Tag: Trump bullying

Trump wants Mueller to investigate ‘the other side.’ There’s just one problem.

Wasn’t Trump just complaining that Mueller’s investigation was too broad?

President Donald Trump lashed out yet again on Thursday morning at Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into collusion between Vladimir Putin’s regime and the president’s 2016 campaign. In addition to Trump’s usual gripes about witch hunts, angry prosecutors, and “no collusion,” this time he criticized the investigators for not exceeding their legal mandate.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t…

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Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

….care how many lives the ruin. These are Angry People, including the highly conflicted Bob Mueller, who worked for Obama for 8 years. They won’t even look at all of the bad acts and crimes on the other side. A TOTAL WITCH HUNT LIKE NO OTHER IN AMERICAN HISTORY!

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The complaint that the “won’t even look at all of the bad acts and crimes on the other side” seems to flatly contradict Trump’s main argument — which is that the investigation has overstepped its legal mandate. He has argued in the past that the investigation is somehow illegal (it’s not), so it’s odd that he would now want an illegal investigation into his political enemies. He has previously demanded via Twitter that his Department of Justice open an investigation into whether his campaign was illegally surveilled and baselessly accused Hillary Clinton’s campaign of colluding with Russia, but having such a probe done by a prosecutor he believes lacks legal standing would no doubt undermine such an effort.

Trump Praises Gianforte for Physically Assaulting Reporter

‘Any guy who can do a body slam — he’s my guy,’ president says

Credit: News Live Insanemrbrain via YouTube screengrab

President Donald Trump on Thursday praised Montana Rep. Greg Gianforte for physically assaulting a reporter on the eve of a special election last year.

Addressing a rally in Missoula on his third trip to Montana this year, Trump at first only alluded to the 2017 incident. “Never wrestle him,” he said after calling Gianforte onstage.

But then the president went further.

View the complete October 18 article by Simone Pathé on the Roll Call website here.

John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash

The following commentary by John O. Brennan, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was posted on the New York Times website August 16, 2018:

That’s why the president revoked my security clearance: to try to silence anyone who would dare challenge him.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, Credit: Greg Nash

When Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s internal security service, told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn’t interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying. Over the previous several years I had grown weary of Mr. Bortnikov’s denials of Russia’s perfidy — about its mistreatment of American diplomats and citizens in Moscow, its repeated failure to adhere to cease-fire agreements in Syria and its paramilitary intervention in eastern Ukraine, to name just a few issues.

When I warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many years, he denied Russian involvement in any election, in America or elsewhere, with a feigned sincerity that I had heard many times before. President Vladimir Putin of Russia reiterated those denials numerous times over the past two years, often to Donald Trump’s seeming approval.

Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash.

View the complete article here.

Trump revokes John Brennan’s security clearance

The following article was posted on the Axios website August 15, 2018:

Credit: William B. Plowman, NBC, NBC NewsWire via Getty Images

President Trump has revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan due to “erratic conduct and behavior,” according to White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders at today’s press briefing.

Why it matters: Sanders said that Trump was using his “constitutional authority” as president to revoke Brennan’s clearance — something that has never been done before, according to Lawfare. Trump is also “evaluating action” regarding the current and former clearances of several other former intelligence and law enforcement officials like James Comey, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr.

The timing: The decision comes one day after Brennan responded to Trump’s infamous tweet calling former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman a “dog” with a tweet of his own: “It’s astounding how often you fail to live up to minimum standards of decency, civility, & probity. Seems like you will never understand what it means to be president, nor what it takes to be a good, decent, & honest person. So disheartening, so dangerous for our Nation.”

View the complete article here.

‘Like a dog’: Trump has a long history of using canine insults to dehumanize enemies

The following article by Philip Rucker was posted on the Washington Post August 14, 2018:

President Trump’s relationship with Omarosa Manigault Newman goes back to “The Apprentice,” but has turned sour with her tell-all book and White House tapes. (Jenny Starrs /The Washington Post)

In President Trump’s singular lexicon, there is no more vicious put-down than likening an adversary to a dog.

“Choked like a dog.”

“Fired like a dog.”

View the complete article here.

