| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 18:17 - Aug 22 with 2578 views | Thursday |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 14:06 - Aug 22 by pikeypaul |
All the boring pric does is trawl the internet to copy and paste biased articles that he agrees with.
He/she no doubt comes across the same amount of opposing views but decides to ignore them. |
I'm grateful for balanced, nonpartisan posters such as yourself. |  | |  |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 18:47 - Aug 22 with 2554 views | pikeypaul |
Good
219 AFLI
SIUYRL |  |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 20:18 - Aug 22 with 2505 views | Dr_Winston |
Let's be honest, even as someone generally more comfortable on the right hand side Trump is a contemptible f*ckwit and the only reason most people shouldn't be hoping that he's in chains by the end of 2018 is because that would usher in the era of President Pence. |  |
| Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair, or f*cking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back. |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 16:26 - Aug 23 with 2416 views | A_Fans_Dad |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 20:18 - Aug 22 by Dr_Winston |
Let's be honest, even as someone generally more comfortable on the right hand side Trump is a contemptible f*ckwit and the only reason most people shouldn't be hoping that he's in chains by the end of 2018 is because that would usher in the era of President Pence. |
" Trump is a contemptible f*ckwit and the only reason most people shouldn't be hoping that he's in chains by the end of 2018 is because that would usher in the era of President Pence. "
Except all those people that actually support him in the USA and can see all the good he is doing them.
They have finally found a Non Politician in a political position who actually does what he said when he campaigned for that position and they are loving it.
We should be so bloody lucky. | | | |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 16:35 - Aug 23 with 2415 views | A_Fans_Dad |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 16:50 - Aug 22 by pikeypaul |
Of course he is.
But his homeland popularity and that of the Republicans is at a higher level now than when he was voted in.
So I can not see them making gains. [Post edited 22 Aug 2018 16:55]
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"Of course he is." (in trouble) .
Are you sure about that?
Cohen has been persuaded to plead guilty to a Non Crime.
As well as that his lawer (a long time Clinton lawer) has admitted that Cohen has blown apart the Steele dossier as they have both admitted that he was not in Prague as the dossier said he was.
The whole thing is falling apart.
Yes Manaforte was found guilty of old crimes which had nothing to do with Trump or the Election, one case against Russians (the companies) is falling apart and the other will be interesting if they decide to be represented in the US the same way as the "Company" ones have.
Add to that is the fact that every single case coming from the Mueller investigation will be overthrown in court due to "the fruit of the Tree" as his investigation was illegal in the first place.
The next few months are going to be very interesting for those following the Real Investigations that are going on and not the Mueller Farce.
ps if you are thinking Campaign Violations perhaps this reminder will put it in perspective.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/obama-2008-campaign-fined-375000-085784 [Post edited 23 Aug 2018 17:22]
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 21:26 - Aug 23 with 2370 views | Shaky |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 16:35 - Aug 23 by A_Fans_Dad |
"Of course he is." (in trouble) .
Are you sure about that?
Cohen has been persuaded to plead guilty to a Non Crime.
As well as that his lawer (a long time Clinton lawer) has admitted that Cohen has blown apart the Steele dossier as they have both admitted that he was not in Prague as the dossier said he was.
The whole thing is falling apart.
Yes Manaforte was found guilty of old crimes which had nothing to do with Trump or the Election, one case against Russians (the companies) is falling apart and the other will be interesting if they decide to be represented in the US the same way as the "Company" ones have.
Add to that is the fact that every single case coming from the Mueller investigation will be overthrown in court due to "the fruit of the Tree" as his investigation was illegal in the first place.
The next few months are going to be very interesting for those following the Real Investigations that are going on and not the Mueller Farce.
ps if you are thinking Campaign Violations perhaps this reminder will put it in perspective.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/obama-2008-campaign-fined-375000-085784 [Post edited 23 Aug 2018 17:22]
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It's called the "fruit of the **poisonous** tree" dumbass.
And the argument that the Mueller investigation is illegitimate has already been put forward by Manafort's defence team in pre-trial hearings, and rejected by the presiding Federal judge. |  |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 23:53 - Aug 23 with 2331 views | A_Fans_Dad |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 21:26 - Aug 23 by Shaky |
It's called the "fruit of the **poisonous** tree" dumbass.
And the argument that the Mueller investigation is illegitimate has already been put forward by Manafort's defence team in pre-trial hearings, and rejected by the presiding Federal judge. |
That is because all the information was not made available to Judge Ellis.
We will see who is correct in the near future. | | | |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 06:58 - Aug 24 with 2296 views | Shaky |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 23:53 - Aug 23 by A_Fans_Dad |
That is because all the information was not made available to Judge Ellis.
We will see who is correct in the near future. |
I think you will find the theory that the doctrine of fruit of the poisonous tree applies in this instance is attributable to such noted legal scholars as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.
In the meantime here is what a law professor from Georgetown and former acting solicitor general has to say:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This Conspiracy Theory Should Worry Trump
When two or more people join together to break the law, as Michael Cohen says he and the president did, the penalties can be harsh.
By Neal K. Katyal, acting solicitor general in the Obama administration
NYT, Aug. 23, 2018
President Trump needs a new defense. He started out with the claim that he didn’t know anything about payments that his former lawyer Michael Cohen arranged or made to the former Playboy model Karen McDougal and the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels. Mr. Cohen’s tape destroyed that assertion, at least as it applied to Ms. McDougal.
His defense then evolved to denying any personal responsibility for those actions. Predictably, Mr. Cohen’s plea agreement on Tuesday destroyed that defense, too, after he told a federal judge under oath that the president had directed him to arrange payments to the two women, who claim to have had affairs with Mr. Trump, “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”
Now President Trump has moved on to a new defense, claiming that what he did wasn’t a crime and so it can’t be prosecuted. That argument has no basis, either, and is inconsistent with centuries of Anglo-American law.
Here’s the new Trump argument, stripped down to its essence: It was clear that he would reimburse Mr. Cohen for those payments to the women, and he’s allowed under Supreme Court precedent to give his campaign as much of his own money as he wants to.
The problem is that legally, his argument doesn’t get him where he wants to go. Even though Mr. Trump can give his campaign as much of his own money as he wants to, he can’t ask other people to front the money for him and promise to pay them back later without reporting the arrangement in a timely fashion to the Federal Election Commission. But he didn’t report it, subverting the whole point of the nation’s post-Watergate campaign finance laws, which is to disclose campaign giving and spending to the American people before an election – not 20 months later.
