***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[IATT]

The inanity of that phonecall is just frightening. Like someone's senile grandpa phoning into the radio in the morning.

8 to be specific.. that we know of

 

[MalcolmNewton]

Cubic Zirconia and Polyester Appear To Lie Under Oath About Trump Payments

Conservative internet pundits Lynnette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson appeared on Thursday to lie under oath to a congressional panel about their financial relationship to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on free speech and social media, Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) asked the pair whether the Trump campaign had paid them. The two emphatically denied receiving any payments. The Trump campaign’s Federal Election Commission filings indicate that the pair were paid $1,274.94 on Nov. 22, 2016 for “Field Consulting.”

 

[rillo561]

please let this be life

 

[addict4sneakers]

Shucking and jiving for $1200?

That’s the definition of hustling backwards

 

[wr]

Where's the recordings of Don bragging about how cheap his African Americans were???

 

[IATT]

 

[Belgium]

I played around ~45 minutes of Pruitt's testimony in the background while I was working on something. I don't think I heard any serious criticism from any House Republicans on the panel, at least nothing to do with all the reported controversy. Vast majority didn't ask anything about misconduct and just asked him some basic questions with some praise sprinkled on it. Some bashed Democrats for "personal attacks" against Pruitt when they were questioning him on the GAO report stating the EPA violated 2 laws and other similar issues. By all accounts they seemed quite pleased with his job performance.

 

[Belgium]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/us/politics/rob-porter-mcgahn-fbi-white-house.html
F.B.I. Letter Casts Further Doubt on White House’s Rob Porter Timeline
The F.B.I. first gave the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, a file containing spousal abuse allegations against Rob Porter in March 2017, according to a detailed new timeline the bureau has given to Congress that casts further doubt on the West Wing’s account of how accusations against one of President Trump’s closest advisers were handled.

Mr. Porter, Mr. Trump’s staff secretary, resigned under pressure in February after allegations that he had been physically violent toward two former wives were aired in the press. The White House — which initially sprang to his defense — has issued several competing accounts of how Mr. Trump’s team handled the allegations, which they insisted no senior officials knew about until just before Mr. Porter left his job.

But in a letter this month to the leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is investigating how Mr. Porter could have received a security clearance given the allegations, a top official at the F.B.I. said that on March 3, 2017, the bureau sent a “partial report” on Mr. Porter “addressed to the Counsel to the President, Donald F. McGahn, which contained derogatory information.” A former federal law enforcement official said the violent abuse allegations were included in that file.

The F.B.I. furnished a more complete report to the White House personnel security office in July, according to the letter, which did not detail the nature of the derogatory information.

Mr. McGahn could not be reached for comment on the report. But a White House official said that he never saw it, and that aides believe it was reviewed by an underling and passed on to the White House personnel security office, which reviews F.B.I. background investigations as part of its process for evaluating whether officials should receive security clearances.


Mr. McGahn, the official said, was busy at the time juggling the Supreme Court confirmation process for Neil M. Gorsuch, the selection of appeals court judges and the vetting of numerous cabinet nominees.

“Don never saw it,” the official said, insisting on anonymity to describe internal procedures. “The right people never saw it.”

The White House previously claimed that the March report contained only basic employment information about Mr. Porter, not allegations of abuse.

The F.B.I.’s attempt to inform Mr. McGahn of damaging information about Mr. Porter was described in an April 13 letter from Gerald Roberts Jr., the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s security division, to Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina and the chairman of the oversight panel, and Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the committee’s ranking Democrat. The Times obtained a copy of the letter.

Mr. Porter’s former wives have said the F.B.I. interviewed them about their abuse claims in January 2017. Mr. Porter himself also alerted Mr. McGahn that an aggrieved ex-wife was making potentially damaging accusations about him, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Mr. Roberts’s letter says that in August, the bureau received a request from the White House personnel security office for additional information on Mr. Porter, “including, but not limited to, re-interviews of Mr. Porter, his ex-wives and his girlfriend at the time.”

In November, the F.B.I. gave the White House another report, Mr. Roberts wrote, “which contained additional derogatory information.”

The F.B.I.’s timeline is at odds with the one given by top officials including John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, who acknowledged in March that he had stumbled in his response to the allegations against Mr. Porter but insisted that he had not known of the damaging accusations until the week Mr. Porter left.

Background investigations often uncover derogatory information, and one person familiar with Mr. Porter’s said the allegations of abuse and the circumstances surrounding them were not as clear-cut as they were portrayed to be when they surfaced in the press, making it difficult to discern whether they warranted action. Even though the White House now appears to have known for months about the claims against Mr. Porter, his temporary clearance was never revoked.

