Tag: Trump lies

Tape Made Public of Trump Discussing Ukraine With Donors

New York Times logoThe recording from a dinner in 2018 showed that the president spent an hour with two key players in the Ukraine pressure campaign. He has repeatedly said he does not know them.

WASHINGTON — For more than an hour one evening in 2018, President Trump sat around a dinner table in a private suite in his Washington hotel with a group of donors, including two men at the center of the impeachment inquiry, talking about golf, trade, politics — and removing the United States ambassador to Ukraine.

The conversation, captured on a recording made public Saturday, contradicted Mr. Trump’s repeated statements that he does not know the two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who went on to work with the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to carry out a pressure campaign on Ukraine.

The recording — a video shot on Mr. Fruman’s phone during the dinner in April 2018 — largely confirmed Mr. Parnas’s account of having raised with Mr. Trump criticisms of the ambassador to Kyiv at the time, Marie L. Yovanovitch, and the president’s immediate order that Ms. Yovanovitch should be removed from the post. Continue reading.

Trump promised his mileage standards would make cars cheaper and safer. New documents raise doubts about that.

Washington Post logoTop Senate Democrat argues that revised rule “will lead to vehicles that are neither safer, nor more affordable or fuel-efficient.”

President Trump has said his plan to weaken federal mileage standards would make cars cheaper and “substantially safer.” But the administration’s own analysis suggests that it would cost consumers more than it would save them in the long run, and would do little to make the nation’s roads safer.

The revised Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule, which has not been released publicly, would require automakers to increase the average fuel efficiency of the nation’s fleets by 1.5 percent per year between model years 2021 and 2026. Rules put in place by the Obama administration, by comparison, require a nearly 5 percent annual increase.

If finalized, the proposal would mandate more progress on fuel efficiency than the Trump administration’s initial effort to freeze fuel standards in the years ahead. But the new analysis, outlined in a letter Wednesday by Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), projects that the benefits of Trump’s proposed rollback would not significantly outweigh the costs. Trump’s approach would lower the sticker price of new cars, according to the documents, but drivers would spend more at the gas pump over time by driving less efficient vehicles. Continue reading.

Senior White House officials faced ‘a mad dash to reconcile intense intra-administration tensions’ due to Trump’s interference in Soleimani killing

AlterNet logoAccording to a report at the Daily Beast, plans to go after Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani were months in the making and, after Donald Trump ordered his assassination, Pentagon and State Department officials were forced to scuttle their plans to handle the fallout because of how the president reacted in the aftermath.

The reports states, “The ensuing days became a mad dash to reconcile the intense intra-administration tensions over what the intelligence actually said about Iranian plots, and how best to sell their case to the American public. At the very top was a president who stewed and complained to staff about how the killing he’d just ordered might negatively affect his re-election prospects and ensnare him in a quagmire in the Middle East of his own creation.”

Plans for Soleimani were in the works for months, the report notes, and after the president chose the option of killing the popular Iranian leader and put it in motion not everyone was on the same page about how to sell it to the public. Continue reading.

‘Four embassies’: The anatomy of Trump’s unfounded claim about Iran

Washington Post logoThe theory was born last Thursday in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where President Trump stood before men in hard hats and orange construction vests for an environmental announcement and offered a fresh rationale for his controversial order to kill a top Iranian general.

“They were looking to blow up our embassy,” Trump said, referring to the heavily secured Baghdad facility that had become a magnet for protesters.

Later that night, at a raucous campaign rally in Ohio, Trump added to his story. The Iranians, he claimed, were planning to attack not only the U.S. Embassy in Iraq but also an undisclosed number of embassies in other countries. Continue reading.

Mr. President, here’s how the budget works

Washington Post logo“We’re actually taking in more revenue now than we did when we had the higher taxes because the economy’s doing so well.”

— President Trump, in an interview with Rush Limbaugh, Jan. 6, 2020

The way the federal budget works is often a mystery to Americans. But it shouldn’t be to the president of the United States.