But, the Trump defenders say, reporting violations happen all the time, and that is certainly true. But there are two facets that make the Trump reporting violations criminally significant, as opposed to a misdemeanor oversight or bureaucratic snafu: It appears to have been an intentional end-run around the campaign finance laws and to involve a conspiracy. Each of these points explains why the new Trump argument will fail.
Criminal law focuses on mens rea, or criminal intent. This means the very same act can be criminal if done with one state of mind and innocent if done with another. It is a mistake to think about Mr. Cohen’s allegations as some sort of routine paperwork error. Structuring a transaction to intentionally avoid reporting it as required by the law is a very serious offense, not a technical one that can be forgiven. That is particularly true of the secret payments to the two women, which, had they been disclosed before the election, as they should have been, might have altered the outcome.
The second facet is even more problematic for the president. Prosecutors use the conspiracy doctrine to punish two or more people who merely agree to commit a criminal act. They don’t even have to actually perform the act; they just need to have agreed to do so. The idea behind conspiracy liability is that when two people agree to commit a crime, it’s much worse for society than when a lone actor does. A Yale Law Journal article I wrote on this subject was inspired by a riddle: Why is it that if you sell a joint, you get a six-month sentence, and if your friend sells a joint, he gets a six-month sentence, but if you both agree to sell a single joint, you get a five-year minimum sentence? The outcomes seem really odd because it looks as if the same crime is getting different punishments.
The answer is that it isn’t the same crime, and hasn’t been thought of that way in the Anglo-American legal tradition for over 500 years. Rather, conspiracy has always been a separate offense, punished independently without calibration to the underlying crime. So conspiracy to sell a joint can be punished the same way as conspiracy to sell a kilo of marijuana.
Why would the law be written that way? The answer has to do with the harm to society when individuals agree with one another to commit criminal acts. These acts are seen as possessing a higher level of moral culpability and are also more dangerous. Two people can often do more harm than one. And those criminal economies of scale are sometimes supplemented by psychological dangers. People tend to take more risks in groups than alone. For these reasons, the law has always treated conspiracy harshly. Indeed, for much of American history, conspiring to commit an immoral but not illegal act was itself punishable as conspiracy.
That is why the latest Trump defense has no viability. His defenders say there is no precedent for a campaign finance reporting violation being punished as a serious felony. Even if that claim were true, and it isn’t, they are looking at the wrong precedents. After all, Mr. Cohen has pleaded guilty to making or facilitating illegal campaign contributions and has said the president directed him to do so, suggesting that Mr. Trump was a co-conspirator in those crimes.
And even assuming we were dealing with just a reporting violation, the right precedents are the thousands of cases in America where even low-level crimes have been severely punished because they involve intentional conspiracies.
Incidentally, it’s no surprise that Mr. Trump himself came out in an interview aired Thursday against the practice of “flipping,” where prosecutors give a guilty person a deal in exchange for information against another person. Flipping and conspiracy charges go hand-in-hand; the latter is what encourages the former.
We are approaching a reckoning, where criminal and perhaps impeachment processes will begin asking hard questions. It would be a huge mistake for the president to rely on assurances from his legal team that what he did was ordinary and not prosecutable. Rather, if the Cohen allegations are true, what President Trump did was knowingly conspire to violate federal campaign law and to hide it from the American people right before the election, and that very severe crime is one that must be punished.
Neal K. Katyal (@neal_katyal), an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, is a law professor at Georgetown and a partner at Hogan Lovells.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/politics/conspiracy-theory-trump-cohe | |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 08:22 - Aug 24 with 2278 views | pikeypaul |
A_Fans_Dad
I agree it was amazing how Obama slipped off the hook after his illegal actions just like Clinton walked free.
Now do not start copy and paste boy trawling the net oh feck to late the boring pric already has.
217 AFLI [Post edited 24 Aug 2018 8:25]
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 09:00 - Aug 24 with 2264 views | Shaky |
“Holy Shit, I Thought Pecker Would Be the Last One to Turn”: Trump’s National Enquirer Allies Are the Latest to Defect
by Gabriel Sherman
Vanity Fair, August 23, 2018 11:30 am
As Robert Mueller’s siege closes in on Donald Trump, the president has been left to wonder which of his staff and closest allies will, after all, stay loyal. On Tuesday, Michael Cohen completed his operatic turn against his former boss when he stood in federal court and pleaded guilty to eight felonies that included making hush-money payments at Trump’s direction to women Trump allegedly had sex with. The admission effectively made Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal crime.
Cohen’s stunning admission came just days after The New York Times reported that White House counsel Don McGahn provided 30 hours of testimony to Mueller’s investigators. McGahn’s extensive cooperation with Mueller rattled the West Wing to the core at a time when aides were struggling to contain the fallout from former Apprentice star Omarosa Manigault Newman’s scathing White House memoir.
And now Trump’s most powerful media ally next to Fox News has broken with him. According to two sources briefed on the Cohen investigation, prosecutors granted immunity to David Pecker, chairman of The National Enquirer publisher, American Media Inc., and A.M.I.’s chief content officer, Dylan Howard, so they would describe Trump’s involvement in Cohen’s payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal during the 2016 campaign. The Wall Street Journal first reported Pecker’s cooperation on Wednesday night. (Pecker and Howard did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.)
Pecker’s apparent decision to corroborate Cohen’s account, and implicate Trump in a federal crime, is another vivid example of how isolated Trump is becoming as the walls close in and his former friends look for ways out. “Holy shit, I thought Pecker would be the last one to turn,” a Trump friend told me when I brought up the news. Trump and Pecker have been close for years. According to the Trump friend, Pecker regularly flew on Trump’s plane from New York to Florida. In July 2013, Trump tweeted that Pecker should become C.E.O. of Time magazine. “He’d make it exciting and win awards!”
During the 2016 campaign, Pecker provided invaluable media support to Trump by regularly attacking his Republican rivals and Hillary Clinton. At times, it seemed like the Enquirer operated as a de-facto arm of the campaign. In October 2015, I reported that Trump aides were a source for an Enquirer article exposing Ben Carson’s malpractice lawsuits (“Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson Left Sponge in Patient’s Brain!”). Pecker denied it at the time. In June, The Washington Post reported that the Enquirer routinely sent stories to Trump to review prior to publication. (The Enquirer denied that as well.) During the transition, rumors circulated that Trump was considering Pecker for a prime ambassadorship. Last summer, Pecker reportedly brought an adviser to Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman to meet Trump in the Oval Office to help him expand A.M.I.’s business.
