Federal prosecutors said for the first time Friday that Michael Cohen acted at the direction of Donald Trump when Cohen committed two election-related crimes in 2016, as special counsel Robert Mueller outlined new contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals.
He should be impeached now.
Eta:
At direction of Individual 1
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
In the summer of 2017, the Trump White House asked for a meeting with a top official at the Department of Justice to discuss a sensitive legal and administrative matter involving a top Republican donor.
The donor, then-Republican National Committee finance chairman and casino magnate Steve Wynn, was embroiled in litigation involving Obama-era rules governing how companies could distribute tips gathered by their employees. Months after the meeting request, the Trump administration revised those rules to make them far friendlier to employers.
It is unclear why the White House made the request for the meeting with acting Solicitor General Jeff Wall, which was uncovered in a Freedom of Information Act discovery by the group American Oversight and has not been previously reported. Nor is it clear if Wall actually met with White House officials about Wynn’s case. Both the White House and the Department of Justice did not return requests for comment.
Top legal officials of past administrations said it was not uncommon for White House officials to meet with the solicitor general or top DoJ officials to discuss pending business before the courts. But the email still struck legal ethicists as problematic, as it showed the Trump White House eager to keep tabs on litigation directly affecting one of the president’s highest-profile donors.
(CNN)The White House is expected to pull the nomination of an experienced career diplomat for US ambassador to Qatar and instead tap former one-term Virginia congressman Scott Taylor, multiple sources familiar with the situation tell CNN.
Molly Phee, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to South Sudan, was nominated by the Trump administration in late 2018. However, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not act on the nomination before the end of the last congressional session and it and other nominations expired. The White House is expected not to resubmit her nomination for the Qatar post and will instead put the former Republican congressman and Navy SEAL forward.
Fraud allegations against Taylor's unsuccessful midterm election campaign are currently under investigation by a special prosecutor in Virginia, although Taylor himself is not under investigation.
One source familiar says the decision to change nominees was made by President Donald Trump himself.
Another source familiar with the situation said Taylor is someone whom "the White House obviously wants to look after."
Overflowing trash cans and vandalism in national parks managed by the Interior Department have become a symbol of the ongoing partial government shutdown. The agency has announced it is taking what it calls the "extraordinary step" of using money from entrance fees to pay for cleanup.
But, despite the shutdown, the Trump administration is continuing work on one of Interior's biggest, most controversial priorities: opening up more Arctic lands in Alaska to oil drilling.
The Bureau of Land Management, an agency under the Interior, has gone ahead with a series of public meetings on its effort to expand oil development in the 22-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
E-mails obtained by Alaska Public Media show that on January 3 — two weeks into the shutdown — a BLM employee was contacting Alaska community leaders to schedule meetings related to oil lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Congress legalized drilling in the refuge just over one year ago, after decades of opposition from conservation groups.
When contacted last week by Alaska Public Media, the employee's email account sent an automatic reply: "Due to the lapse in funding of the federal government budget, I am out of the office. I am not authorized to work during this time, but will respond to your email when I return to the office."
Following public outcry and a letter from a Democratic congressman after Alaska Public Media's report, the Bureau of Land Management this week announced it is postponing the Arctic Refuge-related meetings.
Government under the control of a nation's worst or least-qualified citizens.
Should I post that list again of Trump's appointments?
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
EPA nominee showcases how Trump keeps failing to ‘drain the swamp’
The Editorial Board | USA TODAY Jan. 15, 2019
"Drain the swamp!" was one of those memorable Donald Trump campaign promises that remains unfulfilled, much like "Mexico will pay for the wall!" and "Repeal and replace Obamacare!" with "something terrific."
Unlike the latter two promises, there's little debate about the need to establish strong ethical standards for government. That makes Trump's failure to keep his swamp-draining pledge — highlighted by the Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday for a former coal industry lobbyist nominated to run the Environmental Protection Agency — all the more disturbing.
Nominee Andrew Wheeler became acting EPA administrator after his predecessor and former boss, Scott Pruitt, resigned in July amid a cloud of self-serving ethics scandals. Wheeler, 54, doesn't carry Pruitt's ethical baggage, but he has devoted himself to a disciplined rollback of environmental safeguards.
