monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Cross-border special: Trump! Trudeau! Trade!
Just because Trump and Trudeau are trading barbs over tariffs, doesn't mean our two great nations can't work it out over the phone.

On July 15, Cross Country Checkup will broadcast live from Madison, Wis., where co-hosts Duncan McCue (CBC Radio) and Rob Ferrett (Wisconsin Public Radio) will take calls from Canada and the U.S.

Canadian and American callers can phone in, weigh in and hash out their trade differences on everything from dairy to softwood lumber and steel.

We're asking: Who is doing a better job on trade — Trump or Trudeau? Has the Canada-U.S. relationship changed? How do we avoid a trade war?

Join us live on Sunday starting at 4 p.m. ET (1 p.m. PT) on CBC Radio One, and streaming on cbc.ca and on the CBC Radio app.

he didn't even show basic, common, respect

Plump thinks a charitable foundation is a means of hiding money, tax-free, and then spending it on himself.

@Walter Hinteler,

Quote:

“Instead, we will be there to defend human rights, freedom of speech, democracy and freedom of the press.”

All the things European countries are losing.

Hate to say it, but that one is basically an outright lie. Freedom of speech in Europe and the UK????

Except that the first time you try to talk about Islam or the Kalergi plan or Muslim grooming gangs or taharrush gamea you go straight to prison, no trial, no process, no ******* nothing and Hinkey is sitting there talking about defending freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and democracy????

Like I say, all of those things depend upon governments fearing their own people at least as much as the people fear the governments and, in Europe and the UK, that situation does not exist.

We'll see what happens after Trump meets Putin, but if you're expecting some sort of agreement that will reveal how deeply the president is the Russian's pocket, you are going to be disappointed.

Former Fox News Channel chief political correspondent Carl Cameron has a warning for America: “The Trump team were colluding with the Russians in 2016 – and they are still colluding.”

TP

“Roger Stone’s success,” as Cameron had put it to ThinkProgress, “was having the connections and creating the opportunities for [Russian intelligence officer] Guccifer2.0 and other Russian groups to really start taking advantage of social media and pounding these negative memes that Hillary’s a crook, etc.”

President Trump called the European Union a “foe” of the United States in an interview which aired Sunday, just one day before his controversial — and still unexplained — meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Finland. Asked to name America’s “biggest foe globally right now” during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, the first answer that came to Trump’s mind was the E.U.

"У них маленькие члены такие, что не вижу, как им удается сохранить их количество".....

Comey was being investigated for political interference at time of firing

Former FBI Director James Comey was being investigated by the government’s Office of Special Counsel for potential Hatch Act violations at the time he was fired, according to new documents released Friday as part of a Freedom of Information Act case. The Hatch Act is the government’s prohibition on federal employees engaging in politics.

The OSC investigation was cut short by the firing, since the office doesn’t probe people once they’re out of government.

The documents show dozens of complaints filed against Mr. Comey with the OSC saying he interfered with the 2016 election by the way he handled the investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s secret emails.

“It’s too bad the OSC didn’t have Comey’s book and his memos before he was fired, because he has made the case — better than anyone else — that he was playing politics at the FBI, Mr. Clevenger said.

The investigation of James Comey is exactly what the country needs

The announcement by the Justice Department’s inspector general that his office will look into FBI Director James B. Comey’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s emails reopens painful questions about the 2016 election, but it is also welcome news. The country needs this — an objective, independent and thorough investigation of issues that have roiled the country for months and continue to stir heated debate.

The investigation will be able to unravel the set of events that began with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch’s June 2016 Phoenix airport tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton and that ended with the Nov. 6 letter.

Comey Confirms: In Clinton Emails Caper, the Fix Was In

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
April 28, 2018 9:24 AM

Before we turn first to leaking, some disclosure. I am fond of Jim Comey and have been for 30 years. I vigorously disagree with both his handling of the Clinton emails investigation and the manner in which the FBI has conducted what is supposed to be a classified, counterintelligence probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — not a public, government-orchestrated campaign of insinuation that Trump was complicit in Russian perfidy.

No doubt because of my personal regard for him and respect for his high-end ability, I am inclined to cut the former director slack. He was thrust into a no-win situation: It is not his fault that Democrats nominated a criminal suspect, or that Republicans nominated an irregular politician heedless of the norms of discretion and distance that a president should maintain when dealing with his law-enforcement subordinates.

Comey aside, I had no better friends in nearly 20 years as a federal prosecutor in New York than Dan Richman, the Columbia Law School prof through whom Comey transmitted information to the New York Times, and Pat Fitzgerald and Dave Kelley, Comey’s lawyers. These aren’t just former colleagues of mine; they are old friends. I haven’t tried to speak to any of them about this matter, but my esteem for them weighs on me — as does my duty to be an honest analyst. How well I resolve that tension is not for me to say; I can just tell you it is real.

...The fact that the memos were government property is important because the former director has posited a Clintonesque objection to accusations that he “leaked” information. He had already been fired when he gave the February 14 memo to Richman with instructions to pass it on to the Times. Thus, his theory goes, he was merely a private citizen passing along his personal aide-mémoire.

But in fact, the February 14 memo (the physical memo and its informational content) belonged to the government. Comey orchestrated the transmission of its contents to the media without authorization. That’s a leak, period.

Moreover... executive officials typically refuse in congressional testimony to answer questions about conversations with the president — the privilege belongs to the president. An executive official who discloses without authorization deprives the president the opportunity to assert the privilege lawfully.

Yes, the Fix Was In

In April 2016, Obama publicly stated that he did not want his party’s inevitable nominee charged with a crime. In making that assertion, Obama distorted the Espionage Act, falsely implying that it required proof of intent to harm the United States before someone could be convicted of mishandling classified information. The Justice Department adopted Obama’s erroneous intent standard, as, ultimately, did Comey.

The former director’s statements in the Brett Baier interview firmly establish that the decision not to indict Mrs. Clinton was based on Obama Justice Department standards, not on the terms of the statute.

Comey is trying to have it both ways: He wants you to accept that he made the decision not to prosecute on his own, out of fear that the Justice Department was tainted by bias in Clinton’s favor. Yet, when dismissing critics’ claims that the proof was more than adequate under the applicable law, he shrugs his shoulders and says, in effect, “What could I do? I was constrained by the Justice Department’s interpretation of the law.”

He knew Obama’s Justice Department would sweep Hillary’s violations under the rug, so he played along.

FBI has conducted what is supposed to be a classified, counterintelligence probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — not a public, government-orchestrated campaign of insinuation that Trump was complicit in Russian perfidy.