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Francisco 2.0

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Posts posted by Francisco 2.0

  1. 5 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

    Obviously hannity is an unethical piece of shit and in no way a credible journalist, and should have been fired for any one of the things that have come out this week but in what way are his dealings with Cohen illegal?  I get that he could be guilty of some financial crimes for not disclosing ownership in financial vehicles he was pitching, but the Cohen stuff isn’t that is it?

    I don't believe anyone is suggesting Hannity's entanglements with Cohen are illegal.  They could be embarrassing and/or a violation of his gig at Fox, however.  

  2. 2 hours ago, SizzleChest said:

    https://www.axios.com/sean-hannity-property-holdings-michael-cohen-fb0b1425-6a79-481b-91e4-13e6033e0c8b.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

     

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    Some of the property purchases were financed utilizing mortgage assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development — and Hannity was a vocal supporter of Ben Carson to head the agency without disclosing that connection. These revelations surrounding Hannity's property holdings highlight the ethical issues between his journalistic work and his personal entanglements with the Trump administration.

     

  3. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/22/trump-christian-evangelical-conservatives-television-tbn-cbn-218008

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    The Music City campus of the Trinity Broadcasting Network is about a half-hour drive from Music City itself, in a placid Nashville suburb on a bend in the Cumberland River where the main road through town is called the Johnny Cash Parkway. TBN, America’s largest Christian television network, acquired the complex in 1994 after the death of country singer Conway Twitty, who had operated it as a sprawling tourist attraction he called Twitty City. Last year, TBN renovated Twitty’s personal auditorium, leveling the floor, adding large neon signs and a faux-brick backdrop under the original Corinthian columns. The resulting TV set looks like an urban streetscape framed by a Greek temple.

    On a February night, in his large office just above the auditorium, the network’s biggest star is making last-minute plans for what’s shaping up to be a busy evening. First, Mike Huckabee fields some logistics for dinner at his nearby condo, where he will host three couples who won the privilege in a charity auction. He takes a call from the actor Jon Voight, who tells Huckabee he is free to do an interview about Israel. (Huckabee leaves the next day for Jerusalem, where TBN opened another studio a few years ago.) He checks with one of his producers about an old “Laugh-In” clip Huckabee had requested. “We aren’t paying $6,500 for it, good gosh!” he laughs when he hears the cost of the snippet. “Did they point a gun at your head and wear a ski mask when you asked that?” (They decide not to use it.)

    Two hours later, Huckabee walks onto a stage in front of more than 200 people and kicks off a taping of his hourlong cable show. For nearly all of its 45-year history, Trinity’s programming had been strictly religious, a mix of evangelical preachers, gospel music and a flagship talk show called “Praise the Lord” (now just “Praise”). But Huckabee’s show is saturated with politics. The former two-term governor of Arkansas and one-time Iowa caucus winner opens with a disquisition on the Fourth Amendment (“Our system is designed to make sure the government is your servant”) leading into a pre-taped interview with Senator Rand Paul. It’s followed by an appearance by Kayleigh McEnany, the Republican National Committee spokeswoman and a frequent campaign surrogate for Donald Trump. The crowd roars with laughter when Huckabee promises he won’t go on for as long as Nancy Pelosi, a reference to her recent filibuster-style speech on the House floor. “Can you imagine Nancy Pelosi for eight hours?” he asks, chuckling. “NO!” the audience shouts back.

    When “Huckabee” made its debut on TBN last fall, it immediately became the network’s highest-rated show, with more than a million viewers for a typical episode. Unlike every other show the network has produced, it is overtly political and squarely focused on current events. It has a variety component, with musical guests and comedians, and Huckabee occasionally breaks out his own bass guitar on stage. But in its six months on the air, Huckabee has also interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump-defending Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, anti-abortion activist Serrin Foster and former Senator Joe Lieberman. The very first guest on his very first show, last October, was President Trump.

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    A generation ago—even a few years ago—this would have been unthinkable. Christian TV was largely the province of preachers, musicians, faith healers and a series of televangelism scandals. Politicians were leery of getting too close. To establishment evangelicals, not to mention the rest of America, Christian TV was hokey at best, and disreputable at worst.

    But in the past two years, largely out of view of the coastal media and the Washington establishment, a transformation has taken place. As Christian networks have become more comfortable with politics, the Trump administration has turned them into a new pipeline for its message. Trump has forged a particularly tight marriage of convenience with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, which since early in the 2016 campaign has offered consistent friendly coverage and been granted remarkable access in return. Trump personally has appeared 11 times on CBN since his campaign began; in 2017 alone, he gave more interviews to CBN than to CNN, ABC or CBS. Trump’s Cabinet members, staffers and surrogates also appear regularly. TBN has embraced politics more gingerly—it is still not a news-gathering organization—but Trump has made inroads there, too, starting with his kickoff interview on “Huckabee.”

    Spoiler

    The benefits are mutual. For the networks, having White House officials regularly on screen gives new legitimacy to media organizations that have long felt looked down upon. CBN has belonged to the White House press corps for decades and occupied a seat in the White House briefing room since the Obama era. But its status has risen dramatically during the Trump presidency, when press secretary Sean Spicer gave questions to CBN reporters three times in the first two weeks of the term. During a joint news conference with Netanyahu, Trump himself picked CBN’s chief political correspondent, David Brody, to ask the first question. “The Trump administration has given CBN News the opportunity to be recognized in places a Christian news organization normally wouldn’t,” CBN vice president and news director Rob Allman wrote in an email.

