Society The Donald J. Trump Show - 4 more years editions

Welcome to our Community
Wanting to join the rest of our members? Feel free to Sign Up today.
Sign up

Kingtony87

Batman
Feb 2, 2016
6,524
8,905
Genuine question(s) for any Trumpsters that still visit the thread, but what does the Military need an extra $60billion for? What was it not good enough at? What did it need more of? And why could it not reallocate funds from other areas within it's own budget to cover it?
Not that its probably going towards it, but the VA could definitely use a boost.
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Donald Trump's presidency is the 'most failed first 100 days ever', says US historian
Donald Trump has led "the most failed first 100 days of any president,” a leading historian has claimed.

“To be as low as he is in the polls, in the 30s, while the FBI director is on television saying they launched an investigation into your ties with Russia, I don’t know how it can get much worse,”Douglas Brinkley, a best-selling biographer of presidents Gerald Ford, Franklin Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt, told The Washington Post.

He added: “This is the most failed first 100 days of any president.”

His comments came after FBI director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committeethat the Bureau had found no evidence that Barack Obama had ordered wiretaps in Trump Tower during the presidential election - contradicting Mr Trump's Twitter accusations.

Testifying under oath he said that his agency was conducting an investigation into possible Trump administration ties to Russia.

As a result, Mr Brinkley, who also teaches history at a private research university in Texas, said: “There’s a smell of treason in the air.”

He added: “Imagine if J Edgar Hoover or any other FBI director would have testified against a sitting president? It would have been a mind-boggling event.”

Mr Trump's approval ratings are far worse than those of any former president at this point in their presidency. According to Gallup's tracking polls, Mr Trump had an approval rating of 39 per cent during polling conducted between 13 and 19 March.

Other presidents had far higher approval figures at the same time during their first year in office: Barack Obama had a 62 per cent approval rating, George W Bush had a 58 per cent approval rating and Bill Clinton had the previous lowest rating at 53 per cent.

Dwight Eisenhower had the highest approval rating at in March of his first year at 74 per cent, just ahead of John F Kennedy at 73 per cent.

Mr Brinkley has criticised the Trump administration in the past.

A few days after Mr Trump's January inauguration, he questioned whether the new president was sabotaging himself after he made dubious claims about the crowd size at the event.

“The truth of the matter is he had a successful inauguration with a respectful crowd," Mr Brinkley told the Politico website at the time. "The transition of power went off without a hitch. His supporters were amiable by and large. But then he can never let go and stop watching cable TV. Now he's off to the worst start of a presidency in a very long time.”
 
M

member 1013

Guest
Trump’s ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort secretly worked to ‘greatly benefit’ Putin government in U.S.

Facebook | Twitter | Google+ | Email

Jeff Horwitz And Chad Day, The Associated Press
Wednesday, Mar. 22, 2017


Oleg Deripaska, billionaire and president of United Co. Rusal Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, secretly worked for a Russian billionaire to advance the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin a decade ago and proposed an ambitious political strategy to undermine anti-Russian opposition across former Soviet republics, The Associated Press has learned. The work appears to contradict assertions by the Trump administration and Manafort himself that he never worked for Russian interests.

Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government, even as U.S.-Russia relations under Republican President George W. Bush grew worse. Manafort pitched the plans to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally with whom Manafort eventually signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006, according to interviews with several people familiar with payments to Manafort and business records obtained by the AP. Manafort and Deripaska maintained a business relationship until at least 2009, according to one person familiar with the work.

“We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success,” Manafort wrote in the 2005 memo to Deripaska. The effort, Manafort wrote, “will be offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government.”

Victor J. Blue/BloombergPaul Manafort speaks with the press during an election night event in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Manafort’s plans were laid out in documents obtained by the AP that included strategy memoranda and records showing international wire transfers for millions of dollars. How much work Manafort performed under the contract was unclear.

The disclosure comes as Trump campaign advisers are the subject of an FBI probe and two congressional investigations. Investigators are reviewing whether the Trump campaign and its associates co-ordinated with Moscow to meddle in the 2016 campaign. Manafort has dismissed the investigations as politically motivated and misguided, and said he never worked for Russian interests. The documents obtained by AP show Manafort’s ties to Russia were closer than previously revealed.

In a statement to the AP, Manafort confirmed that he worked for Deripaska in various countries but said the work was being unfairly cast as “inappropriate or nefarious” as part of a “smear campaign.”

“I worked with Oleg Deripaska almost a decade ago representing him on business and personal matters in countries where he had investments,” Manafort said. “My work for Mr. Deripaska did not involve representing Russian political interests.”

