Worth the reminder today, on the day Putin had his political rival killed, that only weeks ago, Donald Trump endorsed the idea that he should have complete immunity to have his own political rivals assassinated.pic.twitter.com/pGhzcvUCBU
Tucker Carlson, when asked about Alexei Navalny, opposition leaders and journalists in Russia: “Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.”pic.twitter.com/pE4SIKdaIO
Tucker Carlson has turned on Vladimir Putin in the wake of the shocking death of Alexei Navalny, just days after releasing a softball interview with the Russian president and a series of ‘tourism board style’ videos about the country’s clean train stations and cheap groceries.
In an exclusive statement to DailyMail.com, Carlson said: ‘It’s horrifying what happened to Navalny. The whole thing is barbaric and awful. No decent person would defend it.’
The former Fox News host told DailyMail.com that he was on a plane traveling from Dubai when Navalny’s death was announced.
‘I didn’t even know it happened till I saw the Daily Mail story,’ Carlson explained.
The conservative pundit has faced backlash over his bizarre sit-down with Putin last week after critics say he failed to challenge the Russian president.
When quizzed about the limitations of his interview at the World Government Summit on Monday, days before Navalny’s tragic death, Carlson made the comment: ‘every leader kills people, leadership requires killing people.’
He told DailyMail.com Friday: ‘It had zero to do with Navalny. I wasn’t referring to him, which is obvious in context, and I certainly wasn’t making excuses for killing people. I’m totally opposed to killing as I said.’
Of course he was. How ridiculous. He didn’t say he was opposed to it. He said “Leadership requires killing people, that’s why I don’t want to be a leader” clearly indicating that he thinks it’s a necessary thing but he just doesn’t want to be the one doing it. And he said it in the context of a question in which Navalny was specifically mentioned. Please.
Meanwhile, Ivanka’s husband is still defending the murderous MBS:
Kushner then goes on to say: "I have not seen the DNI report" but he believes MBS is "a visionary leader. I think what he's done in that region is transformational." Here's that DNI report about the murder of my colleague, available to the public: https://t.co/1ZaVMOiWqv
That’s nothing of course. Trump himself loves Kim Jong Un, murderous dictator, Xi Jinping, murderous dictator, Rodrigo Duterte, former murderous dictator etc. And we know how he feels about Vlad.
This is who they are:
Here’s the social and political model Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump want to bring to the United States of America. https://t.co/QncKflaLvK
Trump: One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, Well, sir, if we don't pay and were attacked by Russia, will you protect us? I said.. No I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. pic.twitter.com/2RPVDFZIXy
The irony of Trump using those words is just too much.
Jesse Watters declared that no one has had any issues working for Donald J. Trump or his companies. I've attached an excerpt from ABC's Dateline. Martin Rosenberg, a small business owner, said over 100 contractors who worked on Trump's casinos in Atlantic City weren't paid. pic.twitter.com/GJL6ravnQX
This is from 2016, no one cared, and it’s been memory holed. The man is a chiseler and always has been:
During the Atlantic City casino boom in the 1980s, Philadelphia cabinet-builder Edward Friel Jr. landed a $400,000 contract to build the bases for slot machines, registration desks, bars and other cabinets at Harrah’s at Trump Plaza.
The family cabinetry business, founded in the 1940s by Edward’s father, finished its work in 1984 and submitted its final bill to the general contractor for the Trump Organization, the resort’s builder.
Edward’s son, Paul, who was the firm’s accountant, still remembers the amount of that bill more than 30 years later: $83,600. The reason: the money never came. “That began the demise of the Edward J. Friel Company… which has been around since my grandfather,” he said.
Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will “protect your job.” But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.
At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.
Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages.
In addition to the lawsuits, the review found more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work — since the 1980s. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y., air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm. On just one project, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, records released by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1990 show that at least 253 subcontractors weren’t paid in full or on time, including workers who installed walls, chandeliers and plumbing.
The actions in total paint a portrait of Trump’s sprawling organization frequently failing to pay small businesses and individuals, then sometimes tying them up in court and other negotiations for years. In some cases, the Trump teams financially overpower and outlast much smaller opponents, draining their resources. Some just give up the fight, or settle for less; some have ended up in bankruptcy or out of business altogether.