    For the White House, the relationship is arguably even more useful. Christian broadcasters offer an unmediated channel to the living rooms of a remarkably wide swath of American believers, an audience more politically and racially diverse than you might expect. TBN alone has more local stations to its name than Fox or the three major networks. “It’s about as direct a route as you can go,” says Michael Wear, a former Obama White House and campaign staffer who has appeared on CBN. They offer Trump officials a softball treatment available in few other venues. Huckabee’s own daughter, after all, is the president’s press secretary—a relationship that would disqualify him as an interviewer on most networks. One of Huckabee’s questions to the president was about the first lady, and whether it bothered the president that his wife “has fantastic approval ratings, soaring above anybody else in the entire city of Washington.”

    This dance between administration politics and televised religion is new, and is built on a connection between Trump’s message and the Christian TV worldview that runs deeper than it might first appear. It also offers a different kind of answer to the puzzle of why an impious man who can barely manage to pay lip service to actual Christian belief earned a higher percentage of the white evangelical vote than predecessors including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush—and why, if anything, his bond with those voters appears to be growing stronger.

    Evangelists have been a fixture of television since the 1950s, and there’s a reason politicians stayed away for so long. Almost from the start, TV preachers carried a unique whiff of tawdriness. There were the preferences for gaudy sets, big hair and absurd stunts, for one. Oklahoma televangelist Oral Roberts once told viewers that unless he received an extra $8 million by the next month, he would die. (The ensuing wave of donations spared him.) Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker opened their own theme park in the 1970s, and TBN, with its own roster of flashy preachers, still maintains its Holy Land Experience park in Orlando, Florida. Then there were the waves of legal disgrace. The “Gospelgate” scandals of the 1980s, implicating big-ticket televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and the Bakkers with a series of sexual and financial misdeeds, seemed to permanently tar the whole enterprise.

    Not all Christian television is televangelism, and not all televangelists are corrupt or even tacky. But American presidents have nonetheless mostly steered clear, preferring to select their religious advisers from more sober ranks of pastors and writers. (Billy Graham, spiritual adviser to many presidents, preached on television but had roots and connections far beyond the airwaves.) Presidents occasionally granted interviews, especially with the powerful Robertson, founder of CBN, with whom President Reagan sat down on the network’s “The 700 Club” in 1985—but they have done so carefully and rarely.

    Trump had none of that caution. He started showing up on Christian TV years ago, giving his first interview to Brody back in 2011, when he was toying with a run for president that no mainstream network took seriously. Trump discussed his “conversion” to opposing abortion, his respect for the Bible (“THE book”) and his churchgoing habits (“I go as much as I can”). Most Republican candidates make occasional stops by CBN to woo conservative Christians. But Trump seemed to take a real shine to Brody, and he must have known he would need to put in overtime to bolster his credibility with religious voters. As his 2016 run gained momentum, a steady stream of staffers and surrogates, including Kellyanne Conway, former Representative Michele Bachmann and televangelist Paula White, appeared on the network to vouch for Trump’s Christian credentials. White told Brody in June 2016 that Trump had first discovered her ministry by watching Christian broadcasting more than a decade before. “Mr. Trump has always been a huge fan,” she said. “He’d always watch Christian television.”

    Whether or not that was true, Trump seemed to sense early on that the Christian television audience would be receptive to his campaign theme of a kind of resentful nostalgia for an imagined idyllic past. When I interviewed Brody last year for a profile, he said Trump shared with older evangelicals a longing for “1950s America,” characterized by patriotism, prayer in school and an absence of political correctness (though he took pains to clarify that the ’50s were not a good era for “race relations”). As Huckabee puts it on one of his promos on TBN, “If you like baseball, apple pie and you love your mom, I’ve got just the show for you.”

    But if Trump detected a cultural affinity with viewers of Christian television, he was also capitalizing on a deliberate turn that the medium was already taking. On TBN, “Huckabee” is part of a change under the leadership of Matt Crouch, who took over recently from his father, Paul, who founded the network back in 1973. The talk show is the network’s most obvious nod to politics, but in the past few years it has also added a newsmagazine show called “The Watchman,” focused on “gathering threats to America’s and Israel’s security”—it’s hard to overstate Christian TV’s interest in Israel—and started airing “Somebody’s Gotta Do It,” in which blue-collar conservative Mike Rowe visits “hardworking Americans” on the job. (Rowe’s show originally aired on CNN; TBN recut the episodesto include scenes like family prayers and snipped out mild cursing.) This is, in part, an effort to reach a new audience of millennials who aren’t as interested in watching sermons on TV. “We’ve got to get beyond the church, beyond the pews,” Colby May, a TBN board member, said of the network’s new direction. May says TBN isn’t trying to emphasize politics per se, but to be seen as more relevant. Huckabee’s interview with Trump “was an exciting and different kind of guest for Christian television,” he says.

    CBN, for its part, had been in the news business since the 1970s, when the network opened a bureau in Washington, and “The 700 Club” transformed from a variety show into its current newsmagazine format. Robertson relishes his role as a kind of ward heeler of the Christian conservative vote, and candidates courting that vote would make obligatory campaign stops on CBN. But Robertson’s own pronouncements on current events seemed enough to keep mainstream politicians at arm’s length: Since the peak of his influence in the 1980s, he has become better known for dire predictions based on divine revelation, his notorious linkage of Hurricane Katrina to American abortion policy and his repeated insistence that Islam is less a religion than a dangerous political system.

    If that last point sounds like something you might have heard at a Trump campaign rally, that begins to get at the affinity between Trumpworld and this particular set of TV viewers. In retrospect, it’s possible to see Robertson as a kind of elder statesman of the exact kind of “politically incorrect” conservative populism that Trump’s campaign rhetoric tapped into so naturally. A viewer who had stuck with Robertson through all that wasn’t likely to be put off by a candidate who took potshots at Mexicans and Muslims.

