I don't see Dems being any worse than your party g. Actually Trump would have been unelectable as a dem after his "legal" rape of his first wife without not even getting into the growing crowd of women coming forward with various allegations. And I suspect your party will be raising the bar at some point. (Maybe after 2018?).

So what you're saying is the GOP will learn from its mistakes .... Okay.

Ivana did the deposition where she details the "legal" rape. Even with the insert Trump had his lawyers put in there doesn't actually deny what she alleged (pulling out her hair and than forcing himself on her, she woke up with her pulled out hair next to her). Yes like other woman he paid her lots of money for her silence and they're just the best of friends now. I don't think it's vile bringing it up at all but than again I think it's vile for the pile of shit having an affair or two after his wife just had his kid.

I think saner minds will prevail in your party eventually. For now though you are the party of Trump

The hostility towards Trump is because he's an unfit piece of shit..

And your constantly calling Donald Trump a "piece of shit" just underscores how vitriolic, emotional and completely unhinged your logic is.

President Trump has achieved more good for the nation in barely his first 9 months than Obama did in 8 years. And reversed and repealed much of the damage Alinsky/Ayers/cultural Marxist Obama (and Hillary Clinton) had previously done.

In roughly his first 6 months, Trump exceeded 3% annual growth, where Obama stunted economic growth with obstructionist policy to 2% or less in all of his 8 years.
Trump is rebuilding our military, has overseen a 25% increase in the stock market, has vastly reduced welfare and disability by creating jobs, has currently reduced illegal border crossings by an incredible 78% (!!!!) and has restored our international prestige by standing up to the Iranians and North Koreans. Unemployment is the lowest since 2001. Manufacturing is the highest since 2004.

And all you have is slander, in the attempt to tear down a president who is in opposition to the globalist/corporate elites in both parties, and for the first time since Ronald Reagan, arguably even more so than Reagan, is serving the best interests of the nation, and of its people.

I am daily awed at how this president has achieved so much, particularly in the face of such opposition, both from wealthy elites, from the obstructionist Democrats who will never give him credit for ANYTHING, and from the turncoat RINOS in his own party (McCain, Graham, Flake, McConnell) many of whom promised to repeal Obamacare, and then did the opposite of what they promised after Nov 2016.

Like no other political leader since Reagan and Gingrich, Trump is a political leader who made promises to voters, and has been committed to doing exactly what he promised.

We had 20 some years of talking about Clinton. Funny how when Trump commits adultery you just double down on Clinton. Actually it's not funny nor sadly that shocking. Trump is the one who committed adultery not me WB. Do you think your judgement doesn't look partisan?

All your making clear is that if Clinton had been a republican you and the GOP would have treated it much differently. Instead you literally have decades of talking about it and using it politically. Clinton didn't have lawyers like Trump does nor had everyone including exwives sign non disclosure forms. He didn't send people to parking lots to threaten mothers with babies. Clinton's adultery will follow him and his legacy. The ride is just getting started with mr. grab them by the pussy and his enablers.

1 Kristen Anderson ("early 1980's")
2 Mariah Billado (1997)
3 Lisa Boyne (1996)
4 Rachel Crooks (2005)
5 Tasha Dixon (2001)
6 Jessica Drake (2006) - Adult film star!
7 Jill Harth (1992-1993) -Vendetta and lawsuit with Trump in other business
8 Cathy Heller (1997)
9 Samantha Holvey (2006)
10 Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
11 Jessica Leeds (1980's)
12 Melinda McGillivray (2003)
13 Cassandra Searles (2013)
14 Natasha Stonyoff (2005) -PEOPLE magazine reporter!
15 Bridget Sullivan (2000)
16 Temple Taggart (1997)
17 Ivana Trump (1989 - The point reading I >>>KNEW<<< I was being hustled!)
18 Karena Virginia (1998)
19 Summer Zerves (2007)


Okay, some of the allegations are more recent than I recalled previously. But most go back 20 years or more. There are only 5 that don't pre-date the Access Hollywood bus video. All are years before the period Trump became a presidential candidate.

But
1) Many of these women clearly have a political agenda, and clearly state their opposition to Donald Trump as president, and therefore have a clear agenda to make allegations to undermine him as president. I would want to see a background for each of these women's political affiliations, and who they voted for, and if they supported/openly advocated Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. That is the case of many of Roy Moore's accusers as well.

2) While I don't dismiss the more serious accusations of Trump groping and allegedly forcing himself on a few of these women, by their accounts, many of these seem straining to allege anything sexually illicit. Some of the Miss USA contestants say he walked through the dressing room while they were changing. Even if true, that is hardly sexual assault.
Including IVANA TRUMP as an "accuser" is outrageous. She said what she did during a bitter divorce where he'd left her for Marla Maples, and she briefly made some accusations she retracted almost 30 years ago. Saying "I >>>FELT<<< raped" emotionally is much different than saying she was physically raped by Trump. There is clearly a vindictive agenda on the part of the Atlantic in their including this in the article. It is billed as "19 accusers" which sounds persuasive until you read through and see how silly some of the alleged "sexual accusations" are. Trump walked through a dressing room, WOW!
One is a pornstar/porn director who probably is aligned with the Hollywood liberal elite, and has no credibility from the outset. Likewise, the PEOPLE magazine reporter, who apparently from her remarks has accused many others of sexually inappropriate behavior and/or assault.
Another sued Trump over a real estate business deal and likewise has every motive to slime him.
Some of the others just say Trump leaned in for a kiss, and that is open to interpretation. I have French and Brazilian female friends who do the kiss-on-the-cheek thing at parties, and beautiful as they are, I'm frankly not comfortable kissing a girl like that who's not my girlfriend. And 20 years later, they could spin it as something it was not. It's laughable to me that Miss America contestants complain about Trump "looking at us like we were just meat". Do these girls understand what a beauty contest is?!? You walk out on stage and spin around for the judges in a dress or a bikini. I fail to see from their own account what Trump did wrong.

