-
Posts
14711 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
14
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Downloads
Recruiting - 2020
2019-2020 Football Season
Football
Entertainment
Sports
News and Business
Cloak Room
Transfer Portal
Recruiting
Events
Posts posted by Francisco 2.0
-
-
Suddenly, a lack of financial disclosures is an issue.
QuoteThe Justice Department on Tuesday sued Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on "The Apprentice" who campaigned for President Donald Trump and later worked for him in the White House, alleging she failed to file a required public disclosure report after she left 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, claims Manigault Newman "knowingly and willingly" failed to file the financial disclosure report after corresponding multiple times with attorneys for the White House. It accuses her of violating the Ethics in Government Act (EIGA) by not filing the report, which was required because her salary exceeded $124,406, despite several oral and written reminders from White House ethics lawyers.
QuoteThe complaint seeks a civil fine of up to $50,000 from Manigault Newman, who served for 11 months as director of communications in the White House Office of Public Liaison before she was fired in December 2017. She allegedly tried to protest the terms of her firing by marching to the White House residence.
Following what was allegedly a dramatic exit, Manigault Newman bounced back from reportedly being fired and escorted off of White House grounds with a much-hyped return to TV. Manigault Newman appeared on the CBS reality show "Big Brother," where she shared her unfiltered feelings about her brief stint working for Trump.
-
Just now, SameSame said:
Goddamn, this dumb senseless motherfucker keeps finding ways to top himself and sound even more like a dumb senseless motherfucker every day.
Just wait for tomorrow.
Oh, I have no idea what it is or will be, but with each passing day he keeps raising, er, lowering the bar.
Today, bashing a soccer player for (double checking here) using her 1st amendment rights and complaining that Twitter is mean to him. Tomorrow, who knows.
-
Quote
NBA superstar Kevin Durant has wrapped up some business in Malibu, selling his oceanfront home on Broad Beach for $12.15 million.
Accounting for real estate commissions and other fees, the sale comes out as a bit of a wash for the 10-time all-star. He bought the place last year for $12.05 million, The Times previously reported in April.
-
-
9 minutes ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:
KD declining option to become FA
What a feeling to turn down 31,000,000. He better go live in a bubble for the next few weeks -
Apparently, Trump thinks Twitter is censoring him:
-
13 minutes ago, 4th&Five said:
Focused on the important things.
The thing that is wrong with that graphic is #6 should have had higher ratings. However, because it was on that satanic network CNN, Fox viewers probably believe it's fiction.
In fact, there's probably a Venn diagram of Fox viewers and moon landing hoaxers that overlaps nicely.
-
1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:
Yep. If NRA held her back from being a larger star. Her opinions are bad but her character and looks could take her to new heights on Fox.
She gonna have to change her hair color.
-
1
-
-
Just now, Hugo Stiglitz said:
I still want Rosenstein
You aren't getting Rosenstein and you are going to like it.
-
16 minutes ago, HenryJames said:
-
4
-
1
-
-
Boston was 12-3 without Iriving this season.
Boston was 14-8 (and 11-8 in playoffs ) without Irving last season.
-
1
-
-
24 minutes ago, Chewbacca said:
Cosmo is one of the best properties on the Strip right now, IMO. They've done a great job with that second floor food area. If it sells, it will be for a big number.
I'd say Caesars is out of it, so either MGM or Wynn are the favorites here. Of course, Wynn was looking to sell their new Boston property to MGM earlier this year before it even opened (both sides backed out) so who knows.
-
-
ESL students have a better grasp of the language.
-
8 minutes ago, Lurch said:
-
2
-
1
-
-
What could possibly go wrong.
QuotePresident Donald Trump has recently mused to confidants about withdrawing from a longstanding defense treaty with Japan, according to three people familiar with the matter, in his latest complaint about what he sees as unfair U.S. security pacts.
Trump regards the accord as too one-sided because it promises U.S. aid if Japan is ever attacked, but doesn’t oblige Japan’s military to come to America’s defense, the people said. The treaty, signed more than 60 years ago, forms the foundation of the alliance between the countries that emerged from World War II.
