The Donald Trump Score Card

Why Republicans Romney, Murkowski, and Collins say they'll vote for Ketanji Brown Jackson

excerpt:

"Three Republican senators -- Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah -- have taken the political risk of breaking from their party to vote for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation to the Supreme Court this week, elevating the first Black woman to the nation's highest court in its 233-year history.

Democrats on Monday were able to advance Jackson's nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 53-47 vote, with the help of those three Republicans, putting President Joe Biden's nominee on a clear path to being confirmed later this week by the full Senate.

But it's unclear if they will face blowback from constituents or colleagues as they continue to explain their reasoning."

 

I think one of them two said Mexico would pay for that wall?

 

Only one GOP senator stayed to applaud after Jackson was confirmed
CNN's Manu Raju and Gloria Borger discuss how Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was the only Republican to stand to applaud after Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation vote.

Only one GOP senator stayed to applaud after Jackson was confirmed - CNN Video

 

State Department: WH gift records for Trump, Pence missing

excerpt:

"WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department says it is unable to compile a complete and accurate accounting of gifts presented to former President Donald Trump and other U.S. officials by foreign governments during Trump’s final year in office, citing missing data from the White House.

In a report to be published in the Federal Register next week, the department says the Executive Office of the President did not submit information about gifts received by Trump and his family from foreign leaders in 2020. It also says the General Services Administration didn’t submit information about gifts given to former Vice President Mike Pence and White House staffers that year.

The State Department said it sought the missing information from National Archives and Records Administration and the General Services Administration, but was told that “potentially relevant records” are not available because of access restrictions related to retired records.

The State Department’s Office of Protocol reported the situation in footnotes to a partial list of gifts received by U.S. officials in 2020. The office publishes such lists annually in part to guard against potential conflicts of interest. A preview of the 2020 report was posted on the Federal Register website on Friday ahead of its formal publication on Monday.

The report notes that the lack of gift information could be related to internal oversights as the protocol office neglected to “submit the request for data to all reporting agencies prior to January 20, 2021,” when the Trump administration ended and the Biden administration began. However, it also noted that there had been a “lack of adequate recordkeeping pertaining to diplomatic gifts” between Jan. 20, 2017, when Trump took office, and his departure from the White House four years later.

The State Department report comes as House lawmakers have opened an investigation into reports that Trump had taken boxes of classified materials with him to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after leaving office last year. The National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to look into the matter."

 

Donations Steered to Trump Super PAC by Canadian Are Found to Be Illegal

excerpt:

"WASHINGTON — A Canadian steel industry billionaire illegally helped steer $1.75 million in donations to a pro-Trump super PAC and has agreed to pay one of the largest fines ever levied by the Federal Election Commission to settle the case, the commission said on Friday.

The $975,000 fine will be paid by entities controlled by Barry Zekelman, a steel industry executive from Ontario who had lobbied the Trump administration to use its power to tighten import restrictions on Mr. Zekelman’s competitors from around the world.

The action came as the election commission continues a multiyear crackdown on foreign influence in American politics.

Mr. Zekelman’s donations in 2018 to the America First Action super PAC helped him secure an invitation to a private dinner with President Donald J. Trump at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where Mr. Zekelman personally pushed Mr. Trump about the steel tariffs and other matters."

 

Trump-Appointed Inspector General's Office Had Sexual Misconduct Findings Removed From Report

excerpt:

"Revelations about domestic violence and sexual misconduct within the Department of Homeland Security were removed from a still-unfinished report at the direction of the department’s inspector general and his top aides, according to an investigation published Thursday by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), and verified by The New York Times.

The report makes clear that sexual misconduct is rampant throughout the DHS. More than 10,000 employees of Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secret Service, and the Transportation Security Administration said they had been subjected to sexual harassment or misconduct in the workplace, according to an unpublished draft of the report from December 2020. The number is more than one-third of the 28,000 employees who responded to the survey, according to POGO.

Less than a quarter of the 10,000 employees who reported sexual misconduct formally reported the incidents, and nearly half of those who did said it “negatively affected their careers.”

The draft report also detailed agencies paying off accusers, including a cash payment $255,000 to a CPB employee who claimed her boss sexually harassed her and asked her for sex, and then retaliated against her refusal by denying her work opportunities. Senior officials suggested this removed be removed the report, as well as other evidence pertaining to sexual misconduct. Also removed, at the direction of Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, were parts of a draft report about how employees received were not disciplined for domestic violence, as well as how the agencies had “put victims and the public at risk of further violence” by not confiscating perpetrators’ firearms.