    By the time Trump arrived on the political scene, it almost didn’t matter that he wasn’t much of a Christian, or tended to mangle the names of the books of the Bible. This audience recognized him as a kindred spirit in everything but religion. His hair-sprayed reality-TV persona—to say nothing of the bluster and the heroic monologues—aren’t that far from the preaching style that has prospered on cable evangelism. His family’s pastor when he was a child wasn’t the minister of the local Presbyterian church, but celebrity success guru Norman Vincent Peale, who had a long-running radio show called “The Art of Living.” Trump ran his campaign events more like tent revivals than policy symposia. And his books and TV persona dovetailed surprisingly well with the “prosperity gospel” preaching that thrives on Christian TV, the relatively new American theology in which material wealth is seen not only as a reward for good behavior, but a kind of endorsement by God.

    Today, Christian broadcasters have rewarded Trump not just with airtime for his surrogates, but with uncritical, often defensive coverage of his administration. Appearing as a guest on “The Jim Bakker Show” soon after the racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, Paula White compared Trump to the biblical queen Esther, and told viewers that opposing the president meant “fighting against the hand of God.” CBN’s Brody this year published a hagiographic “spiritual biography” of the president, The Faith of Donald J. Trump, in which he argues that Trump is on a “spiritual voyage” that has landed him surrounded by believers in the Oval Office. The president obligingly sat down for an interview for the book and later promoted it on Twitter as “a very interesting read.”

    To watch an appearance by a Trump official on “The 700 Club,” or “Faith Nation,” the Washington-based political show hosted by Brody and Jenna Browder that debuted last summer, is to enter a softer precinct of the news universe, one in which officials are treated gently and allowed to air out their views with help, not challenge, from the hosts. When Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney appeared on CBN days after the brief government shutdown in January, he discussed policy issues including immigration and the possibility of passing a spending bill. When Brody asked him about what he would say to Hispanic Christians worried about deportation, Mulvaney reassured them that the president “wants to figure out a way for the DACA folks to stay.” Brody didn’t push him with a follow-up. In December, Vice President Mike Pence went on Brody’s show in part just to reassure evangelicals that Trump is on their team. “The president is a believer, and so am I,” Pence told Brody. “The American people, I think, can be encouraged to know that in President Donald Trump, they have a leader who embraces and respects and appreciates the role of faith and the importance of religion in the lives of our families, in communities in our nation, and he always will.”

    It’s not just a “trust me” argument: Trump has actually delivered the goods in Washington, especially for this particular strain of evangelicals. And he has brought more televangelists and Christian broadcasters into his inner circle than any president before him. White, arguably his closest spiritual adviser, hosted a show that aired on TBN and BET for years. His lawyer, Jay Sekulow, has his own daily call-in radio show on a Christian network. Trump’s faith advisory board, announced during the campaign, included many members drawn from the world of television ministry, including Ken and Gloria Copeland, who have headed a daily program since 1989; Tony Suarez, who hosts a talk show on TBN’s Hispanic-oriented network; Jentezen Franklin and Robert Jeffress, whose sermons air as their own programs on TBN; and Mark Burns, who founded the web-based NOW Network. Johnnie Moore, another advisory board member, is a communications consultant who has worked with clients including CBN. “If you look at his evangelical advisory council, it’s people with media connections, more than broad church-based connections,” Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, says. “That’s a weird slice of the evangelical world.”

    Closer to Trump’s inner circle, the list of friendly faces continues. “This is an evangelical Cabinet,” says Jerry Johnson, president of the National Religious Broadcasters. “You’re looking at name-brand conservative evangelicals that are very comfortable talking to Christian media types.” Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry, Ben Carson and Pence, all evangelical Christians who talk frequently about faith, are among those who have appeared on CBN since Trump took office. And CBN has closely covered what it calls a “spiritual awakening” at the White House, including Oval Office prayers and a weekly Bible study involving many Cabinet members, at one point including Betsy DeVos and the now-departed Tom Price.

    Pence, who himself hosted a conservative talk-radio show and a television show in Indiana in the 1990s, has been a particularly cheerful booster of the work of Christian broadcasters. Speaking at the 75th annual meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters in February, Pence praised its membership’s work. “Your ministry, your message, your values are needed now more than ever before,” he told the crowd in Nashville. “Every day, every hour, you speak strength to the heart of the American people. You shape our country.” (Christian radio is a different business with a somewhat different audience, but it has proved similarly attractive to Trump. Salem Media Group, the largest Christian radio broadcasting platform in the country, spent a day at the White House last summer, hosting a special broadcast with the theme “Made in America.”)

    The audience Christian TV is delivering has a surprising kind of political traction, especially if you lost track of Christian broadcasting after the scandals of the 1980s. “Decline is such an easy narrative,” says Mark Ward, editor of the 2015 book The Electronic Church in the Digital Age. “What really happened is [televangelism] went underground.”

    Newer TV preachers might not be national celebrities with the name recognition of Oral Roberts and Jimmy Swaggart, but they remain influential. Reliable data on the sector are hard to come by, but a 2005 survey by an evangelical pollster found that 45 percent of American adults watched Christian television on a monthly basis, just as many as in 1992. “It’s one of these stories that has just gone completely under the radar,” Ward says. “Even though it doesn’t have the same profile it had, it’s still a very decisive arbiter of the evangelical subculture.”

    TBN in particular has quietly become a major player, in part by capitalizing on the switch to digital TV two decades ago. When the Federal Communications Commission declared in 1996 that all television stations had to convert to digital broadcasting within a decade, the network’s founders, Paul and Jan Crouch, snapped up many local Christian stations that couldn’t afford the conversion. As a result, TBN is now the third-largest television group in the country, with access to 100 million households and more local television stations to its name than Fox or the three major networks. Its largest rival, Texas-based Daystar, also claims access to 100 million households, and carries many of the same programs. (CBN is no longer technically a network but a production company with a series of syndicated programs that air on stations owned by others, including TBN.)

