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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
Emails Show USDA Began Censoring Use Of 'Climate Change' When Trump Took Office:The Guardian reports that in February, USDA employees were instructed to replace "contentious terms" like "climate change," with a list of sanitized terms. "Climate change" was to be replaced with "weather extremes".
 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
Mike Pence Denies Report That He's Assembling Shadow Campaign: Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that VP Mike Pence is assembling a shadow campaign for a run for president in 2020. Pence is reportedly taking frequent dinners with high-profile donors, has set up his own fundraising committee, and hired staff experienced in running campaigns.

In a statement, Pence called the report "disgraceful and offensive"
 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
President Trump attacks Sen. Richard Blumenthal over Vietnam service
President Trump attacks Sen. Richard Blumenthal over Vietnam service

On Monday, the president criticized Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. The senator had appeared on CNN that morning, discussing the Justice Department's crackdown on leaks, the sanctions on North Korea and what he called "potential collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia.

"That investigation must be pursued," Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of the ongoing Russia probes.

That drew the president's ire, with the president calling Blumenthal a "phony Vietnam con artist."


View: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/894525428236464128


View: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/894526670836781056


View: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/894528885701971970



View: https://twitter.com/SenBlumenthal/status/894550621038059521

 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
The Trump administration is ignoring Donald Trump
Recent presidential statements have been simply ignored, tuned out as meaningless noise by the federal apparatus Trump technically runs

Something strange has been happening lately in Washington when the most powerful man in town, the president of the United States, makes a headline-grabbing declaration on some new policy.

The recent response has been: Nothing.

Some recent presidential statements have been simply ignored, tuned out as meaningless noise by the federal apparatus he runs. Sunday provided the latest example of the Trump administration ignoring Donald Trump.

It came after the president suggested at a partisan rally this week that the Justice Department should be investigating his defeated election opponent: “What the prosecutors should be looking at are Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails,” Trump told a crowd, prompting chants of, ”Lock her up!”

No way, said his deputy attorney general.

Rod Rosenstein not only rejected the idea that public statements from the president should be viewed as an order — he made clear that even if such an order were delivered explicitly more formally, in a private setting, he would refuse it as improper.

”No,” Rosenstein replied, when asked about the presidential demand, in a Fox News interview. ”I view what the president says publicly as something he said publicly. If the president wants to give orders to us in the department, he does that privately.”

He went one step further: ”The president has not directed us to investigate particular people. That wouldn’t be right. That’s not the way we operate.”

That back-of-the-hand dismissal followed a similar event a few days earlier.

The president triggered an avalanche of attention with a headline-grabbing announcement on Twitter: After consulting with his generals and military experts, the president said, the U.S. military would no longer accept or allow transgender people.

The blunt, clear statement prompted questions about what procedures might be implemented; what would happen to the transgender people already serving; what financial conditions might apply to any discharges; and whether the order might be fought in court.

But then a considerable wrinkle developed: The military said it wasn’t happening.

It shrugged off the announcement from its commander-in-chief. In an internal communication published by Politico; a statement issued by the Secretary of Defence; and in an exchange with reporters, the military made clear it did not view Trump’s statement as official policy.

“What you saw in the form of a tweet represented an announcement,” Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told Pentagon reporters, according to the Washington Examiner. “Orders and announcements are different things, and we are awaiting an order from the commander-in-chief to proceed.”

One well-connected military official, chatting off the record, said this discord could occur in the most urgent, life-and-death matters. If the president issued an ill-advised order for a military strike, against North Korea or elsewhere, he predicted the military might push back under a four-word justification: ”If it’s not legal.”

That definition of an illegal order, he said, might include a military strike that doesn’t get congressional authorization. He said there was already widespread anxiety last spring, among military brass, over the order for a limited strike against Syria.

That order was ultimately carried out.

But the Syria issue has also offered examples where administration officials have cited policies different from the president: Vice-President Mike Pence, and UN ambassador Nikki Haley, have taken anti-Russia, anti-Assad, pro-regime-change positions at odds with the president’s.

