Thread: President Donald Trump

Trump is awesome !!!

and making sense, it's the stupid deep state bureaucrats that still don't get it

this is the new world, get on with the program, or get out

how was your week?

i'm going to guess it was better than michael cohen's.

Tuesday, May 8:

• Stormy Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, announces on Twitter that Michael Cohen received money from New York private equity firm Columbus Nova. He later posts a longer report detailing payments to Cohen from other firms including AT&T and Novartis.
• Late Tuesday, AT&T confirms that it paid Cohen's firm — Essential Consultants, the same shell company that orchestrated the Stormy Daniels settlement — for "insights into understanding the new administration." The payments totaled to $600,000.

Wednesday, May 9:

• Novartis admits to paying Cohen $1.2 million for advice about the Trump administration’s health policy agenda. However, executives figured out after just one meeting that Cohen “would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated,” the company says in a statement.
  
  • The pharmaceutical giant's payment to Cohen was excessive by D.C. standards. STAT reports that there "weren’t any contracts under which an individual company paid a single lobbying firm [as much as] $1.2 million in 2017."
  
  
• Special Counsel Bob Mueller's investigative team contacted AT&T in late 2017 about the Cohen payment, a company spokesperson says. AT&T says it cooperated fully with the investigation.
• Columbus Nova, a private equity firm whose primary investor is Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — one of the Russians sanctioned by the Treasury Department — acknowledges that it paid Cohen $500,000.

Thursday, May 10:

• The Washington Post reportsthat AT&T's payment to Cohen was to advise on their proposed $85 billion merger with Time Warner, which the Justice Department filed a suit to block in November.

Friday, May 11:

• AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson tells employees in a memo that hiring Cohen was a mistake. “To be clear, everything we did was done according to the law and entirely legitimate. But the fact is our past association with Cohen was a serious misjudgment," he writes.
• Cohen reached out to Ford Motor Companyas well, reports the Wall Street Journal. He offered consulting services, touting access to Trump, and Ford swiftly rejected the offer. Mueller has approached Ford for records of the company's conversations with Cohen, per the Journal.
• Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani tells HuffPost that Trump wasn't aware of Cohen's consulting gigs, adding that the president himself had a role in the decision to sue to block the AT&T–Time Warner merger.

https://www.axios.com/michael-cohen-...e9fc094b9.html

This is odd on so many levels.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...any-zte-us-ban

i dunno.............




maybe a new trump plaza going up in Shang Hai soon

saw that, completely lost it, that should work well with his constituents

Making the PRC Great Again...Go China Go China

I wonder how all the Americans working in companies and businesses that will be affected by the sanctions feel about this.
I wonder If they'll get some kind of special exemption like the Chinese company.

looks like putin sent xi a copy of that piss tape.

Originally Posted by raycarey

looks like putin sent xi a copy of that piss tape.

every world leaders has a copy of it

wonder what merkel does while she's watching her copy of it

Originally Posted by uncle junior

wonder what merkel does while she's watching her copy of it

Pisses herself?

Originally Posted by uncle junior

wonder what merkel does while she's watching her copy of it

heuu, disgusting

I thought one of the main reasons of the ZTE ban was that the Chinese had written a back door into the code to allow eavesdropping. Trump is clueless.

maybe he has a deal with the Chinese to spy on his Pentagon/NSA team, which obviously don't tell him everything

DER SPIEGEL: General Hayden, in January, U.S. intelligence reached the conclusion that Iran was more or less complying with the Iran deal ...

Hayden: ... not more or less. They were complying. (Director of National Intelligence) Dan Coats said: Iran is further away from a weapon than without this deal, and we know more about the Iranian nuclear program with this deal than we would without it.

DER SPIEGEL: So why did Trump decide to pull out of it, despite the advice of his intelligence agencies?

Hayden: Because he doesn't make decisions based upon objective reality. He has this kind of a priori, assumed narrative of the way the world works, and he has almost a natural self-confidence in it. Almost all American presidents have said: "On balance, the more free trade there is, the better it is for America. On balance, immigration is a net positive for the United States of America. On balance, America is strengthened by having mature, strong allies." And we now have a president who is opposed to free trade, who views immigrants as a threat and who views allies as a burden. And that's turning the America of the last 75 years on its head. The single most powerful predictor of where the president comes down on any given issue is where Barack Obama was. He does the exact opposite of what Obama did. You've got the Affordable Care Act, the Paris Climate Accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Syria, and now the Iran deal.

DER SPIEGEL: What do you think are the broader ramifications of the U.S. abandoning the deal?

Hayden: The first line of confrontation is not with the Iranians, but with our European friends. They have a legitimate right to get an answer to the questions, "Do our views matter? Do the Americans take our views into consideration? In addition to whatever it may or may not do in the Persian Gulf, it will alienate our best friends in the world, and we'll end up with a trans-Atlantic argument.

DER SPIEGEL: Trump often criticizes the U.S. intelligence community. He feels he is under surveillance. Do the agencies have as much power as they used to?

Hayden: The president views relationships through the lens of loyalty to him. This is troubling because our ethos inside government is the rule of law. Not loyalty to the man but loyalty to the constitution. What, then, do the fact-bearers do when the president's willingness to accept your facts is governed more by your relationship to him than it is by the evidentiary stack you have behind the facts? You have to keep trying regardless. You keep addressing the issue.

DER SPIEGEL: French President Emmanuel Macron came to Washington to try to convince Trump to remain in the Iran deal, as did German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. What does it mean that such efforts were unsuccessful?

Hayden: Again, he's basing his decision-making on something other than what you and I would be accustomed to from a president, a chancellor or prime minister. And as we go further into the administration, he seems to be surrounding himself with fewer naysayers and more people who seem to think and sound more like he does.

