CEO of Morgan Industries
Superstar
The entire confederate movement has been a part of the GOP since Nixon went full Southern Strategy. Nothing has changed on that front.
RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
The entire confederate movement has been a part of the GOP since Nixon went full Southern Strategy. Nothing has changed on that front.
Jhoon
Spontaneous Mishaps and Hijinks
The aggrieved-white man strategy.
While this isn’t the place to discuss this issue I want to know if we (black people) have a contingency plan for the democrats mueler outcome.
There are 3 possible outcomes in this investigation. Are we prepared for them?
Broke Wave
The GOAT
Eat a dikk you bytch ass nikka. I want this guy fried and humiliated but let’s inject some reality into this thread.
If Mueller was really on his ass about to dry him, why would Trump be emboldened the way he has been recently clowning the FBI? What could possibly give this child the confidence to speak on this issue so gleefully? When it looked like the hammer was coming down, this dude was looking sick and avoiding the topic. Now all of a sudden he can’t stop talking about the FBI?
CEO of Morgan Industries
Superstar
With all due respect, I do think that you're misreading the situation. My argument is that Trump's people have convinced him that firing Mueller now is a bad idea, but that he needs to muddy the waters by attacking the FBI's credibility in the hopes that it gives him enough cover with the public to fire Mueller based on some nebulous idea that the deep state has it in for Trump and isn't being fair. That's why you see Trump and all his allies doing whatever they can to make the FBI look untrustworthy.
It's a strategy completely based on Trump being nervous as fukk.
I think the contingency plan has always been not to trust that Mueller getting Trump will be an automatic and to win the House and Senate in 2018 so that we can investigate Trump with no interruptions from the GOP, to have the ability to impeach in the house with a simple majority, and to block Trump from doing as much shyt as we can until 2020.
Broke Wave
The GOAT
He wants to fire Mueller regardless because he is already doing immense damage to Trump politically. However my contention is Trump does not feel that Mueller is at his doorstep the way people in this thread feel is happening. I don’t see a scared DJT I just see the same petulant self serving shameless child manouvering for political points. If he was genuinely scared for his own freedom he wouldn’t be poking the bear like this.
Anyhow guys, I am going to call it quits until after Christmas. I don’t want thoughts of dotard interfering with my chill time with the fam.
Looking forward to seeing the look in my daughter’s eyes when she opens her gifts.
All the best guys, take some time out over the next few days to appreciate the people in your life that really matter. Enjoy your Christmas!
Looking forward to seeing the look in my daughter’s eyes when she opens her gifts.
All the best guys, take some time out over the next few days to appreciate the people in your life that really matter. Enjoy your Christmas!
Berniewood Hogan
IT'S BERNIE SANDERS WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
He's dumb. But he knows that he can muddy the waters by anointing Mueller "Fake News."
CEO of Morgan Industries
Superstar
I disagree completely just based on the information that we already know about Trump and his associates. Trump could be hauled up for obstruction right now, much less whatever other dealings he and his people had with Russia. He's obviously nervous about that, as are guys like Devin Nunes who went running scared to Trump months ago and now is trying his hardest to discredit Mueller and the FBI as well.
Trump isn't "poking the bear" so much as he's got to do this because this is the only avenue of attack that he has in order to try and confuse the populace. It's a Hail Mary.
Hood Critic
The Power Circle
So your argument is that since Trump is showing such confidence in trashing the FBI that Mueller doesn't have anything concrete against him. So how about when Trump was confident in threatening to release tapes of his dinner with James Comey? Or how about when Trump and company where confident in saying there were no meetings with foreign officials yet emails exposing the meetings to get dirt on HRC were leaked? I can go on and on in regards to "shows of confidence" but the point is they don't have the slightest idea what kind of information the FBI has on them, who was cooperating and if any of those cooperating were wearing a wire. These are the same people who thought they had some type of right to privilege during the transition on their government devices.
Since they are unsure what the FBI will bring forth, his lawyers are unable to build a tangible defense. That is why every week they're throwing something different at the wall to see what will stick. This week is all about trying to destroy the credibility of anyone who can testify to Trump's obstruction.
This is why in the beginning many people have tried to get folks to settle in and be ready for months - maybe even years - of investigation. This will not be over anytime soon, the entertainment at this point is in the occasional bombshell that will drop which will poke a hole in whatever lie at the moment Trump and Co. are riding. Then there will be the casual indictments. By now anyone who has been following any of this should understand that it is all deeper than Trump and he is not the only one who is currently or will be investigated.
this will always be bizarre to me
:ALERTRED:
:50CentUMad:
:50CentUMad:
Bannon Puts Jared Through the Grinder
Ever quotable, the Breitbart chief lays the swirling Russia scandal at the feet of his old White House nemesis.
JACK SHAFERDecember 23, 2017
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Former Trump chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon milled his former Oval Office colleague Jared Kushner into a bloody chunk of battle sausage this week and smeared him across the shiny pages of Vanity Fair. You’ve got to read Bannon’s quote three or four times to fully savor the tang of its malice and cruelty. After scorning the Russia collusion theories as fiction, Bannon acknowledged the grisly reality that the Russia investigation poses for his former boss. And he blamed it all on Kushner, for having created the appearance that Putin had helped Trump. Dropping Kushner head first into the grinder, Bannon turned the crank.
“[Kushner was] taking meetings with Russians to get additional stuff. This tells you everything about Jared,” Bannon told the magazine’s Gabriel Sherman. “They were looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin. That’s his maturity level.”
Informing Vanity Fair that Kushner’s hunt for political smut led him to over-fraternize with the Russians might not be the best way for Bannon to throw special counsel Robert S. Mueller III off the collusion scent. So what was the big man in the Barbour coat up to?
