(Treasury chairs the CFIUS.) Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. As Chair this gentleman would have been the last person to see all the reports of the various agencies. He would have forwarded it on to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If they had any reason to feel that the sale had not met all the requirements for such business dealings, they would have brought that to Obama's attention. Every member of CFIUS after reviewing this sale, gave their blessing to it. Not one of the nine agencies tried to derail it. WERE EVERY ONE OF THESE PEOPLE TAKING BRIBES? All these good and honourable MEN, were they knee deep in Kremlin cash? Since no one agency could make or break the deal, then, using your reasoning, they all had to be on the take...not just Hillary. I DON'T SEE YOU ATTACKING THEM.... Oh, wait, they are "men."
"Final approval was given by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission." I guess everyone at the NRC was taking bribes, too? You do understand what the words "Final approval..." means, don't you?
Nine agencies, the NRC, the President...not one of them found fault with the deal, but YOU CAN ONLY SEE ONE SMALL PLAYER. The sale didn't start with her and it didn't end at her desk. It is just propaganda. It is one of the worst examples of Fake News cranked out by the dishonest republican back room boys. So you bought the book like a good little republican and swallowed it hook, line and sinker. You weren't the first, and, based on what I see all over the internet, reported in many countries abroad as well as at home, "the base" isn't into knowing the truth or seeking it. All they want is a Strong Man to follow around. I used the words "Strong Man" with purpose. You know what I mean. You are playing with fire.
You exist in a state of cognitive dissonance. The truth is all around you, but you persist in believing the lie.
I think we've spent enough time "re-litigating" the past of Secretary Clinton. I think it's time we turn all our attention on the big kahuna.
The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet
One of the women who accused Trump of sexual misconduct has sued him for defamation after he labeled her claims false.
Donald Trump celebrates the opening of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City in 1990. A year later, it was bankrupt.Mike Derer / AP
DAVID A. GRAHAM
Donald Trump is now president and not just a private citizen, but that doesn’t mean he’s free of the controversies that dogged him in his former life.
Last week, a few days before Trump’s inauguration, former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos sued him in New York state, accusing the president of defamation. Zervos, who’s represented by the famous lawyer Gloria Allred, was one of the several women who accused Trump of sexual assault or misconduct prior to the election. She claims that he kissed her and pressed his genitals against her non-consensually. Trump denied those claims, saying all of the women who had accused him had made their stories up. So Zervos sued him for defamation.
“I wanted to give Mr. Trump the opportunity to retract his false statements about me and the other women who came forward,” she said, as my colleague Nora Kelly reported. She added that she would withdraw the suit if Trump said she had been truthful. That seems unlikely, since a spokeswoman dismissed the suit immediately.
It’s unusual for a president to be in such a legal situation—though not entirely unprecedented. Bill Clinton settled a suit for sexual harassment filed by Paula Jones. Zervos’s suit serves to underscore an even more unusual fact, though, which is that Trump won election despite a raft of allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct lodged by women in multiple places, from different eras.
The 2016 presidential campaign saw a long string of stories showing scandals involving Trump, both large and small—from questionable business dealings to allegations of sexual assault. While they did not derail his presidential hopes, many of them remain live issues as Trump begins his transition to the White House.
The breadth of Trump’s controversies is truly yuge, ranging from allegations of mafia ties to unscrupulous business dealings, and from racial discrimination to alleged marital rape. They stretch over more than four decades, from the mid-1970s to the present day. To catalogue the full sweep of allegations would require thousands of words and lump together the trivial with the truly scandalous. Including business deals that have simply failed, without any hint of impropriety, would require thousands more. This is a snapshot of some of the most interesting and largest of those scandals.
View attachment 58967
Mike Segar / Reuters
Sexual-Assault AllegationsJill Harth says Trump assaulted her in the 1990s. Trump’s ex-wife Ivana Trump once suggested he had raped her, though she has since recanted her story. Former Miss Utah Temple Taggart said he kissed her on the lips inappropriately. But since the release, more women have come forward. Two told The New York Times that Trump had assaulted them, one saying he tried to put his hand up her skirt on a flight in the 1970s and another saying he forcibly kissed her. A Florida woman says Trump groped her. A former People reporter recounted an alleged assault at his Mar-a-Lago debate, and says he told her, “You know we’re going to have an affair, don’t you?” Several former teen pageant contestants said Trump walked in on them while they were naked or partially dressed.
