POLITICUSUSA
New York prosecutors have been looking into the Trump Organization for a while now. And the news has continually gotten worse for the former president.
In addition to the Trump children, the state is also looking into people who worked for the family business. The media has focused on CFO Allen Weisselberg who began his career working for Fred Trump.
Michael Cohen was willing to do anything for his former comment, Donald Trump. The former lawyer went to jail, essentially for protecting his former client.
And now that Trump is set to face consequences for his actions, Cohen has been taking a bit of a victory lap. And during a Wednesday appearance on Ari Melber‘s show, Cohen talked about the serious legal issues Trump is facing.
At some point, it should have become strange that Donald Trump had people willing to work for him. The former president has a history of turning his back on both contractors and former employees. When Michael Cohen was arrested back in 2018, his long-time employer certainly didn’t have his back.
For months now, both Georgia and New York state were ramping up cases against Donald Trump. Many wondered where that cases were going and how long it would be before Trump ended up in court.
And now, at least in New York, it seems that the answer is soon. Last week, a spokesperson from New York revealed that the case had gone from civil to criminal. And today, it was reported that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance had convened a grand jury.
When Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, the Republican party took a hard took at what went wrong. They decided that they GOP would be better served by seeking the votes of Latino and Black Americans.
During the 4 years of Donald Trump‘s presidency, Republicans held control of the senate. They used this power to their advantage, pushing through 3 Supreme Court Justices and essentially laughing at Democrats.
Biden made many promises. First and foremost were those of leading us out of the pandemic and improving the lives of Americans. He is doing that by choosing to see the plight of Americans rather than negotiating with a mean and greedy blindness.
These critics seem to want blood for their own sport. The House impeachment managers were not playing such games. They were actually trying to work for and play to the American people in a time of crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an all hands on deck response from many business owners. Among the most prominent CEO’s looking to help was Bill Gates.
Thanks to the Conservative push to minimize the effect of the pandemic, Gates became a frequent target for Fox News. Gates appeared on Ari Melber‘s MSNBC show on Wednesday and responded to the frequent criticism.
Melber first played a video of Laura Ingraham mocking Gates’ push for contact tracing. When asked for his thoughts, Gates said, “Contact tracing was incredibly beneficial in places like South Korea. We have had hundreds of thousands of people alive today in the U.S. If we had done that. The data, you don’t have to give up your personal data. That’s not a fair way of describing it. Some societies really chose to make that work.”
Bill Gates responds to Laura Ingraham's lies about the COVID-19 pandemic. pic.twitter.com/n9Bm03ysQZ
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) January 28, 2021
The billionaire later talked about the criticism levied against both him and Dr. Anthony Fauci. He told Melber:
“Yeah, so, both myself and Dr. Fauci have featured in conspiracy theories. One says that Dr. Fauci is trying to make money off of these vaccines and various negative things about me. You know, there, you’re encouraging people not to trust the advice on masks or taking the vaccine. And that could be damaging. It’s a new phenomenon. I don’t know, will it hurt the vaccine uptake, where everyone who takes the vaccine is not just protecting themselves, but reducing their transmission to other people, and allowing society to get back to normal. It’s a completely unexpected phenomenon, and sadly, a lot of it is based on false information.”
Republican lawmakers have let Donald Trump get away with pretty much anything over the last 4 years. Their enabling the President, in part, led to the terrorist attack on the US Capitol last week.
And no Republican enabled Trump more than Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina senator, who stood in angry opposition to Trump during the 2016 primaries, later became one of his biggest fans.
When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol last week, though, Graham was looking everywhere for help. And according to Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Graham berated police officers for not doing enough to protect him from Trump‘s mob.
Brown told Ari Melber, “I heard when we — when 175 senators were confined in a room with about 75 staff people, Lindsey Graham with his mask off started screaming at one of the officers, I think it was one of the captains, saying ‘How come you didn’t protect us?’ This is the same Lindsey graham that for five years — or for fours years, he didn’t do it at the beginning, defended and argued for and abetted this president.”
