Lies, Non-Truths, Falsehoods and Misleading Statements: The Revisionist History of Trump's Team
Senator Al Franken of Minnesota
said Tuesday that he now believes Attorney General Jeff Sessions is guilty of perjury. Sessions isn't the only member of President Trump's operation to be accused of producing falsehoods to a congressional committee, however. Below are 10 core members of Trump's team and a sample of the untrue or misleading statements they have made.
As
ProPublica notes, the attorney general took a detour from the question at hand to say something false at his confirmation hearing. Asked by Al Franken about reports that Trump staffers and associates were in contact with Russian officials repeatedly during the campaign, Sessions had this to say:
"Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians."
But a
Washington Post report last week found Sessions spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on two separate occasions during the campaign. Since the report, Sessions and his camp have alternately said
he misunderstood the question, that he "did not recall" the specifics of their conversation, and that
they only made "superficial comments about election-related news."
However, Sessions
responded similarly to a written pre-hearing question about Russian contacts from Senator Patrick Leahy.
He later clarified his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Franken
called that response "insulting," and later made the perjury claim.
Sean Spicer
Barely 24 hours into his job as White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer claimed that his boss' inauguration was "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period."
It was
not. When CNN's
State of the Union turned down the chance to host Spicer's colleague Kellyanne Conway because of issues with her credibility,
Spicer subsequently said CNN "walked back or denied" those reports.
That was not true. He also
cited a terror attack in Atlanta three separate times while defending the travel ban. There was no attack, and Spicer later said he "clearly meant Orlando."
And way back during the campaign, Spicer
defended Trump's comments in The Mobile Locker Room to
The Weekly Standard by questioning if what Trump described—grabbing women "by the pussy"—was sexual assault. Spicer then accused the
Standard of fabricating his quote, so they released the audio of him saying it.
Scott Pruitt
The EPA administrator—and, as Oklahoma attorney general,
frequent suer of the EPA—was asked about an issue vital to the nation's conservatives: email.
"Have you ever conducted business using your personal email accounts, nonofficial Oklahoma attorney general email accounts, text messages, instant messenger, voicemails, or any other medium?" Senator Cory Booker asked Pruitt in a pre-hearing questionnaire.
"I use only my official OAG email address and government-issued phone to conduct official business," Pruitt responded.
But in a February 17 report,
ProPublica pointed out that Oklahoma City's local
FOX 25 News found Pruitt
did occasionally use a private account. The report was corroborated by the
Associated Press and the Oklahoma attorney general's office. Pruitt could ask for some advice here from Vice President Mike Pence, who railed against Hillary Clinton's use of private email throughout the campaign and
also used an AOL account for official business as Indiana governor.
Kellyanne Conway
While questions remain as to whether the special counsel to the president
believes in the concept of objective truth, she's certainly run afoul of it. The most infamous example was the "Bowling Green Massacre," an entirely fictional terrorist attack Conway
referenced in multiple interviews with different outlets. When she was called on it, she said it was "an honest mistake."
Steven Mnuchin
In written pre-hearing testimony,
ProPublica notes, the new Treasury Secretary wrote that his former bank, OneWest, did not "'robo-sign' documents" while foreclosing on homes in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
According to
The Columbus Dispatch, however, the bank used the practice in Ohio:
But a Dispatch analysis of nearly four dozen foreclosure cases filed by OneWest in Franklin County in 2010 alone shows that the company frequently used robo-signers. The vast majority of the Columbus-area cases were signed by 11 different people in Travis County, Texas. Those employees called themselves vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, managers and assistant secretaries. In three local cases, a judge dismissed OneWest foreclosure proceedings specifically based on inaccurate robo-signings.
Nice. On the way to
foreclosing on more than 36,000 homes, OneWest also
reportedly foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman over 27 cents.
Stephen Miller
The White House senior adviser's pet topic is voter fraud. He said on the Sunday shows that thousands were bussed into New Hampshire from Massachusetts to vote for Hillary Clinton, a claim first made by former Gov. John Sununu and rated "pants on fire" by
Politifact.