Of Trump's 19 "accusers" (18 actually because Ivana never accused him in 2016) maybe 15 if you eliminate the "he walked through the dressing room" accounts, maybe down to 10 or less if you eliminate the "he looked at me like I was meat" or "he kissed me at a crowded social event" type accusations. And then you're left with a few that look on the surface like actual accusations of something truly inappropriate if Trump actually did it.

But then you get into Democrat political affiliations of the accusers, other assorted personal/professional vendettas against Trump as possible motivation, and actual witnesses to what objectively happened.

Two months after the Senate failed to convict him, President Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright for giving misleading testimony regarding his sexual relationship with Lewinsky, and was also fined $90,000 by Wright.[2][3] Clinton declined to appeal the civil contempt of court ruling, citing financial problems,[2] but still maintained that his testimony complied with Wright's earlier definition of sexual relations.[2] In 2001, his license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years and later by the United States Supreme Court.[4]

FBI just raided Trump's lawyer/fixer, lol

So you celebrate an unprecedented unconstitutional violation of a lawyer's home to violate attorney-client privilege? The client being Trump. I watched a former federal investigator with Laura Ingraham say this is a "highly aggressive" and unprecedented federal investigation.

Meanwhile, a different standard exists for Hillary Clinton, Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Jennifer Palmieri, Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein (and wife), Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr (and wife), James Rybacki, Andrew Weissman, James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Rodolf Contreras.
>>>>ALL<<< of these people have either committed perjury, filed fraudulent information to get a FISA warrant, leaked confidential federal information to the press, and or participated in malicious prosecution.

And all have done the exact opposite to give a free pass to Hillary Clinton and her seems, obstructing prosecution, allowing destruction of evidence. ALL the evidence leads to Hillary's guilt on the Clinton Foundation, FusionGPS, the deleted 33,000 e-mails, her illegal private server, and yet they absolutely refuse to prosecute it. Even as they maliciously strain to prosecute Trump for any contrived reason they can.

So much for law enforcement ethics, and equal protection under the law.

Business


Alan Dershowitz reacted to a federal raid on the office of President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

Dershowitz said it is a "dangerous day today for lawyer-client relations."

He said that federal agents confiscated many items from the office, and predicted that they included confidential documents and files pertaining to attorney-client privilege discussions with Trump.

Dershowitz said that Trump's team, as well as Cohen, have thus far cooperated with the Robert Mueller-led probe into alleged Russian collusion.


"If this were Hillary Clinton [having her lawyer's office raided], the ACLU would be on every TV station in America jumping up and down," he said. "The deafening silence of the ACLU and civil libertarians about the intrusion into the lawyer-client confidentiality is really appalling."

Dershowitz said it is apparent that Mueller is staying within the confines of the Russian collusion case parameters and instead farming out extraneous developments like Stormy Daniels and alleged campaign finance violations to the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York.
Mueller likely obtained penultimate approval for the raid from Acting Southern District U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman in Manhattan - who sent the warrant to a judge for the final say, according to reports.

Berman was appointed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, replacing Acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim, who himself replaced U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara who was fired by Trump.

Yeah, it sucks that the media and the Obama DoJ covered up for the Clinton Crime Syndicate but someone else getting away with a crime isn't a defense to criminal charges if there is credible evidence against Cohen and/or Trump.

I would agree that attorney client privilege is important but according to both Trump and Cohen both made it clear that didn't apply with the hush money. I suspect Trump was careful to cover his fat ass and Cohen may be willing to go to his prison for his man. It might be time to hide Pence for a little while

By Dahleen Glanton, Chicago Tribune
March 8, 2018


We’re allowing a former porn star to distract us from the greatest task facing the American people — limiting Donald Trump to a one-term presidency.

Stormy Daniels isn’t going to get the job done for us. We’ve got to come at Trump with something much stronger than allegations that he slept with an adult film star a decade before he got to the White House.

Without a doubt, the alleged details that have seeped out thus far are pretty juicy. From the interview Daniels gave InTouch magazine in 2011, we learned that Trump allegedly was reckless enough to have sex without a condom. And that he was rather unspectacular in bed, “textbook generic,” as she called it.

We also found out that Trump was allegedly a textbook cheater as well, calling his mistress from a blocked number and assuring her that she need not worry about his wife. Melania Trump, by the way, had recently given birth to their son.

The only tidbit that has a chance of doing any harm to Trump is the allegation that he was involved in paying Daniels $130,000 in hush money days before the presidential election. But even that’s a long shot.

Daniels is suing Trump now, claiming that the agreement to keep quiet is invalid because he never signed it. She is champing at the bit to tell her version of the whole sordid affair.

As for myself, I couldn’t care less what she has to say.



I’d rather use my energy in a more productive way — keeping the heat turned up on Trump for his backsliding policies that do nothing to lift the middle class, raise families out of poverty, keep our children safe from mass shootings, protect the environment, provide health coverage for all or offer a pathway for law-abiding immigrants to become legal citizens.

There is still much work ahead to convince voters in every corner of the country that America cannot afford another two years, much less another four years, of Trump and his enablers at the helm.

While we might get a kick out of watching Trump sweat a little over the details of his sexual prowess, it doesn’t get us anywhere.

We should have learned by now that sexual misconduct does not have the firepower to knock a sitting president out of office. Presidents faced accusations of infidelity long before Trump, and after the buzz died down, most Americans moved on. We can be pretty certain that Stormy Daniels, or any other woman who claims to have had an affair with Trump, isn’t going to be the thing that brings him down.

