GOP now the party of corruption 6 , CD3 DFL

BUSTED: New York Times catches Trump falsifying quotes he tweets to his 67 million Twitter followers

On the same day Columbia University busted a top Trump administration official for plagiarizing, The New York Times busted the president of the United States for tweeting false quotes to his huge Twitter following.

“Watching Fox News ahead of Wednesday’s impeachment vote, President Trump gave a Twitter call out to one of his most combative allies in the House,” Times reporters Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman explained.

“In his tweet, Mr. Trump quoted approvingly from what Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, had said on ‘Fox & Friends’ about the two impeachment articles passed by the House — that they were the product of Democrats who ‘couldn’t find any crimes so they did a vague abuse of power and abuse of Congress, which every administration from the beginning has done.’ But in fact, Mr. Collins never made the claim that “abuse of power and abuse of Congress” were common practices of past administrations,” the newspaper reported.

Fact-based impeachment can’t penetrate the pro-Trump Web

As the House Judiciary Committee convened Friday to approve articles of impeachment against President Trump, a watch party got underway in a private Facebook group that rallies its more than 75,000 members around the banner, “THE TRUMP DEPLORABLES.”

The comments that streamed forth in the group illustrate how Trump’s most ardent supporters have fashioned alternative realities for themselves — as well as for Republican lawmakers aiming to turn the charge of corruption back on those investigating the president.

The feed — from Fox News, a major source of news for the president’s supporters — showed the same scene available to viewers tuning in on various networks all over the country. But in the online enclave where the self-described “deplorables” had gathered to watch the committee vote, Democrats are the lawbreakers who “should be impeached,” as one viewer wrote. Trump’s word is truth. And the federal employees who question his version of events are not just mistaken, they are “scum,” as Trump labeled members of the intelligence community at a rally this week in Hershey, Pa.

Pentagon Investigator to Examine Border Wall Contract Awarded to G.O.P. Donor

The Defense Department’s inspector general will look at a $400 million contract awarded to a North Dakota company embraced by President Trump.

WASHINGTON — The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Defense will investigate a $400 million contract for border wall construction awarded to a North Dakota company after President Trump privately pushed the deal.

The chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, called for the inquiry into the decision made by the United States Army Corps of Engineers last week, raising concerns of “inappropriate influence.” Mr. Thompson wrote in a letter that Fisher Sand & Gravel “did not meet the operational requirements of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and its prototype project came in late and over budget.”

Glenn Fine, the principal deputy inspector general for the Department of Defense, wrote a letter to Mr. Thompson on Thursday saying the watchdog would investigate the contract for Arizona wall construction to see if it met solicitation standards.

Christian psychologist: Trump’s evangelical supporters have been ‘bewitched by an exploitative, pathologically lying snake oil salesman’

Although President Donald Trump is enthusiastically supported by Christianity’s lunatic fringe — that is, white Christian right evangelicals such as Franklin Graham, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell, Jr. — he is not universally loved in Christianity by any means. Vehement criticism of Trump has come from everyone from Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg (a practicing Episcopalian) to the Rev. Al Sharpton to members of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. And Christian psychologist Chris Thurman, in some blistering op-eds for the Christian Post, denounces Trump’s far-right white evangelical supporters as “fools” who have been taken in by an opportunist.

“I believe evangelicals who support Donald Trump are being both blind and foolish to do so, and that labeling them as such is not sinful but appropriate and necessary,” Thurman asserts. “By support, I’m not referring to evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016; I’m referring to those evangelicals who continue to hold Trump up as a great leader, say he is God’s chosen one for the presidency, applaud his appalling words and actions, ignore his glaring moral defects, and enable his dangerous presidency to continue by giving him their time, talents and treasures.”

Thurman first called out Trump’s evangelical supporters in a December 4 op-ed, inspiring some angry responses from pro-Trump evangelicals. One of them came from fellow Christian Post contributor Michael Brown, who wrote on December 6 that Thurman is “blind to Trump’s strengths and his potential to help America greatly.” But Thurman didn’t back down. Instead, he doubled down in an equally blistering op-ed for the Christian Post on December 10.

A day of history accentuates America’s divide and the distortions of truth in the Trump era

For only the fourth time in the nation’s history, congressional leaders on Tuesday put forward articles of impeachment against a president, but that milestone was the most predictable of events on a day that accentuated the degree to which the institutions of government are under stress and the citizens they serve are in conflict.

