Admittedly this holiday week for the incremental update to the Trump Russia Timeline has been one giant wait while the Government remains shutdown and Trump tries to bully and shame Democrats with disgusting accusations that they are somehow responsible for the death of two migrant kids who were in the custody of his CBP Officers.
It’s bullshit, everybody knows it bullshit, even Fox and Fools knows it bullshit.
You talk about a tragedy,” Fox News host Pete Hegseth opined. “There was the tragic death of two migrant children, which no one wants, everyone’s willing to talk about, obviously they were in bad shape when they went into custody but you still do everything you can.”
According to Hegseth, President Donald Trump took the issue “head on” with a tweet blaming “Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies” for the deaths of children.
“Border Patrol agents didn’t kill these migrant children!” Hegseth insisted.
“Of course not!” co-host Rachel Campos Duffy agreed.
“And neither did the Democrats,” co-host Ed Henry added, pushing back on Trump’s tweet.
“Well, they created policies that incentivize illegal immigration,” Hegseth shot back. “Not saying they killed them! But the policies are dumb.”
“Democrats are not the ones shouldering them being killed, let’s be clear,” Henry replied.
“I didn’t say that,” Hegseth complained.
“That’s what the president said,” Henry pointed out.
“It’s their policies!” Hegseth said. “It’s different than people.”
It’s not their policies. It’s the U.S. Constitution you’re having a problem with and the fact that it requires that Treaties Ratified by Congress actually become part of our Constitution, and in 1968 the U.S. Ratified the UN Convention on the Refugee in the aftermath of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.
US Asylum law requires that we accept refugee who apply for asylum whether they enter through an official port of entry or not.
Sec. 208. (a) Authority to Apply for Asylum.-
(1) In general. - Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien's status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 235(b).
The 1951 Refugee Convention is the key legal document that forms the basis of our work. Ratified by 145 State parties, it defines the term ‘refugee’ and outlines the rights of the displaced, as well as the legal obligations of States to protect them.
The core principle is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom. This is now considered a rule of customary international law
Current Democrats did not vote to ratify this treaty, or write the asylum laws which are based on them — and even if they did change these laws to ignore the rights of refugees, that law would be in violation of the treaty and unconstitutional which is why Trump has so easily rebuffed in the courts when he attempted to change asylum rules to limit the ability to apply only to those who had entered the “right” way….
And has also been slapped down with his attempt to block those trying to escape gang and domestic violence from being able to apply for asylum.
A federal judge on Wednesday blocked Trump administration policies that prevented immigrants who suffered gang violence or domestic abuse in their home countries from seeking asylum.
Emmet Sullivan, a US district court judge, declared that some of the guidance that the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued this year cannot be used to determine whether an immigrant has a credible fear of persecution or torture in their home countries, the first step to making an asylum claim in the US.
[...]
A further rebuke to Trump’s efforts came from a US judge in San Francisco who on Wednesday extended his decision blocking the Trump administration from enforcing a ban on asylum for any immigrants who illegally cross the US-Mexico border. Judge Jon Tigar ruled in favor of keeping the ban on hold pending the outcome of a lawsuit challenging it. The case could take months to resolve. He had previously blocked the ban for 30 days.
The ban conflicts with an immigration law that says immigrants can apply for asylum regardless of how they enter the US, Tigar said.
Democrats have nothing to do with this, the LAW and the Constitution have everything to do with it, but of course you then have the FoxFools try and twist this into a pretzel logic with the argument that it’s more compassionate to refuse to accept and block people literally running for their lives from having a safe place to go.
“Is it compassionate to have policies that incentivize people to bring children as a free pass to get in?” Campos-Duffy said, spinning the argument. “Because it’s easier, in fact, if you’re a smuggler — they are actually giving the immigrants that are coming over a lower price to bring them over if they bring a child with them. Because they are more likely to get over the border.”
“Children are definitely being used as pawns in this,” she continued. “And they’re dying. By the way, it’s not just dying. Thirty percent of girls are sexually assaulted, 20 percent of boys. This is a very dangerous journey. The compassionate thing to do would be to stop this.”
The idea that you’re less likely to be rejected and immediately deported if you have children with you is largely a misnomer. There is a 21 day limit on how long families can be detained which is based on the Flores decision which was established during Clinton Administration.