According to Robert Watson, a historian at Lynn University who has written a book about the sexual indiscretions of U.S. presidents, several are known to have had sexual trysts either before they made it to the White House or while they were there.

We all know about John F. Kennedy’s alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe while he was president. Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, the slave with whom he fathered six children, is legendary. And Bill Clinton’s illicit behavior with White House intern Monica Lewinsky still makes our stomachs turn.

In his book, “Affairs of State: The Untold History of Presidential Love, Sex, and Scandal,” Watson reveals juicy tidbits about some of our most beloved heads of state. Some of the stories, at the time, made interesting headlines in the newspapers and juicy gossip behind closed doors. But in the end, the presidents were unscathed.

Take Grover Cleveland, for instance, the 22nd and 24th president. A scandal ensued during his first presidential campaign when it was revealed that the bachelor politician had fathered a child out of wedlock, quite possibly with a prostitute or at the very least, a woman with loose morals.

Right-wing Christian preachers ran with it, portraying Cleveland as a sexual predator who carouses at night and warning that no woman was safe. At campaign events, Republicans would stand in the audience and scream, “Ma, Ma, where's my pa?” After he won, Democrats are said to have added the line, “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!”

While in office, the nearly 50-year-old president married his 21-year-old goddaughter in a relatively secret ceremony. Cleveland had helped raise the girl after her father, his best friend, died years before. If it hurt him, it was short-lived. Cleveland won the popular vote in his bid for re-election but lost the Electoral College. Four years later, he was elected again, the only president to hold two nonconsecutive terms in office.

According to Watson, Woodrow Wilson’s affair with Clara Peck during his marriage was so well-known that critics called him “Mrs. Peck’s bad boy.” The two often traveled together and stayed at her place in Bermuda, but that didn’t derail his first presidential bid. When his wife died, Wilson began having a very public affair with Edith Galt, whom he ended up marrying more quickly than many thought was appropriate for a man in mourning.

While married to Mamie, Dwight Eisenhower allegedly had an affair with Kay Summersby, his British driver during World War II. It did nothing to tarnish the conservative politician’s image as an ideal family man and father figure, according to Watson. Franklin D. Roosevelt is known to have had multiple mistresses while married to Eleanor, Watson said. Yet he was elected and re-elected four times. And like Kennedy, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, also was known for excessive womanizing.

No one would be shocked if Daniels’ allegations about Trump turned out to be true, either. What’s shameful, though, is how easily we allow ourselves to be distracted by chatter that doesn’t really matter.

By Olivia B. Waxman
Updated: March 23, 2018 5:55 PM ET



When Stephanie Clifford appears on CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday, the woman known in her porn career as Stormy Daniels, will be adding a chapter to a very long history of the American public’s fascination with Presidents’ private lives.

Clifford is not the only woman who says she had an affair with President Donald Trump before he took the office — Anderson Cooper recently interviewed former Playboy model Karen McDougal about something similar — but this story is much older than just a decade or so. In some ways, it goes back more than 200 years.

For about as long as the country has existed, the public and the press have imposed few consequences on Presidents for what they do behind closed doors, even when those actions become public, as long as those actions don’t affect the rest of the government. What has changed is the perception of when that line gets crossed.


EARLY SCANDALS

In the nation’s earliest years, newspapers were associated with political parties, so accusations of infidelity were often brought up to slam political opponents but dismissed by loyalists. “The golden age of America’s founding was also the gutter age of American reporting,” as pundit Eric Burns put it in his book Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism.

The most notorious scandalmonger of that period was James Callender, a Federalist newspaper editor, who, for example, spread stories of Thomas Jefferson’s fathering children with Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved at his estate, and also making a move on the wife of his good friend from college.
Of the latter accusation, Jefferson wrote in a July 1, 1805, letter to his Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith, “I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young & single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowlege its incorrectness; it is the only one, founded in truth among all their allegations against me.” (However, Monticello, the museum at the site of his former home, now acknowledges that the charge about Hemings is true too.)

But such claims about Jefferson didn’t seriously damage his career. The times when personal stories like those did make a difference was when there was concern over whether public figures’ personal lives affected their jobs.

The most famous political sex scandal Callender revealed was the extramarital affair that Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton — who wasn’t president, but proves the point — had with Maria Reynolds between 1791 and 1792, details of which Callender published in his anthology The History of the United States for 1796.
In that case, it wasn’t the affair that was controversial so much as the concern that Hamilton may have used federal funds to pay hush money to her husband. In a 1797 pamphlet, he attempted to set the record straight, clarifying that while the affair was shady, he didn’t do anything illegal.

Historian David Eisenbach, an author of One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies and Their Lovers Changed the Course of American History, argues that examining presidents’ personal lives was also a way to judge “how someone would behave in office,” in the absence of other information about their character: “In European countries, politicians came from distinguished families, but in America, you didn’t have the old families to rely upon.”

This was particularly true for candidates who came from humble backgrounds, such as Andrew Jackson. During his rise to power, the media drew conclusions about his fitness for office from speculation on the legality of his marriage. During the 1828 election, John Quincy Adams’ campaign is said to have helped spread speculation about whether he and his wife eloped while she was still married to her first husband, in an attempt to prove that Jackson lacked a moral compass. First-Lady-elect Rachel Jackson died shortly before Jackson’s inauguration, and it’s believed that her stress over the public dissection of their marriage had exacerbated her ailments.

But, again, the charges against Jackson’s marriage didn’t actually keep him from office — and in some cases such uproar could actually help.

