Political Irony

This week, yet another Trump branded and managed hotel went bankrupt. Just four years ago, Trump (and his family) cut the ribbon on the 65-story Trump International Hotel & Tower Toronto. Most of the financing for it came from a Russian-born billionaire. And now, a bunch of middle-class investors who bought condos in the tower got screwed.

Trump is not the project’s developer or even an investor; one of his partners, a Russian-born billionaire who got rich in Ukraine’s steel industry, controls the firm that’s in default. The Trump Toronto is still a posh hotel, and even though nearly two thirds of the tower’s condo units remain unsold, they’re still upscale residences. Still, the saga of the property’s glittering rise and rapid fall is classic Trump, featuring a tsunami of litigation and bitterness, money with a Russian accent, and a financial wreck that probably won’t hit its namesake particularly hard.

Trump has vowed to run the country the way he runs his businesses, and Trump Toronto is yet another reminder that his businesses do not always run smoothly.

It is likely that after the bankrupt hotel is sold off, Trump’s name will be removed from it. Trump’s name has become a liability.

Newsweek investigated and found that Donald Trump destroyed hundreds of thousands of emails, digital records, and paper documents, including many that he was under court order to preserve. And then he lied about it. And of course, he did this to screw other people out of money. He did this over and over again.

Their conclusions:

This review of Trump’s many decades of abusing the judicial system, ignoring judges, disregarding rules, destroying documents and lying about it is not simply a sordid history lesson. Rather, it helps explain his behavior since he declared his candidacy. He promised to turn over his tax returns and his health records—just as he promised to comply with document discovery requirements in so many lawsuits—then reneged. As a result, he has left a sparse evidentiary trail that can be used to assess his wealth, his qualifications for the presidency or even his fitness. Should voters choose him to be the next U.S. president, he will enter the Oval Office as a mystery, a man who has repeatedly flouted the rules. He has solemnly told the country to trust him while refusing to produce any records to prove whether he speaks the truth or has utter contempt for it.

Are we really not that far away from electing a con man as president of the United States?

Two sources within the FBI, speaking off the record and anonymously, told Fox News that the investigation of the Clinton Foundation is likely to lead to an indictment.

Considering that the FBI has no power to issue indictments (that is done by a Grand Jury), and that there is no evidence of wrongdoing with the Clinton Foundation (granting meetings to donors is not illegal), this sounds very much like a dirty trick just before the election.

The FBI is not supposed to comment publicly on ongoing investigations, and certainly not just days away from the election. Doing so is a violation of the Hatch Act. As Electoral Vote puts it “Comey has very clearly created an environment where agents (some of them, at least) are putting partisanship over professionalism.” When law enforcement agencies become political tools, that is a strong indicator of a “banana republic”.

Instead, these anonymous leaks are actually an indictment of James Comey, who has lost control of the FBI. As director, the buck stops with him. And considering that the FBI director can be fired at any time by the president (either this one or the next one), it seems likely his days are numbered.

UPDATE: The Guardian has an inside look at what is going on at the FBI, saying “The FBI is Trumpland”.

The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”

© Phil Hands

The website realtruenews.org pretends to be a conservative website, but its stories are all made up. In fact, the creator of this site Marco Chacon has elevated to a high art his goal of seeing how outrageous and unbelievable he can make a story, and still fool people.

He has written up fake transcripts of Clinton speeches to Wall Street. In the transcript, Clinton is explaining to the Goldman Sachs board of directors that Bronies are going to take over the election. If anyone reading the transcript looks up what a Bronie is, they would (hilariously) learn that Bronies are adult male hard-core fans of “My Little Pony”. In the middle of talking about Bronies, the transcript also had Hillary Clinton saying “bucket of losers”. Conservative sites were completely fooled and picked up the quote. Fox News reported that Clinton had “apparently called Bernie Sanders supporters a ‘bucket of losers.’”

