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Disciplined Galt

Disciplined Galt

Disciplina et Frugalis
First 100
Jan 15, 2015
26,030
30,793
MC Gusto said:
Awe Galt, it will get better. A couple pills, a couple tokes, a greasy lunch and you will be good to go. Hangovers pass. Now go apologize the the American dude down the road.
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Happy Father’s Day! I had yaa dong left over so I don’t get hungover. Tokes have been had, don’t do pills and I wasn’t in the wrong.
 
KWingJitsu

KWingJitsu

ยาเม็ดสีแดงหรือสีฟ้ายา?
Nov 15, 2015
10,311
12,690
MC Gusto said:

View: https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1069622944152911872


View: https://twitter.com/EricTrump/status/1069765937568628736?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1069771975386529793&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthehill.com%2Fhomenews%2Fnews%2F419588-conways-husband-fires-back-at-eric-trump-by-sharing-tweet-about-alleged-trump


View: https://twitter.com/renato_mariotti/status/1069773196440862720


View: https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1069771975386529793
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View: https://twitter.com/CNNnewsroom/status/1070048974680162304


 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Dow plunges 799 points on trade, slowdown fears
The Dow dropped 799 points, or 3.1%, on Tuesday. At one point, the index was down 818 points. The S&P 500 declined 3.2%, while the Nasdaq tumbled 3.8%.
Big tech stocks fell sharply. Apple (AAPL) and Alphabet (GOOGL) lost more than 4% apiece. Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix plunged more than 5%.
The selloff wipes out a chunk of last week's huge rally. The Dow jumped 288 points on Monday on relief about the ceasefire between the United States and China on trade.
But investors are quickly realizing that the US-China trade war is not over. The tariffs already put in place remain. And new tariffs could be implemented if the two sides fail to make progress.
"People are still very concerned about the trade war," said Dan Suzuki, portfolio strategist at Richard Bernstein Advisors. "Financial markets are increasingly showing signs of fear of a recession."
The selling erased nearly $800 billion from the S&P 500's market value, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. Even though it was the Dow's fourth-biggest point decline in history, the percentage loss doesn't even crack the top 25 from the past decade. All three major indexes remain positive on the year.
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McFarland’s Testimony About Russia Contacts Is Questioned
A leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned on Monday whether a high-ranking official in Donald J. Trump’s transition team had been deceptive over the summer about her knowledge of discussions between Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, and a former Russian ambassador.

K. T. McFarland served on the presidential transition team before becoming the White House deputy national security adviser. In July, she was questioned in writing by Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, on whether she had ever spoken to Mr. Flynn about his contacts with Sergey I. Kislyak, who was then the Russian ambassador to Washington, before Mr. Trump took office.

“I am not aware of any of the issues or events described above,” Ms. McFarland wrote in response, sidestepping a direct answer to the question.

An email exchange obtained by The New York Times indicates that Ms. McFarland was aware at the time of a crucial Dec. 29 phone call between Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak that was intercepted by American intelligence. During that call, Mr. Flynn urged Moscow to respond cautiously to sanctions just imposed by the Obama administration for Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to F.B.I. agents about that conversation and other interactions with Mr. Kislyak. He promised to cooperate with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump.

If senators on the Foreign Relations Committee find that Ms. McFarland was evasive in her testimony, it could complicate her nomination to become ambassador to Singapore. Repeated attempts to reach Ms. McFarland, who left her post as deputy national security adviser in May, were unsuccessful.
In his written questions to Ms. McFarland, submitted as part of her confirmation process, Mr. Booker wrote that Mr. Flynn had been warned by another transition official that his contacts with the Russian ambassador would most likely be intercepted by American intelligence agencies. Mr. Booker also mentioned Mr. Flynn’s 2015 trip to Moscow, where he attended a dinner hosted by a Kremlin-backed news network and was seated at the head table next to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Mr. Booker asked, “Did you ever discuss any of General Flynn’s contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak directly with General Flynn?”
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Booker said that he was concerned that Ms. McFarland might have given “false testimony” in her answers.

“If this is the case, this is an alarming development, and another example of a pattern of deception on the part of Trump’s closest associates regarding their connections and communications to Russian government officials,” he said.

Court documents released on Friday, along with Mr. Flynn’s guilty plea, indicate that senior members of Mr. Trump’s transition team were well aware of his discussions with the Russian ambassador about the Obama administration’s sanctions. Mr. Flynn talked to Mr. Kislyak by phone on Dec. 29, the day the sanctions took effect, and several days later.