    The networks haven’t escaped the whiff of scandal, particularly TBN, which was hit by another series of negative headlines just within the past few years, including lawsuits and a family feud that left Matt Crouch in charge. Last summer, a California jury awarded Paul and Jan Crouch’s granddaughter $2 million after she said she had been sexually abused by a TBN employee. There are also questions about its financial health: When the Orange County Registerreviewed the company’s tax filings in 2016, it found a revenue drop from $207 million in 2006 to $121.5 million in 2014. About five years ago, TBN banished its fundraising “praise-a-thons,” which relied largely on small donations from low-income viewers, and now relies more on underwriting and traditional fundraising efforts. Last year, the network sold at least two significant properties in Southern California, including its gaudy headquarters in Costa Mesa.

    But viewers still appear to be loyal, and those viewers aren’t who you might think. Both TBN and CBN say their audiences are split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. This can likely be chalked up to another fact that might surprise people outside the evangelical bubble: their audiences’ racial diversity. Charismatic and Pentecostal preaching, and the related health-and-wealth “prosperity gospel,” are strong traditions within the black community. Popular black pastors including Creflo Dollar, Tony Evans and TD Jakes have all preached regularly over the years on TBN, Daystar, and other Christian networks. Paula White is the pastor of a largely black church. And CBN’s roster of reporters, hosts and regular guests is arguably more racially diverse than those of many cable news networks.

    Wear, the faith outreach director for the 2012 Obama campaign, believes the racial diversity of Christian broadcasting has helped inoculate Trump against charges of racism among his white evangelical voters. CBN and TBN’s on-air diversity “is a significant reason that much of Trump’s base doesn’t take accusations of racism seriously,” he says.

    In October, TBN aired a special on the American church’s role in racial reconciliation, hosted by pastor Samuel Rodriguez, who prayed at Trump’s inauguration. The year before, Rodriguez appeared on CBN to assure viewers that Trump is not a racist. In an interview taped for “Huckabee” in February, Harry Jackson, a black pastor in Maryland who has frequently defended Trump, told Huckabee the same thing.

    For white evangelicals, who voted for Trump overwhelmingly and still approve of his job performance, the approach seems to be working. The networks continually polish Trump’s reputation, and perhaps more importantly, he’s talking to them. “Evangelicals, going back to the time of the Scopes trial, have always been sensitive to being seen as pariahs,” Mark Ward says. “You can get a lot of credibility with evangelicals if you simply make them feel like they matter, if you appear on their TV shows and send your administration to appear on their TV shows.”

    In a fundamental way, TV people are Trump’s people. “Trump appreciates people who can communicate in an attention-grabbing way,” says Wear, author of the 2017 book Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America. “I don’t think Trump would be drawn to a preacher who breaks down five chapters of Ephesians and lays out the Greek and Aramaic.”

    Trump has always had a particular genius for circumventing normal channels, and he seems to understand the power of Christian television as a medium for directly reaching an important and particularly loyal segment of his base. When Pat Robertson interviewed him last summer, in a period in which Trump had granted no other non-Fox interviews for months, the president put it succinctly. “As long as my people understand,” he told Robertson. “That’s why I do interviews with you. You have a tremendous audience. You have people that I love.”

     

     

     

  4. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/us/politics/scott-pruitt-oklahoma-epa.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

     

    Quote

    Early in Scott Pruitt’s political career, as a state senator from Tulsa, he attended a gathering at the Oklahoma City home of an influential telecommunications lobbyist who was nearing retirement and about to move away.

    The lobbyist said that after the 2003 gathering, Mr. Pruitt — who had a modest legal practice and a state salary of $38,400 — reached out to her. He wanted to buy her showplace home as a second residence for when he was in the state capital.

    “For those ego-minded politicians, it would be pretty cool to have this house close to the capitol,” said the lobbyist, Marsha Lindsey. “It was stunning.”

    Soon Mr. Pruitt was staying there, and so was at least one other lawmaker, according to interviews. Mr. Pruitt even bought Ms. Lindsey’s dining room set, art and antique rugs, she said.

    A review of real estate and other public records shows that Mr. Pruitt was not the sole owner: The property was held by a shell company registered to a business partner and law school friend, Kenneth Wagner. Mr. Wagner now holds a top political job at the Environmental Protection Agency, where Mr. Pruitt, 49, is the administrator.

    The mortgage on the Oklahoma City home, the records show, was issued by a local bank that was led by another business associate of Mr. Pruitt’s, Albert Kelly. Recently barred from working in the finance industry because of a banking violation, Mr. Kelly is now one of Mr. Pruitt’s top aides at the E.P.A. and runs the agency’s Superfund program.

    At the E.P.A., Mr. Pruitt is under investigation for allegations of unchecked spending, ethics lapses and other issues, including his interactions with lobbyists. An examination of Mr. Pruitt’s political career in Oklahoma reveals that many of the pitfalls he has encountered in Washington have echoes in his past.

    Spoiler

    According to real estate records, the 2003 purchase of the house for $375,000 came at a steep discount of about $100,000 from what Ms. Lindsey had paid a year earlier — a shortfall picked up by her employer, the telecom giant SBC Oklahoma.

    SBC, previously known as Southwestern Bell and later as AT&T, had been lobbying lawmakers in the early 2000s on a range of matters, including a deregulation bill that would allow it to raise rates and a separate regulatory effort to reopen a bribery case from a decade earlier. Mr. Pruitt sided with the company on both matters, state records show.

    In 2005, the shell company — Capitol House L.L.C. — sold the property for $95,000 more than it had paid. While shell companies are legal, they often obscure the people who have an interest in them, and none of Mr. Pruitt’s financial disclosure filings in Oklahoma mentioned the company or the proceeds — a potential violation of the state’s ethics rules.

