***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[Belgium]

Wait I had to look this up. This dude hired a personal lawyer who went to Cooley? That’s where you go where you’re too dumb to get in any other law school. Jesus these idiots deserve to go to jail for hiring such incompetence.

I think he is referencing the Wire, not Western Michigan's law school

Both actually Michael Cohen indeed graduated from Cooley law school. One of the lowest rated law schools in the US and it has also drawn strong criticism from none other than the American Bar Association. So I threw in a "is you taking notes on a criminal ******* conspiracy?" reference in from The Wire; he seems like the kind of lawyer who hypothetically would casually leave incriminating evidence on his desk.

 

[frink85]

My man went to Hollywood Upstairs Law School, word to Dr. Nick

 

[Belgium]

Hmm
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...hner-joshua-harris-budget-director-loan-trump
Wall St star approached to be Trump budget chief a year before loan to Kushner firm
Private equity executive Joshua Harris began financial disclosure process with support of Trump son-in-law before backing out, sources say. In 2017 his company loaned $184m to Kushner family business

 

[rillo561]

Dudes on fire today

 

[Mr.Guy]

Both actually Michael Cohen indeed graduated from Cooley law school. One of the lowest rated law schools in the US and it has also drawn strong criticism from none other than the American Bar Association. So I threw in a "is you taking notes on a criminal ****ing conspiracy?" reference in from The Wire; he seems like the kind of lawyer who hypothetically would casually leave incriminating evidence on his desk.

Damn so Trump’s lawyer is basically Saul Goodman?

 

[Belgium]

Trump commenting on the Cohen raid according to WaPo:

"It's a disgraceful situation," Trump says of Cohen raid, per White House pool. "I have this witch hunt constantly going on... It's an attack on our country, what we all stand for." Says the special counsel is the "most conflicted group of people I have ever seen."

 

[Chester McFloppy]

Trump commenting on the Cohen raid according to WaPo:

"It's a disgraceful situation," Trump says of Cohen raid, per White House pool. "I have this witch hunt constantly going on... It's an attack on our country, what we all stand for." Says the special counsel is the "most conflicted group of people I have ever seen."

lol @ attack on our country

 

[Belgium]

 

[Mr.Guy]

Mueller gonna take down Trump associates while Trump avoids charges watch.

 

[biggie62]

lol @ attack on our country

 

[Belgium]

Mueller gonna take down Trump associates while Trump avoids charges watch.

I'd see it as extremely unlikely and probably more towards impossible that Mueller would indict Trump. The DOJ has a long-standing legal opinion on that specific topic in place, which was also reaffirmed in 2000 after the Clinton years.
Those DOJ regulations apply to all employees working under the DOJ and by extension Mueller is one of them at the end of the day. If Trump is guilty of anything, Mueller will file his reports and leave charges to state attorneys and impeachment up to Congress.
There is some discussion about how set in stone that legal opinion is or isn't but I'd be very surprised if Mueller were to indict the president if he is guilty.

 

[Belgium]

@aepps20 @whywesteppin
Good news Comrades, it appears our fellow Coal Gang affiliates in Hungary are rising up to go after Soros
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...6_story.html?utm_term=.e5cdc0a404aa&tid=sm_tw
Viktor Orban, after soaring to reelection win in Hungary, to target George Soros and NGOs
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s strongman, right-wing prime minister, soared to reelection victory on Sunday with a powerful supermajority in parliament — precisely the margin he needed to continue an overhaul of the country’s democratic constitution and system of checks and balances.

On Monday morning, hours after the election results were announced, Orban’s representatives announced one of the first orders of business: What they are calling the “Stop Soros” bill is designed to crack down on liberal nongovernmental organizations, think tanks and other institutions that, in the eyes of the government, have worked against their agenda and on behalf of the migrants Orban seeks to keep out.

“Soros” refers to George Soros, the Hungarian American and Jewish financier, government-accountability advocate and pro-migrant philanthropist, whom Orban has cast as an evil puppet master, pulling strings that spell Hungary’s demise.

“Don’t have any doubts,” Janos Halasz, a spokesman for Orban’s Fidesz party, said of the legislation on Hungarian state television Monday morning. “This is a question of sovereignty and national security. This has to be dealt with immediately.”

For activists and members of the opposition — some of whom fought back tears as they watched the results on Sunday night — Orban’s intentions are not a surprise. During his campaign, he warned that Soros’s allies in Hungary would face revenge after the election — “moral, political and legal revenge.” His party has been talking about the “Stop Soros” bill since February.



