Month: July 2019

Trump’s lawyers argue that a president has total impunity

by digby

The argument for a dictator instead of a president was on display in a federal courtroom today:

If anything was clear from Friday’s appeals court hearing in the accounting firm subpoena case, President Trump is going all in on the argument that Congress has almost no right to investigate or regulate his conduct.

The hearing, which lasted more than double the one hour it was allotted, featured Trump’s personal attorney doubling down on an a number of incredible claims. Attorney William Consovoy told the court that there is almost no legislation Congress could constitutionally pass to rein in any unethical behavior by the President. Because of that, Consovoy argued, there were no legitimate legislative reasons for the House Oversight Committee to subpoena Trump’s accounting firm for his finances.

The judges on the court at times appeared surprised by how extreme Consovoy’s theory was.

“Imagine, in the future, you have the most corrupt president in humankind, openly flaunting it, what law could Congress pass?” Judge Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee asked

Consovoy said that it was “very hard to think of one.”

The case is a lawsuit Trump brought against the accounting firm Mazars to block it from complying with a subpoena for the Trump family’s and business’ financial records. The House Oversight Committee has intervened in the case to defend the subpoena, and a district judge already rejected the President’s arguments.

But on Tuesday, Consovoy did not appear humbled in the least by the monumental smackdown he received from the district court. He conceded not an inch to the idea that Congress might be able to pass a law based on what it learned of Trump’s finances. He said that even if Congress could, the House’s claims that it’s looking at potential legislation were not to be trusted.

This argument came to head toward the end the first hour he spent arguing in front of the court.

“I take it your theory is that he’s absolutely immune to any oversight? Is that right?” Judge Millet asked Consovoy, who would only offer the Presidential Records Act as an example of whether Congress could regulate the President.

“Is that it?” she asked, her voice raised, as Consovoy struggled to offer another example of where Congress could address the President’s conduct.

“I don’t want a litany! I want an example,” Millet demanded.

Throughout the hearing, Millett and the other Democratic appointee, Judge David Tatel, floated several different types of laws that could be inspired by a probe into a President’s finances. What about new financial disclosure law? Unconstitutional, Consovoy claimed. They pointed to the ethics-in-politics legislation the House has already passed, and Consovoy said that measure raised constitutional issues, too.

They even constructed a potential law in which the a President was given two options for a salary (which Congress is constitutionally authorized to set): one if he complied with a financial disclosure requirement and one if he didn’t.”

“When it comes to [presidential] conflict of interest, [is there] nothing Congress can do?” Millett asked.

When Tatel asked about the constitutionality of a law that strengthened the enforcement ability of the Office of Ethics, perhaps with more funding, Consovoy would only say that was a harder question.

Underlying this argument was another, perhaps crazier one: that in assessing the legality of the House’s subpoena, the court was required to assess the legality of any potential legislation that could arise from the lawmakers’ investigation.

Judge Tatel tried to put the burden back on Trump and pointed to the “very generous” test the Supreme Court has put on the legislature.

“It seems to me that you would have to show that no law” could come out of the information sought from this subpoena, Tatel said. Consovoy disagreed.

The judges brought up Congress’ authority to investigate the executive branch’s compliance with the law. Consovoy claimed that the office of the President is not part of the executive branch in that way.

He said that Congress could investigate corruption with regards to an agency, but not with regards to the President.

He argued that if Congress wanted to investigate broadly the effectiveness of the law, it could not target one individual person’s compliance.

“I don’t think it’s fair to equate the office of the president to Mr. or Mrs. Smith of the street,” Millett said.

Well, the office of President Trump anyway. Recall that the Republican House released President Clinton’s Grand Jury testimony (filmed for spurious reason in the first place) on national television. Nobody should fool themselves into thinking they intend to follow these rules with any Democrat.

With the court packed by Trump sycophants, they will get away with it too. They have no shame and will easily agree with wingnut arguments that a fatuous reason why the situation is totally different for a Democrats than it was for Donald Trump.

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Trump wants to replace the Director of National Intelligence with a shrill, shrieking wingnut

by digby

Trump seems to be on a mission to have fired his entire cabinet (except Ben Carson) over the course of his first term:

President Trump has told confidants he’s eager to remove Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, according to five sources who have discussed the matter directly with the president.

