Meme Misattributes Quote On Afghanistan To Trump
A viral meme falsely claims that former President Donald Trump suggested that the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was an orchestrated distraction by Democrats. A spokesperson for Trump has denied he made that remark. A very similar statement, not attributed to the former president, previously went viral on Facebook.
Trump Told Pence They Wouldnt Be Friends Anymore If The Vp Didnt Overturn The Election Because Hes A 5
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In the days following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, a narrative emerged in which Donald Trumps longtime footstool, Mike Pence, was hailed as something of a hero for refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Despite relentless pressure from the then president to block Joe Bidens electoral win, which entailed alternately cajoling and browbeating the V.P. and telling him, You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy, Pence officially certified the results following a short interlude in which Trumps supporters threatened to kill him.
But as it turns out, Pence came much closer to overthrowing democracy on his bosss behalf. According to Peril, a new book out next week by veteran reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Pence, in his own telling, did everything he could to try and stop the certification of a free and fair election. Per CNN:
The Washington Postreports that Peril also contains the news that General the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was legitimately terrified that the president was crazy enough to start a war with China just for shits.
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Todd Farha Thaddeus Bereday William Kale Paul Behrens Peter Clay
President Trump granted full pardons to Todd Farha, Thaddeus Bereday, William Kale, Paul Behrens, and Peter Clay, former executives of a healthcare maintenance organization. Widely cited as a case study in overcriminalization, these men have attracted a broad range of support, including from the CATO Institute, the Reason Foundation, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and various scholars and law professors. In 2008, Messrs. Farha, Bereday, Kale, Behrens, and Clay were criminally prosecuted for a state regulatory matter involving the reporting of expenditures to a state health agency. The expenditures reported were based on actual monies spent, and the reporting methodology was reviewed and endorsed by those with expertise in the state regulatory scheme. Notably, there was no evidence that any of the individuals were motivated by greed. And in fact, the sentencing judge called the likelihood that there was any personal financial motivation infinitesimal. The judge imposed a range of sentences from probation to 3 years imprisonment, reflecting the conduct as an aberration from these individuals otherwise law-abiding lives. Messrs. Farha, Bereday, Kale, Behrens, and Clay are described as devoted to their family and their communities, and have weathered their convictions without complaint.
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Impeachment Is An ‘act Of Political Vengeance’ Trump Lawyer Says
“At no point was the president informed the vice president was in any danger,” Michael van der Veen argued, adding that there is “nothing at all in record on this point.” Van der Veen also accused the House impeachment managers of failing to do their due diligence on this issue.
“What the president did know is that there was a violent riot happening at the Capitol,” van der Veen said. “That’s why he repeatedly called via tweet and via video for the riots to stop, to be peaceful, to respect Capitol police and law enforcement and to commit no violence and go home.”
But van der Veen’s argument left senators with additional questions.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who says he is undecided on whether he’ll vote to convict Trump, asked for more details regarding Tuberville’s account of the call with Trump and his tweet railing against Pence.
“Does this show that President Trump was tolerant of the intimidation of Vice President Pence?” Cassidy asked.
But again, van der Veen disputed the sequence of events, calling discussion of Tuberville’s call “hearsay.”
“I have a problem with the facts in the question because I have no idea,” van der Veen responded.
Cassidy told reporters later that he didn’t think his question got a good answer.
Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, hailed by many for his heroism during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, participates in a the dress rehearsal for Inauguration Day.hide caption
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“History will wait for our decision.”
Trump Endorsed 75 Candidates In The Midterms How Did They Fare On Election Day
Editor’s Note:
This post has been updated to correct the win percentage for President Trumps endorsees and also to add races which were called after the initial post was written.
All midterm elections become referenda on the sitting president, and this one was no different. The New York Review of Books even cited UCSD election scholar Gary Jacobsons assertion that a sitting president has never been as central an issue in a midterm election as Trump is in 2018.
So how should we interpret what this means for Trump? The first is to see how his candidates did on Election Day, and to compare how they did with other national figures. Here at Brookings, we kept track of all the House and Senate candidates who were endorsed by one of the following major political figures: President Trump, Vice President Pence, former President Obama, former Vice President Biden, or Sen. Bernie Sanders. We then calculated how the candidates they endorsed performed on election night.
As we can see from the bar graph below, Trump endorsed 75 House and Senate candidates, of whom 42 or 55 percent won. With this rate, Trump performed better than Vice President Mike Pence, for whom nearly 50 percent won, but fell behind Obamas and Bidens endorsees. Sanders does the best, as his endorsees won 70 percent of the time.
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Trump Claims Millions Voted Illegally In 2016
Epitomizing the rare phenomenon of the sore winner, Trump insisted in late November 2016 that he would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. He repeated the lie for years and even claimed falsely in a June 2019 interview with Meet the Press that California admitted it had counted a million illegal votes.
This wasnt just a tossed-off random Trumpian fabrication. His insistence that Democrats had deployed ineligible voters led to his appointment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017. The commission was ostensibly led by Vice-President Mike Pence but was more closely identified with its co-chairman Kris Kobach, the immigrant-bashing, vote-suppressing secretary of State of Kansas. As David Daley explains, it was a wide-ranging fishing expedition that caught exactly zero fish:
Kobachs plan was easy to discern: The commission was to be the front through which a cabal of shadowy Republican activists and oft-debunked academics, backed by misleading studies, laundered their phony voting-fraud theories into a justification for real-world suppression tactics such as national voter ID and massive coast-to-coast electoral-roll purges.