-
13 minutes ago, triplehorn said:
He's also talking about us protecting shipping lanes while he was within the length of a pornstar butt hair of shutting down a fifth of global crude transport through the
StraightStrait with an ego driven bombing attack on Iran. We may never know, but I suspect someone outside of Bolton/Pompeo got to Trump fast enough to scuttle the attack. Now he's trying to reproduce his newfound understanding of the impact of not protecting peaceful commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz as if he knew it all along.It's almost enough to distract from the latest news that we're dealing with a bonafide sexual predator in the Oval.
But we do know. It was Tucker.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/tucker-carlson-talked-trump-out-of-iran-attack.html
QuoteWhen President Donald Trump was considering military options against Iran he suddenly grew “frustrated” with John Bolton, his national security adviser, and the way he seemed to constantly advocate for a strike, reports the AP. So he started broadening his scope and seeking out advice from others, including Tucker Carlson. The Fox News host had a different take than most of his hawkish advisers, insisting that a military strike would not be in the country’s best interests and that it would severely hurt his re-election chances, according to the New York Times. Although there is no indication that Carlson’s voice was the deciding factor in ultimately calling off the strike, he does at least seem to have been one of the ones who planted a seed of doubt in his mind.
-
1
-
-
God Bless the United States of America
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/22/cbp-border-searches-journalists/
QuoteI SHOULD HAVE kept my mouth shut about the guacamole; that made things worse for me. Otherwise, what I’m about to describe could happen to any American who travels internationally. It happened 33,295 times last year.
My work as a journalist has taken me to many foreign countries, including frequent trips to Mexico. On May 13, I was returning to the U.S. from Mexico City when, passing through immigration at the Austin airport, I was pulled out of line for “secondary screening,” a quasi-custodial law enforcement process that takes place in the Homeland Security zone of the airport.
QuoteAustin is where I was born and raised, and I usually get waved through immigration after one or two questions. I’m also a white man; more on that later. This time, when my turn came to show my passport, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was more aggressive than usual in his questioning. I told him I’d been in Mexico for seven days for work, that I was a journalist, and that I travel to Mexico often, as he could see from my passport. That wasn’t enough for him, though. He wanted to know the substance of the story I was currently working on, which didn’t sit right with me. I tried to skirt the question, but he came back to it, pointedly.
QuoteI was going on three hours of sleep, and I hadn’t had anything to eat in the last 12 hours besides some popcorn and peanuts and a Monster energy drink. Had my blood sugar been higher, I might have cheerfully told him. Instead, I muttered something about not having a legal obligation, under the circumstances, to disclose the contents of my reporting.
The agent, whose name was Moncivias, said we would see about that. He asked me to follow him into the secondary screening area.
“Oh, come on, man,” I said, checking the time on my phone. It was just after noon. “This is going to be a huge waste of time.”
Quote“I’m here all day,” Moncivias said. He might have been 30 years old, clean cut, with dark hair and light skin. He and I were close enough in age that there was definitely some male primate posturing going on between us. At one point, I told him that I had been in the Army. “Thank you for your service,” he retorted.
SpoilerIn retrospect, I was naive about the kind of agency CBP has become in the Trump era. Though I’ve reported several magazine stories in Mexico, none have been about immigration. Of course, I knew these were the guys putting kids in cages, separating refugee children from their parents, and that Trump’s whole shtick is vilifying immigrants, leading to many sad and ugly scenes at the border, including the farcical deployment of U.S. troops. But I complacently assumed that wouldn’t affect me directly, least of all in Austin. Later, I did remember reading a report in February about CBP targeting journalists, activists, and lawyers for scrutiny at ports of entry south of California, but I had never had a problem before, not in a lifetime of crossing the Texas-Mexico border scores of times on foot, by car, by plane, in a canoe, even swimming. This was the first time CBP had ever pulled me aside.