Deripaska became one of Russia’s wealthiest men under Putin, buying assets abroad in ways widely perceived to benefit the Kremlin’s interests. U.S. diplomatic cables from 2006 described Deripaska as “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and “a more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.” In response to questions about Manafort’s consulting firm, a spokesman for Deripaska in 2008 — at least three years after they began working together — said Deripaska had never hired the firm. Another Deripaska spokesman in Moscow last week declined to answer AP’s questions.

Manafort worked as Trump’s unpaid campaign chairman last year from March until August. Trump asked Manafort to resign after AP revealed that Manafort had orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation until 2014 on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling pro-Russian political party .

Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via APRussian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 7, 2017
The newly obtained business records link Manafort more directly to Putin’s interests in the region. According to those records and people with direct knowledge of Manafort’s work for Deripaska, Manafort made plans to open an office in Moscow, and at least some of Manafort’s work in Ukraine was directed by Deripaska, not local political interests there. The Moscow office never opened.

Manafort has been a leading focus of the U.S. intelligence investigation of Trump’s associates and Russia, according to a U.S. official. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the investigation were confidential. Meanwhile, federal criminal prosecutors became interested in Manafort’s activities years ago as part of a broad investigation to recover stolen Ukraine assets after the ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych there in early 2014. No U.S. criminal charges have ever been filed in the case.

FBI Director James Comey, in confirming to Congress the federal intelligence investigation this week, declined to say whether Manafort was a target. Manafort’s name was mentioned 28 times during the hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, mostly about his work in Ukraine. No one mentioned Deripaska.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Monday that Manafort “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time” in the campaign, even though as Trump’s presidential campaign chairman he led it during the crucial run-up to the Republican National Convention.

Matt Rourke/Associated PressIn this July 17, 2016 file photo, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort talks to reporters on the floor of the Republican National Convention
Manafort and his associates remain in Trump’s orbit. Manafort told a colleague this year that he continues to speak with Trump by telephone. Manafort’s former business partner in eastern Europe, Rick Gates, has been seen inside the White House on a number of occasions. Gates has since helped plan Trump’s inauguration and now runs a non-profit organization, America First Policies, to back the White House agenda.

Gates, whose name does not appear in the documents, told the AP that he joined Manafort’s firm in 2006 and was aware Manafort had a relationship with Deripaska, but he was not aware of the work described in the memos. Gates said his work was focused on domestic U.S. lobbying and political consulting in Ukraine at the time. He said he stopped working for Manafort’s firm in March 2016 when he joined Trump’s presidential campaign.

Manafort told Deripaska in 2005 that he was pushing policies as part of his work in Ukraine “at the highest levels of the U.S. government — the White House, Capitol Hill and the State Department,” according to the documents. He also said he had hired a “leading international law firm with close ties to President Bush to support our client’s interests,” but he did not identify the firm. Manafort also said he was employing unidentified legal experts for the effort at leading universities and think tanks, including Duke University, New York University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Simon Dawson/BloombergOleg Deripaska is a close ally of Putin
Manafort did not disclose details about the lobbying work to the Justice Department during the period the contract was in place.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, people who lobby in the U.S. on behalf of foreign political leaders or political parties must provide detailed reports about their actions to the department. Willfully failing to register is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, though the government rarely files criminal charges.

Deripaska owns Basic Element Co., which employs 200,000 people worldwide in the agriculture, aviation, construction, energy, financial services, insurance and manufacturing industries, and he runs one of the world’s largest aluminum companies. Forbes estimated his net worth at $5.2 billion. How much Deripaska paid Manafort in total is not clear, but people familiar with the relationship said money transfers to Manafort amounted to tens of millions of dollars and continued through at least 2009. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the secret payments publicly.

In strategy memos, Manafort proposed that Deripaska and Putin would benefit from lobbying Western governments, especially the U.S., to allow oligarchs to keep possession of formerly state-owned assets in Ukraine. He proposed building “long term relationships” with Western journalists and a variety of measures to improve recruitment, communications and financial planning by pro-Russian parties in the region.

Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun/QMI AgencyMaidan Square in Kiev, Ukraine on Thursday September 4, 2014
Manafort proposed extending his existing work in eastern Europe to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Georgia, where he pledged to bolster the legitimacy of governments friendly to Putin and undercut anti-Russian figures through political campaigns, non-profit front groups and media operations.

