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10 December 19
FOCUS | Oops: Ivanka Trump Has Been "Personal Friends" With Christopher Steele for Years
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "On Monday, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his long-awaited report on the FBI's investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russia."
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "On Monday, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his long-awaited report on the FBI's investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russia."
...and for anyone hoping the findings would show there was some sort of conspiracy to take the president down, or that it would end with the line “Donald Trump is the greatest president, nay, human to have ever lived and it’s our recommendation that anyone who’s ever expressed a negative sentiment about him should be sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor Photoshopping his face onto an assortment of ripped bodies without eye roll or heavy sigh,” the report likely came as a real buzzkill. Instead, the IG found, the FBI had an “authorized purpose” when it launched its investigation into the Trump campaign, and rejected the claim that the case was initiated as some kind of political takedown or that informants were used in violation of government rules. Another fun finding? That Ivanka Trump has been buddies with Christopher Steele—the author of the dossier that her father has blasted as “phony and corrupt,” and the basis of the F.B.I. “witch hunt” against him—for years.
Rather than harbor a bias against Trump that led him to produce a negative, highly embarrassing file on the then-presidential candidate, the report found that, if anything, Steele was “favorably disposed” toward the Trump family, given his friendship with Ivanka, which @realDonaldTrump failed to mention at any point while slandering the former British spy as “dopey,” a “Trump hater,” and a “lowlife” on Twitter. While the apple of Trump’s creepy eye is not mentioned by name, the “family member” referenced is said to be his eldest daughter, according to ABC News. Per the report, Steele told investigators that the allegation he was biased against Trump was “ridiculous,” considering well before he started his research, he visited “a Trump family member” at Trump Tower and had “been friendly” with [the family member] for a number of years. Steele described his relationship with said family member as “personal” and told investigators that he’d once gifted them a family tartan from Scotland to.
According to ABC News’s Julia Macfarlane, Steele and Ivanka initially met at a dinner in 2007 and subsequently met up at Trump Tower. Emails suggest they stayed in touch over the next several years, with mentions of other dinners coming up. And not only were the two personal friends, Princess Purses reportedly invited the former spy to her office in 2010, after he’d gone into private practice, to “discuss the possibility of him working for the Trump Organization doing due diligence abroad as part of his work for Orbis [Business Intelligence],” the firm he founded. Strangely, however, none of this came up while the president was maligning Steele as an associate of “Crooked Hillary.” (It is not clear if Trump the elder was aware of his daughter’s relationship with Steele prior to the release of the IG report, or if he called her to wail “You just broke my heard into a thousands pieces!” this afternoon.)
While the report concluded that the FBI placed too much emphasis on Steele’s work, which, the IG wrote, sometimes exhibited a “lack of judgement,” it nevertheless found that none of the reporting in the dossier was done “in bad faith.” (On Monday, legal representatives for Steele issued a statement defending his work, saying that the Trump-Russia memos he wrote in 2016 were derived from “credible and reliable” sources and that his reporting was “extensively corroborated.” Ivanka’s attorney has not responded to ABC’s request for comment.)
Meanwhile Trump’s chief footstool, aka Attorney General William Barr, is already hard at work trying to discredit the findings of his own organization. In a statement issued Monday, Barr said that “The inspector general’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.” Barr has tasked John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, with conducting his own investigation into the Russia investigation, and while it would be fairly unusual for a government document to say something along the lines of “Donald Trump is a beautiful, selfless, tender yet macho man who should be appointed president for life and a personal apology from every American for the crime perpetrated against him,” we’re sure he’ll rise to the occasion. Kamala Harris wastes no time getting down to business
The business of dispensing with (one of) the avowed white nationalists in the White House, that is:
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and a large group of Democratic senators have signed a letter that will be sent to the White House on Monday calling on President Donald Trump to fire senior adviser Stephen Miller in light of leaked emails showing the extent of his white nationalist beliefs. "We write to demand the immediate removal of Stephen Miller as your advisor," states the letter, a copy of which was provided to HuffPost by Harris’s office.
