Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

This looks a bit more substantial than the other allegations but there are lots of unanswered questions about where the material comes from, how authentic it is and whether the relationship continued beyond Deripaska accusing Manafort of ripping him off for $19m in 2014.

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.

Some questions about this too - was repossessing state-owned assets ever mooted? What would the US have had to do with it? They've generally been more keen on keeping state assets in the privates sector than allowing them back into public control.

If they can verify the documents and offer a bit more substance, it could be interesting though.

Trump no doubt asking Sessions if he can, as president, legally have Manafort thrown out a window.

Ha, he literally moved into Trump Tower the year after signing that $10 mil contract to help the Russians.

What would the US have had to do with it?

Asking the wrong question. What could a con man(afort) convince a mark that the US could have to do with it, for the right price?

So yeah, all those comments about 'when will people realize supporting Trump means going against their interests,' etc.

Will this do?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/21/health/opioid-trump-supporter-medicaid-health-care-reform/index.html

good mourning!

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/obamacare-repeal-senate-mcconnell-236326

“Maybe the best outcome is for this to fail in the House so we can move on to tax reform. Which is what we should have done anyway,” said one Republican senator, granted anonymity to make a frank assessment of the party’s political predicament.

xps to Tombot,

It's definitely plausible that the US was seen at the time (not long after the Orange Revolution) as potential power-brokers when it all went sideways. They were never going to come in and demand Ukraine nationalised the coal industry but there was a lot of 'reform' money sloshing about and competition for influence - albeit not as much as there is now. Deripaska hired Manafort for something and the biggest asset he brought with him was his extensive network of connections in the US government.

My completely baseless speculation on Manafort is that someone (possibly the Ukrainian government) is orchestrating a smear campaign against him - largely for domestic reasons, that at least some of the evidence is probably fake or selectively edited but that there's basically enough truth in it to make it impossible to convincingly rebut. He's a crook who received secret payments to influence US policy on behalf of criminal oligarchs and should never have been in a position to go back to managing political campaigns. I assume the same could be said of a lot of people though. His partner, Rick Davis, ran McCain's campaign in 2008 and doesn't sound much cleaner.

“Maybe the best outcome is for this to fail in the House so we can move on to tax reform. Which is what we should have done anyway,” said one Republican senator, granted anonymity to make a frank assessment of the party’s political predicament.

like Trump is going to have the power to pull off tax reform if he emerges weakened from this farrago.

how will he possibly muster enough GOP votes for tax cuts for the rich?

seriously, seems much more straightforward when you remove the part about taking away everyone's health insurance from the equation.

meanwhile my alma mater's law school dean gets ready for his hearing admid controversies of his own.

One of my friends just now on FB, commenting on the defenestration story: It's all just coincidence. Notice how many of these things involve real estate to launder money. Hmmmm who do I know who is in real estate and looooooooooves Russia but totally doesn't know any of these people and why do you want to see his tax returns?

Really? Rick Davis? McCain lost, so DGAF.

Is it really necessary to run a "smear campaign" against Manafort? A "smear campaign" is what the FBI and the NYT and Cilizza do to the Clintons. Calling Manafort a crook seems more like "smearing" rain by spreading around stories about how wet it is.

Yeah, it doesn't help to start any sort of agnostic defense with something like "sure, he's a corrupt crook, but there are a lot of corrupt crooks." Don't have to prove motive in a criminal case, just that someone broke the law. And someone like Manafort at the nexus of all this Russia stuff just keeps tightening the noose.

Tax cuts will be tainted by Trump's proposed draconian budget. It's a lot harder to push tax cuts when they literally have a list of everything and everyone that would likely be affected. But bring it on, I say. Dems can run on it. "Trump said he would help you, and that he would drain the swamp. Instead, after his health care proposal - which would have hurt millions of people - failed, he and his Goldman Sachs cronies immediately moved on to rewarding rich people with tax cuts while cutting your services."

Basically, seems impossible to take a position as a man of the people populist, a GOP war hawk, culture war conservative and an anti-tax libertarian all at the same time.

Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky was unrestrained in his praise for President Trump: Opening for him at a rally on Monday, Mr. Bevin, a conservative Republican, echoed Mr. Trump’s “America First” slogan and only gently noted the nagging divisions in their party.

“We now have a president and a Congress that are united in party, and yet we still have disagreements among us,” Mr. Bevin said, insisting, “This is healthy and good.”

In private, Mr. Bevin has been blunter about the party’s disagreements. Just days before appearing with Mr. Trump in Louisville, he joined a conference call with the president’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, to protest a White House proposal to defund the Appalachian Regional Commission, an economic development agency that spans 13 states and steers millions of dollars in federal money to Kentucky.

Mr. Bevin was not alone in his dismay.

As Mr. Trump and his advisers press for bone-deep cuts to the federal budget, Republican governors have rapidly emerged as an influential bloc of opposition. They have complained to the White House about reductions they see as harmful or arbitrary, and they plan to pressure members of Congress from their states to oppose them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/us/eyeing-trumps-budget-plan-republican-governors-say-no-thanks.html

Is it really necessary to run a "smear campaign" against Manafort? A "smear campaign" is what the FBI and the NYT and Cilizza do to the Clintons. Calling Manafort a crook seems more like "smearing" rain by spreading around stories about how wet it is.