But that was before federal prosecutors investigating Cohen subpoenaed A.M.I. Pecker’s friendship with Trump now seems to be over. According to a source close to A.M.I., Pecker and Trump haven’t spoken in roughly eight months. Howard remains particularly angry at Trump, two people close to Howard told me. “There is no love lost,” one person familiar with Howard’s thinking said. Another person said Howard “hates Trump” and feels “used and abused by him.”
It’s likely that more Trump relationships will be stress-tested in the weeks to come as Trump’s legal peril escalates. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, has given a series of cable-news interviews intimating that Cohen has valuable and damaging information on Trump to share with Mueller–including the claim that Trump had foreknowledge of Russia’s hacking of Clinton’s e-mails. One source close to Cohen told me Cohen wants to tell Mueller that Trump discussed the release of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s e-mails during the weekend when the Access Hollywood "grab ’em by the pussy” tape dominated the news cycle.
Trump, meanwhile, is struggling to develop a strategy to push back on the damaging headlines. He largely avoided the topic of Cohen and Paul Manafort during his relatively subdued rally on Tuesday night in West Virginia. On Wednesday, he gave a meandering interview to Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt, in which he suggested the stock market might crash were he to be impeached. One source close to the White House said Trump is considering announcing he’s revoked additional security clearances to create a new story line. The source added that Trump is even considering taking clearances from former members of his administration, including former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and secretary of state Rex Tillerson.
Gabriel Sherman is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair. Most recently, Sherman served as national-affairs editor at New York magazine, and he is a regular contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/donald-trump-national-enquirer-allies-de | |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 09:03 - Aug 24 with 2262 views | Shaky |
. . .and in related news:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AP: National Enquirer hid damaging Trump stories in a safe
By JEFF HORWITZ
AP, 23 Aug 2018
WASHINGTON (AP) – The National Enquirer kept a safe containing documents on hush money payments and other damaging stories it killed as part of its cozy relationship with Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 presidential election, people familiar with the arrangement told The Associated Press.
The detail came as several media outlets reported on Thursday that federal prosecutors had granted immunity to National Enquirer chief David Pecker, potentially laying bare his efforts to protect his longtime friend Trump.
Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty this week to campaign finance violations alleging he, Trump and the tabloid were involved in buying the silence of a porn actress and a Playboy model who alleged affairs with Trump.
Five people familiar with the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements, said the safe was a great source of power for Pecker, the company’s CEO.
The Trump records were stored alongside similar documents pertaining to other celebrities’ catch-and-kill deals, in which exclusive rights to people’s stories were bought with no intention of publishing to keep them out of the news. By keeping celebrities’ embarrassing secrets, the company was able to ingratiate itself with them and ask for favors in return.
But after The Wall Street Journal initially published the first details of Playboy model Karen McDougal’s catch-and-kill deal shortly before the 2016 election, those assets became a liability. Fearful that the documents might be used against American Media, Pecker and the company’s chief content officer, Dylan Howard, removed them from the safe in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, according to one person directly familiar with the events.
It was unclear whether the documents were destroyed or simply were moved to a location known to fewer people.
Jerry George, a longtime Enquirer reporter who left the publication in 2013, said the practice of catch and kill took root at the Enquirer under Pecker. Though George had no personal knowledge of Trump-specific catch and kills, he said that AMI generally paid hush money only if it believed it had something to gain.
“It’s ‘I did this for you,’ now what can you do for me,” George said. “They always got something in return.”
Catch and kills were loathed by the National Enquirer’s reporters, he said, because they robbed the publication of juicy stories.
American Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Pecker’s immunity deal was first reported Thursday by Vanity Fair and The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources. Vanity Fair reported that Howard also was granted immunity.
Court papers in the Cohen case say Pecker “offered to help deal with negative stories about (Trump’s) relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”
The Journal reported Pecker shared with prosecutors details about payments that Cohen says Trump directed in the weeks and months before the election to buy the silence of McDougal and another woman alleging an affair, porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels was paid $130,000, and McDougal was paid $150,000.
While Trump denies the affairs, his account of his knowledge of the payments has shifted. In April, Trump denied he knew anything about the Daniels payment. He told Fox News in an interview aired Thursday that he knew about payments “later on.”
In July, Cohen released an audio tape in which he and Trump discussed plans to buy McDougal’s story from the Enquirer. Such a purchase was necessary, they suggested, to prevent Trump from having to permanently rely on a tight relationship with the tabloid.
“You never know where that company – you never know what he’s gonna be –” Cohen says.
“David gets hit by a truck,” Trump says.
“Correct,” Cohen replies. “So, I’m all over that.”
While Pecker is cooperating with federal prosecutors now, American Media previously declined to participate in congressional inquiries.
Last March, in response to a letter from a group of House Democrats about the Daniels and McDougal payments, American Media general counsel Cameron Stracher declined to provide any documents, writing that the company was “exempt” from U.S. campaign finance laws because it is a news publisher and it was “confident” it had complied with all tax laws. He also rebuffed any suggestion that America Media Inc., or AMI, had leverage over the president because of its catch-and-kill practices.
“AMI states unequivocally that any suggestion that it would seek to ‘extort’ the President of the United States through the exercise of its editorial discretion is outrageous, offensive, and wholly without merit,” Stracher wrote in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
Former Enquirer employees who spoke to the AP said that negative stories about Trump were dead on arrival dating back more than a decade when he starred on NBC’s reality show “The Apprentice.”
In 2010, at Cohen’s urging, the National Enquirer began promoting a potential Trump presidential candidacy, referring readers to a pro-Trump website Cohen helped create. With Cohen’s involvement, the publication began questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace and American citizenship in print, an effort that Trump promoted for several years, former staffers said.
The Enquirer endorsed Trump for president in 2016, the first time it had ever officially backed a candidate. In the news pages, Trump’s coverage was so favorable that the New Yorker magazine said the Enquirer embraced him “with sycophantic fervor.”
