Contribute into attributions much? I have no idea what is going on in that kind of yours Tops? I am talking about the evils of an attempted central globalist government the wishes to undermine the USA and its founding ideals.
But that goes over one’s head and it becomes something else?
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She is linked to Soros the new DA in LA is linked to Soros. Live in denial of you wish.
https://www.latimes.com/local/califo...523-story.html
Last edited by surfgun; 11 Dec 20,, 21:24.Leave a comment:
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Another shitty right-wing website? That's what you want me to "open my mind to"? And Soros as the bogeyman....should I start posting crap about the Rothschilds while I'm at it?Originally posted by surfgun View Post
I'm not going to say it again: Post your bullshit dog whistles elsewhere.Leave a comment:
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This article does Tops, open your mind....Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...ters-from-jailLeave a comment:
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Senate overwhelmingly advances defense bill that will rename Confederate bases, squashing Trump's chances of a veto
The GOP-held Senate is handing President Trump a defeat that's not going to go over well with his base.
The Senate voted 84-13 on Friday to defeat a filibuster holding up passage of the $741 billion defense bill, which includes a provision that mandates removing Confederate names from military bases. A Senate vote later Friday to officially pass the bill will be similarly overwhelming, CNN's Manu Raju reports, invalidating President Trump's promise to veto it.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had filibustered the National Defense Authorization Act, passed every year to fund the Pentagon, over provisions that would make it harder for Trump to reduce troops in Afghanistan and Germany, Military Times reports. He also clotheslined a stopgap funding measure meant to prevent a government shutdown for another week as Congress continues to debate coronavirus relief and a government funding bill. The House has already overwhelmingly passed both the stopgap measure and the defense bill.
Trump has been pledging for months that he'd reject the defense bill if it included a provision to rename military bases named after Confederate leaders. Discussions over renaming the bases swelled over the summer during protests against police brutality and America's systemic racism. Trump has insisted that the Confederate names actually represent America's "history of winning, victory, and freedom," despite basic facts about the Civil War that would suggest otherwise.
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A Missouri judge has booted a Soros backed prosecutor and her entire office off the case of the armed couple that defended their home, for being political critters.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/hotair....iticizing/amp/Leave a comment:
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Is This the Real Reason Why Trump’s Freaking Out About the Defense Bill?
For 59 years, Congress has passed and the president has signed the National Defense Authorization Act. So why is Donald Trump threatening to veto this year’s $700-billion-and-change plan, which has broad bipartisan support and is widely seen as critical to national security?
Trump has objected to a provision that would change the names of military bases named after Confederate officials and to a non-defense add-on that would preserve a piece of the 1996 Telecommunications Act shielding tech companies from liability for content posted by their users.
None of that explains why he’d risk a humiliating veto override to shoot down a popular bipartisan bill. One thing that would explain his bizarre position here is another add-on: one that could expose financial arrangements that Trump would prefer to keep hidden.
That’s a bill that emanated from the House of Representatives, was folded into its Senate analog called the Corporate Transparency Act that was then attached to the NDAA after passing the Senate on a veto-proof 86-14 vote. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney started working on the Illicit Cash Act—a mouthful of an acronym for Improving Laundering Laws and Increasing Comprehensive Information Tracking for Criminal Activity in Shell Holdings—in 2007 to modernize federal money-laundering laws. It requires shell companies to report their beneficial owners, thus preventing exploitation of U.S. companies by shell companies controlled by rogue nations, terrorists, drug traffickers, weapons smugglers, sex traffickers, and other criminal operators—maybe even vainglorious tax-evading money launderers.
If this legislation had been in place in the mid-1990s, the Trump family may have been inhibited from setting up the shell company All County Building Supply & Maintenance whose main purpose, according to epic reporting by The New York Times, was “to enable Fred Trump to make large cash gifts to his children and disguise them as legitimate business transactions thus evading the 55 percent tax.” Who knows what shell companies profiting Donald Trump have yet to be exposed, and could be with the passage of this Act?
“Currently, the U.S. is at the bottom of the pack with respect to corporate transparency,” Maloney has said. “In many states, more personal information is needed to obtain a library card than to establish a legal entity that can be used to facilitate tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, and corruption. The U.S has been identified in several studies as one of the easiest jurisdictions in which to open an anonymous company.”
