Donald Trump Presidency-Day One

[Stavros]

Collinswriters can speak for himself but I think maybe he thinks the reaction to Kavanaugh has become hysterical rather than rational, and that his President is much the issue as Kavanaugh himself. I am not in the US so don't feel the full force of this, except to say that it seems to me this is how Americans are reacting, and that anyone who is placed into the public arena by this President must expect to become a ball in a game to be kicked from one side to the other. Kavanaugh appears to have been a poor choice, and may pay the price for it. Does it matter? There are plenty conservative judges to take his place.

[Stavros]

The Telegraph is the voice of English Conservatism, even known in some circles as the 'Torygraph'. Ambrose Evans Prichard has been writing for the paper for decades indeed, was Washington Bureau correspondent, and has written this article on Brett Kavanaugh (can you believe this jerk actually met Queen Elizabeth?) which starts-

Twenty-three years ago I crossed swords with a younger Brett Kavanaugh in one of the weirdest and most disturbing episodes of my career as a journalist.
What happened leaves me in no doubt that he lacks judicial character and is unfit to serve on the US Supreme Court for the next thirty years or more, whatever his political ideology.

It continues (in case the Telegraph hide this later behind their pay-wall)

To my surprise, the incident has suddenly become a second front in his nomination saga on Capitol Hill. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has accused him of violating secrecy laws by revealing the details of a federal grand jury.
“Disclosing grand jury information is against the law,” she told Politico. She said it also showed he had misled the Senate by assuring categorically that he had never leaked grand jury material to journalists.
Sen Feinstein released a ‘smoking gun’ document from the archive files of the Starr investigation. It shows Mr Kavanaugh’s efforts to suppress a news story about his wild cross-examination of a witness, including a wayward discussion of “genitalia” that particularly worried him.
This piqued my interest since I am named in the document and the witness – Patrick Knowlton – was in a sense ‘my witness’.
Sen Feinstein is doubtless unaware of the larger, surreal story behind that week, and what it might suggest about rogue operations at the heart of the US federal system.

The document is one of hundreds of papers released by the US National Archives this year. For me it has been a strange journey back in time, like reading your old STASI file in East Berlin. There is one handwritten note by a Starr prosecutor stating – obliquely – “Ambrose about to go off the deep end”. OK, nobody is perfect.
There were debriefing memos of clandestine meetings I had with federal agents and prosecutors. One from Shoney’s restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas; another from a dinner at the Occidental Grill in Washington (my old haunt).
Mr Knowlton had been called to the grand jury because of a story in the Telegraph. Little did I know then that I was about to turn this brave man’s life upside down.
He was a crime scene witness in the death of Vincent Foster, the White House aide and ex-law partner of Hillary Clinton. At the time this was a mystery case, a big story during my tenure as the Sunday Telegraph’s bureau chief in Washington.
I had tracked down Mr Knowlton and discovered that the Starr probe had never spoken to him, even though he had been the first person at the Fort Marcy death location and had highly-relevant information.
I showed him his FBI ‘302’ witness statement from the earlier, superficial Fiske probe. He had never seen the words attributed to him before.
Mr Knowlton was stunned. It contradicted his express assertions. He said the FBI had tried repeatedly to badger him into changing his story on key facts. Each time he refused. Now it appeared they had written in what they wanted to hear. He agreed to go public and accused the FBI of falsifying his witness statement. This was to court trouble.
As soon as the print edition of the Telegraph reached Washington, the Starr investigation issued a subpoena calling Mr Knowlton to the grand jury. He was to face questioning by Brett Kavanaugh.

Mr Kavanaugh was then a cocky 30 year-old from the affluent WASP suburbs of Northwest Washington, very much the country club boy with a high sense of his status, and Georgetown Prep and Yale Law School behind him, though only with a humdrum Cum Laude. If anybody was going to wind up my hard-scrabble, salt-of-America witness, it was this child of privilege.
What happened first was an eye-opener. Before testifying, he suffered two days of what appeared to be systematic intimidation by a large surveillance team. This was observed by two other witnesses, including Chris Ruddy, now the powerful chief executive of NewsMax.
Mr Ruddy called me in shock from Dupont Circle to recount what he saw. A deeply-shaken Mr Knowlton contacted me from his home several times, until his phone was cut off.

Veteran intelligence agents might recognise a method. It had the hallmarks of a boilerplate softening-up operation. In my view – unprovable – the objective was to frighten him before his grand jury appearance. It smacked of police state behaviour on the streets of Washington DC.
I informed Mr Starr’s office that their grand jury witness was being intimidated. So did Mr Knowlton’s lawyer, who asked for witness protection. Nothing was done. Mr Kavanaugh brushed it off, saying the Telegraph was behind all this mischief in order to “sell newspapers”.
When Mr Knowlton appeared at the grand jury – thinking he was doing his civic duty – he says he was subjected to two and a half hours of character assassination by Mr Kavanaugh. There was little attempt to find out what he knew about the Foster death scene.
Could it be that the witness was distraught and imagined much of this? Possibly. But Mr Knowlton and his lawyer later filed a federal lawsuit against FBI agents he claimed were working for Brett Kavanaugh, alleging witness tampering and a conspiracy to violate his civil rights. This eventually reached the US District Court in Washington DC. The quixotic case was impossible to prove. Yet it was the action of a man who clearly felt wronged. To this day he blames Mr Kavanaugh personally.