For example, Grover Cleveland is believed to have won the 1884 presidential election in part because of the grace under pressure he exhibited after a Buffalo newspaper revealed that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. The story was made famous by a Sep. 27, 1884, editorial cartoon published about a month before Election Day, which gave rise to the “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” chant at rallies for his opponent James Blaine. But he was above-board about the issue, and ordered party leaders to tell the truth, including about the child support that he paid. The decision reflected well on him, and he became President.


TURNING A BLIND EYE

The period around the turn of the 20th century marked a major change in journalism, as it became professionalized — with trade organizations and professional schools — and, in many cases, divorced from outright association with a political party. As part of that reform, journalists backed off their scrutiny of presidents’ personal lives.

In fact, one of Warren Harding’s mistresses couldn’t even find anyone to publish her tell-all about her sexual relationship. It was after his death that Nan Britton published The President’s Daughter, which is considered one of the first graphic tell-all political memoirs. As the title suggests, she claimed she gave birth to a child that was his in 1919 — a claim that DNA testing appeared to confirm in 2015. Evidence of the affair was in a trove of explicit letters that a historian found in the early ’60s. His family, however, successfully sued to keep them sealed until 2014.

The press likewise stayed away from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s relationship with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor Roosevelt’s social secretary.
And President John F. Kennedy was spared scrutiny of his trysts, too — or rather his “extracurricular screwing around” as Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor of Pentagon Papers fame, once put it.

The reasons for keeping a lid on presidents’ personal lives were many. For one thing, some of the predominantly male political journalists could be seen as hypocrites if they made a big deal out of presidents’ affairs.

“Many of the men in the White House press corps were carrying on dalliances of their own, so if they went public with the President, there would be blowback, and their wives would find out,” says Barbara Perry, the Director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, who spoke to TIME as part of a new presidential-history partnership between TIME History and the Miller Center.


But it’s significant to note that — perhaps not coincidentally, given the lives of those shaping the media narrative — those dalliances weren’t generally seen as affecting the public at all. They were secret, but also trivial.

The writer Marvin Kalb once recalled a night in 1963 when he was covering one of President Kennedy’s New York visits for CBS, and was tackled by a Secret Service agent right outside an entrance to Kennedy’s private elevator at the Carlyle Hotel. While on the floor, he looked up and caught a glimpse of a woman going into the private elevator. He did not even consider pursuing the story. “In those days, the possibility of a presidential affair, while titillating, was not considered ‘news’ by the mainstream press — not when the Cuban missile crisis was still a fresh and frightening memory of the nuclear dangers of the Cold War, not when racial tensions were again clawing at the soul of the nation,” he wrote.

The moral panic of the 19th century had faded, and concerns about the possibility of harassment had not yet come up on a major scale. So the affairs stayed secret — even when, in some cases, they did have implications for government or security.
For example, though one of Harding’s mistresses couldn’t find a publisher, it was later revealed that the Republican National Committee had to pay hush money to another mistress of his.


THE PUBLIC SHOULD KNOW

In the late 20th century, things changed again. In 1969, after Teddy Kennedy drove a car into the water off Chappaquiddick, leading to the death of his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, a TIME essay posited that the public was asking about what public figures did in their private lives because those figures had gotten more powerful, so it mattered more. In general, that was true — the office of the President became more powerful in the 20th century than it had previously been — but perhaps the bigger change was in the perception of what truly qualified as private. The things that were secret were no longer seen as quite so meaningless to politics.

That difference was thrown into relief in 1987, when Colorado Senator Gary Hart was the frontrunner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. He told New York Times reporter E.J. Dionne that he didn’t care if people followed him around, and that anyone who did so would be very bored. So the Miami Herald staked out his Washington townhouse until they got a photo of Hart with Donna Rice, a 29-year-old Miami model who was not his wife. Two days after refusing to answer a Washington Post reporter’s question, “Have you ever committed adultery?” at a televised press conference, he suspended his campaign.

TIME’s cover story on Hart’s fall from grace cited the Herald’s stakeout as “a watershed moment in political journalism.” It wasn’t just a matter of public willingness to talk about sex or the fact that Hart had been caught in hypocrisy, the story pointed out: “[With] the changing status of women, society has grown less tolerant of the macho dalliances of married men.” (It’s worth remembering, as TIME pointed out in that 1969 essay, that when scandal helped bolster Cleveland, women couldn’t even vote.)

That shifting line — the shared feeling that it doesn’t necessarily matter what the President does in private, but that some things that seem private really aren’t — is also illustrated by what is probably the 20th century’s most famous White House sex scandal: President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

With Clinton, it wasn’t the affair itself but rather the attempt to cover it up that would lead to his impeachment, points out political scientist Alison Dagnes, co-editor of Sex Scandals in American Politics. Clinton’s job approval ratings remained consistently high during the scandal, suggesting that the public didn’t think it was affecting the way he did his job. “People felt good about where they were and where America was in the world and gave Clinton credit for that,” Perry explains.

It has been more recently, as public conversations about sex in the workplace have evolved, that some have come to rethink the implication of a relationship between a President and an intern, and the power dynamics entailed.

Throughout, from Jefferson to Clinton, the takeaway is the same: when the public thinks that the President’s private life will get in the way of governing — whether as a matter of 19th-century morals or 20th-century gender dynamics — such a scandal can truly damage a presidency. If there’s no perception that an affair or similar scandal will impact the government, historically the political fallout has been minor. The real change has been that what people do in private has once again, over the last few decades, come to be seen as relevant to a person’s fitness to lead.


SO WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR TRUMP?

