Trump just made history, many ways. First president to preside over a govt shutdown while his party controls the House, Senate and White House AND first president to preside over a shutdown on the first anniversary of his inauguration AND earliest shutdown ever in a presidency.
As a journalist, this is borderline offensive.
8:06AM: White House makes pool reporter issue a correction to say "The president will NOT have a low-key day and has a full schedule of meetings and phone calls."
9::26AM: The president goes golfing
Hearing tonight from a surprising number of veterans and vets’ relatives who all say Trump’s handling of McCain’s death, esp the flag fiasco, did irreparable damage to their opinion of him, which had been positive until now.
WH & GOP, take note: It’s more serious than you think.
NEW: Giuliani just moved the goal posts in 2 big ways on Fox & CNN :
1. He's no longer claiming Trump didn't collude with Russia. He's claiming "collusion is not a crime."
2. He's not saying Trump did not know abt 2016 Russia mtg in advance. He's saying Trump did not ATTEND it.
Scoop: The stock that Rand Paul’s wife bought in the maker of Remdisivir early in the Covid pandemic was the only time in 10 years that Paul or his wife had purchased shares of an individual stock.
With the great Dan Mangan.
Q: What proof do you have that ppl will illegally vote?
Trump: "Just take a look, all you've got to do is go around, look at what's happened over the years and you'll see. My opinion and based on proof."
Total ballots cast in 2016: 135,000,000
Incidents of voter fraud: 4
On April 11, I called Trump’s favorite architect to ask about jobs he did in Eastern Europe that recently drew Mueller’s eye.
Within hours, John Fotiadis closed down his 10 yr old architecture firm, deleted his portfolio and left Twitter. He’s still MIA.
As Trump accuses a small Va. restaurant of being "filthy," worth noting the restaurant at Trump's Mar-A-Lago has been cited 78 times in the past three years for health code violations, including "a black/green mold-like substance" on the ice machine.
The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!
My favorite Mattis story: Christmas Day 1998. Brigadier General Mattis learned that a young Marine on watch duty that day had a wife and little kids. So Mattis volunteered to take his place, and spent the day manning a guard gate at Quantico so the Marine could be w his family.
Brett Kavanaugh: "No president has ever consulted more widely or talked to more people from more backgrounds to seek input for a Supreme Court nomination."
NEW:
@PeteWilliamsNBC
reports that Rosenstein has said if Trump wants him gone, they'll have to fire him, and that Rosenstein will refuse to resign and go quietly.
Trump on governors: "When they're not appreciative to me, they're not appreciative to the Army Corps of Engineers."
"I say ’Mike [Pence], don’t call the governor of Washington. If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.”
With 100,000 Americans sick, this is chilling.
REUTERS: 8 countries, including France, Egypt, and the UK, have requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over Trump's Jerusalem decision.
France and the UK. Our closest allies.
Trump just now: “I know nothing about Wikileaks. It’s not my thing."
Trump Oct 2016: "WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks."
Trump Oct 2016: “This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove,”
Trump Nov 2016: "Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks."
New: When the RNC stopped paying Trump's family legal bills, it quietly began paying Trump $37,500 a month in rent, plus $12,000 a month in salary to Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew.
Oof. Yesterday VFW announced last-minute that Trump's speech was being moved out of the convention center and into the auditorium. Appears they couldn't fill the auditorium, either.
Trump is not going to love how many empty seats there are for his speech at the VFW convention. Municipal Auditorium in downtown Kansas City is about half full.
New:
@ACLU
responds to Trump requiring WH staff to sign nondisclosures. “Public employees can’t be gagged by private agreements. These so-called NDAs are unconstitutional and unenforceable,” per Ben Wizner, ACLU’s speech and privacy director.
Fox News' senior judicial analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano, out w an op-ed today skewering Trump. "Ordering obstruction to save himself from the consequences of his own behavior is unlawful, defenseless and condemnable," writes
@Judgenap
I may have the honor of serving Alabama as your senator, but the most important thing I have done is prosecuting those klansmen who killed 4 little girls at 16th St Baptist Church.
Trump spoke for more than 50 minutes, and mentioned Kim Kardashian, Maxine Waters and the NFL repeatedly
But not once did he mention that the most lauded Republican lawmaker in a generation announced today that he is dying.
Why aren’t they firing no talent Samantha Bee for the horrible language used on her low ratings show? A total double standard but that’s O.K., we are Winning, and will be doing so for a long time to come!
By allowing only their interpreters, Trump and Kim left no one who cld verify what they agreed to in the mtg. Policy experts agree, this is probably bad for the world.
But for Trump & Kim, who both built empires on fictional narratives, it's just fine. In fact, it's ideal.
Senate interviewer to Kavanaugh on 9/25/2018: "Since you graduated from college, but before the New Yorker article, have you ever discussed or heard discussion about the incident described by Ms. Ramirez?"
Kavanaugh under oath: "No."
The above and the below cannot both be true
"Kavanaugh asked her to go on the record in his defense. Two other messages show communication between Kavanaugh's team and former classmates in advance of the New Yorker story." Great reporting from
@HeidiPrzybyla
@LACaldwellDC
Trump: "Unlike what the Democrats say, you don’t bring trucks of drugs through the checkpoints."
Fact check: The largest fentanyl bust in U.S. history was just made. It was a "truck of drugs" coming "through the checkpoint" in Nogales.
“The Trump Ocean Club Panama project was riddled with brokers, customers and investors who have been linked to drug trafficking and international crime.”
Just concluded a great meeting with my Intel team in the Oval Office who told me that what they said on Tuesday at the Senate Hearing was mischaracterized by the media - and we are very much in agreement on Iran, ISIS, North Korea, etc. Their testimony was distorted press....
As we suspected, the Pentagon was not informed in advance that Trump would announce an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria.
Bigger picture: Trump got bored with the shutdown crisis he had created, so he manufactured a new, bigger crisis to take its place.
Corker says he just got off a classified phone call with Mattis and says he is now headed to a preciously-scheduled meeting with the president and will now discuss Syria. He says there does not appear to have been any interagency process to the withdrawal decision.
Oh my. The only line Trump crossed out of his talking points appears to say, "Anyone involved in that meddling to justice."
So it seems Trump did not want to say that those involved in the meddling would be brought to justice.
Potential charges under consideration: Obstruction of justice, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the US, making false statements to feds, failure to register as a foreign agent, hiding foreign campaign donations, straw man campaign donations, mail fraud and wire fraud.
Wow
Trump literally had a poster of Julian Assange up on the wall in his 2016 presidential campaign debate war room. It featured Assange saying: “Dear Hillary, I miss reading your classified emails.”
Nunes' opening statement suggests Intel Republicans didn't know Sondland was flipping until the last minute, and Nunes didn't have time to update his opening statement.
Just in: Ukraine’s attorney general has fired one of the two prosecutors who GOP Rep. Devin Nunes had his staff meet with, to help them push the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, meddled in 2016.
New: Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has voted by mail 11 times in 10 years, but she now insists that voting by mail is rife with fraud. Great catch by
@scontorno
The Red Cross says it’s being denied access to federal detention centers where children separated from parents are being held.
When other countries deny relief orgs access to detention centers, the United States used to employ every means available to change that policy.
We share everyone's concern about the border situation and stand ready to help. We have offered assistance to federal gov't authorities, but without permission, we can't access facilities. Here’s a list of trusted organizations providing assistance:
This is wild. Nat’l Enquirer sent stories about Trump to Michael Cohen before publication, let Trump suggest phony attack pieces on his opponents, and made edits when Trump and/or Cohen asked.
Nat’l Enquirer was effectively “a Trump campaign mailer.”
So first, this lawyer advised two women not to report abuse. Then, after advising the victims to keep quiet, he gave their allegations to a totally unrelated party, Donald Trump, so Trump could weaponize the information. Amazing.
Holy smokes. New court filings today indicate that Trump already knew about two women's allegations against Schneiderman in 2013, when he wrote this >>
Trump: "When I said Mexico would pay for the wall in front of thousands and thousands of people .... obviously I never meant Mexico would write a check."
Giuliani: “All they knew was that a woman with a Russian name wanted to meet. They didn’t know she was a rep of the Russian” govt.
False. Rob Goldstone 2016 email to Don Jr: Mtg is w a “Russian government attorney” and “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
NEW: My investigation into the $125,000 paid to Manafort's lawyers that Manafort allegedly lied about. Until now, source of $$ had been identified only as Firm A.
We report Firm A is Va. based Multi Media Services Corp, owned by GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio
WOW. Novartis source tells
@statnews
Cohen came to them promising "access to not just Trump, but also the circle around him … we were hiring him as a lobbyist.”
After a bad first meeting with Cohen,
@Novartis
kept paying him so as not to “anger” Trump.
BREAKING:
@ATT
confirms payments to Cohen LLC >>
Full Stmt: “Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration. They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017”
New: A woman who publicly vouched for Kavanaugh's character just learned that she was the butt of a cruel joke on his yearbook page, where he used her name and implied she was promiscuous. "I pray their daughters are never treated this way," she says..
The message this sends from the White House is that taxpayer funded visits to autocrats are fine, and taxpayer funded resort weekends in Palm Beach are fine, but visits to meet with NATO and with troops are not.
I love to watch Oprah saying inspirational things on television. But also I love to watch people who have political experience being elected to national office.
POTUS claims DOJ did not "contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem." Wrong. Trump was warned on August 17, 2016 in his first intel briefing that Russia was trying to infiltrate his campaign.
With Spies, or “Informants” as the Democrats like to call them because it sounds less sinister (but it’s not), all over my campaign, even from a very early date, why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or “Justice” contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?
Trump: “We should have a new force called the Space Force. It’s like the Army and the Navy, but for space, because we’re spending a lot of money on space.”
I’m joining the board of
#AcreageHoldings
because my thinking on cannabis has evolved. I’m convinced de-scheduling the drug is needed so we can do research, help our veterans, and reverse the opioid epidemic ravaging our communities.
@AcreageCannabis
Big day for Trump, who:
1. Threatened to shut down government.
2. Implicitly threatened to shut down Mueller probe, calling it illegal.
3. Threatened to punish the press for reporting “internal deliberations” of government.
4. Claimed Mueller wanted Comey’s job but Trump said no.
Trump: "We as a country cannot tolerate political censorship! We are not going to let them control what we see!"
Only moments before, a Trump aide had physically blocked the lens of a press photographer to prevent him from taking a photo of a protestor.
Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham on Pelosi's presser: "The American people are smart enough to see through this sham...Salem witches got better deals than this.”
Fact check: Salem witches actually died.
Wow. Trump’s claim that Cohen handled only a “tiny, tiny fraction” of his overall legal work directly contradicts Trump’s lawyers’ argument in court that everything Cohen did all day was covered by attorney client privilege.
@VickyPJWard
Priebus warned Trump not to hire Scaramucci, saying SkyBridge Capital's buyers overpaid because he'd promised them special access to Trump.
Wow. For White House to ban U.S. photographers from an entire day of a POTUS overseas trip is unheard of.
The odds Trump met with Putin today just went up.
This what our APEC Summit photo coverage looks today in Da Nang Vietnam. Blank. No coverage by the White House Travel Pool photographers traveling with
@realDonaldTrump
#APEC2017
#apec
Wow. Navarro just ran his oppo dump against Dr Fauci as an op-ed.
In 10 yrs covering politics, I’ve never seen a senior WH official publish a broadside like this against a colleague.
Where’s Meadows? This is what WH Chiefs of Staff are hired to prevent.
March 11: Trump denies he will "add another lawyer to help out” his Russia team, slams
@maggieNYT
’s reporting
March 19: "Former US Attorney Joe DiGenova will be joining our legal team later this week,” said Jay Sekulow, counsel to the president
The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are doing a great job and.....
Mike Pence just publicly congratulated Martha McSally for winning the
#AZSen
GOP primary.
None of the ballot counts have been announced in that race.
Pence deleted the tweet, but here it is. NYT live results showed 0% of AZ precincts reporting when he sent it.
Trump's lawyers called the New York Times this morning to underscore that Trump's Sessions tweet was not an order,
@nytmike
tells MSNBC.
So clearly that's what Trump's lawyers knew that it sounded like, as well.
New: Trump HUD Secretary Ben Carson believes the Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations are part of a centuries old Socialist plot that began in England with something called the Fabian Society.
Trump just steered tens of thousands of his twitter followers to
@atrupar
’s livetweeted thread of today’s press conference, which is deeply critical of Trump.
The Lamestream Media is truly out of control. Look how they work (conspire!) together. They are the Enemy of the People, but don’t worry, we will WIN in November!
Tom Steyer was one of the Democrats targeted with a pipe bomb by a crazed Trump supporter. Three days later, Trump is back to calling Steyer a “lunatic” on Twitter.
Just watched Wacky Tom Steyer, who I have not seen in action before, be interviewed by
@jaketapper
. He comes off as a crazed & stumbling lunatic who should be running out of money pretty soon. As bad as their field is, if he is running for President, the Dems will eat him alive!
BREAKING: 3 members of Trump's Mar-A-Lago Club have been secretly running the Veterans Affairs Dept. for the past two years, despite having no experience or official jobs. Amazing reporting by
@iarnsdorf
Holy smokes. New court filings today indicate that Trump already knew about two women's allegations against Schneiderman in 2013, when he wrote this >>
The White House is using its official "dot gov" government Twitter account to attack a decorated Army officer who is obeying a subpoena to testify before the US Congress.
This seems like a questionable use of taxpayer dollars.