More winning, I for one am getting sick of it now

[Marshall]

And a double bitchslap for Paul Manafort.

Thirty minutes after being sentenced to 6.5 years, NY state indicted him on 16 counts.
This was Trump's campaign chairman. All the best people.

It was supposed be the final act in Paul Manafort’s bruising, 17-month odyssey through the criminal justice system. In the end, Wednesday’s sentencing hearing for the former chairman of President Donald Trump's campaign only added to the now-convicted felon’s legal misery.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson began her remarks to a packed courtroom by characterizing Manafort as a serial “liar” whose “ongoing contempt” for the law spanned more than a decade. It got worse from there.

Jackson delivered a searing critique of the one-time counselor to Republican presidents, whose high-flying lobbying work paid for expensive clothes and homes, who now is convicted of conspiracy, fraud and plotting to obstruct justice. Then she tacked more than three years onto a four-year prison term he received last week in a related case in Virginia.

Wednesday's developments offered a vivid illustration of the danger facing at least some of the high-profile subjects of Russia special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. As Mueller's inquiry grinds toward its conclusion, federal and state prosecutors are in the midst of their own investigations –many sprawling far beyond the bounds of Russian intervention in the 2016 election. Manafort's fate on Wednesday suggested the peril they face is real, and at least partly beyond Trump's control.

The strategically-timed action by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance would put Manafort beyond the reach of a potential pardon, should President Donald Trump choose to set aside the federal convictions against his former aide.

Trump and those around him face a multiplying set of investigations. In addition to the New York state charges lodged against Manafort, federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating fundraising irregularities involving the Trump Inaugural Committee and hush-money payments made by the president, Donald Trump Jr., and Trump Organization financial chief Allen Weisselberg to women who have claimed affairs with the president.

The Trump Foundation, a charity established by Trump long before he took office, also has been the subject of a separate investigation by the New York Attorney General's Office. More recently, according to the New York Times, the New York attorney general issued subpoenas to two banks as part of a separate examination of the Trump Organization, the president's sprawling real estate enterprise.

www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/13/paul-manaforts-trump-campaign-chair-prison-term-new-charges-highlight-russia-probe-perils/3153479002/

Basically everything Trump is involved with is under investigation.

[Deleted]

Impeachment brewing?

[flatandy]

Impeachment is exceptionally unlikely unless Trump is shown to have done something so bad that even a load of Republicans think he's a threat to the country. You need a 2/3 majority in the Senate to convict on impeachment, and that means something like 15-20 Republican Senators are willing to throw Trump under the bus. And that's not going to happen without something much, much more damning.

So there's no benefit to the House starting impeachment proceedings.

They don't need to convict Trump for it to be worthwhile, but they need to have Trump on something so bad that when Republicans refuse to convict him, that refusal can obviously be seen as mendacious and corrupt and unlinked to reality, and they become at risk of losing their seats.

Unless something that bad (Trump knowing that he was an FSB asset, rather than just being an unwitting asset which it looks like he is at the moment) comes up, it's better just to investigate and let the public know all the dodgy dealings and let him lose in 2020.

[voice]

The NY indictments are probably only being filed as insurance as they are pardon proof, many feeling the entire presentation to the judge yesterday and the other week was more directed at Trump than the judge, with many many referenced to 'no collusion, no collusion', even the judge yesterday admonished the defense team for this ploy. Also its gonna be much harder for Trump to issue the pardon while Manifort is still under indictment.

[Marshall]

Manafort's lawyer was rebuked in court by the judge for lying.

Then he goes outside in front of the cameras and repeats the same lie. He should be disbarred.

[voice]

Yeah, loved the fact he was heckled by some bloke shouting 'that's not what she said at all'

[Marshall]

Sounded like a few of them were shouting.

It's amazing how shameless some of these people are.

[voice]

What they said has an audience of 1, they don't care about judges or crowds.

[voice]

The Pentagon has launched an inquiry into acting US Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan for alleged favouritism to his ex-employer, Boeing.

www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47647865

more corruption exposed. There was a time when something like this would have been a huge deal, but in this administration this is so low level it hardly gets a mention when compared to everything else in this omnishambles of a government.