Melber jumped in, “You saw — senator, while you were still in the emergency of it, you saw Senator Graham yelling or berating an officer? What was he getting at?”
Sen. Sherrod Brown: While We Were in Lockdown at Capitol, Lindsey Graham was Berating Police Officers For Not Doing a Good Enough Job of Protecting Lawmakers. pic.twitter.com/GnY2mtKZLY
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa)
January 12, 2021
Back during the 2016 Republican primary, GOP lawmakers had a much different reaction to Donald Trump. Chris Christie frequently bashed him before becoming an important campaign surrogate.
Lindsey Graham famously tweeted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.” No the South Carolina senator is one of Trump’s chief sycophants.
If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 3, 2016
But no Republican has made such a turn on Trump as Ted Cruz. After Trump called the Texas senator’s wife ugly and accused his father of being involved in the Kennedy assassination, Cruz has become his chief defender.
It was a different story following the 2016 Iowa Caucuses, which Cruz won. Trump tweeted at the time, “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.”
Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.
There are clearly many things that Donald Trump doesn’t like about being the president. He doesn’t like being briefed, or working weekends, or being criticized in any way. One thing Trump clearly loves, though, is the power to pardon people.
And he’s taken advantage of that pardon power throughout his term. The people he absolves are largely friends or political allies. And in the last week, he pardoned the father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, is in prison for the things he did while in the president’s service. Once he went to trial, though, Cohen turned on Trump and has repeatedly spoken out against him. During a Monday appearance on The Beat, Cohen said he would have been pardoned by Trump if he never spoke out.
Host Ari Melber asked, “I think we would all agree at one point in time, you would have been one of those people he would have been musing about pardoning because you and him did have a close relationship, professionally, for a long time.”
https://twitter.com/politicususa/status/1343705687122194433
The former Trump lawyer responded:
“I mean, there are people who worked in that pardon office all year long putting together documents, speaking to prosecutors, making sure that the person who receives the pardon is actually entitled to a pardon. Otherwise, basically what you’re doing is you’re giving the president the ability, you know, like his old trump monopoly game, a get out of free jail card simply because you’re a friend. You’re right, I would have received one had I agreed not to come out, not to speak truth to power.”
Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt criticized President Donald Trump’s coronavirus response, saying that the United States would not have the highest death toll from the virus in the world if former President Barack Obama were still in office.
“If Barack Obama was the president of the United States, this would not have happened,” Schmidt told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “We would have had competent professional people. We would have done what we needed to do early.”
Schmidt pointed out that the federal response under Obama would have mirrored “what happened during the Ebola crisis.” (At the time, Obama deployed United States personnel to West Africa to fight the Ebola outbreak, leading a worldwide response that brought cases down “80 percent from peak levels.”)
“We would have had someone like Ron Klain in charge of it, not the confederacy of dunces that we see running around the West Wing,” he continued, adding that “no amount of gaslighting, delusion, fantasy happy talk” from President Trump would alter the reality that it will take years for the United States to recover from the financial devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
You can watch the exchange below.
.@SteveSchmidtSES: "If Barack Obama was the president of the United States, this would not have happened. We would have had competent professional people … not the confederacy of dunces that we see running around the West Wing." pic.twitter.com/9kGosC8NmT
Ari Melber explained how Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee look bad by hiring a female prosecutor to do their dirty work for them in questioning Christine Blasey Ford.
Former Fox News analyst, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, called Trump's revoking of national security clearances un-American and explained why Trump's actions pose a dangerous threat to our country.
MSNBC's Ari Melber called out an absurd lie that Rudy Giuliani told in what is an increasingly desperate effort to prevent Trump from talking to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Ari Melber pointed out that Trump has been exposed as a coward who refuses to fight Putin.
Trump went to Montana and still tried to claim that he is draining the swamp. MSNBC's Ari Melber shattered this ridiculous lie.
Ari Melber schools Trump on due process and the fact that he doesn't have the power to pick the other branches of the government.
Ari Melber preemptively called out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's BS on immigration before showing the Kentucky Senator's claims.