Ironically, Chacon is a moderate Republican (and a veteran and bank executive to boot!). He just got tired of seeing conservative websites posting obviously false stories. One day a few months ago, he saw a story headlined “Obama Issues Executive Order to Take Over U.S.” and asked “How do you counter that? You can try to debunk it, but nobody cares about that. They just say it’s liberal media bias.”

Instead, he decided to make fun of it by making up the most ludicrous right-wing conspiracy theories he could think of, but making them look real. His made up stories have succeeded beyond his wildest dreams:

They’ve appeared on cable news. They’ve trended on Facebook and Twitter. Two polling companies, barraged with hatemail from Trump supporters about “leaked” memos created for RealTrueNews articles, have had to put out official statements denying the existence of such memos. Chacon’s stories are regularly accepted as fact in the pro-Trump message board canon. YouTube videos with tens of thousands of views exist solely to reinforce sentences and ideas Chacon dreamed up on his laptop in the middle of the night.

This article has a bunch of funny stories of people and news organizations that were fooled (including Donald Trump). Which are even funnier when you realize that the stories quote fictional characters, refer to countries that don’t exist, and generally are obviously false.

The biggest loser because of the letter announcing that the FBI is looking into Clinton’s emails seems to be the man who sent the letter, FBI Director James Comey. And the criticism is non-partisan.

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under Dubya (and needless to say a Republican), has filed a complaint against the FBI for violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits government workers from unnecessarily influencing an election. Painter says that Comey abused his power.

Indeed, according to Fox News, Comey admitted publicly that he felt he had to send the letter because Clinton was running for president. It sure looks like he was deliberately trying to influence the election (and note that you are in violation of the Hatch Act even if you weren’t deliberately trying to influence the election).

Three former attorney generals, including two who served George W Bush, have condemned Comey. Comey was the deputy attorney general under Alberto Gonzales in the Bush adminstration. Gonzales said Comey’s actions were an “error in judgement” and that he is “somewhat perplexed about what the director was trying to accomplish here.” Comey’s actions were also criticized by Michael Mukasey, who served Dubya after Gonzales.

Obama’s former attorney general Eric Holder said Comey’s actions were a “stunning breach” of law enforcement protocol:

I served with Jim Comey, and I know him well. This is a very difficult piece for me to write. He is a man of integrity and honor. I respect him. But good men make mistakes. In this instance, he has committed a serious error with potentially severe implications. It is incumbent upon him — or the leadership of the department — to dispel the uncertainty he has created before Election Day. It is up to the director to correct his mistake — not for the sake of a political candidate or campaign but in order to protect our system of justice and best serve the American people.

Comey was also condemned by former prosecutors and Justice Department officials. One former US attorney said “Director Comey acted totally inappropriately. He had no business writing to Congress about supposed new emails that neither he nor anyone in the FBI has ever reviewed.” At least 100 former Justice Department officials signed a letter condemning Comey’s actions, and more than 30 former state attorneys general (from both parties) signed a similar letter, saying that Comey had made a “serious mistake”.

Probably the most surprising condemnation of Comey came from Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, who is a former prosecutor, judge, and Republican elected official from the state of New York. Pirro said on her show that Comey “disgraces and politicizes the FBI and is symptomatic of all that is wrong in Washington.”

Comey’s actions violate not only long-standing Justice Department policy, the directive of the person that he works under, the attorney general. But even more important, the most fundamental rules of fairness and impartiality.

Pirro’s anger comes from personal experience. When she was running for NY attorney general in 2006, the FBI and the Justice Department announced that they were opening an investigation of her. Pirro says it was “mean-spirited and, of course, nothing came of it, except the adverse publicity cost me at the polls. What was done to me in 2006 was wrong, and what happened to Hillary Clinton [Friday], was equally wrong.”