MARY LOUISE KELLY: The Flores lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court. Eventually, in 1997, the two sides signed a settlement that has governed treatment of migrant children in detention ever since. The Flores settlement has been revisited multiple times, most recently in 2015 when the Obama administration sought to carve out an exception for minors who had arrived in the U.S. with their parents. It came amid a surge in migrant families from Central America, and the administration wanted to detain some of them for as long as it took to process their cases. A federal judge in California said no, which brings us to yesterday when the Trump administration submitted a very similar request. And the same federal judge, Dolly Gee, is set to hear the case 33 years after Carlos Holguin first brought suit on behalf of Jenny Flores.
Right here Playboy’s WH reporter Brian Karem totally blasts all this entire wall scam by pointing out that people can tunnel under it and the real issue for Republicans is that they’re afraid of Mexican and Central Americans coming here is the fear that they might gain citizenship and eventually vote Democratic. He also points out that Trump got over $1 Billion for border security last year — and they’ve only spent 6% of that — so what the frack do they need another $5 Billion for something they haven’t even really started doing? And won’t work.
This is all one big distraction from the fact that Mueller is coming after him. He’s not satisfied with the written answers and still wants to interview Trump personally on the issue of obstruction of justice
while Fooliani is flailing around and giving up the ghost with his silly after-dinner act.
“What we see is a whole lot of table pounding by Mr. Giuliani,” he observed.
“When they can’t overcome the facts that are against them, they attack law enforcement, they attack the FBI, they attack prosecutors,” he explained. “I’ve had it happen to me many times over the years.”
“That is a sign of weakness by Giuliani and company,” he concluded.
“The only thing that he is contributing to the dialogue at this time is carbon dioxide,” he added.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has received at least $800,000 in campaign donations from a man with ties to Putin-allied oligarchs, which could explain why the Senator has been increasingly supportive of President Trump lately.
Ruth May, in a piece for the Dallas Morning News, details the donations from Len Blavatnik, "one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle."
Data from the Federal Election Commission show that Blavatnik's campaign contributions dating back to 2009-10 were fairly balanced across party lines and relatively modest for a billionaire. During that season he contributed $53,400. His contributions increased to $135,552 in 2011-12 and to $273,600 in 2013-14, still bipartisan.
In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik's political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.
In 2017, donations continued, with $41,000 going to both Republican and Democrat candidates, along with $1 million to McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund.
An infographic accompanying May's article notes the following:
Blavatnik contributed $800,000 to the Security is Strength PAC, associated with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., via Access Industries.
Blavatnik and oligarch Viktor Vekselberg met attending university in Russia years ago, and together they now own a 20.5% stake in Rusal, oligarch Oleg Deripaska's aluminum company.
Even the news that a Russian intelligence officer Victor Boyarkin was trying to shake down convicted Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort for the $18 Million that he owed Oleg Deripaska — yes, the same Oleg Deripaska who is partners with Vekselberg and Blavatnik who have been shoveling money at Trump, McConnel, Graham and Rubio — isn’t even a blip for Trump.
They’re betting none of this will matter because the fix is in with the GOP Senate.
We’ll see, because for a guy who got the ultimate escape hatch of pardoning anyway the Feds come after — he seems really really nervous and panicked these days.
Happy New Year.
Here are this weeks daily updates.
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December 25th —
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December 26th —
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CBP orders Medical checks for children after a second child dies in their custody.
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Trump claims the shutdown won’t end until the Dems agree to a Wall, or “whatever they call it” except he’s not even talking to the Dems. Reports are that he’s losing confidence in Mnuchin, so naturally Trump says he’s “very happy” with him. Jared and Ivanka slink off to Mar-A-Lago. Trump lawyers use the shutdown as an excuse to delay the Emoluments suit.
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Mueller’s Grand Jury case makes it to the SCOTUS.
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Huckabee defends Trump’s “Santa is marginal” comment by saying “it's not like he’s boiling the little girl's rabbit.”
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ICE dumps hundreds of migrants in downtown El Paso without any warning to aide agencies.
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WSJ reports that Whitaker fudged his academic honors and other documents.
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Trumpnugget Steve Cortez blames the market turmoil on Dems: ‘They are hellbent on impeaching this president’.