Positive headlines for Trump, a Republican, were matched by negative stories about his opponents, including Hillary Clinton, a Democrat: An Enquirer front page from 2015 said “Hillary: 6 Months to Live” and accompanied the headline with a picture of an unsmiling Clinton with bags under her eyes.
https://apnews.com/143be3c52d4746af8546ca6772754407 | |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 17:36 - Aug 24 with 2205 views | Shaky |
Allen Weisselberg, Longtime Trump Organization CFO, Is Granted Immunity in Cohen Probe
Weisselberg earlier this year was subpoenaed to testify before grand jury
By Rebecca Ballhaus and Nicole Hong
WSJ Updated Aug. 24, 2018 11:43 a.m. ET
Allen Weisselberg, President Trump’s longtime financial gatekeeper, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for providing information about Michael Cohen in the criminal investigation into hush-money payments for two women during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Weisselberg, who is chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, was called to testify before a federal grand jury in the investigation earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal previously reported, citing people familiar with the investigation. He then spoke to investigators, though it isn’t clear whether he appeared before the grand jury.
The decision by prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office to grant immunity to Mr. Weisselberg escalates the pressure on Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Weisselberg has served for decades as executive vice president as well as CFO for the Trump Organization. After Mr. Trump was elected, he handed control of his financial assets and business interests to his two adult sons and Mr. Weisselberg.
Mr. Weisselberg didn’t respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Trump, who on Thursday said so-called flipping “almost ought to be illegal,” declined to comment.
Mr. Cohen on Tuesday pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges and told a federal judge that Mr. Trump had directed him during the 2016 campaign to buy the silence of two women who alleged affairs with Mr. Trump, a move that implicated the president in a federal crime. That was the first time Mr. Cohen admitted to coordinating with the president on the hush-money deals. Mr. Trump has denied involvement in the payments, saying he learned of them later.
Federal prosecutors also granted immunity to another longtime Trump ally: David Pecker, the chief executive of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, which in August 2016 purchased the rights to a former Playboy Playmate’s story of an affair with Mr. Trump. In exchange for immunity, Mr. Pecker met with prosecutors and shared details about payments Mr. Cohen arranged, including Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Journal couldn’t determine whether Mr. Weisselberg told prosecutors that Mr. Trump had knowledge of the payments.
Last year, Mr. Weisselberg arranged for the Trump Organization to reimburse Mr. Cohen, who had in October 2016 made a $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford, a former adult-film actress who claimed she had sex with Mr. Trump a decade earlier, in exchange for her silence about the alleged affair. A person familiar with Mr. Weisselberg’s thinking said he didn’t know that money was intended to pay Ms. Clifford, who goes professionally by Stormy Daniels, when he agreed in January 2017 to a $35,000 monthly retainer for Mr. Cohen.
How Cohen’s Guilty Plea Could Impact President Trump
That month, according to charging documents filed Tuesday, Mr. Cohen gave executives at the Trump Organization a copy of the bank statement from his bank account for Essential Consultants LLC, the company he used to pay Ms. Clifford the previous fall. The statement reflected Mr. Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Ms. Clifford, as well as an additional $50,000 that Mr. Cohen added in handwriting was for “tech services.”
Executives at the Trump Organization “ ‘grossed up’ for tax purposes” Mr. Cohen’s requested reimbursement, doubling it to $360,000, and added a $60,000 bonus, the document said. The next month, one executive at the company asked another executive to pay Mr. Cohen’s monthly retainer “from the trust” and to “post to legal expenses.”
Mr. Weisselberg isn’t named in the charging documents but was one of the executives, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Last month, a lawyer for Mr. Cohen released an audio recording of a September 2016 conversation between Messrs. Trump and Cohen in which the two men discussed buying the rights to former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal’s story.
In the recording, which federal investigators reviewed, Mr. Cohen said he would set up a company to make the payment, adding, “I’ve spoken with Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up,” before Mr. Trump interrupts him.
It isn’t clear whether Mr. Cohen actually spoke with Mr. Weisselberg about the plans to buy the rights to Ms. McDougal’s story. Ultimately, American Media Inc., which had purchased those rights a month earlier, declined to sell the rights to Mr. Cohen.
At the Trump Organization, Mr. Trump was known for being meticulous about payments the company made. Mr. Weisselberg would bring Mr. Trump checks to sign for the company on a daily basis, according to a person close to the company. Mr. Trump would routinely ask questions about the checks and what they were for, at times requesting Mr. Weisselberg hold off on specific payments, the person said.
“He would say, ‘That’s too much,’ ” the person said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/allen-weisselberg-longtime-trump-organization-cfo-i | |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 01:57 - Aug 25 with 2149 views | wobbly |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 16:35 - Aug 23 by A_Fans_Dad |
"Of course he is." (in trouble) .
Are you sure about that?
Cohen has been persuaded to plead guilty to a Non Crime.
As well as that his lawer (a long time Clinton lawer) has admitted that Cohen has blown apart the Steele dossier as they have both admitted that he was not in Prague as the dossier said he was.
The whole thing is falling apart.
Yes Manaforte was found guilty of old crimes which had nothing to do with Trump or the Election, one case against Russians (the companies) is falling apart and the other will be interesting if they decide to be represented in the US the same way as the "Company" ones have.
Add to that is the fact that every single case coming from the Mueller investigation will be overthrown in court due to "the fruit of the Tree" as his investigation was illegal in the first place.
The next few months are going to be very interesting for those following the Real Investigations that are going on and not the Mueller Farce.
ps if you are thinking Campaign Violations perhaps this reminder will put it in perspective.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/obama-2008-campaign-fined-375000-085784 [Post edited 23 Aug 2018 17:22]
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The problem Trump has is that it’s not the act but the cover up that gets you.
The only similarity here to the Obama link is that it is campaign finance violations - a set of laws that US law enforcement takes very seriously. But the Obama issue was an administrative failure over the timely reporting of individual donations. There is absolutely no suggestion that Obama even knew about it, let alone directed it.
Not the same for Trump. And not only did he know about it and direct it, he has lied in public for months about it. And he’s the President. And these are the laws that, as I said, the US takes very seriously. This one has legs and still has some ways to run. |  | | |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 07:19 - Aug 25 with 2113 views | peenemunde |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 20:18 - Aug 22 by Dr_Winston |
Let's be honest, even as someone generally more comfortable on the right hand side Trump is a contemptible f*ckwit and the only reason most people shouldn't be hoping that he's in chains by the end of 2018 is because that would usher in the era of President Pence. |
There is no chance of Trump being impeached.
