All Things Trump: Is it over yet?

[L'Emmerdeur]

Harking back to a post from April, the Trump administration had worked on eliminating an Obama-era rule that prevented hospitals and other health care providers from discriminating against gay, transgender, bi people under the guise of 'religious freedom.' A federal district court has put that change on hold for the moment.

'"Crucial Early Victory" for Trans Patients as Judge Blocks Trump's Gutting of Healthcare Discrimination Protections'

LGBTQ+ rights advocates celebrated after a federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked part of a Trump administration healthcare rule that would scrap Obama-era non-discrimination protections for transgender patients, which was supposed to take effect Tuesday.

...

The rule, finalized by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in June, would roll back the Obama-era definition of discrimination on the basis of sex under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Critics warned the rule would embolden discrimination against transgender patients and others seeking care.

Federal District Court Judge Frederic Block of the Eastern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction (pdf) preventing enforcement of the HHS rule during litigation challenging it. Block found the rule contradicts a U.S. Supreme Court decision that came in June, just days after the rule was finalized.

[Joe]

See, there was NO COLLUSION! Trump and his people are merely a national security risk.

Senate report details ‘grave counterintelligence threat’ posed by Trump campaign’s 2016 contact with Russia

An exhaustive investigation run by members of President Trump’s own political party portrays his 2016 campaign as a “grave security threat” because of its myriad connections to Moscow, eager to exploit assistance from the Kremlin and determined to conceal the full extent of its conduct from a multiyear Senate probe.

The long-awaited report from the Senate Intelligence Committee contains dozens of new findings that appear to show more direct links between Trump associates and Russian intelligence, and pierces the president’s long-standing attempts to dismiss the Kremlin’s intervention on his behalf as a hoax.

Like the Mueller Report before it, the nearly 1,000-page Senate document does not contain evidence of direct collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. But the Senate report carries particular weight because it is the first major investigation of Russian interference in 2016 to be conducted by a Republican-controlled committee and endorsed by both Republicans and Democrats.

The report’s language is often stark, describing the Trump campaign’s receptivity to Russian outreach as a “grave counterintelligence threat,” making it susceptible to “malign Russian influence.”

At one point, the document concludes that members of Trump’s transition team likely fell prey to Russian manipulation they were too callow to recognize. Kremlin operatives “were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,” the report said. “Based on the available information, it is possible — and even likely — that they did so.”

[Scot Dutchy]

Another article on the report:

US Senate report goes beyond Mueller to lay bare Trump campaign's Russia links

Bipartisan intelligence panel says that Russian who worked on Trump’s 2016 bid was career spy, amid a stunning range of contacts

A report by the Senate intelligence committee provides a treasure trove of new details about Donald Trump’s relationship with Moscow, and says that a Russian national who worked closely with Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 was a career intelligence officer.

The bipartisan report runs to nearly 1,000 pages and goes further than last year’s investigation into Russian election interference by special prosecutor Robert Mueller. It lays out a stunning web of contacts between Trump, his top election aides and Russian government officials, in the months leading up to the 2016 election.

The Senate panel identifies Konstantin Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer employed by the GRU, the military intelligence agency behind the 2018 poisoning of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. It cites evidence – some of it redacted – linking Kilimnik to the GRU’s hacking and dumping of Democratic party emails.

Kilimnik worked for over a decade in Ukraine with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager. In 2016 Manafort met with Kilimnik, discussed how Trump might beat Hillary Clinton, and gave the Russian spy internal polling data. The committee said it couldn’t “reliably determine” why Manafort handed over this information, or what exactly Kilimnik did with it.

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A new poll published by the Pew Research Center on Tuesday found that 75% of Americans now expect Russian or other foreign interference in the November election, and a diminishing percentage (47% compared with 55% two years ago) are confident the administration will make “serious efforts” to protect the election from hacking and other external threats.

[Brian Peacock]

If Trump goes I'm sure he'll have no trouble getting his own show on RT.

[Tero]

[Seabass]

"Latinos can have a baby every three months."
"If you have fewer than five guns, you're gay."