The Trump White House’s hypocritical, slippery slope on purging its critics’ security clearances

The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website July 23, 2018:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on July 23 that President Trump is “exploring the mechanisms to remove security clearance” for six former intelligence officials. (Reuters)

Now we know why President Trump complained about former intelligence officials being paid as cable analysts. On Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was looking into whether to revoke the security clearances of some of his chief intelligence and law enforcement critics for, among other things, “politicizing” and “monetizing” their past positions.

Here are the people Sanders listed:

  • Former CIA director John Brennan
  • Former FBI director James B. Comey
  • Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.
  • Former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden
  • Former White House national security adviser Susan E. Rice
  • Former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe

The potential move appears mostly symbolic. Brennan and Hayden quickly noted that they don’t use their clearance anymore. And McCabe has already lost his clearance, given that he was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The fact that McCabe was included on the list suggests this wasn’t exactly a well-researched trial balloon — if it even was researched.

View the complete article here.

Trump’s blacklist: White House considers targeting security clearances

The following article was posted on the Axios website July 23, 2018:

Credit: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Monday that President Trump is considering revoking former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance, as well as those of several other former intelligence officials, claiming they’ve “politicized and in some cases actually monetized their public service security clearances” and have made “baseless accusations” against the president.

Why it matters: These former intelligence officials have all been quick to criticize the president, with Brennan being a leading voice of opposition following Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. As some White House reporters pointed out in the briefing, revoking their clearances has the optics of political retaliation.

Others on Trump’s blacklist: Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Advisor Director Michael Hayden, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

View the complete post here.

Trump Assails Critics and Mocks #MeToo. What About Putin? ‘He’s Fine’

The following article by Emily Cochrane was posted on the New York Times website July 5, 2018:

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — President Trump lobbed personal and derogatory attacks at two Democratic senators, mocked the #MeToo movement and vouched for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday during a freewheeling, raucous rally ostensibly intended to solidify support for Montana’s Republican Senate candidate.

Taunting Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, with a refusal to apologize for calling her “Pocahontas,” Mr. Trump imagined a debate during which he would gently throw an ancestry testing kit at Ms. Warren to make her prove the Native American heritage she has controversially claimed.

“We are going to do it gently because we’re the #MeToo generation, so we have to be very careful,” the president said to scattered laughter, adding that he would donate $1 million to charity if Ms. Warren followed through. Mr. Trump, who has faced accusations of sexual assault and harassment, announced earlier in the day that Bill Shine, who was ousted from Fox News over his handling of the network’s harassment scandals, would take a position on his administration’s communications staff.

View the full article on the New York Times website here.

Trump Lashes Out in Error-Filled Tweet About the Media Criticizing His Poor Grammar and Spelling

The following article by Cody Fenwick was posted on the AlterNet website July 3, 2018:

It’s not just the erroneous capitalization that’s the problem.

Credit: AP Photo, Evan Vucci

President Donald Trump decided to lash out on Twitter at the media once again on Tuesday — this time for critiquing his poor spelling and grammar as displayed in his tweets.

And as usual, the tweet was filled with errors:

The first error is that Trump claims to have written books. This is almost certainly false. It’s not clear he’s written any of the books with his name on them. His most famous book, The Art of the Deal, was written with ghostwriterDavid Schwartz, and other ghostwriters were hired for his other books.

View the full article on the AlterNet website here.

Let’s Not Confuse Civility With Surrender

The following article by column Connie Schultz was posted on the creators.com website June 27, 2018:

By Guanaco and subsequent editors – SVG source (version of 17:56, 30 Sep 2011), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=479191

Before I sat down to write this column about what it means to be civil in today’s political climate, I took my dog for a walk through our neighborhood.

We live in the largest development built in the city of Cleveland since World War II. It’s diverse, racially and economically, and home to many LGBTQ families, too. On most days, you can’t walk half a block without talking to a neighbor. This morning, that neighbor was Kenn Johnson, who shared a recent story about what it’s like to be a 56-year-old black man shopping in a drugstore in today’s America.

Johnson has his master’s in psychology and has spent much of his career supervising those who work with people with disabilities. More recently, he has started his own consulting business, and he’s also a political organizer.

He uses a skin product that is available, in our neighborhood, at only two drugstores of the same chain. At one of those stores, he was scanning the shelves in the cosmetics aisle, when a voice on the loudspeaker announced, “Customer needs assistance in the cosmetics aisle.”

View the rest of the article here.