Trump hasn’t told our sources when he plans to make a move, but they say his discussions on the topic have been occurring for months — often unprompted — and the president has mentioned potential replacements since at least February. A source who spoke to Trump about Coats a week ago said the president gave them the impression that the move would happen “sooner rather than later.”

The director of national intelligence serves as an overseer of the U.S. intelligence community and a close adviser to the president and National Security Council, producing each day’s top-secret Presidential Daily Brief.

A source with direct knowledge told me that Trump has privately said he thinks the Office of the Director of National Intelligence represents an unnecessary bureaucratic layer and that he would like to get rid of it. He has been told that eliminating the ODNI is not politically possible, but still would like to “downsize” the office, the source said.

A government source who has discussed the matter with Trump characterized the president’s thinking this way: “It’s time for a change. Dan’s a great guy but the president doesn’t listen to him anymore.”

A White House official responded: “We have no personnel announcements at this time.”

The big picture: Coats has rankled Trump more than once with his public comments, according to sources with direct knowledge.

He angered Trump when he appeared to criticize the president’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin during an on-stage interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell at last year’s Aspen Security Forum.

He drew Trump’s ire again in January when he told a Senate panel that North Korea was unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons, contradicting the president’s cheerier assessments.

In a statement provided by the ODNI, Coats said, “I am focused on doing my job, and it is frustrating to repeatedly be asked to respond to anonymous sources and unsubstantiated, often false rumors that undercut the critical work of the Intelligence Community and its relationship with the President. I am proud to lead an IC singularly focused on the vital mission of providing timely and unbiased intelligence to President Trump, Vice President Pence and the national security team in support of our nation’s security.”

Coats previously served for 16 years as a senator from Indiana — a tenure bookended by a stint as the U.S. ambassador to Germany during George W. Bush’s administration.

He’s also close with Vice President Mike Pence, a fellow Hoosier. (The above statement from Coats was originally provided by the ODNI in response to an NBC News report in March that Pence had talked Coats out of resigning.)

One potential replacement Trump has mentioned to multiple sources is Fred Fleitz, who formerly served as chief of staff to national security adviser John Bolton.

Fleitz was previously a CIA analyst and a staff member of the House Intelligence Committee. He is currently the president of the Center for Security Policy.

Trump has told people that he likes Fleitz and has “heard great things.” Fleitz has publicly criticized Coats and even called for Trump to fire Coats on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business program after Coats’ Senate testimony. Fleitz accused Coats of undermining and “second-guessing” the president.

Here’s all you need to know about Fred Fleitz

Fleitz has said the US intelligence assessment of Russian election interference was “rigged,” and that Trump should pardon everyone involved in the Russia investigation.

Other than that — oh wait, he also heads a think tank that promotes creeping sharia conspiracy theories. https://t.co/grNYrnkBeC

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) July 12, 2019

Michele Bachman isn’t doing anything these days. I’m sure she’d be happy to step in if Fleitz doesn’t work out.

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Trump’s Christian soldiers protect this deviant administration

by digby

Trump and his daughter Ivanka

Another brilliant column by Michelle Goldberg:

On Monday, Donald Trump disinvited the then-British ambassador, Kim Darroch, from an official administration dinner with the emir of Qatar, because he was mad about leaked cables in which Darroch assessed the president as “insecure” and “incompetent.”

There was room at the dinner, however, for Trump’s friend Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, who was charged in a prostitution sting this year. Kraft was allegedly serviced at a massage parlor that had once been owned by Li Yang, known as Cindy, a regular at Trump’s club Mar-a-Lago. Yang is now the target of an F.B.I. inquiry into whether she funneled Chinese money into Trump’s political operation.

An ordinary president would not want to remind the world of the Kraft and Yang scandals at a time when Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest has hurled Trump’s other shady associations back into the limelight. Epstein, indicted on charges of abusing and trafficking underage girls, was a friend of Trump’s until the two had a falling out, reportedly over a failed business deal. The New York Times reported on a party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago whose only guests were him, Epstein and around two dozen women “flown in to provide the entertainment.”

