[Discussion] Impeachment, Legacy, and Discussion of Individual 45

Though noted as discussion, news, debate, and all things related to events that occurred during the Tr*mp administration can go here. The scope of this thread is specific to the former administration and it's hangers-on in the aftermath of the shift in power for the United States and impacted areas worldwide.

It costs $25.02 an ounce, says Google.

The inequality of wealth has gotten so far out of hand, I remember like it was almost yesterday when freedom was $1.05.

Three months on and it looks like most Republicans are going to stick with the lie. We're watching the next Lost Cause myth get written in real time.

Half of Republicans believe false accounts of deadly U.S. Capitol riot: Reuters/Ipsos poll

Reuters wrote:

Since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have pushed false and misleading accounts to downplay the event that left five dead and scores of others wounded. His supporters appear to have listened.

Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.

Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.

Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.

Hundreds of Trump’s supporters, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, climbed walls of the Capitol building and smashed windows to gain entry while lawmakers were inside voting to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The rioters - many of them sporting Trump campaign gear and waving flags - also included known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said the rioters posed “zero threat.” Other prominent Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have publicly doubted whether Trump supporters were behind the riot.

...

The Reuters/Ipsos poll shows a large number of rank-and-file Republicans have embraced the myth. While 59% of all Americans say Trump bears some responsibility for the attack, only three in 10 Republicans agree. Eight in 10 Democrats and six in 10 independents reject the false claims that the Capitol siege was “mostly peaceful” or it was staged by left-wing protestors.

“Republicans have their own version of reality,” said John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University. “It is a huge problem. Democracy requires accountability and accountability requires evidence.”

The refusal of Trump and prominent Republicans to repudiate the events of Jan. 6 increases the likelihood of a similar incident happening again, said Susan Corke, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

“That is the biggest danger – normalizing this behavior,” Corke said. “I do think we are going to see more violence.”

...

The disinformation campaign aimed at downplaying the insurrection and Trump’s role in it reflects a growing consensus within the Republican Party that its fortunes remain tethered to Trump and his devoted base, political observers say.

According to the new Reuters/Ipsos poll, Trump remains the most popular figure within the party, with eight in 10 Republicans continuing to hold a favorable impression of him.

“Congressional Republicans have assessed they need to max out the Trump vote to win,” said Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush. “That that is the path back to the majority.”

OG_slinger wrote:

Three months on and it looks like most Republicans are going to stick with the lie. We're watching the next Lost Cause myth get written in real time.

Most Republicans are going to ride overt fascism, voter suppression, white supremacist terrorism, and conspiracy theories right over the cliff. They have never paid any price, no matter how vile their rhetoric.

Bill Hicks wrote:

"Rodney King? It's all in how you look at the tape. For instance, if you play it backwards you see us help King up and send him on his way."

Malor wrote:

And being a cop, he's used to being insulated from any significant consequences for his actions.

How right you are, Malor.

In this case it turned out that the Salt Lake City cop got his Officer of the Year award for arresting Thomas Pennington, a black man, in 2011 because he thought Pennington had murdered an ex-girlfriend in 1986.

But flash forward three years to 2015 and prosecutors had to dismiss murder charges against Pennington because they needed more time to investigate his alibis.

It turns out that the Officer of the Year ignored the fact that at the time of the murder Pennington lived nearly 1,100 miles away in Kansas City, was working full time at the University of Kansas Medical Center, and had gotten married less than a month before.

Pennington got his life f*cked up--and had to serve time for getting busted on drug charges after spending nearly a year in jail on the murder charges before he could make bail and the cop got an award, was able to retire on a fat pension, and go commit insurrection.

"Are you not now, or have you ever not been, a member of the Republican Party?"

Please tell me this is more of a dying gasp, then business as usual.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, which is why a patriot's financial donation is recurring and a tyrant's is not.

The funny thing is if I went through the donation steps and got to the bottom, and there was a box that basically read "If you uncheck this box you will not have a recurring donation but we will consider you to be a traitor who has sided with our enemies", I would not uncheck the box.

I would close the webpage entirely.

It feels like the GOP is looking down their noses at people who have some extra money and want to send it in just to help out. "Oh, you're just one of those one-time donors." I hope the people that had been thinking of helping out are offended enough that they just decide to keep their money instead.

Keldar wrote:

It feels like the GOP is looking down their noses at people who have some extra money and want to send it in just to help out.

The GOP hate and loathe their constituency. They are marks for them, pure and simple.

Keldar wrote:

The funny thing is if I went through the donation steps and got to the bottom, and there was a box that basically read "If you uncheck this box you will not have a recurring donation but we will consider you to be a traitor who has sided with our enemies", I would not uncheck the box.