In her email to another transition official hours before the first phone call, Ms. McFarland described President Barack Obama’s decision to expel 35 Russian diplomats as a last-minute attempt to discredit Mr. Trump’s victory, box him in diplomatically and provoke him into a potentially politically damaging statement in Russia’s defense.

“General Flynn is talking to the Russian ambassador this evening,” she wrote.

She also wrote: “If there is a tit-for-tat escalation, Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia which has just thrown U.S.A. election to him.” A White House lawyer said on Friday that Ms. McFarland did not mean Russia had tipped the election, only that Democrats were portraying it that way.

Court documents state that Mr. Flynn discussed what he should tell Mr. Kislyak with another transition official beforehand and briefed that person afterward. The court documents do not identify that official, who was with other senior members of the transition team at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. White House officials said on Friday that they believed that the official was Ms. McFarland, but that information has not been confirmed.

During their follow-up call, Mr. Kislyak informed Mr. Flynn that Russia would not retaliate immediately for the sanctions — a surprise to many foreign policy experts. Mr. Flynn then briefed senior transition team members about his discussions with Mr. Kislyak, the records show.

Ms. McFarland worked so closely with Mr. Flynn on the transition team that her colleagues sometimes referred to her as his “brain.”
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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589

View: https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1070342812980391937

Fox News Judge: Donald Trump Jr. ‘Told Friends’ He ‘Expects To be Indicted’
Judge Andrew Napolitano said he believes Donald Trump Jr. will be indicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and revealed the president’s son “told friends he expects to be indicted.”

During a discussion of the Michael Flynn sentencing memo on SiriusXM today, the Fox Nation’s "Liberty File" host told Dan Abrams, the founder of Mediaite and an ABC News chief legal analyst, that news of Flynn’s cooperation with Mueller’s team was a “huge deal.”

Napolitano goes on to discuss the possible linking of the Deutsche Bank raid and the special counsel’s investigation.

“Who is the principle financier of the Trump organization for the past 20 years? Deutsche Bank,” he said. “Now, I don’t know if there’s a connection. You know the means by which means American federal prosecutors could contact their colleagues across the pond and get a warrant served. All this stuff is kept under wraps until we get to it.”

“The President himself should be extremely uncomfortable about this. Not for his son or son-in-law, as much for himself,” Napolitano added.

Abrams then asked the judge and commentator whether he thinks any “of Trump’s inner circle will get indicted” as a part of the probe.

“Yes. I don’t know who, but I do know that Donald Jr. has told friends he expected to be indicted,” Napolitano replied.

Abrams asks again whether Napolitano himself believes Don Jr. would be indicted, to which the judge responded: “Yes.”

When asked about Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, the judge responded: “I don’t know about Jared Kushner. I think Jerome Corsi is going to be indicted. I don’t know about Roger Stone.”

Last night, Mueller’s office released a government memorandum that recommended zero jail time for former national security adviser Michael Flynn after he committed a federal crime by lying to the FBI. The memo justified the lenient suggestion based on the fact that Flynn provided “substantial assistance” to the probe.

"Given the defendant’s substantial assistance and other considerations set forth below, a sentence at the low end of the guideline range — including a sentence that does not impose a term of incarceration — is appropriate and warranted," the memo, filed Tuesday evening, read. "The defendant deserves credit for accepting responsibility in a timely fashion and substantially assisting the government.”
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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Saudi-funded lobbyist paid for 500 rooms at Trump’s hotel after 2016 election
Lobbyists representing the Saudi government reserved blocks of rooms at President Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel within a month of Trump’s election in 2016 — paying for an estimated 500 nights at the luxury hotel in just three months, according to organizers of the trips and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

At the time, these lobbyists were reserving large numbers of D.C.-area hotel rooms as part of an unorthodox campaign that offered U.S. military veterans a free trip to Washington — then sent them to Capitol Hill to lobby against a law the Saudis opposed, according to veterans and organizers.

At first, lobbyists for the Saudis put the veterans up in Northern Virginia. Then, in December 2016, they switched most of their business to the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington. In all, the lobbyists spent more than $270,000 to house six groups of visiting veterans at the Trump hotel, which Trump still owns.

Those bookings have fueled a pair of federal lawsuits alleging Trump violated the Constitution by taking improper payments from foreign governments.

During this period, records show, the average nightly rate at the hotel was $768. The lobbyists who ran the trips say they chose Trump’s hotel strictly because it offered a discount from that rate and had rooms available, not to curry favor with Trump.