    The Oklahoma City deal, which has not been previously reported, was one of several instances in which Mr. Pruitt appeared to have benefited from his relationships with Mr. Kelly and Mr. Wagner while in state politics.

    During his eight years as a Republican state senator, Mr. Pruitt also upgraded his family residence in suburban Tulsa from a small ranch-style home to a lakefront property in a gated community. In addition, he bought a sizable stake in a minor league baseball team, and took a second job at Mr. Wagner’s corporate law firm. Mr. Kelly’s bank, SpiritBank, would be there for much of it — providing financing for Mr. Pruitt’s Tulsa home and his stake in the baseball team, as well as the mortgage for the Oklahoma City house.

    Mr. Pruitt’s interactions with SBC also show that his blurring of lines with lobbyists has roots in his Oklahoma years. One of the issues at the E.P.A. that has gotten Mr. Pruitt in trouble with government watchdogs involved his renting a room in Washington for $50 a night from the wife of an energy lobbyist who has had business in front of the agency.

    Lobbyists and others in Oklahoma state politics who encountered Mr. Pruitt recalled him as a tough competitor who always had his eye on a higher office. Some called him a “Boy Scout” who was stingy with his money, while others said privately that he had exuded a sense of entitlement — that rules did not apply to him.

    David Walters, a former Oklahoma governor and Democrat, described Mr. Pruitt as someone who looked out for himself over the needs of constituents, especially during his years as attorney general.

    “I was disappointed to find him operating in a hyperpartisan manner and seemingly representing corporate interests over Oklahoma citizens,” Mr. Walters said.

    In response to questions submitted by The New York Times about Mr. Pruitt’s finances in Oklahoma, an E.P.A. spokeswoman said Mr. Pruitt’s business dealings with Mr. Kelly and Mr. Wagner “were ethical” and his stake in the shell company “was a simple real estate investment.”

    “Mr. Wagner and Mr. Kelly left high-profile positions in law and banking in Oklahoma, to serve in the administration,” the spokeswoman said in an email. “They are dedicated E.P.A. employees who have earned the respect and admiration of E.P.A. career employees across the country. They serve the country professionally, and transparently — and are committed to ensuring the programs they work on are successful.”

    The house on Northeast 17th Street in the historic Lincoln Terrace neighborhood here was built in 1928 and has a grand staircase and an arched doorway. Ms. Lindsey said one of the home’s attractions was that it looked out on the white dome of the State Capitol.

    Mr. Pruitt stayed in the house for parts of 2004 and 2005, neighbors said. The residence put him within walking distance of his job — legislators worked only part of the year, mainly from February through May — and also near SBC Bricktown Ballpark, which was home to his baseball team, the RedHawks, now known as the Dodgers.

    Jim Dunlap, then a Republican leader in the State Senate, said he rented a room from Mr. Pruitt above the garage. He was under the impression that Mr. Pruitt had bought the home as an investment with a group of lawyers, he said.

    “This was a place where you slept and had dinner,” Mr. Dunlap said. “It was all above board.”

    Oklahoma campaign disclosures filed by Mr. Pruitt at the time made no mention of the home purchase or the rental agreement with Mr. Dunlap. Real estate records show that the transfer of ownership from Ms. Lindsey, the lobbyist, was rather complicated and involved multiple steps — none of them with any public reference to Mr. Pruitt, though the E.P.A. spokeswoman confirmed that he was one of five co-owners of the shell company.

    When asked whether such a disclosure would be necessary, the executive director of the Oklahoma Ethics Commission, Ashley Kemp, referred The Times to a 2005 ethics manual. The rules required disclosing “every business or entity” in which an official held securities valued at $5,000 or more. Securities were defined to include “documents that represent a share in a company.”

    The E.P.A. spokeswoman did not respond to questions about Mr. Pruitt’s disclosure filings in Oklahoma.

    In November 2003, Ms. Lindsey signed the deed of the home over to a relocation company SBC had hired to handle her move and severance. She was reimbursed for close to $475,000, the amount she had paid for the house in 2002, as her contract required, she said.

    The next day, the relocation company signed the property over to Jon Jiles, a health care executive who has a range of business interests and made contributions to Mr. Pruitt’s political campaigns. Records show no mortgage was involved, and Mr. Jiles paid $375,000 in cash.

    That December, Mr. Wagner officially registered the Capitol House shell company with the Oklahoma authorities, and Mr. Jiles transferred the deed to the newly formed company. Mr. Jiles was listed as a manager of Capitol House, and Mr. Wagner as the registered agent.

    The following month, SpiritBank, where Mr. Kelly was chief executive, approved a mortgage in the amount of $420,000 in the name of Capital House L.L.C., another spelling of the entity.

    Ms. Lindsey, the former lobbyist, said she had been focused on her impending move to Dallas, and had deferred the sale and other arrangements to the company’s relocation agent. She said she had known nothing about the involvement of the shell company and did not recall the final sale price. “The bottom line is — it is unusual to take a $100,000 loss on the house” after being on the market for just a few weeks, she said.

    Asked about the drop in price, AT&T said in a statement that two independent firms appraised the house and that its average value came to $390,000. The valuation and sale were handled by the relocation business, the company added.

    Mr. Jiles, in an email exchange, said he became involved because Mr. Wagner presented the house as “a good deal” and a convenient place to stay. He said he had no other business interactions with Mr. Pruitt.

    “A cash transaction was most likely used because sellers will often sell for less if it’s a cash deal rather than a finance deal,” Mr. Jiles said. “And I was likely the one most able to do a cash deal at the time.”

