What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Valmy]

WaPo got the text of Trump's calls to Australia and Mexico.

Read it and weep

That kind of shit has to stop. World leaders need to be able to discuss things without it constantly being leaked to the press.

[garbon]

WaPo got the text of Trump's calls to Australia and Mexico.

Read it and weep

That kind of shit has to stop. World leaders need to be able to discuss things without it constantly being leaked to the press.

You might find this interesting.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/03/trump-presidents-vent-over-leaks-241306?lo=ap_b1

Trump joins long history of presidents fuming over leaks

The Trump administration's campaign to hunt down and prosecute leakers is aimed at sending a chill down the spine of anyone considering handing classified information to the media, but it could also trigger a sense of déjà vu.

Nearly every administration since President Richard Nixon has launched some drive to clamp down on leaks, and most of those efforts found little success.

"We've historically had a monotonous routine of these epicycles of handwringing, blame, and then return to normal," said David Pozen, a Columbia law professor who conducted an in-depth review of the leak phenomenon. "Every time we've gotten a new administration they come in and get upset anew about the inability to control every disclosure. Then they learn there's not much they can do about it at a reasonable cost, and they learn to play the game."

President Donald Trump remains deeply skeptical about the Justice Department's efforts to crack down on leaks and blames Attorney General Jeff Sessions for the lack of action. The pressure only increased Thursday with the publication by the Washington Post of classified transcripts of two of Trump's early calls with foreign leaders.

"I'm very disappointed in the fact that the Justice Department has not gone after the leakers. And they're the ones that have the great power to go after the leakers, you understand...and I'm very disappointed in Jeff Sessions," Trump told the Wall Street Journal last week, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by POLITICO.

"They should go after the leakers in intelligence. I don't mean the White House stuff where they're fighting over who loves me the most, OK?" he told the Journal. "It's just stupid people doing that."

Sessions has scheduled a press conference Friday to talk about DOJ's work against leaks, but precise details of what Justice is planning remain unclear. Aides to Sessions say he plans to discuss statistics showing a "dramatic increase" in leak investigations compared with a year ago.

But there's a long history of attempts to curb leaks that didn't put much of a dent in the practice. Agents tend to be unenthusiastic about them because they're often inconclusive — and because chasing spies and criminals seems more exciting than going after reporters and their sources.

"They're not fun investigations to be on," said former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich. "They're notoriously difficult to solve, and they soak up so many resources."

Before Trump, Nixon was likely the president most obsessed with leaks, even setting up a White House "plumbers" unit aimed at finding the culprits. The administration filed the first serious criminal leak case in the modern era, against researchers Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo.

But Nixon's frantic preoccupation with leaks wound up torpedoing the prosecution. After it was revealed that the White House plumbers broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, the judge declared a mistrial and threw out the case.

Responding to surveillance concerns flowing from Watergate revelations, President Jimmy Carter limited the circumstances under which leaks could be pursued.

But the anti-leak drive fired up again soon after President Ronald Reagan took office. He and his aides grew exasperated by press reports disclosing the dispatching of planes to Egypt and an aircraft carrier to the Libyan coast.

Reagan declared the issue "a problem of major proportions within the U.S. government [that] must not be allowed to continue." Attorney General Ed Meese even said reporters publishing leaked information were "equally guilty" as the leakers, though he said he doubted the Justice Department would resort to wiretapping reporters.

A Reagan-era interagency task force, led by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard Willard, recommended broadening the use of lie detectors for those with access to classified information, but State Department officials and others bristled at the proposal.

"That ended up having to be pulled back as a result of complaints from Congress," Willard said in an interview this week.

"Most of these things don't amount to much of anything," said Britt Snider, a former Pentagon lawyer who served on the panel. "I gave the powers that be a 10-point plan to stop leaks. They didn't want to do any of them."

Snider said he advanced a proposal that officials should have to speak on the record, with only agency heads or their deputies permitted to speak to reporters off the record or on background.

...

[derspiess]

You seem to have special insight about what's up his ass. Is this part of your Michelle obsession?

My obsession is with Michelle's fabulous arms, so yeah, do the math

I'm fairly certain it goes deeper than that.

Ewwww.

[Monoriu]

WaPo got the text of Trump's calls to Australia and Mexico.

Read it and weep

That kind of shit has to stop. World leaders need to be able to discuss things without it constantly being leaked to the press.

You want fewer leaks?  Have career civil servants handle stuff rather than politicians. 

[Grey Fox]

WaPo got the text of Trump's calls to Australia and Mexico.

Read it and weep

That kind of shit has to stop. World leaders need to be able to discuss things without it constantly being leaked to the press.

You want fewer leaks?  Have career civil servants handle stuff rather than politicians.

No, we're not chinese drones here.

[CountDeMoney]

WaPo got the text of Trump's calls to Australia and Mexico.

Read it and weep

That kind of shit has to stop. World leaders need to be able to discuss things without it constantly being leaked to the press.

Sorry, dude...there's deference to presidential prerogative, and there's a clear and present danger.

[garbon]

[Liep]

[garbon]

I loved that one as I can hear them saying it in my head.

[CountDeMoney]

I loved that one as I can hear them saying it in my head.

Scary, isn't it?

[celedhring]

Now I can't stop reading Trump's tweets in Lucille's voice. 

[jimmy olsen]

Shady real estate deals and tax fraud by Trump!? Who could have guessed! 

This Trump real estate deal looks awfully like criminal tax fraud

This Trump real estate deal looks awfully like criminal tax fraud

Two tax lawyers break down the president's sale of two condos to his son.

By David Herzig and Bridget Crawford
August 4 at 6:00 AM

President Trump clearly doesn't want to release his income tax returns to the public. Members of the public and commentators have progressed through stages of outrage, speculation and acceptance that they'll never see the goods, while others have made attempts to pry the documents free (such as proposed legislation in New York and other states that would require presidential candidates to release their returns). But Trump's most pressing tax problem may come from somewhere else entirely: a pre-election transfer of property to a company controlled by his son that could run afoul of the IRS.

According to a recent story by ProPublica and the Real Deal, in April 2016, a limited liability company managed by Trump sold two condominium apartments to a limited liability company managed by Eric Trump. They were on the 13th and 14th floors of a 14-story, full-service, doorman building at 100 Central Park South in Manhattan. This is a prime Midtown neighborhood, yet the sale price for each condo was just $350,000. Although the condition and square footage of apartments 13G and 14G are not readily known, a popular real estate website shows that G-line apartments on both the fifth and eighth floors are one-bedroom, one-bath units of just over 500 square feet. Two years before the Trump transaction, apartment 5G sold for $690,000. Maybe the two units in question were in terrible shape, but two months before the sale to Eric Trump's LLC, they were advertised for $790,000 (on the 13th floor) and $800,000 (on the 14th floor), according to ProPublica.

If a sale between a parent and child is for fair market value, it does not trigger a gift tax. But if a parent sells two expensive condominiums to his son at a highly discounted price, for example, then the parent makes a taxable gift in part. In that case, the seller must pay a gift tax of up to 40 percent. (In this case, that might have run the president somewhere in the neighborhood of $350,000.)

Each taxpayer has a $5.49 million lifetime exemption (a married couple has a combined $10.98 million exemption), meaning you can give away that much money without incurring the tax. To claim that a transaction is covered by the exemption, though, you must file a gift tax return. Well-advised wealthy individuals typically fully use their $5.49 million exemption by making gifts to family members as soon as they have the assets to do so.

So if Donald Trump sold the apartments to his son's company for less than fair market value, he needed to file a gift tax return, even if he wanted to claim that the sale was not taxable because of the exemption. The government wants to know what gifts people make, because gifts are taken into account when determining the value of a person's taxable estate at death. If Trump had already used his exemption, he would owe gift tax on the difference between the fair market value of the apartments and the amount paid by Eric Trump.

It's possible the president filed the right paperwork. But without a full release of his tax returns, the available evidence suggests he hasn't. According to New York City property records, Trump paid $13,000 in state and local transfer taxes for these two sales. That is the correct amount for a sale between strangers. But if he paid state and local transfer taxes, that means he didn't treat the transfers as gifts. And on the real estate forms filed in New York, Trump didn't check any of the boxes indicating that these were sales between relatives or sales of less than the entire property. It would seem, then, that he treated the transactions as if they were sales for fair market value to a stranger.

Since Trump did not cast the transactions as gifts for state and local tax purposes, it is almost certain that he did not do so for federal gift tax purposes, either. In our combined 40 years of experience as tax lawyers, we are unaware of a situation in which a taxpayer would report a transaction as a fair market value between strangers on the state level (and thus incur real estate taxes) but treat it as a gift at the federal level (and thus incur an additional tax). It's fair to infer that Trump didn't follow the rules.

Willful failure to file a tax return, including a gift tax return, is a misdemeanor , punishable by a $25,000 fine, imprisonment of up to one year or both. Fraudulent failure to file — meaning an overt act of evasion — may elevate willful failure to a felony . That carries a fine of up to $100,000, imprisonment of up to five years or both, along with the costs of prosecution. According to internal guidance provided by the IRS to its agents, factors indicating potential fraud include repeated contacts by the IRS, failure to cooperate with IRS agents or employees, knowledge of the filing requirements, offering implausible or inconsistent explanations, substantial tax liability, and refusal or inability to explain failure to file.

Presidential income tax returns are subject to mandatory audit . The IRS can decide whether Trump's transfers were truly gifts. If they were, which seems likely, Trump's failure to file a gift tax return opens him up to penalties and fines, or even criminal charges. Perhaps such a charge wouldn't go anywhere, since the president must consent to being indicted by a federal prosecutor. But tax law would permit them.

[garbon]

Now I can't stop reading Trump's tweets in Lucille's voice. 

[CountDeMoney]

I can't wait to see what September brings!

the national interest
August 4, 2017 1:23 pm
Trump's Fledgling Presidency Has Already Collapsed
By Jonathan Chait

President Trump's approval rating has dropped by about one percentage point per month and now sits in the mid-30s. At the current rate, it would hit zero in September 2020. (A highly unlikely possibility, though with Donald Trump, anything is possible.) Measured in less quantifiable terms, Trump's political decline has not occurred in so linear a fashion. It has happened, as Ernest Hemingway wrote about bankruptcy, gradually and then suddenly.

After half a year of comic internal disarray, even in the face of broad public dismay, Trump's administration had, through most of July, managed to hold together some basic level of partisan cohesion with a still-enthusiastic base and supportive partners in Congress. This has quickly collapsed.

Signs of the disintegration have popped up everywhere. The usual staff turmoil came to a boil in the course of ten days, during which the following occurred: The president denounced his own attorney general in public, the press secretary quit, a new communications director came aboard, the chief of staff was fired, the communications director accused the chief strategist of auto-fellatio in an interview, then he was himself fired. Meanwhile, the secretary of State and national-security adviser were both reported to be eyeing the exits. (Against this colorful backdrop, the ominous news that Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury barely registered.)

More disturbingly for Trump, Republicans in Congress have openly broken ranks. When the Senate voted down the latest (and weakest) proposal to repeal Obamacare, Trump demanded the chamber resume the effort, as he has before. This time, Republican leaders defied him and declared the question settled for the year. When the president threatened to withhold promised payments to insurers in retribution, Republicans in Congress proposed to continue making them. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley, responding to the president's threat to sack Jeff Sessions, announced he had no time to confirm a new attorney general. Many Republican senators have endorsed bills to block the president from firing the special counsel.

The most humiliating rebuke came in the form of a bill to lock in sanctions on Russia, passed by Congress without the president's consent. The premise of the sanctions law is that Congress cannot trust the president to safeguard the national interest, treating him as a potential Russian dupe. It passed through both chambers almost unanimously. Trump delayed signing the bill for days, then submitted to its passage in the most begrudging fashion possible, releasing a statement that reads less like something a president would publish to commemorate the signing of a law than a petulant handwritten note a grounded teen might tape to the bedroom door. "Congress could not even negotiate a health-care bill after seven years of talking," wrote the president of the United States. "I built a truly great company worth many billions of dollars. That is a big part of the reason I was elected."

During his very brief tenure as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci blurted out something very telling: "There are people inside the administration that think it is their job to save America from this president." The conviction that Trump is dangerously unfit to hold office is indeed shared widely within his own administration. Leaked accounts consistently depict the president as unable to read briefing materials written at an adult level, easily angered, prone to manipulation through flattery, subject to change his mind frequently to agree with whomever he spoke with last, and consumed with the superficiality of cable television. In the early days of the administration, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and then–Homeland Security Director John Kelly secretly agreed that one of the two should remain in the country at all times "to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House," the Associated Press reported recently.

And the insurrection appears to be creeping outward. When Trump tweeted that he would ban transgender Americans from military service, the Defense Department announced there had been "no modifications to the current policy" and that, "in the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect." When Trump gave a speech to police urging them to rough up suspects, several police chiefs and even the head of his own Drug Enforcement Agency registered their public objections. The accretion of these acts of defiance is significant. The federal government has flipped on its chief executive.

Barring resignation or removal from office — which would require the vote of a House majority plus two-thirds of the Senate — we are stuck with a delegitimized president serving out the remaining seven-eighths of his term. Politically gridlocked presidencies have become normal, but for the office to be occupied by a man whose own party elites doubt his functional competence and even loyalty is, to borrow a term, unpresidented. Trump's obsession with humiliation and dominance has left him ill-prepared to cope with high-profile failure. He seems unlikely to content himself with quiet, incremental bureaucratic reform.

And yet it is difficult to see what Trump can do to reverse the situation. His next major domestic-agenda item, a regressive tax cut, is highly unpopular. He has inherited peace and prosperity. Nobody in the administration has been indicted. It is far easier to imagine conditions changing for the worse than the better.

There is one frightening exception. Trump could regain public standing through the rally-round-the-flag effect that usually occurs following a domestic attack or at the outset of a war. A miniature version of that dynamic was on display in April, when Trump launched a small missile strike on Syria, garnering widespread praise in the media for his newfound stature. The 9/11 attacks elevated George W. Bush's approval ratings for three years, long enough for his party to gain seats in the 2002 midterms and for Bush, two years later, to win what is still the Republican Party's only national-vote plurality victory since 1988.

Trump's authoritarian tendencies make the prospect of his rebuilding his legitimacy on the basis of security especially dangerous. The number of Republicans who see Trump as a strong leader has dropped by 22 percentage points since January. Trump's opportunity lies in exploiting fear to demonstrate strength.

There is an answer to this danger. It is to not simply assume Trump can — or should be allowed to — use war or terrorism to his advantage.

After 9/11, Democrats and the mainstream news media, harking back to the national unity that prevailed after Pearl Harbor, demonstrated their patriotism by supporting their president almost unquestioningly. That choice allowed Bush to escape scrutiny for policies that may have helped enable the attacks to happen. (Before, his administration had deemphasized the fight against Al Qaeda.) Bush's ground-zero halo gave him a presumption of competence as commander-in-chief that enabled him to launch a war without planning for the occupation. It mostly survived the revelations of the 9/11 Commission Report three years later and did not fully dissipate until the Iraq War occupation had unmistakably descended into a quagmire.

The ability of a president to gain popularity by launching (or suffering) an attack is not a law of nature. It reflects, in part, choices — by the opposition to withhold criticism and by the news media to accept the administration's framing of the facts at face value. A chaotic, still-understaffed administration led by a novice commander-in-chief who has alienated American allies deserves no benefit of the doubt. Everything from Trump's incompetent management of the Department of Energy, which safeguards nuclear materials, to the now-skeletal State Department, to his blustering international profile has exposed the country to an elevated risk of a mass tragedy. A long-term task of the opposition is to prevent the crumbling presidency from transmuting that weakness into strength.

[11B4V]

I can't wait to see what September brings!

the national interest
August 4, 2017 1:23 pm
Trump's Fledgling Presidency Has Already Collapsed
By Jonathan Chait

President Trump's approval rating has dropped by about one percentage point per month and now sits in the mid-30s. At the current rate, it would hit zero in September 2020. (A highly unlikely possibility, though with Donald Trump, anything is possible.) Measured in less quantifiable terms, Trump's political decline has not occurred in so linear a fashion. It has happened, as Ernest Hemingway wrote about bankruptcy, gradually and then suddenly.

After half a year of comic internal disarray, even in the face of broad public dismay, Trump's administration had, through most of July, managed to hold together some basic level of partisan cohesion with a still-enthusiastic base and supportive partners in Congress. This has quickly collapsed.

Signs of the disintegration have popped up everywhere. The usual staff turmoil came to a boil in the course of ten days, during which the following occurred: The president denounced his own attorney general in public, the press secretary quit, a new communications director came aboard, the chief of staff was fired, the communications director accused the chief strategist of auto-fellatio in an interview, then he was himself fired. Meanwhile, the secretary of State and national-security adviser were both reported to be eyeing the exits. (Against this colorful backdrop, the ominous news that Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury barely registered.)

More disturbingly for Trump, Republicans in Congress have openly broken ranks. When the Senate voted down the latest (and weakest) proposal to repeal Obamacare, Trump demanded the chamber resume the effort, as he has before. This time, Republican leaders defied him and declared the question settled for the year. When the president threatened to withhold promised payments to insurers in retribution, Republicans in Congress proposed to continue making them. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley, responding to the president's threat to sack Jeff Sessions, announced he had no time to confirm a new attorney general. Many Republican senators have endorsed bills to block the president from firing the special counsel.

The most humiliating rebuke came in the form of a bill to lock in sanctions on Russia, passed by Congress without the president's consent. The premise of the sanctions law is that Congress cannot trust the president to safeguard the national interest, treating him as a potential Russian dupe. It passed through both chambers almost unanimously. Trump delayed signing the bill for days, then submitted to its passage in the most begrudging fashion possible, releasing a statement that reads less like something a president would publish to commemorate the signing of a law than a petulant handwritten note a grounded teen might tape to the bedroom door. "Congress could not even negotiate a health-care bill after seven years of talking," wrote the president of the United States. "I built a truly great company worth many billions of dollars. That is a big part of the reason I was elected."

During his very brief tenure as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci blurted out something very telling: "There are people inside the administration that think it is their job to save America from this president." The conviction that Trump is dangerously unfit to hold office is indeed shared widely within his own administration. Leaked accounts consistently depict the president as unable to read briefing materials written at an adult level, easily angered, prone to manipulation through flattery, subject to change his mind frequently to agree with whomever he spoke with last, and consumed with the superficiality of cable television. In the early days of the administration, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and then–Homeland Security Director John Kelly secretly agreed that one of the two should remain in the country at all times "to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House," the Associated Press reported recently.

And the insurrection appears to be creeping outward. When Trump tweeted that he would ban transgender Americans from military service, the Defense Department announced there had been "no modifications to the current policy" and that, "in the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect." When Trump gave a speech to police urging them to rough up suspects, several police chiefs and even the head of his own Drug Enforcement Agency registered their public objections. The accretion of these acts of defiance is significant. The federal government has flipped on its chief executive.

Barring resignation or removal from office — which would require the vote of a House majority plus two-thirds of the Senate — we are stuck with a delegitimized president serving out the remaining seven-eighths of his term. Politically gridlocked presidencies have become normal, but for the office to be occupied by a man whose own party elites doubt his functional competence and even loyalty is, to borrow a term, unpresidented. Trump's obsession with humiliation and dominance has left him ill-prepared to cope with high-profile failure. He seems unlikely to content himself with quiet, incremental bureaucratic reform.

And yet it is difficult to see what Trump can do to reverse the situation. His next major domestic-agenda item, a regressive tax cut, is highly unpopular. He has inherited peace and prosperity. Nobody in the administration has been indicted. It is far easier to imagine conditions changing for the worse than the better.

There is one frightening exception. Trump could regain public standing through the rally-round-the-flag effect that usually occurs following a domestic attack or at the outset of a war. A miniature version of that dynamic was on display in April, when Trump launched a small missile strike on Syria, garnering widespread praise in the media for his newfound stature. The 9/11 attacks elevated George W. Bush's approval ratings for three years, long enough for his party to gain seats in the 2002 midterms and for Bush, two years later, to win what is still the Republican Party's only national-vote plurality victory since 1988.

Trump's authoritarian tendencies make the prospect of his rebuilding his legitimacy on the basis of security especially dangerous. The number of Republicans who see Trump as a strong leader has dropped by 22 percentage points since January. Trump's opportunity lies in exploiting fear to demonstrate strength.

There is an answer to this danger. It is to not simply assume Trump can — or should be allowed to — use war or terrorism to his advantage.

After 9/11, Democrats and the mainstream news media, harking back to the national unity that prevailed after Pearl Harbor, demonstrated their patriotism by supporting their president almost unquestioningly. That choice allowed Bush to escape scrutiny for policies that may have helped enable the attacks to happen. (Before, his administration had deemphasized the fight against Al Qaeda.) Bush's ground-zero halo gave him a presumption of competence as commander-in-chief that enabled him to launch a war without planning for the occupation. It mostly survived the revelations of the 9/11 Commission Report three years later and did not fully dissipate until the Iraq War occupation had unmistakably descended into a quagmire.

The ability of a president to gain popularity by launching (or suffering) an attack is not a law of nature. It reflects, in part, choices — by the opposition to withhold criticism and by the news media to accept the administration's framing of the facts at face value. A chaotic, still-understaffed administration led by a novice commander-in-chief who has alienated American allies deserves no benefit of the doubt. Everything from Trump's incompetent management of the Department of Energy, which safeguards nuclear materials, to the now-skeletal State Department, to his blustering international profile has exposed the country to an elevated risk of a mass tragedy. A long-term task of the opposition is to prevent the crumbling presidency from transmuting that weakness into strength.

The Norks. Trump needs a war of his own. The Norks are giving him a convenient excuse.