He may actually benefit from the fact that — given that a range of sexual misconduct allegations already surfaced during his campaign, and just this past week a judge ruled that Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos, who claims that Trump groped her, can move forward with her defamation suit — claims of consensual affairs may not change public opinion in any significant way, though that could change if campaign-funding laws get drawn in.

“There is a genius in Trump’s run for the presidency in that he starts with the premise that all politicians are crooked, and I’m not one, so you don’t need to judge me the way you judge politicians,” Perry points out.

Historian Thomas A. Foster, author of Sex and The Founding Fathers, suggests looking not at what the President does but how his actions compare to his reputation. Shock and hypocrisy, he argues, are more damaging than adultery. Trump — who has owned beauty pageants and has been married three times — built his brand partially on his virility and what Foster calls an emphasis on “conquests.” Now it remains to be seen how he will conquer these most recent allegations.

I think it was pretty much established that adultery isn't an impeachable offense. The crimes committed to cover it up however might be a different matter. Better than impeachment is this dragging on and the Trump people having to get further in the gutter with their guy.

you give a free pass to all these and hold Trump to a standard you would never hold any of these Democrats to. Because it isn't about right or wrong for you, or justice, it's just about whatever contrivance would allow your party to drive Trump out of office.

By David Harsanyi
December 15, 2017

Our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good,” legendary reporter Carl Bernstein recently claimed. Pretty good? If there’s a major news story over the past 70 years that the American media have botched more often because of bias and wishful thinking, I’d love to hear about it.

Four big scoops recently run by major news organizations, written by top reporters and, presumably, churned through layers of scrupulous editing, turned out to be completely wrong.

Reuters, Bloomberg and others reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office had subpoenaed President Trump’s records from Deutsche Bank. Trump’s attorney says it hadn’t.

ABC reported that candidate Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election. He didn’t (as far as we know). The New York Times ran a story claiming that K.T. McFarland, a former member of the Trump transition team, had acknowledged collusion. She hadn’t.

Then, CNN topped off the week by falsely reporting that the Trump campaign had been offered access to hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails before they were published. It had not.

Forget your routine bias. These were four bombshells disseminated to millions of Americans by breathless anchors, pundits and analysts, all of whom are feeding frenzied expectations about Trump-Russia collusion that have now been internalized by many as indisputable truths. All four pieces, incidentally, are useless without their central faulty claims. Yet there they sit. And these are only four of dozens of other stories that have fizzled over the year.

If we are to accept the special pleadings of journalists, we have to believe these were all honest mistakes. They may be. But a person might then ask: Why is it that every one of the dozens of honest mistakes is prejudiced in the very same way? Why hasn’t there been a single major honest mistake that diminishes the Trump-Russia collusion story? Why is there never an honest mistake that indicts Democrats?

Maybe the problem is that too many people are working backward from a preconception. Maybe newsrooms have too many people who view the world through an identical prism — which is to say they believe he stole the election with the help of Russians.

For instance, the CNN reporters who wrote the DNC story contend they had two sources who told them Donald Trump Jr. was offered encryption codes to look at hacked DNC emails. They both must have lied to them about the same date on the same e-mail. CNN says that the duo followed “editorial process” in reporting the piece. This brings three lines of questioning to mind.

First: Do news organizations typically run stories about documents they’ve never authenticated? Can they point to a single story about the Obama administration CNN has written using a similar process?

Second: Why would two independent sources lie about a date on the e-mail to Trump Jr. if they didn’t want to mislead the public? And how independent could they really be? How many stories regarding the Russian-collusion investigation has CNN run from these same sources?

Three: If sources lie to you, why not burn them? There may be good reasons to avoid exposing a dishonest source. Perhaps it will scare away legitimate whistleblowers. Perhaps reporters want to preserve relationships with those in power — because they may help on other stories in the future. At the end of the day, you’re in contest for information.

But these people have put the reporters’ reputation, even their jobs, in danger. Moreover, they have engaged in a serious abuse of the public trust and an abuse of power.

Who knows how many of these mistakes, spread over numerous outlets, came from the same sources? This seems newsworthy.

When honest mistakes are found, the reflex of many journalists has been portraying themselves as sentinels of free speech and democracy. Often they will attempt to do this by contrasting their track record on truth with that of Donald Trump. Yes, Trump is a fabulist. And maybe one day Robert Mueller will inform us that the administration colluded with Russia.

What it has not done up to this point, however, is undermine the ability of the press to report stories accurately. Trump didn’t make your activist source lie.

The fact that many political journalists (not all) have a political agenda is not new, but if they become a proxy of operatives who peddle falsehoods, they will soon lose credibility with an even bigger swath of the country. They will have themselves to blame.

You might consider that an adulter who has a fixer just may not be the fountains of truth here. It's not the media's job to be a propaganda farm for your party.

RNC fundraiser resigns after report of 1.6 million payout
1.6 million is apparently the price these days to cover up an affair and abort the baby in Trumpland

Wow, what do you think your standard looks like these days? Do you think it's time Trump stopped calling his lawyer/fixer a good man and fire him?

What everyone knows is that there was more than enough evidence to do a similar raid of Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, and DOJ/FBI did NOT.

Further the FBI and DOJ just sat on their hands while Hillary Clinton and her subordinates deleted 33,000 self-incriminating e-mails, and bleachbitted the hard-drives of their computers, and smashed all Frau Hitlery's cel phones to eliminate the incriminating messages and email on those. All >>>>AFTER<<<< they were subpoenaed as evidence. The FBI even gave them permission to destroy much of the remaining evidence. Some cel phones were turned over with the SIM cards (i.e., the memory cards) removed, rendered useless as evidence. These people destroyed evidence, and yet no aggressive raids by DOJ and FBI.