    In a statement, SpiritBank’s chief executive and president, Rick Harper, said the bank was legally prohibited from commenting on specific loans, but added, “SpiritBank is confident these loans were made in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.”

    The deal came at a time when SBC was a major employer in the state and a lobbying force in Oklahoma City.

    As president of SBC Oklahoma and a registered lobbyist, Ms. Lindsey said she entertained lawmakers at her home. Moreover, SBC was known to court lawmakers with gifts, including tickets for Mr. Pruitt and others to watch Oklahoma State University play in the men’s basketball Final Four in 2004, The Oklahoman reported at the time.

    “It gives us a chance to try to build a relationship with a lawmaker or an official,” a spokesman, Andy Morgan, told the newspaper. “Events like that offer a much more relaxed atmosphere.” He added: “We’re one of the state’s largest employers. It’s important that lawmakers are informed about issues affecting our company.”

    The prospect of another investigation into a longstanding bribery case had especially rattled SBC. In the early 1990s, an SBC lobbyist had been found guilty in federal court of paying a bribe to a public utilities commissioner to sway a vote that allowed the company to keep federal tax savings rather than disburse them to its ratepayers. But the vote itself was never overturned, and in 2003, another commissioner proposed reopening the investigation, claiming SBC still owed billions of dollars in refunds. The commissioner dropped his plans for an investigation after state legislators, and the attorney general at the time, Drew Edmondson, pushed back against the effort.

    Later, when Mr. Pruitt became attorney general, he helped quash another attempt to revisit the SBC bribery case. In a March 2011 letter, Mr. Pruitt’s office warned that any commissioner who reopened the investigation could face prosecution for the misuse of public funds.

    Around the same time Mr. Pruitt invested in the house in Oklahoma City, he had finished a big business deal that involved Mr. Kelly, Mr. Wagner and a campaign donor who ran a large staffing company.

    A baseball player in college, Mr. Pruitt bought an approximately 25 percent stake in the Oklahoma City RedHawks and became the team’s managing partner, making him a highly visible spokesman for the local team. Mr. Wagner also purchased a small stake, and Mr. Kelly’s bank provided financing for the deal, as first reported by The Intercept, which also disclosed the bank’s loans for one of Mr. Pruitt’s suburban Tulsa homes.

    Mr. Pruitt’s main partner was Robert Funk, the business magnate who ran Express Services, the staffing firm. The sale price was not disclosed, but news reports suggested they paid over $11.5 million, with Mr. Funk carrying the biggest load.

    Two months after the deal closed in November 2003, Mr. Funk attended a news conference where Mr. Pruitt announced legislation that would make it harder for Oklahoma workers to claim certain kinds of injury compensation, something that would benefit companies like Mr. Funk’s.

    The relationship continued, with Mr. Funk serving as campaign chairman during Mr. Pruitt’s unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor in 2006. Mr. Pruitt announced his candidacy outside the ballpark and cited his efforts on workers’ compensation among his achievements.

    After losing the election, Mr. Pruitt took a break from public office, but continued his business relationship with Mr. Funk, proposing a $200 million town center on a parking lot next to the ballpark. The City Council balked at the project, but Mr. Pruitt’s ambitions and prominence grew.

    Back at home in Tulsa, Mr. Pruitt worked with Mr. Wagner’s firm, which had offices in SpiritBank’s building. As a corporate lawyer, Mr. Wagner frequently represented the bank, but also represented a used car dealership run by Mr. Pruitt’s family.

    In 2004, Mr. Pruitt upgraded from a modest one-story home where his family had lived for over a decade to a $605,000 lakeside house a mile away. SpiritBank financed the home. The E.P.A. spokeswoman said Mr. Pruitt was able to afford the house “due to his sale of personal assets.”

    In September 2010, as Mr. Pruitt was on his way to successfully winning his race for attorney general, he and Mr. Funk announced that they had sold the RedHawks. They did not disclose the price, but Forbes estimated its value a few years later at $21 million. SpiritBank, where Mr. Kelly was still chief executive, “played a key role in facilitating” the deal by providing acquisition financing, a news release said.

    As a candidate for attorney general, Mr. Pruitt was not required to disclose the extent of his assets and how much money he made, but there were hints that his finances had improved since his early days as a state senator. Early into his term, he and his wife paid $1.18 million for a 5,518-square-foot Cotswold-style stone residence, featured in a book on Tulsa homes. It has five fireplaces, a library and a guest apartment.

    During his six years as attorney general, Mr. Pruitt blazed a path of spending that holds new meaning now that his E.P.A. expenditures are the subject of investigations and growing political outrage.

    Mr. Pruitt moved the attorney general’s outpost in Tulsa to a prime suite in the Bank of America tower, an almost $12,000-a-month space that quadrupled the annual rent. He required his staff to regularly drive him between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, according to several people familiar with his time as attorney general.

    And he channeled state contracts to Mr. Wagner’s law firm, which was already doing business with the state.

    From 2011 to 2017, state records show, the attorney general’s office awarded more than $600,000 in contracts to Mr. Wagner’s Tulsa-based law firm, Latham, Wagner Steele & Lehman — greatly increasing work with the firm, which had gotten a total of about $100,000 over the four years before that. These contracts are not competitively bid. The additional expenditures reflected an approach, contentious even among some fellow Republicans, to hire private lawyers for state business, often for cases challenging federal regulations.

    “He said that these people had special expertise that his agency didn’t have,” said Paul Wesselhoft, a Republican former state representative. “He has an army of lawyers with expertise. He didn’t have to spend that extra tax money to hire another law firm. It didn’t seem frugal.”

    Mr. Pruitt used the Bank of America building as a base for his growing political ambitions. Oklahoma Strong Leadership, a political action committee he formed in 2015 to help finance fellow Republicans’ campaigns, operated out of the building. The group shared a suite with another PAC tied to Mr. Pruitt, Liberty 2.0, as well as his campaign office.

