Tag Archives: michael

Top Intel Official Won’t Deny Reports That Trump Pressured Him to Push Back on FBI Investigation

by ClemmieMcneil Posted on May 23, 2017

Mother Jones

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Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats on Tuesday refused to tell Senators whether President Donald Trump had asked him to push back against against the FBI investigation into potential links between Trump’s associates and Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, an allegation that was reported by the Washington Post Monday night.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) asked about the accuracy of Post‘s report that Trump had asked Coats and NSA director Michael Rogers to “publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.” According to the Post’s sources, both Coats and Rogers felt Trump’s request was “inappropriate” and refused to comply. Coats declined to answer McCain’s question.

“As the president’s principal intelligence adviser, I’m fortunate to be able and need to spend a significant amount of time with the president discussing national security interests and intelligence,” said Coats. “As it relates to those interests, we discuss a number of topics on a very regular basis. I have always believed that given the nature of my position and the information which we share, it’s not appropriate for me to comment publicly on any of that. So on this topic, as well as other topics, I don’t feel it’s appropriate to characterize discussions and conversations with the president.”

Trump’s alleged request to Coats and Rogers came after then-FBI Director James Comey confirmed publicly on March 20 that the FBI was investigating possible links between Trump campaign associates and the Russian government, and whether any coordination between them existed during the 2016 campaign.

According to the Post, an internal NSA memo written by a “senior NSA official” documented Trump’s request at the time he made it. Of course, that memo wouldn’t be the only time a senior intelligence official apparently documented an inappropriate request made by Trump regarding the Russia investigation. As the New York Times revealed last week, Comey wrote a series of memos documenting his communications with Trump, including one in which he apparently wrote that Trump had asked him to drop the investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

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Top Intel Official Won’t Deny Reports That Trump Pressured Him to Push Back on FBI Investigation

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Why Were Three White House Officials Trawling Through Highly Classified Documents?

by OpheliaZpo Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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Now there are three people involved in revealing classified information to Rep. Devin Nunes:

One of those involved in procuring the documents cited by Nunes has close ties to former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The official, Ezra Cohen, survived a recent attempt to oust him from his White House job by appealing to Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, the officials said….After assembling reports that showed that Trump campaign officials were mentioned or inadvertently monitored by U.S. spy agencies targeting foreign individuals, Cohen took the matter to the top lawyer for the National Security Council, John Eisenberg.

The third White House official involved was identified as Michael Ellis, a lawyer who previously worked with Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee but joined the Trump administration as an attorney who reports to Eisenberg.

This is an amazingly far-reaching conspiracy considering that the documents don’t actually seem to have contained anything very interesting. You’d think that at some point one of these guys would have the common sense to call off this Keystone Cops affair.

And as long as we’ve mentioned Michael Flynn, here’s the latest on him:

Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, has offered to be interviewed by House and Senate investigators who are examining the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in exchange for immunity from prosecution, according to his lawyer and a congressional official.

I didn’t bother mentioning this yesterday because, frankly, I sort of figured that Flynn was hoping for immunity and then wouldn’t say anything very interesting. Last night Josh Marshall opined that “you only get immunity if you deliver someone else higher up the ladder,” but this morning he seems to have changed his mind:

Flynn’s lawyer states rather grandly that his client “has a story to tell and … very much wants to tell it.” But Alex Whiting of Harvard Law School argues pretty convincingly that what we learned last night likely means either that Flynn doesn’t have a story prosecutors are willing to barter for or isn’t yet willing to tell it.

So probably Flynn doesn’t have much to say after all. Which gets us back to the clowns in the White House. What were they doing trawling through highly classified reports anyway? Barton Gellman says this is the key unanswered question so far, and it’s related to the allegation that some of the names in the reports had been unmasked, something that happens only if a “customer” asks for it:

If Nunes saw reports that named Trump or his associates, as he said, the initiative for naming names did not come from the originating intelligence agency. That is not how the process works. The names could only have been unmasked if the customers—who seem in this case to have been Trump’s White House appointees—made that request themselves. If anyone breached the president’s privacy, the perpetrators were working down the hall from him. (Okay, probably in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.) It is of course hypocritical, even deceptive, for Nunes to lay that blame at the feet of intelligence officials, but that is not the central concern either.