DER SPIEGEL: Would you put National Security Advisor John Bolton in the latter category?

Hayden: Bolton is a very smart man. He knows a lot, he's a pretty good bureaucratic infighter. But his job is about process. John has very strong views, he knows how things work. I think he is going to have to struggle with himself to be the process guy, when his instincts are to be the answer guy.

DER SPIEGEL: His answer often seems to be war. Are you concerned?

Hayden: I'll allow myself to say he's more willing to be confrontational.

DER SPIEGEL: What does that mean for U.S. foreign policy?

Hayden: We're a big country with a fairly healthy, robust society. American diplomacy, understood over the long term, is relational, not transactional. And the president now just bent Britain, France, and Germany to America's will, and he's going to celebrate this as a "victory" -- in air quotes. He'll view that as a transactional success. But relationally, it's a disaster, and the problem is that the costs of this "victory" are long term and hard to measure, but they're real costs.

DER SPIEGEL: The reputation of intelligence agencies has suffered tremendously in the last several years, partly due to the many scandals: the CIA torture program after 9/11, the justification for the Iraq War, mass surveillance as unveiled by Edward Snowden. Isn't Trump partly right in criticizing the agencies?

Hayden: I don't have to accept all of your premises to answer your question. But American intelligence is a human enterprise, sometimes you have a good day, sometimes you don't. Full disclosure, I'm in the room voting for the Iraq national intelligence estimate. I've got fingerprints on renditions, detentions, interrogations, targeted killings and electronic surveillance. You can probably tell from my tone, I'm cool with that. What I did was effective, lawful and appropriate.

DER SPIEGEL: But isn't that the major problem for U.S. agencies: that they either got it wrong in crucial situations or pushed the envelope too hard?

Hayden: We have always rested uneasily inside American democracy. I was fond of saying as director of NSA, I only need to be two things to be successful -- powerful and secretive. On balance, American intelligence is actually a pretty good enterprise. We've never been used by a president as a political tool, which not all agencies around the world are able to say about themselves. When Donald Trump tweeted after the election that Obama wiretapped his phones in Trump Tower, there was the allegation underneath it that Barack Obama used American espionage for political purposes. In an interview afterward, the president said: "A lot of people agree with me, that's why I'm right." That's it. That's the post-truth world.

DER SPIEGEL: In your recent book "The Assault on Intelligence," you write that people in the U.S. intelligence world have never served a president for whom truth doesn't matter. Why is this such a big issue?


Hayden: We are seeing an erosion of Enlightenment values in many Western countries. This should really concern Americans because those slaveholding Virginia planters who wrote our foundation documents were scholars of the Enlightenment. Our founding documents are imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment, and so if we walk away from the Enlightenment, we're tugging away at our basic foundation.

DER SPIEGEL: For a former spy, you're quite outspoken. Along with former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, you are quite critical of the president. Is this a form of revenge?

Hayden: This already began in the Obama years, somewhat in defense of some of the current issues. We thought President Obama was hanging good people out to dry in the Snowden affair. But two presidents approved the most controversial program to collect metadata, Congress knows, the court oversees it. But I'm not so sure that constitutes consent of the governed anymore. So a lot of us realized that if we were going to survive in American society, we've got to tell people what we're doing.

DER SPIEGEL: You are a strong supporter of Gina Haspel's nomination as CIA director, although she was deeply involved in the torture program on CIA "black sites." Why is she the right candidate?

Hayden: Who else you got? By merit alone she's a very good and wonderful choice.

DER SPIEGEL: She helped destroy video tapes of the torture interrogations.

Hayden: First of all, we don't define it as torture. And second, she didn't destroy evidence. She was a key member of our counterterrorism center for extended periods of time.

DER SPIEGEL: While the security apparatus was focusing on terror, Vladimir Putin launched his grand campaign to influence the U.S. election. Why is Trump so reluctant to criticize the perpetrator?

Hayden: I really can't explain it. It could be that this is a man who never says sorry, a man who never says he's wrong. What the Russians did is a little like 9/11 in that it was an attack on us from an unexpected direction against a previously unknown weakness.

DER SPIEGEL: Are the security agencies doing enough to protect the mid-term elections?

Hayden: We can do extraordinary things, but our system only goes extraordinary when the president says: "All right. Everybody in. Here's what we're going to go do." He has not done that with regard to the Russians. So if the new NSA director discovers something about the Russians, where does he go? Who does he tell? What body is empowered to do something about it? That's my point.

DER SPIEGEL: Are you surprised by the daily revelations regarding the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller?

Hayden: I don't know the details of the investigation, but there was a lot of contact between the Trump campaign and the Russians. I'm not in a position to judge it, but God, there was a lot of contact. From a low-level advisor to the president's son.

DER SPIEGEL: Is that enough to prove collusion?

Hayden: No, it's sufficient to prove stupidity. I used to think that this is going to end up in a cloud and that will become a national Rorschach test with everybody seeing exactly what they want to see in the end result. But the longer the investigation goes, it looks as if there's more "there" there. It just seems to be an awful lot material that the special counsel is looking at.

Ex-CIA Director Hayden on Trump and Iran Deal - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Originally Posted by uncle junior

^good find.......Whooda thunk the world would be missing W

I posted it over on TC, they called it fake news.

Originally Posted by Cujo

I posted it over on TC, they called it fake news.

Sounds like something that idiot Boontard would say. That guys head is so far up his ass it is about to pop out of his mouth.

awesome

North Korea threatens to cancel Trump summit - BBC News

^ I called it from the start. NK has been playing these clowns all along.