But it could even be worse than that. The FBI may have violated the constitution by conducting an illegal search:

If the laptop was “seized” by the FBI, it’s unlikely that either Weiner or Abedin voluntarily turned over the emails. That means the agency needed to get a search warrant, by swearing to a judge there was probable cause to believe that data on the laptop contained evidence of the suspected “sexting” crime. Under the Constitution, the warrant should have specified exactly the information to be seized and searched, and thereby limited the FBI from looking through the entire contents of the laptop.

Indeed, why were federal agents looking at any emails belonging to the suspect’s estranged spouse? Surely the FBI didn’t think Abedin was involved in the alleged sexting crime.

There are other curious things about the letter that make it look deliberately partisan. For example, Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) tweeted about the letter even before Democratic congresspersons received it. Why would Comey favor Republicans by giving them a heads-up?

Not only that, but while the FBI director has made public announcement about their investigation into Clinton, they are also conducting an investigation into Trump’s relationship to Russia, but they have not made any public announcements about that. According to Senator Harry Reid (D-NV):

In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and co-ordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government – a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity.

Indeed, Comey himself argued against disclosing the Russian investigation because it was too close to the presidential election, and removed the FBI’s name from the report. So why did the FBI feel it had to publicly talk about the Clinton investigation, but not about a far more serious investigation into Trump? Why is the FBI being partisan?

And in the end, there is evidence that the release of the letter isn’t actually changing many votes. So the only loser may be Comey. I suspect that he may soon resign.

I recently reported about the utter hypocrisy of the religious right. Here’s another blatant example:

First up is that we finally have an example of that voter fraud that Trump keeps whining about. And of course the perpetrator voted twice for (who else) Donald Trump. What’s also interesting is that this case (and two others, also both trying to benefit Trump) were caught almost immediately (showing that actual voter fraud is very difficult to get away with) and are reportedly the first cases of voter fraud found in Iowa in 12 years (showing that it is very rare).

But the big story is a new report by David Fahrenthold, who is quickly showing up most of the media by making it look easy to be a real investigative reporter. Fahrenthold’s new report looks into Donald Trump’s charitable giving, and finds that there virtually isn’t any there there. That’s right, Trump’s “foundation” is a sham.

Indeed, the largest donation ever made by the Trump “foundation” was $264,631 to fix a fountain outside one of Trump’s own hotels.

But my favorite example is when Donald Trump crashed a charity event unannounced. I just have to quote the whole story, it is so unbelievably outrageous:

In the fall of 1996, a charity called the Association to Benefit Children held a ribbon-cutting in Manhattan for a new nursery school serving children with AIDS. The bold-faced names took seats up front.

There was then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and former mayor David Dinkins (D). TV stars Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, who were major donors. And there was a seat saved for Steven Fisher, a developer who had given generously to build the nursery.

Then, all of a sudden, there was Donald Trump.

“Nobody knew he was coming,” said Abigail Disney, another donor sitting on the dais. “There’s this kind of ruckus at the door, and I don’t know what was going on, and in comes Donald Trump. [He] just gets up on the podium and sits down.”

Trump was not a major donor. He was not a donor, period. He’d never given a dollar to the nursery or the Association to Benefit Children, according to Gretchen Buchenholz, the charity’s executive director then and now.

But now he was sitting in Fisher’s seat, next to Giuliani.

“Frank Gifford turned to me and said, ‘Why is he here?’ ” Buchenholz recalled recently. By then, the ceremony had begun. There was nothing to do.

“Just sing past it,” she recalled Gifford telling her.

So they warbled into the first song on the program, “This Little Light of Mine,” alongside Trump and a chorus of children — with a photographer snapping photos, and Trump looking for all the world like an honored donor to the cause.

Afterward, Disney and Buchenholz recalled, Trump left without offering an explanation. Or a donation. Fisher was stuck in the audience. The charity spent months trying to repair its relationship with him.

“I mean, what’s wrong with you, man?” Disney recalled thinking of Trump, when it was over.