The upshot: Trump denies all of the allegations. In the sexual-assault cases, Trump faces the difficulty that he in some cases bragged openly about just the behavior of which he has accused—whether grabbing or forcibly kissing. Trump has demanded a retraction from the Times, and has threatened to sue several outlets. The paper, in a letter, refused. A woman who brought a rape case against Trump (twice) withdrew her suit in November, but in January, Summer Zervos sued Trump for defamation, after he labeled her claims of sexual assault false.
Read more: The New York Times, People, BuzzFeed, me
View attachment 58971
Steve Marcus / Reuters
The Beauty Pageant ScandalsThe Boston Globe’s Matt Viser reports on the mess of the American Dream pageant in 1992. After years of attending beauty pageants—Trump seems to have always enjoyed the company of beautiful, scantily clad women—he decided he wanted to get in on the business himself, meeting with George Houraney and Jill Harth, a couple that ran the American Dream pageant. It was an ill-fated effort. Harth and Houraney alleged that Trump started making passes at her almost immediately. On one occasion, Trump allegedly asked them to bring some models to a party. Harth alleges Trump groped her at the party. In a limo afterward, another model said she heard him say that “all women are bimbos” and most “gold diggers.” Trump reportedly joined another model in bed, uninvited, late at night. On other occasions, he forced Harth into bedrooms and made passes at her, she said. But after the contest, Trump broke off dealings. Harth sued Trump, alleging sexual misbehavior, while the couple together sued him for breach of contract. In the suit, they also alleged that Trump had kept black women out of the pageant.
The upshot: The couple settled with Trump for an unannounced sum, and Harth dropped her suit. Trump has denied all the allegations. But it wasn’t Trump’s last turn in the pageant business. A few years later, he bought the Miss Universe pageant, which also includes Miss USA and Miss Teen USA. “Honestly, when I bought [Miss Universe], the bathing suits got smaller and the heels got higher and the ratings went up,” he boasted to Vanity Fair later. In 2012, he won a $5 million suit against a former contestant who claimed the contest was rigged. By 2015, he operated Miss Universe as a joint venture with NBC, but after he slurred Mexican immigrants at his campaign launch, Univision and NBC both announced they would not air the pageant. Trump bought out NBC’s share, then promptly sold the company. He sued Univision but settled in February. The terms were undisclosed.
Read more: The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair
View attachment 58969
Beth Harpaz / Associated Press
Racial Housing Discrimination The New York Times reported. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.” Trump called the accusations “absolutely ridiculous.”
The upshot: The Trumps hired attorney Roy Cohn, who had worked for Joe McCarthy and whom Michael Kinsley once indelibly labeled “innocent of a variety of federal crimes.” They sued the Justice Department for $100 million. In the end, however, the Trumps settled with the government, promising not to discriminate and submitting to regular review by the New York Urban League—though crucially not admitting guilt. The Times has much more on the long history of allegations at Trump-owned properties
Read more: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times
View attachment 58966
Cliff Owen / Associated Press
Mafia Ties not everyone agrees. There have been a string of other allegations, too, many reported by investigative journalist Wayne Barrett. Cohn, Trump’s lawyer, also represented the Genovese crime family boss Tony Salerno. Barrett also reported a series of transactions involving organized crime, and alleged that Trump paid twice market rate to a mob figure for the land under Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Michael Isikoff has also reported that Trump was close to Robert LiButti, an associate of John Gotti, inviting him on his yacht and helicopter. In one case, Trump’s company bought LiButti nine luxury cars.
The upshot: Though Trump has been questioned in court or under oath about the ties, he’s never been convicted of anything. A New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement report after Barrett’s 1992 book on Trump generally found no mafia-related wrong-doing on Trump’s part. Trump Plaza was fined $200,000 for keeping black employees away from LiButti’s table, at his behest, and for the gift of the cars, though Trump personally was not penalized.
Read more: Wayne Barrett, Michael Isikoff, Time, Yahoo, David Cay Johnston
View attachment 58968
Bebeto Matthews / Associated Press
Trump University suckered in by slick free “seminars”—to learn how to get rich. One ad promised they would “learn from Donald Trump’s handpicked instructors, and that participants would have access to Trump’s real estate ‘secrets.’” In fact, Trump had little to do with the curriculum or the instructors. Many of the “students” have since complained that Trump U. was a scam. At one time, it had some prestigious instructors, but over time the “faculty” became a motley bunch of misfits. (It was also never really a “university” by any definition, and it changed its name to the “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative,” because as it happened, the school was violating New York law by operating without an educational license.)