When asked to comment on specific details in this story, a CBP spokesperson responded with a canned statement replete with the sort of pseudo-military terminology that betrays the agency’s sense of itself not as a civil customs service but as some kind of counterterrorism strike force. “CBP has adapted and adjusted our actions to align with current threat information, which is based on intelligence,” the statement reads in part. “As the threat landscape changes, so does CBP.” The agency declined to put me in touch with Moncivias and the other officers named in this account or to make an official available for an interview, but a CBP source mentioned that the “port director” had reviewed “the tape” of the encounter. I found that very interesting, because I had specifically asked Moncivias and the other officers if I was being videotaped or recorded, and they had categorically denied it.
WE PASSED THROUGH a detention area harshly illuminated by fluorescent lights where armed CBP officers in dark uniforms outnumbered the few tired-looking travelers. The officers all had Homeland Security patches on their shoulders and pistols on their belts. Moncivias sat me down in a side room with a desk, two chairs, and a microscope on a filing cabinet. He left the door open.
A bespectacled supervisor named Lopez made an appearance. In a polite back-and-forth, I learned that I was not under arrest or suspected of any crime, and my citizenship was not in doubt, but if I didn’t answer the question asked by the “incident officer,” I wouldn’t be allowed into the United States. He handed me some brochures and left the room.
Moncivias was joined by an Anglo officer named Pomeroy, who had a shaved head and looked a little older. They stared at me expectantly.
“Fine,” I said. “For the last six months, I’ve been doing an investigative journalism project to determine which restaurant has the best guacamole in all of Mexico.”
Moncivias didn’t miss a beat. “And what restaurant is that?”
“El Parnita, on Avenida Yucatán in Mexico City,” I told him, truthfully.
The flippancy would cost me. From then on out, the officers made it clear that I was in for a long delay. When I saw how mad they were, I lost interest in the principle of the thing. In reality, I didn’t care if they knew what the story was about. The draft was done, and my editors had a copy. All I cared about was getting home to a cup of coffee, a sandwich, a shower, and my bed. In an effort to smooth things over, I said that if they really had to know, I was finishing up a story for Rolling Stone about some guys from Texas and Arizona who sold helicopter machine guns to a Mexican cartel and that I’d been in Mexico City to interview a government official who, for understandable reasons, didn’t want his name bandied about. I apologized for my grouchiness, blaming it on the stress of travel.
Cooperation didn’t earn me any leniency. Next up was a thorough search of my suitcase, down to unscrewing the tops of my toiletries. That much I expected. But then a third officer, whose name was Villarreal, carefully read every page of my 2019 journal, including copious notes to self on work, relationships, friends, family, and all sorts of private reflections I had happened to write down. I told him, “Sir, I know there’s nothing I can do to stop you, but I want to tell you, as one human being to another, that you’re invading my privacy right now, and I don’t appreciate it.” Villarreal acknowledged the statement and went back to reading.
That was just the beginning. The real abuse of power was a warrantless search of my phone and laptop. This is the part that affects everyone, not just reporters and people who keep journals.
IN GENERAL, LAW enforcement agents have to get a warrant to search your electronic devices. That’s the gist of the 2014 Supreme Court case Riley v. California. But the Riley ruling only applies when the police arrest you. The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether the same protections apply to American citizens reentering the United States from abroad, and federal appeals courts have issued contradictory opinions. In the absence of a controlling legal authority, CBP goes by its own rules, namely CBP Directive No. 3340-049A, pursuant to which CBP can search any person’s device, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. If you refuse to give up your password, CBP’s policy is to seize the device. The agency may use “external equipment” to crack the passcode, “not merely to gain access to the device, but to review, copy, and/or analyze its contents,” according to the directive. CBP can look for any kind of evidence, any kind of information, and can share what it finds with any other federal agency, so long as doing so is “consistent with applicable law and policy.”
