Tag: CLINTON FOUNDATION

Democrats Plan Starbucks Boycott If “Egotistical, Billionaire Asshole” Schultz Runs For President

By Tyler Durden

Angry Democrats are planning to boycott Starbucks if former CEO Howard Schultz runs for president. The 65-year-old billionaire has said that he may run as an independent – a move which could peel votes away from whoever wins the Democratic nomination to face President Trump. 

Putting it bluntly was a heckler at a New York Barnes & Noble, who told Schultz: “Don’t help elect Trump, you egotistical, billionaire asshole.”

Fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg warned Schultz not to run as an independent, writing on Monday that he had to make the same decision in 2008 when he was considering running for office.

“I faced exactly the same decision now facing others who are considering it,” said Bloomberg. “The data was very clear and very consistent. Given the strong pull of partisanship and the realities of the electoral college system, there is no way an independent can win.“

“In 2020, the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-Trump vote and end up re-electing the President.That’s a risk I refused to run in 2016 and we can’t afford to run it now,” Bloomberg added. “We must remain united, and we must not allow any candidate to divide or fracture us. The stakes couldn’t be higher.“

Schultz, on the other hand, thinks that there are enough moderate voters on both sides of the aisle who are sick of the status quo and will rally behind him.

“I believe that lifelong Democrats and lifelong Republicans are looking for a home,” Schultz told Axios on Sunday night – acknowledging that a vote-splitting campaign “is going to create hate, anger, disenfranchisement from friends, from Democrats.”

Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, called for a Starbucks boycott if Schultz enters the race, tweeting: “Vanity projects that help destroy democracy are disgusting. If he enters the race, I will start a Starbucks boycott because I’m not giving a penny that will end up in the election coffers of a guy who will help Trump win.”

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Other prominent Democrats have shared the anti-Schultz sentiment:

“I have a concern that, if he did run, that, essentially, it would provide Donald Trump with his best hope of getting reelected,” 2020 hopeful Julián Castro told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “I would suggest to Mr. Schultz to truly think about the negative impact that that might make.”

During his Monday interview at Barnes & Noble, Schultz said that he wouldn’t “do anything” to help Trump win again, however he says he believes he would win if he runs.

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The former Starbucks head blasted Trump in a Sunday “60 Minutes” interview – saying he isn’t fit to serve as president, and that both Democrats and Republicans are “consistently not doing what is necessary on behalf of the American people.”

In response to the interview, Trump tweeted on Monday: “Howard Schultz doesn’t have the “guts” to run for President! Watched him on @60Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the “smartest person.” Besides, America already has that! I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!”

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Schultz’s retort? Nada.

“I’m not going to respond to that. It’s childish. I’m not trying to win the Twitter primary” he said.

Schultz, worth $3.4 billion, owns 33 million shares of Starbucks as of June 26, 2018. He stepped down as executive chairman and board member last June after joining the company in 1982, and is now chairman emeritus.

Watch Schultz’s entire hour-long interview below:

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Mueller probe: Fully armed FBI agents arrest Trump’s ex-adviser Roger Stone in pre-dawn raid

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The FBI has arrested Roger Stone, a former campaign adviser to US President Donald Trump, in a surprise early morning raid on his home. Stone has been indicted on charges including obstruction and witness tampering.

He was arrested at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, following Thursday’s indictment by the office of the US Special Counsel Robert Mueller which is investigating Trump and his associates over allegations surrounding his 2016 campaign.

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Roger Stone pleads the Fifth, snubs Senate Democrats’ invitation to testifyRoger Stone pleads the Fifth, snubs Senate Democrats’ invitation to testify

Stone is facing one count of obstruction of proceedings, one count of witness tampering, and five counts of false statements.

It is alleged that Stone, who officially left the Trump campaign in August 2015, told campaign officials in July 2016 about future WikiLeaks (referred to in Mueller’s document as “Organization 1”) releases of damaging information found in leaked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails. US intelligence claims the emails were hacked by Russian “government actors.”

During Trump’s campaign, Stone boasted about having connections with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, but later said it wasn’t a direct link. Instead, he said that he relied on New York radio host Randy Credico (named “Person 2” in the Thursday indictment) as a “go-between.”

The indictment says Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committee about his alleged contacts with WikiLeaks and tried to convince another person to give false testimony.