Recall Ike Kaveladze, the so-called ‘eighth man’ at the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya. Twenty-something years ago, Kaveladze opened up over 2,000 Delaware shell companies and set them up with bank accounts at a now-defunct bank in San Francisco and also with Citibank. These shell companies were used to launder over a billion dollars through Latvia. Senator Carl Levin called Kaveladze—who has never been convicted of a crime and who called the Government Accountability Office report (PDF) detailing his shell companies “a witch hunt”—a “poster boy for money laundering.”
“Beyond the impacts for law enforcement,” Maloney has noted, the Illicit Cash Act, “will directly affect us here at home by lowering housing costs in New York City,” where shell companies parking money in high-end real estate have cut into housing supply and pushed up real estate costs for everyone else. That includes many of the 1,300 Trump condominiums that were purchased with all cash by anonymous shell companies, according to a Buzzfeed investigation.
A New York Times analysis of Trump’s financial records recently concluded that he has liabilities approaching $420 million, with the bulk of that bill coming due in the next few years. If Maloney is right, then the Illicit Cash Act represents a direct financial threat to him. Are there any others?
Well, how about the undisclosed bank accounts tied to Trump that the Times found in Ireland, the UK, and China? It revealed that his secret China account, which millions poured into and out of, was actually in the name of one of the 500 limited liability companies owned by Trump that we know of. How many other LLCs does he own that we don’t know of?
The broker for Trump Sunny Isles development in Florida, Elena Baranoff, who was once described on the cover of a Russian magazine as “Trump’s Russian Hand,” sold countless units in that development to anonymous Russians purchasing through shell companies. When Baranoff died in 2014, David Correia and Lev Parnas, the Rudy Giuliani associate now facing fraud charges, picked up her brokerage business for the Trump development while setting up their own shell company called Mendo Cali LLC which they also leveraged into brokering investment by Russians into potential budding cannabis businesses out west. Baranoff and then Parnas were following in the footsteps of Dolly Lenz, the broker who reportedly sold 65 units in Trump World Tower in the 1990s, mostly to Russians using shell companies.
In unit 63A, the apartment directly below Donald’s in Trump Tower, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov (aka Taiwanchik) ran a gambling ring. That was a different gambling ring to the one run by fellow Trump Tower resident Anatoly Golubchik, reputedly a lieutenant and close associate of “Boss of Bosses” Semion Mogilevich, who ran a multi-million dollar Bank of New York money-laundering scam making substantial use of shell companies. Golubchik and Mogilevich have shell companies that share the same address, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Speaking of Mogilevich, he was able to obtain the release of a notorious Russian vor by the name of Vyacheslav Ivankov from a Siberian gulag. He arranged for Ivankov to live in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn in the mid-aughts and run his rackets from there. The FBI could not locate Ivankov for months, before finally ascertaining that Ivankov had moved into the Trump Towers. Think the FBI could have used the Illicit Cash Act back then?
Those are dots we can see. Who knows what other ones the Illicit Cash Act—a past, present, and future threat to Donald Trump, his children, and his business—would connect? Identification of beneficial ownership of shell companies and the ability of foreign whistleblowers to more effectively blow their whistles on empty vessels like All County Building Supply & Maintenance and Michael Cohen’s Essential Consultants will inhibit nefarious, covert business dealings. It is a shame that Congresswoman Maloney’s legislative quest took so long. But the bipartisan support it has engendered reflects the very real need for this legislation.
If Donald Trump is not afraid, he should be. Take it to the bank. You know, the one offshore.
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Tick Tock Tick Tock...
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Manhattan DA Intensifies Investigation of Trump
State prosecutors in Manhattan have interviewed several employees of President Donald Trump’s bank and insurance broker in recent weeks, according to people with knowledge of the matter, significantly escalating an investigation into the president that he is powerless to stop.
The interviews with people who work for the lender, Deutsche Bank, and the insurance brokerage, Aon, are the latest indication that once Trump leaves office, he still faces the potential threat of criminal charges that would be beyond the reach of federal pardons.