The upshot: The school shut down in 2010. In November 2016, Trump agreed to settle a series of lawsuits related to the school for $25 million. Trump did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement. But he had insisted for months that he would not settle the suit because he expected to win. For a time, he appeared to have been trying to intimidate plaintiffs, including countersuing one for $1 million (a favorite Trump litigation tactic) and refusing to let her withdraw from the suit. (The countersuit was thrown out.) His lawyers cited positive reviews, but former students say they were pressured to give those. Trump also mounted a length attack on the judge, claiming his ethnicity made him biased. Trump has been widely repudiated across the board, with fellow Republicans openly calling him racist.
Read more: Tom McNichol, Steven Brill, National Review, Matt Ford (1) (2)
Mark Lennihan / Associated Press
View attachment 58970
Tenant Intimidation swore in court that mushrooms grew on their carpet from a leak. Perhaps Trump’s most outlandish move was to place newspaper ads offering to house homeless New Yorkers in empty units—since, as Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal, he didn’t intend to fill units with permanent residents anyway. City officials turned him down, saying the idea did not seem appropriate. Typically, Trump also sued tenants for $150 million when they complained.
The upshot: Trump gave in. He settled with tenants and agreed to monitoring. The building still stands today, and his son Eric owns a unit on the top floor.
*************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
You see, Sir, the least you can say is that "it's the Pot calling the Kettle black." And whereas Former Secretary Clinton has been taken through, literally, 10 years of litigation and hearings regarding her part in various situations, ie., White Water, Benghazi, her emails, etc., She has NEVER BEEN FOUND GUILTY OF ANYTHING. Millions of dollars of tax payer's money has been poured down the drain trying to find enough evidence to convict her of anything. And there was nothing. Now, WHY would that be? Because she is not guilty of anything. Contrast that, if you will, with settlement after settlement after settlement, and with findings of wrong doing and intimidation, etc., Innocent people don't settle out-of-court, especially, brawlers like Trump.
Trump settles because he's guilty and can't weasel out of it...so he throws money at it to make it go away. Now, let me help you make the connection, Bill Clinton settled with a woman who claimed he had sexual relations with her....Why would Bill settle? Because He Was Guilty. Trump settles Because He Is Guilty. And, as pointed out before, Hillary Clinton, although Bill Clinton's wife, doesn't control Bill's moral compass. Bill's character faults are his own, just as Trump's are his own.
I TRUST THAT SETTLEMENTS OUT-OF-COURT, A MATTER OF PUBLIC RECORD, MEET WITH YOUR STRICT TERMS FOR RELIABILITY.
NO FAKE NEWS HERE. JUST THE FACTS, AND NOTHING BUT THE FACTS.
"Final approval was given by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission." I guess everyone at the NRC was taking bribes, too? You do understand what the words "Final approval..." means, don't you?
Nine agencies, the NRC, the President...not one of them found fault with the deal, but YOU CAN ONLY SEE ONE SMALL PLAYER. The sale didn't start with her and it didn't end at her desk. It is just propaganda. It is one of the worst examples of Fake News cranked out by the dishonest republican back room boys. So you bought the book like a good little republican and swallowed it hook, line and sinker. You weren't the first, and, based on what I see all over the internet, reported in many countries abroad as well as at home, "the base" isn't into knowing the truth or seeking it. All they want is a Strong Man to follow around. I used the words "Strong Man" with purpose. You know what I mean. You are playing with fire.
You exist in a state of cognitive dissonance. The truth is all around you, but you persist in believing the lie.
I think we've spent enough time "re-litigating" the past of Secretary Clinton. I think it's time we turn all our attention on the big kahuna.
The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet
One of the women who accused Trump of sexual misconduct has sued him for defamation after he labeled her claims false.
Donald Trump celebrates the opening of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City in 1990. A year later, it was bankrupt.Mike Derer / AP
DAVID A. GRAHAM
- JAN 23, 2017
Politics & Policy Daily, a roundup of ideas and events in American politics.
Donald Trump is now president and not just a private citizen, but that doesn’t mean he’s free of the controversies that dogged him in his former life.
Last week, a few days before Trump’s inauguration, former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos sued him in New York state, accusing the president of defamation. Zervos, who’s represented by the famous lawyer Gloria Allred, was one of the several women who accused Trump of sexual assault or misconduct prior to the election. She claims that he kissed her and pressed his genitals against her non-consensually. Trump denied those claims, saying all of the women who had accused him had made their stories up. So Zervos sued him for defamation.
“I wanted to give Mr. Trump the opportunity to retract his false statements about me and the other women who came forward,” she said, as my colleague Nora Kelly reported. She added that she would withdraw the suit if Trump said she had been truthful. That seems unlikely, since a spokeswoman dismissed the suit immediately.