Stone, a long-time ally of Trump, was recently praised by the US president for saying he would “never testify against Trump” and for having “guts” in the face of the “rogue and out of control prosecutor” Mueller.

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The FBI showed up at Stone’s door in force. Agents arrived armed with assault rifles and clad in body armor, and without warning.

FBI agents are among those left without pay due to the ongoing US government shutdown, and the fact that they still went and arrested Stone had the anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ praising on them on Twitter for “protecting this country.”

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Since Trump came to power, FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ‘Russiagate’ probe has been investigating the US intelligence community’s allegations that he had colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign. Stone’s arrest is arguably the most significant of the probe, which has so far resulted in several high-profile arrests on charges unrelated to the still unproven “collusion.”

Russia has dismissed all allegations of working to put Trump in power or control his decisions.

ALSO ON RT.COMMueller shoots down BuzzFeed’s latest ‘Russiagate’ scoop with a rare dismissal

Many of Trump’s opponents blame Russia for his surprise 2016 victory against Hillary Clinton. In April 2018, the House Intelligence Committee concluded that Trump had not colluded with Moscow, but later the Senate committee said he did, choosing to side with US intelligence assessments.

Those assessments, as well as media reports often based on unnamed sources (many of which have since proven to be false) remain the chief basis for the ‘Russiagate’ allegations, as Mueller’s team has so far failed to uncover proof of collusion in its two-year probe.

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The ‘Gilets Jaunes’ Are Unstoppable: “Now, The Elites Are Afraid”

By Tyler Durden

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Authored by Christophe Guilluy via Spiked-Online.com,

The gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement has rattled the French establishment. For several months, crowds ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands have been taking to the streets every weekend across the whole of France. They have had enormous success, extracting major concessions from the government. They continue to march.

Back in 2014, geographer Christopher Guilluy’s study of la France périphérique (peripheral France) caused a media sensation. It drew attention to the economic, cultural and political exclusion of the working classes, most of whom now live outside the major cities. It highlighted the conditions that would later give rise to the yellow-vest phenomenon. Guilluy has developed on these themes in his recent books, No Society and The Twilight of the Elite: Prosperity, the Periphery and the Future of France. spiked caught up with Guilluy to get his view on the causes and consequences of the yellow-vest movement.

spiked: What exactly do you mean by ‘peripheral France’?

Christophe Guilluy: ‘Peripheral France’ is about the geographic distribution of the working classes across France. Fifteen years ago, I noticed that the majority of working-class people actually live very far away from the major globalised cities – far from Paris, Lyon and Toulouse, and also very far from London and New York.

Technically, our globalised economic model performs well. It produces a lot of wealth. But it doesn’t need the majority of the population to function. It has no real need for the manual workers, labourers and even small-business owners outside of the big cities. Paris creates enough wealth for the whole of France, and London does the same in Britain. But you cannot build a society around this. The gilets jaunes is a revolt of the working classes who live in these places.

They tend to be people in work, but who don’t earn very much, between 1000€ and 2000€ per month. Some of them are very poor if they are unemployed. Others were once middle-class. What they all have in common is that they live in areas where there is hardly any work left. They know that even if they have a job today, they could lose it tomorrow and they won’t find anything else.

spiked: What is the role of culture in the yellow-vest movement?

Guilluy: Not only does peripheral France fare badly in the modern economy, it is also culturally misunderstood by the elite. The yellow-vest movement is a truly 21st-century movement in that it is cultural as well as political. Cultural validation is extremely important in our era.

One illustration of this cultural divide is that most modern, progressive social movements and protests are quickly endorsed by celebrities, actors, the media and the intellectuals. But none of them approve of the gilets jaunes. Their emergence has caused a kind of psychological shock to the cultural establishment. It is exactly the same shock that the British elites experienced with the Brexit vote and that they are still experiencing now, three years later.

The Brexit vote had a lot to do with culture, too, I think. It was more than just the question of leaving the EU. Many voters wanted to remind the political class that they exist. That’s what French people are using the gilets jaunes for – to say we exist. We are seeing the same phenomenon in populist revolts across the world.

spiked: How have the working-classes come to be excluded?