Epstein, of course, was also linked to the administration in another way. The president’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, was the United States attorney who oversaw a secret, obscenely lenient deal that let Epstein escape federal charges for sex crimes over a decade ago. On Friday, two days after a tendentious, self-serving news conference defending his handling of the Epstein case, Acosta finally resigned.

Even with Acosta gone, however, Epstein remains a living reminder of the depraved milieu from which the president sprang, and of the corruption and misogyny that continue to swirl around him. Trump has been only intermittently interested in distancing himself from that milieu. More often he has sought, whether through strategy or instinct, to normalize it.

This weekend, Trump National Doral, one of the president’s Florida clubs, planned to host a fund-raiser allowing golfers to bid on strippers to serve as their caddies. Though the event was canceled when it attracted too much attention, it’s at once astounding and not surprising at all that it was approved in the first place.

In truth, a stripper auction is tame by the standard of gross Trump stories, since at least the women were willing. Your eyes would glaze over if I tried to list every Trump associate implicated in the beating or sexual coercion of women. Still, it’s worth reviewing a few lowlights, because it’s astonishing how quickly the most lurid misdeeds fade from memory, supplanted by new degradations.

Acosta, you’ll remember, got his job because Trump’s previous pick, Andrew Puzder, withdrew following the revelation that his ex-wife, pseudonymous and in disguise, had appeared on an Oprah episode about “High Class Battered Women.” (She later retracted her accusations.)

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, was once charged with domestic violence, battery and dissuading a witness. (The case was dropped when his former wife failed to appear in court.) After Bill Shine, a former co-president of Fox News, was forced from his job for his involvement in Fox’s sprawling sexual harassment scandals, Trump hired him.

The White House staff secretary Rob Porter resigned last year after it was revealed that both of his ex-wives had accused him of abuse. The White House speechwriter David Sorensen resigned after his ex-wife came forward with stories of his violence toward her.

Elliott Broidy, a major Trump fund-raiser who became the Republican National Committee deputy finance chairman, resigned last year amid news that he’d paid $1.6 million as hush money to a former playboy model, Shera Bechard, who said she’d had an abortion after he got her pregnant. (In a lawsuit, Bechard said Broidy had been violent.) The casino mogul Steve Wynn, who Trump installed as the R.N.C.’s finance chairman, resigned amid accusations that he’d pressured his employees for sex. He remains a major Republican donor.

In 2017, Trump tapped the former chief executive of AccuWeather, Barry Myers, to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Then The Washington Post discovered a report from a Department of Labor investigation into Myers’s company, which found a culture of “widespread sexual harassment” that was “severe and pervasive.” The Senate hasn’t yet voted on Myers’s nomination, but the administration hasn’t withdrawn it.

And just this week, a senior military officer came forward to accuse Gen. John Hyten, Trump’s nominee to be the next vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of derailing her career when she turned down his sexual advances. “My life was ruined by this,” she told The Associated Press. (The Air Force reportedly cleared him of misconduct.)

Trump will sometimes jettison men accused of abuse when they become a public relations liability. But his first instinct is empathy, a sentiment he seems otherwise unfamiliar with. In May, he urged Roy Moore, the theocratic Alabama Senate candidate accused of preying on teenage girls, not to run again because he would lose, but added, “I have NOTHING against Roy Moore, and unlike many other Republican leaders, wanted him to win.” The president has expressed no sympathy for victims in the Epstein case, but has said he felt bad for Acosta.

Trump seems to understand, at least on a limbic level, that the effect of this cavalcade of scandal isn’t cumulative. Instead, each one eclipses the last, creating a sense of weary cynicism that makes shock impossible to sustain.

It was just three weeks ago that E. Jean Carroll, a well-known writer, accused Trump of what amounted to a violent rape in the mid-1990s, and two friends of hers confirmed that she’d told them about it at the time. In response, Trump essentially said she was too unattractive to rape — “No. 1, she’s not my type” — and claimed that he’d never met her. That was a provable lie; there’s a photograph of them together. It didn’t matter. The story drifted from the headlines within a few days.

Since Epstein’s arrest, many people have wondered how he was able to get away with his alleged crimes for so long, given all that’s publicly known about him. But we also know that the president boasts about sexually assaulting women, that over a dozen have accused him of various sorts of sexual misconduct, and one of them has accused him of rape. We know it, and we know we can’t do anything about it, so we live with it and grow numb. Maybe someday justice will come and a new generation will wonder how we tolerated behavior that was always right out in the open.