[Seabass]

Russiagate Was Not a Hoax

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed what the Mueller report could not.

Rereading the Mueller report more than a year after its publication is an exercise in disappointment. One gets the feeling that Robert Mueller didn’t press his inquiry to its end. Instead of settling the questions that haunt the 2016 campaign, he left them dangling, publishing a stilted document riddled with insinuation and lacunae. He rushed his work, closing up shop before finishing his assignment.

While Mueller received all the hype, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence kept its head down. Yesterday, having avoided cable speculation almost entirely, the SSCI released the fifth and final volume of a report on Russia’s attempt to sway the last election in Donald Trump’s favor. It finally delivered what Mueller either could not or would not: a comprehensive presentation of the evidence in the matter of “collusion.” The report confirms that Russiagate is no hoax. Whether or not the Trump campaign illegally coordinated with the Kremlin, Trump has no grounds for proclaiming vindication, much less that he’s the victim of a witch hunt.

Credit largely goes to Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the SSCI, who shrewdly orchestrated the proceedings. Cultivating a close relationship with the SSCI’s Republican chair, Richard Burr, he worked to keep the investigation deliberately low-key. (The committee did the bulk of its work behind closed doors, without leaks.) As a result, the committee on the whole miraculously avoided the politicization that tainted the broader debate over Russian interference. Each of its findings won bipartisan approval prior to publication. Instead of rushing forward, the committee left the incendiary question of collusion for last.

The thousand-page fifth volume doesn’t definitively settle the question, in part because the SSCI was unable to procure a full record of events. The White House engaged in gamesmanship, invoking executive privilege to deny witnesses and block access to a paper trail. A slew of important witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment. Others, such as Paul Manafort, lied relentlessly to investigators. The election of 2016 is one of the most closely studied events of recent memory, yet even the best-informed students of Russian interference don’t have a comprehensive understanding of it.

When Mueller’s prosecutors appeared in court, in February 2019, they implied that the most troubling evidence they had uncovered implicated Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman. This wasn’t a surprising admission. Throughout their filings, Mueller’s team referred to Manafort’s Kyiv-based aide-de-camp, Konstantin Kilimnik, as an active Russian agent. Manafort had clearly spoken with Kilimnik during the campaign, and had even passed confidential campaign information to him, with the understanding that the documents would ultimately arrive in the hands of oligarchs close to the Kremlin.

One of the great disappointments of the Mueller Report is that it fails to provide narrative closure after building so much anticipation for the Kilimnik story line. Mueller did not fully explain why Manafort’s relationship with his Ukraine-based adviser so bothered his prosecutors. Why had Manafort passed along the documents? And what did the oligarchs want with them?

The committee fills in the gaps somewhat. It reports that Manafort and Kilimnik talked almost daily during the campaign. They communicated through encrypted technologies set to automatically erase their correspondence; they spoke using code words and shared access to an email account. It’s worth pausing on these facts: The chairman of the Trump campaign was in daily contact with a Russian agent, constantly sharing confidential information with him. That alone makes for one of the worst scandals in American political history.

continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ax/615373/

[JimC]

"Latinos can have a baby every three months."
"If you have fewer than five guns, you're gay."

Hello sailor...

[Joe]

In Mueller's defense, his report was finished under the command of AG Barr, a Trump defender. Given that Mueller submitted his report a mere five weeks after Barr took office, I've got to wonder how much more Mueller would have done had Sessions and Rosenstein remained in place.

I've been on the road and haven't had much time to read the Senate report, but the table of contents looks promising.

[Tero]

[Tero]

So little time, so many crooks to pardon!

[Joe]

Trump says he didn't know anything about it other than he didn't like it.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/202 ... ng-vpx.cnn

I wonder if there's a tweet...

[Sean Hayden]

Trump is impossible to l7sten to. It's a mystery to me how hearing his dumbass while watching someone else mouth the words is entertainment.

[Sean Hayden]

...

[Tero]

It is! And she uses props!