It remains unclear whether the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., will ultimately bring charges. The prosecutors have been fighting in court for more than a year to obtain Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns, which they have called central to their investigation. The issue now rests with the Supreme Court.
But lately, Vance’s office has stepped up its efforts, issuing new subpoenas and questioning witnesses, including some before a grand jury, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.
The grand jury appears to be serving an investigative function, allowing prosecutors to authenticate documents and pursue other leads, rather than considering any charges.
When Trump returns to private life in January, he will lose the protection from criminal prosecution that his office has afforded him. While The New York Times has reported that he discussed granting preemptive pardons to his eldest children before leaving office — and has claimed that he has the power to pardon himself — that authority applies only to federal crimes, and not to state or local investigations like the one being conducted by Vance’s office.
Trump, who has maintained he did nothing improper, has railed against the inquiry, calling it a politically motivated “witch hunt.”
The investigation by Vance, a Democrat, has focused on Trump’s conduct as a private business owner and whether he or employees at his family business, the Trump Organization, committed financial crimes. It is the only known criminal inquiry into the president.
Employees of Deutsche Bank and Aon, two corporate giants, could be important witnesses. As two of Trump’s oldest allies — and some of the only mainstream companies willing to do regular business with him — they might offer investigators a rich vein of information about the Trump Organization.
There is no indication that either company is suspected of wrongdoing.
Because grand jury rules require secrecy, prosecutors have disclosed little about the focus of the inquiry and nothing about what investigative steps they have taken. But earlier this year, they suggested in court papers that they were examining possible insurance, tax and bank-related fraud in the president’s corporate dealings.
In recent weeks, Vance’s prosecutors questioned two Deutsche Bank employees about the bank’s procedures for making lending decisions, according to a person familiar with the interviews. The employees were experts in the bank’s underwriting process, not bankers who worked with the Trump Organization, the person said.
While the focus of those interviews was not on the relationship with Trump, bank officials expect Vance’s office to summon them for additional rounds of more specific questions in the near future, the person said.
Glimpses into the investigation have come in court records during the bitter and protracted legal battle over a subpoena for eight years of Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns and other financial records.
A month after Vance’s office demanded the documents from the president’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, in August 2019, Trump sued to block compliance with the subpoena. The case has twisted its way through the federal courts, with the president losing at every turn, and is now in front of the Supreme Court for the second time.
Danny Frost, a spokesman for Vance, declined to comment on recent moves in the investigation. Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, declined to comment, but recently said that the company’s practices complied with the law and called the investigation a “fishing expedition.”
Aon confirmed that the company had received a subpoena for documents from the district attorney’s office but declined to comment on the interviews with prosecutors. “As is our policy, we intend to cooperate with all regulatory bodies, including providing copies of all documents requested by those bodies,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement.
Deutsche Bank, Trump’s primary lender since the late 1990s, received a subpoena last year from the district attorney and has said it is cooperating with the inquiry.
In court papers, the prosecutors have cited public reports of Trump’s business dealings as legal justification for their inquiry, including a newspaper report that concluded the president may have inflated his net worth and the value of his properties to lenders and insurers.
Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer who turned on him after pleading guilty to federal charges, also told Congress in February 2019 that Trump and his employees manipulated his net worth to suit his interests.
“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” he said in testimony before the House Oversight Committee.
Trump’s supporters have noted that Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress and accused him of lying again to earn a reduced prison sentence.
The Trump Organization’s lawyers are also likely to argue to prosecutors that Trump could not have duped Deutsche Bank because the bank did its own analysis of Trump’s net worth.
Over the years, employees and executives inside the bank thought that Trump was overvaluing some of his assets by as much as 70%, according to current and former bank officials. Deutsche Bank still decided to lend Trump’s company hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade, concluding that he was a safe lending risk in part because he had more than enough money and other assets to personally guarantee the debt.
The prosecutors’ interviews with the employees was not the only recent activity in the investigation. Last month, The Times reported that Vance’s office had subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records related to tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump.
According to people with knowledge of the matter, the subpoena sought information about fees paid to TTT Consulting LLC, an apparent reference to Ivanka Trump and other members of her family. Ivanka Trump was an executive officer of the Trump companies that made the payments, meaning she appears to have been paid as a consultant while also working for the Trump Organization.
Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, argued in a statement at the time that the subpoena was part of an “ongoing attempt to harass the company.” He added that “everything was done in strict compliance with applicable law and under the advice of counsel and tax experts.”
Vance’s investigation has spanned more than two years and shifted focus over time. When the investigation began, it examined the Trump Organization’s role in hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. Prosecutors were examining how the company recorded a reimbursement to Cohen for one of the payments. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance violations for his role in the scheme.
A state grand jury convened by Vance’s office heard testimony from at least one witness about that issue last year, according to a person with knowledge of that testimony, but the payments have receded as a central focus of the inquiry.
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Aides try to save Trump from himself
Some of President Trump's advisers are trying to convince him that if he vetoes a defense reauthorization bill that could pass Friday, his fellow Republicans won't sustain it and he'll risk losing credibility with the troops, sources with direct knowledge of the conversations tell Axios.
Behind the scenes: In private conversations, Trump seems to believe Republicans would ultimately bend to his will and support a veto. He argues the bill needs a provision repealing protections for social media companies, but several confidants have tried to persuade him his fellow Republicans don't agree.
One argument made to the president: You have a legacy of rebuilding the military by increasing its budgets. Don't be remembered for trying — and embarrassingly failing — to veto your last big defense bill, the sources said.- Another message: While you're trying to hold Republicans together for your election challenges, is it really a good idea to poke them in the eye?
The fallout: The arguments don't seem to be working. On Thursday, Trump poked Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Jim Inhofe by announcing a foreign policy decision related to Morocco that Inhofe had made very clear he opposed, and was personal to him.
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When in doubt, if you're not Ivanka Trump, always remember Rule #1 about dealing with Donald Trump:
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With Texas AG facing federal probe, lawsuit to help Trump comes amid whispers of pardons
The Texas politician who filed the Supreme Court election challenge that President Donald Trump touted as "the big one" may have good reason to curry favor with the White House at this moment.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took the lead in the long-shot legal bid to overturn Trump's 2020 election defeat just two weeks after reports surfaced that he is the subject of an FBI investigation into allegations he abused his office to benefit a wealthy donor -- a thorny problem Trump could eliminate with a presidential pardon.
Paxton and a group of Republican state attorneys general met with the president at the White House on Thursday, days after filing the case that now shoulders Trump's hopes of holding onto his job for another term. Paxton's attorney, Philip H. Hilder, declined to comment on the nature of Paxton's discussions with the president.
Democrats have gone public with speculation about Paxton's possible motivation for filing the suit, which legal experts have assessed as a case unlikely to find favor with the Supreme Court, even with the court's conservative majority.
"This was an act of some bizarre-world desperation. I don't know what drove it," Marc Elias, the lead attorney for the Democrats fending off a barrage of election lawsuits from Trump and his allies, said in an appearance on CNN.
"I don't know if it's politics, or I read that it may be because Paxton is fishing for a pardon," Elias said. "I don't know what's behind it, but this is honestly a bizarre lawsuit."
"The idea that Texas could sue four other states because Texas didn't like their elections? Well, guess what, Texas? There are a whole bunch of states who don't like the way you disenfranchise voters in Texas," Elias added, in apparent reference the state’s controversial efforts to limit alternatives for voters during the coronavirus pandemic.
It's not clear whether Paxton has had direct conversations with the president or the White House about a potential pardon. He did not respond to ABC News' request for comment Thursday afternoon.
Paxton's lawsuit came after calls with members of President Trump's legal team pushing for him to take the lead on behalf of other state attorneys general to defend the president, as the legal team recognizes they are running out of options, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
In the case, Texas is attempting to sue four swing states that loosened voting restrictions as a result of the pandemic. It appears aimed squarely at helping Trump flip the outcome of the presidential contest.
"The case that everyone has been waiting for is the State's case with Texas and numerous others joining. It is very strong, ALL CRITERIA MET," Trump tweeted Wednesday.
Trump's use of pardon power to reward loyalty and assist his political allies has been an increasing focus as he has neared the end of his term. In late November, Trump pardoned Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a loyal ally who had pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents during the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign before Flynn was swept into a protracted legal fight over the charges.
