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pat_k

(9,313 posts)
Sun Aug 20, 2017, 07:47 PM Aug 2017

Don't know how I missed this one.

In case anyone else missed it too:

The New York Times
Trump Lawyer Forwards Email Echoing Secessionist Rhetoric
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and MATT APUZZOAUG. 16, 2017

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s personal lawyer on Wednesday forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter “has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.”

The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in glowing terms and equated the South’s rebellion to that of the American Revolution against England. Its subject line — “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville” — was a reference to comments Mr. Trump made earlier this week in the aftermath of protests in the Virginia college town.

“You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington,” the email reads, “there literally is no difference between the two men.” Read More





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The Velveteen Ocelot

(115,270 posts)
1. Not surprising that SCROTUS would choose a lawyer
Sun Aug 20, 2017, 07:54 PM
Aug 2017

who's almost as much of a douche as he is. The others - Kasowitz, McGahn, and Sekulow - are weapons-grade assholes, too. And then there was Roy Cohn, formerly Joe McCarthy's chief counsel for HUAC. In fact, it seems that asshole lawyers are all he can get. Hardly anybody wants to work for him any more.

But there may never be enough Trump Lawyers to get the job done. The work is hard, sometimes even humiliating. In fact, the one irreducible character trait of a Trump Lawyer is that he or she is willing to take on Trump as a client, one who often either doesn’t solicit their advice or simply ignores it; who subverts their legal strategy on national television; who requires them to deny facts that he has confirmed and confirm facts that he has denied; who won’t stop tweeting inflammatory, threatening and clearly false statements. It’s a lot to ask of a professional. As Robert Luskin, a veteran Washington lawyer who represented Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame investigation, explains: ‘‘There are folks who come to you because you have a certain expertise and folks who come to you because they have already figured out what they want and need, and they want to use you as a dinner fork.’’

Washington lawyers have defended spies, embezzlers, strongmen, torturers. But the prospect of defending Trump has apparently given them pause. Brendan Sullivan of Williams & Connolly, who represented Oliver North, and Ted Olson of Gibson, Dunn, who represented the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, are among the veterans of Washington scandals who have reportedly rejected overtures to join Trump’s legal defense team.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/magazine/all-the-presidents-lawyers.html?mcubz=1

pat_k

(9,313 posts)
5. I forgot Cohn was a DT mentor!
Sun Aug 20, 2017, 09:22 PM
Aug 2017

From PBS The Choice 2016

TONY SCHWARTZ:
He’s a kid who wants to figure out how to make deals, to figure out how to establish a presence for himself in Manhattan. And he’s right to believe that that’s not easy to do.

NARRATOR:
He needed a mentor. He found one in Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer....

NARRATOR:
Cohn had become famous during the McCarthy hearings, a witch hunt that accused Americans of communist sympathies.

MARIE BRENNER, Vanity Fair:
He delighted in the fact that he had ruined so many lives in the McCarthy era...

Roy Cohn humiliated people. He made up things. He had no morals. You couldn’t even say that he had the morals of a snake. He had no morals. He had no moral center....

NIKKI HASKELL:
Roy was like a street guy. You know, he was like, “Punch— you punch me, I’ll punch you.” And I think he made Donald very confrontational. And I think you had that sort of tough guy, don’t take any kind of, you know, [expletive deleted] from anybody, kind of an attitude. And I think a lot of that, you know, he instilled in Donald.

BARBARA RES, VP, Trump Organization, 1980-92:
And in his drawer, he had a picture of Roy. And it was a grainy black and white picture, and Roy looked like the devil. And he would pull it out and he would say, “This is my lawyer. If we can’t make an agreement, this is who’s going to— who you’re going to be dealing with.”

NARRATOR:
In 1973, Trump hired Cohn to defend him and his father. They had been sued by the federal government for discriminating against black renters looking for apartments in their buildings.

MICHAEL KRANISH, Co-Author, Trump Revealed:
The lawsuit revealed that Trump agents allegedly were writing down C for colored or Number 9 to indicate a black prospective tenant, and those people were often turned away.


A psychopathic nightmare.

Thunderbeast

(3,380 posts)
3. The propaganda machine loves this one.
Sun Aug 20, 2017, 08:02 PM
Aug 2017

The one RWNJ Facebook "friend" that I spar with loves the BLM equals terrorists. The meme seems to be based on one video a featuring high debate where a young man said some really stupid things.