I would close the webpage entirely.

It feels like the GOP is looking down their noses at people who have some extra money and want to send it in just to help out. "Oh, you're just one of those one-time donors." I hope the people that had been thinking of helping out are offended enough that they just decide to keep their money instead.

Well I think it's targeted at people who currently have recurring donations to scare them away from stopping them.

Natus wrote:
Keldar wrote:

It feels like the GOP is looking down their noses at people who have some extra money and want to send it in just to help out.

The GOP hate and loathe their constituency. They are marks for them, pure and simple.

So much this. "Milk the rubes, then toss them out in the street"

In group/out-group fearmongering. Appealing to ppl wanting to be on the in-group circle and not some outside loser.

Manhattan district attorney seizes evidence from Trump executive’s former daughter-in-law

Washington Post wrote:

Investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, acting on a grand jury subpoena, took possession of financial records Thursday morning from the apartment of Jennifer Weisselberg, the former daughter-in-law of a top Trump Organization officer.

Jennifer Weisselberg was married to Barry Weisselberg — the son of Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg — from 2004 to 2018. She has previously said that she had seven boxes of financial records from both her ex-husband and his father, some of which were obtained through divorce litigation. On Thursday, she loaded three boxes and a laptop computer onto a valet cart and wheeled them from her building to a black Jeep with dark-tinted windows that was waiting outside.

The move by District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. appears to be the latest sign that Allen Weisselberg, the company’s highest-ranking corporate officer who is not a member of the Trump family, is a key focus of the ongoing criminal probe into former president Donald Trump’s financial dealings.

The subpoena, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, ordered Jennifer Weisselberg to produce all of the records she possesses for her ex-husband’s bank accounts and credit cards plus his statements of net worth and tax filings. Barry Weisselberg is a Trump Organization employee and manages an ice rink for the company in Manhattan’s Central Park. The subpoena asks specifically for records related to the Trump Organization and Wollman Rink.

“My knowledge of the documents and my voice connect the flow of money from various banks and from personal finances that bleed directly into the Trump Organization,” she said in an interview Thursday. Investigators, she added, now have her ex-husband’s 2019 and 2020 statements of net worth, his tax returns and copies of Wollman Rink checks from private events that she claims were deposited incorrectly.

She has said previously that the documents that were in her possession showed transactions in bank accounts controlled by Barry and Allen Weisselberg jointly.

Trump administration sidelined experts in writing car pollution rules, EPA watchdog finds

Washington Post wrote:

The Trump administration sidelined career staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency when weakening pollution rules for new passenger vehicles, according to a federal watchdog report.

The EPA’s inspector general found top political leaders at the agency failed to properly document and consider the concerns of staff experts while unwinding standards for tailpipe emissions set under President Barack Obama.

The report, released Tuesday, may provide fresh fodder for the Biden administration to tighten mileage and greenhouse gas standards for new automobiles as part of a broader effort to phase out internal-combustion engines and drastically cut the nation’s climate-warming emissions.

...

In 2020, the Trump administration finalized a rule compelling car companies to improve the average fuel economy of their fleets by only 1.5 percent a year — a step back from the 5 percent annual increase set under Obama. Officials argued that forcing automakers to improve the efficiency too quickly would make cars too expensive, prodding people to keep driving older, less safe vehicles.

On paper, the lower emissions standards were signed jointly by the EPA and the Transportation Department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But according to the inspector general’s report, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decided that the NHTSA, and not his own experts, would complete “all modeling and analysis on behalf of both agencies.”

The result was that many EPA staffers felt shut out of the process of making one of the agency’s most important rules. One manager at its Office of Air and Radiation told investigators that “no one at the EPA ever saw NHTSA’s model or input files” in the six months leading up to the release of the final rule.

Jeff Alson, a former engineer at the EPA’s vehicles lab in Ann Arbor, Mich., who retired in 2018, said Tuesday that staffers at the two entities worked closely to set greenhouse gas standards for new cars and trucks under Obama. That kind of collaboration didn’t happen under President Donald Trump, he said.

“I feel like it really confirmed what I had seen,” Alson said of the inspector general’s investigation.

The Trump administration’s decision also meant the EPA failed to properly analyze the rollback’s impact on Americans especially vulnerable to auto emissions, including poor and minority communities often situated near highways and children susceptible to developing asthma, according to the report.