Trump and his daughter Ivanka, in an interview with USA TODAY, shrugged off the lawsuits and other claims of non-payment. If a company or worker he hires isn’t paid fully, the Trumps said, it’s because The Trump Organization was unhappy with the work.
“Let’s say that they do a job that’s not good, or a job that they didn’t finish, or a job that was way late. I’ll deduct from their contract, absolutely,” Trump said. “That’s what the country should be doing.”
To be sure, Trump and his companies have prevailed in many legal disputes over missing payments, or reached settlements that cloud the terms reached by the parties.
However, the consistent circumstances laid out in those lawsuits and other non-payment claims raise questions about Trump’s judgment as a businessman, and as a potential commander- in- chief. The number of companies and others alleging he hasn’t paid suggests that either his companies have a poor track record hiring workers and assessing contractors, or that Trump businesses renege on contracts, refuse to pay, or consistently attempt to change payment terms after work is complete as is alleged in dozens of court cases.
People who defend this grotesque mobster’s fraud as “just doing business” are chiselers too.
And, by the way, I watched this is real time and was stunned that no one answered that the people who were hurt by Trump’s fraud were all the honest people who didn’t lie and had to pay higher interest rates! That’s why you punish fraudsters like Trump — it’s on behalf of the people who play by the rules.
“Is this fair to go after Donald Trump like this in this environment?”
— MSNBC's @KatyTurNBC poses question to legal experts about judge's decision to ban Trump from doing business in NY for 3 years, citing past bans applying only to businesses proven to have caused harm pic.twitter.com/fRrmhiKsWq
Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) visited Ukraine this month and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky, who she describes as “clear-eyed and clear-voiced.” But he’s faced with a “make or break moment” in his country’s fight to remain a free country. Donald Trump wanted (and failed) to build a wall on our southern border. Vladimir Putin wants to rebuild the Iron Curtain.
Spanberger shared her thoughts with Jennifer Rubin (Washington Post):
Spanberger is candid about the Biden administration refusing the initial request from Ukraine for critical equipment, waiting for Europeans to act and then, finally, acceding. “Initially, I was willing to concede they were being careful,” she said. The risk of elevating the war to a major-power war is not zero. However, “we have demonstrated that Ukraine is abiding by the parameters” we set, she argued. The rigmarole leaves us consistently at least “a few months behind” Ukraine’s urgent requests.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) pledged to Zelensky that the aid bill would “get done.” Just how to pass it over MAGA Republican objections is the question.
MAGA Republicans’ indifference to Ukraine — evidenced by their shrug at Trump’s recent invitation for Russia to invade Europe — incensed Spanberger. “What are they missing? We saved the world from fascism. We ended the Holocaust. We freed Europe. That was us,” she said, her voice rising with emotion. Now, these Republicans “want to remove America from the world,” she says. Russian President Vladimir Putin, she continued, “is on the precipice of destroying the world order we put in place through the deaths of thousands of Americans.” And, yet, it seems, they cannot be bothered to “explain this to their constituents or fend off a primary challenge” to defend our vital interests, she declared. Instead, they meekly follow their isolationist cult leader.
She recalled that the day after 9/11, our NATO allies invoked Article 5 for the first time. “They went to war for 2o years for us. For our war.” In a word, she said, she finds Republicans’ disregard of America’s vital interests “shameful.”
Spanberger’s being diplomatic.
Ah, remember the days when the Bushies told us we needed to invade Iraq? How they fed us a flood of raw (and bogus) intelligence about it? Iraq was a clear and present danger to our national security? We needed to fight them over there so we didn’t have to fight them over here?
Ukraine’s ask is not even that. We’re being asked to supply Ukraine with weapons to sustain their fight so We don’t end up in WWIII over there. France supplied the Colonies with weapons in their fight against the British, so it’s a kind of pay-freedom-forward ask, and a damn sight cheaper and cleaner (for us) than a war between NATO and Russia. Not to mention a jobs program for American arms manufacturers. You’d think the party of big business would consider it a sound investment with a yuge ROI.
