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FM123's JournalManhattan DA Suggests He Is Investigating Trump Org For Fraud
(Talking Points Memo) The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is probing the Trump Organization over fraud allegations, state prosecutors suggested in a Monday court filing.
The probe covers allegations of potential bank and insurance fraud, wrote Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance in a motion to dismiss a federal case that President Trump filed to block a subpoena that New York prosecutors obtained for the President’s tax returns, which are held by a third-party accounting firm. The Supreme Court dismissed a challenge from President Trump to the subpoena last month, but left room for him to continue objecting to the demand for documents at the district court level.
Vance cited news reports and an article referencing former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony in the filing. At a hearing before the House Oversight Committee last year, Cohen alleged that Trump would change the book value of his properties for lenders and insurers. The filing does not appear to cite a specific act of alleged wrongdoing as the focus of the investigation, however, instead arguing that “undisputed information in the public record” invalidates Trump’s earlier accusation that the subpoena was “wildly overbroad.”
Rather, Vance argued, there have been “public allegations of possible criminal activity at Plaintiff’s New York County-based Trump Organization dating back over a decade.” “Although the Office bears no affirmative burden to justify the breadth of the Mazars Subpoena, and although Plaintiff is not entitled to know the scope and nature of the grand jury investigation, publicly available information itself establishes a satisfactory predicate for the Mazars Subpoena,” Vance argued.
Trump asked a Manhattan federal judge to throw out the subpoena last year, and re-upped the request last month after the Supreme Court rejected his argument that his status as President rendered him “immune from criminal process” but gave him leave to file further arguments. Trump’s first round of arguments saw one of his attorneys claim that, were the President to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, police could only investigate the crime until after the expiry of his presidential term.
Read the filing here: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/manhattan-da-says-he-is-investigating-trump-org-for-fraud
Melania Trump's brilliant Rose Garden idea
*somehow I missed this witty editorial written directly to Melania by a gardening expert
(CNN) I saw your announcement about renovating the White House Rose Garden. Great idea! This is a fine opportunity to give America's most famous garden a long-overdue facelift. The Rose Garden is an American treasure and a symbol of our country's can-do attitude. President Ulysses Grant once tried to grow vegetables there. John F. Kennedy celebrated the safe return of astronauts in the garden. Tricia Nixon got married there. And your husband famously celebrated his response to the Covid crisis there: "If we didn't do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing we would have half the cases."
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I am excited about your plans. Let's consider them point-by-point:
1. You want to replace crabapple trees with white rose shrubs.
Love this idea! In fact, my own back garden is ringed with white roses. Given your husband's sour opinion of the press corps that gathers in the garden, shouldn't you be thinking of adding more crabapples? Or maybe barrel cactus, whose sharp needles pierce the skin?
2. You want "electrical upgrades" for TV appearances.
When Bunny Mellon's crew dug up the lawn in 1962, a worker's shovel cut a cord that connected to the nation's nuclear response system, according to Meryl Gordon's 2017 biography, "Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend." Launching World War III was not an option until repairs were made. Though your husband's relationship with Russia has never been better, we need to really think this one through. Dig very, very carefully, and keep Vladimir Putin in the loop.
3. You want to improve drainage.
This is a problem that every great gardener faces. Sadly, too few are willing to spend the time and effort to deal with it. In fact, I hear that it's a bit of a swamp over there at the White House right now. Drain it! It's been almost four years. What have you been waiting for?
(Read More) https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/27/opinions/melania-trumps-great-idea-slatalla/?hpt=ob_blogfooterold
Laurence Tribe says if a 2020 result isn't decided by January 20, Pelosi will be president
(Last night on Joy Reid's show - The Reid Out)
https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/watch/laurence-tribe-says-if-a-2020-result-isn-t-decided-by-january-20-pelosi-will-be-president-89374789734
House Democrats subpoena Pompeo for documents on Biden's son
(ABC News) The House Foreign Affairs Committee has subpoenaed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for documents he turned over to a Senate panel that is investigating Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden
WASHINGTON -- The House Foreign Affairs Committee has subpoenaed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for documents he turned over to a Senate panel that is investigating Hunter Biden, a son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Committee Chair Eliot Engel said Friday he had issued the subpoena as part of an investigation into Pompeo's “apparent use of Department of State resources to advance a political smear of former Vice President Joe Biden.”
