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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM

megaeliz Since: Mar, 2017
#238251: Apr 10th 2018 at 6:25:14 PM

Michael Cohen, ‘Ultimate Trump Loyalist,’ Now in the Sights of the F.B.I.

During the presidential campaign, Michael D. Cohen got a Google alert for a breaking story: “Russian President Vladimir Putin Praises Donald Trump as ‘Talented’ and ‘Very Colorful.’”

For most American politicians, that article in December 2015 would hardly have been welcome news. But Mr. Cohen, whose role as personal lawyer and fixer for President Trump has been firmly rooted in the transactional world of his boss, saw opportunity. He emailed an old friend who had been talking about seeking Kremlin support to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and sent him the article.

“Now is the time,” Mr. Cohen wrote. “Call me.”

Mr. Cohen’s efforts put him under scrutiny in the Trump-Russia inquiries and hinted at the somewhat murky space he occupied in the Trump Organization, where his precise duties were unclear. Since then, a series of disclosures have revealed the unusual range of Mr. Cohen’s portfolio.

Agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided his office and hotel room on Monday, seeking records related to payments made shortly before the 2016 election to two women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Mr. Trump. The investigation poses a legal threat to Mr. Cohen — and possibly his client. Few people closer to Mr. Trump have more knowledge of what the president has been involved with over the years.

“Michael Cohen would lay his life down for Donald Trump,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York political strategist who knows both men. “He is the ultimate Trump loyalist.”

Mr. Trump values few things more than loyalty, but secrecy is one of them. For years, to keep the circle of people involved as small as possible, he chose to have Mr. Cohen serve as his legal attack dog from a perch inside Trump Tower in Manhattan instead of having outside counsel deal with his problems, according to two people familiar with their relationship.

In private, Mr. Cohen has compared himself to Tom Hagen, the smooth consigliere to the mafia family in the movie “The Godfather.” His detractors have used other descriptions, with one longtime Trump associate saying that the words “finesse” and Mr. Cohen have rarely been yoked together in a sentence.

If nothing else, the federal investigation, which has also drawn in a tabloid company friendly to Mr. Trump, has cast a harsh light on a partnership that, until recently, at least, worked out well for both Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen, who met Mr. Trump nearly two decades ago when he bought units in several Trump buildings in New York, later played the role of point man and adviser on some of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand his brand internationally.

Mr. Cohen also became his boss’s go-to guy for cleaning up messes, from local zoning disputes to negative stories. The lawyer seemed to relish his reputation as Mr. Trump’s “pit bull” and embraced an aggressive — some say bullying — approach to solving problems.

Though Mr. Cohen has been sidelined from the Trump inner circle since the election — he never got a senior administration job, which people who know him say he expected — he has remained devoted to the president. On Twitter, he regularly speaks up on his behalf and assails critics. On Sunday, the day before the F.B.I. raid on his office, Mr. Cohen posted a quote about the importance of loyalty, adding: “I will always protect our @POTUS.”

One such attempt at protection was his effort in July 2015 to quash a Daily Beast article about an old complaint that Mr. Trump’s first wife, Ivana, had made during their divorce, in which she claimed marital rape. She later withdrew the allegation. Mr. Cohen told a reporter for the website that marital rape was not legally possible, and threatened the reporter if the story went forward.

After that, he mostly kept out of the public eye, helping the campaign build African-American and religious coalitions and raising money.

In recent months, Mr. Cohen’s efforts to protect Mr. Trump from claims by two women of extramarital affairs have emerged as a major distraction — and possibly worse — for the White House.

Mr. Cohen’s efforts to silence the pornographic actress Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, began as early as 2011, when he threatened legal action against a tabloid website that tried to publish her story. During the 2016 campaign, he says, he decided on his own to draw $130,000 from a home equity line of credit and pay Ms. Clifford to keep quiet, channeling the payment through a limited liability company.

Mr. Cohen has repeatedly denied any impropriety around the efforts to restrain Ms. Clifford from speaking out. And he has maintained that he was simply trying to deal with a potentially damaging story even though, he said, it was false.

What is more, Mr. Cohen has also insisted that he made the payment to Ms. Clifford without consulting Mr. Trump. Asked recently whether he knew about the payment, Mr. Trump told reporters he did not, and referred questions to Mr. Cohen.