The White House’s contention that Mr. McGahn never saw the original F.B.I. report comes as it is facing fresh questions about its process for vetting personnel for top posts in Mr. Trump’s administration, after Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, the White House physician who was his pick to be the secretary of veterans affairs, withdrew on Thursday amid damaging allegations that he drank on the job, overprescribed medication and presided over a hostile work environment.

Like Dr. Jackson, Mr. Porter was among a small circle of senior officials who spent their days in proximity to Mr. Trump. As staff secretary, Mr. Porter handled the reams of sensitive documents that flow through the president’s office daily. The allegations against him were one reason he could not obtain a permanent security clearance, and the scandal surrounding his departure highlighted a pattern at the White House of allowing senior officials who had not been given permanent clearance to see classified information to serve in the highest echelons of the White House.

Mr. Kelly has since revised clearance procedures at the White House, stripping interim clearances from some senior officials who had been working with temporary ones for months, most prominently Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

Among the changes Mr. Kelly instituted was a new requirement that if the F.B.I. uncovers “significantly derogatory” information about a White House official, it must brief the White House counsel in person on the material. The White House official said Mr. McGahn specifically requested the change to rectify what happened in Mr. Porter’s case, when he felt that he was being held responsible for having information that he had, in fact, never seen.

Mr. Cummings said the new information showed a cavalier attitude at the White House toward granting access to classified information.

“The F.B.I. has now confirmed that it repeatedly provided derogatory information to the White House about Rob Porter as far back as March of 2017,” he said. “But White House officials ignored this information and continued granting Porter access to our nation’s most highly classified secrets — just as they did with Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner.”

Mr. Cummings said the White House had refused to give the oversight panel documents it had requested or make staff members available for interviews on the matter, and he criticized Mr. Gowdy for failing to issue subpoenas to obtain the material.

Congressional officials said the White House Counsel’s Office had briefed Mr. Gowdy and Mr. Cummings on April 11, but had declined to give the lawmakers any information about how security clearances had been handled in the past, speaking only about how they would be handled in the future.

 

[Belgium]

After the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled their 2013 voter ID law as unconstitutional in 2014, the GOP simply tried again last year in order to circumvent the 2014 SC ruling according to a lawsuit filed by one of the plaintiffs in the original case.
A judge has now blocked the current voter ID law from being enforced in the May 22nd primary.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...ory.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b3360e5ed45f
Arkansas judge blocks state’s revived voter ID law

An Arkansas judge has blocked a voter ID law that’s nearly identical to a measure the state’s highest court found unconstitutional about four years ago.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Alice Gray on Thursday granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law from being enforced during the state’s May 22 primary. Early voting for the primary begins May 7.

A lawsuit challenging the measure claims the law enacted last year circumvents a 2014 Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that struck down a previous voter ID measure. The lawsuit was filed by a Little Rock voter who was among the four plaintiffs who challenged the previous photo ID requirement.

 

[Majorbread]

THESE MF'ERS WANNA MAKE IT SO HARD TO VOTE **** THEM FOREVER

 

[gry60]

"Cheap butter biscuits are better than no butter biscuits"

That's all it takes to make you act a fool all over TV and the internet

 

[aepps20]

Silk and Diamond didn't do anything wrong. LIB CONJECTURE AND INNUENDO is in high gear tonight. DISGUSTING. That money was for urban outreach. Without that money Kanye and Chance wouldn't be on the RIGHT team.

 

[sonoftony]

 

[deleted]

Watch Diamond and Silk have a skit on the new Kanye album

 

[tommyicerocking]

wow

 

[gry60]

Ain't even mad at this if they can find a way to normalize relations between their countries.

Watch Trumpangina take credit for that though.

 

[whatscomplex]

I want the North to open up just from a humanitarian standpoint. People are literally fleeing in fear to South Korea and hoping their families don't get hurt back home.

I don't know how they could ever merge though unless it's a very long, step by step process. Biggest hurdle is who's going to lose political influence? No way in hell South Korea (or any country) will want to give any political power to Kim Jong-Un, and Kim Jong-Un doesn't seem like the type to concede a damn thing. Then the economics of South Korea having to essentially take care of North Korea, albeit gaining in natural resources and land. There was a poll done and most young people in South Korea don't even want to merge at this point.

 

[gry60]

 

[sonoftony]

Watch Diamond and Silk have a skit on the new Kanye album

The Trump Workout Plan

 

[MalcolmNewton]

The peninsula will not re-unite if the U.S has anything to do with it. Re-unification = the expulsion of USFORKOR and loss of major strategic military positions close to China. These are the closest ground forces to the Chinese border with everything else requiring air or sealift.

 

[IATT]

 

[boris]

 

[EddieDoyers]

This genius doesn’t even realize we didn’t qualify for the World Cup this year

 

[Mr.Guy]

I wanna know who Kim Jong's barber is. Son stays with the crispy line.

 

[BIG LEEMELONE]