We know why Trump is able to get away with it: the white Conservative Evangelicals worship him more than Jesus Christ:

What about the white conservative evangelical women?

During my research fieldwork with evangelical Christian women at Bethel Church and Jesus Culture in California, they reported that they backed Trump because they believed he would battle hard on key issues, such as immigration. As one woman told me about her vote for Trump: “It’s founded in personal and emotional beliefs. Politics is different.”
Social scientists have pointed out how Trump successfully taps into an evangelical narrative, based on white American nationalism, of returning Christians to their rightful place at the centre of American life. Recently, for example, Trump declared his unity with evangelicals, promising to “cherish and honour” them by denouncing late-term abortion. Trump’s embattled language aligns with common evangelical narratives that casts them as being “under attack” by a secular majority, or needing to go into “combat mode” against political issues such as trans-inclusive bathrooms. Framing their political involvement in this way is instrumental to sustaining evangelicals as a cohesive religious group. 

Rather than just representing the Republican party, Trump reproduces emotionally driven evangelical narratives, including the imperative to return the US to its rightful (white) Christian heritage. For many white evangelical women, accustomed to hearing these narratives in their churches, Trump’s language is resonant and familiar. 

Another reason why white evangelical women support Trump can be explained by their prioritisation of racial and religious identity over their gender identity. All of us manage and negotiate our various identities, emphasising some and suppressing others depending on the socio-political context we are in. Even the question of how a woman could vote for a sexist president presupposes the primacy of gender as a deeply felt identity category for all women. 

Instead, the evangelical women I met explained that to be evangelical is firstly to be politically engaged with Republican partisanship, and secondly to focus this engagement around core issues – including abortion and immigration. In other words, many white evangelical women prioritise their religious and racial identities over their gender identities and in so doing are able to reconcile themselves with Trump.

Need more proof?

• A Pew Research Center survey found that only 25% of white evangelicals say the U.S. has a responsibility to accept refugees.
• Meanwhile, people with no religious affiliation were most likely to say the U.S. does have that responsibility.

Leviticus 19:34 — “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the foreigner as yourself, for you were foreign in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

Matthew 25:35 — “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Jeremiah 22:3 — “Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.”

Exodus 22:21 — “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien; for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

Stat o’ the day

by digby

Another telling transformation over a generation in America: almost 9 out of 10 adults now say politics important in their life. “Very important” percentage roughly matches the total importance response in 1990. pic.twitter.com/08XqEqlFGU— Bill McInturff (@pollsterguy) July 8, 2019

Civic involvement is great. But I have a feeling this is more about tribalism and the entertainment value of our current “situation.” And that’s not great.

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My Salon column this morning:

Last week President Trump sent the Department of Justice into a tailspin by publicly insisting that he planned to defy the Supreme Court ruling which found that the government’s rationale in the census citizenship question case was so “contrived” that not even Chief Justice John Roberts could stomach it. Lawyers at Justice had already acquiesced to the ruling, as expected, when Trump started blathering about how they had several ways to get the question on the census anyway, including simply issuing an executive order.

When the press asked him about it on July 5, Trump said this:

We’re thinking about doing that, we have four or five ways we can do it, it’s one of the ways we’re thinking about doing it very seriously. We can start the printing (of the census forms) now and maybe do an addendum after we get a positive decision, so we’re working on a lot of things, including an executive order.

Not long after that, the government lawyers who originally worked on the case suddenly dropped out. This was presumably because they could not ethically go back to the court and make a different argument than the one they’d originally made, particularly since they had insisted that the case had to be fast-tracked in order to make a drop-dead deadline that was clearly no longer operative. The judge in the case refused to allow the change, however, saying that the government had failed to provide a proper reason. At this point, the legal case was a train wreck but Barr and Trump nonetheless kept insisting they would get this done by hook or by crook.

Barr gave an interview to the Associated Press early in the week in which he declared that he agreed with Trump that the Supreme Court decision was wrong and that he thought there was “an opportunity potentially to cure the lack of clarity that was the problem and we might as well take a shot at doing that.”