Cuffari, whom former President Donald Trump appointed in 2019, has a history of this sort of thing. He blocked investigations that Secret Service staff proposed into the agency’s use of tear gas and sting-ball grenades to violently disperse those protesting police brutality near the White House in 2020. He blocked an investigation into the spread of Covid-19 within the Secret Service. He slow-rolled an inquiry into a retaliation complaint from a DHS employee who says he was demoted for criticizing the Trump administration. (The employee, Brian Murphy, would go on to file a whistleblower complaint alleging a litany of wrongdoing going far beyond workplace retaliation.)"

 

Whistleblower: Trump Officials Endangered the Nation to Protect Trump's Fragile Ego

excerpt:

"WASHINGTON — They juiced the numbers to fabricate a non-existent terrorist threat on the southern border to make the case for President Trump’s border wall. They buried the intelligence about Russian interference in American elections to keep the president happy. They demanded the reassignment or termination of “deep state” analysts whose reports didn’t fit the administration’s predetermined narrative about violence and corruption in Latin America. And they retaliated against the career official who dared to question or resist these moves.

“They,” in this case, refers to a crew of political appointees who have led the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, including but not limited to current Acting Secretary Chad Wolf, former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and senior DHS official Ken Cuccinelli. These high-ranking Trump officials and others are the subject of a 24-page whistleblower complaint, released on Wednesday, that was filed by Brian Murphy, the former principal deputy undersecretary in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, where he was responsible for all of DHS’s intelligence work.

Murphy’s complaint alleges a staggering array of wrongdoing, including perjury and illegal retaliation, not to mention deceptions perpetrated on the American people. A former active-duty Marine and FBI agent, Murphy says he was demoted from his position as the top intelligence official at DHS and an adviser to the Homeland Security secretary as retribution for speaking out against the alleged wrongdoing described in his complaint."

 

Good ... and ban him from this country for good.

 

Sounds like Trump.

 

'Stop the Steal' organizer agrees to cooperate with the Justice Department's Capitol riot investigation

excerpt:

"A top organizer of the "Stop the Steal" movement has agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department's expanded investigation into the January 6 Capitol riot and rally, according to The New York Times.

Ali Alexander told the outlet via his lawyer that he recently received a subpoena from a federal grand jury seeking information on pro-Trump rallies that followed the 2020 election.

While several rioters have struck cooperation deals with the government, Alexander, who planned multiple pro-Trump post-election events, is the first notable political figure to publicly acknowledge his cooperation with the Justice Department's criminal probe. In a statement provided to The Times by his lawyer, Alexander said he was taking a "cooperative posture" with the federal government's investigation but was unsure of what help he could offer."

 

Pa. GOP Senate leaders to try to eliminate ballot drop boxes next week

excerpt:

"Republican leaders in the Pennsylvania Senate will move to eliminate ballot drop boxes next week.

Counties would no longer be allowed to host and collect ballots at ballot drop boxes, according to a news release. Instead, mail voters would be required to mail their ballots, deliver their ballot directly to their county board of elections office, or have a designee submit their ballot with written permission from a voter who can not return their own ballot.

Ballot drop boxes have been widely criticized by Republicans since the state Supreme Court permitted counties to use them in the 2020 election, as fears mounted that the U.S. Postal Service could not handle the number of mail ballots requested during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The drop boxes, however, proved to be a popular way for voters to deliver their ballots, with some counties like Philadelphia utilizing nearly a dozen across the state’s biggest city."

 

Doing away with drop boxes altogether is a brute force approach for dealing with an issue that hasn't been shown to produce voter fraud.


Is it really a big deal that voters drop off more than one ballot?

excerpt:

"Remember, only a few years ago, we all had to get off our fannies and drive, walk or take a bus to the polls. We had to stand in line to register. Then we had to wait for a voting booth to open.

Now, some people can’t be bothered to put their own ballot in their mailbox, or in a drop box.

A lot of them don’t know better. I get that. Heck, even Gov. Tom Wolf screwed it up last year when his wife dropped off his ballot for him. He volunteered that, without hesitation, during a radio interview.

But ignorance shouldn’t be an excuse anymore.