“Absolutely not. It had nothing to do with that. Not one bit,” said Michael Gibson, a Maryland-based political operative who helped organize the trips.

Some of the veterans who stayed at Trump’s hotel say they were kept in the dark about the Saudis’ role in the trips. Now, they wonder if they were used twice over: not just to deliver someone else’s message to Congress, but also to deliver business to the Trump Organization.

“It made all the sense in the world, when we found out that the Saudis had paid for it,” said Henry Garcia, a Navy veteran from San Antonio who went on three trips. He said the organizers never said anything about Saudi Arabia when they invited him.

He believed the trips were organized by other veterans, but that puzzled him, because this group spent money like no veterans group he had ever worked with. There were private hotel rooms, open bars, free dinners. Then, Garcia said, one of the organizers who had been drinking minibar champagne mentioned a Saudi prince.

“I said, ‘Oh, we were just used to give Trump money,’ ” Garcia said.

The Washington firm Qorvis/MSLGroup, which has long represented the Saudi government in the United States, paid the organizers of the “veterans fly-in” trips, according to lobbying disclosure forms. The firm declined to comment.

The Saudi Embassy did not respond to questions for this report. Trump hotel executives, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss their clients, said they were unaware at the time that Saudi Arabia was ultimately footing the bill and declined to comment on the rates they offer to guests.

The existence of the Saudi-funded stays at Trump’s hotel was reported by several news outlets last year. But reviews of emails, agendas and disclosure forms from the Saudis’ lobbyists and interviews this fall with two dozen veterans provide far more detail about the extent of the trips and the organizers’ interactions with veterans than have previously been reported.

That reporting showed a total of six trips, during which the groups grew larger after the initial visit and the stays increased over time. The Post estimated the Saudi government paid for more than 500 nights in Trump hotel rooms, based on planning documents and agendas given to the veterans and conversations with organizers.

These transactions have become ammunition for plaintiffs in two lawsuits alleging that Trump violated the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause by taking payments from foreign governments. On Tuesday, the attorneys general in Maryland and the District subpoenaed 13 Trump business entities and 18 competing businesses, largely in search of records of foreign spending at the hotel.

Earlier this year, the Trump Organization donated about $151,000 to the U.S. Treasury, saying that was its amount of profit from foreign governments, without explaining how it arrived at that number. The Justice Department, defending Trump in the lawsuits, says the Constitution doesn’t bar routine business transactions.

Next year, the transactions will also face scrutiny from the House’s new Democratic majority. Democrats have said they want to understand Trump’s business connections with the Saudi government in the aftermath of the killing of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

“Foreign countries understand that they can curry favor with the president by patronizing his businesses,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who will lead the House Intelligence Committee next year. “It presents a real problem, in that it may work.” The White House declined to comment.

When these trips began, in late 2016, the Saudi government was on a losing streak in Washington.

In late September, Congress had overridden a veto from President Barack Obama and passed a law the Saudis vehemently opposed: the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, called JASTA. The new law, backed by the families of Sept. 11 victims, opened the door to costly litigation alleging that the Saudi government bore some blame. Of the 19 hijackers involved in the attacks, 15 were Saudi citizens.

In response, the Saudis tried something new. To battle one of America’s most revered groups — the Sept. 11 families — they recruited allies from another.

They went looking for veterans.

“Welcome Home Brother!” wrote Jason E. Johns, an Army veteran and Wisconsin lobbyist, to several veterans in December 2016, according to identical emails two veterans shared with The Post. Johns invited the veterans, whom he did not know personally, on a trip to “storm the Hill” to lobby against the law.

“Lodging at the Trump International Hotel, all expense paid,” Johns wrote in the emails. Johns’s email signature said he was with “N.M.L.B. Veterans Advocacy Group,” which is Johns’s law firm in Madison, Wis.

According to filings with the Justice Department, Johns was actually making the overtures on behalf of the Saudi government. The Saudis’ longtime lobbyist, Qorvis, was paying Gibson, who in turn was paying Johns.

The first trip Johns organized, in mid-November 2016, was small and short: about 22 veterans, staying two nights at the Westin in Crystal City, Va. — on the other side of the Potomac River, separated from Capitol Hill by four miles and one big traffic jam. Gibson — who helped organized the trips — said another fly-in was held at the Westin later the same month.

Then, on Dec. 2, 2016, Gibson said he was told by Qorvis to organize another visit on very short notice — with the attendees to arrive in just a few days. Gibson said the Westin was booked. So were many other hotels he tried.

