monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I imagine you or someone like you is going to spin the above mentioned crimes as not crimes. Well, I have enough of the BS the last two years to waste more time on arguing about it.

President Trump claimed Monday that he deserves a Nobel Prize for “a lot of things” but complained that the committee that hands out the awards does so unfairly.

The comment came during a bilateral meeting in New York with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan after Trump said he was “ready, willing and able” to mediate between India and Pakistan in a decades-old dispute over the territory of Kashmir.

“If you can solve this outstanding issue of Kashmir, very likely and definitely you’ll be deserving a Nobel Prize,” a Pakistani journalist told Trump.

“I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t,” Trump said.

Mueller cleared Trump and his team of working with the Russians.

Every single news media channel spent the 2 years claiming Trump was guilty.

...then all of those news channels saw their ratings drop when people realized they had been lied to for 2 1/2 years.

Media speculation was driven by their hatred of Trump...

Muellers team found nothing...

The meeting was a setup and had nothing to do with the election.

She deleted all the emails and wiped it clean with Bleach Bit, how would the FBI know anything?

The FBI never got to look at her server, which was illegal and was hacked.

How many corrections have they had to post in the last 2 years?

As I said before, they found no evidence of conspiracy, that's all.

That's simply not true.

That's your personal interpretation. People who study the media report similar drops in viewing numbers when long running news stories reach their conclusion.

Media speculation was fueled by Trump's behavior.

They found plenty.

A number of indictments were handed down.

They also found evidence that Trump may have obstructed justice but they couldn't indict him due to Justice Department protocols.

You're out in left field.

They were told the Russians had information on Clinton. Trump was so excited about this that he made reference to a real big story that was going to break.

They went to the meeting to secure information from a foreign source which showed their willingness to collude with Putin's Russia.

You said her server got hacked.

If they never got to look at it why do you say it was hacked?

Nuh-uh.

Proof, links facts?

By the Chinese, when she was still Sec of State.

Why else would she destroy evidence?

The server was illegal, she had no right to have such a server and the FBI would have found the proof.

A US police officer has been suspended after arresting two six-year-olds at a school in Orlando, Florida.

One of the two was handcuffed after throwing a tantrum and kicking a teacher, the girl's grandmother told US media.

The officer, Dennis Turner, was suspended as officials said he did not secure the necessary permissions to arrest the two.

Prosecutors say they will try to erase the arrests from their records.

Both children were charged with misdemeanour battery. Little about the other arrest - which was in a separate incident - has been made public.

"The children will not be prosecuted, and just as importantly I am looking into options that may reverse the legal damage such as removing the arrest from the children's records," said State Attorney Aramis Ayala in a news conference.

Police Chief Orlando Rolón said in a statement: "As a grandparent of three children less than 11-years-old this is very concerning to me. Our department strives to deliver professional and courteous service."

Neither child has been identified by police, but the grandmother of one of the children said she suffered sleep apnoea which had contributed to her behaviour.

Meralyn Kirkland told NBC that when she went to retrieve her granddaughter from jail, "they told us we had to wait a few minutes because [she] was being fingerprinted, and when she said fingerprinted it hit me like a tonne of bricks".

"No six-year-old child should be able to tell somebody that they had handcuffs on them and they were riding in the back of a police car and taken to a juvenile centre to be fingerprinted, mug shot."

According to Orlando Police, Mr Turner was retired from the police force but was working as security in the school as part of the local department's reserve unit.

Schools have increasingly turned to hiring part-time officers since a series of deadly school shooting attacks, such as on Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

According to AFP, 46% of US schools have an officer present on campus for at least one day of each week.

House Barrels Toward Impeachment Decisions as Democratic Resistance Crumbles

WASHINGTON — House Democrats hurtled on Tuesday toward a consequential set of decisions about the potential impeachment of President Trump, weighing a course that could reshape his presidency amid startling allegations that he sought to enlist a foreign power to aid him politically.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, who has stubbornly resisted a rush to impeachment, appeared to be rapidly changing course, as lawmakers from every corner of her caucus lined up in favor of filing formal charges against Mr. Trump if the allegations are proven true, or if his administration continues to stonewall attempts by Congress to investigate them.

One possibility was the formation of a special committee — reminiscent of the one created in 1973 to investigate the Watergate scandal — to look into the president’s dealings with Ukraine and potentially lay the groundwork for articles of impeachment based on the findings.

Ms. Pelosi planned a meeting Tuesday afternoon to coordinate strategy with the six committee chairmen who have led the investigations of Mr. Trump, followed by a broader closed-door meeting of all of the chamber’s Democrats to brief them and gauge their mood in light of the changed circumstances.

Calls for impeachment have mounted, with a growing list of vulnerable moderates — until now the chief skeptics of the move — stating that they believed articles of impeachment would be the only recourse if reports about attempts by Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer to push Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son were true.
“The first responsibility of the president of the United States is to keep our country safe, but it has become clear that our president has placed his personal interests above the national security of our nation,” Representative Antonio Delgado, Democrat of New York and one of the party’s most politically vulnerable freshman moderates, wrote on Tuesday. “I believe articles of impeachment are warranted.”

Progressives, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a leading Democratic candidate for president, demanded even faster action. “It must start today,” she said of impeachment.

Mr. Trump, in New York for his second day of diplomatic meetings at the United Nations, dismissed the effort as a desperate political ploy by Democrats, and continued to maintain he had done nothing wrong.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “It’s a witch hunt. I’m leading in the polls. They have no idea how they stop me. The only way they can try is through impeachment. This has never happened to a president before.”
House Republicans’ campaign arm blasted out a statement predicting Democrats would be ensuring the end of their House majority if they followed through.

The shift in outlook among Democratic lawmakers has been rapid, and could yet still turn away from impeachment if exculpatory evidence comes to light. The developments that have turned the tide began less that two weeks ago, when Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the Intelligence Committee chairman, first revealed the existence of a secretive whistle-blower complaint that the intelligence community’s internal watchdog had deemed “urgent” and credible but the Trump administration had refused to share with Congress.

That complaint remains secret, and lawmakers are fighting to see it, but news reports have established that the complaint was related, at least in part, to a July call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in which Mr. Trump pressed the foreign leader to investigate Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter, for corruption.

Just days earlier, Mr. Trump had ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine. While Mr. Trump denies having explicitly linked the two issues, lawmakers believe they are connected and have demanded documentation that could clarify the situation.

The campaign of Mr. Biden, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, announced he would make a midafternoon statement on the matter from Wilmington, Del.

WASHINGTON — The last time he was accused of collaborating with a foreign power to influence an election, he denied it and traveled the country practically chanting, “No collusion!” This time, he is saying, in effect, so what if I did?

Even for a leader who has audaciously disregarded many of the boundaries that restrained his predecessors, President Trump’s appeal to a foreign power for dirt on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is an astonishing breach of the norms governing the American presidency.

That his phone call with Ukraine’s leader took place literally the day after the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III testified to Congress about Russian interference in the 2016 election demonstrated that Mr. Trump took no lessons from that episode about the perils and propriety of mixing his own political interests with international relations.

If anything, the president has grown even more defiant since Mr. Mueller found insufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, almost as if having avoided charges, he is daring the establishment to come after him again. The man who once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan without consequence seems to be testing whether he can do the political equivalent.

What he’s learned is you can get away with just about anything if you’re willing to gamble and you have zero shame,” said Gwenda Blair, a biographer of the Trump family. “He had just outbluffed the old-school way of holding people to account, so what the heck, why not go for it in the phone call to the new, young and vulnerable Ukrainian president?”

Mr. Trump has openly acknowledged raising the topic of Mr. Biden during a July 25 phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in which he urged the newly inaugurated government to crack down on corruption. While Mr. Trump denied applying pressure to investigate Mr. Biden, he said it would “have been O.K. if I did.”

Likewise, he said that he did not threaten during the call to cut off security aid if Ukraine failed to investigate Mr. Biden. But he also did not explain why he blocked the aid, and he quickly added that “we’re giving a lot of money away to Ukraine” and it was legitimate to want to ensure that an aid recipient was “going completely to be not corrupt.”

In speaking with reporters while in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, Mr. Trump was in a combative mood on Monday, brimming with hyperbole and invective, at one point even casually saying that if Republicans had done what Mr. Biden had done, “they’d be getting the electric chair right now.”

Mr. Trump scored his lawyer’s rambling and confusing appearance on a CNN show last week like a boxing match. “Rudy Giuliani took Fredo to the cleaners,” he said, using a derogatory nickname for the show’s host, Chris Cuomo. And the president excoriated reporters in the room with him. “You are crooked as hell,” he charged.

Mr. Giuliani has been Mr. Trump’s point person in pushing Ukraine for an investigation, and in recent days, he has thrown out a dizzying series of allegations and conspiracy theories about the country involving Hillary Clinton, George Soros and others plotting to take down Mr. Trump in 2016.
But now it is Mr. Trump whose intervention with Ukraine is at issue, and whether it constitutes an abuse of power will fall to Congress to decide.

After bulldozing past so many other controversies, Mr. Trump has now exposed himself to a greater risk of impeachment in the House than ever before, even if conviction in the Senate remains a remote possibility.

“I do regard this as a transgression by the president even more egregious and dangerous, and even more clearly calling for impeachment, than the many that have come before it,” said Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard law professor and an author of “To End a Presidency,” a book on impeachment.
“It’s difficult to imagine a purer example, even on the president’s own account of his conduct, of why the Constitution’s framers thought it essential to include the impeachment power,” he added.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor, said that if reports about the president’s actions were accurate, it would be “the latest and perhaps most disturbing example in a series of actions that display a profound disregard for presidential norms by this president.”

Plenty of questions remain unanswered, and Congress will now press for more information, particularly the release of a transcript of the call with Mr. Zelensky as well as the complaint filed by an American government whistle-blower raising alarms. A clear focus of the inquiry will be the blocked aid.
Some critics said it did not even matter if Mr. Trump explicitly linked the two issues in the call; simply using the power and prestige of his office to lean on a foreign leader for help in a domestic political contest by itself could justify impeachment, they said. And suspending the aid, they said, appeared to be a corrupt exercise of presidential power to benefit himself, whether he mentioned it to Mr. Zelensky or not.

But Mr. Trump’s defenders said he was being targeted for partisan and political reasons, his every move interpreted in the most cynical light and distorted to tarnish his reputation, while adversaries like Mr. Biden are given a free pass.

The United States “routinely pushes foreign countries to launch broad anti-corruption initiatives as well as to undertake criminal investigations or prosecutions of specific persons, both Americans and foreigners,” said David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

“And we routinely back up such requests with threats and blandishments,” he added. “So, political issues aside, there is nothing inherently unusual about Trump’s request to Zelensky.”

Mr. Trump and his allies argue that Mr. Biden is the one who abused his power when he was vice president by threatening to hold up $1 billion in American loan guarantees to Ukraine unless it fired its chief prosecutor. At the time, his younger son, Hunter Biden, worked for a Ukrainian oligarch who had come under scrutiny by the prosecutor.

The ouster of the Ukrainian prosecutor, who was widely believed to be turning a blind eye to rampant corruption, was the consensus position of the Obama administration as well as European governments and international institutions at the time. No evidence has emerged to indicate that Mr. Biden acted to protect his son. However unseemly it might be for a family member to appear to cash in on the vice president’s name, no authorities in either country have alleged illegality by either Biden.

Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as White House communications director but has now broken with the president, said Mr. Trump was not interested in corruption but re-election. “He is going after Biden hard because he knows Biden destroys him in a general election, and so he will do and say anything to anybody to knock him out now,” Mr. Scaramucci said.

The furor that has developed in recent days will force the White House,
Congress, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and perhaps even the courts to confront once again the question of where the lines of political standards are drawn and whether Mr. Trump crossed over them.
In more than two years in office, Mr. Trump has kept his properties, which do business with the federal government and foreign officials, and has even proposed hosting next year’s Group of 7 summit at his Doral resort in Florida. He has repeatedly called on the Justice Department to investigate his political rivals, and he fired an attorney general who he complained did not protect him from Mr. Mueller. The president has even sought the repudiation of weather forecasters who contradicted his hurricane prediction.

In recent days, his lawyers have asserted that not only can Mr. Trump not be indicted while serving as president, he cannot even be criminally investigated, a far more sweeping claim of immunity than ever found by courts. And Mr. Trump has made clear he sees no problem in accepting derogatory information from foreign governments, saying, “I’d take it,” even after the Mueller report.

That leaves the impression with allies and adversaries alike that Mr. Trump is focused on his own interests. “The president will say and do anything for his own personal pursuits and not for the benefit of the country,” said Heather A. Conley, the director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

All of which, she said, has damaged the notion of America as a “shining city on a hill,” as Mr. Reagan put it, the country that would stand for principle, even if it did not always live up to that aspiration. Now, she said, millions of people around the world “have now learned that the city is for sale, not unlike other kleptocratic regimes.”