Friday, February 21, 2020

JUDGE AMY BERMAN SAYS TRUMP IS NOTHING BUT AN ORANGE BABOON WHO HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED FOR HIS LIFELONG WHITE COLLAR CRIMES

Obama judge gives Roger Stone 40 month sentence – and rants against Trump


Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, handed down Roger Stone’s sentence today: 40 months. That's 40 months longer than anything done to James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Hillary Clinton, James Clapper, or the other Deep State actors, but it’s significantly less than the 7-9 years that Mueller’s rabid crew sought for him. To offset the more lenient sentence, Jackson went on an anti-Trump rant.
Roger Stone is not an appealing character, but even unappealing characters can get railroaded. The broad outlines of what happened are that James Comey inveigled Trump into pointing Robert Mueller as an “independent prosecutor” charged with investigating whether Trump conspired with Russia to win the election; that Mueller and his attack dogs knew within days of beginning the investigation that the foundational accusations were lies; that the Mueller team nevertheless dragged the investigation out for 2 years and $35 million, all the while trying to find something against Trump; and that, along the way, the Mueller team set out to ruin anyone close to Trump, tangling them up with process crimes and threats of personal destruction.
Roger Stone was one of those caught in the tainted Mueller net. He told lies that are the normal currency in Washington, D.C. People such as Comey, Clinton (both Clintons, actually), McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, and others told similar lies but nevertheless were able to walk away with TV gigs and book deals. He also fulminated at another witness, issuing threats and asking him to lie, demands and threats so impotent that the witness considered them laughable.
When the FBI arrested Stone, instead of talking to Stone’s lawyer to arrange for him to turn himself in, the FBI did a pre-dawn SWAT raid, with the CNN camera conveniently located nearby. Then, Mueller’s attorneys put Stone in front of Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee.
Interestingly enough, before Trump’s presidency, Berman was a slightly left-leaning, but otherwise reasonably even-handed judge. Sure, she ruled that the Roman Catholic Diocese of Washington had to provide contraceptives under Obamacare, but she also ruled against the National Labor Relations Board, the Obama-era EPA, and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., who got a 30-month sentence, in his case for misusing campaign funds.
When Trump came into office, though, Jackson became a resistance judge. She dismissed a wrongful death complaint against Hillary brought by parents of two of the men who died in Benghazi. She placed Paul Manafort in solitary confinement, muzzled Manafort’s and Rick Gates’ attorneys, and allowed special counsel to walk away from a plea deal. She’s been equally draconian with Roger Stone, placing gag orders on him and his attorneys and insisting on sentencing him before conducting a hearing about the jury foreperson who lied about the fact that she was a rabid Trump and Stone hater.
It should be no surprise, then, that Jackson used the sentencing hearing to go off on a rant about Trump:
[S]he turned his sentencing hearing into a stunning rebuke not just of Stone but of the president himself, saying the prosecution was not brought by 'political enemies,' and that there was no 'anti-Trump cabal' at the hear of the case.
'He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the president, he was prosecuted for covering up for the president,' she said.
'There was nothing unfair, phony or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution.'
Democrats, of course, pointed to Trump’s earlier tweets against Jackson to justify her partisan attack:


What both Jackson and the Democrats fail to understand is that Trump is a political figure who does not need to appear impartial. Jackson, however, is a judge, and the entire basis of trust in the judicial system is the belief that judges are impartial. Jackson exploded that myth.
Trump-the-politician, meanwhile, gets the final word as to this political witch hunt:

“They say Roger Stone lied to Congress.” @CNN OH, I see, but so did Comey (and he also leaked classified information, for which almost everyone, other than Crooked Hillary Clinton, goes to jail for a long time), and so did Andy McCabe, who also lied to the FBI! FAIRNESS?





A VERY STABLE GENIUS


“This taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump’s shambolic tenure in office to date.” - Dwight Garner, The New York Times

THE BOOK

Washington Post national investigative reporter Carol Leonnig and White House bureau chief Philip Rucker, both Pulitzer Prize winners, provide the definitive insider narrative of Donald Trump’s unique presidency with shocking new reporting and insight into its implications.
“I alone can fix it.” So went Donald J. Trump’s march to the presidency on July 21, 2016, when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, promising to restore what he described as a fallen nation. Yet over the subsequent years, as he has undertaken the actual work of the commander in chief, it has been hard to see beyond the daily chaos of scandal, investigation, and constant bluster. It would be all too easy to mistake Trump’s first term for one of pure and uninhibited chaos, but there were patterns to his behavior and that of his associates. The universal value of the Trump administration is loyalty - not to the country, but to the president himself - and Trump’s North Star has been the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky and mistrustful democracy.
Leonnig and Rucker, with deep and unmatched sources throughout Washington, D.C., tell of rages and frenzies but also moments of courage and perseverance. Relying on scores of exclusive new interviews with some of the most senior members of the Trump administration and other firsthand witnesses, the authors reveal the forty-fifth president up close, taking readers inside Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as well as the president’s own haphazard but ultimately successful legal defense. Here for the first time certain officials who have felt honor-bound not to publicly criticize a sitting president or to divulge what they witnessed in a position of trust tell the truth for the benefit of history.
This peerless and gripping narrative reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished and exposes how decision making in his administration has been driven by a reflexive logic of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement - but a logic nonetheless. This is the story of how an unparalleled president has scrambled to survive and tested the strength of America’s democracy and its common heart as a nation.