The subpoena demands all the records that the department has turned over to Republican-led Senate committees that are investigating Hunter Biden's work for a gas company in Ukraine while his father was vice president. It also asks for internal department emails about responding to Congress. The committee says Pompeo had delivered more than 16,000 pages of records to the Senate but refused to send the same materials to the Democrat-led House. “Secretary Pompeo has turned the State Department into an arm of the Trump campaign and he’s not even trying to disguise it," Engel said in a statement announcing the subpoena, which demands the materials by next week.
snip
The new efforts by Democrats come as the nation’s intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence committees and Joe Biden have all warned of renewed election interference by Russia this year. Trump himself has been loath to discuss the subject or acknowledge that Russia tried to sow discord in the 2016 contest by hacking Democratic accounts and pushing out inflammatory content on social media (Read More)
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/house-democrats-subpoena-pompeo-documents-bidens-son-72109023
How Jared Kushner's Secret Testing Plan "Went Poof Into Thin Air"
(Vanity Fair) This spring, a team working under the president's son-in-law produced a plan for an aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response that could have brought the pandemic under control. So why did the White House spike it in favor of a shambolic 50-state response?
On March 31, three weeks after the World Health Organization designated the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, a DHL truck rattled up to the gray stone embassy of the United Arab Emirates in Washington, D.C., delivering precious cargo: 1 million Chinese-made diagnostic tests for COVID-19, ordered at the behest of the Trump administration. Normally, federal government purchases come with detailed contracts, replete with acronyms and identifying codes. They require sign-off from an authorized contract officer and are typically made public in a U.S. government procurement database, under a system intended as a hedge against waste, fraud, and abuse.
This purchase did not appear in any government database. Nor was there any contract officer involved. Instead, it was documented in an invoice obtained by Vanity Fair, from a company, Cogna Technology Solutions (its own name misspelled as “Tecnology” on the bill), which noted a total order of 3.5 million tests for an amount owed of $52 million. The “client name” simply noted “WH.”
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Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert. That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.
*wow, why not just come right out and say yippee the Dems are dying...
(Read More) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air
Florida halts COVID-19 testing as it prepares for hurricane
*not feeling too safe and secure down here with DeSatan at the helm....
(Associated Press) MIAMI (AP) — Hurricane Isaias’ imminent arrival forced the closure of some outdoor coronavirus testing sites Friday even as the state reached a new daily high in deaths.
Meanwhile, the virus was complicating efforts to put contingency plans in place for evacuations and shelters if the storm makes them necessary. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency for all east coast counties from the Florida Keys to Jacksonville on Friday, but no evacuations had been ordered or shelters opened.
The coming weather forced officials to halt testing in Miami, which has been worst hit by the coronavirus, for at least three days because many of the sites operate outdoors, in tents. Under normal circumstances, the sites have the capacity to test hundreds of people per day.
“We had to put safety first,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez said at an online news conference Friday. “We will have thousands of tests that will not be conducted until we get these test sites up and running again.” (Read More)
https://apnews.com/5e0396f6b6b02a1f254025efcc211973
The beautiful voice and words of Amanda Gorman, 1st Youth National Poet Laureate
I just saw this on TV - I know this is a commercial for United Way, but when I realized it was the amazing Amanda Gorman (I am a huge fan) I wanted to post and share it....
Judge Releases Trove Of Sealed Records Related To Case Against Ghislaine Maxwell
(NPR) Updated at 9:40 a.m. ET
A federal judge has unsealed hundreds of pages of deposition transcripts and other documents related to a now-settled defamation suit brought against Ghislaine Maxwell, who is accused of helping the late Jeffrey Epstein run a sex trafficking operation that catered to rich and powerful men.
The 47 documents include a deposition given by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the draft of a memoir she was writing about her experiences inside the sex-trafficking ring, and previously unseen email exchanges between Maxwell and Epstein.
A centerpiece of the documents remains sealed: Ghislaine Maxwell's own deposition transcripts from 2016. U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska granted a stay on those records and a transcript from "John Doe 1" until Monday, to give her legal team time to seek a stay in appellate court.
Maxwell, Epstein's ex-girlfriend, was charged earlier this month on several counts related to sex trafficking of minors and perjury. She has pleaded not guilty in that case. The 2015 defamation suit was brought by Giuffre after the British socialite accused her of lying when she alleged Epstein and Maxwell had sexually abused and exploited her.
Some of the documents released late Thursday night are being seen publicly for the first time; others have been released before, but now have different or no redactions.
snip
Maxwell has denied allegations linking her to Epstein's exploitation of girls and young women, including under sworn testimony. But federal authorities now accuse her of committing perjury during depositions.
In legal records about Epstein, Giuffre was once known only as "Jane Doe No. 102." But she decided to speak out publicly "in hopes of helping others who had also suffered from sexual trafficking and abuse," according to her lawsuit against Maxwell.