Still, Mr. Cohen’s claim that he struck a nondisclosure agreement with Ms. Clifford by himself, coupled with his effort to force her to comply with it, has exposed Mr. Trump to possibly having to testify about his knowledge of what his lawyer was up to. Ms. Clifford sued Mr. Trump last month, and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, has filed court papers seeking to depose the president.

“As we predicted and as the F.B.I. raid shows,” Mr. Avenatti tweeted on Tuesday, “Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump are in a lot of trouble.”

In a text message on Tuesday, Mr. Cohen said the investigation had been difficult.

“This has not been easy and has taken a terrible toll on me, my wife and children,” Mr. Cohen said.

Another payment that the F.B.I. is said to be investigating, for $150,000, was made by American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer. The tabloid business bought the rights to the former Playboy model Karen Mc Dougal’s story alleging an affair with Mr. Trump and never published it. David J. Pecker, now the chairman of A.M.I., was the chief executive of Hachette in the 1990s and for a time published Mr. Trump’s in-house hotel magazine.

Mr. Trump, who was from Queens, and the Bronx-born Mr. Pecker viewed themselves as outsiders looking in at an elitist Manhattan establishment. First at Hachette and later, when he took over chairmanship of A.M.I., Mr. Pecker acquired a reputation for buying and burying stories in ways that protected associates like Mr. Trump.

Several people close to A.M.I. and Mr. Cohen have said that the lawyer was in regular contact with company executives during the presidential campaign, when The Enquirer regularly heralded Mr. Trump and attacked his rivals. The Times reported in February that A.M.I. had shared Ms. Mc Dougal’s allegations with Mr. Cohen, though the company said it did so only as part of efforts to corroborate her story, which it said it could not do. Ms. Mc Dougal’s lawyer at the time, Keith Davidson, and Mr. Cohen communicated around the time as she and A.M.I. were finalizing their deal.

The agreements for Ms. Mc Dougal’s and Ms. Clifford’s silence formed the basis of complaints by the public interest group Common Cause to the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission. The group claims the payments amounted to improper campaign contributions.

On Monday, as news of the F.B.I. raids broke, The Times reported that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was looking into a $150,000 donation to Mr. Trump’s charitable foundation from a Ukrainian billionaire that was solicited by Mr. Cohen during the 2016 campaign. In addition, Mr. Mueller has examined Mr. Cohen’s postelection role in forwarding to the administration a Ukraine-Russia peace proposal pushed by a Ukrainian lawmaker.

And Trump-Russia investigators have also examined the 2015 Moscow deal that Mr. Cohen pushed at a time when his boss was campaigning for the Republican nomination for president.

Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to build a Trump property in Russia found new life when Felix Sater, a friend of Mr. Cohen’s and a longtime associate of Mr. Trump’s, surfaced with a fresh proposal. He exchanged emails and phone calls with Mr. Cohen in late 2015 saying that he had a prospective developer lined up, and that he could use his contacts in Russia to garner Kremlin support for the project.

Mr. Cohen wasted no time, arranging for Mr. Trump to sign a letter of intent for the Moscow tower deal. But the project seemed to stall in the coming months.

Rather than let it go, Mr. Cohen reached out directly to Mr. Putin’s press secretary in January 2016, asking for assistance. Later, he asserted that his effort was unsuccessful.

“I decided to abandon the proposal less than two weeks later for business reasons,” he said, “and do not recall any response to my email.”

I've seen speculation that one of the reasons Mueller and Rosenstein decided to give this tip to the New York FBI when they did, was to try to get him to to try to get him to flip. I'm sure there are some state charges against him as well, that will probably also being investigated right now, which might be leverage.

edited 10th Apr '18 6:36:57 PM by megaeliz

Hodor2 Since: Jan, 2015
#238252: Apr 10th 2018 at 6:36:55 PM

Something I came across and found interesting as a topic for discussion- a review of a new book about the Obama administration that kind of deconstructs his presidency and concludes he was a well-intentioned failure because he was too much of a policy wonk. Not sure to what extent I agree (partly because of zero mentions of race/pushback Obama got because of his statements condemning police violence) but thought worth noting:

It becomes clearer every day that Barack Obama, a historic president, presided over a somewhat less than historic presidency. With only one major legislative achievement (Obamacare)—and a fragile one at that—the legacy of Obama’s presidency mainly rests on its tremendous symbolic importance and the fate of a patchwork of executive actions.

