Where did stolen documents in empty folders found in Mar-A-Lago go?

Echo editorial opinion published in The Freeman a newspaper published in Cebu, Philippines.  

Maine Writer: This editorial is evidence about the international disbelief  regarding Trumpziism's illegal activities.  Although this editorial states the obvious, the information supports how the egregious Trumpziism activities are a source of international embarrassment.

Obviously, the troubles of former US president Donald Trump are not ending anytime soon.

Following the raid on his residence in Mar-a-Lago for allegedly taking top-secret documents out of the White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported finding 48 empty folders marked “Classified” there, leading some to believe he has more such documents stashed somewhere else.

Sure, Trump can say that those empty folders are nothing more than props for his restaurants, just like the “Classified” folder featured in his bar in the Trump Tower. But would his legal residence really be a place for such trivial items?

We are more inclined to believe that those “Classified” folders really came from some US government office they were not meant to be taken out of and really contained papers with sensitive information. In all likelihood the contents of those folders have already been taken to only Trump-knows-where.

Who knows what damaging, damning, or leveraging information was in those folders? Worse, some of them may even involve issues of US national security.

Trump needs to be held accountable for his actions. His behavior is now showing him to become more and more of a danger to US democracy.

Vote Democratic  #VoteBlueNoMatterWho

Going on the campaign trail, Trump recently attended a rally in Pennsylvania where he called US President Joe Biden an “enemy of the state”.

“He's an enemy of the state, if you want to know the truth. The enemy of the state is him and the group that controls him,” he said during his speech.

However, in continuing to perpetuate his big lie --the one where #tRumpzi insists there was massive cheating that led to his defeat in the 2020, election even without an ounce of evidence-- Trump is even more of an enemy of the state than Biden ever will be.

Unbelievably, #tRumpzi's latest actions also prove how much he is willing to gamble with state secrets, just perhaps (❗)to get a leg up on his rivals. 

#fakeBarrLetter - does not exonerate Donald Trump

Donald Trump lies about his golf game and can't even admit to his height and weight. 

"They didn’t report any of those multiple offers by a hostile foreign power to the FBI."

Gene Lyons opinion echo published in the Biddeford Maine Journal Tribune:

So Trump says the Mueller report proves his innocence: “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.”

As usual, he’s making it up.

Nobody outside the Justice Department has seen the Mueller report yet. But even Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the evidence regarding obstruction of justice specifically quotes its author: “(W)hile this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

The word “collusion” appears nowhere in Barr’s summary. He does write that “the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

Here’s something else they didn’t do: They didn’t report any of those multiple offers by a hostile foreign power to the FBI. That in itself constitutes a profound betrayal. Indeed, history records that Trump himself vociferously and repeatedly denied what U.S. intelligence agencies said was definitive evidence of Russian skullduggery. “It could be Russia … It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” the candidate claimed during one presidential debate. Trump’s strange obsequiousness toward Vladimir Putin continues to this day.

Trump's campaign knew all about Russian hacks of DNC emails; that much has been proven beyond a doubt. (Russia if you're listening!) At minimum, they sat on their hands. Reading between the lines of Barr’s summary, it’s clear that the Mueller report endorses the central finding of the intelligence community: The Russians actively worked to help Trump win the 2016 election. We should be asking ourselves why.

What did Russia hope to gain?

Conspiracy, of course, is a notoriously difficult crime to prove. It becomes almost impossible when one party to a corrupt bargain is beyond the law: that is, resides in Russia and isn’t being made available to investigators.

Which is not to say that a cunning rogue like Donald Trump was ever going to enter into a quid pro quo arrangement with the Russian government and leave fingerprints. It was always naive to think that he might. The president famously doesn’t write things down. These things are done with winks and nudges. What’s said and what’s not said.

A Kremlin intermediary offers “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Donald Jr. is dumb enough to write, “I love it,” and to take a meeting — the famous June 2016 session at Trump Tower with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya — but Donald Sr. remains offstage. In the building, but not at the meeting.

What’s more, Veselnitskaya isn’t technically a member of the Russian government. Neither, however, has she visited the United States since her name first surfaced in The New York Times. Sure, the president helped Junior concoct a fake cover story, but it has never been a crime to lie to the press.

This too: Insufficient evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy isn’t the same as no evidence. As shrewdly as Attorney General Barr has played his hand so far, that’s worth keeping in mind. We’ll find out how Trump triumphalism looks after people have read the actual report, although the necessity of reading and thinking about a complex document with Sean Hannity screaming in our collective ears will certainly limit the Mueller report’s impact.

It’s also worth remembering that there are all sorts of dishonorable actions that aren’t crimes. For example, it’s not a crime for a man to have an affair with his sister-in-law, but it’s contemptible all the same. As Michael Kinsley once quipped, “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal.”

