RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
I watch MTP yesterday and became apoplectic
when they buried that tweet and then buried the whopping comment therein, instead they lead with Trump's rambling non sequiturs
and his lawyers inane "calls" for the end of the special counsel investigation, at one point referring to the later as his "want", o'rly? a defense lawyer wants his client to no longer be under legal scrutiny
...headline stuff there
was so tight, had to turn that shyt off
no he is making the obvious point
if you were so innocent, you would have stop tweeting and STFU, long time ago
he is saying that this should be obvious to trump, by way of it being so obvious that you don't know why he is even saying it
ergo trump is guilty of something serious or he would STFU
Tony D'Amato
It's all about the inches
U don't even need memos, just read the moron's twitter feed
Newly Emboldened, Trump Says What He Really Feels
Newly Emboldened, Trump Says What He Really Feels
By MAGGIE HABERMANMARCH 18, 2018
President Trump has developed more self-confidence as he has settled into the job, those close to the president or White House say. Doug Mills/The New York Times
For months, President Trump’s legal advisers implored him to avoid so much as mentioning the name of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, in his tweets, and to do nothing to provoke him or suggest his investigation is not proper.
Ignoring that advice over the weekend was the decision of a president who ultimately trusts only his own instincts, and now believes he has settled into the job enough to rely on them rather than the people who advise him.
A dozen people close to Mr. Trump or the White House, including current and former aides and longtime friends, described him as newly emboldened to say what he really feels and to ignore the cautions of those around him.
That self-confidence has led to a series of surprising comments and actions that have pushed the Trump presidency in an ever more tumultuous direction.
Long wary about publicly expressing his belief in the death penalty for drug dealers, he proposed it at a rally in Pennsylvania. “Probably you will have some people that say that’s not nice,” he said.
He bragged about making up an assertion in a conversation with the leader of a close ally, Canada, and called a reporter a “son of a bytch.”
He barreled ahead with a plan to meet with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, to the dismay of much of the diplomatic corps.
He vanquished the economic aides he had previously seen as having more stature than he did by announcing he would go ahead with tariffs on certain imports, alarming key allies.
And then this weekend he seemed to raise the possibility of dismissing Mr. Mueller.
“This could be the manifestation of growing confidence,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., one of the president’s oldest confidantes.
Projecting strength, control and power, whether as a New York developer or domineering reality television host, has always been vital to Mr. Trump. But in his first year in the White House, according to his friends, he found himself feeling tentative and anxious, intimidated by the role of president, a fact that he never openly admitted but that they could sense, people close to the president said.
This, after all, is someone for whom leaving the security of Trump Tower and moving to Washington and the White House was a daunting prospect. Even now, as he has grown more comfortable in the job, he rarely leaves the White House unless he is certain the environment will be friendly, such as at one of his own properties. Rallies are rarely scheduled in areas that could invite large protests.
For months, aides were mostly able to redirect a neophyte president with warnings about the consequences of his actions, and mostly control his public behavior.
Those most able to influence him were John F. Kelly, the retired Marine general turned chief of staff, and Gary D. Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive and director of the National Economic Council. And few people had more ability to blunt the president’s potentially self-destructive impulses than Hope Hicks, his communications director, who has been one of his closest advisers since the earliest days of his 2016 campaign.
Some of Mr. Trump’s allies have said that Mr. Trump was trapped in a West Wing cage built by Mr. Kelly, and has finally broken loose.
The reality is more complicated, his closest aides say. They say Mr. Trump now feels he doesn’t need the expertise of Mr. Kelly, Mr. Cohn or Rex W. Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil executive he made secretary of state. If he once suspected they were smarter or better equipped to lead the country and protect his presidency, he doesn’t believe that now.
Two of those men are now on their way out. And Mr. Trump has an ambiguous relationship with the third, Mr. Kelly, whom he alternately assures that his job is secure and disparages to other people. Ms. Hicks is leaving the White House in the coming days, a departure that has caused concern among his allies about how he will cope without her in the long term.
Outside the White House, there are few friends the president will listen to. Some of them warned him to back off his tariffs plan, telling him that he would undo what he had accomplished with the tax bill. Mr. Trump said he didn’t agree, and that was that.
But Mr. Trump’s moods have always been like storm clouds passing quickly over a desert island, and aides say that has not changed. Contrary to descriptions of a constantly fuming, beleaguered president, friends and advisers say Mr. Trump is more at ease than he has been in some time. What seems like unchecked chaos to almost everyone else is Mr. Trump feeling he is in his element.
“He seems more relaxed, believe it or not,” said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who spent several hours with the president during two St. Patrick’s Day events on Thursday.
“I would say it’s a combination of being more relaxed and also being frustrated by the fact that he feels like a lot of what he didn’t succeed at, or what hasn’t worked, is that he wasn’t allowed to be Trump,” he said.
His close allies, like Representative Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Republican who is the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, believe the president is finding his stride and learning how to navigate Washington.
“I see it more as a function of just, ‘O.K., I’ve taken a year to understand the different dynamics within a broad array of personalities,’ and so now it’s all about putting together a team to go the distance for the next three years,” Mr. Meadows said.
Perhaps.
Warnings of dire consequences from his critics have failed to materialize. When Mr. Cohn announced that he was resigning, the predictions were that the stock market would plummet. There was only a minor dip by the end of the next day.