”There’s a certain amount of dysfunction,” conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review told an ABC talk panel Sunday.

”The Pentagon seems to be basically ignoring the president’s tweet (on transgender people). And that’s not something that’s just isolated to the Pentagon. The vice-president seems to have his own Russia policy… Attorney-General Sessions, not doing what the president wants him to do in terms of prosecuting or investigating Hillary Clinton.

”There’s a question on the part of subordinates in this administration of how seriously they should take the utterances of this president.”

Some of those glaring public differences have fuelled speculation that different Republicans are seeking to build their own political resumes. A weekend article in The New York Times suggested different Republicans were even planning the possibility of running in 2020, in case the president doesn’t.

Pence vigorously denied a weekend story in The New York Times that he was organizing for such a run: “The allegations in this article are categorically false and represent just the latest attempt by the media to divide this administration.”

But the congressional wing of Trump’s party doesn’t deny this: Republican lawmakers are indeed pushing back.

They’ve passed a Russia-sanctions bill; used procedural tools to block presidential appointments during the summer break; and several have crafted bills to protect the special Russia investigator Robert Mueller from being dismissed without cause.

All of this is against the president’s wishes.

”I think, actually, it may be the Republicans should get some credit for showing independence and not necessarily deferring to a White House that happens to share their party,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis told Fox on Sunday.

”One of the mistakes that Congress has have made over the past 70 or so years is convey a lot of authority (to the president) that they should never have allowed to leave the Congress.”
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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
The curious case of ‘Nicole Mincey,’ the Trump fan who may actually be a Russian bot
Early Saturday morning, President Trump tweeted his gratitude to a social-media super-fan, Nicole Mincey, magnifying her praise of him to his 35 million followers.

Here’s the problem: There is no evidence the Twitter feed belongs to someone named Nicole Mincey. And the account, according to experts, bears a lot of signs of a Russia-backed disinformation campaign.

On Sunday, Twitter suspended the Mincey account, known as @ProTrump45, after several other users revealed that it was probably a fake, created to amplify pro-Trump content.

The incident highlights Trump’s penchant for off-the-cuff tweeting — and the potential consequences for doing so now that he holds the nation’s highest office. Even as the president has railed against multiple investigations into Russia’s meddling in U.S. politics, he may have become Exhibit A of the foreign government’s influence by elevating a suspected Russia-connected social-media user — part a sophisticated campaign to exacerbate disputes in U.S. politics and gain the attention of the most powerful tweeter in the world.

'The president doesn’t know whether it’s a Russian bot or not,” said Clint Watt, a former FBI agent and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, using the term for a fake Twitter account pretending to represent a real person and created to influence public opinion or promote a particular agenda. “He’s just pushing a narrative, whether it’s true or false. This provides a window not just for Russia but for any adversary to both influence the president or discredit him.”
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“Nineteen to 20 percent of the messages in the month before the election were originated by bots,” said Emilio Ferrara, a researcher at the University of Southern California who conducted research on the impact of bots on the 2016 election. “About 400,000 accounts that posted tweets related to the political conversation we believe were bots.”

If anything, these accounts have found an even greater foothold since the election among Trump’s most ardent supporters online.

In the past week, a virtual army of accounts identified as having ties to a Russia-backed disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. political system zeroed in on efforts among Trump’s supporters to attack his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, over the firing of two Trump loyalists from the National Security Council.

A tool created by a bipartisan group of national security experts and researchers to track Russian-backed propaganda accounts found that the “#fireMcMaster” hashtag became popular among these misinformation accounts at the same time that several influential, pro-Trump users on Twitter adopted the anti-McMaster position.
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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
Trump retweets Fox News story containing classified info - CNNPolitics
President Donald Trump's retweet of a Fox News story claiming US satellites detected North Korea moving anti-ship cruise missiles to a patrol boat is raising eyebrows on Tuesday after US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley indicated that the information in the report is classified and was leaked.