If he was though, the 2nd American revolution would begin. |  | | |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 08:38 - Aug 25 with 2098 views | Shaky |
Exclusive: Ex-Trump World Tower doorman releases 'catch-and-kill' contract about alleged Trump affair
By Sonia Moghe, CNN
Updated 11:15 PM EDT, Fri August 24, 2018
(CNN) A former Trump World Tower doorman who says he has knowledge of an alleged affair President Donald Trump had with an ex-housekeeper, which resulted in a child, is now able to talk about a contract he entered with American Media Inc. that had prohibited him from discussing the matter with anyone, according to his attorney.
On Friday, Marc Held -- the attorney for Dino Sajudin, the former doorman -- said his client had been released from his contract with AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, "recently" after back-and-forth discussions with AMI.
CNN has exclusively obtained a copy of the "source agreement" between Sajudin and AMI, which is owned by David Pecker.
The contract appears to have been signed on Nov. 15, 2015, and states that AMI has exclusive rights to Sajudin's story but does not mention the details of the story itself beyond saying, "Source shall provide AMI with information regarding Donald Trump's illegitimate child..."
The contract states that "AMI will not owe Source any compensation if AMI does not publish the Exclusive..." and the top of the agreement shows that Sajudin could receive a sum of $30,000 "payable upon publication as set forth below."
But the third page of the agreement shows that about a month later, the parties signed an amendment that states that Sajudin would be paid $30,000 within five days of receiving the amendment. It says the "exclusivity period" laid out in the agreement "is extended in perpetuity and shall not expire."
The amendment also establishes a $1 million payment that Sajudin would be responsible for making to AMI "in the event Source breaches this provision."
"Mr. Sajudin has been unable to discuss the circumstances regarding his deal with American Media Inc. and the story that he sold to them, due to a significant financial penalty," Held told CNN. "Just recently, AMI released Mr. Sajudin from the terms of his agreement and he is now able to speak about his personal experience with them, as well as his story, which is now known to be one of the 'catch and kill' pieces. Mr. Sajudin hopes the truth will come out in the very near future."
In April, Sajudin told CNN he claims to have knowledge of a relationship Trump had with his former housekeeper that resulted in a child.
At the time, AMI called Sajudin's story "not credible" and denied any connection between the story and Trump and his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen.
The White House did not respond to CNN's requests for comments in April.
CNN has contacted AMI to clarify whether Sajudin has now been released from the contract to be able to speak on terms of the agreement and to seek reaction on this latest development, but has yet to receive a response.
Sajudin's allegation that Trump fathered a child out of wedlock has not been independently confirmed by any of the outlets that have investigated the story.
Held said he cannot give the exact date the agreement was terminated, per another agreement the attorney made with AMI in order to get his client out of the contract.
Held said that now that Sajudin has been released from the agreement with AMI, he would no longer be liable for a payment for speaking out.
"He's a blue-collar worker and a million dollars would have ruined him for life," Held told CNN.
What the doorman claims to know
When the story surfaced in April, Sajudin told CNN about the alleged relationship in a statement:
"Today I awoke to learn that a confidential agreement that I had with AMI (The National Enquirer) with regard to a story about President Trump was leaked to the press. I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower I was instructed not to criticize President Trump's former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump, which produced a child."
The Associated Press reported in April that Cohen "acknowledged to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin's story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it. He said he was acting as a Trump spokesman when he did so and denied knowing anything beforehand about the Enquirer payment to the ex-doorman."
Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges of tax fraud, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations tied to his work for Trump.
In that deal, he pleaded guilty to paying $130,000 to former adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, to conceal her story of an alleged affair with Trump. He also pleaded guilty to working with AMI to pay off former Playboy model Karen McDougal in a similar "catch and kill" agreement in order to keep her allegations of an affair with Trump from being published. Trump has denied an affair with both women.
Pecker has received immunity in the Cohen case for providing details of the payments to prosecutors, a source confirmed to CNN on Friday.
View on CNN
© 2018 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/08/24/politics/trump-tower-doorman-contract-ami/ind | |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 08:38 - Aug 25 with 2096 views | Shaky |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 07:19 - Aug 25 by peenemunde |
There is no chance of Trump being impeached.
If he was though, the 2nd American revolution would begin. |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 17:28 - Aug 25 with 2052 views | dizietsma |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 08:29 - Aug 26 with 2009 views | Shaky |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 17:28 - Aug 25 by dizietsma |
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And so he should be given the importance of Trump's Pecker to his rise to power. Here a brief history:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pravda on the Checkout Line
First Donald Trump got an endorsement from the tabloids. Now he’s getting a mouthpiece.
By JACK SHAFER
Politico, January/February 2017
The 2016 campaign hadn’t even begun when America’s supermarket tabloids picked their guy. “New Poll: Donald Trump’s The One!” the National Enquirer breathlessly announced in February 2015, long before the real estate developer was even a punchline in the political conversation.
As Trump’s unlikely run got underway that summer, the Enquirer kept rolling the drums, even publishing a September 2015 three-part series by Trump titled, imaginatively, “My Life Story.” Meanwhile, the tabloid treated Hillary Clinton’s White House dream as doomed from the start, the hope of a “desperate and deteriorating” candidate who, depending on which story you read, had only six months to live, or was headed to jail for covering up Vince Foster’s 1993 “murder,” or was going “behind bars for life” over her email scandal. The Enquirer accelerated in this new political direction as 2016 arrived, running a two-part soft interview with Trump and hammering his closest political rival, Ted Cruz, as a philanderer whose father was “linked” to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The tabs had covered politicians before, sure: Back in 1987, the Enquirer helped scuttle Gary Hart’s presidential ambitions when it published a cover photo of Donna Rice sitting on his lap, and in a 2008 series, it threw a saddle on John Edwards’ presidential bid and rode it into the ground. But the tabloids’ thrust had almost always been pure scandal. Politics was only the backdrop. That changed this time, as the tabloids–especially the Enquirer–fixated on the presidential campaign, sometimes in oddly substantive ways. Trump, Clinton or one of the other presidential candidates appeared on the Enquirer cover more than 20 times in 2016, an editorial trajectory that shows no sign of ending with 2017. “How Trump Will Fix Spy Showdown” heralds a cover line in the January 16 issue. The tab routinely depicted Clinton as crazed, diseased, near death, an ISIS-supporting traitor, a liar, a blackmailer, corrupt and a member of a crime family. The Enquirer’s sister tabloid, the Globe, contributed its own anti-Hillary salvos, claiming she was hooked on pills, crippled with multiple sclerosis, relying on a body double to conceal her illness and had suffered a “shocking crackup.”