    Oklahoma Strong Leadership, funded by private donors and corporations, also appeared to support lavish travel and entertainment.

    An analysis of expenditure disclosures by the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that pushes for stricter rules governing money in politics, shows that just 9 percent of the PAC’s spending was devoted to other candidates. The group found that the PAC had disbursed more than $7,000 for trips to Hawaii in summer 2015 and 2016, $2,180 of which was spent at a Ritz-Carlton. The PAC also put $4,000 toward dining, including a $661 meal at the Cafe Pacific, a high-end seafood restaurant in Dallas.

    The person who oversaw that spending, as the PAC’s treasurer and chairman, was Mr. Wagner.

    Last summer, about six months into his job as E.P.A. administrator, Mr. Pruitt traveled by chartered jet to a Superfund cleanup site in Colorado, where the Gold King Mine had released toxic wastewater.

    At the event were two of his most loyal Oklahoma business associates — Mr. Kelly and Mr. Wagner, newly installed as E.P.A. officials themselves, though neither of them had a background in environmental policy or regulation.

    Last year, Mr. Kelly, known as Kell, was barred for life from the banking industry. He has not disclosed why, though an order from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said there was “reason to believe” he was illegally involved in “an agreement pertaining to a loan.” He has pushed for more intensive cleanups of Superfund locations to pave the way for investment on the reclaimed land by private developers.

    Mr. Wagner landed a job as one of Mr. Pruitt’s closest personal aides, helping the agency coordinate its regional offices and representing it at high-profile events.

    At an energy conference in Kentucky in November, Mr. Wagner reminisced about his long relationship with the E.P.A. chief.

    “I’ve known Administrator Pruitt for 20-plus years, and had the good fortune of being his business partner in a triple-A baseball team and a former law partner as well,” he said. “The idea that the major influence at the E.P.A. is coming from the middle of the country is something new.”

     

  5. https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/30/health/teen-birth-rate-prenatal-care-2016/index.html

    Quote

    n the United States, teen-aged moms are increasingly rare. In 2016, the teen birth rate dropped 9% compared to the previous year, a new government report published Friday found. This record low for teens having babies continues a long-term trend. 

    The birth rate among teen girls has dropped 67% since 1991, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which presented preliminary data for 2016 based on a majority (99.9%) of births.

    But Obama.

    http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/384208-trump-admin-announces-abstinence-focused-overhaul-of-teen-pregnancy

     

    Quote
    The Trump administration will shift federal funding aimed at reducing teen pregnancy rates to programs that teach abstinence. 
    The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Friday the availability of grants through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, (TPPP) a grant program created under former President Obama that funds organizations and programs working to reduce teen pregnancy rates. 
    Trump's HHS announced, however, that unlike under the Obama administration, grants will be geared toward organizations that teach abstinence education to teens instead of the comprehensive sex ed approach the previous administration supported. 
    In a funding announcement released Friday, the administration announced two tiers of funds for the TPP program. 
    In the first, grantees would have to follow one of two abstinence programs to receive funding. 
    One of the programs uses a "sexual risk reduction model," which is designed to reduce sexual risk behaviors. 
    The other program uses a "sexual risk avoidance model," which teaches teens to avoid sex completely. 
    "Projects will clearly communicate that teen sex is a risk behavior for both the physical consequences of pregnancy and sexual transmitted infections; as well as sociological, economic and other related risks," the funding announcement reads. "Both risk avoidance and risk reduction approaches can and should include skills associated with helping youth delay sex as well as skills to help those youth already engaged in sexual risk to return toward risk-free choices in the future." 
     

     

  6. 2 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

    Michael Cohen’s Other Woe: Mounting Unpaid Taxes on New York Cabs

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-20/michael-cohen-s-other-woe-mounting-unpaid-taxes-on-nyc-cabs

     

    Taxicab companies owned by Michael Cohen or family members just got hit with nearly $80,000 in new claims for unpaid taxes, according to records filed in New York.

    The bills show the declining fortunes of some companies linked to Cohen, the longtime personal lawyer to President Donald Trump. Cohen is under a federal criminal investigation into his business and financial dealings that broke into the open this month with FBI raids on his office and residences. All the parties involved are now jostling over how that evidence will be used.

    New York state filed tax liens in Manhattan this week against five companies owned by Cohen and members of his family, including Mad Dog Cab Corp., Martha Cab Corp., LAF Hacking Corp. and NY Funky Taxi Corp. The Cohens own medallions for 32 taxis in New York City through 16 companies. Most of those companies are now encumbered by liens: State tax authorities are seeking about $174,000 in all in taxes from Cohen family taxi companies, including the latest claims.

    Just making sure here; he couldn't pay $174,000 in taxes, but was able to get a loan against his home for $130,000 for a porn chick, just for kicks?

     

     

  7. https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2018/04/18/stormy-daniels-lawsuit-hearing-536925

     

    Quote

    A federal judge in Los Angeles has set a hearing for Friday on a bid by President Donald Trump and his embattled personal attorney Michael Cohen to delay a lawsuit filed by porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump about a decade ago.

    U.S. District Court Judge S. James Otero scheduled the hearing after attorneys for Trump and Cohen said the suit should be put on hold for 90 days because of the criminal investigation federal prosecutors in New York are pursuing into Cohen's involvement in various matters, including a $130,000 pre-election payment to Daniels.

    Otero did not explain in detail why he is convening the first hearing in the case, filed by Daniels last month in an attempt to have the alleged 'hush money' deal declared invalid. Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti has argued that the agreement was never consummated, in large part because Trump never signed it.

