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Jeff Sessions Apparently Forgot About This Meeting with Russian Operatives

Maybe it’s Alzheimer, or maybe it’s just selective memory. Whatever it is, Trump’s Attorney General is not being totally honest with the American people.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to amend prior testimony to Congress this week, acknowledging that contrary to an earlier statement, he’d encountered the Russian ambassador to the United States twice in the last year.

Sessions appears to have left out a third instance in which they crossed paths.

In April of 2016, Sessions attended a VIP reception at a hotel in Washington, D.C., with President Donald Trump and roughly two dozen guests, including four ambassadors. One of them was Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The cocktail meet-and-greet took place in a private room at the Mayflower Hotel near the White House. Shortly thereafter, Trump delivered a foreign policy speech in the hotel’s ballroom, where he called for improved U.S.-Russia relations. Kislyak was seated in the front row.

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Listen to Trump Brag on 911 That His Building Was Now the Tallest – AUDIO

Who cares that almost three thousand people had just died in the biggest terrorist attack in America’s history? Not Donald Trump. His only concern after the buildings at the World Trade Center fell, was to make that point that his building was now the tallest in Manhattan.

Asked in a radio interview if his building suffered any damages during September 11th, Trump went on a rant explaining that his building is now the tallest in downtown Manhattan.

“Forty Wall Street actually was the second tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was, actually before the World Trade was the tallest, and then when they built the World Trade Center became known as the second tallest and now it’s the tallest…”

It’s all about the donald!

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A $400 Million Giveaway to Rich People Hidden in Republican’s Healthcare Plan

Republicans are on the fast-track to repealing Obamacare and throwing Americans off their life saving healthcare. But in the process of sticking it to middle class once again, Republicans are using their Obamacare replacement to give more money to rich people.

Republicans are giving away $400 million in tax cuts to CEOs of insurance companies, according to language buried deep in their proposed plan.

Democrats on Wednesday broadly blasted a proposed Obamacare replacement bill after learning the federal government would lose about $400 million in lost tax revenue over the next decade due to a sweet break for health insurers.

Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., said that the tax break related to executive pay underscores the fact that the Republican replacement bill is “the beginning of a huge giveaway to the very, very wealthy,” and the end of insurance coverage to millions of lower-income people.

“We’re starting off… with essentially a giveaway to insurance executives,” Levin said.

The proposed tax break, buried in cryptic language in the Republican plan, would allow health insurers to more fully deduct the value of their executives’ compensation on their taxes. That compensation can be as high as tens of millions of dollars, in the case of CEOs of insurers.

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Report – Obama Furious Over Trump’s Wiretapping Accusation

Sounds like a defamation of character lawsuit to me. Without any evidence, Trump has accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones during the 2016 presidential campaign. But knowing the easy-going ways of the former president, he would probably just allow Trump to bury himself with his dumb tweets.

That said, Trump’s wiretapping accusation really got under the former president’s skin.

An aide to Obama told the Wall Street Journal the former president had decided he would not respond to every one of the his successor’s tweets. But people familiar with Obama’s thinking told the WSJ he was livid after Trump posted several tweets early Saturday morning making serious accusations.

“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump first tweeted on Saturday, without evidence.

An Obama spokesman later responded:

“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” said Kevin Lewis. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

Trump’s allegations have widened a rift between Trump and his predecessor, according to the report, who made an effort to be cordial during the transition.

Trump also reportedly believes that officials loyal to Obama have been behind the leaks coming out of the administration.

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Republicans Rushing to Stop Enforcing Obama’s ‘Fair Pay and Safe Workplace’

Yes, they are against “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces.” Who would be against that? Republicans of course.

Earlier this month, the House approved a measure to stop implementation of Obama’s 2014 “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces” order, which was designed to ensure that contractors “understand and comply with labor laws.” Senate action is expected soon. The order had been stalled, if not killed by, a federal court ruling in Texas.

If repeal efforts are successful, it would be “the start of what we fear will be a sustained assault on America’s working families,” Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, said in a statement.

Under the executive order, contractors would be required to report workplace violations for the previous three years. Agency contracting officers then would use that information to determine if the business “is a responsible source that has a satisfactory record of integrity and business ethics.”

In other words, a firm’s prior violations of fair-pay and safe workplace standards could be used to prevent that company from getting future contracts, among other options.

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Trump Signs Executive Order for Muslim Ban Part 2

Governing from behind the safe confines of the executive pen, Donald Trump signed a second version on his Muslim ban on Monday away from the cameras and glitzes used in his first Muslim ban order, and aiming to withstand court challenges while still barring new visas for citizens from six Muslim-majority countries and temporarily shutting down America’s refugee program.

The revised travel order leaves Iraq off the list of banned countries but still affects would-be visitors and immigrants from Iran, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Libya.

Trump privately signed the new order Monday while Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Attorney General Jeff Sessions formally unveiled the new edict. They did not take questions from reporters.

The low-key rollout was in contrast to the first version of the order, which Trump signed a week after his inauguration in a high-profile ceremony at the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes as Secretary of Defense James Mattis stood by.

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Beware the Idiocies of March

Yes, my friends, this is getting frighteningly Shakespearean. And we have a variety of dysfunctional, murderous, illegal and psychologically damaged examples to choose from. Is the Trump White House Macbeth? Hamlet (soon to be starring Jared Kushner as the prince)? Othello? Any of the histories? We know there’s no Falstaff because this really isn’t funny. The field is wide open.

