[Discussion] Hope to Remember The Trump Administration Thread as being 'transparent and honest'

Let's follow and discuss what our newest presidential administration gets up to, the good, the bad, the lawsuits, and the many many indictments.

OG_slinger wrote:

Then the wonderful citizens of Alabama decided he was just the person to represent their state, first as the state's attorney general for several years, and then as a flippin' Senator for two decades.

Hell of a system of government we have when it gives terrible excuses of humanity more and more power.

Well, I mean, he is representative of them.

Maybe we need a system where if a state or district keeps sending a terrible person to represent them in Congress, instead of just censuring the congressman, we censure the people who keep putting him there. I mean, he isn't really the underlying problem here if the people keep voting him in, right?

(Yeah, I know. Right now we don't even censure the congressmen. I can dream, though.)

Keldar wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Then the wonderful citizens of Alabama decided he was just the person to represent their state, first as the state's attorney general for several years, and then as a flippin' Senator for two decades.

Hell of a system of government we have when it gives terrible excuses of humanity more and more power.

Well, I mean, he is representative of them.

Maybe we need a system where if a state or district keeps sending a terrible person to represent them in Congress, instead of just censuring the congressman, we censure the people who keep putting him there. I mean, he isn't really the underlying problem here if the people keep voting him in, right?

(Yeah, I know. Right now we don't even censure the congressmen. I can dream, though.)

Well, the percentage of Alabamians who are allowed to vote in elections, aren't in prison and forced to provide free labor to the governor's mansion, and so on.

Gremlin wrote:
Keldar wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Then the wonderful citizens of Alabama decided he was just the person to represent their state, first as the state's attorney general for several years, and then as a flippin' Senator for two decades.

Hell of a system of government we have when it gives terrible excuses of humanity more and more power.

Well, I mean, he is representative of them.

Maybe we need a system where if a state or district keeps sending a terrible person to represent them in Congress, instead of just censuring the congressman, we censure the people who keep putting him there. I mean, he isn't really the underlying problem here if the people keep voting him in, right?

(Yeah, I know. Right now we don't even censure the congressmen. I can dream, though.)

Well, the percentage of Alabamians who are allowed to vote in elections, aren't in prison and forced to provide free labor to the governor's mansion, and so on.

they call that "States Rights" down there.

I will not stand for disparaging weasels by contrasting them to Sessions.

Garrcia wrote:

I will not stand for disparaging weasels by contrasting them to Sessions.

Thank you!

Badferret wrote:
Garrcia wrote:

I will not stand for disparaging weasels by contrasting them to Sessions.

Thank you!

Nice marmot.

16 States Sue to Stop Trump’s Use of Emergency Powers to Build Border Wall

NYT wrote:

A coalition of 16 states, including California and New York, on Monday challenged President Trump in court over his plan to use emergency powers to spend billions of dollars on his border wall.

The lawsuit is part of a constitutional confrontation that Mr. Trump set off on Friday when he declared that he would spend billions of dollars more on border barriers than Congress had granted him. The clash raises questions over congressional control of spending, the scope of emergency powers granted to the president, and how far the courts are willing to go to settle such a dispute.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in San Francisco, argues that the president does not have the power to divert funds for constructing a wall along the Mexican border because it is Congress that controls spending.

Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, said in an interview that the president himself had undercut his argument that there was an emergency on the border.

“Probably the best evidence is the president’s own words,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s speech on Feb. 15 announcing his plan: “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

The lawsuit, California et al. v. Trump et al., says that the plaintiff states are going to court to protect their residents, natural resources and economic interests. “Contrary to the will of Congress, the president has used the pretext of a manufactured ‘crisis’ of unlawful immigration to declare a national emergency and redirect federal dollars appropriated for drug interdiction, military construction and law enforcement initiatives toward building a wall on the United States-Mexico border,” the lawsuit says.

New constitution who dis?

Yonder wrote:

New constitution who dis?

It’s more of a “guideline.”

Documents detail multimillion-dollar ties involving EPA official, secretive industry group

Politico wrote:

The nation’s biggest coal-burning power companies paid a top lobbying firm millions of dollars to fight a wide range of Obama-era environmental rules, documents obtained by POLITICO reveal — shortly before one of the firm’s partners became President Donald Trump’s top air pollution regulator.

Now that ex-partner, Bill Wehrum, is aggressively working to undo many of those same regulations at the EPA, where he is an assistant administrator in charge of issues including climate change, smog and power plants’ mercury pollution.