How much of that was due to fate and how much was due to Obama’s own shortcomings as a politician is up for debate and is a question that emerges from Princeton historian Julian Zelizer’s new edited volume, The Presidency of Barack Obama.

With contributions from seventeen historians, the book bills itself as “a first historical assessment” of the Obama presidency. The overwhelming consensus, Zelizer writes, is that Obama “turned out to be a very effective policymaker but not a tremendously successful party builder.” This “defining paradox of Obama’s presidency” comes up again and again: the historians, by and large, approve of Obama’s policies (although some find them too timid) while they lament his politics.

The politics were pretty disastrous. As Zelizer summarizes, “During his presidency, even as he enjoyed reelection and strong approval ratings toward the end of this term, the Democratic Party suffered greatly. . . . Democrats lost more than one thousand seats in state legislatures, governors’ mansions, and Congress during his time in office.” Zelizer could have gone further. According to Ballotpedia, more Democratic state legislative seats were lost under Obama than under any president in modern history.

Yet even with such political fallout, the overall tone of the book is surprisingly wistful. Or perhaps it is unsurprising when you notice that it was written shortly after the 2016 election. The contributors, like the nation, were shell-shocked by the results, and the book, which has a few strong chapters, suffers from the sting of Donald Trump’s victory—after which it became difficult to say anything negative about a normal president.

As such, the book frequently makes excuses for Obama. As Zelizer says in the very first chapter, “The President could take Speaker of the House John Boehner out to play as much golf and drink as much bourbon as their hearts desired, but it wouldn’t make one iota of difference.” Some of the contributors likewise treat Obama’s political problems as if Obama had nothing to do with them, and in so doing they tend to absolve Obama himself from any responsibility for them.

This sort of benefit-of-the-doubt thinking, however, does not produce very insightful history. True, playing golf and drinking bourbon would not alone have changed the composition of the Republican caucus, but it would have given the president a better idea of what he was up against. Moreover, it caricatures what really happened: Obama was not just distant from the Republicans in Congress—he was distant from the Democrats as well. His reluctance to engage members of Congress cut across the aisle, with many Democrats just as furious as Republicans. This would only occasionally break out into the press, but it was well known on the Hill.

So while it is true that Obama faced an extremely oppositional Republican Party, historians must not ignore the fact that Obama was a distant politician. In the end, he was more concerned with policy and reluctant to engage in the political battles that make for successful and sustainable policy.

This flaw is evident in one of the book’s best essays. In “Neither a Depression nor a New Deal,” Eric Rauchway describes the Obama presidency’s “original sin, ” its response to the Great Rec Rauchway recounts how Christina Romer, the first chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, came up with a number ($1.8 trillion), “based on arithmetic and data,” that she thought would be necessary to jumpstart the economy again. Given the sense of emergency at the time and the Democratic control of both houses of Congress, Obama could have used his rather large amount of political capital to authorize and then fight for a larger stimulus package, one which focused intensely on job creation and retention. But the star economist on his team, Lawrence Summers, disagreed with Romer and argued that the economy could be stabilized using a much smaller stimulus. Obama chose to go with Summers’s plan; the results of that decision would reverberate throughout his presidency.

First of all, while Summers’s plan worked, the recovery was very slow. Second, instead of focusing relentlessly on jobs, as Romer, most of Congress, and most of the nation wanted, the administration quickly pivoted to its next policy agenda item: health care. As Rauchway writes, “Obama’s decision to deemphasize stimulus in favor of pressing for health insurance reform was a gamble of immense, if unknowable, magnitude and consequence.”

By 2010 Obama’s fate was sealed. In the midterm elections, Republicans ran on the slow recovery, the perception that the stimulus package favored Wall Street, not Main Street, and the Democrats’ tone-deaf obsession with the health care bill. They easily took control of the House, picking up sixty-three seats—the biggest midterm election gains for the out party since 1938. And from then on, the Obama presidency struggled under a radicalized Republican Party. As Paul Starr writes in the collection, “Obama repeatedly chose substance over politics, which hardly seems like a fault in a president—except that the failure to get credit later limited what he was able to do.”