If events took place as just described, then what exactly were Trump’s appointees doing? I am not talking only about the political chore of ginning up (ostensible) support for the president’s baseless claims about illegal surveillance by President Obama. I mean this: why would a White House lawyer and the top White House intelligence adviser be requesting copies of these surveillance reports in the first place? Why would they go on to ask that the names be unmasked? There is no chance that the FBI would brief them about the substance or progress of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to the Russian government. Were the president’s men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?

That reference at the end to “the president’s men” is no coincidence. This whole thing looks more Watergate-ish by the day. Maybe it’s time to start calling it Russiagate.

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Why Were Three White House Officials Trawling Through Highly Classified Documents?

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Report: Two White House Officials Gave Devin Nunes "Incidental" Surveillance Info

by kellia88103519 Posted on March 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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Two White House officials assisted in providing Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, with the information he used to claim that members of Donald Trump’s transition team were “incidentally” swept up in foreign intelligence collection efforts, the New York Times reports. The paper identified the officials as National Security Council intelligence director Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former aide to Michael Flynn, and Michael Ellis, who worked for Nunes before taking a job in the White House counsel’s office.

The effort to provide Nunes with the incidental collection info led to a bizarre and dramatic series of events last week. After viewing the intelligence reports on the White House grounds, Nunes, whose committee is probing Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, staged a dramatic press conference the next morning and then rushed to the White House to brief the president.

The bombshell report comes as Nunes has refused to disclose the source of the intelligence reports, even to members of his own committee, and mounting calls for him to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, or even step down as the committee’s chair. The controversy has brought the Russia investigation in the House to a halt.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer repeatedly batted away questions regarding the Times report Thursday, claiming he was “not at liberty” to discuss it.

“I never said I would provide you answers,” he said at one point. “I said I would look into it.”

Earlier this month, the president ignited a firestorm of controversy when he accused his predecessor, Barack Obama, of wiretapping him. Trump—under fire for his baseless allegation—claimed that he felt “somewhat” vindicated by the information that Nunes provided him with (even though it in no way backed up his wiretapping claim).

Republican lawmakers, including Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, have called on Nunes to provide additional information about his White House meeting or risk losing the “ability to lead” the ongoing probe.

This is a breaking news post. We will update when more information becomes available.

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Report: Two White House Officials Gave Devin Nunes "Incidental" Surveillance Info

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Who Was Devin Nunes’ Secret White House Source?

by MandyToddmqo Posted on March 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for Devin Nunes to recuse himself from further involvement in the Russia probe. This comes after Nunes’ bizarre unveiling of supposed evidence that the Obama White House really did surveil Trump aides during the transition. Nunes still hasn’t shown his evidence to anyone, and it appears increasingly likely that it doesn’t really show anything at all. Nor will he tell us who he met with on the White House grounds to procure his evidence. Here is Michael Isikoff:

The Schiff statement came as panel staffers speculated on the possible identity of Nunes’ White House source, focusing on Michael Ellis, a lawyer who worked for Nunes on the intelligence panel and who was recently hired to work on national security matters at the White House counsel’s office. A White House official and spokesman for Nunes declined to comment on whether Ellis was involved in providing information to Nunes, as did a spokesman for Schiff. White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted that White House officials were not aware of Nunes’ secret trip to meet his source and referred all questions to Nunes’ office.

Democrats have been furious that Nunes has yet to describe precisely the classified intelligence he has seen. Nor has he shared any documents with others on the House intelligence panel. Nunes, for his part, defended his previously undisclosed trip to the White House grounds, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he had to view the classified documents in an executive branch location because the intelligence community had not yet provided them to Congress.

Michael Ellis is a former editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review and a longtime “promising young conservative.” Sadly, he’s not related to the Ellis side of the Bush family, which would have been great.

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Who Was Devin Nunes’ Secret White House Source?