Wehrum’s past role as a utility lobbyist is well-known, but the documents reveal never-before-disclosed details of how extensively his old firm, formerly called Hunton & Williams, worked to coordinate the power industry’s strategy against the Obama administration’s regulations. Twenty-five power companies and six industry trade groups agreed to pay the firm a total of $8.2 million in 2017 alone, according to an internal summary prepared in June of that year — less than three months before Trump tapped Wehrum for his EPA post.

POLITICO obtained 26 pages of briefing materials distributed to members of an umbrella group of utilities Wehrum represented while at the firm. Known as the Utility Air Regulatory Group, the secretive organization included some of the largest coal-burning utilities in the country. The materials were marked "CONFIDENTIAL ATTORNEY-CLIENT COMMUNICATION" and outlined goals for a meeting of the group's policy committee.

Wehrum has said he won't work on lawsuits former clients are involved in, but nothing in federal ethics rules prevents him from working on regulations that apply to a broad sweep of actors in the industry he once represented. To that extent, it does not appear Wehrum has violated any laws, but it does expose holes in the ethics system.

Last year the Pentagon failed it's first comprehensive financial audit (something Congress told it to do almost 30 years ago).

Why that matters now is that the Pentagon just revealed that the $2.5 billion in unspent counterdrug funds Trump wants to use to build his wall isn't all there. There's only $85 million left in that account.

Pentagon brass wants Congress to give them the OK to reprogram $2.4 billion in other military spending so they can top up that counterdrug account so Trump can then use it on his wall.

OG_slinger wrote:

Last year the Pentagon failed it's first comprehensive financial audit (something Congress told it to do almost 30 years ago).

Why that matters now is that the Pentagon just revealed that the $2.5 billion in unspent counterdrug funds Trump wants to use to build his wall isn't all there. There's only $85 million left in that account.

Pentagon brass wants Congress to give them the OK to reprogram $2.4 billion in other military spending so they can top up that counterdrug account so Trump can then use it on his wall.

and did anyone bother to ask or say where 2.4 billion dollars went?

thrawn82 wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Last year the Pentagon failed it's first comprehensive financial audit (something Congress told it to do almost 30 years ago).

Why that matters now is that the Pentagon just revealed that the $2.5 billion in unspent counterdrug funds Trump wants to use to build his wall isn't all there. There's only $85 million left in that account.

Pentagon brass wants Congress to give them the OK to reprogram $2.4 billion in other military spending so they can top up that counterdrug account so Trump can then use it on his wall.

and did anyone bother to ask or say where 2.4 billion dollars went?

“Training costs.”

Reaper81 wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Last year the Pentagon failed it's first comprehensive financial audit (something Congress told it to do almost 30 years ago).

Why that matters now is that the Pentagon just revealed that the $2.5 billion in unspent counterdrug funds Trump wants to use to build his wall isn't all there. There's only $85 million left in that account.

Pentagon brass wants Congress to give them the OK to reprogram $2.4 billion in other military spending so they can top up that counterdrug account so Trump can then use it on his wall.

and did anyone bother to ask or say where 2.4 billion dollars went?

“Training costs.”

Beer ain't free, you know.

Reaper81 wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Last year the Pentagon failed it's first comprehensive financial audit (something Congress told it to do almost 30 years ago).

Why that matters now is that the Pentagon just revealed that the $2.5 billion in unspent counterdrug funds Trump wants to use to build his wall isn't all there. There's only $85 million left in that account.

Pentagon brass wants Congress to give them the OK to reprogram $2.4 billion in other military spending so they can top up that counterdrug account so Trump can then use it on his wall.

and did anyone bother to ask or say where 2.4 billion dollars went?

“Training costs.”

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
-Smedley D. Butler, retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient.

JeffreyLSmith wrote:
Reaper81 wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Last year the Pentagon failed it's first comprehensive financial audit (something Congress told it to do almost 30 years ago).

Why that matters now is that the Pentagon just revealed that the $2.5 billion in unspent counterdrug funds Trump wants to use to build his wall isn't all there. There's only $85 million left in that account.

Pentagon brass wants Congress to give them the OK to reprogram $2.4 billion in other military spending so they can top up that counterdrug account so Trump can then use it on his wall.

and did anyone bother to ask or say where 2.4 billion dollars went?

“Training costs.”

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
-Smedley D. Butler, retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient.

I have never seem this before. Thank you. The book looks incredible.

OG_slinger wrote:

Pentagon brass wants Congress to give them the OK to reprogram $2.4 billion in other military spending so they can top up that counterdrug account so Trump can then use it on his wall.

Haha, yeah, that's going to happen.

Kushner and Cos., the real estate company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, wants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to give them $1.2 billion in loans so they can buy 6,000 apartments Maryland and Virginia.