It’s unusual for a president to be in such a legal situation—though not entirely unprecedented. Bill Clinton settled a suit for sexual harassment filed by Paula Jones. Zervos’s suit serves to underscore an even more unusual fact, though, which is that Trump won election despite a raft of allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct lodged by women in multiple places, from different eras.
The 2016 presidential campaign saw a long string of stories showing scandals involving Trump, both large and small—from questionable business dealings to allegations of sexual assault. While they did not derail his presidential hopes, many of them remain live issues as Trump begins his transition to the White House.
The breadth of Trump’s controversies is truly yuge, ranging from allegations of mafia ties to unscrupulous business dealings, and from racial discrimination to alleged marital rape. They stretch over more than four decades, from the mid-1970s to the present day. To catalogue the full sweep of allegations would require thousands of words and lump together the trivial with the truly scandalous. Including business deals that have simply failed, without any hint of impropriety, would require thousands more. This is a snapshot of some of the most interesting and largest of those scandals.
View attachment 58967
Mike Segar / Reuters
Sexual-Assault AllegationsJill Harth says Trump assaulted her in the 1990s. Trump’s ex-wife Ivana Trump once suggested he had raped her, though she has since recanted her story. Former Miss Utah Temple Taggart said he kissed her on the lips inappropriately. But since the release, more women have come forward. Two told The New York Times that Trump had assaulted them, one saying he tried to put his hand up her skirt on a flight in the 1970s and another saying he forcibly kissed her. A Florida woman says Trump groped her. A former People reporter recounted an alleged assault at his Mar-a-Lago debate, and says he told her, “You know we’re going to have an affair, don’t you?” Several former teen pageant contestants said Trump walked in on them while they were naked or partially dressed.
The upshot: Trump denies all of the allegations. In the sexual-assault cases, Trump faces the difficulty that he in some cases bragged openly about just the behavior of which he has accused—whether grabbing or forcibly kissing. Trump has demanded a retraction from the Times, and has threatened to sue several outlets. The paper, in a letter, refused. A woman who brought a rape case against Trump (twice) withdrew her suit in November, but in January, Summer Zervos sued Trump for defamation, after he labeled her claims of sexual assault false.
Read more: The New York Times, People, BuzzFeed, me
View attachment 58971
Steve Marcus / Reuters
The Beauty Pageant ScandalsThe Boston Globe’s Matt Viser reports on the mess of the American Dream pageant in 1992. After years of attending beauty pageants—Trump seems to have always enjoyed the company of beautiful, scantily clad women—he decided he wanted to get in on the business himself, meeting with George Houraney and Jill Harth, a couple that ran the American Dream pageant. It was an ill-fated effort. Harth and Houraney alleged that Trump started making passes at her almost immediately. On one occasion, Trump allegedly asked them to bring some models to a party. Harth alleges Trump groped her at the party. In a limo afterward, another model said she heard him say that “all women are bimbos” and most “gold diggers.” Trump reportedly joined another model in bed, uninvited, late at night. On other occasions, he forced Harth into bedrooms and made passes at her, she said. But after the contest, Trump broke off dealings. Harth sued Trump, alleging sexual misbehavior, while the couple together sued him for breach of contract. In the suit, they also alleged that Trump had kept black women out of the pageant.
The upshot: The couple settled with Trump for an unannounced sum, and Harth dropped her suit. Trump has denied all the allegations. But it wasn’t Trump’s last turn in the pageant business. A few years later, he bought the Miss Universe pageant, which also includes Miss USA and Miss Teen USA. “Honestly, when I bought [Miss Universe], the bathing suits got smaller and the heels got higher and the ratings went up,” he boasted to Vanity Fair later. In 2012, he won a $5 million suit against a former contestant who claimed the contest was rigged. By 2015, he operated Miss Universe as a joint venture with NBC, but after he slurred Mexican immigrants at his campaign launch, Univision and NBC both announced they would not air the pageant. Trump bought out NBC’s share, then promptly sold the company. He sued Univision but settled in February. The terms were undisclosed.
Read more: The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair
View attachment 58969
Beth Harpaz / Associated Press
Racial Housing Discrimination The New York Times reported. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.” Trump called the accusations “absolutely ridiculous.”