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Sanitorium claims “Obama strangled the economy” even though the crash started the year before he took office and he then had 7 straight years of economic growth, the last 6 of which Repubs blocked every economic bill he brought up.
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Trump visit troops in Iraq and uses the occasion as a campaign stop, criticizing Dems and signing #MAGAt hats. “Whatever it takes, we need a wall.” He also tells them that he gave them a 10% pay raise, which was their first in 10-years [Both claims are lies, they get a raise every years and the most recent one was 2.6%.] Since Trump doesn’t tweet today and attack either the Fed Chair or Mnuchin the Dow rebounds by 1,000 points.
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Foreign Policy reports how Trump’s repeated business failures with Casinos in Atlantic City killed his credit rating and forced him to do business with Russians who worked mostly in cash.
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Carter Page sues the DNC for “domestic terrorism” [which isn’t a crime] claiming that they paid for an crafted the Steele Dossier to defame him, using paperwork that appears he wrote himself without a lawyer.
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Jemele Hill has no regrets for calling Trump a White Supremacist: ‘I thought I was saying water is wet’.
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Morning Joe: “Trump is unhinged", and “there’s no adults left.”
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Retiring GOP Rep. Mark Sandford says Trump could lead to a “Hitler-like figure.” [Too Late.]
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December 27th—
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December 28th —
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December 29th —
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Former FBI Agent Clint Watts who served with JTTF says Trump’s wall is a giant waste of money. “This is something we could invest in — tighter, improved border security without putting up a wall, much more effective investing in our technological advances in the United States.”
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Neilsen travels to Yuma and continues attacking Dems for issues at the border. She claims that they’re not being allowed to “follow the laws as written” which his crap because they’re losing pretty badly in court for not following asylum law.
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Time Magazine reports that former Russian intelligence officer Victor Boyarkin “was a key link” between Manafort and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin says. “And he was offering ways to pay it back.” They also report that Boyarkin was question by Mueller but he told them to “go dig a ditch.”
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Trump rage tweets in response claiming again wrongly that “Mueller deleted 19,000 texts by Strzok and Page” when he nothing to do with that or the Time report on Manafort and Russians spies. Then he blames the deaths of two migrant children on Democrats. “Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally,” [That’s a ratified UN treaty on receiving refugees he’s arguing with, not Democrats.] Also 8-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo’s autopsy indicated that he had Influenza-B and when he was wrongly treated for a common cold and released when he had a fever of 103o . He also argues he’s waiting in the WH for Democrats to come over and make an offer on the wall, but then says they’re “too busy with Presidential harassment” [They’re hiring, but they haven’t even started yet.] ignoring the fact that McConnell won’t make any deal until Trump approves it first. Then he freezes the 2.1% pay increase that was scheduled for Federal workers, just to be a complete dick to those who actually are still receiving their pay.
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MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner reveals Giuliani’s weakness: “When they can’t overcome the facts that are against them, they attack law enforcement, they attack the FBI, they attack prosecutors,” he explained. “I’ve had it happen to me many times over the years.”
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Trump supporter Joseph Borelli get smacked down hard by CNN host Victor Blackwell and Richard Painter when he calls the media “holier than though” for pointing out Trump’s endless lies. “Let me finish, that was a comma,” the CNN host told him. “He also stood there and said this was the first they’d gotten a raise, which was not true. He was not telling the truth about how much the raise was, we’re now at 7,500 of these. Part of the reason you didn’t see this kind of display and tally [for Obama] is because there weren’t so many a day.”
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A foreign initiated malware cyber attack disrupts the distribution of the LA Times.
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FBI collects the fake green cards that Trump’s New Jersey golf club managers had provided their undocumented workers.
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December 30th —
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All hell breaks lose on Fox and Fools when host Ed Henry denied that Democrats are “killing migrant kids” at the border. “It’s their policies, not the people.” [It’s neither.]
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Kellyanne Conway — while in Florida — attacks Nancy Pelosi for being in Hawaii and not DC to negotiate with Trump, even though she’s NOT THE SPEAKER YET, Paul Ryan — who is still Speaker — has shutdown the House and Trump already reneged on their previous deal after it passed both Houses. Then she blames the death of migrants kids on Democrats just like Trump, even though the journey and dehydration isn't what killed them, but if it had been they would have been dehydrated and exhausted because there's a 131 mile wall at El Paso already.