New probe confirms Trump officials blocked Puerto Rico from receiving hurricane aid

NBC News wrote:

The administration of former President Donald Trump obstructed an investigation looking into why officials withheld about $20 billion in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, one of the deadliest U.S. natural disasters in over 100 years, a new report says.

A Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General report made public Thursday also found that tensions between the department and the Office of Management and Budget resulted in unprecedented procedural hurdles that produced delays in the disbursement of the congressionally approved funds.

It all started after 2018 when OMB began requiring HUD to send grant notices for disaster funds through an interagency review process for approval, making it hard for HUD to publish the notices needed to unlock funding in a timely manner. Investigators found that OMB had never before required such a review process for a notice allocating recovery funds.

Former HUD Deputy Secretary Brian Montgomery told investigators about a phone call he had with then-OMB Director Russell Vought in which Montgomery told Vought the actions from his office were equivalent to holding disaster-relief funds “hostage,” according to the report.

Investigators said they were unable to obtain testimonies from officials who ordered the interagency review process. Former HUD Secretary Ben Carson and another former HUD official also declined to be interviewed by investigators.

Access to HUD information was delayed or denied multiple times throughout the course of the investigation, the report said, and several former senior administration officials at the OMB refused to provide requested information about their decision-making process in regard to the Puerto Rico relief funds.

...

The Trump administration's OMB also insisted on overhauls to Puerto Rico’s property management records, suspension of its minimum wage on federal contracts and other prerequisites to access relief funds, according to the report. Some HUD officials worried such requirements were potentially beyond HUD’s authority to impose on grantees.

The Office of Inspector General began the review in March 2019 after Congress asked it to look into hurricane aid delays as the island sought to recover from a storm that resulted in the deaths of 2,975 people and triggered the world's second-longest blackout.

Seven months after the probe was launched, two top HUD officials admitted to knowingly missing the congressionally mandated deadline to issue a notice that would have unlocked billions in federal recovery funds to Puerto Rico. Carson later defended his agency's actions by echoing Trump talking points — citing concerns about corruption, fiscal irregularities and "Puerto Rico's capacity to manage these funds."

Throughout his term, Trump repeatedly opposed disaster funding for Puerto Rico while disputing and failing to acknowledge Maria's death toll. Trump had also told top White House officials "that he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico," the Washington Post reported in 2019. "Instead, he wanted more of the money to go to Texas and Florida."

Under Trump, Congress had approved a total of $20 billion in HUD funds for Puerto Rico's post-hurricane reconstruction, a historic amount. But the agency stalled the release of the aid in 2019 and imposed additional restrictions and requirements last year on how Puerto Rico could gain access to the funds, citing corruption and financial mismanagement concerns.

Office of Inspector General audits published last year found that Puerto Rico needs to have a better system for requesting and monitoring federal grants to rebuild after Hurricane Maria — but Texas and Florida had similar issues and their funds were not held up after natural disasters.

The latest probe comes two days after President Joe Biden's administration removed Trump-era restrictions unique to Puerto Rico limiting its ability to access recovery funds through HUD. The agency also unlocked access to $8.2 billion in Community Development Block Grant Mitigation funds to help the island build resiliency against future disasters. The aid was approved by Congress in 2018.

Biden eliminated restrictions requiring incremental grant obligations, a federal financial monitor to supervise the aid and additional oversight from the island’s federally imposed financial oversight board, according new HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge.

Unless people go to jail, none of this matters.

OG_slinger wrote:

New probe confirms Trump officials blocked Puerto Rico from receiving hurricane aid

NBC News wrote:

The administration of former President Donald Trump obstructed an investigation looking into why officials withheld about $20 billion in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, one of the deadliest U.S. natural disasters in over 100 years, a new report says.

Well, that's easy. Racism. Plus they're all dirty Democrats.

Didn't really need an investigation to figure that one out!

After 100 days out of office, Trump's support softens in NBC News poll

NBC News wrote:

Out of office, off of Twitter, still complaining about the election results — the last 100 days or so haven’t been kind to Donald Trump, our new national NBC News poll finds.

His ratings among all adults stands at 32 percent favorable, 55 percent unfavorable, which is down from his rating in January (40 percent favorable, 53 percent unfavorable among registered voters), as well as where he was in the poll right before the election (43 percent favorable, 52 percent unfavorable among registered voters).

By comparison, President Biden’s current favorable/unfavorable stands at 50 percent positive, 36 percent negative.

Even Trump’s pull within his own party appears to have lessened, with 44 percent of Republicans saying they’re more supporters of Trump than the GOP, versus 50 percent who say they’re more supporters of the GOP than the former president.