Thousands of documents from the Starr probe are still secret. Others are redacted. It is impossible to know whether Mr Kavanaugh was linked to any intimidation or obstruction of justice, but there is no doubt in my mind that he failed to protect the rights of his own grand jury witness.
This is not the place to revisit the Foster case, the electric third rail of US politics. But it is worth noting two points that touch on Mr Kavanaugh.
Few people are aware that the US federal prosecutor handling the death investigation at the outset, Miquel Rodriguez, had resigned earlier from the Starr investigation after a bitter dispute.
His resignation letter – later leaked – said he was prevented from pursuing investigative leads, that FBI witness statements did not reflect what witnesses had said, that the suicide verdict was premature, and that his grand jury probe was shut down just as he was beginning to uncover evidence. An informed source told me his work had been sabotaged by his own FBI agents.

The nub of the dispute was over compelling evidence of a wound in Foster’s neck, which contradicted the official version that Foster shot himself in the mouth and had essentially been suppressed. The key crime scene photos had vanished and the FBI labs said others were over-exposed and useless.
Mr Rodriguez, by then suspicious, slipped them to the Smithsonian Institution and had them enhanced. One showed a black stippled ring like a gunshot wound in the side of Foster’s neck. This remains secret but I have seen it.
The photo was pivotal. It confirmed what several people who handled the body had originally stated. I interviewed the first rescue worker on the scene and when I asked him about the mouth wound, he grabbed me, and said with frightening intensity: “listen to me buddy, Foster was shot right here,” jabbing his finger into my neck. He said the FBI had pressured him too into changing his story and that official narrative was a pack of lies.
Mr Kavanaugh’s reaction to the findings of his colleague can be found in the stash of released documents from the Starr inquiry. One says in his hand-written notes: “startling discovery”, “blew up portions of photo – trauma to the neck on rt side”, “appears to be bullet hole”.
He was presented with a long analysis by Rodriguez that ripped apart the earlier Fiske report and called for an open homicide investigation. This had huge implications for the Clinton presidency and caused an internal crisis in the Starr office. A decision was made to shut down that part of probe. Miquel Rodriguez said he was “forced out”. It was the end of the only genuine probe of the Foster death – conducted under oath – that had ever occurred.
Mr Kavanaugh faced a choice. He chose to go with the establishment rather than stick up for his colleague. This proved good for his career. He took over the grand jury, by then a legacy showpiece. His treatment of my witness revealed his colours.

Mr Kavanaugh went on to write the Starr Report on the Foster death. But Mr Knowlton got the last word, literally. He filed a 511-page report at the US Federal Court with evidence alleging a pattern of skullduggery, and asked that it be attached to the Starr Report.
The three top judges did not agree but they ordered that a shorter 20-page version be attached at the end, despite vehement protest from the Starr office. This had never happened before in the history of the office of the independent council.
This summary asserts that the FBI had “concealed the true facts”, that there had been witness tampering, and that the report had wilfully ignored facts that refuted its own conclusions. There it sits in perpetuity, a strange rebuke for Mr Kavanaugh by his own fellow judges on the federal bench.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was the Sunday Telegraph’s Washington Bureau Chief from 1992 to 1997
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/my-...ans-pritchard/

[filghy2]

You guys want to police how people think and, behave and anyone against it is an enemy of the people. I don't see Republicans pushing for that.
You guys pretend like there's no logic behind what Republicans do. You think you are the only ones that have the ability to reason?
And you guys are the ones saying that we must believe all women just because they are women. Some of you even believe all men are rapists, misogynistic, homophobic and all (this is now a popular line amongst Democrats).
They no longer think for themselves, they need people to think for them as a group.

Nice diatribe. Must have been very satisfying for you, especially with applause from the fearless types in the peanut gallery. But who actually said those things?

I don't suppose you realise how ironic it is that you use the term 'enemy of the people', which Trump has applied to any media that criticise him. If Republicans are such free-thinkers perhaps you could give us a list of those who don't think tax cuts for the rich are a panacea for every economic problem, who think that something should be done to control guns or that climate change is a problem requiring government action. Perhaps you could explain why Republican attitudes on free trade and Russia have done an about-turn since Trump.

The logic behind what Republicans do is unfortunately depressingly clear:
1. Use temporary control of the three arms of government to lock in a conservative majority in the Supreme Court and undermine government programs such as Obamacare.
2. Use control of the majority of states to tilt the electoral system in their favour through gerrymandering and voter suppression.
3. Use white christian identity politics to attract white working class support, while masking the real agenda of redistribution toward the rich.
4. Undermine independent sources of information such as the free media and expert analysis, while relying on tame media sources to hide the truth and spread misinformation.