Guilluy: All the growth and dynamism is in the major cities, but people cannot just move there. The cities are inaccessible, particularly thanks to mounting housing costs. The big cities today are like medieval citadels. It is like we are going back to the city-states of the Middle Ages. Funnily enough, Paris is going to start charging people for entry, just like the excise duties you used to have to pay to enter a town in the Middle Ages.

The cities themselves have become very unequal, too. The Parisian economy needs executives and qualified professionals. It also needs workers, predominantly immigrants, for the construction industry and catering et cetera. Business relies on this very specific demographic mix. The problem is that ‘the people’ outside of this still exist. In fact, ‘Peripheral France’ actually encompasses the majority of French people.

spiked: What role has the liberal metropolitan elite played in this?

Guilluy: We have a new bourgeoisie, but because they are very cool and progressive, it creates the impression that there is no class conflict anymore. It is really difficult to oppose the hipsters when they say they care about the poor and about minorities.

But actually, they are very much complicit in relegating the working classes to the sidelines. Not only do they benefit enormously from the globalised economy, but they have also produced a dominant cultural discourse which ostracises working-class people. Think of the ‘deplorables’ evoked by Hillary Clinton. There is a similar view of the working class in France and Britain. They are looked upon as if they are some kind of Amazonian tribe. The problem for the elites is that it is a very big tribe.

The middle-class reaction to the yellow vests has been telling. Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.

Now the elites are afraid. For the first time, there is a movement which cannot be controlled through the normal political mechanisms. The gilets jaunes didn’t emerge from the trade unions or the political parties. It cannot be stopped. There is no ‘off’ button. Either the intelligentsia will be forced to properly acknowledge the existence of these people, or they will have to opt for a kind of soft totalitarianism.

A lot has been made of the fact that the yellow vests’ demands vary a great deal. But above all, it’s a demand for democracy. Fundamentally, they are democrats – they want to be taken seriously and they want to be integrated into the economic order.

spiked: How can we begin to address these demands?

Guilluy: First of all, the bourgeoisie needs a cultural revolution, particularly in universities and in the media. They need to stop insulting the working class, to stop thinking of all the gilets jaunes as imbeciles.

Cultural respect is fundamental: there will be no economic or political integration until there is cultural integration. Then, of course, we need to think differently about the economy. That means dispensing with neoliberal dogma. We need to think beyond Paris, London and New York.

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OCASIO-CORTEZ: Set To Party With Hollywood At Sundance… Medicare, free tuition for all! And she’s just getting started…

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(Bloomberg Businessweek) — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might not have seen eye to eye with Joseph Overton, the late free-market advocate. But she has a firm grasp of the concept for which he is best known: the Overton Window. The term refers to the range of ideas that are at any given time considered worthy of public discussion. Thanks largely to her, the Overton Window on tax rates has just been moved significantly to the left.

Ocasio-Cortez, the mediagenic 29-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., is the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. In an appearance on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper that aired on Jan. 6, she was talking up the Green New Deal, a plan to move the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Cooper challenged her by saying the program would require raising taxes. “There’s an element, yeah, where people are going to have to start paying their fair share,” she replied. Asked for specifics, she said, “Once you get to the tippy tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent.”

 

Seventy percent! For perspective, the top rate under the tax law that passed in December 2017 is 37 percent. And now, suddenly, a number so extreme that no one in polite society dared utter it became a focal point of debate. Ocasio-Cortez’s fans—she has 2.4 million followers on Twitter alone—loved it. Some pundits dug up economic research defending rates in the 70 percent range. Others pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez was actually lowballing the historical comparison: Top rates were 90 percent or higher as recently as the 1960s. Defenders of low tax rates heaped abuse on her, which backfired on them by inflaming her supporters.

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What Ocasio-Cortez understands is that getting an idea talked about, even unfavorably, is a necessary, if insufficient, step on the path to adoption. (President Trump also gets this.) “It’s the easiest thing to say, ‘No, we can’t change anything,’ ” says Eric Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who recently retired from Columbia University. “Most of the big ideas in American history started among radical groups who were told, ‘No, you’re never going to be able to achieve that.’ ” Foner sees parallels between the strategies of today’s left-leaning Democrats and the radical Republicans who fought slavery before the Civil War, “which was put out an agenda, be aware that you can’t just accomplish it all at once, obviously, but change the political discourse by pushing your agenda and then work with those who are willing to do some of it.”

