monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

This is more of you trying to ride with the horses and run with the hounds. If you think the way minorities is treated is bad then stop voting for racists. You can't have it both ways.

you could try being honest and say that as long as the NRA can continue to shoot up schools you don't care how racist the president is.

She could still rise to a leadership position in the party; I don't think this finishes her career. The criticism from the left was unrelenting though — her successful career as a prosecutor was used against her. There are some progressives who automatically view convicted criminals as "victims" of the justice system.

Trump Calls Trudeau ‘Two-Faced’ After Comments Caught on Video

The leaders of Canada, France and Britain did not appear to realize that a conversation — apparently about President Trump — at a Buckingham Palace reception was being recorded.

LONDON — President Trump on Wednesday called Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada “two-faced,” after a video surfaced that showed him venting to other world leaders about Mr. Trump’s behavior at a NATO anniversary celebration designed specifically to avoid unwanted disruptions.

“Well, he’s two-faced,” the president said when asked about the video. After a long pause, he added, “He’s a nice guy. I find him to be a very nice guy.”

Mr. Trump, who was taking questions from reporters ahead of a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, attributed Mr. Trudeau’s frustration to the American leader’s pressure campaign to increase Canada’s military spending to 2 percent of its economic output.

“He should be paying more than he’s paying,” Mr. Trump said. “I called him out on that, and I’m sure he wasn’t happy about it, but that’s the way it is.”

The brief video showed grinning world leaders at a Buckingham Palace reception on Tuesday night, apparently commiserating about the president.

In the video, which was posted online by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mr. Trudeau seems to be discussing Mr. Trump’s behavior during the first day of the two-day NATO meeting. Mr. Trump spoke to reporters for more than two hours in total on Tuesday, which appeared to astonish Mr. Trudeau.

“He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference at the top,” Mr. Trudeau says to a small group that includes President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands and Princess Anne.

Mr. Trudeau does not mention Mr. Trump by name during the exchange, in which the Canadian leader appears to be discussing the day’s bilateral meetings.

“You just watch his team’s jaws drop to the floor,” Mr. Trudeau says at another point. Mr. Macron is also seen participating animatedly in the conversation, but his comments cannot be heard. Mr. Johnson is seen smiling.

None of the world leaders seem to realize that the conversation is being recorded. By the afternoon, some of the participants were seeking to distance themselves from the perceived criticism of Mr. Trump.

During a news conference, Mr. Johnson claimed that he had not been party to any discussion about Mr. Trump. “That’s complete nonsense, and I don’t know where that has come from,” he said. “I really don’t know what is being referred to there.”

The hot-mic incident was not the only moment that upended hopes for a drama-free NATO gathering.

On Tuesday, Mr. Macron put Mr. Trump on the defensive during a tense 45-minute appearance in which he aggressively challenged the American president’s vision for NATO and his handling of a military conflict involving Turkey. For Mr. Trump, it was a rare face-to-face meeting with another world leader in which he was not driving the conversation.

It was also not the first time that Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau have publicly clashed, or that Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Trudeau of misrepresenting himself.

Last year, Mr. Trump derided the Canadian leader as “very dishonest and weak” after Mr. Trudeau pledged at a Group of 7 summit in Quebec City that he would retaliate against United States tariffs on steel and aluminum products. Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter at the time that Mr. Trudeau had acted “so meek and mild” when they met face to face.

Mr. Trump has long bridled at the idea of other world leaders poking fun at the United States, and part of his 2016 presidential campaign pitch to voters was that his election would change how America was viewed abroad. “The world is laughing at us,” he said frequently during the campaign, criticizing the leadership of President Barack Obama.

In June 2017, when he announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, Mr. Trump said: “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be. They won’t be.”

In 2018, laughter broke out at the United Nations General Assembly when Mr. Trump claimed that his administration had “accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”

The president insisted at the time that he was not the target, saying, “They weren’t laughing at me, they were laughing with me.”

None of the NATO leaders on Wednesday publicly acknowledged that they were talking about Mr. Trump in the uncomfortable video. But the clip loomed over the gathering of NATO leaders on Wednesday morning at The Grove, a country resort in Hertfordshire, where they met for a group photograph and welcome ceremony.

The leaders took the stage one at a time to greet Mr. Johnson and the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, and pose briefly before the assembled news cameras.

Mr. Johnson greeted Mr. Trudeau with a handshake and a soft pat on the arm as they stood onstage together. Mr. Macron said hello to Mr. Johnson with a tap on the hand, and lingered, making jovial small talk before exiting the stage.

Mr. Trump arrived late to the meeting, just outside London, and shortly before he was due to emerge on the stage, an aide appeared to inform Mr. Johnson of a delay.