And on North Korea, even the grayest of foreign policy beards have conceded that Mr. Trump might be able to accomplish something.
“The president has his own original style, and it’s unlikely to be changed at this stage of his life,” Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, said in an interview. “But it also is conducive to bringing forward opportunities like this Korean conversation. It is not what we traditionalists would have recommended in the first place.
“But I have to say, when I have thought it through, and how it could play out, it could restore a political initiative to us, and could compel a conversation with countries” otherwise disinclined.
Some worried aides are less sanguine. They view the weekend’s attacks on Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I. as a particularly disturbing taste of what they believe could come. They say privately that Mr. Trump does not understand the job the way he believes he does, and that they fear he will become even less inclined to take advice.
It remains to be seen whether his attacks on Mr. Mueller are anything more than an effort to define the terms of the public conversation about the investigation, and the parameters of an interview with the president that the special counsel is seeking.
But the possibility that Mr. Trump would be emboldened enough to fire Mr. Mueller was raised on Sunday by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Such a move, Mr. Graham said on CNN, would be “the beginning of the end” of the Trump presidency.
@DonKnock @dza @88m3 @wire28 @smitty22 @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @.r. @Dorian Breh @Dameon Farrow @TheNig @VR Tripper @re'up @Blackfyre_Berserker @Cali_livin
he looks terrified walking down those stairs, almost kid like ... eric cartman. i almost feel bad for him but then i remember he's donald trump and a big p*ssy that's terrified of stairs.
Last edited:
:ALERTRED::ALERTRED::ALERTRED:
Kushner Companies confirms meeting with Qatar on financing
Kushner Companies confirms meeting with Qatar on financing
Jared Kushner’s father met with Qatar’s finance minister three months after President Trump’s inauguration, a New York City session at which funding for a financially troubled real estate project was discussed, the company acknowledged Sunday.
However, Charles Kushner said he turned down possible funding to avoid questions of a conflict of interest for his son, who had run the family company until he became Trump’s senior adviser. The elder Kushner said that the Qataris had asked for the meeting, and that he told them he couldn’t accept sovereign funds.
“I was invited to a meeting,” he said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Before the meeting, Kushner Companies had decided that it was not going to accept sovereign wealth fund investments. We informed the Qatar representatives of our decision and they agreed. Even if they were there ready to wire the money, we would not have taken it.”
The company said Kushner agreed to the meeting as a courtesy.
Untangling the web of Jared Kushner
A spokesman for the Qatari Embassy in Washington said his government had no comment.
Kushner told The Post in a January interview that he would have refused the money if it been offered, but the comment was not on the record, and he did not disclose that he had met with the Qataris after the inauguration. Kushner put the comment on the record Sunday and added details about the circumstances of the meeting.
The April 2017 meeting at the St. Regis Hotel between the top Qatari official and Charles Kushner came as Jared Kushner was deeply immersed in shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East, a central part of his portfolio as a top aide to the president.
One of his top priorities at the time was preparing for Trump’s maiden overseas trip, to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Europe in late May, and in developing a new peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians. While in Riyadh, Trump forged a close bond with Saudi King Salman, while Jared Kushner solidified his relationship with Salman’s son and heir apparent, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Days after the summit, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, with Trump’s public support, revived their long-standing charges that Qatar was funding international terrorism, broke relations with the neighboring country and instituted an economic boycott.
The meeting between Charles Kushner and Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif al-Emadi was reported earlier this month by the online publication the Intercept. It said the meeting had been requested by Kushner. At the time, Kushner Companies said in response that “we did not meet with anyone from the Qatari Government to solicit sovereign funds for any of our projects. To suggest otherwise, is inaccurate and false.”
The statement did not address whether a meeting took place, however, and the company declined to respond to follow-up questions at the time. Kushner’s statement to The Post marks the first time he has confirmed the meeting took place.
Jared Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, had relinquished control of his family’s real estate business upon joining the administration. That left his father to continue the search for financing for a major project considered an important part of the company’s health.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television during his April visit, Emadi said investments by his country’s sovereign wealth fund were “purely commercial driven . . . we go where we think we’re going to have value. We like what we see here” in the United States, he said.
Kushner Companies’ need for a cash infusion stemmed from Jared Kushner’s decision in 2007 to sell off many of its New Jersey apartments to buy the nation’s most expensive building, a 41-story tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Shortly after the purchase for $1.8 billion, the real estate market crashed, and Kushner refinanced the property, leaving the company with a $1.2 billion loan that comes due in early 2019.
With the building losing money, Kushner and his company came up with a plan to redevelop the tower and double its size. That required significant amounts of cash. Kushner looked at potential sources around the world, and Qatar emerged as one of the leading candidates.
The Kushners had earlier sought money from Qatar, working from 2014 until at least 2016 to obtain funding from a private investment fund run by Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, a wealthy former prime minister.
A tentative deal for $500 million fell through because Qatar sought to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest after Jared Kushner was named senior White House adviser, according to Tom Barrack, a Trump friend who had suggested Hamad look at investing with the Kushners.
Others have said that Hamad pulled out because his funding was contingent on separate financing with the Chinese insurance fund Anbang, which fell through.
Barrack told The Post that Charles Kushner was “crushed” when the deal fell through.
@DonKnock @dza @88m3 @wire28 @smitty22 @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @.r. @Dorian Breh @Dameon Farrow @TheNig @VR Tripper @re'up @Blackfyre_Berserker @Cali_livin