***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[getback]

What a racist thing to grant clemency

wut

 

[noshoegame]

Racist thing?

 

[sonoftony]

What a racist thing to grant clemency

YIKES

 

[stuntman mike]

What a racist thing to grant clemency

he grants clemency to a black lady and that proves he's not racist? if you're intelligent enough to actually pass the bar, then your comment surpasses disingenuous and waltzes into fullof**** territory.

 

[northoaklandfc]

What a racist thing to grant clemency

What an idiotic thing to say.

I'm mad that you actually think this is intelligible.

 

[RustyShackleford]

Let us not feed this troll.

Just earlier this week news broke the Dept of Education was rolling back civil rights enforcement. His trolling *** was nowhere to be found.

Now he wants to peddle this nonsense.

He probably just left Popeyes on a biscuit run and to put in an application for fry cook and general counsel; and now wants to cape for America's #1 bigot.

 

[aepps20]

I see Libs are in their feelings as Dwalk schooled them with da fax.

 

[stuntman mike]

I see Libs are in their feelings as Dwalk schooled them with da fax.

i am so angry right now!

 

[aepps20]

i am so angry right now!

I understand Comrade. I used to get heated when Comrade Bloc02 used to hit Libs with da fax machine. It wasn't until I ignored the noise (Conjecture and Innuendo) that I realized that Libs destroyed our country and we have to take it back.

 

[nomnom]

This guy again

 

[Belgium]

Is there anyone from the Trump campaign who didn't have some sort of involvement with Russians?
https://www.buzzfeed.com/anthonycor...el-cohen-tower?utm_term=.grVRdXyQ6#.wb4v5qpn4
Ivanka Trump Was In Contact With A Russian Who Offered A Trump-Putin Meeting
Her contact, a Russian Olympic weightlifter, said a meeting between Trump and Putin could expedite a Trump tower in Moscow.
Amid intense scrutiny of contacts between Donald Trump's inner circle and representatives of Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump's name has barely come up. But during the campaign, she connected her father’s personal lawyer with a Russian athlete who offered to introduce Donald Trump to Putin to facilitate a 100-story Trump tower in Moscow, according to emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News and four sources with knowledge of the matter.

There is no evidence that Ivanka Trump’s contact with the athlete — the former Olympic weightlifter Dmitry Klokov — was illegal or that it had anything to do with the election. Nor is it clear that Klokov could even have introduced Trump to the Russian president. But congressional investigators have reviewed emails and questioned witnesses about the interaction, according to two of the sources, and so has special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, according to the other two.

The contacts reveal that even as her father was campaigning to become president of the United States, Ivanka Trump connected Michael Cohen with a Russian who offered to arrange a meeting with one of the US’s adversaries — in order to help close a business deal that could have made the Trump family millions.

These interactions also shed new light on Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer and fixer, who is under criminal investigation and who played a key role in many of Donald Trump’s biggest deals — including the audacious effort to build Europe’s tallest tower in the Russian capital.



In the fall of 2015, that effort was well underway. Cohen negotiated with Felix Sater, one of the president’s longtime business associates, and agreed upon a Russian developer to build the tower. Donald Trump personally signed a nonbinding letter of intent on Oct. 28, 2015, the day of the third Republican debate, to allow a Russian developer to brand the tower with Trump’s name. The agreement stated that the Trump Organization would have the option to brand the hotel’s spa and fitness facilities as “The Spa by Ivanka Trump” and that Ivanka Trump would be granted “sole and absolute discretion” to have the final say on “all interior design elements of the spa or fitness facilities.”

Ivanka Trump was then an executive vice president of development and acquisitions at the Trump Organization. Publicly, she was a sophisticated ambassador for the company, attending ribbon cuttings, posting pictures of deals on her Instagram page, and gracing advertisements for the company’s new properties. But inside the Trump Organization, she had a reputation as a shrewd and tough executive known to get her way.

Ivanka Trump, who now works in her father’s administration, did not respond to questions sent to her personal email, chief of staff, and the White House. A spokesperson for her attorney wrote that Ivanka Trump did not know about the Trump Moscow project “until after a nonbinding letter of intent had been signed, never talked to anyone outside the Organization about the proposal, and, even internally, was only minimally involved. Her only role was limited to reminding Mr. Cohen that, should an actual deal come to fruition (which it did not) the project, like any other with the Trump name, conform with the highest design and architectural standards.”

But emails and interviews suggest that her involvement ran deeper.

In November 2015, Ivanka Trump told Cohen to speak with Klokov, according to the four sources. Cohen had at least one phone conversation with the weightlifter, they said. It is not known what the men discussed over the phone, but they exchanged a string of emails that are now being examined by congressional investigators and federal agents probing Russia’s election meddling.