Trump Dials Back On Russia Hack Invitation
According to Merriam-Webster, visits to its dictionary website to look up the word “treason” spiked 76 percent after Donald Trump’s comments Wednesday about Russia and Hillary Clinton’s emails.
“They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted,” he said. “If Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I’d love to see them.”
Many have wondered, if he was urging a foreign country to hack into the computers of a U.S. political candidate, was he committing a crime?
Related: Trump Urges Russia to Expose Clinton’s Personal Email
Trump and his campaign have said he wasn’t encouraging anyone to hack into anything, though he did say at one point Wednesday, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
There is, of course, nothing to hack into now. The clintonemail.com server was decommissioned long ago. Trump seemed to be saying, if anyone did hack into it in the past and still has the e-mails it contained, turn them over.
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Will Donald Trump Lose Support After Encouraging Russian Espionage
But suppose he was urging a foreign government to hack a political candidate? Would that be a crime?
Treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution, consisting of levying war against the United States or “adhering to” to an enemy, which means giving aid and comfort.
“What Donald Trump said does not amount to treason,” said Carlton Larson, a professor at the University of California at Davis School of Law and one of the nation’s few experts on the law of treason.
For starters, he says, only a country or entity that has declared war or is in a state of open war constitutes an enemy, so Russia and China don’t count. Second, Larson says, aid and comfort must be something material, not words of encouragement.
“Putting the interest of another country ahead of the United States, though a bad thing to do, is just not adhering to an enemy,” he said.
Related: Donald Trump’s Plea to Russian Hackers Roils the Campaign
Larson notes that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 after they were convicted on espionage charges for passing U.S. atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, could not be charged with treason because the Soviets were not considered enemies under the treason provision.
No one has been convicted of treason in the US in nearly 70 years.
Some have wondered if Trump’s statement amounts to the solicitation of a crime. But federal law requires using or threatening to use physical force to meet that definition.
What The Fuck Just Happened Today
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1/ The Senate postponed a vote to suspend the nationâs debt limit after Republicans planned to filibuster the effort for the third time in two weeks. Mitch McConnell and Republicans lawmakers continue to block debate on the legislation as part of their opposition to Bidenâs economic agenda, arguing that Democrats should raise the debt limit unilaterally through reconciliation. Democrats, however, have repeatedly said that reconciliation is not an option, since it would be too complicated, time-consuming, and âriskyâ given the threat of a first-ever default on federal debt. Democrats need at least 10 Republicans to join them to break a filibuster on raising the debt ceiling. Schumer has said he wants Congress to pass legislation on the debt ceiling by the end of the week.
4/ Florida is the only state that hasnât submitted a plan to the Education Department for how itâll use federal Covid-19 relief funds for schools. The stateâs plan is required before more than $2.3 billion in federal aid can be released to Floridaâs schools. The Biden administration, meanwhile, ordered Arizona to stop using federal pandemic funding on a pair of grant programs only available to schools without mask mandates.
poll/ 38% of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president â his lowest approval rating since taking office. 53% disapprove.
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After Speaking Out On Impeachment Herrera Beutler Heads Toward Clash With Her Party
“The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,” he said, “and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”
McConnell rebuked Trump for his actions after the insurrection as well.
“He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed and order restored,” he continued.
“No. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily happily as the chaos unfolded,” he said. “Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger.”
But McConnell said that the process of impeachment and conviction is a “limited tool” and that he believes Trump is not “constitutionally eligible for conviction.”
“The Constitution gives us a particular role. This body is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal,” he said.
He said that the text of the question of constitutionality is “legitimately ambiguous” and that he “respects” his colleagues for reaching either the conclusion to acquit or convict.
Seven Republicans broke ranks with their party in voting for a conviction.
Michael van der Veen, defense lawyer for former President Donald Trump, gives closing arguments during Trump’s second impeachment trial on February 13, 2021.hide caption
Thomas Kenton Ken Ford
President Trump granted a full pardon to Ken Ford, a 38-year veteran of the coal industry and currently the General Manager of a coal company. Mr. Fords pardon is supported by members of the coal mining community, including those with extensive experience in mining operations, safety, and engineering, who describe Mr. Ford as a model manager who conducts himself with the utmost professionalism and integrity. Twenty years ago, Mr. Ford made a material misstatement to Federal mining officials. Mr. Ford pled guilty and served a sentence of 3 years probation. In the decades since, Mr. Ford has been an upstanding member of his community and has used this experience and his decades of expertise to keep miners safe, including promoting truthfulness and integrity with Federal mining officials, for whom Mr. Ford states that he has the utmost respect.
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House Impeachment Managers Say Trump’s ‘incitement’ Is Not Protected Speech
Trump’s legal team also argued that his Jan. 6 rally speech was protected by the First Amendment, a contention that impeachment managers labeled ludicrous. This, after all was an impeachment trial, not a criminal proceeding. An impeachment trial is a political process intended to judge whether an official was upholding their oath of office and a standard of conduct.
With his second acquittal, Trump now plots his next steps in political and public life. Yet he is also contending with potential legal trouble stemming from a New York grand jury investigation and a newly announced criminal probe in Georgia.
That’s in addition to Trump’s mounting debt and devalued assets. The former president’s net worth also dropped $1 billion in early 2020, according to Forbes.
Trump has been able to spin difficulties in his business and personal life before, and the country waits to see if has a next, and perhaps final, act.
Lead House impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., delivered his closing arguments on the fifth day of former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial.hide caption
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Lead House impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., delivered his closing arguments on the fifth day of former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial.
“It’s now clear beyond doubt that Trump supported the actions of the mob,” lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin said on the Senate floor.
“He must be convicted,” said the Maryland Democrat. “It’s that simple.”