For the $10 million contract, Manafort did not use his public-facing consulting firm, Davis Manafort. Instead, he used a company, LOAV Ltd., that he had registered in Delaware in 1992. He listed LOAV as having the same address of his lobbying and consulting firms in Alexandria, Virginia. In other records, LOAV’s address was listed as Manafort’s home, also in Alexandria. Manafort sold the home in July 2015 for $1.4 million. He now owns an apartment in Trump Tower in New York, as well as other properties in Florida and New York.

One strategy memo to Deripaska was written by Manafort and Rick Davis, his business partner at the time. In written responses to the AP, Davis said he did not know that his firm had proposed a plan to covertly promote the interests of the Russian government.

Davis said he believes Manafort used his name without his permission on the strategy memo. “My name was on every piece of stationery used by the company and in every memo prior to 2006. It does not mean I had anything to do with the memo described,” Davis said. He took a leave of absence from the firm in late 2006 to work on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Manafort’s work with Deripaska continued for years, though they had a falling out laid bare in 2014 in a Cayman Islands bankruptcy court. The billionaire gave Manafort nearly $19 million to invest in a Ukrainian TV company called Black Sea Cable, according to legal filings by Deripaska’s representatives. It said that after taking the money, Manafort and his associates stopped responding to Deripaska’s queries about how the funds had been used.

Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, Deripaska’s representatives openly accused Manafort of fraud and pledged to recover the money from him. After Trump earned the nomination, Deripaska’s representatives said they would no longer discuss the case.

With files from Jack Gillum, Eric Tucker, Julie Pace, Ted Bridis, Stephen Braun and Julie Bykowicz in Washington; Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed from Moscow and Kyiv, Ukraine; and Jake Pearson contributed from New York


Posted in: News Tags: World, Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, The Kremlin, Vladimir Putin


More on this Story

Former Trump campaign manager alleged to have laundered payments from Ukraine via offshore banks

Comey: FBI investigating links of collusion between Russia and Trump associates during 2016 campaign

New files reveal Flynn received US$68,000 from Russian airline, TV network and cybersecurity firm.
 

Zeph

TMMAC Addict
Jan 22, 2015
24,355
31,947
Trump’s ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort secretly worked to ‘greatly benefit’ Putin government in U.S.

Facebook | Twitter | Google+ | Email

Jeff Horwitz And Chad Day, The Associated Press
Wednesday, Mar. 22, 2017


Oleg Deripaska, billionaire and president of United Co. Rusal Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, secretly worked for a Russian billionaire to advance the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin a decade ago and proposed an ambitious political strategy to undermine anti-Russian opposition across former Soviet republics, The Associated Press has learned. The work appears to contradict assertions by the Trump administration and Manafort himself that he never worked for Russian interests.

Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government, even as U.S.-Russia relations under Republican President George W. Bush grew worse. Manafort pitched the plans to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally with whom Manafort eventually signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006, according to interviews with several people familiar with payments to Manafort and business records obtained by the AP. Manafort and Deripaska maintained a business relationship until at least 2009, according to one person familiar with the work.

“We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success,” Manafort wrote in the 2005 memo to Deripaska. The effort, Manafort wrote, “will be offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government.”

Victor J. Blue/BloombergPaul Manafort speaks with the press during an election night event in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Manafort’s plans were laid out in documents obtained by the AP that included strategy memoranda and records showing international wire transfers for millions of dollars. How much work Manafort performed under the contract was unclear.

The disclosure comes as Trump campaign advisers are the subject of an FBI probe and two congressional investigations. Investigators are reviewing whether the Trump campaign and its associates co-ordinated with Moscow to meddle in the 2016 campaign. Manafort has dismissed the investigations as politically motivated and misguided, and said he never worked for Russian interests. The documents obtained by AP show Manafort’s ties to Russia were closer than previously revealed.

In a statement to the AP, Manafort confirmed that he worked for Deripaska in various countries but said the work was being unfairly cast as “inappropriate or nefarious” as part of a “smear campaign.”

“I worked with Oleg Deripaska almost a decade ago representing him on business and personal matters in countries where he had investments,” Manafort said. “My work for Mr. Deripaska did not involve representing Russian political interests.”

Deripaska became one of Russia’s wealthiest men under Putin, buying assets abroad in ways widely perceived to benefit the Kremlin’s interests. U.S. diplomatic cables from 2006 described Deripaska as “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and “a more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.” In response to questions about Manafort’s consulting firm, a spokesman for Deripaska in 2008 — at least three years after they began working together — said Deripaska had never hired the firm. Another Deripaska spokesman in Moscow last week declined to answer AP’s questions.