Amid the partisan breakdown over President Trump’s conduct in office, there was a rare statement of progress: a deal to cement a new U.S. trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, the only substantial legislative breakthrough of the year and one long sought by the president.

But in today’s hyper-polarized environment, agreement among elected leaders — once considered the norm — is now the anomaly. Instead, the House Democrats’ march to impeach Trump and the president’s continuing war with the FBI over the origins of the Russia investigation more clearly characterized the strained state of the nation and the rising prominence of distorting facts for political gain.

Trump, allies aim to delegitimize impeachment from the start

President Donald Trump and his Republican allies spent weeks trivializing the House impeachment inquiryahead of Tuesday’s historic unveiling of formal charges against the president.

Where Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton treated the prospect of impeachment as a serious threat to their presidencies, Trump’s boosters have tried to brush off the whole thing. Believing that acquittal by the GOP-controlled Senate is all but certain, they’re out to convince voters to punish the president’s Democratic accusers — or at least tune out the Washington spectacle.

To that end, they have belittled the impeachment process with mockery, schoolyard taunts and an unyielding insistence that Trump did not a single thing wrong. They have stonewalled, refusing to allow witnesses to testify; protested by declining to send their own lawyers to hearings; and dished out the ultimate Trumpian insult: calling the proceedings boring.

Experts blast Bill Barr for ‘utterly shocking bad faith’ NBC interview attacking FBI: ‘Sean Hannity is the attorney general now‘

In a stunning move the Attorney General of the United States on Tuesday blasted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, widely separating himself from the findings of the Dept. of Justice Inspector General’s report. Barr also claimed the FBI should have ended the counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump once he was elected president.

And Barr even said the FBI acted in “bad faith” in conducting the investigation into Trump and Russia.

Effectively, Barr is saying not only should the president never be prosecuted, but presidents should never be investigated. All these statements are contrary to what many if not most constitutional experts have said.

Giuliani Roasted For Claiming Constitution Requires Trump To ‘Investigate’ Bidens

The President’s personal attorney is claiming – falsely – that the U.S. Constitution “obligates” President Donald Trump to extort Ukraine to manufacture false evidence of crimes by his top political opponent Joe Biden and the former vice president’s son Hunter Biden.

And he’s getting scorched for these false claims.

Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney, made the false claims Friday morning on Twitter.

Trump loves the massive grift he’s running on the nation — and knows he can’t win a fair election

When I was growing up at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, back in the early 1960s, my mother drove down to Kansas City one morning to go shopping and have lunch with an old friend of her mother’s. Ladies going out shopping and having lunch in the upscale Country Club Plaza in Kansas City was almost a formal occasion. I remember she put on a summery suit and heels and stockings, and I’m pretty sure she wore a pair of white cotton gloves.

When she returned a few hours later, she wasn’t carrying any bags from the shops, and she was seething. The woman she’d eaten lunch with was married to a man who owned a chain of downtown hotels in major cities around the country. They lived in a big Tudor house in Mission Hills, the Beverly Hills of the Midwest. She drove a Cadillac. She was rich.

Why was my mother so angry? Well, it was what her mother’s friend talked about throughout their lunch. That week, she had gone to the bankruptcy auction of a chain of Midwestern drug stores and had bought a thousand pairs of stockings for a nickel apiece. She couldn’t stop talking about it, my mother said. She’d bought 50 makeup compacts, a hundred bottles of her favorite nail polish and a hundred color-matching Revlon lipsticks. She’d gotten the whole load — the stockings and the makeup and the nail polish — for less than $100.

Giuliani draws attention with latest trip to Ukraine

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, traveled to Ukraine this week even as an impeachment process focused in part on his involvement in the Trump administration’s policy toward Ukraine accelerated.

Giuliani met with multiple Ukrainian officials as he continued his effort to counter House Democrats’ impeachment probe and paint an investigation into the Bidens as a matter critical to the relationship between the two countries.

The trip is sure to draw scrutiny from Democrats, who could draft articles of impeachment against President Trump in a matter of days accusing him of abusing his office by pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, including Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Share this:

Share this:

The Defense Department’s inspector general will look at a $400 million contract awarded to a North Dakota company embraced by President Trump.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: