What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[viper37]

I can't see why people admire this man as a great president and leader, even in his own words he sucks.

Apparently, it's because they feel "he's one of them".  As silly as it sounds, it's what I've heard from an "ex-fan", on radio.  Like he would even talk to them...  <sigh>

[Jacob]

Looks like the Trump campaign is responsible for between 1-3% of all American credit card fraud. If any languishites donated to WinRed, double check your credit card statements.

[The Larch]

Newsflash! Capitol rioters were, mostly, racists.

Fears of White People Losing Out Permeate Capitol Rioters' Towns, Study Finds
Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population were the most likely to be homes to people who stormed the Capitol.


When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.

But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.

If Mr. Pape's initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, "Jews will not replace us!"

"If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups," Mr. Pape said. "You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future."

One fact stood out in Mr. Pape's study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.

Law enforcement officials have said 800 to 1,000 people entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, and prosecutors have spent the past three months tracking down many of them in what they have described as one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history. In recent court filings, the government has hinted that more than 400 people may ultimately face charges, including illegal entry, assault of police officers and the obstruction of the official business of Congress.

In his study, Mr. Pape determined that only about 10 percent of those charged were members of established far-right organizations like the Oath Keepers militia or the nationalist extremist group the Proud Boys. But unlike other analysts who have made similar findings, Mr. Pape has argued that the remaining 90 percent of the "ordinary" rioters are part of a still congealing mass movement on the right that has shown itself willing to put "violence at its core."

Other mass movements have emerged, he said, in response to large-scale cultural change. In the 1840s and '50s, for example, the Know Nothing Party, a group of nativist Protestants, was formed in response to huge waves of largely Irish Catholic immigration to the country. After World War I, he added, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a revival prompted in part by the arrival of Italians and the first stirrings of the so-called Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the industrialized North.

In an effort to determine why the mob that formed on Jan. 6 turned violent, Mr. Pape compared events that day with two previous pro-Trump rallies in Washington, on Nov. 14 and Dec. 12. While police records show some indications of street fighting after the first two gatherings, Mr. Pape said, the number of arrests were fewer and the charges less serious than on Jan. 6. The records also show that those arrested in November and December largely lived within an hour of Washington while most of those arrested in January came from considerably farther away.

The difference at the rallies was former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Pape said. Mr. Trump promoted the Jan. 6 rally in advance, saying it would be "wild" and driving up attendance, Mr. Pape said. He then encouraged the mob to march on the Capitol in an effort to "show strength."

Mr. Pape said he worried that a similar mob could be summoned again by a leader like Mr. Trump. After all, he suggested, as the country continues moving toward becoming a majority-minority nation and right-wing media outlets continue to stoke fear about the Great Replacement, the racial and cultural anxieties that lay beneath the riot at the Capitol are not going away.

"If all of this is really rooted in the politics of social change, then we have to realize that it's not going to be solved — or solved alone — by law enforcement agencies," Mr. Pape said. "This is political violence, not just ordinary criminal violence, and it is going to require both additional information and a strategic approach."

Mr. Pape, whose career had mostly been focused on international terrorism, used that approach after the Sept. 11 attacks when he created a database of suicide bombers from around the world. His research led to a remarkable discovery: Most of the bombers were secular, not religious, and had killed themselves not out of zealotry, but rather in response to military occupations.

American officials eventually used the findings to persuade some Sunnis in Iraq to break with their religious allies and join the United States in a nationalist movement known as the Anbar Awakening.

Recalling his early work with suicide bombers, Mr. Pape suggested that the country's understanding of what happened on Jan. 6 was only starting to take shape, much like its understanding of international terrorism slowly grew after Sept. 11.

"We really still are at the beginning stages," he said.

[Syt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/nyregion/rudy-giuliani-trump-ukraine-warrant.html

Federal Investigators Search Rudy Giuliani's Apartment and Office

Prosecutors obtained the search warrants as part of an investigation into whether Mr. Giuliani broke lobbying laws as President Trump's personal lawyer.

Federal investigators in Manhattan executed search warrants early Wednesday at the home and office of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who became President Donald J. Trump's personal lawyer, stepping up a criminal investigation into Mr. Giuliani's dealings in Ukraine, three people with knowledge of the investigation said.

The investigators seized Mr. Giuliani's electronic devices and searched his apartment on Madison Avenue and his office on Park Avenue at about 6 a.m., two of the people said.

Executing a search warrant is an extraordinary move for prosecutors to take against a lawyer, let alone a lawyer for a former president. It is a major turning point in the long-running investigation into Mr. Giuliani, who as mayor steered New York through the Sept. 11 attacks and earlier in his career led the same U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan that is now investigating him.

Mr. Giuliani's lawyer, Robert J. Costello, called the searches unnecessary because his client had offered to answer questions from prosecutors, except those regarding his privileged communications with the former president.

"What they did today was legal thuggery," Mr. Costello said. "Why would you do this to anyone, let alone someone who was the associate attorney general, United States attorney, the mayor of New York City and the personal lawyer to the 45th president of the United States."