The Lessons of Theodore Roosevelt

To get out of our Second Gilded Age, look no further than how we got out of the first one.


September 6, 2019
We’ve been rocked by scandals over the past year involving the nation’s most wealthy and powerful. We’ve learned that a twisted multimillionaire allegedly procured and raped girls in his Manhattan mansion and on his private Caribbean Island; entitled celebrities and corporate plutocrats paid millions of dollars in bribes to get their kids into elite universities; pillars of the Hollywood and media establishments have used their stature to sexually prey upon underlings; and, yes, our president was caught lying about possibly violating campaign finance laws with hush money payoffs to a porn star and Playboy bunny.
This moral corruption is accompanied by the regressive government policies of a scandal-stained administration. President Donald Trump is rolling back programs that protect consumers, voting rights, the environment, and competitive commerce faster than Congress can issue subpoenas. His cabinet includes 17 millionaires, two centimillionaires, and one billionaire with a combined worth of $3.2 billion, according to Forbes. He presides over the most corrupt administration in American history, one marked by nepotism and self-dealing. His so-called “A Team” of senior officials has undergone a record 75 percent turnover since he took office—most of whom resigned under pressure, often caught up in scandal.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose net worth is estimated at $600 million, reflected the arrogance and empathy deficit that typifies the Trump White House during last winter’s record-long government shutdown. He suggested that federal workers just take out loans until they got paid.
But nobody tops the swamp king, Trump himself. Forget the sleaze, forget the obstruction of justice, forget the constant dissing of Congress. His defying the Constitution’s emoluments clause alone would, in a normally functioning American democracy, make him the subject of impeachment. Instead, he flouts the rules as if they don’t apply to him. If he gets his way and hosts next year’s G-7 summit at Mar-a-Lago, we may as well send the Constitution to the shredder. And yet, as more recent controversies have shown us, including the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal and Jeffery Epstein’s sex trafficking racket, this kind of indifference to moral values is not confined to government grandees.
So, what gives? Is America drowning in a marsh of unchecked corruption and entitlement brought on by latter-day Louis XVI’s and Marie Antoinettes? Are the uber-wealthy out of control? There’s something rotten in America and, if we don’t fix it soon, we invite a new wave of national decline and social disintegration.
The good news is that we have faced similar challenges before. Some prescriptions from a previous era may provide a lodestar for a future Democratic president to steer the country in the right direction. As Mark Twain, who coined the term “the Gilded Age,” once said, “The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many poor.” He was talking about the original Gilded Age, but that diagnosis could just as easily apply to our current American condition.
The first Gilded Age was marked by rapid economic growth, massive immigration, political corruption, and a high concentration of wealth in which the richest one percent owned 51 percent of property, while the bottom 44 percent had a mere one percent. The oligarchs at the top were popularly known as “robber barons.”
Theodore Roosevelt, who was president at the time, understood that economic inequality itself becomes a driver of a dysfunctional political system that benefits the wealthy but few others. As he once famously warned, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.”
His response to the inequities of his times, which came to define the Progressive Era, have much to teach us now about how to sensibly tackle economic inequality. It’s worthwhile to closely examine the Rooseveltian playbook. For instance, his “Square Deal” made bold changes in the American workplace, government regulation of industry, and consumer protection. These reforms included mandating safer conditions for miners and eliminating the spoils system in federal hiring; bringing forty-four antitrust suits against big business, resulting in the breakup of the largest railroad monopoly, and regulation of the nation’s largest oil company; and passing the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the FDA. He prosecuted more than twice as many antitrust suits against monopolistic businesses than his three predecessors combined, curbing the robber barons’ power. And he relentlessly cleaned up corruption in the federal government. One-hundred-forty-six indictments were brought against a bribery ring involving public timberlands, culminating in the conviction and imprisonment of a U.S. senator, and forty-four Postal Department employees were charged with fraud and bribery.
Now, we are in a Second Gilded Age, facing many of the same problems, and, in some ways, to an even greater degree. The gap between the rich and everyone else is even greater than it was during the late 19th Century, when the richest two percent of Americans owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth. Today, the top one percent owns almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, or more than the bottom 90 percent combined, according to the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. The first Gilded Age saw the rise of hyper-rich dynastic families, such as the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and DuPonts. Today, three individuals—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. And three families—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars—have enjoyed a nearly 6,000 percent rise in wealth since Ronald Reagan took the oath as president, while median U.S. household wealth over the same period has declined by three percent.
The consequences of this wealth gap are dire. Steve Brill explains in his book Tailspin that, by manipulating the tax and legal systems to their benefit, America’s most educated elite, the so-called meritocracy, have built a moat that excludes the working poor, limiting their upward mobility and increasing their sense of alienation, which then gives rise to the populist streak that allowed politicians like Trump to captivate enough of the American electorate.
Similarly, psychologist Dacher Keltner’s research shows that power in and of itself is a corrupting force. As he documents in The Power Paradox, powerful people lie more, drive more aggressively, are more likely to cheat on their spouses, act abusively toward subordinates, and even take candy from children. Too often, they simply do not respect the rules.
For example, in monitoring an urban traffic intersection, Keltner found that drivers of the least expensive vehicles virtually always yielded to pedestrians, whereas drivers of luxury cars yielded only about half of the time. He cites surveys covering 27 countries that show that rich people are more likely to admit that it’s acceptable to engage in unethical behavior, such as accepting bribes or cheating on taxes.“The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially appropriate behavior,” says Keltner.
That’s why we need to reform our political system if we are to survive the rampant amorality and lawlessness of the Second Gilded Age. Simply put, so very few should not wield so much sway over so many.
One of the first priorities of an incoming administration should be to narrow the wealth and income gap. French economist Thomas Picketty favors a progressive annual wealth tax of up to two percent, along with a progressive income tax as high as 80 percent on the biggest earners to reduce inequality and avoid reverting to “patrimonial capitalism” in which inherited wealth controls much of the economy and could lead essentially to oligarchy.
The leading 2020 Democratic candidates favor raising taxes, as well. Elizabeth Warren has proposed something commensurate to Picketty’s two percent wealth tax for those worth more than $50 million, and a three percent annual tax on individuals with a net worth higher than $1 billion. She has also proposed closing corporate tax loopholes. Joe Biden wants to restore the top individual income tax rate to a pre-Trump 39.6 percent and raise capital gains taxes. Bernie Sanders has proposed an estate tax on the wealth of the top 0.2 percent of Americans.
Following Theodore Roosevelt’s example, we need to aggressively root out the tangle of corruption brought on by Trump and his minions. This has already begun with multiple and expanding investigations led by House Democrats into the metastasizing malfeasance within the Trump administration. Trump’s successor, however, should work with Congress to appoint a bipartisan anti-corruption task force to oversee prosecutions and draw up reform legislation to prevent future abuses.
“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy,” Roosevelt once warned. The free market has made America the great success it is today. But history has shown that unconstrained capitalism and a growing wealth gap leads to an unhealthy concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. When the gap between the haves and the have-nots goes unchecked, populism takes hold, leading to the election of dangerous demagogues like Trump, and the disastrous politics they bring with them. It is not too late to reverse course. But first, we need to re-learn the lessons from our first Gilded Age if we are going to get out of the current one.