Manafort worked as Trump’s unpaid campaign chairman last year from March until August. Trump asked Manafort to resign after AP revealed that Manafort had orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation until 2014 on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling pro-Russian political party .

Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via APRussian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 7, 2017
The newly obtained business records link Manafort more directly to Putin’s interests in the region. According to those records and people with direct knowledge of Manafort’s work for Deripaska, Manafort made plans to open an office in Moscow, and at least some of Manafort’s work in Ukraine was directed by Deripaska, not local political interests there. The Moscow office never opened.

Manafort has been a leading focus of the U.S. intelligence investigation of Trump’s associates and Russia, according to a U.S. official. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the investigation were confidential. Meanwhile, federal criminal prosecutors became interested in Manafort’s activities years ago as part of a broad investigation to recover stolen Ukraine assets after the ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych there in early 2014. No U.S. criminal charges have ever been filed in the case.

FBI Director James Comey, in confirming to Congress the federal intelligence investigation this week, declined to say whether Manafort was a target. Manafort’s name was mentioned 28 times during the hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, mostly about his work in Ukraine. No one mentioned Deripaska.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Monday that Manafort “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time” in the campaign, even though as Trump’s presidential campaign chairman he led it during the crucial run-up to the Republican National Convention.

Matt Rourke/Associated PressIn this July 17, 2016 file photo, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort talks to reporters on the floor of the Republican National Convention
Manafort and his associates remain in Trump’s orbit. Manafort told a colleague this year that he continues to speak with Trump by telephone. Manafort’s former business partner in eastern Europe, Rick Gates, has been seen inside the White House on a number of occasions. Gates has since helped plan Trump’s inauguration and now runs a non-profit organization, America First Policies, to back the White House agenda.

Gates, whose name does not appear in the documents, told the AP that he joined Manafort’s firm in 2006 and was aware Manafort had a relationship with Deripaska, but he was not aware of the work described in the memos. Gates said his work was focused on domestic U.S. lobbying and political consulting in Ukraine at the time. He said he stopped working for Manafort’s firm in March 2016 when he joined Trump’s presidential campaign.

Manafort told Deripaska in 2005 that he was pushing policies as part of his work in Ukraine “at the highest levels of the U.S. government — the White House, Capitol Hill and the State Department,” according to the documents. He also said he had hired a “leading international law firm with close ties to President Bush to support our client’s interests,” but he did not identify the firm. Manafort also said he was employing unidentified legal experts for the effort at leading universities and think tanks, including Duke University, New York University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Simon Dawson/BloombergOleg Deripaska is a close ally of Putin
Manafort did not disclose details about the lobbying work to the Justice Department during the period the contract was in place.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, people who lobby in the U.S. on behalf of foreign political leaders or political parties must provide detailed reports about their actions to the department. Willfully failing to register is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, though the government rarely files criminal charges.

Deripaska owns Basic Element Co., which employs 200,000 people worldwide in the agriculture, aviation, construction, energy, financial services, insurance and manufacturing industries, and he runs one of the world’s largest aluminum companies. Forbes estimated his net worth at $5.2 billion. How much Deripaska paid Manafort in total is not clear, but people familiar with the relationship said money transfers to Manafort amounted to tens of millions of dollars and continued through at least 2009. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the secret payments publicly.

In strategy memos, Manafort proposed that Deripaska and Putin would benefit from lobbying Western governments, especially the U.S., to allow oligarchs to keep possession of formerly state-owned assets in Ukraine. He proposed building “long term relationships” with Western journalists and a variety of measures to improve recruitment, communications and financial planning by pro-Russian parties in the region.

Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun/QMI AgencyMaidan Square in Kiev, Ukraine on Thursday September 4, 2014
Manafort proposed extending his existing work in eastern Europe to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Georgia, where he pledged to bolster the legitimacy of governments friendly to Putin and undercut anti-Russian figures through political campaigns, non-profit front groups and media operations.

For the $10 million contract, Manafort did not use his public-facing consulting firm, Davis Manafort. Instead, he used a company, LOAV Ltd., that he had registered in Delaware in 1992. He listed LOAV as having the same address of his lobbying and consulting firms in Alexandria, Virginia. In other records, LOAV’s address was listed as Manafort’s home, also in Alexandria. Manafort sold the home in July 2015 for $1.4 million. He now owns an apartment in Trump Tower in New York, as well as other properties in Florida and New York.