    In a brief order Wednesday, Otero — an appointee of President George W. Bush — said simply that a hearing on the stay request "is warranted."

     

     

  8. Amazing how quickly this was resolved once Cohen went under the spotlight:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/us/politics/karen-mcdougal-american-media-settlement.html

    Quote

    The tabloid news company American Media Inc. agreed to let a former Playboy model out of a contract that had kept her from talking freely about an alleged affair with Donald J. Trump.

    The settlement agreement, reached on Wednesday, ends a lawsuit brought by the model, Karen McDougal, and protects the president from being drawn into a legal case involving efforts to buy the silence of women who had stories to tell about him during the 2016 campaign.

    He still faces another lawsuit from Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels. Ms. Clifford is suing to get out of a deal that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, arranged in 2016 for her silence about an alleged affair. Mr. Trump’s representatives have denied both women’s stories.

    In August 2016, A.M.I., which owns The National Enquirer, acquired the rights to Ms. McDougal’s story about Mr. Trump — which it never ran — in return for $150,000 and commitments to use its magazines to promote her current career as a fitness specialist.

    Quote

    A.M.I. indicated earlier this month that it would fight Ms. McDougal, asking the Los Angeles Superior Court to dismiss her lawsuit.

    But that was roughly a week before federal investigators obtained email communications, audio recordings and other documentation from Mr. Cohen during their raid of his office, home and hotel room. Those materials included information about A.M.I. and the McDougal suit, people involved in the case said.

    The suit also claimed that Mr. Cohen had been secretly involved in the talks between A.M.I. and Ms. McDougal’s lawyer at the time, Keith M. Davidson — who emailed Mr. Cohen at the end of the negotiations. A spokesman for Mr. Davidson has said the lawyer “fulfilled his obligations and zealously advocated for Ms. McDougal.”

     

  9. 31 minutes ago, Message Board User said:

    There's still a lot of series left to be played, but yeah I was all in on the Bucks a little more than a year ago - long, athletic, young team with a budding superstar. Wow was I wrong on them and Greek Freak ain't Lebron.  Not even close.

    Milwaukee's body language was terrible.  They look/play like a team that knows as soon as the season is over, it's gonna get blown up.  

  10. 29 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    All bottles have been opened, ready for pouring.  I'd hate to have someone wonder whether it's worth breaking the seal on one, when we need to focus on having a good seat to watch the Republic burn to ashes.

    And again, y'all think I'm kidding.  I'm not.  The Republic survives.  Until it doesn't.

    PM me your address; I'll be down ASAP on the day of reckoning. 

  11. To be honest, I'm kinda surprised.  I figured he would just tweet out something like "I'm not paying taxes any longer, because Obama didn't" or Hillary or whatever. 

    https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/17/trump-tax-returns-extension-528945

     

    Quote

    Count President Donald Trump among the Americans who won’t meet Tuesday’s deadline for filing his tax returns.

    The White House confirmed Tuesday that the president has filed for an extension on his taxes, although a spokesman did not immediately respond to a follow-up question as to whether Trump had filed for extra time on his federal or state taxes. The extension deadline for both federal taxes and New York state taxes is Oct. 15.

    The White House spokesman also did not immediately offer a reason why Trump was unable to meet Tuesday's tax deadline, although White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told a reporter that the president had "filed an extension ... as do many Americans with complex returns."

     

  12. 4 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    It bugs him to no end that he will never be as popular as Barack Obama.

    I'm really surprised he hasn't thrown out a line along the lines of "but Obama will never have as much money or property as me" or somesuch.

     

     

  13. 9 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

    Only a Trumpkin could see increasingly interlinked evidence between Russia, Trump, and Fox and blow it off with "Riiiiiight".  Congratulations, you're a pawn.

    Maybe it didn't come across quite the way I intended...

    9 hours ago, ChiTownDoc said:

    Maybe I'm wrong but I think he's saying the far right sycophants will just spin the news that much more...

    This.

  14. Just now, Mdhorn said:

    The whores really came home to roost on this.  Seriously, WTF, they are full on treasonous sons of bitches.  Will be interesting to see if their followers are too.

    Riiiiiight.

     

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/sean-hannity-michael-cohen-client-far-right-response?mbid=social_twitter

     

    Quote

    “So it has gone from Russia collusion, to a St. Petersburg troll farm, to Stormy Daniels, to Michael Cohen, and now, Sean Hannity?” Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft asked rhetorically, reeling from a whirlwind day that began with Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, walking into federal court, and ended with the revelation that Cohen claimed Hannity as a client. “Where does it stop and what the hell does this have to do with the Russia collusion?”

     

    Quote

    Fellow MAGA pundit and troll Jack Posobiec called Hannity a casualty of the Mueller probe and Cohen’s incompetence. In fact, he added, people in his circles believe that Cohen is a greater danger to his other clients than to Trump. “Most [think] Cohen’s clients are going to kill him when their files all get leaked to the media,” he said, just minutes before the Hannity revelation went public. (“See what I mean?” he texted later.)

    Kurt Schlicter, a pro-Trump columnist for Townhall, agreed that Trump, Cohen, and Hannity were getting a raw deal. “I don’t think Trump did anything wrong, so I don’t think it’s dangerous. It’s very clear that there’s no Russia stuff. What happened with Stormy Daniels”—the $130,000 payoff, which Cohen said he paid out of pocket, and which critics suggest may constitute an illegal campaign contribution, à la the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair—“I keep trying to find the crime, and I can’t.” Even if some sort of crime had been committed, Schlichter suggested, Trump and Cohen would have to be “terrible crooks” to keep the evidence. “But if these guys are this crime family why do you think they’d keep something incriminating around? That’s just silly. More than that, I don’t think there’s anything incriminating. I think there’s stuff that might be embarrassing.”

     

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