He also spouted something that he must have seen on Fox, Breitbart, or InfoWars. He claimed that since Nazis are National Socialists, they were just Bernie Sanders.

Deep thinkers all huh?

BigmanPigman

(51,430 posts)
4. It was mentioned on the cable news shows but was dwarfed by the endless stream
Sun Aug 20, 2017, 08:10 PM
Aug 2017

of other BS coming from Twitter Tower last week.

pat_k

(9,313 posts)
6. Disrupt, distract, dissipate, while busily transforming our governement in ways...
Sun Aug 20, 2017, 10:32 PM
Aug 2017

Last edited Sun Aug 20, 2017, 11:58 PM - Edit history (3)

...that are likely to take many, many years to repair.

Perhaps that’s precisely the intent: Disrupt, distract, dissipate, and drown out independent voices and inconvenient realities while fulfilling his agenda with an eager Republican Congress. Critics and the press chase their tails in a tizzy, while Trump’s executive orders get signed and cabinet picks get confirmed, one by one. More


Amid the distraction of the chaotic horror show he is definitely "getting things done."

All of this smoke is missing the steady progress that the modern Republican Party is achieving,” said Grover Norquist, the longtime anti-tax advocate. “The idea that Trump isn’t getting anywhere is wrong. Those free market guys are picking up maybe not all the marbles in the world, but a large quantity of them. And we haven’t thrown away any marbles.”... His appointment of Ajit Pai to head the Federal Communications Commission is one of them. Pai is poised to dismantle net neutrality rules, moving away from treating online content as a public utility and toward a system that allows cable and telecom industry interests to control content and traffic. “That appointment,” Norquist said, “is [determining] 16 percent of the economy.”


Some of the things tracked on presterity.org:
Executive action telling government agencies to slash "job killing" rules that environmentalists argue serve as important protections... executive action establishing a framework to scale back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law... killing off the so-called fiduciary rule requiring brokers and financial advisers to act in the best interest of retirement savers.... remove Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist groups from terror watch list and focus solely on Islamic groups... "unprecedented" approach to staffing cabinet without ethics vetting... spend taxpayer money meant to encourage enrollment in the Affordable Care Act on a public relations campaign aimed at methodically strangling it... Actions by the Trump administration are triggering double-digit premium increases on individual health insurance policies purchased by many people... signs an executive order that will allow federal contractors to discriminate against LGBT employees... intervening in an important private employment case, urged a federal appeals court to rule that civil rights law does not bar job discrimination based on sexual orientation... revives Reagan-era ban on use of foreign aid for abortion counseling... FCC is stopping nine companies from providing federally subsidized Internet to the poor... Individuals with Disabilities Education website vanishes without explanation... Trump administration revoked a grant to Life After Hate, a group that works to de-radicalize neo-Nazis... DOJ Argues Title VII Does Not Protect LGBTQ People... appointed an activist who led a campaign to restrict bathroom access for transgender students to the office of Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in the US Agency for International Development.... emoving sexual orientation and gender identity from the list of categories explicitly protected from discrimination in its latest equal employment opportunity statement... executive order that will allow federal contractors to discriminate against LGBT employees... Appoints Anti-LGBTQ Activist to Lead HHS Civil Rights Office... rescinded directive that sought to curtail the government’s use of private prisons... Sessions and Cook bringing back the national crime strategy of the 1980s and ’90s from the peak of the drug war... abandoning Paris agreement on climate change... made it harder for workers to set up retirement accounts and has delayed the implementation of workplace safety rules... repealed a regulation protecting workers from wage theft... allowed employers with spotty labor records to get government contracts... Occupational Safety and Health Administration has hit the brakes on a rule that would require firms to report worker injury data online.


I fear that the actions that are big enough, or implemented at a level high enough, to make the news are just the tip of the iceberg compared to damage being done by the systematic decimation of executive regulatory functions going on at every level. And this doesn't even touch on his abusive use of executive power over foreign policy, which is making the world a more dangerous .place, not to mention his withdrawal from efforts to use of our influence and dollars to advance human rights.

Human beings are naturally pulled in when confronted with something that is beyond understanding. As we witness DT's evermore explosive and bizarre verbal diarrhea, our attention is diverted. At the same time, we are being overwhelmed by the shear volume and breadth of the damaging actions he's pulling off. Generalized opposition is strong, but a whole lot is getting by without fanfare or organized opposition.
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