“I just out of the blue decided, ‘Why not call the Trump hotel?’ ” he said. “I said I was representing a client, a group of veterans . . . Did they offer any discounts for veterans? And they said yes, they did have availability.” They also offered a lower rate, he said.

After that trip, Gibson said, Qorvis asked him to schedule more trips for 2017. It didn’t tell him to go back to the Trump hotel. But the first trip had gone well. So he did.

In all, there were five more trips in January and February, according to documents and interviews. The number of attendees rose to 50 on one trip in late January, and the trips extended to three nights, according to agendas sent to veterans. That also was the clients’ call. Gibson said he never told any Trump hotel staff that the Saudis were paying: “I did all this on my corporate credit card for my client, who was Qorvis, and said I was bringing a group of veterans to work on legislation.”

Veterans who attended these trips said a few things surprised them.

One was how good their group seemed to be at spending money.

“We’ve done hundreds of veterans events, and we’ve stayed in Holiday Inns and eaten Ritz Crackers and lemonade. And we’re staying in this hotel that costs $500 a night,” said Dan Cord, a Marine veteran. “I’d never seen anything like this. They were like, ‘That’s what’s so cool! Drink on us.’ ”

Each trip included one, and sometimes two, dinners in a Trump hotel banquet room. There was usually an open bar in the room, veterans said, and it was always supposed to end at a certain hour — but often, they said, Johns would theatrically declare an extension.

“He’d be like, ‘You know what, just put it on for another hour!” said Scott Bartels, an Army veteran from Wisconsin who went on three trips.

Another surprise, veterans said, was how bad their group seemed to be at lobbying.

Veterans said they were told that the new law might cause other countries to retaliate and might lead to U.S. veterans being prosecuted overseas for what their units had done in war. They were given a few fact sheets — including one with small print at the bottom, reading “This is distributed by Qorvis MSLGROUP on behalf of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.”

But they said they weren’t given detailed briefings about how the law ought to be amended, or policy briefings to leave behind for legislators to study.

The timing also was odd. They returned five times in January and February, when the issue was largely dormant and Washington was distracted by a new president’s inauguration. They were sent, again and again, for dead-end meetings with legislators who had made up their minds.

“The fourth time I saw Grassley’s guy, he was like, ‘Hey, what [else] is going on?’ We didn’t even talk about the bill,” said Robert Suesakul, an Army veteran from Iowa, about his fourth visit to the office of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). It had been clear after the first trip that Grassley wasn’t interested in amending the bill. “It didn’t make sense hitting these guys a fourth time.”

Another problem: In some cases, congressional staffers confronted them because they knew who was funding these trips.

Even if the veterans did not.

“We’d walk in there, and they’d go, ‘Are you the veterans that are getting bribed?’ ” Suesakul said.

In a phone interview, Johns said it was disappointing to hear veterans say they were “duped” and that he had always made clear, at the opening night’s dinner, that the Saudi government was paying. He said the veterans in attendance were all told that if they didn’t like it, they could go home.

“I said, ‘Look, I’m a fellow vet, and I am working with a PR firm here, and Saudi Arabia funded” the trip, Johns said.

But another organizer, Army veteran Dustin Tinsley, didn’t remember Johns telling everyone about the Saudi involvement. He did say he felt veterans should have done their own research or asked.

“When I was asked directly, ‘Is Saudi Arabia paying for this?’ I would say yes, and out of [all of them] not a single one of them said, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this,’ ” Tinsley said.

Several veterans disputed Johns’s account, saying they were not told of the source of the funding — or that the news had only slipped out later, after repeated questioning or strong drink.

“One of the guys had a little too much to drink,” said Gary Ard, a Navy veteran from Texas, describing an encounter with one of Johns’s aides after the aide had been drinking at the Trump hotel. “He kind of raises up his hands, and he says, ‘Thank you, Saudi prince!’ ”

Ard quit going after two trips. He said he felt guilty, for having unwittingly gathered political intelligence for a foreign power.

“We’re taking that heart-to-heart conversation [with legislators], writing it down, and giving it to a group of people whom I don’t know,” Ard said. “And my fear in that is we’re going to create a pool of insight to what congressmen, what senators can be approached, and what their mind-sets are. And that’s completely wrong.”

The last trip to the Trump hotel was in mid-February 2017, after the first news reports outed Johns as a Saudi contractor. Johns himself said he wasn’t sure how much the trips had cost: The bills for the hotel rooms didn’t go to him, and he never saw how much the rooms cost.

