Tag: GOP the party of corruption under Trump

R Is For Republican — And Russian

Vladimir Putin is brilliant. Without firing a single nuclear missile, without dispatching a team of assassins to murder American leaders, without even sending a nuclear submarine to lurk near our shores, he has managed to inflict significant damage on our country.

Putin must be smiling at his astonishing success. He interfered in the 2016 presidential election and helped into office a narcissistic sociopath who not only admires Putin but also does his bidding. President Donald J. Trump is a would-be despot who, for reasons we may never know, carries out Putin’s wishes — destroying democratic values, exacerbating civic division and, of course, trashing Ukraine.

But Putin’s victory did not end there. Because Trump has completely taken over the Republican Party, so has Putin. His GOP lackeys are going around repeating the discredited propaganda that Putin must have whispered into Trump’s ear: that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

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The GOP Attack Machine Targets The US Military

The focus here isn’t President Donald Trump. He is a creature unto himself. Rather, this is about his spineless political party, which stands mute, or even supportive, as he breaks U.S. military discipline, morale and leadership.

The GOP used to be the party of superpatriots, always saluting our men and women in uniform. It still playacts. Some members of the Republican caucus continue to make a show of thanking soldiers for their service even as they savage the soldiers’ reputations to advance the president’s interests. (Someday we’ll get to the bottom of what those interests really were.)

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer has just been fired. Ignore the convoluted explanations for his termination. In the end, Spencer was dismissed for having openly opposed Trump’s perverse move to reverse the judgments on three service members accused or convicted of war crimes. The decisions were all reached within the military justice system.

View the complete November 27 article by From a Harrop on the National Memo website here.

Trump knew of whistleblower complaint when he released aid to Ukraine

Lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office told Trump in August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, two people said.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump had already been briefed on a whistleblower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine when he unfroze military aid for the country in September, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office told Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said.

The revelation could shed light on Trump’s thinking at two critical points under scrutiny by impeachment investigators: his decision in early September to release $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine and his denial to a key ambassador around the same time that there was a “quid pro quo” with Kiev. Trump used the phrase before it had entered the public lexicon in the Ukraine affair.

View the complete November 27 article by Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman from The New York Times on The Star Tribune website here.