“We’re live now,” Mr. Johnson, who seemed perturbed, said to the aide before asking how long the delay would be. “A half an hour? 45 minutes?”
“How are we doing?” Johnson asked the aide few minutes later. “Come on!”

After the two co-hosts lingered onstage for about five minutes, rocking back and forth on their heels, Mr. Trump emerged and patted Mr. Johnson on the back.

Later in the morning, Mr. Trump politely shook hands and exchanged a few words with Mr. Trudeau before the general meeting of NATO leaders. Mr. Trump also wrote on Twitter that he had “enjoyed my meeting with the Prime Minister @BorisJohnson of the United Kingdom at @10DowningStreet last night,” noting that the two had discussed “numerous subjects including @NATO and Trade.”

In addition to Mr. Trump’s meeting with Ms. Merkel, he was scheduled to hold meetings with the prime minsters of Denmark and Italy, and to participate in a working lunch with representatives of Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Britain.

Mr. Trump was also expected to hold a news conference before his departure, but on Wednesday he appeared to abruptly cancel those plans.

“We’ll go directly back,” he said. “I think we’ve done plenty of press conferences. Unless you’re demanding a press conference. But I think we’ve answered plenty of questions.”

The viral video clip was not only seen as a potential embarrassment for Mr. Trump. Mr. Trudeau also drew criticism for speaking so freely in a setting where his remarks could be recorded.

“By this point in his tenure, the prime minister should realise that events with pool cameras need to be approached and managed as on the record events,” Andrew MacDougall, who was a spokesman for Mr. Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, wrote on Twitter.

“Hopefully this gaffe doesn’t wind the President up at a sensitive time” for United States-Canada relations, Mr. MacDougall wrote.

Chris Rands, a producer at the CBC’s Parliamentary news bureau in Ottawa, said he had first unearthed the video while searching for images of Mr. Trudeau in footage from Buckingham Palace.

Mr. Rands added that based on his listening, Mr. Trudeau was discussing Mr. Trump’s surprise announcement that a Group of 7 summit meeting next June would be held at Camp David rather than the Trump National Doral golf resort in Miami.

William Barr: 'Communities' that don't show law enforcement more respect may lose 'police protection'

Attorney General William Barr said that if communities do not show more respect to law enforcement officers, they may lose "police protection."

Barr made the comments, which have drawn criticism from some liberal groups and commentators, at an award ceremony Tuesday honoring officers and deputies for "distinguished service in policing."

In his speech, Barr compared being in law enforcement to being in the military. Barr said it took decades after the Vietnam War for troops to earn respect. He said he remembers parades as soldiers left for then returned home from the first Gulf War in the 1990s.

"But when police officers roll out of their precinct every morning, there are no crowds along the highway cheering them on. And when you go home at the end of the day, there's no ticker tape parade."

Barr said Americans, instead, need to focus on "the sacrifice and the service" of law enforcement.

"They have to start showing more than they do – the respect and support that law enforcement deserves," Barr said. "And if communities don't give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need."

Barr did not say what "communities" he was referring to, however critics said they felt the comments were direct at communities of color, where long standing issues of trust over police brutality and racial profiling have persisted.

Jeb Fain, a spokesperson for the liberal super PAC American Bridge, told HuffPost the comments were "as revealing as they are disturbing – flagrantly dismissive of the rights of Americans of color, disrespectful to countless law enforcement officers who work hard to serve their communities, and full of a continuing disregard for the rule of law.”

Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics under both Presidents Barrack Obama and Donald Trump, asked on Twitter, "And what 'communities' would those be, Bill Barr?"

Quote:

Scott Hechinger
Verified account

Is this a threat? "[T]hey have to start showing, more than they do, the respect & support that law enforcement deserves ― & if communities don’t give that support & respect, they might find themselves w/o the police protection they need.”

In August, Barr told the Fraternal Order of Police that there must be "zero tolerance for resisting police," and in the same speech, criticized "district attorneys that style themselves as 'social justice' reformers."

Nineteen law enforcement officers and deputies were honored at the Tuesday event, highlighting their work in "criminal investigations, field operations or innovations in community policing." The officers and deputies worked on cases that included gang violence, natural disasters, active shooters and youth outreach.

Phone-call records disclosed in the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry report released Tuesday show extensive contact between President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and the White House during key moments of the Ukraine saga.

The call records provide powerful circumstantial evidence that Giuliani was coordinating with the White House on his Ukraine gambit, something Giuliani has previously acknowledged. The records also show contact between a Giuliani associate, Lev Parnas, and one of Trump’s key defenders in Congress, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.).