 

Ocasio-Cortez was actually less radical than she could have been on 60 Minutes. She passed up the opportunity to move the Overton Window on another of her pet issues: budget deficits. She adheres to a doctrine called Modern Monetary Theory that’s catching on among young, left-leaning politicians and older policymakers alike.

Its counterintuitive core idea is that deficits don’t matter if you borrow in your own currency, just as long as they don’t cause inflation. Unless the economy is at risk of overheating, MMTers say, paying for a new government program doesn’t require cutting another or raising taxes.

 

Ocasio-Cortez could have said, “No, Anderson, we wouldn’t need to raise taxes to pay for the Green New Deal. But I want to raise taxes anyway, because I believe in redistributing money from the rich to the poor.” That really would have lit up the internet. Randall Wray, an MMT theorist who’s a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, wrote in an email that he was “a bit disappointed” that Ocasio-Cortez connected tax hikes to the Green New Deal. Stephanie Kelton, another MMT theorist and Bernie Sanders’s economic adviser during his race for the Democratic nomination in 2016, says she thinks reducing inequality is the real reason Ocasio-Cortez favors higher rates on the rich: “It’s kind of a recognition that levels of income and wealth inequality parallel those of the 1920s.”

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Whatever the particulars, Ocasio-Cortez wants to raise tax rates—by a lot. Since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, Democrats have been almost as allergic as Republicans to raising taxes. Hillary Clinton didn’t advocate increasing rates on top incomes at all during her 2016 presidential campaign. Even Sanders, that wild socialist from Vermont, dared propose a top rate of only 52 percent when he ran for president.

But with Ocasio-Cortez, antitax conservatives immediately sensed that a taboo was being broken, that a crack has opened up in the dam they’d spent decades building and reinforcing. Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, who in 1986 devised the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge that commits signers to vote against any net increases in taxes, on Twitter likened her proposal to slavery. “Slavery is when your owner takes 100% of your production. Democrat congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez wants 70% (according to CNN) What is the word for 70% expropriation?” he tweeted.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is the Darling of the Left, Nightmare of the Right

Norquist now says he remains confident that tax rates won’t rise to 70 percent, because “it’s such a bad idea.” In fact, he says he thinks Democrats are hurting only themselves by entertaining it. Ocasio-Cortez, he says, is a “pied piper” leading her party to its demise. It’s not at all clear, though, that higher taxes on the rich are a losing issue for Democrats. A Hill-HarrisX poll conducted on Jan. 12 and Jan. 13 found that 59 percent of registered voters supported the idea of raising the top rate to 70 percent. That included 45 percent of Republican voters. Thanks perhaps to the presidential campaign of Sanders, who like Ocasio-Cortez calls himself a democratic socialist, even “socialism” is no longer a dirty word: Gallup reported in August that 57 percent of Democrats and those leaning Democratic had a positive view of socialism, while only 47 percent had a positive view of capitalism.

 

What would a 70 percent top tax rate do to the U.S. economy and businesses? The rap on high rates is that they discourage work and promote wasteful tax-sheltering. Even many economists who think the rich pay too little say the better solution is to eliminate loopholes—subjecting more income to taxation rather than taxing a narrow base at a high rate.

 

Norquist argues that a 70 percent top rate would trigger an exodus of high-earning individuals from the U.S., saying that the last time U.S. rates were that high, they were also high in other nations, reducing the incentive to move. The Tax Foundation, a right-of-center think tank, said on Jan. 14 that a 70 percent top rate on ordinary income (not capital gains) exceeding $10 million “would not raise much revenue.” “Not much revenue” in this case means an estimated $189 billion in total over 10 years—or $292 billion before accounting for the likelihood that people in that tax bracket would work less and invest less in their noncorporate businesses.

 

On the other hand, economists supportive of Ocasio-Cortez were quick to point out that Denmark has among the world’s highest living standards despite a 56.5 percent tax rate on incomes above about $80,000 a year, a far lower threshold than her $10 million. A 2011 paper by Nobel laureate Peter Diamond of MIT and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley advocated top total tax rates (federal plus state) for the richest Americans of 73 percent on ordinary income (again, not capital gains). They assumed that an extra dollar of income for someone in that bracket has very little value in comparison to a dollar received by a lower-income person. Critics of their research have said Diamond and Saez treat the rich as sheep to be shorn and underestimate how much high tax rates would discourage people from getting advanced degrees or starting businesses. Diamond rejects the criticism, cites the need for more public investment, and says, “I’m perfectly comfortable” with Ocasio-Cortez’s 70 percent rate.