In a filing with the Justice Department — required of U.S. firms working as agents for foreign powers — Qorvis said it had spent $190,000 on lodging at the Trump hotel, and another $82,000 on catering and parking.

The figure for lodging works out to about $360 per person per night, which is far below the Trump hotel’s average rate for the same period. In financial records accidentally released last year by the General Services Administration, which owns the building, the Trump Organization said it received an average nightly rate for January and February of $768.67 — a price inflated by high demand around the inauguration.

Since February 2017, Saudi customers have boosted the bottom line at two other Trump hotels. In Chicago, the Trump hotel’s internal statistics showed a sharp uptick in customers from Saudi Arabia after Trump took office. In New York this year, the general manager of Trump’s hotel at Central Park said a single stay by some Saudi customers — who were traveling with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — was so lucrative it helped the hotel turn a profit for the quarter.
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KWingJitsu

KWingJitsu

ยาเม็ดสีแดงหรือสีฟ้ายา?
Nov 15, 2015
10,311
12,690
So prescient.


View: https://youtu.be/hq7l8dScGj0


Beautiful irony that if Tramp had actually listened to Obama, he wouldn't be in the mess he's in, thereby confirming he probably thought "Obama said not to hire Michal Flynn, so here's what I'm gonna do......"
 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Undocumented workers at Trump golf club speak out – as it happened
Victorina Morales, the undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who works at Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf club, provides a host of details that suggest managers there knew she was not authorized to live in the country and employed her anyway.

The housekeeper, who entered the country illegally almost 20 years ago, was hired at the club in 2013, she told the New York Times in an interview. She said an employee of the course drives her and a group of others to work every day because it is known they can’t get driver’s licenses because of their immigration status.

When she was hired, Morales said she told a supervisor she didn’t have “good papers.” The manager said she should bring the documents she used at a previous job, and she brought a fake green card and social security card.

Last year, a supervisor told her she had to get a new social security and green card since there were problems with the one she had on file. According to Morales, she said she didn’t know where to get the documents, and the manager referred her to a maintenance worker who took her to get a new set of forged papers.

Another worker, Sandra Diaz, told the Times she was undocumented while working at the club for several years. She has since left the job and gained legal status.

Diaz was assigned to clean Trump’s personal residence at the Bedminster club, where she washed Trump’s clothes. She recalled he had an outburst over orange stains on the collar of a white golf shirt, which she said were stains from his makeup that she was unable to get out.

Morales said she knew she could lose her job or get deported for speaking out, but chose to come forward because she was upset by Trump’s disparaging comments about immigrants and abusive treatment by a supervisor that she felt was encouraged by Trump’s rhetoric.

“I ask myself, is it possible that this señor thinks we have papers? He knows we don’t speak English,” she said. “Why wouldn’t he figure it out?”
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Making President Trump’s Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers
Ms. Morales’s journey from cultivating corn in rural Guatemala to fluffing pillows at an exclusive golf resort took her from the southwest border, where she said she crossed illegally in 1999, to the horse country of New Jersey, where she was hired at the Trump property in 2013 with documents she said were phony.

She said she was not the only worker at the club who was in the country illegally.

Sandra Diaz, 46, a native of Costa Rica who is now a legal resident of the United States, said she, too, was undocumented when she worked at Bedminster between 2010 and 2013. The two women said they worked for years as part of a group of housekeeping, maintenance and landscaping employees at the golf club that included a number of undocumented workers, though they could not say precisely how many. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump or Trump Organization executives knew of their immigration status. But at least two supervisors at the club were aware of it, the women said, and took steps to help workers evade detection and keep their jobs.

“There are many people without papers,” said Ms. Diaz, who said she witnessed several people being hired whom she knew to be undocumented.
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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Documents Point to Illegal Campaign Coordination Between Trump and the NRA
The National Rifle Association spent $30 million to help elect Donald Trump—more than any other independent conservative group. Most of that sum went toward television advertising, but a political message loses its power if it fails to reach the right audience at the right time. For the complex and consequential task of placing ads in key markets across the nation in 2016, the NRA turned to a media strategy firm called Red Eagle Media.

One element of Red Eagle’s work for the NRA involved purchasing a slate of 52 ad slots on WVEC, the ABC affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia, in late October 2016. The ads targeted adults aged 35 to 64 and aired on local news programs and syndicated shows like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. In paperwork filed with the Federal Communications Commission, Red Eagle described them as “anti-Hillary” and “pro-Trump.”