And so for its remaining six years, the Obama presidency had to confront a Republican Party that was hell-bent on opposing everything he did. But was such opposition set in stone?

At its height, the House Republican Tea Party Caucus consisted of only 60 members out of 242 Republican members of Congress. That left 182 Republicans to be wooed by a new and charismatic Democratic president—far fewer than what was needed to break gridlock. But a president who would not court members of his own party was not likely to try or to be successful at courting members of the other party, either.

In the summer of 2010, for example, Obama tried to pass a comprehensive cap-and-trade bill to combat climate change. It failed miserably, and after that, climate change legislation “fell off the political radar,” according to Meg Jacobs. It was replaced by an aggressive strategy of executive actions, from the Clean Power Plan to the Paris climate accords. And yet, as Jacobs concludes, “With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, many of Obama’s advances became vulnerable to rollback by the new GOP president who believes climate change is a ‘hoax.’”

Indeed, as Zelizer’s volume makes clear, the problem with executive action is that it is so easily undone. The majority of the book is spent cataloging Obama’s many well-intentioned executive actions that are in the process of being reversed by his successor.

Obama, for instance, presided over a Justice Department that made meaningful gestures toward reducing incarceration and demanding accountability for police violence. But these moves can be undone by the current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, leaving Peniel E. Joseph to characterize this part of the Obama legacy as “an opportunity found and frustratingly lost for advocates of criminal justice reform.” Writing about Obama’s urban policy, Thomas J. Sugrue calls Obama’s actions “miniscule” and “too cautious” and notes that, “In Obama’s last two years in office, American cities began to burn again.”

Obama’s most significant executive action came as the result of his failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform. As Sarah R. Coleman notes, “In the summer of 2012, under pressure from party activists to show some effort on immigration reform before the November election and unable to rise above the partisanship that dominated Washington as he had hoped, President Obama turned to his executive powers and announced the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.” But again we see the weakness of executive action. As Coleman concludes, “President Obama ends his two terms with few successes and a mixed legacy on immigration and refugee policy.”

Of course there were successes in the Obama administration that appear to be sustainable. The fact that the Affordable Care Act escaped congressional repeal by the skin of its teeth is one bright spot in an otherwise dreary picture, even though the Trump administration continues to undermine it at every step. And as Timothy Stewart-Winter points out, Obama will likely be remembered as the “Gay Rights President,” in honor of the astonishing progress toward LGBTQ rights made during his years in office.

But as this first accounting of the Obama presidency shows, a president’s policy legacy is indistinguishable from his political legacy. Meaningful, sustained progress on policy requires some continuity in the political base. Rather than remake the Democratic Party from top to bottom, Obama opted to focus his political hopes on the continued success of his campaign, Obama for America. Writing in this volume, Michael Kazin notes, “Organizing for America (OFA), the group Democrats created just before the inauguration to harness the momentum of the Obama campaign to their legislative program, failed to keep the party’s young, multicultural base mobilized against the Republican onslaught that followed.”

The Presidency of Barack Obama is a good example of how hard it is to write history quickly. In twenty or so years, we may well discover that Obama’s distance from politics was intentional and designed to preserve an image of the president as “above politics.” As we know from Fred Greensteins’s book on President Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (1982), Eisenhower intentionally obscured his acute political sense. But his “above it all” approach to the presidency did not change what was the liberal, New Deal trajectory of the country any more than Obama changed the conservative, anti-government zeitgeist.

In the end there are only two ways a president can forge a legacy in U.S. politics: accomplish things with bipartisan support, or nurture his political party so that people are elected who will carry on and protect his accomplishments. Obama’s legacy is in trouble because he did neither. For him, the first path was difficult—and some would say impossible. He faced a Republican Party controlled by extremists determined to undermine him at all costs. “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency,” he said in his last State of the Union address, “that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”

That left him a second path: build a Democratic Party strong enough to carry on his accomplishments. Though he did not do so at the time, Obama’s current pledge to nurture a new generation of leaders(through his foundation) and his support for former Attorney General Eric Holder’s campaign to fight gerrymandering are signs that he has come to the realization that his legacy depends on politics after all. It is a late realization but, given that the fifty-six year old has many years of influence before him, perhaps his post-presidency will help build the political support for the kinds of policies he advocated as president.