One thing that most people don’t know about Ocasio-Cortez is that she was a science nerd in high school in Westchester County, N.Y. In 2007, out of almost 1,500 students from 46 countries competing in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, she was one of four second-place winners in the microbiology category. (Her research was on the effect of antioxidants on roundworms.) It’s a biographical detail that adds another dimension to the story of a young woman born in the Bronx to parents of Puerto Rican descent who became the first in her family to attend college. While she was away at school her father died, pushing the family to the brink of financial ruin. “When you come from a working-class background, it often feels like you’re just one disaster away from everything falling apart,” she said in an Instagram video about a year ago.

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Like former President Barack Obama, Ocasio-Cortez became a community organizer after graduating from college, in 2011, and supported herself as a waitress and bartender. She worked for Sanders’s campaign in 2016. After that, things happened fast. She ran for the Democratic nomination in her Bronx-Queens congressional district and upset Joe Crowley. Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Crowley had been seen as a candidate to succeed Nancy Pelosi of California as speaker. He outspent Ocasio-Cortez 18 to 1 and had endorsements from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and both New York senators. She won huge.

 

No one shifts the Overton Window on any subject without strong communications skills, and Ocasio-Cortez is ninja-level in that department. She thrills supporters by going after critics hard on social media, which she uses the way an older generation used street rallies. “I’m a firm believer that organizing never stops,” she told Cooper in the 60 Minutes interview. One of her first acts after her election was to visit the office of Pelosi—not to seek her blessing but to support climate change activists who were occupying the soon-to-be speaker’s office. Now Ocasio-Cortez works two doors away from Pelosi—but not for her. She’s floated the idea of creating a progressive caucus among the Democrats, modeling it on the powerful Freedom Caucus on the right. Among her allies are new members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first Somali-American elected to Congress; New Mexico’s Deb Haaland, one of the first American Indian women elected to Congress; and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Palestinian-American in Congress.

“This is a movement; this is not me,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram video last year.

Both Ocasio-Cortez and Trump are social media virtuosos. They excel at turning back attacks on their credibility. Attempts to challenge them on facts come across to their supporters as mean-spirited and unfair—the knee-jerk reaction of an establishment trying to suppress outside voices. So it was when Ocasio-Cortez mistakenly said on social media last year that the Pentagon had lost track of $21 trillion in funds, a figure that was about 30 times the Department of Defense’s annual budget. Unlike Trump, she corrects her mistakes. “The thing that’s hard is that you’re supposed to be perfect all the time on every issue and every thing,” she said on Instagram last year.

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Implicit in that statement: Ocasio-Cortez has plenty more Overton Windows to shift and no intention of slowing down for the critics. Aside from the Green New Deal and higher taxes on the rich, she favors Medicare for all, a federal guarantee of a job, abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, and tuition-free college or trade school. She also wants to slash military spending, ban assault weapons, and bring back Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks.

 

That may all sound like tail risk to American businesses, which have been enjoying deregulation under Trump. Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, says, “This is the kind of plan where you can’t go to Wall Street executives first to try to get them to buy into it. You gotta show ’em.”

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The question is whether she’ll be able to show them, or anyone. A week after Ocasio-Cortez came to Washington, fellow Democrats complained that she was disruptive and not a team player. Chief among her sins: threatening to back the primary opponents of members of Congress who aren’t liberal enough for her. “I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, a Missouri Democrat, told Politico. “We just don’t need sniping in our Democratic Caucus.”

To pass any of their initiatives, Ocasio-Cortez and her allies will have to defeat the proven Republican strategy of using budget deficits as a justification for opposing new spending. That’s where Modern Monetary Theory comes in. It says a government can spend money without raising taxes—indeed, without even borrowing from the public via bonds. The government simply creates new money to pay its bills. The only constraint on spending under MMT is that the government could use up too much of the nation’s productive capacity, which would result in high inflation. As long as inflation remains low, as it is now, deficits are no problem. The usual reply from other economists is that even a nation that owes debt in its own currency can suffer a crisis if investors lose faith in its ability to service the debt without resorting to the printing press.