He also said that "you have millions of people who are registered in two states or who are dead who are registered to vote. And you have 14 percent of noncitizens, according to academic research, at a minimum, are registered to vote, which is an astonishing statistic."
The Washington Post rated Miller's claims false: While one study did show some voter registration records were out of date, the study's author has specifically said it provided no evidence of voter fraud:
David Becker
✔ @beckerdavidj
We found millions of out of date registration records due to people moving or dying, but found no evidence that voter fraud resulted.
12:18 PM - 28 Nov 2016
Betsy DeVos
ProPublica reminds us that Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire suggested the now-Secretary of Education was involved in a family foundation that has provided millions in funding to anti-LGBT groups.
When Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan pointed out that DeVos sits on the board of the foundation, DeVos bluntly replied, "I do not."
As
The Intercept found, though, DeVos was listed as a vice president of the foundation on IRS filings for nearly two decades. DeVos
called this a clerical error.
Elsewhere, DeVos had some trouble with the numbers. In written pre-hearing testimony, according to
NPR, DeVos defended virtual charter schools—where high-school students take all their classes online—in general terms. That was fine, but then she provided some specific data about graduation rates at some of those institutions:
Idaho Virtual Academy (IDV A): 90 percent
Nevada Virtual Academy (NVV A): 100 percent
Ohio Virtual Academy (OHV A): 92 percent
Oklahoma Virtual Charter Academy (OVCA): 91 percent
Texas Virtual Academy (TXVA): 96 percent
Utah Virtual Academy (UTV A): 96 percent
Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIV A): 96 percent"
As NPR pointed out, all these numbers were wrong. Nevada Virtual, for instance, had a 63 percent rate—not 100. Ohio's was 53, and Utah's
was 42. The Trump administration did not respond to NPR's request for comment on the faulty numbers, but they appear to come from
a report by the for-profit company that runs these virtual schools.
Reince Priebus
The White House chief of staff, whose name is clearly an anagram,
claimed on CBS'
Face the Nation in January that John Podesta's email was easy to hack because his password was "password." There is no evidence this is true, so it's unsubstantiated at best.
Rex Tillerson (Maybe)
The water is murkier here, but when asked about his history of lobbying against sanctions on Russia, the Secretary of State offered: "I have never lobbied against sanctions. To my knowledge, Exxon never directly lobbied against sanctions."
However, as ExxonMobil's CEO, Tillerson TK would have known about this piece of lobbying, documented by
Politifact:
Government lobbying records show that in
2014 and
2015, Exxon paid the Nickles Group over $193,000 to press "issues related to Russian sanctions impacting the energy sector," along with a number of other matters. It paid another $120,000 in
2014 and
2015 to Avenue Solutions for work on a range of issues, including "energy sanctions in the Ukraine and Russia." In the same time frame,
according to public logs, Tillerson visited the White House five times to see Jeffrey Zients, director of the National Economic Council. The meetings started about a week after President Barack Obama authorized the
first of three rounds of sanctions.
Bloomberg reported that Tillerson saw Treasury Secretary Jack Lew seven times in the second half of 2014. The Treasury Department oversees how sanctions are carried out.
Politifact rates Tillerson's answer as "artfully crafted" but "pretty misleading" and, ultimately, "mostly false." Moreover, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman and Republican Bob Corker reminded Tillerson in the hearing that he had called him personally in response to the sanctions. Corker later gave Tillerson a bail-out opportunity, which he took, claiming that "ExxonMobil participated in understanding how the sanctions are going to be constructed," rather than lobbied against them.
