monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Has anyone seen any Russian collusion besides Killary's and the DNC's yet?

And of course, Trump serves Putin's purpose because he is making noises about the US withdrawing from NATO, which has kept Russia out of Western Europe since the end of WWII.

If U.S. President Donald Trump‘s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen ends up speaking with special counsel Robert Mueller, he may have some information that would be pertinent to his investigation into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

That information pertains to thousands of emails that were hacked from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and released by Wikileaks.

Trump knew about these emails before they were released, and Cohen knew he knew, his lawyer Lanny Davis told CNN Wednesday.

Davis had earlier said that Cohen would be willing to cooperate with the Russia probe, and that he’d refuse any pardon from the president.

Speaking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, Davis said, “I don’t know if it’s a smoking gun or how decisive it is, what I’m suggesting is that Mr. Cohen was an observer and was a witness to Mr. Trump’s awareness of those emails before they were dropped, and it would pertain to the hacking of the email account.”

Davis also said that the emails “could only have been derived through illegal hacking from a Russian agency called Wikileaks.”

In the interview with CNN, Davis also responded to Trump’s claim to Fox News that the campaign charges to which Cohen pleaded guilty were not violations because they came from his own funds.

“It’s an incorrect understanding of the law,” Davis said.

“What the prosecutors found is that the money was paid two weeks from the election, motivated by a fear and a threat from [Stormy] Daniels that she was going to go public right before the election.

“So the finding of the prosecutors, subject to a jury and a trial, is that the motivation as a principal political purpose, made that donation illegal and a felony.”

Davis then repeated a point he made on Tuesday, the day Cohen pleaded guilty.

“If it’s a felony for my client Michael Cohen, it’s certainly a felony for the man who, according to the prosecutors, directed and coordinated the payment of that illegal campaign contribution.”

Glad to see you back.

I live here and I’m not overly concerned about it either.

It’s strange when people make Chicago out to be dangerous when it’s per-capita numbers place it in pretty good company as far as America is concerned.

Finn wrote:

Here is how I summarize this thread:

WE HATE TRUMP

We also hate Adolf Hitler.
So, what's your point?

coldjoint wrote:

Just wish him dead,

Nobody wants trump dead.

Let him rot in jail with the rest of his bunch.

LOCK HIM UP!!
LOCK HIM UP!

President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign was fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for campaign reporting violations — one of the largest fees ever levied against a presidential campaign, POLITICO has learned.

The fine — laid out in detail in FEC documents that have yet to be made public — arose from an audit of the campaign, which was published in April. POLITICO obtained a copy of the conciliation agreement detailing the fine, which was sent to Sean Cairncross, the chief lawyer for the Republican National Committee, one of the groups that filed complaints about the campaign’s FEC reporting from 2008.

The major sticking point for the FEC appeared to be a series of missing 48-hour notices for nearly 1,300 contributions totaling more than $1.8 million — an issue that lawyers familiar with the commission’s work say the FEC takes seriously. The notices must be filed on contributions of $1,000 or more that are received within the 20-day window of Election Day.

More than half of those contributions were transferred from the Obama Victory Fund,a joint committee between the campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Sources said the fine resulting from the settlement agreement has been paid, with $230,000 coming from the Obama campaign’s coffers and the remainder from the DNC.

The document outlined other violations, such as erroneous contribution dates on some campaign reports. The Obama campaign was also late returning some contributions that exceeded the legal limit.

Not my list, but let us take a look so far.

Cohen did indeed plead guilty to two campaign finance violations -- making an excessive campaign contribution and causing an unlawful corporate contribution -- stemming from payments Cohen made to keep two women's allegations of an affair with Trump out of the public eye during the 2016 campaign. Cohen was subsequently reimbursed by the Trump Organization as part of a "retainer agreement" which prosecutors said did not exist and was not in connection with any legal fees.

Both of the campaign finance-related felonies to which Cohen plead guilty carry a maximum of five years in prison per charge.

"What he admitted to is a crime. It's a violation of a law and he plead to a criminal violation of that law. Therefore it's a crime. He plead to a crime," said Larry Noble, the former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission who is now senior director at the Campaign Legal Center.

