an explosive follow-up report on Sunday, the Mother Jones reporters make clear that these observers were right to be concerned:

Yang is an officer of two groups with ties to China’s Communist government. And she founded a Miami-based nonprofit that promotes “economic and cultural exchange” between China and the West in coordination with “senior … Chinese leaders” in the United States, according to a profile of Yang posted on a Chinese social media platform … .

[A] cursory examination of the organization’s leadership structure reveals that [Yang’s nonprofit] is directly subordinate to the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. In July, the Daily Beast reported, “‘Peaceful reunification associations’ — the term refers to Beijing’s intent to obtain sovereignty over Taiwan—have a close relationship with the [Communist Party’s] United Front Work Department, in some cases functioning almost as an extension of its Overseas Chinese Affairs Office.”

If you were following politics in the 1990s, you might be getting a little feeling of déjà vu. Chinese fundraising scandals were a staple of political investigations during the Bill Clinton years. Perhaps you remember the names Johnny Chung, Yah-Lin “Charlie” Trie, John Huang, James Riady and Maria Hsia. These were all major Democratic Party and Clinton donors who were investigated for campaign finance law violations and, in a couple of cases, connections to Chinese intelligence and other Chinese government officials.

The Justice Department first started investigating all this in 1996, right after that year’s presidential campaign. Congress soon took it up and the matter escalated into a major scandal that continued for years. Republicans repeatedly demanded an independent counsel but were rebuffed by Attorney General Janet Reno, who insisted the Department of Justice was capable of handling this investigation. It did. The probes resulted in several guilty pleas, large fines and probation. There was no evidence of any collusion with the Clinton administration or the DNC, and the campaigns returned the money.

The Republican majority in Congress made fools of themselves, as they are wont to do in these situations, and turned the congressional hearings and investigations into a circus. The House Oversight Committee, chaired at the time by the slightly daft Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., spent more than $7 million on its investigation, at the time the most expensive congressional probe in U.S. history.

Congressional expert Norm Ornstein said at the time:

Barring some dramatic change, I think the Burton investigation is going to be remembered as a case study in how not to do a congressional investigation and as a prime example of investigation as farce.

The Clinton campaign finance scandals were messy and damaging. But there was no sex trafficking or prostitution involved, and those foreign donors weren’t putting cash into the president’s personal bank account, as Yang and company are doing with big parties at a private club owned by the president. This is blackmail just waiting to happen — if it hasn’t happened already.

Presidents divest themselves of their businesses not just to avoid the “appearance” of conflict of interest, but to avoid the possibility of compromise. This president seems to have a peculiar fetish for putting himself in as many compromising positions as possible.

late 2017, on one of President Donald Trump’s retreats to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, he caught up with an old friend: Albert Hazzouri.

When Hazzouri is not at Mar-a-Lago, he’s a cosmetic dentist in Scranton, Pennsylvania. At a campaign rally there in 2016, Trump gave him a shoutout: “Stand up, Albert. Where the hell are you, Albert? Stand up, Albert. He’s a good golfer, but I’m actually a better golfer than him. Right?”

Shortly after Hazzouri and Trump saw each other in late 2017, Hazzouri followed up with a message, scrawled on Mar-a-Lago stationery. Here’s the letter:

[note]

In a telephone interview, Hazzouri said he sent the note as a favor to the 163,000-member American Dental Association. He said he had only the vaguest sense of what proposal he was vouching for.

“I’m really not involved in any politics, I’m just a small-time dentist,” he said. “I guess there’s a lot of money spent on veterans’ care and American Native Indians’ care, and I guess they wanted to have a little hand in it, the American Dental Association, to try to guide what’s going on or whatever.”

The idea seemed to intrigue Trump. He took a thick marker and wrote on top of Hazzouri’s note, “Send to David S at the V.A.,” referring to David Shulkin, then the secretary of veterans affairs. Next to the Mar-a-Lago coat of arms, an aide stamped: “The president has seen.”

It was not the first time Mar-a-Lago membership had bestowed access to the VA. As ProPublica revealed last year, Trump handed sweeping influence over the department to club member Ike Perlmutter, who is the chairman of Marvel Entertainment and was a major donor supporting Trump’s campaign, along with a physician and a lawyer who are regular guests at the resort. The trio, known as the “Mar-a-Lago Crowd,” acted as a shadow leadership for the department, reviewing all manner of policy and personnel decisions, including budgeting and contracting. The House veterans committee is now investigating the trio’s “alleged improper influence.”

pro pub 119

“Doubling Down”: With Private Care Push, Trump’s VA Bucks Lawmakers and Some Veterans Groups

Trump Cabinet official hid ties to Confederate groups from the Senate in sworn disclosures: report

On Friday, CNN’s KFile reported that Robert Wilkie, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, failed to disclose his ties to Sons of Confederate Veterans in a questionnaire to the…

https://www.alternet.org/how-republicans-sold-out-veterans-health-care-and-wastefully-funneled-money-private-companies

For years, conservatives have assailed the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as a dysfunctional bureaucracy. They said private enterprise would mean better, easier-to-access health care for veterans.President Donald Trump embraced that position, enthusiastically moving to expand the private sector’s role.

Here’s what has actually happened in the four years since the government began sending more veterans to private care: longer waits for appointments and, a new analysis of VA claims data by ProPublica and PolitiFact shows, higher costs for taxpayers.