But the crackdown on liberal actors in civil society appears to be coming sooner than they might have imagined. It will top the agenda when the new parliament begins its work next month, Fidesz officials said Monday.

“That means some NGOs will be demolished in a couple of months,” said Marton Gulyas, a political activist and head of Common Country, the largest promoter of opposition party coordination before the election. “They have to be to prepared for government threats, raids and I don’t know what else.”

“We can see an alarmingly fast crackdown on civil society, or independent voices, in Hungary,” said Marta Pardavi, the co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights watchdog group that works extensively with migrants and refugees.

Orban’s government has been working to curtail the work of nongovernmental organizations for some time now, Pardavi said. The effort included a June 2017 law seeking to register — and stigmatize — organizations with foreign funding.

“We’ve seen a shying away of public partners, state partners and institutions that previously worked together with us — certain projects were halted,” said Stefania Kapronczay, director of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. She noted some of those partnerships had lasted for nearly 20 years.


“But this proposal — which we call starve and stop — is taking that to a different level,” Pardavi said of Orban’s “Stop Soros” initiative.

According to the version of the bill submitted to parliament before the election, it would impose a 25 percent tax on foreign donations to nonprofits that work with migrants and allow the interior minister to forbid any activity he identified as a “national security risk.”

The law and the campaign behind it, Pardavi said, not only seek to create an environment in which groups like hers cannot afford to function but also enter new territory by targeting specific individuals.

In recent months, she said, government ministers who support the bill have named her organization and her employees as a threat to the national interest. “Saying that individuals in Hungary are a national security threat is, I think, a method that clearly has no place in a democracy,” she said.

On Friday, two days before Hungarians went to the polls, Orban suggested the government had amassed a list of names of domestic enemies it would soon be tracking down.

“Approximately 2,000 people are working in Hungary to overthrow the government in the election campaign and replace it with a pro-immigration cabinet favorable to George Soros, as well,” he said, speaking to state-run Kossuth Radio.

“We know exactly, by name, who these people are and how they operate in order to turn Hungary into an immigrant country.”

The 2,000 figure may be a distortion of a comment by Tracie Ahern, a former chief financial officer of Soros Fund Management. In late March, Magyar Idok, a pro-government newspaper, reported it had a recording of Ahern saying Soros’s Open Society Foundations had 2,000 people working on his behalf.

But Ahern’s comment was taken out of context, as part of what some called a sting operation designed to boost the government’s electoral appeal. About 2,000 people work for Soros’s foundations around the word, but only 174 of these employees work in the Budapest office, said Csaba Csontos, a spokesman for Open Society Foundations.

“It’s a double threat,” Csontos said. “First, it’s scary that government uses information that was gathered using intelligence technologies like this. It’s threatening because the prime minister is using rhetoric that was last used in Europe by Milosevic.” Slobodan Milsoevic was the former Serbian president tried for facilitating genocide during the Bosnian War.

“It’s not just that we are his enemies,” Csontos said of Orban. “It’s that we somehow became ‘mercenaries,’ in the rhetoric. It basically suggests to people that there are enemies like enemies in a war, and that the enemies must be eliminated.”

On a serious note though, Hungary appears to be going down a dangerous path of full-blown authoritarianism.

 

[Majorbread]

They're gonna get Cohen to flip on Trump. Have to think that Cohen knows A LOT and potentially the common denominator on all his ****** and shady dealings.

Just hope that doesnt mean Kushner and Erik Prince get to skate, which I doubt, but I think Mueller would love to not have to give them plea deals

 

[Belgium]

Looks like Pruitt may be in some additional hot water due to...emails
For context, here's Pruitt's statement on the controversial pay raises in that recent Fox interview:

HENRY: If you're committed to the Trump agenda, why did you go around the president and the White House and give pay raises to two staffers?

SCOTT PRUITT, ADMINISTRATOR OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY: I did not. My staff did, and I found about it.

HENRY: Was somebody, you mean, fired for that?

PRUITT: That should not have been done.

HENRY: So, who did it?

PRUITT: There will be accountability.

HENRY: A career person or political person.

PRUITT: I don't know.

HENRY: You don't know? You don't know who did it?

PRUITT: I found out about this yesterday. And I corrected the action. And we are in the process of finding out how it took place and correct it.