[Deleted]

Ain't that just the way of the world right now? We seem to be losing our values, and honour stands for nothing.

[flatandy]

I'm not sure this would have ever been a massive scandal in the US. There's always been exceedingly dodgy movement between industry and government. It's not as if the guys who ran Halliburton weren't involved in distributing the oil field "recovery" work in Iraq, frinstance.

[Marshall]

In case you were getting bored, here's another Trump scandal.

More than a year before her Super Bowl selfie with the president, Li “Cindy” Yang brought two Chinese-born tech executives — an Australia-based cryptocurrency guru known in the industry as “the Martian” and a startup CEO whose firm recently became a jersey sponsor for the Dallas Mavericks — to take formal photos with President Donald Trump.

It was a big moment — and it came with a big price tag: $50,000 per photo, benefiting the president’s re-election campaign.

But neither Ryan Xu nor Lucas Lu appear to have paid for the privilege. A search of a federal database showed no record of either man giving to Trump Victory, the political action committee that sold tickets — as well as perks like photos with the president — for the Dec. 2, 2017, breakfast fundraiser hosted by the Republican National Committee in New York City.

So who paid Trump Victory for their photos?
Yang isn’t saying — but she and three associates with an Asian-American political group donated a total of $135,500 to Trump Victory in the weeks leading up to the event. None of those associates would comment either. One of them told the Miami Herald she could not recall making a $25,000 donation listed in her name and address. Selling tickets to campaign fundraisers without disclosing the buyer to the Federal Election Commission is illegal. Selling tickets to foreign nationals, who are banned from donating to American political causes, would be an additional violation of U.S. law.

www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article227941749.html

[flatandy]

The Republicans really don't care about democracy or the rule of law these days. You just have to look at them trying to eviscerate the felon voting right ruling from Florida or what they tried to do in Wisconsin and Michigan in the lame duck sessions.

Nobody in the Republican party is going to be bothered by a few million in completely illegal campaign contributions, and nobody is going to get prosecuted for it. Least of all President Crook.

[Marshall]

Nope. But they'll jump up and down about "millions of illegal votes in CA", the country going communist if we ever get universal health care and other cherished fantasies.

[Marshall]

BUT HER EMAILS!

Jared Kushner's attorney told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform that Kushner uses private messaging applications and personal email to communicate about official White House matters, the committee wrote in a letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone on Thursday.

The oversight panel said that Kushner, the president's son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, had been using WhatsApp as part of his official duties — an apparent violation of a law governing White House records.

The committee said that it learned about the use of private email and WhatsApp from a December 2018 conversation from Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, who also represents the president's daughter, Ivanka Trump.
Meanwhile, the committee said that Trump had been receiving official emails on her personal account and has not been forwarding them to her official White House account as required by law. Her lawyer confirmed this as well, according to the committee.

www.npr.org/2019/03/21/705561586/kushner-used-private-email-to-conduct-official-business-house-committee-says

Isn't this what they wanted to lock Hillary up over? There's no way Kushner should have a security clearance.

[flatandy]

Kushner's worse than Clinton. Ivanka's done literally the same as Clinton.

Jared's ridiculous excuse that he "took screenshots of all his Whatsapps and sent them to the Presidential Records..." is just the most amazing bullshit.

He still has refused to explain why he was using Whatsapp in the first place.

[Marshall]

Over the next decade we'll be finding out how much damage Trump and his brood of idiots have done to the country.

Of course people will still be defending him, saying he was the greatest president the world has ever seen.

[flatandy]

Experience suggests that they won't. They'll pretend he never existed, then spend three years criticising a Democrat who replaces him, and then grip on to their next idiot with the same ridiculous fervour. They did it with Nixon, they did it with Bush. They even basically did it with Reagan, forgetting he existed for half a decade or more before finally trying to deify him.

[voice]

We know Trump uses an unsecured personal phone wgenhe sh*t tweets at 4am, yes no mention how that compromises national security, they are brazen about all this and those in his personality cult swallow what ever load he gives em, no thinking allowed.

[voice]

in related news, the MAGA Bomber has plead guilty.

www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47660638

One less Trump foot soldier on the streets.