But that was before the Christian right’s crush on Putin, and before white nationalists discovered Russia as their “beacon of salvation” in a diversifying West. Because Russia-so-white, Christian, and anti-gay. The extremist’s ditching freedom and all that predates Trump’s flowering bromance with Putin. Almost makes one miss Cold War Republicans.
Re: Spanberger. My last Democratic congressperson was a Blue Dog. We’ve had a string of rather notorious Republicans since January 2013, including Mark Meadows and Madison Cawthorn. So while others may give side-eye to centrist Democrats, my view of Spanberger is tempered by that experience.
Spanberger has chosen not to return to Congress so she can run for Virginia governor in 2025 instead. So I wish former former CIA agent, former Blue Dog, and current Problem Solver Caucus member bon courage.
@pete.dominick Here are my comments at our last school board meeting where a few bad faith actors have tried to create a controversy in our schools with no regard to the students safety or best interest. We have a generally welcoming student body when it comes to LGBT issues. I would dare to say the kids are all right – it’s the parents who are the problem. John Lewis asked us to make good trouble. And Dr. King told us not to be silent. #LGBT #transgender #trans #BOE #humanrights #schoolboardmeetings #transrights #boardofeducation #turningpointusa #momsforliberty ♬ original sound – Pete Dominick
I’m not sure why he felt the need to tease this for the past year but it’s good that he finally pulled the plug on this nonsense. (Actually, I know why he did it. He’s a diva and he loves attention so he always preens and poses before he finally agrees to do the right thing.)
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., announced Friday that he is not running for president after spending months mulling a bid that would have shaken up the 2024 campaign.
“I will not be seeking a third-party run. I will not be involved in a presidential run,” Manchin said during a speech. “I will be involved in making sure that we secure a president that has the knowledge and has the passion and has the ability to bring this country together.”
Manchin said that a third party could be viable down the road, but that a bid this year would have been “very challenging.” He added that he didn’t want to be a “deal-breaker” or a “spoiler.”
“I just don’t think it’s the right time,” Manchin said. “We’re on a real teetering situation here that could go either way. Democracy is at stake right now.”
A Conman cries. All the judges everywhere hate Donald Trump because he’s trying to save America from all the bad people who want to ruin it.
Waaaah.
A New York judge called out former President Trump and other Trump Organization executives Friday for their lack of remorse in a civil fraud case over the company’s business dealings.
Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay nearly $355 million in penalties following a months-long trial last year. Toward the end of his 92-page ruling, Engoron cited the defendants’ refusal to admit to any error.
“The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) first declared, ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine.’ Defendants apparently are of a different mind,” Engoron wrote.
“After some four years of investigation and litigation, the only error (“inadvertent,” of course) that they acknowledge is the tripling of the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse, which cannot be gainsaid. Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” he continued in his decision. “They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again.”
“This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Defendants did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff,” he wrote. “Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ posture that the evidence belies.”
Engoron found Trump, the Trump Organization and several top executives, including his adult sons, liable for fraud before the trial began. The verdict is at the sole discretion of the judge because there was no jury at the trial.
The fine is some $16 million less than the $370 million New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office asked the judge to force Trump to pay. It also blocks the former president from participating in New York business for three years.
Trump’s adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, were ordered to pay more than $4 million each, and were both barred from serving as officers or directors of any New York corporation or other legal entity for two years.
The former president repeatedly attacked Engoron as political and biased throughout the trial. He levied similar personal attacks against James, calling her a racist and a partisan who was out to get him.
Maybe that wasn’t such a hot idea.
This man’s con has been going his whole life. His companies declared bankruptcy 6 times. He’s settled numerous fraud trials before this one, notably the Trump University case. He and his spawn have already been barred from ever running another “charity” in New York after he defrauded little kids with cancer. All of his is well known.
He’s a con artist who is so narcissistic he thought he could become president and nobody would ever be able to stop him. But he lost 66 cases stemming from his bogus claims of voter fraud after the 2020 election. Two women, E. Jean Carroll and Leticia James have now obtained half a billion dollars in damages from his lies, defamation and fraud. Next month we will have the first of several criminal trials that may catch up with him as well.