 

One precinct where deficits still matter, and MMT most certainly does not, is the office of House Speaker Pelosi. On Jan. 3, under Pelosi’s direction, the House passed a set of rules including pay-as-you-go, which requires legislation that would increase the deficit to be offset by tax increases or spending cuts. PAYGO, as it’s known, is contrary to the spirit of MMT and hamstrings liberal Democrats by making most of their spending initiatives impossible. Ocasio-Cortez was one of only three Democrats to oppose the provision, along with Ro Khanna of California and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.

 

Ocasio-Cortez had another setback when she was passed over for a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees taxes, Social Security, and Medicare. But she recovered nicely by getting a seat along with other progressives on the powerful House Financial Services Committee, headed by Maxine Waters of California. Carolyn Maloney, a fellow New York Democrat, says, “I was once that young woman who others tried to rein in. I certainly don’t believe in doing that to anyone else. Representative Ocasio-Cortez is bringing new energy and a new approach, and we should all embrace that.”

 

Ocasio-Cortez’s disregard for political niceties is both her strongest quality as an activist and potentially her Achilles’ heel as a representative. She shows no sign of dialing back. One way or another, says Kelton, the economic adviser, “the conversation is shifting. The space is opening up.” —With Allison McCartney

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US media intensify pretext for ousting Trump

By Finian Cunningham

It’s no secret that since his election in 2016, powerful elements in the US political and media establishment have been running a non-stop campaign to remove Trump from the White House. Lately, the stakes have been raised.

Spearheading the media effort to defenestrate Trump are the New York Times and Washington Post. Both have been prominent purveyors of the “Russiagate” narrative over the past two years, claiming that Republican candidate colluded with Russian state intelligence, or at least was a beneficiary of alleged Russian interference, to win the presidency against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Congressional investigations and a probe by a Special Counsel Robert Mueller, along with relentless media innuendo, have failed to produce any evidence to support the Russiagate narrative.

Now, the anti-Trump media in alliance with the Democratic leadership, the foreign policy establishment and senior ranks of the state intelligence agencies appear to have come up with a new angle on President Trump – he is a national security risk.

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‘Dirty cops’: Trump slams FBI agents who wanted to investigate him over alleged Russia ties‘Dirty cops’: Trump slams FBI agents who wanted to investigate him over alleged Russia ties

Ingeniously, the latest media effort lessens the burden of proof required against Trump. No longer has it to be proven that he deliberately collaborated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump could have done it “unwittingly,” the media are now claiming, because he is a buffoon and reckless. But the upshot, for them, is he’s still a national security risk. The only conclusion, therefore, is that he should be removed from office. In short, a coup.

Over the past couple of weeks, the supposed media bastions have been full of it against Trump. An op-ed in the New York Times on January 5 by David Leonhardt could not have made more plain the absolute disdain. “He is demonstrably unfit for office. What are we waiting for?”

Follow-up editorials and reports have piled on the pressure. The Times reported how the Federal Bureau of Investigation – the state’s internal security agency – opened a counterintelligence file on Trump back in 2017 out of concern that he was “working for Russia against US interests.”

That unprecedented move was prompted partly because of Trump’s comments during the election campaign in 2016 when he jokingly called on Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s incriminating emails. Never mind the fact that Russian hackers were not the culprits for Clinton’s email breach.

Then the Washington Post reported former US officials were concerned about what they said was Trump’s “extraordinary lengths” to keep secret his private conversations with Russia’s Putin when the pair met on the sidelines of conferences or during their one-on-one summit in Helsinki last July.

The Post claimed that Trump confiscated the notes of his interpreter after one meeting with Putin, allegedly admonishing the aide to not tell other officials in the administration about the notes being sequestered. The inference is Trump was allegedly in cahoots with the Kremlin.

This week, in response to the media speculation, Trump was obliged to strenuously deny such claims, saying: “I have never worked for Russia… it’s a big fat hoax.”

What’s going on here is a staggering abuse of power by the US’ top internal state intelligence agency to fatally undermine a sitting president based on the flimsiest of pretexts. Moreover, the nation’s most prominent news media outlets – supposedly the Fourth Estate defenders of democracy – are complacently giving their assent, indeed encouragement, to this abuse of power.