I had my doubts as to whether they could actually crack my iPhone and MacBook, but I didn’t doubt that they would be happy to confiscate them. So I decided to take another tack: I told the officers I had nothing to hide, but I felt I had a professional obligation to call an attorney for further advice. Pomeroy said I could not because I wasn’t under arrest; I just wasn’t allowed to enter the United States. I wasn’t allowed to leave the Homeland Security zone, either. I know because I tried to sort of wander out a couple of times and got yelled at. When I actually tried to call a lawyer friend of mine in Austin, Pomeroy stopped me. They held onto my phone from then out.
Sophia Cope, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued CBP over its warrantless device searches, told me that the agency “has for sure said no” as to whether there is a right to counsel during secondary screening. “They’ve been pretty consistent. You don’t get a lawyer. A lot of people have tried to push back, particularly after the Muslim ban. People were like, ‘I have a green card, and you’re putting me back on a plane to Iran. I need a lawyer to come down to the airport.’”
CBP has been doing warrantless device searches since the advent of the modern smartphone, Cope said, but the practice has increased by some 300 percent since Trump took office. In late 2017, EFF teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a case alleging the unconstitutionality of the administration’s blitz of warrantless searches. Anecdotally, CBP appears to be targeting typical Trumpian scapegoats, including Muslims, Latinos, and journalists, but anyone reentering the United States can be subject to these searches. The 11 plaintiffs in the EFF and ACLU case are a computer programmer, a filmmaker, a graduate student, a nursing student, a limousine driver, a businessman, an engineer, a professor, an artist, and two journalists. All are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents who had experiences similar to mine.
“The secondary inspection environment is inherently coercive,” the complaint says. “Travelers are not free to exit those areas until officers permit them to leave.” Travelers are usually exhausted, sometimes ill, and may be under pressure to catch a connecting flight, anxious to get home to kids, or needed at work. Forcing travelers who are not suspected of any wrongdoing to cough up their passwords, on pain of having their devices seized, violates the Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, the plaintiffs argue, and also infringes the First Amendment right to free expression and association by means of government intimidation and surveillance. “Regardless of whether you have embarrassing information on your device,” Cope said, “it’s about personal autonomy and living in a free society and not a police state.”
I DIDN’T KNOW all of this when I was being held by CBP. When the officers told me they only wanted to check my devices for child pornography, links to terrorism, and so forth, I believed them. I was completely unprepared for the digital ransacking that came next.
After I gave him the password to my iPhone, Moncivias spent three hours reviewing hundreds of photos and videos and emails and calls and texts, including encrypted messages on WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. It was the digital equivalent of tossing someone’s house: opening cabinets, pulling out drawers, and overturning furniture in hopes of finding something — anything — illegal. He read my communications with friends, family, and loved ones. He went through my correspondence with colleagues, editors, and sources. He asked about the identities of people who have worked with me in war zones. He also went through my personal photos, which I resented. Consider everything on your phone right now. Nothing on mine was spared.
Pomeroy, meanwhile, searched my laptop. He browsed my emails and my internet history. He looked through financial spreadsheets and property records and business correspondence. He was able to see all the same photos and videos as Moncivias and then some, including photos I thought I had deleted.
At one point, Pomeroy was standing over my laptop on the desk. I couldn’t see the screen, and he had such a puzzled expression on his face that I stood up to see what he was looking at. “Get back,” he said, clapping a hand on his sidearm. “I don’t know if you’re going for my gun.” At another point, Pomeroy had taken my laptop to the desk in the waiting area, and I thought I heard him call for me to come over, so I did. “Stand back from my gun,” he said, when he saw me approaching; it turns out he had been talking to someone else. Three times during the course of the secondary screening, Pomeroy pronounced words to the effect that he was subjectively forming a reasonable belief that I might grab his service weapon.
It was an implicit death threat and a rhetorical move on part of the police that will be familiar to people of color: I’ve got a gun on you, ergo, you’re a threat to me. Speaking of which, I’m certain this whole experience would have been worse had I been black or brown instead of white. And that is to say nothing of migrants and refugees, whose treatment at the hands of CBP on the U.S.-Mexico border is another matter altogether. But it does go to show that you can’t contain a culture of aggression to one part of an armed agency.