The federal authorities have been largely focused on whether Mr. Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs, who at the same time were helping Mr. Giuliani search for dirt on Mr. Trump's political rivals, including President Biden, who was then a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The United States Attorney's office in Manhattan and the F.B.I. had for months sought to secure a search warrant for Mr. Giuliani's phones.

Under Mr. Trump, senior political appointees in the Justice Department repeatedly sought to block such a warrant, The New York Times reported, slowing the investigation as it was gaining momentum last year. After Merrick B. Garland was confirmed as President Biden's attorney general, the Justice Department lifted its objection to the search.

While the warrants are not an explicit accusation of wrongdoing against Mr. Giuliani, it shows that the investigation has entered an aggressive new phase. To obtain a search warrant, investigators need to persuade a judge they have sufficient reason to believe that a crime was committed and that the search would turn up evidence of the crime.

The investigation of Mr. Giuliani grew out of a case against two Soviet-born men who aided his mission in Ukraine to unearth damaging information about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter, who was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The prosecutors charged the two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, with unrelated crimes in late 2019 and a trial is scheduled for October.

While investigating Mr. Giuliani, prosecutors have examined, among other things, his potential business dealings in Ukraine and his role in pushing the Trump administration to oust the American ambassador to Ukraine, which was the subject of testimony at Mr. Trump's first impeachment trial.

As he was pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens, Mr. Giuliani became fixated on removing the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, whom he saw as an obstacle to those efforts. At the urging of Mr. Giuliani and other Republicans, Mr. Trump ultimately ousted Ms. Yovanovitch.

As part of the investigation into Mr. Giuliani, the prosecutors have explored whether he was working not only for Mr. Trump, but also for Ukrainian officials or businesses who wanted the ambassador to be dismissed for their own reasons, according to people briefed on the matter.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, it is a federal crime to try to influence or lobby the United States government at the request or direction of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department.

The prosecutors have scrutinized Mr. Giuliani's dealings with Yuriy Lutsenko, one of the officials who helped Mr. Giuliani and his associates in their dirt-digging mission while also urging them to work to get the ambassador removed.

Among other things, the prosecutors have examined discussions Mr. Giuliani had about taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in apparently unrelated consulting business from Mr. Lutsenko, which resulted in a draft retainer agreement that was never executed.

Mr. Giuliani has said he turned down the deal, which would have involved him helping the Ukrainian government recover money it believed had been stolen and stashed overseas.

As the investigation heated up last summer, prosecutors and F.B.I. agents in Manhattan were preparing to seek the search warrant for Mr. Giuliani's records about his efforts to remove the ambassador, but they first had to notify Justice Department officials in Washington, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Federal prosecutors must consult Justice Department officials in Washington about search warrants involving lawyers because of concerns that they might obtain confidential communications with clients. The proposed warrant for Mr. Giuliani was particularly sensitive because his most prominent client was Mr. Trump.

Career Justice Department officials in Washington largely supported the search warrant, but senior officials raised concerns that the warrant would be issued too close to the election, the people with knowledge of the matter said.

Under longstanding practice, the Justice Department generally tries to avoid taking aggressive investigative actions within 60 days of an election if those actions could affect the outcome of the vote.

The prosecutors in Manhattan tried again after the election, but political appointees in Mr. Trump's Justice Department sought once more to block the warrant, the people with knowledge of the matter said. At the time, Mr. Trump was still contesting the election results in several states, a legal effort being led by Mr. Giuliani, those officials noted.

[grumbler]

MAGA = My Attorney Got Arrested

[Sheilbh]

This is the exception where I'd let cameras in the court. And God I hope he defends himself.

[Jacob]

Four Seasons Total Landscaping tweeted this image with the following text:

Wrong apartment. We kicked him out months ago.



https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1387453573290766349

[Sheilbh]

Interesting nugget in the press here tomorrow - Chris Steele (the former MI6 spy behind the Trump dossier) apparently provided a separate dossier to the FBI during Trump's presidency from different sources and also it sounds like he generally continued to provide information to the FBI

[PDH]

Interesting nugget in the press here tomorrow - Chris Steele (the former MI6 spy behind the Trump dossier) apparently provided a separate dossier to the FBI during Trump's presidency from different sources and also it sounds like he generally continued to provide information to the FBI

Well he's a good source of info.  The fact that Trump denied everything means it must have been true.  That's how he works.

[Admiral Yi]

Four Seasons Total Landscaping tweeted this image with the following text:

Wrong apartment. We kicked him out months ago.

Wonder why they decided to shop the image.

[Syt]

So Trump has his own pseudo-Twitter now?

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk

[Syt]

Donald J. Trump
10:27am May 3, 2021

The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!

[The Brain]

No sweet little lies?

[Syt]

No sweet little lies?

His posts are lies, but neither sweet nor little.

[garbon]

So Trump has his own pseudo-Twitter now?

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk

Well the decision on whether he can return to FB is due out today.