Tag Archives: Trump corruption

Reuters reports: President Donald Trump on Sunday denied that he was briefed on reported Russian bounties placed on U.S. troops in Afghanistan and asked “fake news” The New York Times to identify its source. Taking to Twitter, the president stressed that no one in his administration had ever received such reports. The story, released by The New York Times on …

The New York Times reports: Shortly after he became attorney general last year, William P. Barr set out to challenge a signature criminal case that touched President Trump’s inner circle directly, and even the president’s own actions: the prosecution of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime fixer. Mr. Barr spent weeks in the spring of 2019 questioning the prosecutors over …

From the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal: Lately he has all but given up even talking about the pandemic when he might offer realism and hope about the road ahead even as the country reopens. His default now is defensive self-congratulation. The country also wants firm but empathetic leadership after the death of George Floyd, but Mr. Trump …

Talking Points Memo reports: U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson pushed back Roger Stone’s surrender date until July 14. Stone had a requested a delay until August 30. Jackson’s order Friday was accompanied by an opinion giving her reasons for only partially granting the delay request that is still under seal, but the judge indicated she would like to make …

The New York Post reports: “People don’t have a job, people don’t know where to go, they don’t know what to do,” the former vice president said in Lancaster on Thursday, Fox News reported. “Now we have over 120 million dead from COVID.” In reality, the death toll from the illness in the US stood at about 122,000, according to …

NBC News reports: Attorney General William Barr on Thursday raised concerns that expanding mail-in voting could lead to widespread fraud — but admitted he had no evidence to support his claims. In an interview with NPR, Barr was asked if he believes an election conducted mainly by mail can be secure. “Personally, no. I mean, we just mailed out checks …

Bloomberg News reports: The Senate Judiciary Committee blocked an effort by Chairman Lindsey Graham to give the attorney general the power to veto investigations of Justice Department lawyers by the inspector general. The committee instead backed — over the objections of Graham and Attorney General William Barr — a bipartisan bill by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah that would …

The Daily Beast reports: A New York judge has tossed an application by President Donald Trump’s brother to try and halt the publication of his niece’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Queens County Surrogate Court Judge Peter Kelly cited “several improprieties” in Robert Trump’s filing that rendered it “fatally defective”—including …

The Daily Beast reports: Attorney General William Barr has agreed to attend a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on July 28, Department of Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupec said Wednesday. The announcement comes as the Judiciary Committee convened for another Department of Justice oversight hearing and just days after the complicated firing of Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern …

The Insider reports: The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday held an oversight hearing focusing on Attorney General William Barr’s decisions as head of the Justice Department. As part of the proceedings, the committee heard testimony from two DOJ officials: Aaron Zelinsky, a federal prosecutor at the US attorney’s office in Baltimore, and John Elias, a senior official in the department’s …

Bloomberg News reports: A federal appeals court ordered a judge to immediately dismiss the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, Bloomberg News reports. A three-judge appellate panel on Wednesday denied U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan the authority to examine whether the government’s surprise motion to dismiss the case, in which Flynn pleaded guilty twice …

Reuters reports: American approval of President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has dropped to the lowest level on record, the latest Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll shows, as new COVID-19 cases surged and Trump was widely criticized for suggesting he wanted to slow down testing. The poll shows that 37% of Americans approved of the way Trump has responded to …

Politico reports: Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone is asking a federal court for a delay of more than two months in the 40-month prison sentence he is to begin serving next week after being convicted last year of seeking to stymie a congressional investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election. In a series of hyperbolic Instagram postings over …

“In the many cases I have been privileged to work on in my career, I have never seen political influence play any role in prosecutorial decision making. With one exception: United States v. Roger Stone. “What I saw was the Department of Justice exerting significant pressure on the line prosecutors in the case to obscure the correct sentencing guidelines calculation …

The Washington Post reports: Trump had taken a cognitive screening test as part of his 2018 physical, and now, more than two years later, he brought up the 10-minute exam. He waxed on about how he’d dazzled the proctors with his stellar performance, according to two people familiar with his comments. He walked the room of about two dozen White …

USA Today reports: Dr. Anthony Fauci told House lawmakers on Tuesday that despite President Donald Trump’s claim that he had asked officials to “slow the testing down,” he had never been given such a directive. “To my knowledge, none of us have ever been told to slow down on testing. That just is a fact,” he said. “In fact, we …

Just in this morning from the Lincoln Project: During Trump’s poorly-attended rally in Tulsa, Trump admitted what Americans across the country feared: that he commanded public health experts to impede COVID-19 testing for personal, political advantage. As it stands, 122,000 American lives have been lost and the virus is surging in many of the states President Trump coerced into hasty …

FactCheck.org reports: Contrary to President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that he inherited a Strategic National Stockpile with “empty” or “bare” cupboards, the federal government had more ventilators in stock than it ended up distributing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, FactCheck.org has learned. The SNS had 16,660 ventilators “immediately available for use” when the federal government began deploying the breathing machines to …

The Associated Press reports: President Donald Trump slammed his former National Security Adviser John Bolton again on Tuesday in the continued fallout over Bolton’s White House memoir. In a tweet, the president described Bolton as a “washed-up creepster” and a “lowlife,” while stating the ex-administration official should be in prison. Titled The Room Where It Happened, Bolton’s book portrays Trump …

The Hill reports: President Trump on Monday refused to say whether he told staff to slow down COVID-19 testing to make it look like the U.S. had fewer cases, but argued that the country has done “too good a job” on testing. “If we did slow it down, we wouldn’t show nearly as many cases,” Trump said in an interview …