As 2016 began, the tabloids celebrated favorite son Trump at every turn. The Enquirer endorsed him in March 2016–one of vanishingly few publications anywhere to do so–and stacked its pages with praise. In its February 29, 2016, issue, the tabloid toted up the shameful secrets the candidates were hiding. His secret? “[H]e has greater support and popularity than even he’s admitted to!” the Enquirer reported. During the campaign, Trump returned the affection by saying the Enquirer ought to be “respected” and asking why it didn't win a Pulitzer Prize for its Edwards stories. The Globe likewise pushed the Trump candidacy. It puffed him up with a story titled, “Don’t Mess With Donald Trump!”–and it threw spitballs at the Vatican on his behalf in “Donald Trump Schools the Pope on Vital American Security.” This open embrace of a candidate was new, and people noticed, with pieces appearing in New York magazine, the Washington Post, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the Daily Beast and elsewhere.
It’s easy to imagine that tabloids don’t matter; the Enquirer is a relatively small voice in the media kingdom, with a weekly circulation of only 342,071, down from the 5.9 million it commanded in the 1970s. But that misses the importance of the constant cultural background noise it adds to American life: There are 37,000 supermarkets in America, with an average of about 10 checkout stands each, and many stands feature a wire rack displaying the Enquirer, the Globe, often the company’s other tab, the National Examiner, and celebrity magazines. According to an industry study, American households make an average of 1.5 trips to the supermarket each week. Every customer passes by the checkout stand, which means that even people who never purchase a tabloid still absorb the ambient headlines, and those headlines can shape their view of the world.
It’s easy to imagine that tabloids don’t matter, but that misses the importance of the constant cultural background noise they add to American life.
After Trump’s November victory, the tabloids took a predictable bow: “Pundits, polls, politicians, the press–everyone else was WRONG and we were RIGHT AGAIN, AGAIN AND AGAIN!” crowed the Enquirer in its November 28, 2016, issue. “We had our finger on the pulse of the nation all along.” Instead of letting her retire from the field of combat, the tabloids reloaded for Clinton; the Enquirer had her fleeing for Qatar or Nigeria to escape Trump’s prosecution; the Globe reported the “indictment” of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea.
In the weeks since the election, the tabloids have redirected their energy yet again, in a genuinely surprising way: policy. “SUCCESS IN JUST 36 DAYS,” the Enquirer trumpeted in late December, touting a bullet-pointed list of Trump’s policy wins, including Air Force One, the Iran nuclear deal, global trade and other topics not often seen on the Enquirer’s cover. The Enquirer closed out December by announcing: TRUMP ALREADY RESTORING DIGNITY TO OVAL OFFICE, fully 22 days before he was even scheduled to take the oath. As a media machine, the Trump administration is poised to be like nothing we’ve seen–a Twitter-fueled, cable-news-obsessed juggernaut with its own direct channels to supporters, and at open war with the mainstream media. And the tabloid press–the ankle-biting, scandal-mongering attack dog scourge of the establishment–is becoming one of its propaganda arms. What’s going on?
In another era, Trump’s history of tomcatting, unscrupulous business dealings and grandiose tastes would have made him a perfect tabloid villain. But in that era, all the tabs would not have been owned by one person, who happened to be a friend of Trump. That person is David Pecker, CEO of American Media, the New York-based publisher that owns the Enquirer, the other tabloids and Radaronline, its Web tabloid. The two worked together in the late 1990s on Trump Style, a magazine for guests of the Trump properties, when Pecker was a magazine executive at Hachette Filipacchi Magazines. Pecker acknowledges their personal closeness, and reports have documented what looks like a significant amount of back-scratching. According to an anonymously sourced article in the Daily News last summer, Trump intervened with Pecker when his disciple Omarosa Manigault threatened to sue the Enquirer, an allegation both men deny. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Pecker’s company bought and then spiked an exclusive about Trump’s alleged 10-month-long affair with a Playboy centerfold model, which began in 2006 and extended into 2007. Trump was already married to Melania, to whom their son Barron was born in March 2006, which would mean–if the story were true–that he had been carrying on with the model when his son was just an infant. The contract gave American Media exclusive rights in perpetuity to the model’s story, which she had expected would be published, according to the Journal. It never was. Purchasing a story just to bury it is a rare move called “catch and kill” in tabloidworld. Trump, for his part, denied the affair.
Now, instead of taking Trump down a few pegs, Pecker’s magazines are offering rich, soft-focus lifestyle features on America’s new royal family, while going after his opponents with a vitriol not even seen in coverage of Mel Gibson. You don’t have to be a Hillary lover to be repulsed by the Enquirer’s coverage of her; the sicknesses the Enquirer has attached to Clinton would fill a medical encyclopedia–muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, endometriosis and brain damage from her concussion. She suffers from obesity (289 pounds), brain cancer and mental disorders, and has had two strokes, the Enquirer claims.
How the tabloids see Hillary Clinton.The Trump family, meanwhile, dominates the January 2, 2017, Enquirer cover; inside, the tab gives the family the most generous coverage about their interests. For tabloid readers accustomed to stories about the sordid lives of the famous, this marks a complete editorial relocation. It’s as though the Trumps are the home team and the Enquirer the house organ for a season that will last at least four years. In this, you could say they were embracing the earlier American gossip tradition of fan magazines like Photoplay and Modern Screen. In a recent academic study, gossip historian Anne Helen Petersen urges us to think of gossip “as a spectrum, with scandalous gossip residing on the left while fannish gossip exists on the right.” Both classes of publications create “‘imagined’ and real communities of readers,” she writes, “in which standards of morality are constructed, affirmed and challenged.” The reader of fan magazines, Petersen writes, “feels affection and devotion to a figure and, presumably, does not wish that devotion to be challenged.”
That’s as good a way to think about Trump’s base as any political pundit has found. Typical Trump voters may not literally be tabloid readers, but, like tabloid readers, they’ve compartmentalized their feelings about the man. Pulling the lever for Trump meant they were willing to overlook his sexual indiscretions, be they physical or verbal. His underhanded business dealings? His incitements of violence to crowds at his rallies? Little of this matters to them, and little of it matters to the tabloids, either.