One strategy memo to Deripaska was written by Manafort and Rick Davis, his business partner at the time. In written responses to the AP, Davis said he did not know that his firm had proposed a plan to covertly promote the interests of the Russian government.

Davis said he believes Manafort used his name without his permission on the strategy memo. “My name was on every piece of stationery used by the company and in every memo prior to 2006. It does not mean I had anything to do with the memo described,” Davis said. He took a leave of absence from the firm in late 2006 to work on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Manafort’s work with Deripaska continued for years, though they had a falling out laid bare in 2014 in a Cayman Islands bankruptcy court. The billionaire gave Manafort nearly $19 million to invest in a Ukrainian TV company called Black Sea Cable, according to legal filings by Deripaska’s representatives. It said that after taking the money, Manafort and his associates stopped responding to Deripaska’s queries about how the funds had been used.

Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, Deripaska’s representatives openly accused Manafort of fraud and pledged to recover the money from him. After Trump earned the nomination, Deripaska’s representatives said they would no longer discuss the case.

With files from Jack Gillum, Eric Tucker, Julie Pace, Ted Bridis, Stephen Braun and Julie Bykowicz in Washington; Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed from Moscow and Kyiv, Ukraine; and Jake Pearson contributed from New York


Posted in: News Tags: World, Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, The Kremlin, Vladimir Putin


More on this Story

Former Trump campaign manager alleged to have laundered payments from Ukraine via offshore banks

Comey: FBI investigating links of collusion between Russia and Trump associates during 2016 campaign

New files reveal Flynn received US$68,000 from Russian airline, TV network and cybersecurity firm.
Want to know the best part? Paul Manafort has lived in Trump Tower since 2006.
 

Qat

QoQ
Nov 3, 2015
16,385
22,483
So 100 days is over already? Wasn't this an important watermark, I can remember Splinty @Splinty pointing it out. So, boss, what say you? :)
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
100 days in and I wonder, is America great yet?

Still no wall.
Still Obamacare.
ISIS hasnt been wiped off the face of the map.
No Muslim or travel ban in effect.
No ratification of NAFTA.
And America is now the butt end of jokes on the international front.

All Trump has accomplished to date is pulling out of TPP.
 
Last edited:

Freeloading Rusty

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

All this from the administration who is crying about leaks..... Nunes goes on to be a leaky faucet.

Apparently Nunes provided this 'info' to the White House & then the press before the committee doing the investigation. The committee only learned about it as Nunes was talking to the press.

Time for an independent investigation into all this.
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
What Devin Nunes's Bombshell Does and Doesn't Say
The House intelligence committee chair, a Trump ally, muddied waters and gave comfort to the White House, but he provided no evidence of wrongdoing or support for Trump’s “wiretap” claims.


In a head-spinning development on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Representative Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, revealed that … well, what Nunes revealed isn’t totally clear.

Nunes held a brief press conference Wednesday afternoon saying that “on numerous occasions the Intelligence Community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.” But Nunes’s vague statements raised a host of questions, and his decision to announce them publicly and then go to the White House to brief President Trump, having not informed Democrats on the committee about his new findings, cast a pall of politics over the proceedings.

Coming into Wednesday, the Trump administration faced a crisis: Every knowledgable source, from congressional Republicans to intelligence officials, has said that President Trump’s claim that his predecessor “wiretapped” him was bogus. In the midst of this crisis, a mysterious and unnamed “source” apparently delivered new information to Nunes, a Trump ally, which deals with legal collection of information. Nunes, in turn, quickly went public with the information, despite offering no proof of wrongdoing, in an apparent effort to shift the story in a direction favorable to the administration.


For example, Nunes said that all of the information that was collected legally, as part of “incidental collection” that occurs when U.S. citizens are captured speaking with lawful non-U.S. targets of surveillance under FISA orders. Nunes also reiterated that there had been no “wiretap” on Trump Tower, as the president has alleged and continued to assert, despite disavowals by top Republicans in Congress and the intelligence community.

Yet Nunes’s announcement offered Trump a lifeline, presenting him—intentionally or not—with a way to claim he really had been surveilled. Trump quickly seized it, saying he felt “somewhat” vindicated during a brief pool spray at the White House.

Nunes charged that while the collection was entirely legal, the fact that Trump team staffers’ names were unmasked and information was shared is “inappropriate.”

“It looks like it was legal, incidental collection that then made its way into intelligence report,” Nunes said. “Nothing criminal at all involved.”