ADVERTISING
The Trump campaign pursued a strikingly similar advertising strategy. Shortly after the Red Eagle purchase, as Election Day loomed, it bought 33 ads on the same station, set to air during the same week. The ads, which the campaign purchased through a firm called American Media & Advocacy Group (AMAG), were aimed at precisely the same demographic as the NRA spots, and often ran during the same shows, bombarding Norfolk viewers with complementary messages.

The two purchases may have looked coincidental; Red Eagle and AMAG appear at first glance to be separate firms. But each is closely connected to a major conservative media-consulting firm called National Media Research, Planning and Placement. In fact, the three outfits are so intertwined that both the NRA’s and the Trump campaign’s ad buys were authorized by the same person: National Media’s chief financial officer, Jon Ferrell.

“This is very strong evidence, if not proof, of illegal coordination,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission. “This is the heat of the general election, and the same person is acting as an agent for the NRA and the Trump campaign.”

Reporting by The Trace, which has teamed up with Mother Jones to investigate the NRA’s political activity, shows that the NRA and the Trump campaign employed the same operation—at times, the exact same people—to craft and execute their advertising strategies for the 2016 presidential election. The investigation, which involved a review of more than 1,000 pages of Federal Communications Commission and Federal Election Commission documents, found multiple instances in which National Media, through its affiliates Red Eagle and AMAG, executed ad buys for Trump and the NRA that seemed coordinated to enhance each other.

Individuals working for National Media or its affiliated companies either signed or were named in FCC documents, demonstrating that they had knowledge of both the NRA and the Trump campaign’s advertising plans.

Experts say the arrangement appears to violate campaign finance laws.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation where illegal coordination seems more obvious,” said Ann Ravel, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission, who reviewed the records. “It is so blatant that it doesn’t even seem sloppy. Everyone involved probably just thinks there aren’t going to be any consequences.”

National Media, the NRA, the Trump campaign, and the White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment. AMAG does not appear to have any employees or contacts independent of National Media; a lawyer who has been identified in news accounts as representing AMAG did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The web site for National Media, which is based in Alexandria, Virginia, describes it as “a nationally recognized leader in media research, planning, and placement for issue advocacy, corporate, and political campaigns,” and says that its “goal is to maximize every dollar that our clients spend on their media.” Those clients have included the Republican National Committee as well as the GOP’s congressional and senatorial campaign committees.

Publicly available corporate documents do not indicate who owns or runs AMAG, but a lawyer representing the company acknowledged to the Daily Beast in 2016 that it was affiliated with National Media. PBS has described AMAG as an “offshoot” of National Media. The Trump campaign paid AMAG more than $74 million for “placed media” in September and October of 2016.

Red Eagle Media, the firm that the NRA used to place its pro-Trump ads, is merely an “assumed or fictitious name” used by National Media, according to corporate records. Corporate, FEC, and FCC records for all three entities list the addresses of 815 Slaters Lane or 817 Slaters Lane, a pair of adjacent brick buildings that share a parking lot in the historic Old Town section of Alexandria.

The NRA was free to spend as much money as it wanted on behalf of Trump in 2016. But under federal election law, if an independent group and a campaign share election-related information, then the group’s expenditures no longer qualify as independent and are instead treated as in-kind donations, subject to a $5,000 limit.

When an outside group and a candidate use the same vendor, staffers working for either client are prevented by law from sharing information with each other. Typically, such vendors make staffers sign a company “firewall” policy, which functions as a pledge not to coordinate and an acknowledgment that there are civil and criminal penalties for doing so. Under the law, National Media staffers working for Trump should have been siloed from those working for the NRA. Documents suggest, instead, a synchronized effort.

Records in the FCC “public inspection files”—files that television stations maintain in order to comply with transparency regulations around political advertising—show that Red Eagle and AMAG often bought ads around the same time, on the same stations, for the NRA and the Trump campaign, respectively. During the last week of October, for instance, Red Eagle bought $36,250 worth of ads on the ABC affiliate in Cleveland on behalf of the NRA. A form the NRA filed with the station described spots mentioning the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and the 2016 presidential election.

At the same time, AMAG spent almost the exact same amount—$36,150—on a series of Trump campaign ads on the same Cleveland station during the same week. Both the NRA ads and the Trump ads aired during many of the same programs, including local newscasts, Good Morning America, and NCAA football.

We identified at least four current or former National Media employees, including CFO Jon Ferrell, who are named in FCC filings as representatives of both the Trump campaign and the NRA during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential election.