.

megaeliz Since: Mar, 2017
FluffyMcChicken My Hair Provides Affordable Healthcare from where the floating lights gleam Since: Jun, 2014 Relationship Status: In another castle
My Hair Provides Affordable Healthcare
#238254: Apr 10th 2018 at 7:50:53 PM

I hope Haldeman Cohen wasn't tipped off and managed to destroy evidence. From the sound of it, he was in his residence when the raid occurred.

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#238255: Apr 10th 2018 at 8:04:25 PM

You just know Cohen has his own paper shredder at home.

Disgusted, but not surprised
Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#238256: Apr 10th 2018 at 8:20:54 PM

If they find recent use of a paper shredder, that's probable cause to investigate him for even more crimes.

Also, his house wasn't the only place hit, I doubt he can pull an Oliver North.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
TheWanderer Student of Story from Somewhere in New England (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
Student of Story
#238257: Apr 10th 2018 at 8:25:57 PM

In fairness he should, and honestly so should anybody who gets or keeps any paper records of accounts, balances, or similarly private matters.

There's much less need for it today than 10-20 years ago, but if you're paranoid about data breaches and spyware, you might still do a lot of retirement planning and such on paper.

Hot rumor of the hour: Trump allies from the House are talking up the possibility of holding DOJ personnel in contempt of the House subcommittee's investigation

In turn there's speculation about whether that would give Trump a legal fig leaf to fire Rosenstein.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#238258: Apr 10th 2018 at 8:26:05 PM

[up]X3 Thus why it was a no-knock raid.

[up] Of what investigation? The house shut their one down.

edited 10th Apr '18 8:27:18 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
TheWanderer Student of Story from Somewhere in New England (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
Student of Story
#238259: Apr 10th 2018 at 8:33:44 PM

Yeah, but it's a rumor that the leader of the House Freedom Caucus is talking up.

Now it's pretty unlikely to happen, and Meadows blows a lot of hot air and is almost certainly posturing,, but it's worth noting the depths the Tea Party and other Trump allies in Congress are willing to contemplate.

edited 10th Apr '18 8:35:16 PM by TheWanderer

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#238260: Apr 10th 2018 at 8:36:36 PM

Can't see Paul Ryan allowing that to pass, he might be passive in the face of Trump's obstruction of justice, but I doubt that he'd actively play hatchetman in an election year.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
danime91 Since: Jan, 2012 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
#238261: Apr 10th 2018 at 8:38:49 PM

I don't know why people rely on paper shredders. A determined enough team can piece them back together. Just soak your documents in water or burn them. Nobody's reconstructing a soggy lump or a pile of ashes.

Protagonist506 from Oregon Since: Dec, 2013 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
#238262: Apr 10th 2018 at 9:00:11 PM

[up]Well, in this case it's because the point isn't to make the information unobtainable, just make it so difficult that obtaining it would be less-than-profitable.

Leviticus 19:34
Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#238263: Apr 10th 2018 at 9:07:54 PM

[up][up] You shred then burn, you get a mroe complete burn if the document is in bits as each individual piece burns from all sides, so there no centre of the document that can be left partially intact.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
archonspeaks Since: Jun, 2013
#238264: Apr 10th 2018 at 9:21:49 PM

Not to mention there are computer programs these days that can piece a shredded document back together quite quickly.

Shredding stuff is a really good way to indicate where the incriminating evidence can be found.

They should have sent a poet.
Clarste One Winged Egret Since: Jun, 2009 Relationship Status: Non-Canon
One Winged Egret
#238265: Apr 10th 2018 at 9:38:19 PM

Lawyers should be regularly shredding things related to client privacy anyway, so I wouldn't say it's particularly incriminating.

Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#238266: Apr 10th 2018 at 10:13:06 PM

Also just old copies of documents that have been replaced, I’ve got an out fo date will (made by someone else with me as the executor) that I need to shred and burn at some point, I suspect that that’s why my dad has a shredder in his office (he works doing probate).

Shit I’ve legitimately shredded ballots before, that one felt super weird.

edited 10th Apr '18 10:13:47 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#238267: Apr 10th 2018 at 10:20:56 PM

All of this is more or less why Cohen would definitely have a paper shredder at home. Even if he wasn't into anything shady (but he totally is).