“Take a shot” didn’t sound very optimistic, and for good reason. Ending up back in front of the chief justice and telling him that, hey, they had only been kidding about fast-tracking the case before and that their new rationale was the honest truth this time, they promise, seemed like a shaky strategy that not even Barr would relish pursuing. So most legal observers believed the administration would pursue an executive order, print the forms and face the constitutional confrontation that was bound to follow.

After all, Trump doesn’t understand anything about the Constitution, while Barr and his “unitary executive” cronies see Trump as an instrument to enshrine their monarchical philosophy. Perhaps this would be the case that would put the judiciary on notice that it too is a secondary branch with has very limited power to second-guess the executive, just like the Congress.

The rationale for doing this was vividly expressed by the conservative former federal judge Michael Luttig, who was quoted in the Washington Post pushing for the president to just do it:

The way forward is thus both obvious and urgent: President Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo ought to have a meeting when the president returns from the Group of 20 summit, and decide if such questions are necessary and, if so, why. If yes, then Barr should commit the conclusions to writing and prepare an executive order for the president’s signature directing the commerce secretary to add any such questions, and be prepared to defend the questions on the grounds discussed in the meeting. Nothing more is required.

Some conservatives assumed that when the case inevitably found its way back to the Supreme Court, Roberts would be fine with that. Common sense suggests otherwise: Roberts would have perceived this action for the slap in the face it certainly would be. He would likely have ruled against them again, opening the door for the president to defy the high court the same way he is currently defying Congress. If congressional leaders refuse to fulfill their duty of impeaching a lawless president, there’s every chance Trump and his team would get away with it.

That’s a scenario Barr would be quite happy to see unfold, but it looks as though they decided to save it for another day. There are plenty of cases coming down the pike that might serve that purpose. As it turns out, the administration has other fish to fry at the moment.

As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye reported on Thursday, the president and his men blinked on this one and decided not to push the issue on the census, instead opting for a Band-Aid executive order that will gather the citizenship information by other means. That approach was always available (as opponents of the census question constantly pointed out) but at this point the administration loses nothing don’t lose much by going back to it. One of the main purposes of the citizenship question was to intimidate non-citizens into refusing to fill out the forms, leaving urban areas with lots of people uncounted. That goal has likely been achieved. If this administration is largely incompetent, it excels at scaring immigrants.

But there’s more to it than that. As we have now learned from the documents retrieved from the computer of late Republican operative Thomas Hofeller, the whole point of this exercise was to exclude a large number of non-citizens from the census count used to determine the number and location of congressional districts in each state. That would give GOP-controlled state legislatures a chance to draw districts that would help Republicans gain more seats.

On Thursday, Trump said straight out that “some states may want to draw districts based on voter-eligible population,” so they aren’t even trying to hide this anymore. But Barr said something even more troubling at the end of his remarks. This isn’t just about redistricting:

That information will be useful for countless purposes, as the President explained in his remarks today. For example, there is a current dispute over whether illegal aliens can be included for apportionment purposes. Depending on the resolution of that dispute, this data may possibly prove relevant. We will be studying the issue.

That “dispute” refers to a case just filed in Alabama in which the state argues that including undocumented immigrants when apportioning congressional seats deprives Alabama of its “rightful share of political representation,” on the premise that it’s losing out to states with more non-citizens. Barr obviously sees this as the better vehicle to accomplish his goal: Fewer districts with likely Democratic majorities.

So the administration’s decision to back off the census question may look like a surrender, but it wasn’t the end of this drama by a long shot. It’s only the beginning.

What he says and what he really means
by Tom Sullivan

Proving again he is the loud guy holding forth at the end of the bar, our acting president told his “social media summit” Thursday (emphasis mine):

“See, I don’t think that the mainstream media is free speech either because it’s so crooked. It’s so dishonest. So to me, free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad. To me, that’s very dangerous speech, and you become angry at it. But that’s not free speech.”

What he really means is speech that flatters him (and reporters who fawn over him), that’s free speech. That deserves 1st Amendment protection. The rest, not so much.

