Tag: Donald Trump

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White House Snips Reporter’s Question To Putin Asking If He Wanted Trump To Win Election

The White House has posted an edited version of the Helsinki press conference removing a question asking if the Russian president wanted Trump to win the 2016 election.

The White House has chosen to post a oh-so-slightly edited version of the press conference with Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin the Helsinki summit.

The new White House version omits one sentence from a Reuters reporter asking Putin if he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election.

Rachel Maddow highlighted the edit during her broadcast Tuesday night.

Here’s the original transcript unedited:

Putin: “Options abound. And they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.”

Reuters: “Mr. President, did you want President Trump to win the election? And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?

Putin: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did.”

Now, here’s the version the White House has posted

Putin: “Options abound. And they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.”

Reuters: “And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?

President Vladimir Putin: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did.”

Things that make you go ‘hmmm….’

Now, why edit just that one little question? Shouldn’t the White House be presenting history as it actually happened?

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Quinnipiac Polling: Trump Approval Rating At 38%, Majority Of Americans Believe Putin Has Dirt On Trump

Donald Trump won’t be pleased to see the results of Quinnipiac’s latest polling on his approval numbers.

Conducted completely post-Helsinki, the new survey shows Trump back on the downswing again to only 38% job approval, with 58% disapproving.

Additionally, from the same survey, American voters believe 51%-35% “that the Russian government has compromising information about President Trump.”

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Trump Tweets Caps-Locked Rant At Country That Can’t See Twitter

Donald Trump

Donald Trump shocked many last night as he tweeted a full-on, caps-lock threat to Iran.

According to newspaper reports, Iran’s President Rouhani urged Trump to make peace with Iran.

Rouhani is quoted as saying “American must understand well that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace and war with Iran is the mother of all wars.”

Rouhani went on to warn Trump to stop “playing with the lion’s tail” and threatening Iran, “or else you will regret it.”

And so, the Trumpster’s tiny fingers tapped out, “To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”

It’s not clear who Trump was trying to impress with his swagger as Twitter has been banned in Iran since 2009. So, the folks there weren’t reading this.

The Twitterverse immediately assumed some bad news is about to come down Trump’s pike and this was a case of ‘wag the dog.’

As we all know, Trump has tweeted the idea of threatening war with Iran as a distraction many times in the past.

There’s always a tweet.

More from the tweet people:

Some Twitterers took the missive for the unhinged musing that it is and just inserted song lyrics at random:

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Trump Rants Over Seized Cohen Recordings

Donald Trump angrily tweets about his own lawyer recording their private conversations.

The breaking news late yesterday afternoon was Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime ‘fixer,’ had recorded his conversation with the Trumpster planning a hush money payment to former Playboy model Karen MacDougal about their alleged 10 month affair shortly after Melania Trump had given birth to their son, Barron.

Trump, who is said to be ‘livid’ over the revelation, took to Twitter this morning to vent, saying, “Inconceivable that the government would break into a lawyer’s office (early in the morning) – almost unheard of. Even more inconceivable that a lawyer would tape a client – totally unheard of & perhaps illegal. The good news is that your favorite President did nothing wrong!”

Obviously, the Donald is playing fast and loose with the truth here.

The government didn’t ‘break’ into anywhere. There are established procedures for searching an attorney’s office and the Justice Department followed them including getting a legal search warrant from a judge.

Also, New York state – where Trump and Cohen lived and worked in 2016 – is a “one-party” consent state, which means a person can legally record or monitor a conversation with the consent of one party to the conversation.

Speaking of “secret recordings,” remember when Trump hinted he might have some of his own?

The one thing Trump is right about is that it is very unusual for an attorney to record his own conversations with clients.

You have to wonder why Cohen felt the need to do so two months before the election?

Unless he knew he might need that recording at some point in the future…?

p.s. Trump is NOT the country’s ‘favorite president.’ He lost the popular vote by three million votes and his approval rating average according to RealClearPolitics is 43%.

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Michael Cohen Recorded Trump ‘Hush Money’ Conversation

Former ‘fixer’ for Donald Trump – Michael Cohen

From The New York Times:

President Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Mr. Trump two months before the presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump, according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording.

The F.B.I. seized the recording this year during a raid on Mr. Cohen’s office. The Justice Department is investigating Mr. Cohen’s involvement in paying women to tamp down embarrassing news stories about Mr. Trump ahead of the 2016 election. Prosecutors want to know whether that violated federal campaign finance laws, and any conversation with Mr. Trump about those payments would be of keen interest to them.

The recording’s existence further draws Mr. Trump into questions about tactics he and his associates used to keep aspects of his personal and business life a secret. And it highlights the potential legal and political danger that Mr. Cohen represents to Mr. Trump.

Once the keeper of many of Mr. Trump’s secrets, Mr. Cohen is now seen as increasingly willing to consider cooperating with prosecutors.