Violations of campaign finance law can be handled as a civil matter by the FEC or as a criminal matter by the Justice Department. The violations become a criminal matter when those laws are broken in a "knowing and willful" manner, Noble said.

"Usually, there's no allegation that it's knowing and willful. Once you cross over to knowing and willful, they can be criminal," Noble said.

That's where the second part of Trump's tweet, drawing a comparison between Cohen's guilty plea and a campaign finance violation by President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, falls apart.

Obama's campaign was fined $375,000 by the FEC -- one of the largest fines levied against a presidential campaign -- for missing reporting deadlines on $1.8 million in contributions. The violation did not rise to the level of a criminal violation because there was no indication the misreporting was willful and the fine was assessed as part of a conciliation agreement with the FEC.

"There's no comparison," Noble told CNN. "There's no presidential campaign that I'm aware of that hasn't had campaign finance violations. A lot of money flows through them and they almost all have some violations."

"What is unusual is having a violation where it's been alleged that the candidate and now president was allegedly involved and personally directed the violation," Noble said.

During Wednesday’s press briefing, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stuck to a limited set of talking points regarding Michael Cohen’s guilty plea Tuesday that implicated President Trump in campaign finance violations. She repeatedly insisted that Trump simply did nothing wrong and that there are “no charges against him.”

When asked if Trump lied about the hush money payments to women he’d had affairs with, Sanders called it a “ridiculous accusation.”

Contrary to Sanders’ admonishment, Trump’s narrative is very much in doubt.

Back in April, Trump said in an interview on Air Force Once that he had no knowledge of the $130,000 payment that Cohen — his personal lawyer — made to Stormy Daniels and that he also didn’t know where Cohen had gotten that money. But in his plea agreement, Cohen stated under oath that he made the payments to both Daniels and Karen McDougal at Trump’s behest for the “purpose of influencing [the] election.”

A recording made public last month reveals Cohen and Trump speaking directly about how to arrange the $150,000 payment to McDougal. Though Trump suggests writing a check, that payoff ended up being made by American Media Inc, thanks to Trump’s friendship with its chairman.

Trump also further undermined his claim to have not known about the payments in an interview Wednesday. Fox News teased a clip of the interview, due to air in full Thursday morning, in which Trump claimed he only knew about the payments “later on.” But mere seconds later, Trump also said the payments didn’t come from the campaign, “they came from me.”

Trump is apparently trying to have his cake and eat it too by trying to suggest that Cohen’s payments weren’t illegal while also maintaining his distance from them.

The indictment lays out that Cohen personally made the payment to Daniels for the purpose of keeping her story about having an affair with Trump out of the election. Because $130,000 far exceeds what can be legally contributed to a presidential campaign, it was a clear campaign finance violation.

Trump seems to believe that because he personally reimbursed Cohen, that somehow ameliorates what was illegal about Cohen’s payment. New documents show that Trump’s real estate company authorized reimbursing Cohen for the payment to Daniels in February 2017, after he’d already taken office. There’s thus no way the money came from Trump in 2016, and it likewise makes no sense that Trump made a payment but simultaneously didn’t know about it. Either way, he’s lying.

Despite Trump’s increasing willingness to take ownership of the payments, the White House continues to deny that Trump had an affair with either woman.

Alan Dersowitz has says their is no crime. Case closed.

Enough said. Bias city.

President Trump on Wednesday night said he was directing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures,” as well as the “killing of farmers.”

He then quoted Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, who earlier Wednesday had railed against plans by South Africa’s ruling party to pursue constitutional changes allowing the government to redistribute land without compensation. The measure is designed to redress racial inequalities that have persisted nearly a quarter-century after the end of apartheid in 1994.

The episode represented a case study in how the president runs his administration. The apparent basis of Trump’s directions to the nation’s top diplomat were accusations leveled by Fox — accusations that echo talking points used by white-nationalist groups, including an organization that has referred to “the so-called apartheid” and the “so-called ‘historical injustices of the past.’”