The Times in the above report admitted, in a buried one-line disclaimer, that there was no evidence linking Trump to Russia.

Nevertheless, the media campaign doubled down to paint Trump as a national security risk.

The Times reported on January 14 about deep “concerns” among Pentagon officials over Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw the US from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The reporting portrays Trump as incompetent, ignorant of policy details and habitually rude to American allies. His capricious temper tantrums could result in the US walking away from NATO at any time, the newspaper contends.

Such a move would collapse the transatlantic partnership between the US and Europe which has “deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years,” claimed the Times.

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Fixated on collusion, Dems seeking (again) to subpoena interpreter present at Trump-Putin meetingFixated on collusion, Dems seeking (again) to subpoena interpreter present at Trump-Putin meeting

The paper quotes US Admiral James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, calling Trump’s withdrawal whims “a geopolitical mistake of epic proportion.”

“Even discussing the idea of leaving NATO — let alone actually doing so — would be the gift of the century for Putin,” added Stavridis.

The Times goes on to divulge the media campaign coordination when it editorialized: “Now, the president’s repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Mr Trump’s efforts to keep his meetings with Mr Putin secret from even his own aides, and an FBI investigation into the administration’s Russia ties.”

Still another Times report this week reinforced the theme of Trump being a national security risk when it claimed that the president’s Middle East policy of pulling troops out of Syria was “losing leverage” in the region. It again quoted Pentagon officials “voicing deepening fears” that Trump and his hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton “could precipitate a conflict with Iran”.

That’s a bit hard to stomach: the Pentagon being presented as a voice of sanity and peace, keeping vigilance over a wrecking-ball president and his administration.

READ MORE: Twitter erupts after NYT reveals FBI probe into Trump-Russia links that lead… nowhere

But the New York Times, Washington Post and other anti-Trump corporate media have long been extolling the military generals who were formerly in the administration as “the adults in the room.”

Generals H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, John Kelly, Trump’s ex-chief of staff, and James Mattis, the former defense secretary until he was elbowed out last month by the president, were continually valorized in the US media as being a constraining force on Trump’s infantile and impetuous behavior.

The absence of “the adults” seems to have prompted the US media to intensify their efforts to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.

A new House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party has also invigorated calls for impeachment of Trump over a range of unsubstantiated accusations, Russian collusion being prime among them. But any impeachment process promises to be long and uncertain of success, according to several US legal and political authorities.

Such a tactic is fraught with risk of failing, no doubt due to the lack of evidence against Trump’s alleged wrongdoing. A failed impeachment effort could backfire politically, increase his popularity, and return him to the White House in 2020.

Given the uncertainty of impeaching Trump, his political enemies, including large sections of the media establishment, seem to be opting for the tactic of characterizing him as a danger to national security, primarily regarding Russia. Trump doesn’t have to be a proven agent of the Kremlin – a preposterous idea. Repeated portrayal of him as an incompetent unwitting president is calculated to be sufficient grounds for his ouster.

When the Washington Post editorial board urges a state of emergency to be invoked because of “Russian meddling in US elections”, then the national mood is being fomented to accept a coup against Trump. The media’s fawning over the Pentagon and state intelligence agencies as some kind of virtuous bastion of democracy is a sinister signal for a military-police state.

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Twitter erupts after NYT reveals FBI probe into Trump-Russia links that lead… nowhere

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Russiagate disciples are squealing with joy after the New York Times wrote about the FBI apparently probing if Trump was secretly working for the Russians. In fact, the article states there is no evidence to support the theory.

In what appears to be a last-ditch Russiagate Hail Mary, the New York Times breathlessly reported on Friday – of course, citing people ‘familiar with the investigation’ – that the FBI began looking into whether the president was a covert Kremlin agent, after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. According to the Times, “agents and senior FBI officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign,” but were reluctant to launch a formal probe into the matter. This all changed, the Times tells us, after Comey got the boot.

The investigation was quickly handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller, who continues to lead a probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election and collusion with Trump’s presidential campaign.

According to the Times, counterintelligence investigators “had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security.” Agents were also tasked with determining whether Trump “knowingly work[ed] for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.”

The decision to secretly investigate the president for possibly threatening national security triggered a “vigorous debate” within the Justice Department. The FBI, however, apparently felt vindicated after Trump remarked that Comey’s firing had helped relieve Russia-related political pressure.