 

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com

 

#1 New York Times Bestseller!
Peter Schweizer has been fighting corruption―and winning―for years. In Throw Them All Out, he exposed insider trading by members of Congress, leading to the passage of the STOCK Act. In Extortion, he uncovered how politicians use mafia-like tactics to enrich themselves. And in Clinton Cash, he revealed the Clintons’ massive money machine and sparked an FBI investigation.
Now he explains how a new corruption has taken hold, involving larger sums of money than ever before. Stuffing tens of thousands of dollars into a freezer has morphed into multibillion-dollar equity deals done in the dark corners of the world.
An American bank opening in China would be prohibited by US law from hiring a slew of family members of top Chinese politicians. However, a Chinese bank opening in America can hire anyone it wants. It can even invite the friends and families of American politicians to invest in can’t-lose deals.
President Donald Trump’s children have made front pages across the world for their dicey transactions. However, the media has barely looked into questionable deals made by those close to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Mitch McConnell, and lesser-known politicians who have been in the game longer.
In many parts of the world, the children of powerful political figures go into business and profit handsomely, not necessarily because they are good at it, but because people want to curry favor with their influential parents. This is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. But for relatives of some prominent political families, we may already be talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
Deeply researched and packed with shocking revelations, Secret Empires identifies public servants who cannot be trusted and provides a path toward a more accountable government.


Coulter: All Hail President Javanka!