The problem is that there’s no way to assess the truth of Nunes’s claims. He says he has full faith in his source, suggesting it’s someone within the intelligence community, but it’s not clear that anyone besides Nunes has seen the “reports” to which he referred: Adam Schiff, the Democratic ranking member on the committee, has not, and while Nunes briefed both Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan, there’s no indication he showed them the report.


This is troubling because, as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf reported Wednesday morning, Nunes’s statements so far in the investigation make it difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt on truthfulness. The Washington Post also previously reported that the White House had asked Nunes to help tamp down stories about Trump team ties to Russia.

Moreover, Nunes repeatedly said he did not have all the information he needed, raising the question of why he felt it was worthwhile to go public immediately. As Republicans including Nunes complain about unauthorized leaks of classified information to the press, he has come forward to publicize anonymously obtained intelligence community materials.

His choice to take it to the White House is even more perplexing, especially without having discussed the matter with Schiff. Trump accused Obama of having surveilled him despite offering no evidence for the claim. No evidence has appeared since. Pressed to explain why it can’t simply provide the proof, the White House—rather than admit, as appears indisputable, that it has no evidence—has claimed that because of “separation of powers,” Congress should investigate without executive-branch interference. By taking his information to Trump on Wednesday, Nunes has driven a bulldozer through that wall of separation.

In leaving Schiff out of the process, meanwhile, he has blithely poisoned his cooperation with the Democratic member on the committee. Monday’s committee hearings with FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers showed that there were already effectively two separate House intelligence committees, a Democratic one worried about Russian meddling in the election and a Republican one worried about leaks about Michael Flynn. Nunes’s sidestepping of Schiff, though, could doom any remaining prospects for cooperation on the committee.


Schiff angrily responded during a press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

“The chairman will need to decide whether he is the chairman of an independent investigation into conduct which includes allegations of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians, or he is going to act as a surrogate of the White House, because he cannot do both,” Schiff said. “Unfortunately I think the actions of today throw great doubt in the ability of the both the chairman and the committee to conduct the investigation the way it ought to be conducted.”

Nunes also made several jabs at Comey, who confirmed that the FBI was investigating whether Russia colluded with Trump officials to interfere with the election. This is also exactly what one might do if one were trying to assist Trump.

There are a few useful pieces of information to be gleaned from Nunes’s two press conferences, one at the Capitol and another at the White House later in the afternoon. Nunes said that none of the information involved Russia, though he would not say what foreign countries the subjects of surveillance were from. He said he did not know that any of the communications were intercepted from Trump Tower. Nunes was not clear about who might have been caught up in the incidental collection. It was already known that Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, was intercepted speaking with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and Nunes said it went beyond that, though his wording was somewhat opaque.


“I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the president-elect and his team were I guess at least monitored and disseminated about in the intelligence community,” he said.

In both press conferences, reporters expressed puzzlement at what Nunes believed was wrong, since he indicated that the collection was lawful and incidental. His answer focused on the question of “unmasking.” When Americans’ names are caught up incidental collection, those names are supposed to be redacted unless there is a reason why including them is essential to understanding the report.

At the White House, however, Nunes offered an answer that muddied the waters on whether he thought the collection was in fact legal.

“What I have read seems to me to be some level of surveillance activity, perhaps legal, but I don’t know that it’s right, I don’t know that the American people would be comfortable with what I read, but let’s get all the reports,” Nunes said.

But this, too, is perplexing, as though Nunes was just now realizing for the first time that U.S. persons’ information is routinely caught up in FISA surveillance.

In sum, Nunes’s announcement on Wednesday raises far more questions that it answers. It’s hard to see how that ambiguity, and the way he handled it, make the American public better informed, or strengthen the House investigation or instill faith in it. But by design or not, they brightened the skies over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, at least for a day.
U.S. intelligence picked up Donald Trump’s own communications while monitoring foreign espionage


Nunes himself shot down the idea that Barack Obama wiretapped his successor, a claim Trump made that later caused a spat involving him, Fox News, Germany, and the United Kingdom’s spy agency.

“That never happened,” Nunes said of Trump’s allegations against Obama, adding in a later CNN interview: “(Trump’s) not right about that.”
 
Last edited:

Zeph

TMMAC Addict
Jan 22, 2015
24,355
31,947
Did you read the article? He says that Trump communications were picked up while running legit investigations into other people, not Trump. He goes on to say Trump's claims of a wiretap were false.
 
Last edited:

jason73

Auslander Raus
First 100
Jan 15, 2015
74,434
136,697
"And I'll tell you, NSA is being cooperative," Nunes continued, "but so far the FBI has not told us whether or not they’re going to respond to our March 15th letter, which is now a couple of weeks old.”