[buttslinger]

I agree 100% with Filghy, and I'm going to nominate Stavros to Steve for the Hung Angels Literary Prize, but not only are the Republicans raping and pillaging, they have the nerve to claim VICTIM as well. It's going to take sticks and stones, torches and pitchforks, and millions of VOTES to shut Trump up. There is still a chance Trump could become the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party. There's nothing wrong with Trump that a jail cell won't cure, Instead of Impeachment, I think they should let an impotent Trump stay in the White House for two years as a constant reminder to Conservative Media and Redneck Voters what they hath wrought. Nobody wants Mike Pence to be President by default. No matter how you cut it, cleaning up this mess if going to be horrific.

[collinswriters]

If the Truth is ugly enough, people will prefer lies. Fox News isn't a Democrat problem, it's a United States problem.

There's absolutely no truth to this claim. Can you provide a link (or links) with credible evidence which shows beyond doubt that fox news should not be trusted or is a United States problem. Fox news reports the news as is or in favor of the Republicans but they don't lie. You simply don't like the truth.

[collinswriters]

Just as an addendum here: is it not completely obvious that Collinswriter has misrepresented his own views to seem like a moderate who is simply skeptical about the Democrats' behavior? I get along with plenty of conservatives and can have civil conversations with them but it's very difficult when someone pretends they're not right-wing and plainly are.

On one page he is saying he is just concerned about due process and then on another is saying he isn't sure Fox News is biased, is complaining about Obama without providing a reason and is claiming Trump is getting a bum rap and that people don't even know what they object to about him.

He realizes he's on a site where the readers are much more likely to liberal and so has presented himself in a completely misleading way. It's kind of irritating.

That is your opinion and all I said were my opinions. I never complained about Obama, I only talked about the media's activities during his tenure which is almost exactly the same thing Fox News is doing with regards to Trump.
I am being skeptical as I said and that's just it whether you like it or not. I don't have to think like everyone else.

[collinswriters]

I agree 100% with Filghy, and I'm going to nominate Stavros to Steve for the Hung Angels Literary Prize, but not only are the Republicans raping and pillaging, they have the nerve to claim VICTIM as well. It's going to take sticks and stones, torches and pitchforks, and millions of VOTES to shut Trump up. There is still a chance Trump could become the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party. There's nothing wrong with Trump that a jail cell won't cure, Instead of Impeachment, I think they should let an impotent Trump stay in the White House for two years as a constant reminder to Conservative Media and Redneck Voters what they hath wrought. Nobody wants Mike Pence to be President by default. No matter how you cut it, cleaning up this mess if going to be horrific.

As a self-proclaimed freethinker, I am NOT a Republican. I don't like all Trump's policies and I don't hate him in general.
In accordance with the constitution, why should Trump be locked up?
And what brought about Trump's impotency? How do you know that he is impotent?
Why should the Conservative media be reminded of anything? Don't they have the right to do what they do?

[collinswriters]

Nice diatribe. Must have been very satisfying for you, especially with applause from the fearless types in the peanut gallery. But who actually said those things?

I don't suppose you realise how ironic it is that you use the term 'enemy of the people', which Trump has applied to any media that criticise him. If Republicans are such free-thinkers perhaps you could give us a list of those who don't think tax cuts for the rich are a panacea for every economic problem, who think that something should be done to control guns or that climate change is a problem requiring government action. Perhaps you could explain why Republican attitudes on free trade and Russia have done an about-turn since Trump.

The logic behind what Republicans do is unfortunately depressingly clear:
1. Use temporary control of the three arms of government to lock in a conservative majority in the Supreme Court and undermine government programs such as Obamacare.
2. Use control of the majority of states to tilt the electoral system in their favour through gerrymandering and voter suppression.
3. Use white christian identity politics to attract white working class support, while masking the real agenda of redistribution toward the rich.
4. Undermine independent sources of information such as the free media and expert analysis, while relying on tame media sources to hide the truth and spread misinformation.

You asked "who actually said those things?"
My turn. Where did you find the claims you mentioned (4 of them) and who made them?
You said it's clear.

[filghy2]

You asked "who actually said those things?"
My turn. Where did you find the claims you mentioned (4 of them) and who made them?
You said it's clear.

So you want me to spend time finding sources for you, even though you have not bothered to provide a single piece of evidence for any of the claims you have made? I would do so if I thought you were genuinely interested, but nothing you've said so far suggests that. I note that you have ignored the considered responses by trish and broncofan to your previous post.

If you want people to take you seriously how about demonstrating that you are acting in good faith by providing evidence for your opinions and engaging with other people's arguments? If you want people to believe you are independent then you need to show it, not just assert it. At the moment you are acting more like a troll.

[peejaye]

Poor old Collin....he's probably on his way to the "funny farm" which is where most people end up who've had dealings with you fruit bats.
I just wish Trump had won the Nobel Peace prize to see you lot wetting yourselves for the next six months!