The leaked emails, the letter says, show that "what is driving Mr. Miller" is "not national security, it’s white supremacy—something that has no place in our country, federal government, and especially not the White House." [...] Nearly one month ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center published a series of blockbuster reports analyzing 900 emails Miller sent to the far-right website Breitbart from 2015 to 2016, when he was working as an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). The emails show Miller actively shaping Breitbart stories related to race and immigration, encouraging editors and writers at the publication to draw inspiration from explicitly white supremacist websites like VDare. At one point Miller suggested that Breitbart write about "The Camp of Saints," a fascist French novel that depicts feces-eating brown people taking over Europe.
"It is simply appalling that a senior advisor to the President advanced parallels between this book and contemporary events," the letter states, which probably won’t stop Miller from referencing the text in his upcoming marriage vows.
Marianne Williamson accuses Trump of pardoning Charles Manson
It's not actually true, but you can see where she got the idea though, right?
"There is something deeply sinister about Trump pardoning Charles Manson, even posthumously," the self-help guru and Democratic presidential candidate tweeted to her 2.8 million followers. "Dog whistles of the very worst possible kind…" Criticizing the president for pardoning a race-war spouting killer wouldn’t exactly qualify as a hot take for the author of "A Politics of Love" — except that it never happened. In fact, since the murderous cult leader, who died in 2017, was convicted on California state criminal charges, Trump couldn’t issue him a pardon even if he wanted to. Williamson later posted a follow-up tweet apologizing and noting that she was "Glad To have been wrong." But she soon deleted both the original tweet and the apology.
While Williamson, who has yet to drop out of the Democratic race for president, was incorrect about Trump pardoning Manson, the president has pardoned:
- Kristian Saucier, who pleaded guilty to unauthorized possession and retention of national defense information and presumably scored points with Trump by arguing at this sentencing that he should have received probation because Hillary Clinton didn’t go to jail for her e-mails;
- Scooter Libby, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, a matter obviously near and dear to the president’s heart;
- Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who the Department of Justice said oversaw "the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in U.S. history" and was convicted of contempt of court;
- A con man who wrote a book called Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other;
- A bunch of war criminals.
So, really, Manson wasn’t that far off base.
"All the best people"
Did we have "Trump world figure arrested for allegedly stalking his ex-girlfriend, threatening to steal her cats" on our 2019 Bingo? No, but somehow, it feels so right:
A perennial Republican House candidate whose doomed bids against Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) have become a cause célèbre on the right was arrested Saturday on three felony charges. Businessman Omar Navarro has leveraged his frequent campaigns against Waters to become a prominent voice on the far-right, earning more than $1 million in campaign contributions and the backing of Trumpworld figures like controversial former sheriff Joe Arpaio, former Trump adviser Roger Stone, and Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn.
[Lorraine] Tesoriero, a self-styled MAGA relationship expert who is running a quixotic congressional run of her own against Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), told The Daily Beast that she saw Navarro skulking outside her home late at night. Tesoriero said she then received a text from an unknown number with the message, "Bitch, I came to see you."...Tesoriero called the police, who arrested Navarro on three felony charges: felony stalking, criminal threats, and attempted extortion. Navarro is also facing a misdemeanor charge for allegedly violating a five-year restraining order Tesoriero received against him earlier this year after months of harassing text messages from Navarro. In an interview, Tesoriero claimed that Navarro offered her money to marry him, threatened to leak her relatives’ addresses to left-wing antifascist "antifa" activists, and even threatened her pets. "He would have stolen my cats," Tesoriero said.
Navarro acknowledged he’d been near Tesoriero’s apartment on Saturday but denied the allegations to The Daily Beast, saying "Men in this country get treated unjustly, too, you have to acknowledge that...Just because a woman says something doesn’t mean it’s true." Amazingly, he also claimed that in calling the police on him, his ex-girlfriend had violated Ronald Reagan’s "11th Commandment" that apparently says Republicans shouldn’t air their dirty laundry with other Republicans in public. In a statement, Tesoriero said: "Clearly, he has a lot of screws loose. I think a lot of this power has gotten into his head. He has a lot of money now from campaign donations"
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