"I can't talk about anything that's classified and if that's in the newspaper that's a shame," Haley said Tuesday on "Fox and Friends" when asked about the story that cites two anonymous sources.
Pushed on whether the information was leaked, Haley said "it's one of those things I don't know what's going on. I will tell you it's incredibly dangerous when things get out into the press like that."
But just a few hours before Haley's appearance on Fox, Trump retweeted a post from the Fox News morning show promoting the story said to contain classified information.

The White House has not responded to a request for comment.
"It is alarming the casualness with which President Trump shares classifieds information," Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California
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Trump Receives Twice-Daily Briefing Of Positive Coverage: Vice News reports that President Trump has been routinely receiving two briefings per day of exclusively positive coverage. The "propaganda document," as it's referred to by multiple staffers, used to be presented to the president by Sean Spicer or Reince Priebus after it was assembled by the Republican National Committee. Now, however, it appears to be presented based on the timing of larger media events.

White House Staff Moves To Jersey For Trump's Working Vacation: President Trump is on day four of his 17-day "working vacation" at his New Jersey golf course, and it appears that he's brought his staff along. The Hill reports that Chief of Staff John Kelly is staying on the property and has met with Trump multiple times to discuss events oversees. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have reportedly been with President Trump for the entirety of the trip. Trump will also be visited by other staff, including the Vice President and HHS Secretary Tom Price.

Trump Deportations Lag Behind Obama Era: According to new data from ICE, the Trump Administration has deported undocumented immigrants at a lower rate than the Obama Administration. At its slowest, the Obama administration deported 20,000 people per month. The Trump administration has deported84,473 people since February at a rate of 16,900 people per month.
 
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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
FBI conducted predawn raid of former Trump campaign chairman Manafort’s home
FBI agents raided the Alexandria home of President Trump’s former campaign chairman late last month, using a search warrant to seize documents and other materials, according to people familiar with the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Federal agents appeared at Paul Manafort’s home without advance warning in the predawn hours of July 26, the day after he met voluntarily with the staff for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The search warrant was wide-ranging and FBI agents working with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III departed the home with various records.

The raid came as Manafort has been voluntarily producing documents to congressional committees investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. The search warrant indicates investigators may have argued to a federal judge they had reason to believe Manafort could not be trusted to turn over all records in response to a grand jury subpoena.

It could also have been intended to send a message to President Trump’s former campaign chairman that he should not expect gentle treatment or legal courtesies from Mueller’s team.

The documents included materials Manafort had already provided to Congress, said people familiar with the search.

“If the FBI wanted the documents, they could just ask [Manafort] and he would have turned them over,” said one adviser close to the White House.

Josh Stueve, spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment, as did Reginald Brown, an attorney for Manafort.

The search came as Mueller has increased legal pressure on Manafort, consolidating under his authority a series of unrelated investigations into various aspects of Manafort’s professional and personal life.

Manafort’s allies fear that Mueller hopes to build a case against Manafort unrelated to the 2016 campaign, in hopes that the former campaign operative would provide information against others in Trump’s inner circle in exchange for lessening his own legal exposure.

The significance of the records seized from Manafort’s apartment is unclear.

Manafort has provided documents to both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate and House intelligence committees. The documents are said to include notes Manafort took while attending a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016.

Emails show Trump Jr. took the meeting and invited Manafort after he was promised the lawyer would deliver damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to assist his father’s campaign.
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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
President Trump Escalates Threats Against North Korea: Thursday afternoon, President Trump escalated his threats against North Korea, saying that his threat of "fire and fury" on Tuesday may not have gone far enough. Trump told reporters from his New Jersey golf course "things will happen to them like they never thought possible."

Diamond And Silk Given Fed Meeting To Help Grown Business After Being Paid By Trump Campaign: Earlier this week, pro-Trump YouTube stars Diamond and Silk were given a federal meeting to help them grow their pro-Trump business of selling Trump merchandise and making pro-Trump YouTube videos. The Department of Commerce tweeted out a picture of the stars visiting their offices before quickly deleting it. Federal disclosures show that Diamond and Silk were paid over a million dollars as "consultants" for appearances and services (most likely their videos) during Trump's presidential campaign.
 
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