The FBI and DOJ also gave Mills and Abedin immunity, in exchange for exactly no information.
Contrast that destruction of overwhelming evidence and clear crimes (selling State Department influence in exchange for hundreds of millions in foreign donations to the Clinton foundation, for openers), to the piddly offenses DOJ and FBI are raiding Trump on with what legal scholar Alan Deshowitz describes as "extreme aggression". Was there really any evidence that Cohen would have destroyed evidence he never had a clue DOJ and FBI would aggressively raid?

From the first days Special Counsel Robert Mueller began to assemble his investigative team to try to get to the bottom of that ever-elusive, Democrat-driven Trump-Russia "collusion" narrative, reports about political bias among his staff began to emerge. When details about former team member Peter Strzok's overt antipathy for Trump hit the headlines, allegations of bias among the intelligence community ratcheted up.

A new study by The Daily Caller throws more fuel on the fire of the anti-Trump bias allegations. TheDC looked into the political affiliations among those tasked with supposedly giving us a fair investigation about the Russia allegations — and found nothing close to bipartisan balance.

An examination of the voter registration records of the 16 publicly confirmed lawyers on Mueller's team found that 13 of them are registered Democrats. Not a single one is a registered Republican. Three have no party affiliation.

TheDC notes that one of the currently unaffiliated attorneys, Zainab Ahmad, was once registered as a Republican, but that was back at age 18. As for the political affiliation of the still unidentified 17th attorney on the team, who knows, but the percentages aren't stacked in the GOP's favor.

While previous reports revealed that 9 of the known 16 had donated over $60,000 to Democrats, TheDC's study found that in fact 11 have made donations, some of which were not in FEC records. Previous reports found that one of the nine who donated to Democrats also donated a few thousand to Republicans.

While his team is overwhelmingly Democratic, Mueller himself is a registered Republican.

Read the full report HERE

Lol, it's funny after your previous posts. Clearly your the one with the double standard. The guy in charge as noted is a republican btw. One that republicans liked till he was put in charge of the investigation.

You allege corruption based on party affiliations and when it's a republican it doesn't count because you say it's in name only. Seems very partisan of you. Thank goodness that type of partisan rationalizing doesn't excuse Trump from any crimes he may have committed. It doesn't matter if the evidence is there if it's presented by law abiding democrats lead by a republican who you call a rhino because he's doing his job.

More free passes for your guy, lol. You can certainly accuse Clinton/Dems/republicans that don't do Trump's talking points, of everything you want but that really is only a distraction for you. The FBI didn't raid her lawyer's office.

Poor WB, you would be having a field day if Clinton had the lawyer/fixer paying out cash and being raided. I here it's a very high bar to raid a lawyer so I'm just waiting to see what comes out of that. And no comments about the Enquirer participation?

There is a very high legal bar to do the raid they did WB.

Despite what you say it is a very high legal bar. I would point out that you go way beyond the facts. For example assuming Bill cut some deal with Loretta. She recused herself to avoid the appearance of anything fishy. The raid on Trump's fixer required several high hurdles being met and not just within the FBI. What I take from the fact that they were able to do the raid I suspect Cohen is screwed. And given that he was running around during the election paying off women hush money for Trump it's not looking good for Spanky either.

Oh and I wonder what Hannity needed Cohen for that his regular lawyers couldn't handle, lol.

As Hannity has explained, he never employed Cohen as a lawyer. As Hannity explained, they are friends having lunch and talking, and Hannity would say he has this or that potential legal situation, what do you think I should do. He said he never hired or paid Cohen for anything, and that he's highly amused by the media's pouncing on the mention of his name, showing clips of CNN and MSNBC anchors mentioning him over and over, with orgasmic glee that Hannity might have done something wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMkyWp56m-I

So Trump's fixer was lying when he listed Hannity as an actual client?

Cohen is reportedly taking the 5th, lol

Nope, you just gave Hannity a free pass. You can make all the accusations you want but those would be off topic and sad partisan deflection. Hannity is also very biased so if you don't accept fact checks I'm sure as heck not accepting Hannity crap.

As Hannity tells it, there is no actual business relationship. It sounds to me like he just informally asked Cohen's opinion over cocktails or dinner, and that Hannity entrusted the actual transactions to other lawyers that he actually paid.

Since Cohen said that Hannity is his client, it's legitimate to clarify what Hannity's relationship is with Cohen. But pending any facts to the contrary, Hannity has answered those questions, and he doesn't have business ties to Cohen.

WHAT ABOUT THE LAUNDRY LIST OF REPORTERS HANNITY CITED WITH FAR MORE EXTENSIVE UNDISCLOSED POLITICAL TIES?!?
A long list of undisclosed incestuous relationships by CNN reporters and executives?
Who donated 96% for Hillary Clinton?
With extensive ties to the Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton administrations and staff?

You once again hold Republicans to a >>>>FAR<<<<< higher standard than the thieving Cultural Marxist America-hating bastards you align yourself with.

JUDGE IN COHEN CASE APPOINTS INDEPENDENT 'SPECIAL MASTER' TO REVIEW COHEN'S SEIZED RECORDS. STORMY DANIELS' LAWYER FILES TO OBTAIN RECORDS FROM SEIZURE

Records that never should have been subject to search in the first place.

When DOJ shows equal zeal for obtaining Hillary's deleted 33,000 e-mails, and filing charges against Hillary, Huma, and Mills for destroying evidence, then and only then could this be called a legitimate raid. Or have any resemblance to equal protection and prosecution under the law.

Hannity & Dobbs are definitely biased sources.

I understand why you don't like fact checks.

...Spanky...

George "Spanky" McFarland (October 2, 1928 – June 30, 1993) was an American actor most famous for his appearances as a child in the Our Gang series of short-subject comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. The Our Gang shorts were later syndicated to television as The Little Rascals.