HENRY: So, hang on, both of these staffers who got these large pay raises are friends of yours, I believe from Oklahoma, right?

PRUITT: They are staffers here in the agency.

HENRY: They're friends of yours?

PRUUITT: Well, they serve a very important person.

HENRY: And you didn't know that they got these larges pay raises?

PRUITT: I did not know that they got the pay raises until yesterday.

HENRY: OK. One of them got a pay raise of, let's see, 28,000; the other was $56,000. Do you what the median income in this country is

PRUITT: No, what?

HENRY: $57,000 a year.

PRUITT: OK.

HENRY: So, one of your friends from Oklahoma got a pay raise that's the median income --

PRUITT: They did not get a pay raise. They did not get pay raise.

HENRY: They did.

PRUITT: They did not. They did not; I stopped that yesterday.

HENRY: So, you stopped it. Are you embarrassed that --

PRUITT: It should not have happened. And the officials that were involved in that process should not have done what they did.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/pruitt-epa-raises/557561/
An Internal Email Contradicts Scott Pruitt's Account of Controversial Raises
The EPA administrator has said he “didn’t know” about unusual salary bumps given to a pair of trusted aides, but a message from one of those staffers claims otherwise.

An email that suggests Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt personally signed off on a controversial pay raise for a favored aide last month is roiling the agency.

In the last few days, top staffers became aware of an email exchange between one of two aides who received such a raise and the agency’s human resources division. In mid-March, Sarah Greenwalt, senior counsel to the administrator, wrote to HR in an attempt to confirm that her pay raise of $56,765 was being processed. Greenwalt “definitively stated that Pruitt approves and was supportive of her getting a raise,” according to an administration official who has seen the email chain.

A second administration official confirmed the exchange. The email “essentially says, ‘The administrator said that I should get this raise,’” the official told me. Both spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the private correspondence.

“Administrator Pruitt had zero knowledge of the amount of the raises, nor the process by which they transpired,” Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, said in a statement. “These kind of personnel actions are handled by myself, EPA’s HR officials and PPO. These kind of personnel actions are handled by EPA’s HR officials, PPO and me. Any communications claiming otherwise are simply inaccurate.”

The email began floating around the agency’s top ranks after the EPA’s Inspector General expanded its inquiry into Pruitt’s hiring practices to include the raises, according to the two administration officials. In early March, as first reported by The Atlantic, Pruitt requested hefty salary bumps for Greenwalt and his director of scheduling, Millan Hupp. When the White House refused to sign off on the raises—$56,765 and $28,130, respectively–Pruitt used an obscure hiring authority under the Safe Drinking Water Act to grant them anyway. The provision, which allows the EPA’s administrator to appoint up to 30 staffers without White House or congressional approval, was intended to help the agency bring on experts and staff up especially-stressed offices. Greenwalt and Hupp’s raises went into effect on April 1, according to HR documents obtained by The Atlantic.

Now, the agency’s IG is probing whether Pruitt abused that hiring authority. On Wednesday, Pruitt was pressed by Fox News’s Ed Henry to respond to The Atlantic’s report, but denied any knowledge of the episode. “You didn’t know they got these pay raises?” Henry asked. “I didn’t know they got the pay raises until yesterday,” Pruitt responded.

“My jaw dropped when he said that,” said the first administration official. The perception that Pruitt had gone on TV and lied, the official said, was what really scared people inside the agency.

After the interview, top aides, including Jackson, began corralling files that appeared to contradict Pruitt’s statements. The two administration officials described it as a way of “getting ahead” of the IG’s investigation. Greenwalt’s email, however, has proved the most troubling, according to both administration officials. “It’s an ‘oh, ****’ moment that they’re trying to figure out before the IG finds the email,” said one. “Because it’ll be damn near impossible to have Sarah explain her way out of it.”

On Monday, two Democratic members of the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works, Tom Carper and Sheldon Whitehouse, sent a letter to Pruitt citing The Atlantic’s previous reporting and the Fox News interview, and asking him to turn over all relevant documents and communications that might illuminate “the degree to which you were aware of, supported, directed or were otherwise involved in the decision to award Sarah Greenwalt and Millan Hupp raises” by April 20.