Some consider Enquirer readers representative of the emerging “post-truth” era, reliant on their own beliefs and indifferent to the facts accepted by the mainstream. But a better way to look at Enquirer readers might be as a “pre-truth” group, drawn to arguments based on pure emotional appeal. Ted Cruz makes such a perfect tabloid villain because he looks like one, because he went to Princeton and Harvard, and because he seems unimpressed by anybody not named Ted Cruz. Hillary Clinton, too, is a paid-in-full member of the American elite: Wellesley, Yale, the Senate and global foundation muckety-muck. Going into 2016, the tabloids already had marked her as their campaign heavy.
Trump, on the other hand, could be cast as the perfect proletarian candidate: patriotic, plain-talking (or plain double-talking) and a nativist. Trump, being rich and educated at the Wharton School, isn’t an obvious ideological fit for these Enquirer readers. But when he wolfs down fast food or speaks in broken sentences, praises his tacky palaces as beautiful, or unexpectedly takes a vulgar turn in the middle of a speech, he ends up declaring a kind of class solidarity with a set of people who could never afford his resorts. His penchant for glitter, big hair, big things in general and bad grammar, and his disdain for all thing refined (his favorite musical is Evita), makes him highly representative of Rust Belt culture. I grew up with many of the people who voted for Trump in the primaries and the general election. They can smell condescension at the parts-per-billion level. With Trump, they don’t even sniffle.
Like Franklin D. Roosevelt before him, Trump can bridge sociological divides, and that gives him wide appeal among the Enquirer crowd. He certainly sounds more sincere on the issues that appeal to middle- and lower-class voters than Clinton sounds, who pronounced herself their champion in speech after unconvincing speech. Where Clinton was convincing–her policy ideas, her grasp of issues–Trump simply didn’t care, aggressively pandering to voters who believe in simple, turn-key solutions to whatever foreign policy, environment, crime and employment problems that exist. In his worldview, there is a tabloid solution to every ill facing America. All he asks is for citizens to swallow.
As a business move, the tabloids’ Trumpian turn appears to have worked: Pecker says the “pro-Trump and anti-Hillary” covers do 23 percent better on the newsstand for the Enquirer.
As a journalistic move–and yes, you can call the Enquirer journalism–there’s something bigger going on. Overtly partisan coverage is hardly noteworthy in 2016. What is noteworthy is the kind of partisanship the tabloids have exhibited. Their attacks on Trump’s opponents have been, no other word for it, propagandistic in their approach: They’ve followed his lead in constructing blatantly false or half-true assertions and circulating them in banner headlines.
All the hallmarks of classic propaganda appear in the newly politicized tabloids. First, there is the pure volume of the malicious bunk they churn out. The tabs construct wild story after wild story that “entertains, confuses, and overwhelms the audience,” as one recent report described modern Russian propaganda technique. Like the Enquirer, propagandists are rarely content to push a single fabrication. The greater the number, the greater likelihood one will take root. The Enquirer’s harping on Clinton’s health is a good example. Had she suffered from half of the conditions and ailments the Enquirer had claimed, she would have been in intensive care instead of on the campaign trail. But classic propaganda makes little attempt to be consistent with observable facts, relying instead on volume and insistence to overwhelm its subjects and on their willingness to believe what’s spread.
All the hallmarks of classic propaganda appear in the newly politicized tabloids.
Like propagandists, tabs make up bizarre yet plausible stuff faster than the fact-checkers can knock it down–assuming that the fact-checkers care about tracking tabloid outrageousness in the first place. In a Rand Corporation study of Russian propaganda published last year, Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews write about the “rapid, continuous and repetitive” quality of the propaganda, which is a good descriptor of the kinds of bogus campaign stories the Enquirer and Globe published. Effective propaganda, they tell us, drowns out other messages, and repeated exposure increases the acceptance among the receptive over time.
The best propagandists always remember to fold a dash of the plausible into the mix, and here the tabloids excel. Like most people in their late 60s, Clinton shows her age. She has her ailments and conditions, and maybe she carries a few more pounds than she should. And then there was that fainting spell during her bout with pneumonia. Upon this foundation of her normality, an ambitious tabloid propagandist can float a thousand invented maladies, as the Enquirer did, needing only a few claims to take anchor and lead readers to believe she’s a terminal case.
The same goes for the Enquirer inflations about Cruz’s alleged affairs, his father’s “links” to the Kennedy assassination and Clinton’s criminal exposure in the wake of the email scandal. In the Enquirer’s malicious hands, the now retired, world-renowned doctor Ben Carson becomes a “bungling surgeon” and Jeb Bush becomes a “cheater” who is involved in the drug trade. Propagandists often rely on eliciting emotion–fear, pity, disgust, happiness, anger, frustration–to make the sale, and here the Enquirer excels again with its hysterical coverage of illegal immigration and its assertion that Muslim spies have infiltrated the CIA. Propagandists simplify the complicated, and here again, the Enquirer takes the cue. One cover line states that “Plugging Leaks Will Destroy ISIS!” Another that building the wall will “Smash Cartels’ $60 Billion Drug & Trafficking Business!” Still another that “Apple’s 4.5 Million Jobs [are] Coming Home!” All thanks, of course, to Donald J. Trump.
The Enquirer agrees that it has become more political but rejects the notion that it’s a Trump mouthpiece. Through a spokesperson, Enquirer Editor-in-Chief Dylan Howard said the paper is just serving its readers: Surveys showed they wanted to know more about Trump than the other candidates. “Rest assured, no one influences the publication’s coverage other than me and my editors,” he said.
It would overstate the tabloids’ power by several magnitudes to say they primed the country for Trump victory. But put them together with the Drudge Report, which has hyped Enquirer stories; Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News Channel, which touted an Enquirer story in the late days of the campaign; and Breitbart, which toes the Trump line, and you’ve got the makings of a new, all-American misinformation bloc. The tabloids’ lockstep behind Trump may be the greatest aid and comfort a major publication has given to a presidential candidate since the 1936 campaign, when Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick turned the 17th floor of the Tribune Tower over to 100 supporters of Alf Landon to work the phone banks and ran headlines like “Moscow Orders Reds in U.S. to Back Roosevelt.” Meanwhile, Tribune operators answered the phone in countdown style–“Only 97 days left to save your country”–until Election Day.