Wheeler is one of 188 former lobbyists working in the administration, according to ProPublica, and a fox-guarding-the-hen-house example of someone regulating an industry that once paid him handsomely.
Others include the acting secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt, previously an influential lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, and EPA senior attorney Erik Baptist, who used to work as a lobbyist and lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute.
Trump replaced President Barack Obama's ethics rules with a set he said were tougher, but which in fact allow for the liberal granting of waivers so that the swamp once again can fill with water.
Among Wheeler’s consulting duties, according to the Project on Government Oversight, was hosting a fundraiser for key Republican Sen. John Barrasso, now the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, before which Wheeler will testify Wednesday.
After more than a decade working for the Senate's premier denier of human-caused climate change, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Wheeler joined a consulting firm working against environmental restrictions on behalf of his top client, coal magnate Robert Murray.
"He's spent his career carrying out someone else's agenda," Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard Law School's environmental law program, says of Wheeler.
Since Wheeler joined EPA, first as deputy and then acting administrator, the agency has worked to roll back fuel efficiency standards on vehicles, ease greenhouse-gas restrictions on coal-burning power plants and, in December, rescind regulations that reduce coal-plant release of mercury and other poisons.
Given the Republican majority in the Senate and Trump's avid support, Wheeler's confirmation might be a foregone conclusion. But that doesn't mean senators can't use the confirmation hearing to press the nominee on a variety of important issues.
After all, Wheeler isn't a lobbyist anymore. If confirmed, he'll be in charge of implementing environmental laws designed to protect the quality of the air Americans breathe and the water they drink.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is targeting one of the hallmarks of the Obama administration: a rule that would protect the most vulnerable borrowers from the ballooning debt that can accrue with payday loans.
The rule never actually took effect. And now the consumer protection bureau is proposing to take it off the table.
On Wednesday, bureau officials said they plan to nix the part of the rule that requires payday lenders to check borrowers' ability to pay. And they plan to delay the rest of the rule until 2020.
The agency's chief, Kathy Kraninger, said in a statement that pulling back the rule would encourage competition in the payday lending industry and help improve credit options for borrowers in need.
Riiigghht. ; )
Under the Trump administration, the consumer protection bureau reversed course. The rule was supposed to kick in back in January 2018 — but it never did. Instead, then-CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney delayed the rule...
... Mulvaney had accepted campaign donations from payday lenders, and NPR has reported that under his leadership, the agency loosened its oversight of the industry.
Payday lenders including Select Management Resources, Advance America and Check Into Cash Inc. have also donated substantially to Trump's inaugural committee. The industry's trade group, the Community Financial Services Association of America, held its annual conference at Trump National Doral Golf Club near Miami in August 2018.
President Trump on Saturday appointed Rear Adm. Ronny L. Jackson, his former personal physician who is under investigation by a Pentagon watchdog, as White House chief medical adviser and assistant to the president.
Adm. Jackson was serving as the president’s doctor when Mr. Trump tapped him in March 2018 to become Secretary of Veterans Affairs. The nomination was withdrawn a month later amid allegations of drinking on the job, overprescribing medication and creating a hostile workout environment.
William Barr’s Son-in-Law Just Landed a Job Advising Trump on “Legal Issues”
CNN reports that Tyler McGaughey, the husband of Barr’s youngest daughter, has been hired as an attorney in the White House counsel’s office, where he’ll “advise the president, the executive office, and White House staff on legal issues concerning the president and the presidency.” While the division is separate from the legal team that defends Trump in the Russia investigation—a group of leading lights that includes Rudy “maybe there was collusion” Giuliani—its work nevertheless does “intersect with the investigation.” (Trump reportedly blamed former White House counsel Don McGahn for failing to bring the probe to a close.) Meanwhile, Mary Daly, Barr’s oldest daughter, will be leaving her current job in the deputy attorney general’s office for a gig at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which has had its own Russian intrigues.
Barr, of course, has his own special conflicts of interest when it comes to Robert Mueller’s probe. Last June, he sent an unsolicited 20-page memo to the Justice Department calling the inquiry into potential obstruction of justice by Trump “fatally misconceived” and Mueller’s actions “grossly irresponsible,” and insisting “Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the President submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction.”
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951