Bloomberg wrote:

President Trump appointed Joseph Otting to oversee the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Fannie and Freddie. Otting previously served as CEO of OneWest Bank, founded by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, an ally of Kushner’s in the West Wing.

Last year a real estate management company that made investments for Qatar's state-owned wealth management fund saved the Kushner family from financial ruin by giving them a $1.1 billion cash infusion that prevented the family from defaulting on loans for 666 Fifth Street, a building Jared purchased for $1.8 billion at the peak of the market in 2007, and that had been sitting largely empty.

A company that would stand to benefit greatly from a Saudi nuclear deal also just signed a 99 year lease for space in 666 5th Ave.

Paid upfront.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

A company that would stand to benefit greatly from a Saudi nuclear deal also just signed a 99 year lease for space in 666 5th Ave.

Paid upfront.

This boggles my mind. Like... it’s not even an attempt to hide. This isn’t an ‘innocent until proven guilty’ sort of thing. This is an overt and unashamed abuse of allowing others to handle the levers of power in the US. To think that this behavior has now been normalized is what is so damn depressing.

If this was a Democrat President that did this it would be immediate impeachment hearings.

TheGameguru wrote:

If this was a Democrat President that did this it would be immediate impeachment hearings.

Time saving tip. Copy this and post it after every new news story about Trump posted in this thread.

TheGameguru wrote:

If this was a Democrat President that did this it would be immediate impeachment hearings.

Evergreen sub-tweet.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

A company that would stand to benefit greatly from a Saudi nuclear deal also just signed a 99 year lease for space in 666 5th Ave.

Paid upfront.

Link? All I found were stories from last year about the real estate company purchasing the building on a 99 year lease (which one article stated was a common thing in Manhattan real estate deals). If now this happened and the building belonged to a non-Kushner company, then it shouldn't be an issue.......unless that was the plan all along, then it could/should be a scandal.

Or am I misunderstanding something?

AUs_TBirD wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

A company that would stand to benefit greatly from a Saudi nuclear deal also just signed a 99 year lease for space in 666 5th Ave.

Paid upfront.

Link? All I found were stories from last year about the real estate company purchasing the building on a 99 year lease (which one article stated was a common thing in Manhattan real estate deals). If now this happened and the building belonged to a non-Kushner company, then it shouldn't be an issue.......unless that was the plan all along, then it could/should be a scandal.

Or am I misunderstanding something?

It was part of the Washington Post write-up about the House report on the Saudi deal.

The report released Tuesday notes that one of the power plant manufacturers that could benefit from a nuclear deal, Westinghouse Electric, is a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, the company that has provided financial relief to the family of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser. Brookfield Asset Management took a 99-year lease on the Kushner family’s deeply indebted New York City property at 666 Fifth Ave.

The acquisition was finalized in August of 2018. This Saudi deal has reportedly been in the works since early '17.

I'm trying to find where I read that it was paid upfront. I'll look for that in the morning.

Thanks for the clarification. If it has been in the works since before the property left Kushner's control, that's certainly not a good look...

AUs_TBirD wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

A company that would stand to benefit greatly from a Saudi nuclear deal also just signed a 99 year lease for space in 666 5th Ave.

Paid upfront.

Link? All I found were stories from last year about the real estate company purchasing the building on a 99 year lease (which one article stated was a common thing in Manhattan real estate deals). If now this happened and the building belonged to a non-Kushner company, then it shouldn't be an issue.......unless that was the plan all along, then it could/should be a scandal.

Or am I misunderstanding something?

Link

NYT wrote:

The deal, in which Brookfield paid the rent for the entire 99-year term upfront, helps remove the family’s biggest financial headache: a $1.4 billion mortgage on the office portion of the tower that was due in February next year. The Kushners have spent more than two years on an international search for new partners or fresh financing that stretched from the Middle East to China.

...

In the 666 Fifth Avenue deal, Brookfield paid about $1.1 billion in upfront rent, according to an executive who requested anonymity because he had been briefed on the deal but was not authorized to discuss it. Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, who now runs the company, in turn, negotiated with his lenders to pay less than the company owed to satisfy the debts, the executive said.

666 Fifth Street was Jared's deal and it was destroying the family business. Jared paid a record-setting $1.8 billion for the building in 2007 right before the economy hit the skids. The Kushers had to sell the retail space in the building to make the early loan payments and the rest of the loan would have been due this month. The Brookfield deal saved the Kushners' business because they didn't have the money.

What are the two primary things a foreign agent looks for when choosing an asset to leverage?

1) Sexual liasons the target does not want revealed

2) Debt and other financial trouble.

They're also two big red flags (among many others) for security clearances.

How is it Kushner has a clearance again?