Giuffre has said she fell under Maxwell and Epstein's influence in 1999, when she was 15 years old and working at Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach, Fla., resort owned by Trump. She says Maxwell recruited her to give Epstein a massage – and that years of sexual abuse followed, including instructions for Giuffre to have sex with Epstein's friends.
Epstein never faced a federal trial for the crimes he was accused of. Roughly a month after his arrest on sex trafficking charges last summer, he died after being found unresponsive in his jail cell in Manhattan. His death at age 66 was ruled a suicide. (Read More)
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/31/896627505/judge-releases-trove-of-sealed-records-related-to-case-against-ghislaine-maxwell
We're Dying Here': Florida Newspaper Pleads With DeSantis To Step Up COVID-19 Fight
(HuffPost) “Your daily upbeat message is hopelessly at odds with what Floridians are going through,” said a Sun Sentinel editorial calling for mask mandate.
A leading Florida newspaper pleaded in an editorial for more action by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to battle COVID-19, reminding him: “We’re dying here.”
“With each passing day, COVID-19 continues to careen out of control in Florida,” said the Thursday editorial in the Sun Sentinel. “Your daily upbeat message is hopelessly at odds with what Floridians are going through. You make it sound like everything is headed in the right direction. But it’s not.”
Florida hit a record number of deaths from COVID-19 three days running this week, climbing from 191 deaths on Tuesday to the latest record of 253 deaths on Thursday. The state surpassed New York’s total number of cases last Saturday.
The editorial pleaded with DeSantis to issue a statewide mask requirement — which is already a regulation in 32 other states. A new Quinnipiac poll has found that 79% of Floridians support a mask requirement, including 60% of Republicans, the editorial noted. “If that’s not a mandate, what is?” the newspaper asked.
DeSantis was one of the last governors in the nation to lock down his state amid the COVID-19 crisis, and among the first to open it back up. A blistering article in The Washington Post revealed that DeSantis sidelined health experts as the disease ravaged his state, instead turning to the White House for marching orders on getting businesses back up and running despite the risks.
Florida’s record on addressing the pandemic is so abysmal that at least 12 states have “singled out Floridians for 14-day quarantines should we dare to fly north to escape the heat and whatever lurks in the air,” noted the Sun Sentinel.
“Who can blame them? Florida now boasts the second highest number of cases per 100,000 people, with 2,008,” it added. (New Jersey currently has the highest number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the nation.)
“Help us out, governor,” the editorial was headlined. “We’re dying here.”
It concluded: “The science is clear: Face coverings reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus and can save lives. Issue a mask mandate, governor.”
DeSantis has not commented on the editorial, which can be read in its entirety here. https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/editorials/fl-op-edit-desantis-masks-20200729-klyb3eypgfcyhpsb3ezmxx4fkm-story.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dying-desantis-florida-covid-19-help-sun-sentinel_n_5f233f52c5b68fbfc880d27f
How the Covid-19 Housing Crisis Could Affect Voter Participation
Where do you register to vote if you just got evicted?
With temporary eviction moratoriums timing out and rent relief programs falling short of the need, tens of millions of Americans are facing a future of housing instability. The threat of being evicted or the stress of having to move doesn’t only affect someone’s health—it could also affect how likely they are to vote in an upcoming election.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. was facing a severe housing crisis. Now, with tens of millions of Americans out of work and struggling to pay rent, experts anticipate an “avalanche” of evictions, and for the number of people who arerent-burdened to skyrocket. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), we need $100 billion in rental assistance to keep low-income Americans stably housed. (This is the amount earmarked in the HEROES Act, but it’s yet to be passed in the Senate.)
“COVID-19 is already disrupting our elections in profound ways,” Brian Miller, executive director of Nonprofit VOTE, which works to promote civic participation, says in an email. Millions of voter registrations are not being collected or updated, because DMVs are closed and voter contact programs are on hold amid the pandemic, he notes. “This is worsened by the waves of COVID-related displacement, from college students leaving their closed universities to the forced evictions amid the economic fallout.”
Miller says that if you are displaced from your home, you should make sure to register to vote at your new address. Continued social distancing may mean the office you usually visit to update your voter information is closed, but you can still register online, and nonprofits, businesses, universities, and other institutions can organize voter registration efforts. Nonprofit VOTE is working with nonprofits on the front lines of this economic crisis—including food pantries, community health centers, and housing organizations—to help make sure that the people they serve are registered and ready to vote by November. Voter registration deadlines vary by state; the furthest out is 30 days from an election, while about 21 states and the District of Columbia allow residents to do same-day voter registration. Read More:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90530009/how-the-covid-housing-crisis-could-affect-voter-participation
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