This Level of Corruption Is Unprecedented in the Modern History of the Presidency
Just like the fire department would really rather come into a building when there was smoke coming out of one window instead of when there are flames coming out of every window, because it's a lot easier to control the fire early on, it's much easier to control an epidemic early on. It's almost as though the entire bureaucratic immune system of the government is reacting to an invading virus. The worst thing any of us can do is assume that the ascent of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago was not the sui generis event that it clearly was, and that he, himself, is not the sui generis occupant of the White House that he clearly is, and that he has not surrounded himself with dubious quacks and hacks that are sui generis in their approach to government as they clearly are. There is a level of intellectual—and, perhaps, literal—corruption that is unprecedented in the modern history of the presidency and that is a genuine and unique threat to democratic institutions that are the objects of destructive contempt. ...
And it's threatening our democracy.
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what happened to nothing but the best....more like nothing but the most corrupt
This Level of Corruption Is Unprecedented in the Modern History of the Presidency
And it's threatening our democracy.
The important part about dealing with epidemics is to deal with them early. Just like the fire department would really rather come into a building when there was smoke coming out of one window instead of when there are flames coming out of every window, because it's a lot easier to control the fire early on, it's much easier to control an epidemic early on.
It's almost as though the entire bureaucratic immune system of the government is reacting to an invading virus. The worst thing any of us can do is assume that the ascent of
El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago was not the
sui generis event that it clearly was, and that he, himself, is not the
sui generis occupant of the White House that he clearly is, and that he has not surrounded himself with dubious quacks and hacks that are
sui generis in their approach to government as they clearly are.
There is a level of intellectual—and, perhaps, literal—corruption that is unprecedented in the modern history of the presidency and that is a genuine and unique threat to democratic institutions that are the objects of destructive contempt. The man ran on chaos. He won on chaos. And now he's governing on chaos. The checks and balances and safety valves of the Constitution—the things that, well, constitute—the immune system of this self-governing republic are facing a threat that is as different as it is lethal.
The man ran on chaos. He won on chaos. And now he's governing on chaos.
The latest manifestation of this phenomenon is the sudden firing of U.S. Attorneys all over the country—specifically, those appointed by the previous administration. It is true that every president can do what this president did, and that most have. But the people who said all through the campaign that the rules changed with the elevation of Donald Trump cannot say that the rules are back now that he's president. In addition, what he did on Friday was precipitous in the extreme and so much so that it seems to have been improvised on the spot, and that it might have been prompted by a virulent paranoia at the White House about "deep-state" saboteurs, a feeling encouraged by the hardbar caucus in Congress and pimped heavily by the conservative media auxiliaries.
By contrast, in 2009, the newly elected Barack Obama put his U.S. Attorneys in place, but he didn't fire all of the incumbent ones all at once without having the faintest idea who their replacements might be. And this was in the wake of the naked politicization of the DOJ during the Bush Administration. From
Tiger Beat On The Potomac:
"I expect that we'll have an announcement in the next couple of weeks with regard to our first batch of U.S attorneys," Holder said Thursday during a House Judiciary Committee hearing which stretched out over most of the day due to breaks for members' votes. "One of the things that we didn't want to do was to disrupt the continuity of the offices and pull people out of positions where we thought there might be a danger that that might have on the continuity—the effectiveness of the offices. But...elections matter—it is our intention to have the U.S. Attorneys that are selected by President Obama in place as quickly as they can." Holder's comments begin to resolve questions in the legal community about whether the new administration would hesitate to replace the chief prosecutors en masse because of the intense controversy that surrounded President George W. Bush's unusual mid-term replacement of nine U.S. attorneys in late 2006. In addition, legal sources said some Bush appointees were looking to burrow in, in part to avoid a grim economic climate for private-sector legal jobs."
But, as we are relentlessly told by people who are whistling past a considerable graveyard, Donald Trump is different. He certainly is. Already, there are serious questions about his violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, about how and where he got his money, about how seriously we should take his claim to have divorced himself from his business interests, and about the precise relationship he has with kleptocrats the world over, especially in Russia. In that context, his decision all at once to decapitate the Justice Department at the local level takes on a more sinister character.