You’ll recall the White House ferociously denied that Donald Trump knew ANYTHING about the payments to Karen McDougal, who says she began a nearly yearlong affair with the Trumpster in 2006, shortly after Melania Trump gave birth to their son, Barron.

According to CNN’s Dana Bash and Gloria Borger, Trump is privately livid about the revelation:

From Stormy Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti:

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Trump Reverses Course (Again) On Putin Proposal

Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Putin (R)

During the Donald Trump/Vladimir Putin press conference on Monday, Trump praised Putin’s ‘offer’ to allow Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to travel to Russia to ‘observe’ interrogations of the 12 indicted Russian military officers as ‘incredible.’

In exchange, however, Putin wants to question Americans including our former Ambassador to Russia who was critical of the Russian president.

Danger Will Robinson, danger.

Via Politico:

Trump called the idea an “incredible offer” during the news conference. And on Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the president would “meet with his team” on Putin’s proposal, setting off a Russia-related backlash against the Trump administration for the third straight day.

By Thursday, as the Senate prepared to formally rebuke Trump, the White House reversed course.

“It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it,” Sanders said in a statement. “Hopefully President Putin will have the 12 identified Russians come to the United States to prove their innocence or guilt.”

The Senate voted 98-0 for a resolution denouncing the idea that we would hand over our foreign diplomats, past or present, to Russian agents for interrogation.

By the way, a new poll by SurveyMonkey shows 79% of Republicans approve of how Trump handled the Monday press conference.

Compare that with 91% of Democrats who disapproved and 62% of Independents who disapproved.

Overall, the numbers fell pretty much in line with Trump’s usually polling – 58% disapproved and 40% approved.

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Schoolhouse Rock Explains Trump’s Russian Presser Defense – “Double Negative Junction”

The Late Show presents “Double Negative 

From The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

“The newest Schoolhouse Rock! song explains double negatives and how the president doesn’t not use them to lie.”

In an effort to explain the now-popular ‘double negative’ defense by Donald Trump (hey, it can happen to anyone speaking on the world stage on behalf of the most powerful nation in the world), The Late Show harkens back to the 70s ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ to explain what it was that
Trump was trying to say.

Double negative, what’s your function?
A desperate way to not side with the Russians
Double negative, how’s that function?
Confusing the people with sentence construction…

#Fabulous

(h/t TheOUTFront)

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Trump Covers TIME & The New Yorker

Photo illustration by Nancy Burson for TIME

“Popular, you’re gonna be pop-u-u-lar…”

Donald Trump graces the covers of both TIME and The New Yorker this week.

In the TIME cover, the editors have merged the faces of the Trumpster and Vladimir Putin into one image, because, well, they have become one.

And from The New Yorker:

A little more than three years ago, Donald Trump descended an escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the Presidency. That image makes a return in Barry Blitt’s latest cover, which remarks on Trump’s performance during and after his summit with Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki.

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Report: Trump Was Briefed On Russian Interference Weeks Before Taking Office

The New York Times reports that Donald Trump was briefed, in detail, two week before his inauguration, about Russia's interference in the 2016 election.
Donald Trump

On January 6, 2017, two weeks before taking an oath to defend the United States of America, Donald Trip was briefed by James Clapper, director of national intelligence; John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.

Trump was informed, in detail, of the vast amount of evidence that showed Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

From The New York Times:

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.

Also present at the meeting was the-FBI director James Comey. It was after that briefing that Comey privately shared with Trump the now-infamous Steele Dossier.

In other words, Trump has known since before he entered the White House that Putin ordered the disruption.

And he pushed out every top official at that meeting to protect himself.

One day after being shown all of the damning evidence, Trump went on the offense attempting to obfuscate the issue.

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With Fox News Turning On Him, Trump Attempts To Walk Back Statements At Putin Summit

Calling his Helsinki summit with Putin the “most successful visit” about “the most pressing issues facing humanity,” Trump claimed that the U.S. relationship with Russia is now “substantially better” after the summit.
Donald Trump

In a very awkwardly delivered statement, Donald Trump (reading from prepared remarks) attempted to walk back some of his disastrous comments made in Helsinki yesterday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Calling his Helsinki summit with Putin the “most successful visit” about “the most pressing issues facing humanity,” Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. relationship with Russia is now “substantially better” after the summit.

The Trumpster also asserted that he has faith in the U.S. intelligence establishment’s conclusion that Russia interfered, and then swerved back into the underbrush saying it could also be somebody else.

“I have a full faith in our intelligence agencies. Always have. I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling took place (though) it could be other people also.”

And just for good measure, or out of habit, he threw in another “There was no collusion at all.”

Trump tried to explain that at the summit he ‘misspoke’ and said “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia” rather than “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.”

Here’s the word salad explanation: “The sentence should have been ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’ sort of a double negative. So you can put that in and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself. I have on numerous occasions noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere in our elections.”

Watch below.

And for the Game of Thrones fans: