Tag: Donald Trump

Trump joked about Jamal Khashoggi’s grisly murder in phone calls to Saudi prince: report

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Former president Donald Trump cracked a joke about the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives, according to a new report.

The October 2018 murder of the U.S.-based journalist set off a crisis inside the White House, and Trump personally called Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and his father King Salman seeking answers about the slaying in Turkey, reported Yahoo’s “Conspiracyland” podcast.

“The president had multiple calls with MBS and with King Salman, specifically asking them, did you know anything about this?” said Kirsten Fontenrose, then the director of Gulf affairs at the National Security Council. “The president would flat-out ask, I mean, up to a dozen times on any individual phone call, whether it was with King Salman or with MBS or both of them, ‘Did you have any knowledge of this operation?’ ‘Did you know this was going to happen?’ ‘Did you give this order?'” Continue reading.

Reporters point to a simple sign that Trump’s social media lawsuit is ‘unserious’

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It took Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC), the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) just “minutes” to begin fundraising off of what some are calling the former president’s “frivolous” lawsuits against Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

Politico’s Sam Stein posted this text from the joint Trump-RNC fundraising committee:

Continue reading.

Trump-allied GOP chairs turn on fellow Republicans

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State Republican Party chairs who have bought into former President Trump’s lies of widespread election malfeasance are turning their fire on fellow Republicans who have acknowledged the reality of Trump’s defeat, in a turn that has longtime party leaders and strategists worried about the future of the conservative coalition.

For most of modern political history, a state party chair’s role has been confined to raising money and building an organization that can contact voters and elect candidates. Their job is much more often to promote those who win primaries than to wade in on behalf of a specific contender during those primaries.

But in the age of Trump, some party leaders are as eager to talk about the perceived turncoats within their own ranks as they are to go after the opposition party. Continue reading.

The death of Ashli Babbitt offers the purest distillation of Donald Trump’s view of justice

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The night of May 29, 2020, was a frightening one for President Donald Trump. The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer had spawned massive protests throughout the country, including on the streets of Washington. Concerned about the unrest, the president’s protective detail moved him into a bunker inside the White House, a precautionary measure that Trump would later claim involved nothing more than a tour. (This was not true.)

Always seeking to project strength, Trump the next morning presented the situation as though he was a conquering general.

“Great job last night at the White House by the [Secret Service],” he wrote on Twitter. “ … I was inside, watched every move, and couldn’t have felt more safe.” He praised agents for letting the protesters “scream & rant,” noting that if any “got too frisky or out of line, [agents] would quickly come down on them, hard — didn’t know what hit them.” Continue reading.

Trump charged Secret Service nearly $10,200 in May for agents’ rooms

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Former president Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., charged the Secret Service nearly $10,200 for guest rooms used by his protective detail during Trump’s first month at the club this summer, newly released spending records show.

The records — released by the Secret Service in response to a public-records request — show that the ex-president has continued a habit he began in the first days of his presidency: charging rent to the agency that protects his life.

Since Trump left office in January, U.S. taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $50,000 for rooms used by Secret Service agents, records show. Continue reading.

Mike Lindell’s lawsuit that he vowed would put Trump back into the White House already facing court setbacks

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Trump-loving MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been saying this week that former President Donald Trump will be returned to the Oval Office next month — a claim that even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) shot down this week for being outlandish.

One of Lindell’s purported weapons in his war to put Trump back in the White House is a lawsuit that he filed against Dominion Voting Systems that he claimed would expose the company’s supposed role in stealing the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.

According to Reuters judicial reporter Brad Heath, however, Lindell’s big lawsuit is already facing setbacks in court. Continue reading.

Rudy Giuliani suspended from practicing law in D.C. court

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The D.C. Court of Appeals has temporarily barred Rudolph W. Giuliani from practicing law, following a similar decision in New York.

A committee of judges in New York determined last month that Giuliani was unfit to keep practicing law after he “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large” while representing former president Donald Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

A day after the ruling, disciplinary counsel in D.C. recommended suspending Giuliani’s license in D.C. until the New York case is resolved. On Wednesday the D.C. Court of Appeals agreed. Continue reading.

Arizona secretary of state asks AG for a criminal investigation into election interference by Trump

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Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has asked her state’s attorney general to investigate election interference from President Donald Trump and his allies.

The Arizona Republic reported Wednesday that Hobbs believes the communications “involve clear efforts to induce supervisors to refuse to comply with their duties,” which she thinks could have violated Arizona law. 

She went on to cite a report from last week that text messages and voicemails came from surrogates of Trump’s, Rudy Giuliani and then ultimately from the White House itself.  Continue reading.

‘It sickens me’: Longtime GOP voter disgusted by the ‘corrupt and ridiculous’ Republican antics in Arizona

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The Republican Accountability Project describes itself as an initiative tasked with “defending the accessibility, integrity, and competitiveness of American elections.” This Tuesday, the group uploaded a video to YouTube featuring “Julie” from Prescott, Arizona, who described herself as a former Republican and Army veteran who worked for the federal government for 34 years.

“I love my country. I loved being a Republican. I was a Republican for 40 years. I voted in every election as long as I was stateside during that 40 years,” Julie said. “And I believed and still believe in the principles and the ideals of the Republican Party, which are smaller government and lower taxes, balanced budgets and free trade and all those things.”

“I still believe in those, but as of this day, I am a Democrat because I could not stay in a party that was committed to one person, to his bidding and his appeasement. And I just couldn’t do it. So I left the party because they left me and I am now a Democrat,” she continued.  Continue reading.

Trump briefly derails his own press conference as he bizarrely rambles about the word ‘nuclear’

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During a press conference this Wednesday in Bedminster, New Jersey, former President Donald Trump announced that he is filing a class action lawsuit against tech giants Facebook and Twitter, along with their CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, over being banned from their platforms.

“We’re demanding an end to the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing, a stop to the blacklisting, vanishing and canceling,” Trump said, adding that “we are asking the court to impose punitive damages.”

Trump said the suit points out “so many violations of our Constitution” that were allegedly perpetrated by the tech companies, and referenced the fact that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook removed posts that questioned the origins of the novel coronavirus, only to later relent when the question became more mainstream. Continue reading.