The upshot: The Trumps hired attorney Roy Cohn, who had worked for Joe McCarthy and whom Michael Kinsley once indelibly labeled “innocent of a variety of federal crimes.” They sued the Justice Department for $100 million. In the end, however, the Trumps settled with the government, promising not to discriminate and submitting to regular review by the New York Urban League—though crucially not admitting guilt. The Times has much more on the long history of allegations at Trump-owned properties
Read more: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times
View attachment 58966
Cliff Owen / Associated Press
Mafia Ties not everyone agrees. There have been a string of other allegations, too, many reported by investigative journalist Wayne Barrett. Cohn, Trump’s lawyer, also represented the Genovese crime family boss Tony Salerno. Barrett also reported a series of transactions involving organized crime, and alleged that Trump paid twice market rate to a mob figure for the land under Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Michael Isikoff has also reported that Trump was close to Robert LiButti, an associate of John Gotti, inviting him on his yacht and helicopter. In one case, Trump’s company bought LiButti nine luxury cars.
The upshot: Though Trump has been questioned in court or under oath about the ties, he’s never been convicted of anything. A New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement report after Barrett’s 1992 book on Trump generally found no mafia-related wrong-doing on Trump’s part. Trump Plaza was fined $200,000 for keeping black employees away from LiButti’s table, at his behest, and for the gift of the cars, though Trump personally was not penalized.
Read more: Wayne Barrett, Michael Isikoff, Time, Yahoo, David Cay Johnston
View attachment 58968
Bebeto Matthews / Associated Press
Trump University suckered in by slick free “seminars”—to learn how to get rich. One ad promised they would “learn from Donald Trump’s handpicked instructors, and that participants would have access to Trump’s real estate ‘secrets.’” In fact, Trump had little to do with the curriculum or the instructors. Many of the “students” have since complained that Trump U. was a scam. At one time, it had some prestigious instructors, but over time the “faculty” became a motley bunch of misfits. (It was also never really a “university” by any definition, and it changed its name to the “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative,” because as it happened, the school was violating New York law by operating without an educational license.)
The upshot: The school shut down in 2010. In November 2016, Trump agreed to settle a series of lawsuits related to the school for $25 million. Trump did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement. But he had insisted for months that he would not settle the suit because he expected to win. For a time, he appeared to have been trying to intimidate plaintiffs, including countersuing one for $1 million (a favorite Trump litigation tactic) and refusing to let her withdraw from the suit. (The countersuit was thrown out.) His lawyers cited positive reviews, but former students say they were pressured to give those. Trump also mounted a length attack on the judge, claiming his ethnicity made him biased. Trump has been widely repudiated across the board, with fellow Republicans openly calling him racist.
Read more: Tom McNichol, Steven Brill, National Review, Matt Ford (1) (2)
Mark Lennihan / Associated Press
View attachment 58970
Tenant Intimidation swore in court that mushrooms grew on their carpet from a leak. Perhaps Trump’s most outlandish move was to place newspaper ads offering to house homeless New Yorkers in empty units—since, as Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal, he didn’t intend to fill units with permanent residents anyway. City officials turned him down, saying the idea did not seem appropriate. Typically, Trump also sued tenants for $150 million when they complained.
The upshot: Trump gave in. He settled with tenants and agreed to monitoring. The building still stands today, and his son Eric owns a unit on the top floor.
*************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
You see, Sir, the least you can say is that "it's the Pot calling the Kettle black." And whereas Former Secretary Clinton has been taken through, literally, 10 years of litigation and hearings regarding her part in various situations, ie., White Water, Benghazi, her emails, etc., She has NEVER BEEN FOUND GUILTY OF ANYTHING. Millions of dollars of tax payer's money has been poured down the drain trying to find enough evidence to convict her of anything. And there was nothing. Now, WHY would that be? Because she is not guilty of anything. Contrast that, if you will, with settlement after settlement after settlement, and with findings of wrong doing and intimidation, etc., Innocent people don't settle out-of-court, especially, brawlers like Trump.
Trump settles because he's guilty and can't weasel out of it...so he throws money at it to make it go away. Now, let me help you make the connection, Bill Clinton settled with a woman who claimed he had sexual relations with her....Why would Bill settle? Because He Was Guilty. Trump settles Because He Is Guilty. And, as pointed out before, Hillary Clinton, although Bill Clinton's wife, doesn't control Bill's moral compass. Bill's character faults are his own, just as Trump's are his own.
I TRUST THAT SETTLEMENTS OUT-OF-COURT, A MATTER OF PUBLIC RECORD, MEET WITH YOUR STRICT TERMS FOR RELIABILITY.
NO FAKE NEWS HERE. JUST THE FACTS, AND NOTHING BUT THE FACTS.