Nunes also reported that as of now, he "cannot rule out" President Obama ordering the surveillance.
 

Zeph

TMMAC Addict
Jan 22, 2015
24,355
31,947
"And I'll tell you, NSA is being cooperative," Nunes continued, "but so far the FBI has not told us whether or not they’re going to respond to our March 15th letter, which is now a couple of weeks old.”

Nunes also reported that as of now, he "cannot rule out" President Obama ordering the surveillance.
In back-to-back news conferences at the Capitol and then the White House — where he had privately briefed the president — Nunes said he was concerned by officials' handling of the communications in the waning days of the Obama administration.


He said the surveillance was conducted legally and did not appear to be related to the current FBI investigation into Trump associates' contacts with Russia or with any criminal warrants. And the revelations, he said, did nothing to change his assessment that Trump's explosive allegations about wiretaps at Trump Tower were false.

What you're quoting isn't in the article you linked. Where are you quoting from?
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Donald Trump said 14 false things in an interview about how he says false things
1. The claim: “Sweden. I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a massive riot, and death, and problems.”

In fact: Nobody died in the Sweden riot that occurred two days after Trump falsely suggested that a terrorist incident had occurred in Sweden the previous night.

2. The claim: “NATO, obsolete, because it doesn’t cover terrorism. They fixed that.”

In fact: NATO has long addressed terrorism.


3. The claim: “…and I said that the allies must pay. Nobody knew that they weren’t paying. I did. I figured it.”

In fact: Barack Obama, among many other Americans, chided NATO allies for failing to meet a guideline of spending 2 per cent of their gross domestic product on defence. The fact that several NATO countries do not meet the guideline was widely known.


4. The claim: “Brexit, I was totally right about that. You were over there I think, when I predicted that, right, the day before.”

In fact: Trump did not predict Brexit the day before; the day before the vote, he said, “I don’t think anybody should listen to me (because) I haven't really focused on it very much,” but that his “inclination” would be that Britain should vote to leave the European Union. This was a recommendation, not a prediction.


5. The claim: “Now remember this. When I said wiretapping, it was in quotes.”

In fact: Trump did use the word in quotation marks in two of his four tweets falsely alleging that Barack Obama had spied on him, but he also made the same allegation without quotation marks in the two other tweets.


6. The claim: “Here, headline, for the front page of the New York Times, ‘Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump aides.’ That’s a headline. Now they then dropped that headline, I never saw this until this morning. They then dropped that headline, and they used another headline without the word wiretap, but they did mean wiretap. Wiretapped data used in inquiry. Then changed after that, they probably didn’t like it. And they changed the title. They took the wiretap word out.”

In fact: The Times never changed its headline; it simply used different words in its print and online headlines, which is normal.


7. The claim: “I mean mostly they register wrong, in other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly, and/or illegally. And they then vote. You have tremendous numbers of people.”

In fact: Every credible expert, including Republican secretaries of state for individual states, says the number of people voting illegally is tiny.


8. The repeated claim: “Brexit, I predicted Brexit, you remember that, the day before the event. I said, no Brexit is going to happen, and everybody laughed, and Brexit happened.”

In fact: Nope.


9. The claim: On his campaign claim that Ted Cruz’s father was seen with Lee Harvey Oswald: “But that was in the newspaper. I wasn’t, I didn’t say that. I was referring to a newspaper … I’m just quoting the newspaper.”

In fact: The newspaper in question is the National Enquirer — and when he made the claim, Trump did not make clear that he was quoting the Enquirer. He said directly: “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous.”


10. The claim: “I went to Kentucky two nights ago, we had 25,000 people in a massive Basketball Arena.”

In fact: The capacity of the arena is about 18,000.


11. The claim: “I said the day before the opening, but I was saying Brexit was going to pass, and everybody was laughing, and I turned out to be right on that.”

In fact: Still nope.


12. The claim: “And the New York Times and CNN and all of them, they did these polls, which were extremely bad and they turned out to be totally wrong.”

In fact: The final New York Times poll was precisely correct: it had Hillary Clinton winning the national popular vote by 3 per cent; she ended up winning by 3 per cent. CNN’s final poll had her up 5 per cent, still within the margin of error.


13. The claim: “I assume this is going to be a cover too, have I set the record? I guess, right? Covers, nobody’s had more covers.”

In fact: Richard Nixon has the record for most Time magazine covers: 55. Trump has not appeared on the cover even half that many times.


