Category: Government

President Trump Spending Close To 25% Of His Time Away From Washington…

Remember all the noise from the right about President Obama’s golfing activities and vacations? The outrage by some on the right over his time away from Pennsylvania Avenue?

Well now after almost six weeks in the office President Trump has spent almost 25% (four out of seven weekends) of his presidency at Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. Golfing and presumably relaxing with his wife and First Lady Melania.  Who as we know will not spend her time living in the White House. All this at great expense to American tax payers.

Where’s the outrage from conservatives and republicans? As we wait to hear even a peep. The hypocrisy of the right again on display.

Donald Trump is believed to have spent almost a quarter of his time as President in the sunshine state of Florida.

The President, who enjoys referring to his Palm Beach estate as the “Winter White House”, has spent four out of seven weekends of his presidency at his 126-room Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.

As of Sunday, when the billionaire property developer flew out of the resort, he had spent almost 242 hours out of his 1,060 total hours as president in Florida, according to the Palm Beach Post.

While he has spent the majority of his time inside or near his opulent Palm Beach estate, which he purchased for $5 million in 1985, he has also made fleeting visits to Tampa, Melbourne and Orlando.

Mr Trump expressed his fondness for Florida, a state he has been visiting for decades, over the weekend. He referred to it as his “second home” and Mar-a-Lago as the “Southern White House”.

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While Mr Trump and his family enjoy private quarters in a closed-off area of the grounds, the resort is also home to a members club. The Mar-a-Lago Club’s members include real estate developers, energy executives and Wall Street financiers.

On Monday, Democratic senators urged the Trump administration to publicly release logs of visitors to both Mar-a-Lago and the White House.

Mr Trump’s frequent visits to the resort have allowed members extraordinary access to powerful figures in the US government. Visitors have taken photos with Ivanka Trump, the President’s eldest daughter, reading by the pool, and taken selfies with Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s chief strategist and the former executive chairman of far-right publication Breitbart News.

But the financial burden of his Florida trips could be hitting the taxpayer. An estimate by the Government Accounting Office found trips to Mar-a-Lago could be costing the US taxpayer more than $3 million (£2.4m) per visit.

Full story BELOW THE FOLD.

 

The President Of The United States Is A Conspiracy Theorist…

Trump is, in essence, a conspiracy theory nut job. He bought into the birther movement of the far right. Now he has made wild accusations that President Obama had his phones wiretapped. This folks is something you would expect from Alex Jones, Stephen Banning, Joseph Farrah, Rush Limbaugh, INFOWARS, Breitbart, WND, and EIB Network. Not from the President of the United States.

But we do not have a normal person occupying The White House. We elected a narcissistic fool with huge insecurities. He has shown himself to be not only a narcissist but a misogynist, a xenophobic, and a pathological liar was well. He is a man many believe is in great need of psychoanalysis and extensive counseling. To think this man has the nuclear launch code is chilling to say the least.

Because Trump’s administration is under scrutiny for unethical conduct and lying in regards to contact with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign Trump has floated his on conspiracy theory. Of course he is doing this as a way to distract from the real story swirling around himself and his administration, and, because he know a yuuuuuge number of fellow nut cases will believe him. Simply because he says it is so. He has offered no credible evidence supporting his claim President Obama had his phones wiretapped. He hasn’t because there is none.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CNN) – President Donald Trump made a stunning claim Saturday, alleging without offering evidence that his predecessor, Barack Obama, wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower ahead of the 2016 election.