Today, I am directing my Administration to explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect the free speech rights of ALL AMERICANS. We hope to see more transparency, more accountability, and more FREEDOM! #SocialMediaSummit https://t.co/i6th5qtfAj— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 11, 2019

THis is why a poll found nearly 50% of Trumpers would support Trump if he closed down media outlets for being unfair to Trump: Trump Says It's Not Free Speech to 'Write Bad' About 'Something Good': That's 'Dangerous Speech' https://t.co/gOwTtWlLbH via @mediaite— (((DeanObeidallah))) (@DeanObeidallah) July 11, 2019

Jonathan Chait adds:

This is one of those statements that would be shocking if made by any normal president but is almost banal with Trump. He barely disguises his admiration for dictators and their freedom to murder journalists who displease them. While his own powers of suppression are far weaker, Trump is happy to use government authority to punish independent media (like CNN and the Washington Post, whose owners he has punished with unfavorable regulatory actions) and even individuals. (Trump has boasted that he personally enforced the NFL blacklist of Colin Kaepernick for the offense of kneeling during the national anthem.)

Trump’s invocation of “free speech” is consistent: His entire goal is to promote supportive views and suppress hostile ones. And the willingness of virtually the entire conservative movement to support or tolerate his cynical conscription of free speech to intimidate the media reveals how little it, too, cares about freedom.

Among the things Trump and his cult do not understand are such diverse elements as….

Snowflake in Chief doesn’t like flies

Today’s Epstein primer

by digby

New York Magazine published these highlights of the 2017 non-fiction book by novelist James Patterson called “Filthy Rich” about Jeffrey Epstein:

In 2017, the master of mass-market thrillers, James Patterson, focused his attention on his Palm Beach neighbor Jeffrey Epstein for the true-crime book Filthy Rich. With the help of John Connolly, an investigative reporter and former cop, and Tim Malloy, a former Palm Beach news anchor, Patterson takes readers through the investigation and legal maneuvering that ended with Epstein pleading guilty to two charges of solicitation (one with a minor) in 2008.

Many strange and disturbing Epstein facts have been rehashed this week, following the new federal charges filed against him in New York, but somehow there’s still more. Here, the weirdest and most interesting details reported in Patterson’s book.

Epstein’s Palm Beach home was an odd place

Bland on the outside and bizarre on the inside, Epstein’s Palm Beach home was full of pictures of naked women and girls, including some of the alleged victims of his crimes. When police executed their first search warrant in 2005, they found nude photos of some of Epstein’s accusers. The photos lined the walls. They also found soaps shaped like penises and vaginas, along with UFC videos and a copy of the 2001 Mark Wahlberg movie Rock Star.

Patterson says Esptein had a hidden camera in a clock that he used to surreptitiously snap pictures of his victims. Police found those photos on his computer, but the presence of the camera wasn’t a surprise. The police had put it there for Epstein years prior when investigating a theft from his home.
His body was weird too

His penis in particular. One of his accusers is quoted in the book describing it as “very tiny.” Another told police that he “has some sort of birth defect — on his thing.” She went on: “It’s like a teardrop. Like a drop of water. It’s really fat at the bottom and skinny at the top.” Another called it “egg-shaped.” 

Epstein was very generous to the Palm Beach PD

In 2004, Epstein gave the Palm Beach Police Department a donation of $90,000. It was “generous, even by the generous standards of Palm Beach,” Patterson writes, and earmarked for a firearms simulator. Several months after the start of the department’s investigation, Epstein called the police chief and asked if he’d bought the simulator yet. The chief hadn’t and Epstein offered more money to make it happen. At that point, the police figured Epstein knew they were investigating him. 

Sometimes, he paid girls just to hang out

One of Epstein’s alleged victims told police that she would sometimes get paid just to sit around his house watching TV or reading books. Of course, she had to be naked. “Sometimes he’d just invite me over for breakfast, for dinner, or just to use the swimming pool, and I’d get paid for that too,” she told police. 

Epstein would turn away some girls

One of his accusers, who said she recruited new girls, told police that she brought a 23-year-old to Epstein and he said she was too old. Another said her friend was rejected for being “a little overweight.” 

Epstein once had flowers delivered to a girl at her high school

A man who worked for Epstein was dispatched to deliver a dozen roses to his alleged victim following her high-school drama performance.

Why Trump banned him from Mar-a-Lago

As Patterson tells it, Epstein was banned from Trump’s Palm Beach club, where he was never an official member, after he invited a young woman he met there back to his house. She went, and Epstein tried to get her to undress. The girl refused and told her father, who went to Trump.