14. The repeated claim:“Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump aides. Ok? Can you possibly put that down? Front page, January 20th. Now in their second editions, they took it all down under the internet. They took that out. Ok?”

In fact: Still nope.


 
Last edited:

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
'The damage is done': Devin Nunes's Trump briefing prompts 'grave' concerns about credibility
He can apologize all he wants, but Devin Nunes's ill-considered move this week to leapfrog his panel colleagues by informing the White House about surveillance of the Trump team has already fractured his committee, deepened doubts about its fairness and amplified calls for an independent probe.

Trust in Nunes, the chair of the U.S. House intelligence committee, has splintered after he shared with the Trump administration a report from the U.S. intelligence community that legal, broad surveillance activities might have "incidentally collected" communications with the president.

As the ranking Democrat on the committee, the expectation would have been that congressman Adam Schiff of California would be briefed first on the matter, along with Nunes's Republican committee colleagues. Instead, Schiff learned of the intelligence intercepts via a media statement.

Schiff slammed the chairman for acting as if he were a "surrogate of the White House."

"You don't take information that the committee hasn't seen and present it orally to the press and to the White House before the committee even has a chance to vet whether it's even significant," he fumed to reporters on Wednesday.

Cries from the Democratic side will likely grow louder for an independent investigation, says Mark Harkins, a congressional expert with the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. A censure motion or other disciplinary action for Nunes might be introduced on the House floor.

"Being that he's supposedly the chairman of the investigative committee but went directly to the executive branch, that leads to concerns as to whether he can properly execute the oversight role that Congress has over the executive branch."

Speaking to CNN, Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, suggested that Nunes himself should become the subject of an investigation.

Senator John McCain, a fellow Republican, called the committee's integrity into doubt and told NBC News it was a "bizarre situation."

"What the American people have found so far is that no longer does Congress have the credibility to handle this alone," he said.

Nunes apologizes
Nunes, a congressman from California, was a member of U.S. President Donald Trump's transition team. He apologized on Thursday for the unusual briefing, given his role as chair of the chief investigative panel probing Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 election.

It didn't appear to be enough. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Democratic congresswoman Jackie Speier, who sits on the House panel, said it was a "grave question" whether the committee should continue to have faith in their chairman.

"Over the next few days, we are going to assess whether or not we feel confident that he can continue in that role," she said.

Nunes's actions weren't just a breach of decorum, say veteran staffers of former House and Senate intelligence committees.

"It was a rupture in a relationship with the committee in a highly sensitive topic," says Mark Lowenthal, who served as a Republican staff director of the House permanent select committee on intelligence during the Bill Clinton administration.

Lowenthal believes Democrats will be wary of dealing with him further if they suspect Nunes, a staunch Trump ally on Capitol Hill, might have divided loyalties. He expects dysfunction can also bleed through into the House committee's affairs.

When a bipartisan committee comes apart in such a way, he said, "it becomes very, very unpleasant; trust is lost and it's hard to get any work done.

"So yes, you can apologize, but the damage is done."

Were he more politically astute, Lowenthal says, Nunes would have presented the intelligence report to Schiff regarding possible collection of surveillance of Trump, then shared his intentions to approach the president.

Collateral effect
There may also be a collateral effect in the separate Senate intelligence committee into the Trump-Russia matter, which is to be chaired by Senator Richard Burr. The North Carolina Republican could be constricted by the fallout from his counterpart in the House committee.

That could be a positive outcome, says Gary Schmitt, a former staff director for the Senate select committee on intelligence.

"You'll see an effort by the [Senate intelligence] committee itself to be forced, in a way, to remain as bipartisan as possible, because its reputation is at stake," Schmitt says. "Nunes has put them in a position where if they don't do their job in a very bipartisan way, the reputation of the institution suffers, and they suffer reputationally."

Demands to form a new special committee such as the independent inquiry that looked into the Benghazi embassy attacks in 2012 are "inevitable," Schmitt says.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has seized upon the latest intelligence revelations by Nunes as validation of the president's debunked claims that the Obama administration ordered Trump Tower to be wiretapped.

When pressed further, though, Nunes stressed it was "possible" that routine U.S. surveillance of foreign targets — and unrelated to Trump — might have also scooped up some of the president's communications in the process. There remains no evidence that any wiretapping occurred, Nunes said.

Trump nevertheless wasted no time spinning the development in his favour. The morning after the Nunes uproar, Trump's campaign team issued a new email blast imploring subscribers to stand with the president against the scourge of so-called fake news. The email had a one-word subject line: "Vindicated."