Among Russiagate’s devout faithful, the report was treated as an earth-shattering revelation that reinforced their core dogma – i.e., that Donald Trump is a Kremlin agent installed in the White House by Vladimir Putin to destroy democracy.

Unfortunately, even the Times begrudgingly admitted – albeit buried in the ninth paragraph – that “no evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.”

Indeed, Twitter was swamped with indignant comments accusing the paper of cooking up a massive nothingburger. One observant netizen pointed out that in October 2016, the New York Times even ran a headline that stated unequivocally: “Investigating Donald Trump, the FBI sees no clear links to Russia.”

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Trump himself took to Twitter to mock the report.

“Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!” he wrote.

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The White House said in a statement that the notion that Trump was in bed with Russia makes little sense, given the administration’s hardline policies directed at Moscow.
“Unlike President Obama, who let Russia and other foreign adversaries push America around, President Trump has actually been tough on Russia.”

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The report also raises questions about whether Comey was being entirely truthful when he testified to Congress in December that Trump wasn’t among the “four Americans” targeted by the FBI counterintelligence probe into Russian meddling.

As one political pundit observed, the Times’ story raises more questions about the FBI than it does about Trump and his still unproven ties to Russia.

“Is NYT story about Trump, or about FBI malfeasance?” Fox News contributor Byron York asked in a tweet.

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Poll: Democrats Against Pulling Troops Out Of Syria, Afghanistan

By Chris Menahan

A new poll from Morning Consult/Politico found the majority of Democrats are against President Trump’s move to pull out of Syria and also oppose Trump pulling half our troops out of Afghanistan.

On the flip side, Republicans overwhelmingly favor both pulling out of Syria and drawing down troops from Afghanistan.

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On the religious front, non-evangelical Catholics were the most supportive of pulling out of Syria (64%/24%) while Jews were the most opposed (34%/52%).

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Though “conservative” Erick Erickson suggested last month that our soldiers were ready to stage a coup to overthrow president Trump in order to keep the war in Syria going, the poll found military households were also overwhelmingly in favor of ending the war (55%/35%).

Most Democrats were against the war in Syria in 2017 before the latest media blitz ordered them to support it:

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As I reported earlier this week, over the past two years neocons have begun shifting over to the Democratic Party.

MSBNC’s Ari Melber recently hailed “woke Bill Kristol”:

MSNBC also recently celebrated that the “military-industrial complex is now run by women”— as well as the CIA.

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The Democratic Party has become the party of war.

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PHOTOS: Top Democrat Donor Ed Buck With His Democrat Pals and His Black Male Prostitutes — 2 Dead Now

by Jim Hoft

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Top Democrat donor Ed Buck with: Governor Jerry Brown, Rep. Ted Lieu, In a T-shirt, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Rep. Adam Schiff, and Hillary Clinton.

The body of another young black gay escort was found at the West Hollywood home of Ed Buck, a top Democrat donor and and political activist.

Sheriff’s deputies are investigating after an African-American male was found dead early Monday morning at the Laurel Avenue apartment belonging to one of Hillary Clinton’s donors, Ed Buck.

There will be a rally tonight at the home of Ed Buck to call on LAPD to arrest Buck, according to WEHOVille,

Jasmyne Cannick, a communications and public affairs strategist who has worked  with Gemmel Moore’s family, has announced that there will be a rally at 7 p.m. tonight at 1234 Laurel Ave., the home of Ed Buck, to call on the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to arrest Buck and for District Attorney Jackie Lacey to “prosecute him for murder after another young Black gay man was found dead in his West Hollywood apartment of an apparent overdose.”

As previously reported, a black gay escort named Gemmel Moore died of a meth overdose at Ed Buck’s West Hollywood home in July of 2017.

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The LA County District Attorney’s Office previously declined to prosecute Ed Buck saying the evidence is “insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that (Buck) is responsible for the death of Gemmel Moore,” which sparked an outrage from family members and others in the community.

Ed Buck is a gay white man in his 60’s and according Gemmel Moore’s mother, Buck has a fetish for getting young black men high.

When not donating to Democrats Ed Buck liked to get black gay prostitutes high on drugs.

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Damar Love and Ed Buck (Weho Times)

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