“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump tweeted early Saturday morning in one part of a six-tweet tirade that began just after 6:30 a.m.
The President went on to compare the alleged tapping of his phones to Watergate and called Obama “bad (or “sick).”
“How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy,” Trump tweeted.
The White House did not provide evidence to back up Trump’s claim or explain the source of his information.
The White House did not provide evidence to back up Trump’s claim or explain the source of his information.
But two former senior US officials quickly dismissed Trump’s accusations out of hand.
“Just nonsense,” said one former senior US intelligence official.
Another former senior US official with direct knowledge of investigations by the Justice Department under the Obama administration said Trump’s phones were never tapped.
“This did not happen. It is false. Wrong,” the former official told CNN.
A spokesman for Obama, Kevin Lewis, called “any suggestion” that Obama or any White House official ordered surveillance against Trump “simply false.”
“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Lewis said in a statement early Saturday afternoon. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
Warrants to tap into someone’s phones in the course of a federal investigation would be sought by the Department of Justice, which conducts investigations independent of the White House and the president.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, an independent and secretive federal court, is responsible for issuing surveillance warrants in cases concerning foreign intelligence. The FBI has been investigating contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russians known to US intelligence, and that court would likely be the forum to petition for such a warrant.
The former senior US official with direct knowledge of the Justice Department’s investigations said Obama could not have ordered such a warrant. It would have been taken to a judge by investigators, but investigators never sought a warrant to monitor Trump’s phones, the former official said.
A federal judge would only have approved a warrant to wiretap Trump’s phones if he or she had found probable cause that Trump had committed a federal crime or was a foreign agent.
Former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes echoed the point in a tweet responding to Trump on Saturday morning.
“No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you,” he said in his Twitter post. (Read More – With Video & Tweets)
How this man gets up and looks at himself in the mirror every morning is beyond explanation.

Saturday Morning Trump Hits… Just To Get Ya Going!

As we awaken on another Saturday we’ve almost made it through another week under the steady albeit chaotic “leadership” of our Acting President. Damn, he sure does a remarkable job of acting doesn’t he?

Anyhoo, some interesting articles to start the weekend.

Trump, citing no evidence, accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ plot to wiretap Trump Tower

Trump to Undo Vehicle Rules That Curb Global Warming

Scientists say Trump’s border wall would devastate wildlife habitat

 Trump Team’s Links to Russia Crisscross in Washington

Keith Olbermann mocks Trump’s leak confusion: If they are making up stories why are you searching for leaks

Following Trumps Address To Congress He Quickly Returns To The Old (True) Trump…

President Trump is back to playing Twitter in Chief. As his administration is coming under increasing scrutiny for contact with the Russian Government, and, Attorney General Sessions failure to disclose his contact with Russian official(s) during confirmation hearings, Trump has went into full attack mode. His modus operandi of course is to deflect attention from his administration by claiming democrats are hypocrites, having done the same themselves. He apparently fails to recognize his comparisons are ones of apples to oranges.

 

President Donald Trump, his administration under siege for contacts with Russian officials, is calling for “an immediate investigation” into Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer’s own ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s evidence? A 14-year-old photo of Schumer and Putin holding coffee and doughnuts in a New York City gas station.

The president on Friday tweeted a photo of the two men, calling for a probe into Schumer’s “ties to Russia and Putin” and called the New York senator “A total hypocrite!” Trump did not say where the photo came from, but Schumer quickly pointed out that it was taken in 2003 when Putin ventured to New York to celebrate the opening of a Russian-owned Lukoil gas station on Manhattan’s west side.

Several news organizations covered that event, which drew far more political star power than the average gas station opening.

Schumer, in his own tweet, said he would “happily talk” under oath about his meeting with Putin, which took place “in full view of press and public.”

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Trump’s tweet came just hours after the conservative website Drudge Report made the photo its lead image. And that was a day after the photo was unearthed by the pro-Trump blog Gateway Pundit, which ran it with the headline “Where’s the outrage?”

Trump targeted congressional Democrats for their encounters with Russians over the years even though the party’s criticism of Attorney General Jeff Sessions centered on his failure to acknowledge his meetings when questioned at his Senate confirmation hearing and in written responses to the Judiciary Committee.

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Trump also tweeted Friday about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who was among the first to call for Sessions to resign.

In his tweet, Trump linked to a 2010 photo in which Pelosi and other lawmakers, including Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, are shown meeting with Russian officials, including then-President Dmitry Medvedev and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

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Pelosi then needled Trump by saying he didn’t “know the difference” between an official meeting photographed by the press and a “secret” meeting that Sessions “lied about under oath.”

It is not improper for elected officials to meet with foreign diplomats’.

See full article FOLBELOW THE FOLD.