I was being physically submissive, keeping my hands visible at all times, not making any sudden moves, but Pomeroy would not let me see the laptop screen. I told him I at least had the right to know what files he was reviewing. “All of them,” he said, giving me a hard stare. “I’m going to look at all of them.”
“Please don’t look at the one called ‘Secret ISIS Confession,’” I said.
There was a South Asian couple detained along with me, a husband and wife with their luggage. Neither of them would have been able to get away with a crack like that. In my case, Pomeroy just determined to proceed even more painfully slowly.
Both he and Moncivias spent the most time on my photos. Admittedly, I had some crazy ones, including footage of combat taken while reporting in Iraq and Syria. Likewise, my phone contained many chat logs with people in the Middle East, and even more with people in Mexico and Colombia. That could make a border agent justifiably curious, but they had made the decision to detain me and give me a hard time well before they saw the images or messages. That I turned out to be a war correspondent just gave them more ammunition to question me.
“They ask a lot of fishing questions,” said Alexandra Ellerbeck of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has documented dozens of unwarranted interrogations of reporters by CBP in recent years. “There’s an opportunistic element to it. It seems to be targeted towards general intelligence-gathering. They take a broad view of their mandate to ask these questions, and there can be repercussions if you refuse to answer. They’ll hold you for longer, search your devices, or flag you in the future.” She added, “We don’t think this should be happening at all.”
MONCIVIAS, POMEROY, AND VILLARREAL questioned me for hours on all aspects of my work. They asked about conversations with editors and colleagues. They asked about my political opinions. Moncivias wanted to know how I felt about Trump trying to pull troops from Syria. He asked if I’d had contact with the Taliban there, and I had to explain that the Taliban don’t operate in Syria. It was clear that they weren’t after anything in particular; their questions were completely scattershot. This wasn’t a continuous interrogation, either. They were wandering in and out of the room, leaving me alone for long periods of time. Interestingly, they didn’t ask me anything about CBP itself. I had told them my current story was about gunrunning, but they didn’t think to ask if I’d done any reporting on their employer, which I had. In fact, my laptop contained hard-won documents on CBP, but I didn’t see the officers reading them.
I did see them copy my laptop’s serial number and write down three or four numbers and alphanumeric sequences found deep in my phone’s settings. The only specifier I halfway understood was the phone’s IMEI number, which can be used to track its physical location. Even if I get rid of the phone, I could be on some accursed watchlist, or somehow electronically tagged, for the rest of my life. Even if it’s benign, like those devices scientists stick whales with, I experience it as an indignity, and you probably would too. They didn’t handcuff me, but the officers otherwise acted as if I were under arrest in a police station, though I had done nothing wrong and they had no reason to suspect me of anything. They frequently took my devices out of the room for long periods of time. When I asked if they had backed up the devices or copied files, they denied it, which I found hard to believe. “You didn’t stick a thumb drive in there?” I asked Pomeroy, who was walking around carrying my laptop. He pretended not to hear.
Around the three-hour mark, I became completely passive. Confinement in a blank room is a soft form of torture, especially if you suffer from a crippling caffeine addiction, as I do. They were “fresh out” when I demeaned myself by meekly requesting coffee. For a long time, I sat slumped in the chair with a mounting headache while Moncivias finished typing up his report on me. He would pause, carefully consult something on my phone, and then go back to typing. This went on for another hour.
It was around 4 p.m. when Moncivias finally finished up and informed me, anticlimactically, that I was free to go. I couldn’t wait to get outside because the detention area was freezing. No wonder Spanish-speaking migrants call CBP detention la hielera — the icebox. I took my phone and laptop and silently packed up my luggage, which still lay disemboweled on the desk, underwear and all. Pomeroy was gone by this time. As I was walking out, I said to Moncivias and Villarreal, “It’s funny, of all the countries I’ve been to, the border guards have never treated me worse than here, in the one country I’m a citizen of, in the town where I was born.”
“Welcome back to the USA,” Moncivias said.