[Julie K Brown from the Miami Herald who broke this story said yesterday that it was a business dispute and they were never able to pin this story Trump has pread down… fwiw — d]

Epstein was accused of sexual assault in the ’90s

In 1997, a young actress went to the LAPD with accusations of sexual assault, but it didn’t result in any charges. In 2010, she told a newspaper, “The cops said it’d be my word against his. And since he had a lot of money, I let it go.”

Alan Dershowitz used Myspace pages to discredit Epstein’s victims

Some insight into Epstein’s fortune

One of the most vexing mysteries about Epstein is how he made his fortune. Patterson sheds a bit of light on this question by describing Epstein’s main hustle in the mid-’80s. Epstein would work for fabulously wealthy people, devising “creative new ways” for them to avoid paying taxes, Patterson writes. Epstein would charge a flat fee for his services.
Epstein argued that he was only guilty of loving massages

Patterson writes:

Epstein can’t use Tinder

As a condition of the deal he struck with prosecutors, Epstein can’t look at porn online or “use social networking for sexual purposes,” Patterson reports.

Apparently he doesn’t need to look at porn. According to the indictment they found many tapes of encounters with real people. he could just review his previous rapes and molestations.

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Trump took some wingnut viagra today

by digby

Your “great looking and smart very stable genius” president,

Trump got very over-excited about being worshipped by the right-wing fever swamp today. He’s insulting Warren’s looks now. This is only the beginning.

Trouble in wingnut paradise

by digby

You think the Democrats are in disarray? Well, get a load of this:

Donald Trump has invited personalities from across the right-wing internet to the White House on Thursday for a “Social Media Summit,” but the event is causing his administration headaches even before it begins.

So far, the summit has stirred up resentments among pro-Trump personalities who were never invited to the party, and one invitee has been disinvited over an anti-Semitic cartoon—raising questions for the White House about why he was invited in the first place.

The White House hasn’t released a public list of attendees for the Thursday afternoon event, but a number of pro-Trump personalities have posted invitations on Twitter. They include Ali Alexander, a right-wing operative pushing a smear that Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris (CA) isn’t really “an American Black,” a pro-Trump “memesmith” who goes by the screenname “@CarpeDonktum,” and blogger Jim Hoft, whose Gateway Pundit blog frequently promotes hoaxes.

The invitee list also includes more traditional White House visitors, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and representatives from campus conservative group Turning Point USA and conservative YouTube channel PragerU. In an Instagram post, Turning Point executive Benny Johnson promised to use the conference to give Trump “dank meme ideas.”

Neither Facebook or Twitter are reportedly attending the summit, suggesting that the event will mainly feature conservative allegations that the social media giants are biased against them.

Notably, the group so far doesn’t appear to include anyone who has actually been banned from major social platforms, even though those bans have played a significant role in driving accusations on the right that the social giants are biased. Pro-Trump figures like anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer, InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Proud Boys men’s group founder Gavin McInnes, for example, don’t appear to have been invited.

That fact hasn’t been lost on fringe Trump supporters. In a livestream from Washington, D.C., InfoWars reporter and Jones lieutenant Owen Shroyer raged that no one from InfoWars was invited to the event, while people who hadn’t been banned were.

Shroyer declared that the event was an “abortion of truth” and compared the invitees to dogs getting a bone and a pat on the head.

“The people that are actually getting censored get ignored,” Shroyer said. “Isn’t that funny?”

Jones protégé Paul Joseph Watson weighed in on the summit too, asking why no figures who have faced total social media bans were invited.

“Have any of the people who got invited to the social media summit actually been censored by social media?” Watson tweeted.

Have any of the people who got invited to the social media summit actually been censored by social media? 🤔— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) July 10, 2019

White House officials such as social media director Dan Scavino, a top Trump confidant and longtime aide, have taken the lead on forming the summit’s agenda and assembling its eclectic guest list, according to two people familiar with the process. Scavino, who is adept at navigating the convoluted meme culture of the pro-Trump internet, keeps tabs on the work of many Trump-loving social media personalities, and will often flag their work directly to the president, who often reacts with an amused smirk or chuckle, the sources said.

This is pathetic. But typical.

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