He’s crying and whining about being persecuted. And his hardcore followers are all Trump sin-eaters who so identify with him that they cannot admit to error either. They voted for him, they supported him they cannot possibly be wrong.
But there must be a few people who are starting to see that they’ve been conned. I hope so anyway or e are living in a country with so many deluded,brainwashed people that even without Trump it’s hard to imagine this country can survive.
Former President Donald J. Trump has told advisers and allies that he likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with three exceptions, in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s deliberations.
Mr. Trump has studiously avoided taking a clear position on restrictions to abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the middle of 2022, galvanizing Democrats ahead of the midterm elections that year. He has said in private that he wants to wait until the Republican presidential primary contest is over to publicly discuss his views, because he doesn’t want to risk alienating social conservatives before he has secured the nomination, the two people said.
Mr. Trump has approached abortion transactionally since becoming a candidate in 2015, and his current private discussions reflect that same approach.
One thing Mr. Trump likes about a 16-week federal ban on abortions is that it’s a round number. “Know what I like about 16?” Mr. Trump told one of these people, who was given anonymity to describe a private conversation. “It’s even. It’s four months.”
When discussing prospective vice-presidential candidates, Mr. Trump often asks whether they are “OK on abortion.” He is instantly dismissive when he hears that a Republican doesn’t support “the three exceptions.” He tells advisers that Republicans will keep losing elections with that position.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Mr. Trump told advisers that he believed the decision was going to be harmful to Republicans. Since then, he has formed the view that the abortion issue is overwhelmingly responsible for a string of Republican losses in congressional races.
And he is acutely aware of his own vulnerability: He appointed the three justices who enabled that decision, a fact he has publicly claimed credit for in several settings. Those statements have already been included in ads, and Democrats plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to remind voters of that fact.
I hope so.
The smarter play is to simply say that he believes in states’ rights and that that’s what the Supremes did. It’s not great but it’s a little bit better than endorsing a national ban. But he can’t. The evangelical wingnuts won’t let him.
The White House clashed with the Justice Department in the run-up to the release of a special counsel report last week about President Biden’s handling of classified information, previously undisclosed correspondence shows.
The letters, obtained by The New York Times, show that a top Justice Department official rejected complaints from Mr. Biden’s lawyers about disparaging comments in the report regarding the president.
The lawyers wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland the day before he released the report by the special counsel, Robert K. Hur. They raised objections to passages in the report in which Mr. Hur suggested that Mr. Biden’s memory was failing and questioned some of his actions, even though the special counsel had found no basis to prosecute the president.
The lawyers said Mr. Hur’s comments “openly, obviously and blatantly violate department policy and practice,” the letters show.
The next day, as the department was preparing to make the report public, Bradley Weinsheimer — the department’s senior career official, or nonpolitical appointee, who deals with ethics complaints or appeals of department decisions — wrote back rejecting their criticism. He insisted that the comments in the report “fall well within the department’s standards for public release.”
The Biden Impeachment inquiry seems to attract witnesses who turn out to be con artists and criminals for some reason. The Republican inquisitors get a tip that somebody’s got the goods on “the Biden family” and they fan out to the right wing media to hail the news that they’ve finally nabbed the Big Guy. Then the truth inevitably comes out that they were played for fools.
The alleged crime at the center of the impeachment probe is still that ridiculous claim that then Vice President Biden was working on behalf of his son’s business, Burisma, in Ukraine when he pushed the government to fire a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, whom they claim was investigating the company. The problem is that he wasn’t investigating the company at all and was ousted because he failed to investigate corrupt politicians. (No wonder all these Republicans find him to be such a sympathetic figure.) In fact, the whole international community was agitating to have him fired because he was corrupt and the Ukrainian parliament finally did it.
When the Republicans took over the House in 2023, they went full steam ahead with their investigation of those same moldy facts, following the orders of their leader Donald Trump who has demanded that they impeach Joe Biden at least once as payback for his impeachment which, not coincidentally, was also centered around Ukraine. (He also wants his impeachments “expunged” like they are a juvie record but it looks like that will have to wait until he’s restored to the White House next year.)