Trump is not the first president to use his pardon power as a means to benefit his friends and family. But many legal experts say he has already shown an unusual willingness to employ that special power impulsively.
"In previous presidencies there have been clearer lines," Michigan State Law Professor Brian C. Kalt told ABC News. "You get a sense with President Trump, he hasn't distinguished between what's good for him personally and what's good policy."
Those who spoke with ABC News about Paxton's White House visit said they were only able to speculate about the nature of the conversation. Neither Paxton nor the White House would say whether a pardon is on the table.
The Texas politician has been dogged by legal challenges for the better part of his tenure in office. Paxton pleaded not guilty in 2015 to three felony counts related to allegations he misled investors in his private investment dealings -- a case that has languished in state court ever since. As that case became stalled in a related dispute over the funding for the special prosecutors who brought it, reports surfaced of a new probe -- this one federal.
The Associated Press reported that the federal case relates to allegations made by seven senior lawyers in Paxton's office who had accused him of abuse of office, bribery, and other crimes. The former colleagues have all left the office, and several brought a civil suit against Paxton as well.
The AP reported that the full extent of what those former colleagues told the FBI remains unknown, and the scope of the federal probe is unclear. An attorney for Paxton reached this week declined to comment on the reports, or on the status of the federal investigation.
Paxton was scheduled to meet one-on-one with Trump Thursday ahead of a larger gathering that includes state officials who have filed papers in support of the Texas case.
Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor, said that while the law prohibits people from giving anything of value to a government official in exchange for an official act, he does not think the circumstances of Paxton's lawsuit -- even if it had been filed in hopes of garnering himself clemency -- would be subject to legal scrutiny.
"I think it would be very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an act like filing the Texas lawsuit, however it might ingratiate the attorney general to Trump, is specifically linked to a hoped-for pardon," Shane said.
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Speaking of offensive pardons....Leave a comment:
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‘Art Of The Deal’ Co-Author: Trump Will Inflict 'Suffering On All Of Us’ As Term Ends
Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Donald Trump’s most well-known book, “The Art of the Deal,” on Wednesday termed the president a “sociopath” who would seek to cause as much collateral damage as possible in his remaining weeks in office.
“Trump feels he’s been wronged by virtually everybody,” Schwartz said on MSNBC, and as an example noted that a longtime friend of the president, Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera, has said that Trump was no longer taking his calls after he acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden won November’s election.
Schwartz added that Trump is “feeling unbearably diminished by the country’s lack of acceptance of his dominance. So it becomes something like, ‘I’ll show them. I’ll inflict as much suffering as I can in the weeks I have left.’”
Asked to elaborate by host Ari Melber, Schwartz said Trump would be “inflicting suffering on all of us” before Biden is inaugurated at noon on Jan. 20.
“He’s going to piss people off in any way he can over the next four weeks, beginning with pardons,” Schwartz said. “Watch what he does with pardons. They will be equal opportunity offensive.”
Schwartz also offered his take on a viral clip from Monday when Trump awarded the Medal of Freedom to famed Olympic gold-medalist wrestler Dan Gable at the White House. The footage showed that Trump’s exit from the Oval Office after the ceremony and as reporters asked him questions about the election seemed to leave Gable perplexed. (An extended version of the video shows that while Trump did make a sudden exit, he nevertheless took some questions and offered additional praise for Gable before departing.)
″[I see] depression,” Schwartz said when asked what he thought of the clip. “I mean, he slunk out of that office... He just couldn’t bear to be there.”
Schwartz added that his greatest fear over the next four years was not necessarily the president, but the “cult of Trump” ― and said Biden needed to make “humility and decency cool again.”
In recent years Schwartz has repeatedly said he regrets teaming up with Trump to produce 1987′s “The Art of the Deal,” which reached the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list. Although the two shared co-authorship credit, Schwartz has said he wrote the book and Trump made some edits.
He has previously characterized Trump as “delusional.” In May, he said that as the death toll from COVID-19 mounted, all Trump cared about remained winning reelection.
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A 74 year old man acting worse than a spoiled child. It'd be comical-bordering-on-contemptuous if we weren't talking about the President of the United States.
So, any predictions on these offensive pardons? His whole Administration is probably begging for one...Leave a comment:
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