That Bannon and Kushner skirmished during their time together in the White House has been long established. Kushner advocated the sacking FBI Director James B. Comey, for example, and Bannon opposed it. He later told 60 Minutes that the firing was maybe the worst mistake in “modern political history” because it precipitated the hiring of the special counsel and had thereby expanded the investigation.
Sherman’s piece reveals the cognitive split that evolved between Bannon and others, specifically Trump, on how to handle the mess that had been created. “Goldman Sachs teaches one thing: don’t invent shyt. Take something that works and make it better,” Bannon told Sherman. He said he consulted with Bill Clinton’s former lawyer Lanny Davis about how the Clintons responded to Ken Starr’s probe. “We were so disciplined. You guys don’t have that,” Bannon recalls Davis advising him. “That always haunted me when he said that,” Bannon told Sherman. Bannon said the investigation was an attempt by the establishment to undo the election, but he took it seriously and warned Trump he was in danger of being impeached.
Bannon’s gripe against Kushner in Vanity Fair continues: He claims that Donald Trump’s disparaging tweets about Attorney General Jeff Sessions were designed to provide “cover” for Kushner by steering negative media attention toward Sessions and away from Kushner as he was scheduled to testify before a Senate committee.
There’s even more hot Bannon on Kushner action. Bannon tells of an Oval Office meeting he attended with Trump, Kushner and Kushner’s wife Ivanka Trump in which he called Ivanka “the queen of leaks.” “You’re a fukking liar!” Ivanka allegedly responded. Hard to know how to score this round, but shattering the public image of Ivanka as poised princess must have been satisfying for a guy who called Javanka “the Democrats.”
Getting mauled by Steve Bannon might not be the worst thing to happen to the president’s son-in-law this week. He and Ivanka were sued by a private attorney for failing to disclose assets from 30 investment funds on their federal financial disclosure forms. Perhaps more ominous for Kushner, and according to the New York Times, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have subpoenaed Deutsche Bank records about Kushner’s family’s real estate business. “There is no indication that the subpoena is related to the investigation being conducted by Robert S. Mueller III,” the Times allowed. Yeah, but wouldn’t you want to be there when Mueller’s team invites Bannon in to talk to him about the Vanity Fair article, and they ask him, “What did you mean about Jared taking meetings with Russians to get additional stuff? Like, what stuff?”
Although “people close to Kushner, who decline to be named” told the Times they don’t think the Mueller investigation exposes him to legal jeopardy, the young prince isn’t taking chances. The Washington Post reports that his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has been shopping for a “crisis public relations firm” over the past two weeks. (Senator Robert Menendez, the recent beneficiary of a deadlocked corruption trial, is another Lowell client.)
Why hire super flacks now? Does Kushner sense disaster? Another Bannon offensive? The Flynn plea bargain exposed him—according to the press—as the “very senior member” of the Trump transition team described in court documents who told former national security adviser Michael Flynn to lobby the Russian ambassador about a U.N. resolution on Israeli settlements. Maybe he’s just buying reputation insurance. Or maybe he’s taken to heart Chris Christie’s scathing comments. Christie was squeezed out of the Trump transition early on, some say by Kushner who is said to hold a grudge against Christie who, when he was federal prosecutor, put Kushner’s father in jail. This week Christie said that Kushner “deserves the scrutiny” he’s been getting. It was almost as if Christie and Bannon were operating a twin-handled grinder, cranking out an extra helping of Kushner’s tainted reputation.
President Putin and President Trump occupied the same page about the scandal this week in what was either a matter of collusion or of great minds thinking alike. Speaking at a four-hour media event in Moscow, Putin blamed the scandal on the U.S. “deep state” and said, “This is all made up by people who oppose Trump to make his work look illegitimate.” According to CNN, Trump took the opportunity this week to call the Russia investigation “bullshyt” in private. In public, he told reporters, “There’s absolutely no collusion. I didn’t make a phone call to Russia. I have nothing to do with Russia. Everybody knows it.”
Everybody, perhaps, except former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Appearing on CNN, Clapper used direct language to bind former KGB officer Putin to Trump tighter than a girdle to a paunch. “[Putin] knows how to handle an asset, and that's what he's doing with the president,” Clapper said. “I think some of that experience and instincts of Putin has come into play here in his managing of a pretty important account for him, if I could use that term, with our president.”
Writing in Newsweek, Jeff Stein collected other tell-tale signs of Trump’s cooptation: He refused to take Russian meddling in the election seriously. He responds favorably to Putin’s praise and seems to crave more. He dismisses worries about his circle’s connections to Kremlin agents before the election and during the transition—and he tried to call off the Flynn investigation.
It’s enough to make you wonder why Bannon thinks Kushner is the enemy, not Trump.
******
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably disappointed that more didn’t happen in the Trump Tower scandal this week. Sue me in small claims court via email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts never believed in collusion, my Twitterfeed is set to cut a plea deal with Mueller, and my RSS feed has several crisis PR firms on retainer.
Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.
Show Comments
rightfultoefinger
All Star
Broke Wave
The GOAT
Bannon is such a delusional piece of shyt. He talks about how Goldman Sachs taught me one thing, like it was Vietnam or something.
He says “we had disicipline, you guys don’t have that”. This guy worked at an investment bank and is so delusional he is trying to make it sound like he was on the block selling nicks or in Fallujah or some shyt.
He says “we had disicipline, you guys don’t have that”. This guy worked at an investment bank and is so delusional he is trying to make it sound like he was on the block selling nicks or in Fallujah or some shyt.