Since 2014, 1.9 million former service members have received private medical care through a program called Veterans Choice.It was supposed to give veterans a way around long wait times in the VA. But their average waits using the Choice Program were still longer than allowed by law, according to examinations by the VA inspector general and the Government Accountability Office. The watchdogs also found widespread blunders, such as booking a veteran in Idaho with a doctor in New York and telling a Florida veteran to see a specialist in California. Once, the VA referred a veteran to the Choice Program to see a urologist, but instead he got an appointment with a neurologist.

The winners have been two private companies hired to run the program, which began under the Obama administration and is poised to grow significantly under Trump. ProPublica and PolitiFact obtained VA data showing how much the agency has paid in medical claims and administrative fees for the Choice program. Since 2014, the two companies have been paid nearly $2 billion for overhead, including profit. That’s about 24 percent of the companies’ total program expenses — a rate that would exceed the federal cap that governs how much most insurance plans can spend on administration in the private sector.

According to the agency’s inspector general, the VA was paying the contractors at least $295 every time it authorized private care for a veteran. The fee was so high because the VA hurriedly launched the Choice Program as a short-term response to a crisis. Four years later, the fee never subsided — it went up to as much as $318 per referral.

“This is what happens when people try and privatize the VA,” Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, the ranking Democrat on the Senate veterans committee, said in a statement responding to these findings. “The VA has an obligation to taxpayers to spend its limited resources on caring for veterans, not paying excessive fees to a government contractor. When VA does need the help of a middleman, it needs to do a better job of holding contractors accountable for missing the mark.”

(Read more about how ProPublica and PolitiFact did the analysis.)

The Affordable Care Act prohibits large group insurance plans from spending more than 15 percent of their revenue on administration, including marketing and profit. The private sector standard is 10 percent to 12 percent, according to Andrew Naugle, who advises health insurers on administrative operations as a consultant at Milliman, one of the world’s largest actuarial firms. Overhead is even lower in the Defense Department’s Tricare health benefits program: only 8 percent last year.

Even excluding the costs of setting up the new program, the Choice contractors’ overhead still amounts to 21 percent of revenue.

“That’s just unacceptable,” Rick Weidman, the policy director of Vietnam Veterans of America, said in response to the figures. “There are people constantly banging on the VA, but this was the private sector that made a total muck of it.”

Trump’s promises to veterans were a central message of his campaign. But his plans to shift their health care to the private sector put him on a collision course with veterans groups, whose members generally support the VA’s medical system and don’t want to see it privatized. The controversy around privatization, and the outsize influence of three Trump associates at Mar-a-Lago, has sown turmoil at the VA, endangering critical services from paying student stipends to preventing suicides and upgrading electronic medical records.

A spokesman for the VA, Curt Cashour, declined to provide an interview with key officials and declined to answer a detailed list of written questions.

One of the contractors, Health Net, stopped working on the program in September. Health Net didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The other contractor, TriWest Healthcare Alliance,said it has worked closely with the VA to improve the program and has made major investments of its own. “We believe supporting VA in ensuring the delivery of quality care to our nation’s veterans is a moral responsibility, even while others have avoided making these investments or have withdrawn from the market,” the company said in a statement.

TriWest did not dispute ProPublica and PolitiFact’s estimated overhead rate, which used total costs, but suggested an alternate calculation, using an average cost, that yielded a rate of 13 percent to 15 percent. The company defended the $295-plus fee by saying it covers “highly manual” services such as scheduling appointments and coordinating medical files. Such functions are not typically part of the contracts for other programs, such as the military’s Tricare. But Tricare’s contractors perform other duties, such as adjudicating claims and monitoring quality, that Health Net and TriWest do not. In a recent study comparing the programs, researchers from the Rand Corporation concluded that the role of the Choice Program’s contractors is “much narrower than in the private sector or in Tricare.”

Before the Choice Program, TriWest and Health Net performed essentially the same functions for about a sixth of the price, according to the VA inspector general. TriWest declined to break down how much of the fee goes to each service it provides.

Because of what the GAO called the contractors’ “inadequate” performance, the VA increasingly took over doing the Choice Program’s referrals and claims itself.

In many cases, the contractors’ $295-plus processing fee for every referral was bigger than the doctor’s bill for services rendered, the analysis of agency data showed. In the three months ending Jan. 31, 2018, the Choice Program made 49,144 referrals for primary care totaling $9.9 million in medical costs, for an average cost per referral of $201.16. A few other types of care also cost less on average than the handling fee: chiropractic care ($286.32 per referral) and optometry ($189.25). There were certainly other instances where the medical services cost much more than the handling fee: TriWest said its average cost per referral was about $2,100 in the past six months.

Beyond what the contractors were entitled to, audits by the VA inspector general found that they overcharged the government by $140 million from November 2014 to March 2017. Both companies are now under federal investigation arising from these overpayments. Health Net’s parent company, Centene, disclosed a Justice Department civil investigation into “excessive, duplicative or otherwise improper claims.” A federal grand jury in Arizona is investigating TriWest for “wire fraud and misused government funds,” according to a court decision on a subpoena connected to the case. Both companies said they are cooperating with the inquiries.

Despite the criminal investigation into TriWest’smanagement of the Choice Program, the Trump administration recently expanded the company’s contract without competitive bidding. Now, TriWest stands to collect even more fees as the administration prepares to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise to send more veterans to private doctors.

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