The willingness of phone companies to turn over the records in response to the congressional request also served as a reminder of the power of Congress’s investigatory tools, despite efforts by Trump to block government officials from complying with the impeachment inquiry.

During a news conference Tuesday, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), said “the phone records show that there was considerable coordination among the parties, including the White House.”

The report attributes the phone records to “document production” from AT&T and Verizon, suggesting the companies were subpoenaed. The report doesn’t say whose phone records were subpoenaed, but the text suggests the committee obtained extensive records of calls by Giuliani and Parnas.
Giuliani’s phone records include calls with a number designated only as “-1,” sometimes close in time to calls between Giuliani and the White House switchboard. The suggestion is that “-1” might be a phone belonging to Trump, though the report does not state that clearly.

Schiff, speaking to the Los Angeles Times, said he suspects the number could be Trump’s and that the committee is trying to find out whether calls logged as “-1” indeed came from the president.

A lawyer for Giuliani declined to comment.


The records show several calls and text messages in early August between Giuliani and numbers associated with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget. At that time, U.S. diplomats were trying to set up an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the Ukrainians were eager to schedule. Giuliani’s calls and texts include a nearly 13-minute call with an OMB official and “-1” on Aug. 8.

Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is also simultaneously serving as the acting White House chief of staff.

The report uses the phone records to bolster evidence that Giuliani, his associates and “one or more individuals from the White House” coordinated a smear campaign against former vice president Joe Biden.

In the weeks leading up to Biden’s April 25 announcement that he would seek the presidency, the logs show contacts between Giuliani, Parnas and John Solomon, then a conservative columnist for the Hill newspaper.

On the day that Biden announced his campaign, Solomon published a piece alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign. The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged. No evidence has surfaced backing the prosecutor’s claim.

At 7:14 p.m. that evening, Giuliani received a call from “-1” that lasted nearly five minutes. Moments later, according to the records, Giuliani spoke to Fox News host Sean Hannity for 36 seconds. Later that night, Trump was a guest on Hannity’s show. The Fox News host asked Trump to respond to Solomon’s latest column.

Trump said, “that sounds like big, big stuff. I’m not surprised.”
The call records also show a number of phone calls between Nunes and Giuliani and between Nunes and Parnas earlier this year. Joseph Bondy, a lawyer for Parnas, has accused Nunes and his staff of participating in Giuliani’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Biden.

Call records also show that on May 10, as Giuliani came under fire for a planned trip to Ukraine to meet Zelensky, the former New York mayor began trading missed calls with Kash Patel, an official at the White House National Security Council who previously worked for Nunes.

In the afternoon, after the aborted calls, Giuliani and Patel managed to connect and spoke for over 25 minutes, according to the report. Five minutes later, Giuliani connected with “-1” for more than 17 minutes.

Patel has denied news reports — based in part on the closed-door testimony from Fiona Hill, former top Russia adviser on the National Security Council — that he was serving as a back-channel to Trump on Ukraine issues.

“At no time have I ever communicated with the president on any matters involving Ukraine,” Patel said earlier this year in a statement to Axios. “Any reporting to the contrary, and any testimony provided to Congress, is simply false, and any current or former staff who suggest I have raised or discussed Ukraine matters with President Trump, are similarly misinformed or spreading outright falsehoods.”

The report Tuesday doesn’t detail any communications between Patel and Trump regarding Ukraine. It does say that he was talking to Giuliani right at the moment when Ukraine was at the top of the former New York mayor’s agenda.

After his call with Patel and “-1,” Giuliani went on Fox News and said that he would be canceling his trip to Ukraine, because Zelensky was surrounded by “enemies of the president.”

A spokesman for the National Security Council didn’t respond to a request for comment regarding Patel’s call. Nunes, speaking on Tuesday to Hannity on Fox News, said he has known Giuliani for a long time and spoke with him about Robert S. Mueller III’s probe. Nunes said he didn’t really recall the name Parnas but it was possible he had spoken to him and needed to check his phone records. “But it seems very unlikely I’d be taking calls from random people,” Nunes said.

Another Parnas lawyer, Edward B. MacMahon Jr., reiterated that, “with appropriate protections,” his client would fill in the blanks for lawmakers on the content of the calls. “All phone records show you is that a phone call was made,” he said. “It takes a participant in the phone call to tell you what was said.”

It is unlikely Parnas will actually testify. Parnas is seeking immunity from Congress before talking to lawmakers. Such a move could complicate the campaign finance charges against him in federal court in New York, and lawmakers rarely take such a step without the blessing of the Justice Department. He has denied wrongdoing.

Pierre Trudeau as an "asshole"