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Here’s How Badly Police Violence Has Divided America These Past Few Years

by PennyWinter Posted on March 19, 2017

Mother Jones

In Shots Fired, the buzzworthy police drama premiering March 22 on Fox, federal agents investigate a black cop who has gunned down a young, unarmed white man. By the numbers, police actually kill more white people than they kill black people, but they kill black people at a far higher rate. Using population data from the Census Bureau and police shooting data from the Washington Post‘s 2015 database, we calculated that black men between the ages of 18 and 44 were 3.2 times as likely as white men the same age to be killed by a police officer. And while black men make up only about 6 percent of the US population, last year they accounted for one-third of the unarmed people killed by police.

We’ve obviously got some policing issues, but the Trump administration seems inclined to look the other way. Last month, in his first speech as attorney general, Jeff Sessions made clear that his Justice Department will curtail the monitoring of problem-plagued police departments that the Obama administration used as a tactic to combat civil rights violations by police. (Sessions suggested the monitoring had undermined “respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult.”) Lest readers have forgotten just how divisive the racial disparities in law enforcement have been, and continue to be, we put together this brief history of recent police violence and backlash to it.

July 2013
Sickened by the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, labor organizer Alicia Garza writes on Facebook, “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter.” Her friend Patrisse Cullors turns the last bit into a hashtag.

Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA Wire via AP Photo

March 2014
In a Pew poll, 46 percent of Americans agree that “our country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.”
July 2014

Eric Garner is choked to death by an officer on Staten Island, New York. His last words, “I can’t breathe,” become a civil rights slogan.

Bruce Cotler/ Globe Photos/Zuma

Aug. 2014
A white cop in Ferguson, Missouri, kills black teen Michael Brown, sparking weeks of protest. Police deploy riot gear, armored vehicles, and sniper rifles, while demonstrators adopt a “hands up, don’t shoot” posture based on claims that Brown had his hands up when he was shot. On Twitter, #BlackLivesMatter takes off.
Oct. 2014
A Chicago cop shoots Laquan McDonald 16 times. Police officials claim the teen was approaching officers with a knife—a union rep says he “lunged”—but the city won’t release dash-cam footage.
Nov. 22, 2014

Tamir Rice, 12, is killed by a Cleveland officer as he plays with a toy gun in a park.
Nov. 24, 2014
A Ferguson grand jury declines to indict Officer Darren Wilson, Michael Brown‘s killer. More protests. Critics of #BlackLivesMatter respond with #AllLivesMatter.

Darren Wilson St. Louis County Prosecuter’s Office/Reuters

Nov. 30, 2014
Five St. Louis Rams players walk onto the field for a game in the “hands up” position.
Dec. 3, 2014
The NYPD officer who choked Eric Garner escapes indictment. Days later, LeBron James and other NBA players don “I Can’t Breathe” shirts at pregame warmups.

Jonathan Brady/ PA Wire via Zuma Images

Dec. 18, 2014
The White House announces a new task force to “strengthen trust among law enforcement officers and the communities they serve.”
Dec. 20, 2014
Two NYPD officers are ambushed. Their killer, a black man, had posted a photo of his gun on Instagram: “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today.”
Jan. 2015
#BlackLivesMatter tweets average 10,000 a day.

Erik McGregor/Zuma

March 2015
A Department of Justice report says Ferguson police employees sent racist emails and targeted black residents with nuisance citations to generate revenue.
April 2, 2015
A white sheriff’s deputy in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shoots black suspect Eric Harris after a foot chase. “I’m losing my breath,” Harris pleads in a video. “Fuck your breath,” another officer responds.
April 4, 2015

Walter Scott is fatally shot as he attempts to flee from Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Walter Scott in his Coast Guard days Courtesy of the Scott family

April 19, 2015
Freddie Gray dies of his injuries after a “rough ride” in a Baltimore police van.
May 2015
“I have heard your calls for ‘no justice, no peace,'” prosecutor Marilyn Mosby says as she announces charges against six officers in the Gray case. The White House task force releases its report: Police must “embrace a guardian—rather than a warrior—mindset.”

Alex Brandon/AP Photo

June 2015
Rapper Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” video depicts him being shot by police. It garners about 70 million YouTube views and wins two Grammys.