ANN COULTER
 10 Apr 2019111
2:52

While other reporters waste their time examining Donald Trump’s public statements, interviewing his high school classmates and poring over legal filings, investigative reporter Vicky Ward has produced the definitive book on our current president.

For example, did you know our president got breast implants in high school (Ivanka claimed she was just “curvy”), bought his way into Harvard (Jared is even dumber than you thought), and together have no books in their New York apartment? (Some dispute that there are no books, citing “a few art books” or “decorator-curated books.”)

Ward’s recently released blockbuster, 
Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, tells you all this and more about our actual commander in chief: President Javanka.

On the bright side, Jared has stopped rolling his eyes so much about his father-in-law now that Trump is president, er, “president.” Until Trump’s nomination was a virtual lock, Jared was back in New York pretending not to be related to him.

Only after Trump had racked up a slew of primary wins did a lightbulb go on in Jared’s head: Hey! This presidential campaign could be great for business! According to a close associate, Jared viewed the campaign as a terrific “networking opportunity.”

In short order, Jared moved himself in, and moved campaign manager Corey Lewandowski out.

Trump’s loyal campaign manager had been with him through the “Mexican rapists” speech, Macy’s dumping Trump’s ties, the “McCain isn’t a war hero” controversy, the Muslim ban, the “hand size” embarrassment, and on and on and on. But when all was said and done and Trump was still cruising to victory, Jared and Ivanka walked in and delivered an ultimatum to Trump: “It’s Corey or us.” 

Jared would later shyly cop to being “[The Man Who] Won Trump the White House,” as a Forbes magazine cover story put it. 

And who understood the beating heart of the Trump voter like Jared and Ivanka? With Javanka in charge, the campaign schedule was soon bristling with such items as “women’s empowerment week,” “education week” and “entrepreneur week.” 

In no time, Trump was 16 points down and sinking fast. Steve Bannon was brought in, whereupon he promptly threw out all the Working Women’s Intersectional Global Warming weeks and got back to Trump’s issues. 

Jared assured Bannon that the campaign had $25 million on hand. That’s when Bannon had to explain “debits” to Kushner. The campaign had $25 million — provided you didn’t count all the unpaid expenses. When those were included, it turned out the campaign was in debt. 

As the SAT board had discovered, math wasn’t Jared’s strong suit. 

Although it has been well reported that Jared’s Harvard admission was purchased for him by his father, Ward produces a shocking new detail. Of the five tracks at Jared’s high school, he wasn’t at the bottom of track one, perhaps suitable for a lesser Ivy League with solid SAT scores. He wasn’t even in track two. Jared was in track three. But now he has co-opted the Make America Great Again movement for his own personal advancement. I guess that makes him smarter than Trump. 

Apart from staging photo-ops, including her “princess moment” at the inaugural ball (her words), Ivanka’s first order of business upon winning the presidency was assigning White House office space. Her map showed a big office for her, a big office for Jared — and also a nice corner office, which was designated “Trump family office.” 

Transition officials, Ward reports, “were surprised that the first lady did not appear to have an office. So, too, was Melania Trump, who quickly put an end to Ivanka’s scheming.” 

Jared’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ), refer to Jared as “the clown prince.” Bone-cutter MBS assured those around him that he had Jared “in my pocket.” 

MBS and MBZ derided Jared’s Middle East peace plan as infantile, while using him to achieve their objective: war with Qatar. According to an American businessman’s leaked emails, their attitude was, “Nobody would even waste a cup of coffee on him if it wasn’t for who he is married to.” 

As one former top White House official explained: “Jared never understands the details of anything. He’s just impressed by names.” 

Following meetings at the White House and also with the Kushners over their 666 Fifth Avenue property, former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim reported back to the emir that “the people atop the new administration were heavily motivated by personal financial interest.” 

After Ivanka’s speech introducing her father at the Republican National Convention — rivaled only by Billy Carter’s introduction of his brother, Jimmy! — she tweeted from her personal account: “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech.” 

After the Trump family was interviewed on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Ivanka’s company emailed out a “style alert” advertising the $10,800 diamond bracelet she’d worn on the show — “available from Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry.” 

Ivanka has managed to win a slew of trademarks in China since her father became the Figurehead President, with several approvals being fast-tracked at about the same time Trump was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago. 

Instead of “Make America Great Again,” the motto of the Trump presidency is, as one of Trump’s legal spokesmen put it: “The advance team for Jared and Ivanka.” 

This is not what anyone voted for. 

One cautionary example is President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose ticket into Harvard, according to the 2006 book The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, was his father’s $2.5 million dollar gift to the university. Jared got his Harvard degree, but he has been the butt of social-media taunts precisely because his daddy had to pay a fortune to get the school to admit him. The cost of a brag-worthy degree? Millions. The cost of the right- and left-brain stuff? Priceless.




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