And then there's the case of Preet Bhahara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the scourge of the money power in New York City, which definitely includes the current president* of the United States. The man was the swamp-drainer supreme. The situation with Bharhara already is stranger than usual. In the first place, a week ago, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III had asked Bhahara to stay on. Also, Bhahara has a number of investigations that may or may not hit too close to home at the White House,
including one involving Fox News. And,
as has become customary with this administration, the whole matter was handled with the delicacy of a monkey trying to fck a football. From
The Washington Post:
Within the Justice Department, some are questioning whether a recent phone call from Trump to Bharara may have contributed to the decision to remove the Obama holdovers, according to a person familiar with the matter. On Thursday, a White House aide called and left a message for Bharara, saying the president wanted to speak with him, though the prospective topic of discussion was unclear. Bharara consulted his staff and determined that it would probably be a violation of Justice Department protocols for him to speak directly to the president, this person said. That protocol exists in order to prevent political interference—or the appearance of political interference — with Justice Department work.
He's shaking up Washington! He's exploding political norms! He's also lighting his own pants on fire. By forsing the administration to fire him, Bharara managed to maneuver the World's Greatest Dealmaker into elevating Bharara's profile even higher, and to draw the spotlight down on what Bhahara's investigations, past and present. He also set up Bhahara as a free radical in our politics; the defrocked U.S. Attorney
already is talking about his "absolute independence," which ought to freeze the bowels of a lot of people with plans for the future. If, one day, we're all talking about Senator Preet Bhahara, then the current president* will get a big assist.
He's shaking up Washington! He's exploding political norms! He's also lighting his own pants on fire.
There's a kind of momentum building inside and outside the government right now. For a long time, I thought the Republicans in Congress could hold out against the encroaching chaos long enough to pass their wish list, which the president* would sign, because that beats working and he doesn't know anything. But the way they've botched health-care makes the congressional majorities look as though they've both been hit in the head with a hammer. (The mischief out in the states, however, is still ongoing, and as strong as ever.)
It's possible that too many things are coming from too many directions for that strategy to work any more. The way you'll know if that situation reaches a tipping point will be if the various legislative intelligence committees of the Congress looking into the Russia business give up the job either to a special prosecutor or to some sort of blue-ribbon 9/11-type commission. You want chaos? That will be chaos, and the patient may flat-line.
GOP Obamacare repeal bill is a windfall for the wealthy
Millionaires would win big under Republicans' bill to repeal Obamacare. People earning more than $1 million annually would save an estimated $165 billion in taxes over 10 years, an analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found. That's because the legislation, which started moving through the House this week, would eliminate two surcharges on the rich that help pay for Obamacare. The taxes would end after this year. Under the Affordable Care Act, single taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 and couples making more than $250,000 annually have paid an additional 0.9% Medicare payroll tax on the amount they earn above those thresholds. Another 3.8% tax applies to investment income ...
Mulvaney: Tax cuts for rich could balance out
OMB Director Mick Mulvaney addresses the tax cuts for the wealthy included in the new healthcare bill in an interview on State of the Union ...
OMB Director Mick Mulvaney addresses the tax cuts for the wealthy included in the new healthcare bill in an interview on State of the Union
www.cnn.com
Republicans Want to Make These 2 Monumental Changes to Medicare
Fixing Social Security may be one of the top priorities of lawmakers in Washington, but the honest truth is that Medicare, the program that provides subsidized healthcare coverage to roughly 56 million people (most of them seniors), is probably in deeper trouble than Social Security. According to the Medicare Board of Trustees 2016 report, the Hospital Insurance Trust, which funds Part A, the component of Medicare that covers in-patient hospitals stays, procedures, and long-term skilled nursing care, is slated to burn through its spare cash by the year 2028. The silver lining here for senior citizens is that a depletion of Medicare's spare cash doesn't mean the program is bankrupt or insolvent. The danger of such a drop is that Medicare, which is accepted by more than 90% of physicians and hospitals across the U.S., may wind up being dropped if reimbursements aren't deemed to be sufficient. ...
This would impact every single senior citizen over the age of 65.
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