July 2015
BLM activists seize the mic at a Democratic candidate forum to grill Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders on police violence.
Oct. 2015
Rapper Vic Mensa’s video for “16 Shots,” a song about Laquan McDonald, goes viral.

Nov. 19, 2015
A judge orders the release of dash-cam footage that appears to show McDonald walking away from police when he was shot. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fires his police chief the next month.
Nov. 22, 2015
Presidential candidate Donald Trump tweets out a chart of fabricated crime statistics suggesting that black criminals are responsible for the vast majority of homicides against white people. It’s entirely bogus. Here’s Politifact’s summary:

Feb. 7, 2016
Beyoncé’s dancers adopt a Black Panther look for the Super Bowl halftime show. Police unions call for a boycott of the star.

via GIPHY

Feb. 24, 2016
BLM activists disrupt a Hillary Clinton fundraiser, demanding she apologize for her racially charged comments about “super predators” during the 1990s. Clinton appears irritated, but the next day she does just that.
May 2016
The first state “Blue Lives Matter” bill passes in Louisiana. Attacking a cop is now a hate crime.
June 2016
The police-van driver in the Freddie Gray case is acquitted.
July 5, 2016

Alton Sterling is fatally shot by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while officers have him pinned to the ground.
July 6, 2016
During a traffic stop, a Minnesota cop shoots Philando Castile as he reaches for his wallet—that’s according to Castile’s girlfriend, who livestreamed his demise on Facebook: “You told him to get his ID, sir!”

July 7, 2016
A black gunman kills five cops at a Dallas protest against police violence. He holes up in a parking garage, where police kill him with an explosives-bearing robot.
July 12, 2016
President Barack Obama defends Black Lives Matter at a memorial for the slain officers. “We have all seen this bigotry in our lives at some point,” and “none of us is entirely innocent,” he says. “That includes our police departments.”
July 17, 2016
A black military vet who ranted online about the treatment of black people by police assassinates three officers (one of them black) in Baton Rouge.
July 18, 2016
At the Republican National Convention, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who is black, proclaims that “blue lives matter.” In an op-ed the same day, he calls Black Lives Matter the “enemy.”

Mike Segar/Reuters via ZUMA Press

July 18, 2016
A police officer in Florida shoots a black caregiver who was lying in the street with his hands up. A union rep explains that the officer had been aiming at the man’s autistic patient, whose toy truck he mistook for a firearm.
July 27, 2016
After further acquittals in the Freddie Gray case, charges are dropped against the remaining officers.
Aug. 2016
49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick starts sitting out the national anthem to protest police violence. A few pros and countless high school and college athletes follow suit.

Kevin Terrell/AP

Sept. 2016
Clinton debates Trump: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police,” she says. Critics pounce. “Yes, Hillary Clinton called the nation racist,” writes a Washington Times columnist.
Oct. 2016
Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the DOJ will (finally) start collecting national data on police use of force.
Dec. 2016
A jury of 11 whites and one African American deadlocks in the trial of Michael Slager. A retrial is scheduled for late August 2017. A separate federal trial, to determine whether Slager violated Walter Scott’s civil rights, is slated to begin in May 2017.

Mic Smith, File/AP Photo

Feb. 2017
In his first speech as attorney general, Jeff Sessions suggests that the Justice Department, under his watch, will discontinue its practice of monitoring police departments suspected of violating people’s civil rights.
March 2017
A new drama series, Shots Fired, debuts on Fox. “There were a lot of people who never saw Trayvon Martin as a kid,” one of the show’s co-creators tells Mother Jones. “He was painted as the victimizer, and Zimmerman Martin’s killer got donations from all over the country. So in doing a show that deals with police violence, the question was how do we make those people who sent in the donations see this kid as a human being? One of the things we came up with was to make one victim white.”

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Here’s How Badly Police Violence Has Divided America These Past Few Years

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Michael Flynn Has Just Resigned As National Security Adviser

by AgnesCoronado Posted on February 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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Embattled National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has resigned in the face of a mounting scandal related to his communications with the Russian government.

The resignation capped a day of political turmoil for Flynn and the White House. Just hours earlier, all 17 Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform signed a letter demanding a full investigation of Flynn’s alleged discussions of sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the US during the month before President Trump took office.