In one of those emails, Klokov told Cohen that he could arrange a meeting between Donald Trump and Putin to help pave the way for the tower. Later, Cohen sent an email refusing that offer and saying that the Trump Organization already had an agreement in place. He said he was cutting off future communication with Klokov. Copying Ivanka Trump, the Russian responded in a final brusque message, in which he questioned Cohen’s authority to make decisions for the Trump Organization. Frustrated by the exchange, Ivanka Trump questioned Cohen’s refusal to continue communicating with Klokov, according to one of the sources.

BuzzFeed News was shown the emails on the condition we do not quote them.

It’s unclear how Ivanka Trump came into contact with Klokov. The chiseled giant, who is 35 and lives in Moscow, has 340,000 followers on Instagram, where he frequently posts pictures and videos of weightlifting and associated products bearing his name.

He won the silver medal in the 2008 Olympic Games and took gold at the 2005 World Championships, but he has no apparent background in real estate development. Nor is he known to be a close associate of Putin or anyone in the Russian president’s inner circle, and he does not appear to publicly participate in his country’s politics. It’s not even clear he could have made good on his offer to arrange a meeting between Putin and Donald Trump.

Klokov initially told BuzzFeed News that he did not “send any emails” to Cohen. “I don’t understand why you ask me about this,” Klokov said in text messages. “I’m weightlifter, not a political.” When told that he had sent at least two emails to Cohen and had had a phone conversation with him at Ivanka Trump’s request, Klokov stopped responding.

Cohen referred BuzzFeed News to his attorney, Stephen Ryan, who declined to comment.

FBI and congressional investigators, two of the sources said, are still trying to determine the relationship between Ivanka Trump and the Olympian.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and emails between Cohen and Klokov were among the documents that the Trump Organization turned over to the committee, according to two sources. When he was interviewed by the panel in October, Cohen released a statementdisputing allegations of a conspiracy to rig the election in Trump’s favor.

North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, declined to comment on Klokov, Ivanka Trump, or any specifics. But he said he could see how Russian athletes, like the country’s oligarchs, might be drawn into Russian politics.



“I can’t speak specifically to athletes, but you see the oligarchs, and there is a model for them, and they do things on behalf of the country and on behalf of Putin at their own expense — they’re not asked, they just assume the responsibility to do it, whether that’s a mercenary army in Syria or it’s screwing with elections; whether it’s the hacking out of the St. Petersburg facility,” Burr told BuzzFeed News. “So it’s not a stretch to say if Putin allows oligarchs to make money as long as they don’t get involved in politics and they do things that are beneficial to Putin — I could see athletes falling into the same category.”

A spokesperson for Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the committee vice chair, declined to comment. The special counsel’s office declined to comment as well.

Ivanka Trump wields unusually strong influence over a president known for his unpredictability and impulsiveness. Though her efforts to moderate her father’s right-wing tendencies have not always succeeded, such as when he withdrew from the Paris climate accord despite her opposition, she remains uniquely close to him. She has been by his side for years in business and was one of his most trusted and popular surrogates during the presidential campaign. She has an office in the West Wing and a small staff of advisers.

She was with her brother Donald Trump Jr. and Sater when they visited Moscow in 2006 to scout locations for a possible tower there, famously sitting in Putin’s office chair during a visit. She was also instrumental in the development of Trump SoHo, a troubled hotel and condominium tower in Manhattan. New York City prosecutors considered criminal fraud charges against Ivanka Trump and her brother Donald Jr. for allegedly misleading prospective buyers at Trump SoHo, ProPublica reported last October.

 

[Belgium]

Gotta give credit to Kim, she went in that oval office and got the job done. Maybe all it took was giving Trump some eye candy for him to drool over but it is what it is. I strongly dislike much of what their family does but at the end of the day I have to respect the hustle.

 

[Belgium]

Even this invertebrate is denying Trump's fabricated "Spygate" claim has any truth to it. He's retiring from Congress and it still took him days after that briefing to call out the nonsense. Whereas Trey Gowdy did so almost immediately.
https://apnews.com/9f0192df329643f9...cts-Trump's-claim-that-the-FBI-planted-a-'spy'
Ryan contradicts Trump’s claim that the FBI planted a ‘spy’
In a break with President Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan said Wednesday that he agrees there is no evidence that the FBI planted a “spy” in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign in an effort to hurt his chances at the polls.

He also issued a careful warning about Trump’s recent assertion that he has the authority to pardon himself.

“I don’t know the technical answer to that question, but I think obviously the answer is he shouldn’t and no one is above the law,” Ryan told reporters on Wednesday.

The comments come after Trump insisted in a series of angry tweets last month that the agency planted a spy “to help Crooked Hillary win,” referring to his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

There is a growing sense that Republicans are uncomfortable with those statements. Ryan, R-Wisc., is one of three congressional Republicans who have now contradicted Trump on the spying matter, including House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C.