As for reality, we have a mucking mess. President Trump (shudder) gave what many distracted and fooled pundits called a presidential speech last week where he created false realities and set himself up as the only person who could solve them.

  • Mexicans swarming the border? False, but let’s build a wall.
  • Public education failing? False, so let’s funnel money to private, religious and charter schools.
  • Unvetted radical Muslims crashing our shores? False, so let’s forget that we vet asylum seekers for two years and claim that our porous borders are swarming with terrorists.
  • Health care law failing? False, so let’s make sure that everybody has the freedom to have to pay for their care, whether they can afford it or not.
  •  Foreign policy failures from the Obama Administration? False, so let’s cut money to the State Department because, really, the only policy we need is what Trump tweets in the morning.
  • Anti-Semitism? True, though wait 6 months before tepidly denouncing the longest hatred, but only after you dress down an Orthodox Jewish press reporter who’s actually on your side at your head-scratching press conference.

Trump might have delivered his speech without devolving into a red-faced, spitting mess, but is that really our expectation from the leader of the free world? He then followed up for a few days with policy-laden tweets and pronouncements that sounded rather…normal. But that’s what this presidency is all about, has been all about and will be all about: Vacuous pronouncements and personality-driven drivel. The words of the speech came out well; the words themselves were hateful, deceitful,  and troubling.

And then came Jeff Sessions and the Trump Administration Two-Step: Lie at your hearings and hope the real media doesn’t pick up on it or hope that the leakers have taken a public sector job sick day. Looks like that’s not going to happen so much. When the Attorney General shades the truth (benefit of the doubt) or baldly lies (probably the truth), then your administration is in trouble. And the Russia stories just keep on coming, like bottomless cups of coffee at the diner. Served with a smile, but hyper-inducing nonetheless.

But the week couldn’t end without the president reverting to form, accusing President Obama of tapping his phones. Which is ludicrous. And not based on reality. And even more troubling because if Trump is basing his information on some security briefing, then he’s compromising national security. There’s always a source for his anger, and in this case it’s likely a Breitbart story he read. And now he’s calling for a Congressional investigation as part of the Russia probe to show what a fair-minded person he really is. Trump is going to do these types of things for the rest of his term, and they are decidedly not normal. He just can’t help himself.

Or the country.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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More Trump People Who Met With Russian Intelligence During Campaign – Video

J.D Gordon, a former adviser to Donald Trump who worked with the Trump campaign admitted that he too, met with Russian officials during Trump’s presidential campaign.

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Keith Olbermann on Trump – “He Will Die In Prison” – Video

Besides Donald Trump’s many wars – war on immigrants, war on the media, war on women, war on common decency to name a few – Donald Trump’s war against the intelligence committee has begun. It begun when the president of the United States foolishly decided that the very folks keeping him informed on national security and foreign threats to the United States, those people are the enemy. And from the looks of things, the intelligence committee is winning.

Keith Olbermann explains;

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Rep. Elijah Cummings Demands a Jeff Sessions’ Resignation – Video

Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions lied when he said he had no contacts with Russia officials during the 2016 presidential election.

“Give me a break!” Elijah Cummings said with the news that Jeff Sessions met with members of the ethics committee for directions on what his next move should be. Just 24hrs prior, news broke that Sessions did in fact meet with Russian officials during Trump’s campaign and hours after that news broke, Sessions recused himself from future investigations into the Trump/Russia involvement.

“Suddenly, now he says because he’s talked to the ethics people that he is going to recuse himself. They say they told him to do it because he was involved in the campaign. Give me a break! He is the number one law enforcement officer in the country. He has been a U.S Attorney for the state of Alabama, and as an attorney, he knows, and I know that there are certain things that you don’t to the ethics people about.”

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Trump’s White House Now Acknowledges Multiple Contacts With Russia

This just might go down as the most untrustworthy Administration in America’s history. This Trump administration is yet to be introduced to the simple concept of telling the truth.

After months and months of saying that no one in their campaign met or had any contact with Russia during or after the 2016 presidential election,  they’re now saying that previously held position was not true.

Michael T. Flynn, then Donald J. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, had a previously undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador in December to “establish a line of communication” between the new administration and the Russian government, the White House said on Thursday.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and now a senior adviser, also participated in the meeting at Trump Tower with Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. But among Mr. Trump’s inner circle, it is Mr. Flynn who appears to have been the main interlocutor with the Russian envoy — the two were in contact during the campaign and the transition, Mr. Kislyak and current and former American officials have said.

But the extent and frequency of their contacts remains unclear, and the disclosure of the meeting at Trump Tower adds to the emerging picture of how the relationship between Mr. Trump’s incoming team and Moscow was evolving to include some of the president-elect’s most trusted advisers.

The White House has repeatedly sought to play down any connections with Mr. Kislyak. Attorney General Jeff Sessions acknowledged this week that he had met twice with him during the campaign, despite previous denials.

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Obama White House Left Evidence Showing Connection Between Trump Campaign and Russia

Original reporting by The New York Times and NBC News report that in the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.

American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Mr. Trump’s associates.

Then and now, Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.

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