The White House took contradictory positions on Flynn Monday. Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway first insisted that Flynn enjoyed “the full confidence of the president,” but less than an hour later, Sean Spicer, the press secretary, announced Trump was “evaluating the situation.”

But a bombshell news report on Monday night by the Washington Post appeared to finally set Flynn’s resignation in motion. The Post reported that then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates told the White House in late January that she believed “Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador.” The paper reported that Yates had “warned that Flynn was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail.”

In a resignation letter posted by the White House soon after the news broke, Flynn admitted that he had “inadvertently” provided “incomplete information” to Vice President Mike Pence about the content of his calls to the Russian ambassador.

Flynn’s resignation was accepted late Monday by President Trump who named Lt. General Joseph Keith Kellogg, Jr. as Acting National Security Adviser.

Here’s the full text of Flynn’s resignation, courtesy of the White House:

In the course of my duties as the incoming National Security Advisor, I held numerous phone calls with foreign counterparts, ministers, and ambassadors. These calls were to facilitate a smooth transition and begin to build the necessary relationships between the President, his advisors and foreign leaders. Such calls are standard practice in any transition of this magnitude.

Unfortunately, because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the Vice President Elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian Ambassador. I have sincerely apologized to the President and the Vice President, and they have accepted my apology.

Throughout my over thirty three years of honorable military service, and my tenure as the National Security Advisor, I have always performed my duties with the utmost of integrity and honesty to those I have served, to include the President of the United States.

I am tendering my resignation, honored to have served our nation and the American people in such a distinguished way.

I am also extremely honored to have served President Trump, who in just three weeks, has reoriented American foreign policy in fundamental ways to restore America’s leadership position in the world.

As I step away once again from serving my nation in this current capacity, I wish to thank President Trump for his personal loyalty, the friendship of those who I worked with throughout the hard fought campaign, the challenging period of transition, and during the early days of his presidency.

I know with the strong leadership of President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and the superb team they are assembling, this team will go down in history as one of the greatest presidencies in U.S. history, and I firmly believe the American people will be well served as they all work together to help Make America Great Again.

Michael T. Flynn, LTG (Ret) Assistant to the President / National Security Advisor

This is a developing story. We’ll update as more news comes in.

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Michael Flynn Has Just Resigned As National Security Adviser

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The Dead Pool – 10 February 2017

by MargaretaDycus7 Posted on February 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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As if National Security Advisor Michael Flynn doesn’t already have enough bad news on his plate, today he got some more:

On Friday, one of Flynn’s closest deputies on the National Security Council, senior director for Africa Robin Townley, was informed that the Central Intelligence Agency had rejected his request for an elite security clearance required for service on the NSC, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

That forced Townley, a former Marine intelligence officer who had long maintained a top secret-level security clearance, out of his NSC post, explained the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters. One of the sources said that the rejection was approved by Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo and that it infuriated Flynn and his allies.

Flynn has been sharply critical of the CIA, and apparently he’s regarded by some in the White House as waging “a jihad against the intelligence community.” So was this a little chin music by the CIA to warn Flynn to back off? Or was there really some kind of problem with Townley? Maybe someday we’ll find out.

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The Dead Pool – 10 February 2017

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Melania Trump’s Own Immigration Lawyer Condemns Refugee Ban

by Allison05T Posted on January 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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First Lady Melania Trump’s own immigration attorney, who has also represented the Trump Organization in numerous immigration cases, condemned President Donald Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” on Saturday afternoon, during an interview on MSNBC.

“How can we turn our backs on these individuals?” New York lawyer Michael Wildes said, adding that he thought the legal disputes over the executive order would eventually be taken up by the Supreme Court. “I think it is going to get worse before it gets better.”

“This is not the way you deal with people’s lives,” he said.

Wildes has previously represented Trump Models, President Trump’s New York modeling agency, and secured visas for models appearing in Trump’s Miss Universe pageants.

Last September, Melania Trump attempted to clear up questions surrounding her own immigration to the US, when she released a signed letter from Wildes flatly denying allegations that she had worked illegally in the US before receiving a proper work visa. But new documents uncovered by the AP less than two months later—including financial ledgers and contracts—contradicted the public account given by Trump and Wildes, revealing the Slovenia-born model had in fact received paid New York modeling assignments in the seven weeks before she received her work visa.