It’s the first time since July 2019 when party supporters have outnumbered Trump supporters in our poll, and it’s also the first time that party supporters have reached 50 percent on this question.

Strikingly, these numbers are coming as the perception of Trump’s pull within his party couldn’t be stronger.

GOP politicians are still trekking to Mar-A-Lago. They’re clamoring for his endorsement. And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy continues to hug Trump, even after what happened on Jan. 6.

But close to 100 days after leaving office, Trump’s standing — nationally as well within his own party — is weaker today than it was three months ago.

You have to wonder what all the Republicans who still tie themselves to Trump are thinking now. If Trump's favorable numbers dropped eight points in just 100 days, where are they going to be in 2022? Perhaps the GOP's strategy of riding Trump's populism back into Congressional power wasn't such a great idea.

OG_slinger wrote:

You have to wonder what all the Republicans who still tie themselves to Trump are thinking now.

That they're greasing the squeaky wheel?

Jonman wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

You have to wonder what all the Republicans who still tie themselves to Trump are thinking now.

That they're greasing the squeaky wheel?

That they aren’t ready to give up on the dream of replacing democracy with a white fascist dictator?

RawkGWJ wrote:
Jonman wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

You have to wonder what all the Republicans who still tie themselves to Trump are thinking now.

That they're greasing the squeaky wheel?

That they aren’t ready to give up on the dream of replacing democracy with a white fascist dictator?

Yeah, I don't think Trumpism is at all done yet, unfortunately. If nothing else, his moronic grifting kids will keep it going. What I wouldn't give for some really sharp, *public* GOP infighting!

Natus wrote:
RawkGWJ wrote:
Jonman wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

You have to wonder what all the Republicans who still tie themselves to Trump are thinking now.

That they're greasing the squeaky wheel?

That they aren’t ready to give up on the dream of replacing democracy with a white fascist dictator?

Yeah, I don't think Trumpism is at all done yet, unfortunately. If nothing else, his moronic grifting kids will keep it going. What I wouldn't give for some really sharp, *public* GOP infighting!

Trump is still the only game in town. Name another Republican that has as much influence in the party or as big a base. He still owns the crazies.

MI6 spy Christopher Steele 'produced second dossier on Donald Trump for FBI'

The Telegraph wrote:

The former MI6 spy Christopher Steele produced a second dossier for the FBI on Donald Trump while he was in the White House, sources told The Telegraph.

Mr Steele filed a series of intelligence reports to US authorities during the Trump presidency, including information concerning alleged sexual exploits.

Mr Steele’s continued involvement supplying intelligence to the FBI appears to give credibility to his original dossier, which sparked a Special Counsel investigation by prosecutor Robert Mueller into Russian interference into the 2016 US presidential elections.

...

The emergence of the 35-page dossier, written between June and December 2016, did not it appears signal an end to the former MI6 officer’s working relationship with the FBI and continued after Mr Trump's inauguration in January 2017.

The Telegraph understands that Mr Steele, through his company Orbis Business Intelligence, continued supplying raw intelligence to the federal authorities in the US.

The second dossier contains raw intelligence that makes further claims of Russian meddling in the US election and also references claims regarding the existence of further sex tapes. The second dossier is reliant on separate sources to those who supplied information for the first reports.

The fact the FBI continued to receive intelligence from Mr Steele, who ran MI6’s Russia desk from 2006 to 2009 before setting up Orbis, is potentially significant because it shows his work was apparently still being taken seriously after Mr Trump took hold of the reins of power.

...

Intelligence gathered by Mr Steele for his second dossier is understood to include further details of Mr Manafort’s alleged Russian contacts.

Earlier this month, news sources in the US reported that Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate of Mr Manafort, had passed Trump campaign polling and strategy information to Russian intelligence sources.

The FBI is offering a $250,000 reward for "information leading to the arrest of" Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate of Mr Manafort.

The US Treasury has placed Mr Kilimnik under sanctions, describing him as a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent".

The Treasury report states: "During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy."

It is understood that Mr Steele believes the targeting of Mr Kilimnik shows collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian intelligence services.

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump remains banned from posting on
Facebook, the company’s independent content oversight board
ruled, extending the former U.S. president’s exile from the
largest social network and leaving him without one of his
favorite ways to reach supporters and goad opponents.

IMAGE(https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjIzZjYxZWYtOTI4ZC00ZjMwLWE4ZjAtNjI3NzNlOTVhZjFiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMzU0NzkwMDg@._V1_UY1200_CR45,0,630,1200_AL_.jpg)

I guess he’ll just have to keep updating us via his Creed Thoughts blog.