Republicans had been hinting around that they’d found a smoking gun in the case for some time with House Oversight Chair James Comer, R- Ky., and Nebraska Senator Chuck Grassley flamboyantly announcing last May that they’d sent a letter to he Justice Department stating that there was evidence of “an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions” and demanding that the department release this damning evidence to the public. Comer even threatened the FBI with contempt if they didn’t turn over the documents immediately.
Grassley took the lead in leaking out tidbits of information about this evidence which was attributed to an FBI confidential informant who had been informed of the bribe by a Ukrainian businessman. And lordy, they said there were tapes of Biden and Hunter being bribed electrifying the right wing media and leading to hours of feverish innuendo on Fox and other networks.
Media Matters has tracked Fox’s obsession with this story for some time:
Hannity’s show aired at least 85 Hunter Biden segments in 2023 promoting the dubiously sourced and wholly unproven notion that Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch who controlled Burisma, paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden. This is an extension of the Ukraine conspiracy theory with all the problems detailed above, in addition to its own issues, but nonetheless is treated credulously by the Fox host. Of those 85 segments, 28 were Hannity monologues.
Those hysterical monologues are truly something to see. Here’s a bit of the one Hannity gave on the day Grassley released the document:
There are now real and growing concerns that your president, the president of our country, is compromised. After months of obfuscation from the FBI and the DOJ, that FD-1023 form that documented allegations of bribery from a trusted FBI confidential human source has now finally been released, thanks to Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Now, its contents are devastating…this is about the big guy himself, Joe Biden, a corrupt career politician who is now very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.
It was never very credible. One of the red flags, as I noted at the time, was the fact that this five million dollar bribe seemed to be a “sloppy conflation with a five million dollar bribe that was revealed in September 2020 when they arrested three Burisma executives for offering five million dollars to Ukrainian anti-corruption officials and which the Ukrainian government went to pained lengths to say neither Hunter Biden nor Joe Biden had anything to do with.” There is also the fact that there were quite a few Republicans who were very cagey about this breathless assertion that there were tapes of the bribes.
It makes you wonder what they knew or suspected about this whole thing now that it turns out that their smoking gun witness was arrested in Las Vegas yesterday on charges of lying to the FBI and creating false records. The indictment, returned by a grand jury and filed by Special Counsel David Weiss tells quite a tale.
It says that the informant Alexander Smirnov, “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [Biden], the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against [Biden] and his candidacy.”
In the original interview, Smirnov had claimed that he’d been told about the bribe in 2016. But apparently Smirnov couldn’t have had that conversation in 2016 because he “met with officials from Burisma for the first time in 2017, after [Biden] left office in January 2017.”The indictment says that Smirnov’s meeting with Burisma were “unremarkable” pitch meetings not discussions of bribes to then VP Biden that were made at a later date.
Smirnov’s accusation was cited over and over as the main basis for the impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden, despite the fact that they knew the information was unverified:
Chairman @jimjordan has said that the “best example” and “most compelling evidence” of wrongdoing by POTUS are the Burisma allegations that relied solely on an FBI source’s info.
Today, that FBI source was indicted for lying about Burisma.
None of the Fox News celebrity hosts mentioned this indictment tonight, after flogging in relentlessly for the past year. James Comer issued a statement expressing no remorse for his role and even criticized the FBI for not being forthcoming about its investigation of his big witness, despite the fact that he and Grassley made the whole thing public over their protests. He told CNN, “to be clear, the impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023. It is based on a large record of evidence, including bank records and witness testimony, revealing that Joe Biden knew of and participated in his family’s business dealings.” None of that has panned out thus far.
Oh, and by the way, this is the second major Comer witness to be indicted. The first was Gal Luft indicted last July on 8 counts of arms trafficking, sanctions violations and acting as an unregistered agent for China. He’s now a fugitive from justice.
These Republicans sure know how to pick ’em. Or, to be more precise, these unsavory characters know how to pick Republicans.