Disgusted, but not surprised
rmctagg09 The Wanderer from Brooklyn, NY (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: I won't say I'm in love
The Wanderer
#238268: Apr 10th 2018 at 10:29:39 PM

Scott Pruitt’s Civilization-Threatening Lie:

From the day he walked into Congress as the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt has been trying to foist a colossal lie on the American public.

“Science tells us that the climate is changing, and human activity in some manner impacts that change,” he said that day, 14 months ago. “The human ability to measure with precision the extent of that impact is subject to continuing debate and dialogue, as well they should be.”

In other words: We do not know enough about the risks to take any action. Burn that coal, baby! Mr. Pruitt, confirmed by the Senate in a close vote, then proceeded to begin dismantling the modest regulations on climate change that the Obama administration had put in place.

This is not just any old white lie that Mr. Pruitt has been telling. This is a civilization-threatening lie, a lie that will kill people and destroy small nations, if not some large ones. Future generations will see him as a man guilty of a major historical crime, along with his enablers in Congress and their puppet masters in the fossil-fuel industry.

How bizarre, then, that Mr. Pruitt is now in trouble not for this epic lie, but for petty ethical violations.

Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.
Ramidel Since: Jan, 2001
#238269: Apr 10th 2018 at 11:13:18 PM

Considering all the protests? If mueller got fired, half the country would lose their shit.

And 30% of the country would consider the above a perk.

AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#238270: Apr 11th 2018 at 3:20:34 AM

In a way, destroying evidence related to investigations, specially after warrants have been issued and the responsible for the documents have been ordered to deliver them, is obstruction of justice.

Using a shredding machine or anything that indicates a file burn, can be used as evidence of obstruction of justice. Which means, it also shows the unwillingness of the people being investigated to cooperate, which also means that the FBI can pursue more aggressive searches since they now have reasonable suspicion that there will be attempts to conceal or erase evidence.

It is a dumb move, but so far the Trump administration has done nothing but dumb moves.

Inter arma enim silent leges
sgamer82 Since: Jan, 2001
#238271: Apr 11th 2018 at 4:08:10 AM

Speaking of:

"'Get ready, Russia,' missiles 'will be coming': Trump tweets on U.S. response to Syria crisis" - Get updates at Reuters.com

Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
PhysicalStamina i'm tired, my friend (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Coming soon to theaters
i'm tired, my friend
#238273: Apr 11th 2018 at 4:50:55 AM

  1. Isn't this sort of thing precisely what people warned us Hillary would do?
  2. I can't help but wonder what Putin thinks of this.

EDIT: A thought just came to me: what if Trump sent that tweet out just to "prove" this was no collusion with Russia? After all, he wouldn't have challenged them like that if he colluded with them, would he?

edited 11th Apr '18 4:54:36 AM by PhysicalStamina

i'm tired, my friend
megaeliz Since: Mar, 2017
#238274: Apr 11th 2018 at 5:03:23 AM

He's gone mad(-er)

The Failing New York Times wrote another phony story. It was political pundit Doug Schoen, not a Ukrainian businessman, who asked me to do a short speech by phone (Skype), hosted by Doug, in Ukraine. I was very positive about Ukraine-another negative to the Fake Russia C story!
"Fake Russia C Story?"

So much Fake News about what is going on in the White House. Very calm and calculated with a big focus on open and fair trade with China, the coming North Korea meeting and, of course, the vicious gas attack in Syria. Feels great to have Bolton & Larry K on board. I (we) are....doing things that nobody thought possible, despite the never ending and corrupt Russia Investigation, which takes tremendous time and focus. No Collusion or Obstruction (other than I fight back), so now they do the Unthinkable, and RAID a lawyers office for information! BAD!
I'm pretty sure that counts as Obstruction, you know.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War. There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?

Or to put it another way:

...Did he just warn Russia of specific future United States' military operations?

So now Russia is calibrating its S-400 systems, and putting their crews on high alert. Great job. Pentagon must be loving this.

Or this:

Psst. Hey Vlad sweetie. Bashar honey. Move all your fave peeps away from the target zone. My super smart missile rockets are coming. I have the best missiles.

edited 11th Apr '18 5:42:02 AM by megaeliz

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#238275: Apr 11th 2018 at 5:16:46 AM

Hey, everybody knows the best way to win a war is to tell the opponent your strategy in advance.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

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