The form filed with the Cleveland station on behalf of the NRA by Red Eagle in September 2016 lists a person named Kristy Kovatch as a point of contact. (An identical form that Red Eagle filed for the NRA with WCPO in Cincinnati also lists Kovatch.) Kovatch is a senior buyer for National Media, specializing in “television media buying for political candidates, issue/advocacy groups and public affairs clients.” According to her bio on the company’s website, she’s been with the firm for 20 years.

Throughout the fall of 2016, Kovatch was also involved in ad purchases for Trump. Just three days before she was named in records as the contact for Red Eagle in Cleveland and Cincinnati, she appeared in the same role on an AMAG advertising request sheet filed for the Trump campaign with an NBC Telemundo station in Miami. FCC documents also list her as the AMAG buyer or contact for various other Florida stations.

Another National Media employee, Ben Angle, was identified in the 2018 book Inside Campaigns: Elections through the Eyes of Political Professionals as an architect of Trump’s airwave strategy. “In mid-September,” the book says, “Angle and his boss were summoned to Trump Tower and told their firm would be placing all of the Trump campaign’s television advertising during the last seven weeks of the campaign.” Angle is listed on National Media’s website as a “senior media buyer.” In October, his name appeared in FCC paperwork as the contact for an NRA ad buy, placed through Red Eagle, at an ABC station in Denver.

A fourth staffer whose name appears on both NRA and Trump campaign documents, Caroline Kowalski, left National Media in 2017. Her title was “media specialist,” according to her LinkedIn page. Within the span of one week in late October and early November 2016, she was listed as the Red Eagle contact for an NRA ad purchase in Cape Coral, Florida, and as the AMAG contact for a Trump campaign placement at a CBS station in Philadelphia.

Ferrell’s signature appeared on forms authorizing ads on stations across the country. For the Trump campaign, that included battleground markets such as Youngstown, Ohio; Cape Coral, Florida; and Reno, Nevada. For the NRA, it included Cincinnati and Wilmington, North Carolina. Ferrell also signed off on placements with national syndicators and distributors covering most of the country for both Trump and the NRA.



Ferrell, Kovatch, Angle, and Kowalski did not respond to requests for comment. According to their National Media bios or LinkedIn pages, all are specialists in the art of strategic media placement. Ferrell’s “efforts help [National Media] provide optimal financial stewardship of campaign media budgets.” Kovatch “has consistently bought the largest media markets around the country, building an extensive knowledge of ratings, costs and seasonal trends across all time periods and dayparts.” Angle uses his “extensive experience” to “strategically place efficient and effective media buys for our clients.” And Kowalski “acted as a liaison between media buyers and TV, radio, and cable networks,” and “researched voter demographic data to help create” advertising campaigns for, among others, “presidential” candidates and “issue-advocacy groups.”

Prior reporting has identified consulting firms as conduits for potentially illegal coordination between campaigns and outside groups. In 2013, a Center for Public Integrity and NBC News investigation turned up evidence that an AMAG media buyer purchased airtime both for a Texas congressional candidate and for an outside group that was supporting him. In July, we found that the NRA had been using an apparent shell firm called Starboard Strategic Inc. to produce ads for Senate candidates who employed a GOP consulting outfit called OnMessage Inc. The two entities, according to subsequent complaints filed to the FEC, are “functionally indistinguishable.” Starboard and OnMessage are located in the same Alexandria buildings as National Media, according to public records.

The FEC has the authority to launch investigations and seek civil penalties, but it’s unlikely that the NRA or the Trump campaign will face any official action. The FEC’s four commissioners—it is supposed to have six—have been deadlocked for years in an ideological split, making the unanimous vote required for significant investigations almost impossible to achieve. The Department of Justice is also authorized to launch investigations, but prosecutions under the Federal Election Campaign Act are uncommon. If convicted, violators can be subject to criminal fines and up to five years in prison.

Experts say the apparent coordination is the most glaring they’ve ever seen.

“It is impossible for these consultants to have established firewalls in their brains,” Brendan Fischer, the director of the Federal Reform Program at the Campaign Legal Center, said. “We have not previously seen this level of evidence undermining any claim of a firewall.”


Sources: Trump campaign contract; NRA contract / Daniel Nass
Effectively placing ads is among the most important tasks in getting a candidate elected to office. “The creative content is only part of the equation,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican media strategist. “Political advertising relies on smart media placement at every stage. Anything else and you might as well just throw your money in a bonfire.”