The ability of the Enquirer and its weird sister tabloids to feed word-of-mouth and other organizations in the mediasphere–not just the Hillary-hating Breitbart and Drudge, but the mainstream newspaper, Web and television outlets–makes these outlets a new kind of political asset for the 45th president. Trump says something, and the tabloids echo it first and amplify it to the distortion point later. A Trump enemy appears on the horizon–somebody like Cruz or Bush–and the tabs go after him.
In the quaint days of American politics, politicians jousted mostly over spin or ideology. But in the Trump era, the battle has become one about “facts,” which in his case aren’t facts at all but forms of magical thinking. Already Trump has asserted that “millions of people voted illegally,” a position that he does not retreat from when the media–and other credible sources–refute that claim. In late December, Trump took credit for Sprint’s plans to add 5,000 jobs in the United States, when the additions were really part of an earlier decision. He called for national unity after the election out of one side of his mouth while attacking the media for allegedly inciting protests out of the other. Like the propagandists, he intends to erode the public’s ability to distinguish what is true from what is fantasy. The tabloid echo chamber becomes one more mirror in the funhouse, reflecting not just his opinions, but his proffered version of reality.
The tabloids will never take the New York Times’ position when it comes to setting the national agenda, but in the Web era, you don’t need a credible platform to start shaping the news. The cable networks have learned to crossfade from straight news to something more speculative and conspiratorial, shooting the tabloids’ pre-truth serum right into the civic bloodstream. Instead of thinking of the tabs as purveyors of celebrity dish and gross-out stories, try thinking of them as adjuncts to Trump’s Twitter feed–provocative and dubious material that unfailingly steals the scene, and is no longer safe to ignore.
Jack Shafer is senior media writer at Politico. | |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 09:41 - Aug 26 with 1997 views | exiledclaseboy |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 07:19 - Aug 25 by peenemunde |
There is no chance of Trump being impeached.
If he was though, the 2nd American revolution would begin. |
So that’s a revolution in the States if trump is impeached and a mass popular uprising here if Brexit doesn’t happen.  |  |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 11:08 - Aug 26 with 1973 views | peenemunde |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 09:41 - Aug 26 by exiledclaseboy |
So that’s a revolution in the States if trump is impeached and a mass popular uprising here if Brexit doesn’t happen. |
Tell us what you think and it’ll end up the complete opposite.
Like it did for the 2015 general election, Brexit and Donald Trump 🤣
As for a 2nd American revolution - that is inevitable.
The American people are growing apart not closer. | | | |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 13:02 - Aug 26 with 1958 views | exiledclaseboy |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 11:08 - Aug 26 by peenemunde |
Tell us what you think and it’ll end up the complete opposite.
Like it did for the 2015 general election, Brexit and Donald Trump 🤣
As for a 2nd American revolution - that is inevitable.
The American people are growing apart not closer. |
See you keep mentioning those three things but the only one I can remember predicting confidently is trump not becoming president. I didn’t think a sophisticated nation like the USA would ever take leave of its collective senses long enough to elect someone so unsuited to the great office he now holds. Clearly I was wrong.
If I predicted a remain win in the referendum I can’t imagine it was that confident a prediction cos the vote was always going to be close. I can’t remember predicting the 2015 election at all really. You may be able to find evidence to the contrary of course. If so, fine. Getting things wrong is all part of expressing an opinion sometimes. I’m not exactly bothered about it. | |
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 13:39 - Aug 26 with 1928 views | Shaky |
i have to say i think there is a fair chance the US will fracture sometime within the next 20-30 years, although the chances of this happening through armed civil war conflict are next to nothing.
I did some analysis based on the '16 presidential election and it is well known that Hillary won a majority of the popular vote by 3 million odd votes.
But if you count the states she won according to their percentage contribution to US GDP she won something like 65%!! (I couldn't find full GDP data to complete the analysis but that is in the ballpark). And of the remaining %35, Texas is a disproportionately large percentage, which is likely to flip permanently Democrat due to demographics/hispanic immigration within the next 10 years.
So why should the largely coastal 'elites' that generate the vast majority of US economic wealth, put up with the the persistent and increasingly illiberal crap coming from the gerrymandering Republicans?
Their ideology has produced typically dirt poor communities of morons in the south; let them get on with it. In other words fcuk 'em. [Post edited 26 Aug 2018 13:42]
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 13:44 - Aug 26 with 1923 views | peenemunde |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 13:39 - Aug 26 by Shaky |
i have to say i think there is a fair chance the US will fracture sometime within the next 20-30 years, although the chances of this happening through armed civil war conflict are next to nothing.
I did some analysis based on the '16 presidential election and it is well known that Hillary won a majority of the popular vote by 3 million odd votes.
But if you count the states she won according to their percentage contribution to US GDP she won something like 65%!! (I couldn't find full GDP data to complete the analysis but that is in the ballpark). And of the remaining %35, Texas is a disproportionately large percentage, which is likely to flip permanently Democrat due to demographics/hispanic immigration within the next 10 years.
So why should the largely coastal 'elites' that generate the vast majority of US economic wealth, put up with the the persistent and increasingly illiberal crap coming from the gerrymandering Republicans?
Their ideology has produced typically dirt poor communities of morons in the south; let them get on with it. In other words fcuk 'em. [Post edited 26 Aug 2018 13:42]
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Liberal elites lol.
Next to no chance of armed uprisings lol, there are more guns in the USA than people.
It’s coming make no mistake and what happens over there will no doubt spread to Europe. | | | |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 13:48 - Aug 26 with 1921 views | Shaky |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 13:44 - Aug 26 by peenemunde |
Liberal elites lol.
Next to no chance of armed uprisings lol, there are more guns in the USA than people.
It’s coming make no mistake and what happens over there will no doubt spread to Europe. |
Alas the majority of the guns are in the hands of people who are too fat, lazy and stupid, to organise much more than a massacre at their local high school. [Post edited 26 Aug 2018 13:52]
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| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 13:58 - Aug 26 with 1912 views | peenemunde |
| Breaking News: FBI Raid Trump's Lawyer on 13:48 - Aug 26 by Shaky |
Alas the majority of the guns are in the hands of people who are too fat, lazy and stupid, to organise much more than a massacre at their local high school. [Post edited 26 Aug 2018 13:52]
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Yeah ok. Believe what you want.
Liberalism and globalism being forced onto people and social engineering of whole countries is going to explode very soon. | | | |
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