Kind of, but it's not just about Manafort any more. It's about who else gets swept along with him and what the consequences of that would be. The Manafort texts suggest that the anti-corruption MP who accused him yesterday of hiding a $750k payment was seeking payoffs himself - which would be hugely detrimental to the current campaign against domestic graft if true. They also suggest that Yanukovich and Manafort premeditated the killing of protesters in Maidan Nezalezhnosti - which is another hugely contentious domestic point. Allegations that Manafort was involved in Ukrainian politics after 2014 could sway future elections. Hints that two main oligarchs in Donbass - Dmytro Firtash and Rinat Akhmetov are part of a Russian-government-controlled network with Deripaska play into the domestic power struggle between them and Poroshenko / Kolomoisky / Pinchuk, etc.

Even if Manafort is a villain, which we all agree with, the evidence - and the people providing it - still matters.

A lot of that 'evidence' is left aside by sites like AP, right? I'd guess they do a lot of proofing right now.

You'd think so. They have been incredibly vague about where it comes from and what it consists of, but that might be expected. What is kind of interesting is how slow Russia-focused journalists have been to comment on this. I'd guess there's a lot of double and triple checking of their own sources going on at the moment.

Well, they got a response from Manafort, and he apparently didn't deny the explosive memo.

Manafort might want to reallocate his crisis management budget to his legal team.

Did you know President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican? President Trump apparently thinks most people don’t.

“Great president,” Trump said Tuesday night at a fundraising dinner for House Republicans. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican. Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that. We have to build that up a little more.”

Trump then suggested using a political action committee to run advertisements letting people know that Lincoln was a member of his party.

What's it called when you assume that everyone else is as dumb as you are?

Dunning-Kruger?

“Maybe the best outcome is for this to fail in the House so we can move on to tax reform. Which is what we should have done anyway,” said one Republican senator, granted anonymity to make a frank assessment of the party’s political predicament.

can I bet money that this was Sasse

https://media.tenor.co/images/1adc82b4fda387f154f143364c43d6b0/raw

Ha. "Sass."

For some reason I remember that Luke Perry episode better than most.

Good thread https://twitter.com/mattmfm/status/844159094302949376

xp that episode also had a great Sprockets:

https://www.hulu.com/watch/276488

Good lord these fucking people https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/22/ex-colo-gop-leader-said-only-democrats-committed-voter-fraud-now-hes-charged-with-voter-fraud/

The 2016 election was just a month away when Steve Curtis, a conservative radio host and former Colorado Republican Party chairman, devoted an entire episode of his morning talk show to the heated topic of voter fraud.

“It seems to me,” Curtis said in the 42-minute segment, “that virtually every case of voter fraud I can remember in my lifetime was committed by Democrats.”

On Tuesday, Colorado prosecutors threw a wrench into that already dubious theory, accusing Curtis of voter fraud for allegedly filling out and mailing in his ex-wife’s 2016 ballot for president, Denver’s Fox affiliate reported.

Curtis, 57, was charged in Weld County District Court with one count of misdemeanor voter fraud and one count of forgery, a Class 5 felony, according to local media.

. . . Officials in Weld County, Colo., said they learned of Curtis’s allegedly fraudulent ballot when his ex-wife, Kelly Curtis, called the local elections office in October asking how she could cast a vote by mail in Colorado from her new home in South Carolina, Fox 31 reported.

An election worker reportedly told her the office had already received her ballot. Per Fox 31:

“I was just completely stunned. I thought there had to be some kind of mistake,” said Kelly Curtis.

That’s when verification judges for the Weld County Clerk and Recorder’s Office got involved. “We compared her (ballot) signature just to the signatures on her registration,” said Weld County Clerk and Recorder Carly Koppes, who quickly determined the signatures didn’t match but noted the ballot was sent from Steve Curtis’s home in Firestone, Colo.

The Weld County district attorney’s office opened an investigation, filing a criminal complaint on Feb. 1, the Denver Post reported.

ahahahahahahahahahahahaha ffs

that virtually every case of voter fraud I can remember in my lifetime was committed by Democrats

tbf this guy is probably blackout drunk 70% of the time

Blobfish oozes confidence

Though McConnell guarantees that Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed to the Supreme Court before the April recess, he’s a bit more circumspect when it comes to repealing Obamacare.

“We’ll either pass something that will achieve a goal that we’ve been working on," he said. "Or not.”

https://twitter.com/EliClifton/status/844544466216214529

Eli Clifton‏Verified account @EliClifton

Gorka changes story from "I have never been a member of Vitezi Rend" to "I never swore allegiance formally." http://bit.ly/2o2peOu

dreading Yam's outburst on London killing

same

Anything that makes Trump even more loathed n the UK than he already is is fine by me.

it's not that - it's that he will use this as an opportunity to distract from all his other garbage w some grandstanding

Nunes press gaggle in fifty minutes re Trump/Russia:

https://twitter.com/jamiedupree/status/844573118291197953

Presumably obfuscation but who knows?

(xp) I'm thinking from a UK political perspective, given that May has hitched her wagon to the cretin.

oh yeah, I'm sure he'll put his foot in his mouth and offend some britons

“We’ll either pass something that will achieve a goal that we’ve been working on," he said. "Or not.”

how much does McConnell hate his life right now

GOP POO: supreme court justice gorsuch or ACA repeal

Blobby can actually get the votes for Gorsuch.

Reuters:

BREAKING: House Oversight Committee requests documents from White House, FBI on any communications, payments between Flynn and Russia

So Chaffetz is starting to have second thoughts, is he?

Best of both worlds would be GOP pursuing Russia, etc. and still losing seats. Because assholes.

gorka you fuck, you wore the goddamn uniform to the inauguration

xposts

any GOP investigation into russia is going to be half-assed. chaffetz will do enough to avoid widespread criticism and that's it