Campaign coordination, Wilson added, allows candidates and outside groups to “maximize their resources,” making spending far more efficient. “Modern campaigns are driven by data,” he said. “Pollsters and analytics people will give you a set of targets, and you want to address those targets as best you can, in as many markets as you can.”

The Trump campaign and NRA purchases were mirror images of each other. Side by side, the spots aired across the country on as many as 120 stations.
Concurrent purchases by Red Eagle and AMAG appear to have been designed to provide such a higher return on spending. On September 15, 2016, for instance, Red Eagle executed an $86,000 deal for the NRA with Raycom Sports Network, a syndicator of sports programs, for slots during seven ACC college football games airing during the final weeks of the presidential race. Documents authorizing the purchase were signed by Ferrell, whose colleague Ben Angle, the senior buyer at National Media, has been a proponent of sports as a way to reach conservative audiences. “Every time we assist a Republican candidate, we advise him to advertise at sports events,” he told one journalist. “In sports, the audience is engaged, they like to see it live so they do not skip the commercials by using a recording device.”

Less than a week later, another National Media staffer authorized virtually the same purchase for Trump. Because stations are required to charge candidates the so-called “lowest unit price” for airtime (while charging independent groups the higher market rate), the deal only cost $30,000.

The purchases were mirror images of each other. In five of the games, both the NRA and Trump bought ads. When the NRA ran two spots either attacking Clinton or promoting Trump, the Trump campaign ran just one. And when the Trump campaign ran two spots, the NRA ran one. The pattern even persisted when there was no direct overlap: In the two games the Trump campaign sat out, the NRA ran two ads. And in the one game during which the NRA didn’t buy time, Trump bought two slots. Side by side, the spots aired across the country on as many as 120 stations, according to data provided by Raycom.

Angle’s name appears on Trump campaign paperwork documenting the Raycom purchase, directly above “AMAG.”

After reviewing the Raycom records, Wilson said the pattern suggests the purchases were part of a unified strategy by the NRA and the Trump campaign. “Sometimes you want to maximize the lowest unit rate on the campaign side,” he said. “But you still need more fire on the target. This is why the FEC says coordination is illegal.”
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Trump to name former Fox anchor Heather Nauert as next UN ambassador
Donald Trump has decided to name the state department spokeswoman Heather Nauert as the ambassador to the United Nations, a source familiar with his decision told Reuters.

Trump will send a tweet on Friday morning about choosing Nauert to replace the outgoing UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, who announced her resignation in October, Fox News reported, citing multiple sources.

Trump’s decision was first reported by Bloomberg News.

Requests for comment to the state department and the White House were not immediately returned.

Haley has held the post since the beginning of Trump’s administration and said she would stay in the job through the end of the year.

Nauert, whose nomination would require Senate confirmation, is a former Fox News Channel correspondent and anchor. She does not have prior political or policy-making experience.

Nauert became the state department spokeswoman in April 2017 and this year was named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.


Nikki Haley's departure reflects the chaos of Trump's foreign policy
Michael H Fuchs
Read more
It was reported in November that Nauert had been offered the job, but it was not clear at the time whether she had accepted. She met with Trump at the end of October, fueling speculation that she had emerged as the president’s top choice for the role.

“She’s excellent. She’s been with us a long time,” Trump said of Nauert last month. “She’s been a supporter for a long time.”

The president has reportedly sought out someone who will demonstrate loyalty. Officials at the White House at times viewed Haley with skepticism, in part over her willingness to publicly disagree with the president.

Haley took a particularly forceful posture against Russia, assailing the Kremlin at UN security council meetings over its aggression in Ukraine and support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria, even as Trump remained reluctant to criticize Vladimir Putin.

Nauert has kept close ties to the West Wing and is seen by the president as more inclined to defend him on the job. Trump had a fractious relationship with Nauert’s first boss, the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, but continued to hold a favorable view of the state department’s top spokeswoman.

Nauert will probably be pressed on her qualifications by Senate Democrats and could face a contentious confirmation hearing, but needs only a simple majority vote to be elevated to the role.
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KWingJitsu

KWingJitsu

ยาเม็ดสีแดงหรือสีฟ้ายา?
Nov 15, 2015
10,311
12,690
Well, holy orange shit.
In news that's a surprise to noone, the president is a fucking criminal retard.


View: https://youtu.be/r6Rc68FXk-E

And oh the irony of being excoriated by a fellow criminal of the oil variety...
 
BeardOfKnowledge

BeardOfKnowledge

The Most Consistent Motherfucker You Know
Jul 22, 2015
60,723
56,229
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