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Lindsey Graham yet again blames Obama for the Iraq pull out and snaps “Bullshit” when Dana Bash mentions that the withdrawal date was part of a status of forces deal negotiated by Bush. [Yeah, ok, so you would’ve have kept out Troops in without immunity for prosecution? Also ISIS had started in 2004 inside Camp Bucca while Bush was President then moved to Syria — so us having Troops in Iraq wouldn’t have stopped them growing in Syria, and when Obama called for taking more action in Syria asking for Authorization for Military Force in 2013, Republicans — including YOU Lindsey — refused to even vote on the bill, so Obama postponed it.]
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Former Afghanistan Commander Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal says Trump is “immoral” and that by planning for withdrawal without negotiating a cease fire with the Taliban first the U.S. has “basically traded away the biggest leverage point we have.”
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Gen. John Kelly does an exit interview with the LA Times and basically brags that his main legacy is that he stopped Trump from doing things that were just pretty much bonkers and he blames the separation policy on Jeff Sessions. He also says “To be honest, it’s not a wall.”
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Howard Dean says Trump's staff is ‘terrified’ because he’s ‘mentally incapacitated’ and thinks he’s winning the wall fight.
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Former Prosecutor Guy Lews says he’s surprised that the FBI is investigating the fake green cards and ID that Trump's staff provided their undocumented workers at his New Jersey Golf Course rather than ICE, although he doubts it will impact Trump personally.
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Trump has a 2-hour lunch with Lindsey Graham who comes out and says that there may be room to negotiate on DACA, TPS and some kind of version of border security. “The wall is a metaphor, can we stop hating each other enough up here to find a way forward that would be a win-win.” [You Repubs started it, and haven’t stopped yet.] Then Trump calls his right-wing buddies up to promise he hasn't given up on “the wall”, even though he basically told Graham he’s given up on the wall.
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Steve Cortez continues to claim “Mexico will pay for the wall” eventually through the new NAFTA deal, even though that’s financially nuts.
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Defense Attorney Randy Zelin says that Giuliani would have never accepted anyone talking to him as US Attorney the way he talks about Mueller. “Hell no!” Zelin exclaimed. “I’ll tell you when Mr. Rudy Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of New York, no one would dare speak like that about him or any of his assistants.”
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December 31st —
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Surprising no one, Elizabeth Warren announces her bid for 2020.
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Mattis tells the Troops to “Hold Fast” and “Defend the Constitution” with his farewell.
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MSNBC Anchor Yasmin Vossoughian reports that apparently nobody qualified wants to be Defense Secretary meaning that Shanahan might be Acting SecDef indefinitely.
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Trump tweet screams he’s not “flip-flopping” and says he definitely wants a concrete wall, mostly, while sitting home alone at the WH suggests he may slowdown the pullout from Syria and whines: “I am the only person in America who could say that, ‘I’m bringing our great troops back home, with victory,’ and get BAD press,”
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The FSB in Moscow arrests US citizen Paul Whelan during an “espionage operation.”
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Former Federal Prosecutor Glenn Kirschner says that indictments for Wikileaks and Assange are likely to be submitted by Mueller in 2019.
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Democrats prepare to re-submit the clean CR with $1.3 Billion in border security that passed both Houses in early December as we reach the 10th day of the shutdown.
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GOP Strategist Scott Jennings says they’re betting they can push a “crazy town” narrative against Democrats hoping they’ll overreach with all their investigations of Trump and people will reach “outrage fatigue”
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Trump tweets lies that he’s “in the oval office” waiting for Democrats to come to him to negotiate, but Playboy WH correspondent Brian Karem looks outside at the Oval and can tell he's not there because there’s no marine guard in place.
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WaPo’s Matt O’Brien says that Trump’s tax cut has failed to bring back $5 Trillion in foreign investment (only reaching $141 Millions so far), that most of it has been used for stock buy backs, and making rich people richer — not creating jobs, or increasing wages — while exploding the deficit.
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The Hill reports that DC Lobbyists are growing concerned they may be targeted by Mueller using a WWII-era law against foreign propaganda.
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Putin tells Trump that Moscow is ready for a chat. [This would be a call from the Home Office.]
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Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone erupt in a fued as they feel the heat from Mueller’s breath on their neck.