The scrambling comes as EPA officials are trying to tamp down the seemingly endless set of controversies plaguing the agency. On Monday, The New York Times reported that the government’s top ethics official had sent a letter to the agency urging ethics staffers to take “appropriate actions to address any violations.” The letter specifically addressed Pruitt’s rental of a condo connected to an energy lobbyist for just $50 a night. It also touched on Pruitt’s frequent trips home to Oklahoma on the taxpayer’s dime. Those flights “do raise concerns about whether the administrator is using his public office for personal gain in violation of ethics rules,” wrote David Apol, acting director of the Office of Government Ethics.

All of which has made for a tense workplace in the last week, according to multiple EPA officials. Despite President Trump’s tweet on Saturday affirming his support for Pruitt, officials said that Pruitt’s future—and thus, their own—appears tenuous. Several officials are seeking transfer to other agencies; as one official put it, “It’s been very emotionally draining. The stress is unsustainable.”

Added to that is what one official called the “gloating” of top political appointees, who feel that Pruitt, given Trump’s vocal support, is now “bulletproof.” On Friday, according to an official who witnessed the exchange, a small group of staffers, including Jackson, Greenwalt, and Hupp, joked that Pruitt, like Trump, “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone” and “get away with it.”

But the discovery of Greenwalt’s email exchange may upset that calculus. “One moment, people are feeling really confident,” said the official who witnessed the exchange. “And the next, they’re desperate to keep this email hush-hush.”

Pruitt meets with President Trump today at 2:45pm in the Oval Office to discuss renewable fuels such as ethanol, according to a schedule shared with The Atlantic.

 

[chao7]

Someone who is well-versed in the law explain this to me if I'm misunderstanding the argument. If you hold that the President can't obstruct justice or be indicted, aren't you essentially saying he's above the law?

 

[Belgium]

Someone who is well-versed in the law explain this to me if I'm misunderstanding the argument. If you hold that the President can't obstruct justice or be indicted, aren't you essentially saying he's above the law?

Note: I am not that well versed in law
The course of action for presidential crimes as it currently stands under DOJ regulations is impeachment. Once they are no longer sitting presidents, they can be charged.
A sitting president can obstruct justice, he just can't be indicted for it while he's still in office.
I'm not sure if state prosecutors are held to the same legal guidelines though.

 

[Nike Jordan]

 

[Benny Hinn]

MAGA!!
DRAIN DA SWAMP!!

 

[Belgium]

I don't think that's how it works in a midterm year
http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...l-side-with-him-in-trade-fight-even-if-theyre
Trump: Farmers will understand if they get hurt in China trade spat

President Trump on Monday acknowledged that U.S. farmers could take a hit from trade disputes with China but said they will ultimately "understand" why the confrontation is necessary.

“But if we do a deal with China, if, during the course of a negotiation they want to hit the farmers because they think that hits me, I wouldn’t say that's nice. But I tell you, our farmers are great patriots,” Trump said.

“These are great patriots. They understand that they're doing this for the country," Trump said. "And we'll make it up to them. And in the end, they're going to be much stronger than they are right now.”



He added that farmers have been “trending downward over an eight-year period” and said that, because of his actions on the North American Free Trade Agreement and China, “farmers will be better off than they ever were.”
The Trump administration has moved aggressively to levy tariffs on China, including $50 billion in penalties proposed early last week. After China retaliated by proposing $50 billion in tariffs on U.S. goods, including soybeans, the White House late Thursday said Trump had ordered officials to look at another $100 billion in tariffs on China.

Many farmers have expressed fear that their livelihoods could be impacted in the escalating trade war, given that China is a major market for agricultural exports, particularly soybean and sorghum.

The Farm Bureau said in a statement to The Hill that it has been unambiguous in its opposition to tariffs and support for free trade.

"It’s our hope and expectation that both sides will eventually arrive at an agreement that does not include tariffs," a spokesperson for the Bureau said. "Whatever happens, you can be certain our policy will support the interests of farmers nationwide."

Earlier this month, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told a town hall in Ohio that the president had told him that farmers would not be hurt by the ongoing trade dispute with China.

“I talked to the president as recently as last night,” Perdue said. “And he said, ‘Sonny, you can assure your farmers out there that we're not going to allow them to be the casualties if this trade dispute escalates. We're going to take care of our American farmers. You can tell them that directly.’ ”

 

[EddieDoyers]

 

[Belgium]

According to Bloomberg Deputy AG Rosenstein approved Mueller referring his tip to the federal prosecutors in Manhattan, resulting in the FBI raid.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...aid-on-cohen-s-office-new-level-of-unfairness

 

[Mr.Guy]

I'd see it as extremely unlikely and probably more towards impossible that Mueller would indict Trump. The DOJ has a long-standing legal opinion on that specific topic in place, which was also reaffirmed in 2000 after the Clinton years.
Those DOJ regulations apply to all employees working under the DOJ and by extension Mueller is one of them at the end of the day. If Trump is guilty of anything, Mueller will file his reports and leave charges to state attorneys and impeachment up to Congress.
There is some discussion about how set in stone that legal opinion is or isn't but I'd be very surprised if Mueller were to indict the president if he is guilty.

Welp, congress prob isnt gonna impeach him.

 

[dacomeup]

Oh ok, you're probably right I always thought Cohen went to Michigan Law for some reason.

Don't do us like that, bruh. Having Ann Coulter as an alum is enough.

 

[Belgium]

https://www.politico.eu/article/don...ll-fire-robert-mueller-well-see-what-happens/
Trump on whether he’ll fire Robert Mueller: ‘We’ll see what happens’

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday again dangled the possibility of firing special counsel Robert Mueller, slamming the federal prosecutor’s involvement in the raid of his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen as a “disgrace.”

After news broke that the FBI earlier in the day had seized documents in properties linked to Cohen in New York, reportedly through a referral from Mueller, the president was pressed by reporters about the possibility of dismissing the former bureau director as special counsel.

“Why don’t I just fire Mueller? Well, I think it’s a disgrace what’s going on. We’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “but I think it’s a really sad situation when you look at what happened, and many people have said you should fire him.”

The White House has repeatedly disputed reports that Trump is considering firing Mueller, even as the president has continued to lob grenades at the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and ties to Trump campaign officials. Trump, who frequently derides the Russia probe as a “witch hunt,” singled out Mueller by name for the first time last month, tweeting that the “Mueller probe should never have been started” and accusing the special counsel’s team of consisting largely of Democrats.

Trump on Monday called the raid against Cohen “a disgraceful situation” and “a total witch hunt,” and accused Justice Department officials of political bias, despite the fact that several members of Mueller’s team, including the former FBI director himself, are registered Republicans.

“This is the most biased group of people, these people have the biggest conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen,” Trump said. “Democrats all — or just about all, either Democrats or a couple of Republicans that worked for President Obama.”

It was unclear whether Trump was speaking specifically about Mueller’s team or members of the FBI.

The president also questioned why federal authorities were “not looking at the other side” and focusing on his former opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton, reviving his long-running criticisms of the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation into her private email server.

“They only keep looking at us so they find no collusion,” Trump said, “and then they go from there and they say, well, let’s keep going, and they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning and I think it’s a disgrace.”

He also bashed Sessions' recusal again
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/09/trump-sessions-russia-probe-511115
Trump revives criticism of Sessions’ recusal in Russia probe

President Donald Trump on Monday renewed his criticism of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Justice Department probe of Russian election meddling in the 2016 election, calling it a “terrible decision” and again suggesting he would not have picked Sessions had he known about his plans.

“The attorney general made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself,” the president told reporters at the White House on Monday evening, “or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself and we would have used a — put a different attorney general in.”


He added: “So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country, but you'll figure that out.”

The president has repeatedly rebuked Sessions in public for stepping back from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation.

During an interview with The New York Times last July, Trump called the decision “very unfair to the president” and said he never would have appointed the attorney general if he had known of the steps he would take.

The president’s remarks came on the heels of reporting that the FBI raided several properties linked to Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen through a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller.

In response, Trump blasted the ongoing federal investigation into Russian election interference and ties to Trump campaign associates as a “witch hunt” and a “real disgrace.”

"It’s a disgrace, it’s a frankly real disgrace,” the president said of the raid. “It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand.”

 

[Sharpshoeter13]

I don't think that's how it works in a midterm year
http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...l-side-with-him-in-trade-fight-even-if-theyre
Trump: Farmers will understand if they get hurt in China trade spat

Yes, cuz these farmers have no choice but to accept the outcome of his actions. They played themselves thinking they can make a quick killing under Trump cuz he's a "businessman" and represents "profit."

Just watched Trump reax regarding the Cohen raid. As always, he blurted out words to sound articulate. I'm surprised Obama wasn't mentioned, but Trillary emails had no chance.

The man already declared there wasn't any collusion. Whew! Thank God that's over with. #TeflonDON