Report: Source who leaked Cohen financial info claims key government reports were missing

Also Trump acknowledges payment to his fixer finally and the ethics office forwards it to the Justice Department.

Federal law requires banks to file suspicious activity reports to flag anything that could be fraud, money laundering or other financial misconduct.

Specifically...



Always implying, never proving.

Michael Cohen did monthly services for Trump, for which Trump was not even aware. He paid Cohen to deal with things, without bothering Trump with the details, for which Trump reimbursed him later, after billed. Similar, on a smaller scale, with how I pay my VISA bill every month.

Again: If there was ANYTHING to this, the Meuller investigation would not have said yesterday that they will not be indicting Trump on any charges. It was over a month ago that ALL Michael Cohen's records were raided by the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York. They've had endless time to sift through all the records, and there is nothing to file charges on.

In just ten weeks, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who is representing porn star Stormy Daniels in her lawsuits against President Trump, has racked up an impressive 147 interviews on broadcast and cable news programs, according to Newsbusters. But the tide may be beginning to turn against the "creepy porn lawyer," as Fox News' Tucker Carlson calls him, as lawsuits and complaints stack up against him.

According to Fox News, the State Bar of California is investigating Avenatti after a complaint was filed against him regarding unpaid taxes.
Fox News on Wednesday obtained an April 18-dated letter verifying the existence of the investigation—unrelated to his representation of Daniels.

“The complaint against attorney Michael J. Avenatti has been reviewed and forwarded to the Enforcement Unit for further investigation and prosecution, if warranted,” said the letter from the state bar, written by Supervising Attorney Anand Kumar and reviewed by Fox News.

Also, according to TMZ, Avenatti is being sued by his ex-law partner for $2 million.

According to new legal docs, obtained by TMZ, Avenatti's being sued by Jason Frank, a former partner at Egan Avenatti ... Michael's law firm, because he claims Avenatti stiffed him out of a couple mil.

This comes after The Daily Caller over the weekend posted a blistering expose on Avenatti's past business dealings, which are reportedly "littered with lawsuits, jilted business partners and bankruptcy filings." According to the Caller, people who have worked with Avenatti describe him as "ruthless, greedy and unbothered by ethical questions."

Avenatti allegedly cheated a coffee vendor out of $160,000 and was sued for misrepresentation by actor Patrick Dempsey. The shady lawyer was also sued for engaging in some kind of “pump and dump scheme to deprive federal and state taxing authorities of millions of dollars.”

Like someone with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), Avenatti has an abnormally developed capacity to "dish it out," but is completely unable to take it. The DCNF's unflattering report prompted the attorney to lash out at the writers, threatening them with a lawsuit.

• Let me be clear. If you and your colleagues do not stop with the hit pieces that are full of lies and defamatory statements, I will have no choice but to sue each of you and your publication for defamation. During that process, we will expose your publication for what it truly is. We will also recover significant damages against each of you that participated personally. So if I were you, I would tell Mr. Trump to find someone else to fabricate things about me.
  
  “If you think I’m kidding, you really don’t know anything about me. This is the last warning.”

Avenatti's inflamed, over-the-top reaction provoked journalists from across the ideological spectrum to come to The Daily Caller's defense.

Avenatti has appeared dozens of times on CNN and MSNBC, but has spurned Fox News, likely out of fear that he would be facing something a little more challenging than the puffball interviews he's grown accustomed to on MSNBC and CNN.

According to Newsbusters, 74 of Avenatti's 147 appearances have been on CNN, making him perhaps the most frequent guest in the network's history.

No guest — not Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders in 2016, nor Adam Schiff in 2017 — received anything close to the outpouring of free media coverage that CNN has bequeathed to Avenatti.

The saddest part of the whole sordid affair is that polls show the public really. doesn't. care.

They can see what's going on here, but they don't want to see it.

So I guess we can forgive the MSM for not jumping on this bombshell allegation from Tasha Reign, the star of an adult film directed by Stormy Daniels late last year:

Reign claims that in November of last year she was assaulted by one of Daniels’ crewman and that he admitted to what he did in front of Daniels, who was the film’s director. Reign says that after the crewman’s admission, Daniels did nothing to him but shamed her for making the alleged abuser cry. Worse, according to Reign, Daniels then lied to the production company, Wicked Pictures, with the claim that nothing had happened.

Apparently in the hope of making the matter go away, Avenatti released a statement this week claiming Wicked had done a full investigation and Daniels was cleared of all wrongdoing.

Wicked, however, contradicted Avenatti and says the investigation is ongoing.

Then there's this:

[Twitter post: ]
STORMY DANIELS WILL PERFORM NAKED WITH TRUMP STATUE IN OREGON.

So you see this as just lying about sex? As a lawyer I would think you would see more problems than that. Trump does have dependable base though that just hates the other side so I think he might be protected unlike Edwards or Clinton was.

I would point out your first comment after Cohen's allegations came out were a partisan swipe at democrats.

So you see this as just lying about sex? As a lawyer I would think you would see more problems than that. Trump does have dependable base though that just hates the other side so I think he might be protected unlike Edwards or Clinton was.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered adult-film star Stormy Daniels to pay President Trump more than $293,000 in legal fees amid their ongoing legal battles.
U.S. District Judge James Otero ordered Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, to pay the fees in her defamation case against Trump, which Otero dismissed in October.

Daniels alleged that Trump defamed her in an April tweet that mocked her claims that a man threatened her in 2011 to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump.
Shortly after Daniels and her attorney, Michael Avenatti, released a forensic sketch of the man who allegedly threatened her, Trump posted a side-by-side photo suggesting that the man was Daniels’s ex-husband.