Ryan, Gowdy and Burr all attended classified briefings on the matter late last month, following reports that the FBI used an informant in its Russian election meddling investigation to speak to members of the Trump campaign who had possible connections to Russia.

The Department of Justice held two briefings on Trump’s orders after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., had asked for documents concerning the informant. Trump said it was “starting to look like one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history.”

Gowdy said afterward that the FBI was doing its duty.

“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got,” Gowdy said on Fox News last week. “And that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.”

Gowdy added, in a separate interview on CBS, that such informants are used all the time and “the FBI, if they were at the table this morning, they would tell you that Russia was the target and Russia’s intentions toward our country were the target.”

Ryan told reporters on Wednesday that he thinks Gowdy’s “initial assessment is accurate,” and he has seen “no evidence to the contrary” of what Gowdy said.

Hours after Ryan’s comments, Burr told The Associated Press that he, too, agreed with Gowdy.

“I have no disagreement with the description Trey Gowdy gave,” Burr said.

Democrats made similar comments immediately after the briefing. In a joint statement, the four Democrats who attended said “there is no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a ‘spy’ in the Trump Campaign, or otherwise failed to follow appropriate procedures and protocols.”

That statement was issued by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence panels, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and Rep. Adam Schiff of California.

Despite the statements, some House lawmakers may continue to pursue the issue. Ryan said Congress has “more digging to do” and that he wished they had gotten the information earlier. Nunes has said the committee is still waiting for documents, and Ryan backed him on that Wednesday.

“We have some more documents to review, we still have some unanswered questions,” Ryan said.

Burr, however, appeared ready to move on, saying the briefing he attended “sufficiently covered everything to do with this right now.”

On the pardon issue, Ryan joined Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in sending a subtle message to Trump.

Trump recently said he has the “absolute right” to pardon himself if it were necessary — which Trump says it won’t be, because “I have done nothing wrong.”

McConnell said Tuesday the question of whether Trump has legal authority to pardon himself is “an academic discussion,” but Trump “obviously knows that would not be something that he would or should do.”

 

[elpablo21]

 

[AEA18]

"Both parties are the same"

 

[Belgium]

"Both parties are the same"

I see the libbies are triggered once more. Guess they just love big government oppression discriminating against business' god given right to discriminate
Sickening

 

[cedric ceballos]

Crazy thing is that most the people I know who pull the “both parties are the same” line are usually vocal as hell and always *****ing about stuff.

I get it. Having a 2 party system and only 2 options sucks. But when one party is way less in favor of things beneficial to you and does a crappy job of hiding it and hell even encourages you not to show up and vote, perhaps it’s a good short term strategy to get the lesser of two evils in office and pursue a long term strategy while having the better alternative in office as opposed to the opposition which is only going to push things back even further.

 

[youngogjosh]

"Nothing to lose"

 

[aepps20]

I'm sure he meant LIBs of all colors. He didn't mean Coal Gang because we Proudly enter through the back. #MLKWASACONSERVATIVE

 

[MalcolmNewton]

 

[gry60]

Let us not feed this troll.

Just earlier this week news broke the Dept of Education was rolling back civil rights enforcement. His trolling *** was nowhere to be found.

Now he wants to peddle this nonsense.

He probably just left Popeyes on a biscuit run and to put in an application for fry cook and general counsel; and now wants to cape for America's #1 bigot.

@dwalk31 might wanna give a call to Pruitt. I heard he knows how to hired at fast food joints.

 

[stuntman mike]

that dmitry klokov dude is an absolute beast at the oly lifts. definitely a russian icon. i can see him being buddies with putin.

 

[frink85]

that’s my future governor

 

[aepps20]

that’s my future governor

JROSE5.

 

[Belgium]

You may recall I posted some documents last week that Avenatti uploaded. They contained several emails showing Davidson, former attorney for Stormy and Karen McDougal, immediately forwarding reporters' email inquiries about the Stormy payment directly to Cohen. There was also an email in which Cohen forwarded an email inquiry from CNN to Davidson so it wasn't just one way traffic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/us/politics/stormy-daniels-lawsuit.html
Stormy Daniels Sues, Saying Michael Cohen Colluded With Her Former Lawyer
The pornographic film actress Stephanie Clifford sued President Trump’s fixer, Michael D. Cohen, and her own former lawyer on Wednesday, making public a set of text messages discussing efforts to quash the story of her alleged affair with Mr. Trump as it emerged early this year.

The suit, filed in California State Court, accused Keith M. Davidson, the Beverly Hills lawyer who represented Ms. Clifford in 2016, of violating attorney-client privilege. It also said he withheld relevant communications from her and her current lawyer, Michael Avenatti.

The suit accused Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, of helping and encouraging Mr. Davidson to breach his professional duties of confidentiality and loyalty to his client this year. In 2016, Mr. Cohen paid her $130,000 shortly before the election to keep quiet about the alleged affair.