Here, the president makes a basic mistake. He asserts that even though he signed into law a bill cutting taxes in 2017, revenue has kept going up — a fact he attributes to a robust economy. Some listeners might even have gotten the impression that the tax cuts were paying for themselves — a false claim the administration made repeatedly before the passage of the tax bill.

But revenue was always supposed to be going up year after year, despite the tax cuts. And revenue is way down from what had been anticipated before Congress approved the tax cuts, which (along with higher spending) is the reason the federal budget deficit is soaring despite a good economy. Continue reading.

Critics pummel Secretary Esper over ‘astoundingly embarrassing’ Sunday show interviews after he admits there’s no evidence to back up Trump’s ‘4 embassies’ claim

AlterNet logoDefense Secretary Mark Esper made the morning show rounds on Sunday, ostensibly to provide cover for the Trump administration’s claim that Iranian General. Qassem Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” to United States personnel prior to his assassination. In doing so, however, Esper highlighted the administration’s evolving justifications for launching the strike that killed Soleimani, and contradicted President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claim the Iranian commander was planning an attack on “four embassies” in the region.

Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Esper insisted Trump “never said there was specific intelligence to four different embassies.”

“What the president said was he believed it probably could have been,” Espert told Tapper. “He didn’t cite intelligence.” Continue reading.

Trump now claims four embassies were under threat from Iran, raising fresh questions about intelligence reports

Washington Post logoPresident Trump said on Friday that a senior Iranian general killed by a U.S. drone strike had been planning attacks on four U.S. embassies, a claim made to justify the decision but that was at odds with intelligence assessments from senior officials in Trump’s administration.

Trump and his top advisers have been under intensifying pressure from lawmakers in both parties to share more details about the intelligence they say showed Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, was planning imminent attacks against U.S. personnel in the Middle East. On Trump’s orders, Soleimani was killed last week in a drone strike, prompting Iran to fire a volley of ballistic missiles this week at bases in Iraq housing U.S. soldiers.

In an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, excerpts of which were released Friday afternoon, Trump expanded on comments from a day earlier, when he initially told reporters that Soleimani’s forces “were looking to blow up our embassy” in Baghdad. He later said at a rally in Toledo that “Soleimani was actively planning new attacks, and he was looking very seriously at our embassies, and not just the embassy in Baghdad.” Continue reading.

Pompeo defends intelligence behind Soleimani strike amid press grilling

The Hill logoSecretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday defended the decision to authorize a drone strike to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, saying intelligence suggested that he was plotting a “large-scale” attack that threatened U.S. embassies, among other American facilities.

Pressed by reporters at a press conference in the White House briefing room, Pompeo said that the Trump administration didn’t know precisely when or where the attack would occur, but insisted it was imminent.

“We had specific information on an imminent threat and the threat stream included attacks on U.S. embassies. Period, full stop,” Pompeo told reporters. Continue reading.

 

Critics blast Trump’s self-congratulatory tweet about the decline in cancer deaths after his administration decimated research budgets

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump is often quick to take credit for any good news – while pawning off responsibility for negative outcomes on others, especially his predecessor. But social media users were stunned – and many outraged – when Trump tweeted Thursday morning a clear pat on the back for himself on recent news the rate of cancer deaths in America took a steep drop.

“Cancer Death Rate in U.S. Sees Sharpest One-Year Drop,” a New York Timesheadline reported Wednesday. “The cancer death rate in the United States fell 2.2 percent from 2016 to 2017 — the largest single-year decline in cancer mortality ever reported.”

President Trump was not even in office for the full year of 2017, so it’s literally impossible that anything he has done has contributed to the welcome decline in the cancer death rate. Continue reading.

Trump Falsely Blames Obama For Iran’s Missile Strike On US Bases

Donald Trump on Wednesday delivered an address from the White House in which he tried to blame former President Barack Obama for the attacks Iran carried out against U.S. troops Tuesday night.

In the speech, Trump claimed that Iran paid for the missiles it used to strike Iraqi bases housing American troops with money it had received from the nuclear deal struck under the Obama administration.

“The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration,” Trump said, repeating a false statement he has used previously about Obama giving Iran billions of dollars.  Continue reading.