After the defamation case failed, Trump’s attorneys had requested that Daniels pay them $340,000 in legal fees.
Otero, writing that Trump’s attorneys spent “excessive” time on the case, ordered Daniels to pay about 75 percent of Trump’s legal fees, plus an additional $1,000 in sanctions.

Trump’s attorney, Charles Harder, praised Tuesday’s decision as “a total victory for the President, and a total defeat for Stormy Daniels in this case.”

Again, John Edwards' case is way beyond what Trump is alleged to have done. Edwards was ussing campaign money to pay for his trips around the country to have an extended affair with a female documentary filmmaker, who initially was filming Edwards' campaign. While his wife was dying of cancer.

The fact that a trial couldn't prove the far more blatant case of Edwards' criminality, speaks of howw much less likely it is that any case can be made aagainst Trump.

In the case of Trump, he used his own money, not campaign funds. And again, many of the Democrats in the House are guilty of the same and worse of what they are trying to allege against Trump. The hypocrisy of Democrats just piles on high. As does their audacity.

Hey, you can't talk about God's Chosen President™ that way! Save that slanderous nonsense for the COMMUNIST MUSLIM CULTURAL MARXIST MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE GLOBALIST AND WORST OF ALL NONWHITE BARACK OBAMA!!!

I remember Cohen complaining he had to pay Stormy out of his own pocket and the National Enquirer just fessed up about paying another woman hush money for Trump. And who really thinks Trump wouldn't leave a wife that was dying of cancer? He certainly has no problem fucking other women while he has a wife recuperating from giving birth.

When sexual harassers agree on confidential settlements with victims, at least the payments come out of the harassers' own pockets or from companies that choose to employ them.

But not, as the nation has learned this month, when the harasser serves in Congress. Then, taxpayers foot the bill. And the entire episode remains hidden.

This outrageous system grows out of a 1995 law, known as the Congressional Accountability Act, that was intended to make lawmakers subject to the same workplace laws against harassment and discrimination as the rest of American employers.
The law was a well-intentioned and much needed effort to end Congress' status as the "last plantation." But some of the fine-print provisions — such as mandating that settlements be secret and having taxpayers pick up the tab for lawmakers violating the law — represent the opposite of accountability.

For complainants, the act set up an arrangement so cumbersome that it seems designed less to protect wronged workers than to insulate lawmakers from public embarrassment.

To file a complaint, employees must go through a 90-day “mandatory dispute resolution process,” the first step of which is counseling — for the accuser. Yes, you read that correctly. The alleged harasser isn’t forced to get counseling. The victim is.

Outside Congress, workers with claims can file a lawsuit in federal court whenever they want. But if they work for Congress, “failure to follow these procedures … may jeopardize any claims raised under” the law.

Because of public furor over sexual harassment and the decision by some female lawmakers to reveal their own experiences, the 1995 law is under a much deserved spotlight. In recent weeks, current and former congresswomen have revealed enduring everything from unwanted advances to being groped on the House floor. One told of a staffer who quit after a lawmaker told her to bring materials to his house, answered the door in a towel, and exposed himself.


Add to that accusations against two of Congress' most liberal members, and you have the makings of a watershed moment. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., apologized Monday for disrespecting women. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., stepped aside Sunday as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee after being accused of making unwanted advances toward female staffers and firing one after she resisted. (Conyers allegedly settled that claim with $27,000 of taxpayers’ money from his office account, disguising it as “severance pay.” He acknowledged settling but denied the allegations.)

Even so, all the public knows is that since 1997, Congress has paid more than $17 million to settle scores of workplace claims from a special Treasury Department fund created by the 1995 law.

Whether the claims involved sexual harassment, or discrimination against protected groups, is unknown. So is the identity of lawmakers and aides involved in alleged misbehavior.

Such secrecy is a betrayal of the public trust and the whole notion that government works in public. Nor should Capitol Hill be a place that tolerates crude and ugly mistreatment of women.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is pushing a measure to make the complaint process less cumbersome for workers, get rid of required secrecy, and mandate that any lawmaker who settles a claim as a harasser repay the U.S. Treasury out of his or her own pocket.

Nothing in the Speier-Gillibrand proposal should be particularly controversial, but passage is far from assured. Congress has never been particularly good at policing itself.

That's too mean and slanderous to be funny.

https://media.giphy.com/media/xT0GqnzmiRvvGPtsWY/giphy.gif

That's too mean and slanderous to be funny.
I never made an issue of Obama's race. And if I and other Republicans did have a problem with Obama's race, we wouldn't be so enthusiastic about black Republicans like Herman Cain, Dr Ben Carson, former Rep. Allen West (who I voted for twice in my local district), and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (who is, by the way the only black Senator, there are no Democrat black senators).

The problem with Barack Obama is not his skin color, it is his Cultural Marxism, anti-colonialism, Liberation Theology and insurrectionist hatred of the United States, and the same poisonous ideology in those who surround him, that is very well documented in his own writings, speeches, and actions, as well as those of his inner circle and administration. Likewise Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the inner circle surrounding them, and in their own self-incriminating words. Any one of whom you can easily look up.
http://archive.discoverthenetworks.org/summary.asp?object=Persons&category=
That is just a fact.

I (and other Republicans you slander) don't have more disdain for the Obamas than for the Clintons or other Marxist radicals. It is the same contempt for all of them.

It is their ideology and goals, not their skin color, that is offensive.

Dipshit.

*** You are ignoring this user ***

Stormy' lawyer says he has 3 more women Trump paid hush money to. With the Cohan tape Trump could find himself in John Edwards territory.