The delivery of multiple ballots in Lehigh doesn’t mean there was fraud. No one has alleged that individuals filled out multiple ballots.

The system is solid at preventing people from requesting multiple ballots. They can be tracked. If people were harvesting ballots, you’d think that fraud would be exposed when voters whose identities were stolen went to the polls and were told they’d already voted by mail.

And, as one astute reader pointed out to me, someone would be pretty dumb to try to stuff a bunch of fraudulent ballots in a drop box that’s under video surveillance.

But revelations that people are breaking the law when they use drop boxes fuels accusations about fraud. It feeds the frenzy."

 

GOP banker spends $11 million on his campaign — and whines the middle class don’t pay enough taxes: report

excerpt:

"On Friday, The Washington Post reported that newly unearthed footage from a media event last fall shows Mike Gibbons, a candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio, complained that the middle class does not pay enough in taxes.

“The top 20 percent of earners in the United States pay 82 percent of federal income tax — and, if you do the math, and 45 percent to 50 percent don’t pay any income tax, you can see the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share, depending on how you want to define it,” said Gibbons in the video. He added that the rich already pay too much, saying, "How much of the total tax bill can a very small percentage of the nation pay and still be a democracy?"

Gibbons, a wealthy investment banker, has largely self-funded his own campaign, putting $11.4 million of his own money into the effort, according to The Columbus Dispatch. He has raised less than $1 million from other donors."

 

Ohio Senate primary remains all about Trump as candidates hope for late endorsement - CNNPolitics

excerpt:

"The jockeying for a late, game-changing endorsement from Trump comes in part because polls show the primary is wide open with less than four weeks remaining before the May 3 primary, and with early voting having kicked off this week. Appeals to voters still loyal to the former President are on display in debates and candidates’ television ads.

Venture capitalist and author J.D. Vance has aligned himself with far-right figures who emerged in Trump’s wake. He defended Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently spoke at a White nationalist gathering, saying in Wilberforce that he listened to her speech and “agreed with nearly every word that she said.”

“She said nothing wrong, and I’m absolutely not going to throw her under the bus, or anybody else who’s a friend of mine,” Vance said.

Former Ohio Republican Party chair Jane Timken has frequently equated being hand-picked for that party job by Trump to an effective endorsement for this race. She has hired two of Trump’s former top political allies, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

Self-funding financier Mike Gibbons and former state Treasurer Josh Mandel have also courted Trump aggressively. Gibbons has cast himself as a candidate in Trump’s mold – a former businessman with no real political background, and experience making money in systems that he’d now like to overhaul.

Mandel has focused on Gibbons’ business experience, accusing him at a debate in Cleveland last month of “making millions” on stock in a Chinese company.

“You’ve never been in the private sector in your entire life. You don’t know squat,” Gibbons said."

 

Vance is the candidate who called Trump an idiot in 2016 but now loves him. Vance said he made stupid remarks about Trump in the past.

Gibbons has spent $11.4 million of his own money on his campaign with less than $1 million from donors. He says the middle class don't pay enough taxes.

In what looked like a fist fight about to start at a debate, Mandel blew up at Gibbons when he said Mandel had no private sector experience (which is a factual statement) and started praising his own military service in Iraq (which isn't private sector experience).

 

Ohio's best and brightest...

 

Let's keep in mind that the voter fraud cases in PA were all instances of Republicans voting twice, even with a ballot of their dead mother.

 

Trump arrives for North Carolina rally amid "treason" accusations

excerpt:

"Former President Donald Trump will arrive in North Carolina for a "Save America" rally on Saturday as he and his allies—including his son Donald Trump Jr.—face accusations of "treason" and planning a "coup."

Supporters of the former president are converging on Selma to attend the right-wing event at The Farm at 95, which is about 30 miles southeast of Raleigh. While thousands of Trump supporters regularly attend his rallies, the venue for this event can only hold about 400 attendees. The rally, which is scheduled to start at 7 p.m., will be live-streamed on YouTube by Right Side Broadcasting Network as well as through the website Rumble.

On Friday afternoon, CNN first reported that Donald Trump Jr.—the former president's eldest child—sent a text message to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows just two days after the November 3, 2020 presidential election, outlining strategies to subvert President Joe Biden's win. At that time, multiple states were still counting ballots and Biden would not be determined as the winner until November 7."