-
1
-
-
-
Gee Senator, can you make it a little more clear? Not sure exactly what your trying to tell all of us.
-
1
-
-
Quote
"To be honest, the process was such a disaster and such a shit-show and there were so many unqualified people coming through that the issues with [future HUD Secretary Ben] Carson don't really stick out to me," said one RNC vetter. "You know, I'm like, 'Oh gentle Ben is unqualified and thinks that pyramids store grain or whatever. Great. At least he's not beating his wife and his wife's not appearing on Oprah.'"
QuoteWe'd be sitting around and Trump would be like, 'Oh, hey, I'm bringing like Joe Shmoe up to Bedminster for Department of Interior,' and then we were like, 'F---, we need to run a vet on this guy to make sure he's not a kid-toucher,'" said one source involved in the vetting. "It was just a clown show."
"I think I truly understood what less than half of the people were being vetted for," said another source involved in the vetting. "Totally inadequate resources for the overall process. ... We would probably run through dozens [of contenders] a day."
-
2
-
-
https://www.axios.com/leaked-donald-trump-vetting-docs-hbo-6ce3cd26-1eb9-4da8-b15e-47b56020aef7.html
QuoteNearly 100 internal Trump transition vetting documents leaked to "Axios on HBO" identify a host of "red flags" about officials who went on to get some of the most powerful jobs in the U.S. government.
Why it matters: The massive trove, and the story behind it, sheds light on the slap-dash way President Trump filled his cabinet and administration, and foreshadowed future scandals that beset his government.
QuoteSome highlights:
Scott Pruitt, who ultimately lost his job as EPA Administrator because of serial ethical abuses and clubbiness with lobbyists, had a section in his vetting form titled "allegations of coziness with big energy companies."
Tom Price, who ultimately resigned as Health and Human Services Secretary after Trump lost confidence in him in part for stories about his use of chartered flights, had sections in his dossier flagging "criticisms of management ability" and "Dysfunction And Division Has Haunted Price's Leadership Of The House Budget Committee."
Mick Mulvaney, who became Trump's Budget Director and is now his acting chief of staff, has a striking assortment of "red flags," including his assessment that Trump "is not a very good person."
The Trump transition team was so worried about Rudy Giuliani, in line for Secretary of State, that they created a separate 25-page document titled "Rudy Giuliani Business Ties Research Dossier" with copious accounting of his "foreign entanglements."
One red flag for Gen. David Petraeus, who was under consideration for Secretary of State and National Security Adviser: "Petraeus Is Opposed to Torture."
QuoteIn the chaotic weeks after Trump's surprise election victory, Trump fired Chris Christie as the head of his transition. The team that took over — which V.P. Mike Pence helmed — outsourced the political vetting of would-be top officials to the Republican National Committee.
We obtained the political vetting forms that Trump and his senior aides were given for Ben Carson, Dan Coats, Betsy DeVos, Gary Cohn, Don McGahn, Elaine Chao, John Kelly, James Mattis, John Bolton, Mick Mulvaney, Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, Rick Perry, Robert Lighthizer, Ryan Zinke, Scott Pruitt, and many others.
President-elect Trump reviewed many of these documents at Trump Tower and Bedminster before his interviews, according to a source who saw him eyeball them.
QuoteTraditionally, any would-be top official faces three types of vetting: an FBI background check, a scrub for financial conflicts of interest from the Office of Government Ethics, and a deep dive from the president-elect's political team, which veteran Washington lawyers often handle.
We obtained many of the political vetting forms. According to sources on the RNC vetting team, senior Trump officials asked them to do an initial "scrub" of the public record before Trump met the contenders. But in many cases — for example the misguided choice of Andrew Puzder as Labor Secretary — this RNC "scrub" of public sources was the only substantial vetting in Trump's possession when he announced his picks.
The documents show what Trump’s vetting shop worried about in assessing candidates for the most important jobs in government.
QuoteThe first red flag for Rex Tillerson, who became Trump’s first Secretary of State, was about Russia. "Tillerson's Russia ties go deep," it read.