Wildes, a Democrat, voted for Hillary Clinton, according to an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell:

It’s not the first time Wildes has spoken out about Trump’s actions on immigration as president. “This is scary stuff for America’s legacy of immigration, for business and for our hospitality,” Wildes told ABC News this week.

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Melania Trump’s Own Immigration Lawyer Condemns Refugee Ban

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Seth Meyers devoted a full nine minutes to Trump and climate change.

by LynetteNettleto Posted on December 22, 2016

Penn State’s Michael Mann will be permitted to proceed with a lawsuit against writers from the conservative National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute after an appeals court ruling in his favor Thursday.

Mann, the scientist behind the “hockey stick” graph, has been a frequent target of climate change deniers’ harassment.

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Rand Simberg in a 2012 Competitive Enterprise Institute blog post, “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in service of politicized science that could have dire consequences for the nation and planet.”

The National Review’s Mark Steyn quoted these comments in a post of his own, writing that Simberg “has a point” and calling Mann’s work “fraudulent.”

Mann accused the two writers of libel, and now a three-judge panel for the D.C. Court of Appeals has ruled that he may proceed with his defamation suit against the authors and their institutions.

“Tarnishing the personal integrity and reputation of a scientist important to one side may be a tactic to gain advantage in a no-holds-barred debate over global warming,” wrote Judge Vanessa Ruiz in the court’s decision. Now it could be a costly one.

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Seth Meyers devoted a full nine minutes to Trump and climate change.

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Republicans Need to Step Up and get Gen. Michael Flynn Out of the White House

by ChristeHeron Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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You’ve probably heard that a gunman entered the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC yesterday and started shooting. He didn’t hit anyone, though, and it’s not clear if he was even trying. So why was he there? He says he was trying to “self investigate” an allegation that Bill and Hillary Clinton ran a pedophilia ring out of the restaurant.

No, this is not me being smug and elitist again this morning. This is an honest-to-goodness conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, and it’s been making the rounds for a while. Why? Because the owner of Comet Ping Pong is both gay and a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party. And that’s not all!

It’s known, for instance that Bill Clinton and Donald Trump flew on the private plane of convicted child abuser Jeffery Epstein. Tony Podesta, the brother of the Clinton aide whose emails were hacked, was a friend of Dennis Hastert, a Republican politician who earlier this year was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and has admitted abusing boys. The Jimmy Savile scandal in the UK has featured in speculation as an example of a serial child abuser getting away with his crimes.

So far this has no connection to Donald Trump, and perhaps you’re thinking that’s another silver lining, aside from the fact that no one was hurt in the attack. But I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with only one silver lining today. You see, Gen. Michael Flynn, who will soon be Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, tweeted this a few days before the election:

And that’s not all. Here is Michael Flynn Jr., who is not just Flynn’s son. He is also Flynn’s chief of staff and closest aide. Here he is yesterday, after the shooting:

There’s much more in Flynn Jr’s Twitter feed following this, all pointing in the same direction: he is a complete crackpot. And he is one of the closest confidantes of his father, who is also a crackpot. And Flynn Sr. is the top national security aide to Donald Trump, who is well known to have a weakness for conspiracy theories already.

Obviously Democrats have no influence over Donald Trump’s White House. But presumably Republicans do. They need to figure out a way to get Flynn booted from the NSA position and as far away from Trump as possible. This isn’t an amusing joke, and it’s not just politics anymore. It’s a serious national security weakness.

UPDATE: It’s hard to keep up these days. In the tweet at the top of this post, Flynn Sr. isn’t referring to Pizzagate. He’s referring to a different pedophilia allegation involving Hillary Clinton. According to Truepundit.com, it linked “Clinton herself” and her “associates” to money laundering, child exploitation, sex crimes with children, perjury, obstruction of justice, and “other felony crimes.”

I even wrote about it back when it happened. It’s been a busy two weeks since then. Sigh.

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Republicans Need to Step Up and get Gen. Michael Flynn Out of the White House

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