One red flag for Fox News host Laura Ingraham, considered for White House press secretary: "Ingraham said people should wear diapers instead of sharing bathrooms with transgender people."
One heading in the document about Kris Kobach, in the running for Homeland Security Secretary, listed "white supremacy" as a vulnerability. It cited accusations from past political opponents that he had ties to white supremacist groups.
Vetters had unique concerns about Gary Cohn. "Some Say Cohn Has An Abrasive, Curt, And Intimidating Style," they wrote, citing a Bloomberg piece. "He Would Sometimes Hike Up One Leg And Plant His Foot On A Trader's Desk, His Thigh Close To The Employee's Face, And Ask How Markets Were Doing."
QuoteSome of the contenders were strikingly swampy — even by the RNC vetters' standards.
Seema Verma, who Trump appointed as the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had this paragraph near the top of her vetting form: "Verma was simultaneously advising Indiana ($3.5 million in contracts) on issues impacting how it would spend Medicaid funds while she was also being paid by a client that received Medicaid funds. Ethics experts have called the arrangement a conflict of interest that potentially put Indiana taxpayers at risk."
Sonny Perdue, Trump's pick for Agriculture Secretary, had a vetting form with sections labeled "Business conflicts of interest" and "Family conflicts of interest." It noted that "Perdue is the owner of Houston Fertilizer and Grain, a company that has received contracts from the Department of Agriculture."
QuoteThe documents point to Trump’s willingness to meet with — and sometimes hire — people who had harshly criticized him. The vetting team often put these denigrations at the top of the documents. A source with direct knowledge told me many of these documents were handed to Trump; he knew about the insults, and picked the insulters anyway.
Nikki Haley, who became Trump's U.N. ambassador, had a note that she'd said Trump is everything "we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten."
Ryan Zinke, who became Interior Secretary, had described Trump as "un-defendable."
Rick Perry, Energy Secretary, had voluminous vetting concerns: "Perry described Trumpism as a 'toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition,'" the vetters noted.
QuoteThe RNC vetted some left field contenders. Nobody we spoke to, including senior members of the transition, could remember what job Hollywood talent agent Ari Emanuel was vetted for. (A suggested question for Emanuel in his interview: "Will you have any personal issues during times when the Trump administration faces partisan criticism from Democrats, including your brother Rahm or President Obama?")
Two sources who were doing the vetting at the RNC told me they often didn't know what jobs they were vetting people for.
QuoteWe are publishing a selection of these vetting documents. Below you can read the forms we obtained for the people who got jobs in the Trump administration, as well as a small group who didn't get jobs but whose vetting dossiers are noteworthy.
We redacted personal details that weren't newsworthy, information from spurious sources, and material the vetting team described as rumors about contenders’ personal lives, and contact and identification information. All the unredacted information is from public sources.
We've reached out for comment to the White House, the Republican National Committee, and each person whose vetting form we are publishing. You can see the responses here, and we publish the RNC's full statement in a separate article that has behind-the-scenes details about their work.
Damn.
-
3
-
-
2 minutes ago, SquishMitten said:
So did they just use an old picture? Or was the whole thing a lie and there wasn’t even an armed group to begin with? I’m confused on how many lies need to be tallied here
Oh, there's an actual militia or two claiming to protecting the 11 GOP senators, and they claimed to show up at the capital.
The old picture was used by the Oregon GOP to show the militias meant business, but the picture had nothing to do with militias.
-
31 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:
If there was a way to reasonably stop Trumpism, it would probably look a lot like the US constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
"Have you seen the actual Constitution? It's so faded out, that no one knows any longer what the real words say, and you can't take pictures of it to prove what it really says! And everything else is made up by the Deep State!
-MAGA folks and the GOP years from now when doing things that are blatantly unconstitutional.
-
1
-
2019 NBA Offseason Thread -- Trades, Free Agents, Firings, Retirements, Etc
in Basketball
Posted
A few months ago, the Knicks were dreaming of Zion, AD, Irving, etc. Funny how things change.