I agree with The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer that the single most unsettling revelation of the entire investigation is the one that fixer Michael Cohen is going to prison for lying to Congress about: Trump Tower Moscow.

Trump himself repeatedly and shamelessly lied about the project throughout the presidential campaign, praising Vladimir Putin at every turn, and falsely claiming to have no business dealings whatsoever in Russia while standing to profit by hundreds of millions had it gone through.

But once again, Trump didn’t do it under oath, and it’s not a crime to lie to American voters. Even if by so doing he exposed himself to potential Russian blackmail. Had Trump not behaved himself, Putin could have pulled the plug on his presidential campaign in a heartbeat. Trump behaved.

Franklin Foer: “Trump’s motive for praising Putin appears to have been, in large part, commercial. With his relentless pursuit of Trump Tower Moscow, the Republican nominee for president had active commercial interests in Russia that he failed to disclose to the American people. … Trump ran his campaign as something of an infomercial, hoping to convince the Russians that he was a good partner. To enrich himself, Trump promised to realign American foreign policy.”

“Total EXONERATION,” the man says.

I don’t think so.

— Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner.

A terrible Trumpzi year - past time to exit

2019 will be the worst year of Donald Trump’s life

An echo opinion by Jon Weiner published in The Los Angeles Times

Some presidents have really bad years.

For Richard Nixon, it was 1974 — the Watergate year, which ended with his resignation. For Clinton, it was 1998 — the Monica year, which culminated with an impeachment trial in the Senate in 1999. He won that vote easily and came out more popular than before.

It’s a good guess that Donald Trump’s really bad year will be 2019. And it’s not yet clear whether he’ll survive, like Clinton, or be forced out of office, like Nixon.

Nixon’s worst year resulted from crimes in his 1972 reelection effort, when burglars working for the campaign got caught breaking into the Democratic headquarters, and then Nixon and others conspired to stop the break-in investigation and cover up what had happened.

The events that brought Clinton to an impeachment trial in the Senate had nothing to do with his political campaigns. His misdeeds were strictly personal: He had sex with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and then denied it under oath.

The storm clouds gathering around Trump involve both the personal and the political. 

More than a dozen federal and state investigations are underway focused on Trump and those who worked on his election effort. He will also soon be facing aggressive congressional investigations by the House Democrats.

It’s easy to get lost in the details of Russiagate and the guilty pleas of Trump associates involved in a range of crimes, but what is developing is not that complicated: It’s a political corruption scandal with the potential to be larger than anything we’ve seen before in American history.

The infamous Trump Tower meeting, where Don Jr., Jared Kushner and campaign chief Paul Manafort met with a Russian operative offering help in the election, could turn out to be far worse than anything that happened in Watergate. And Trump’s sexual troubles would be worse than Clinton’s, too, if he is found to have violated campaign funding laws in trying to buy the silence of women he slept with.

Still, there are many similarities between Trump’s troubles and earlier presidential scandals — along with some differences.

Both Nixon and Clinton faced allegations of obstruction of justice. They were tripped up not so much by the acts themselves, but rather by attempts to cover them up.

Obstruction is also a focus of the investigations facing Trump. 

For Trump, the possible obstruction involves his efforts to stop the Russiagate investigation and his firing of FBI Director James Comey.

Trump is also facing potential charges that neither Nixon nor Clinton had to deal with. The biggest question is whether Russiagate was a quid pro quo in which Russia offered to help Trump win the election in exchange for Trump easing Russia sanctions. We will probably learn more this year about what Russia did, exactly, during the election, both with “information influence” spread through social media and cyberattacks on the Dems. But the big question will remain what the Trump campaign knew about those efforts, and who exactly was in the loop.

I’m betting that, in the end, Trump resigns and gets an advance pardon for himself and his children.

Trump also faces campaign finance issues that neither Nixon nor Clinton had to deal with. 

If, as Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen has said, Trump directed that payments be made to two women to keep them silent during the election campaign, then the payments could be construed as illegal campaign contributions.

Trump also faces allegations that he violated the emoluments provision of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits federal officeholders from receiving payments from foreign or state governments while in office. The attorneys general of the District of Columbia and Maryland argue that Trump violated the emoluments clause by receiving money from foreign governments while holding office, through hotels owned by his family.

And if that weren’t enough, Trump also faces investigations into alleged illegalities at the Trump Foundation and in the fundraising and spending by his inauguration committee.

Nixon’s troubles hold another possible caution for Trump in a year when committees in the House will almost certainly be subpoenaing the president’s tax returns. For Nixon, news that he had violated tax laws by taking an illegal write-off did a lot to turn the public against him. Nixon had backdated the deed of gift of his papers to the National Archives in order to take his write-off in a more advantageous year.

People who shrugged off Watergate on the grounds that “everybody does it” were outraged that the president had claimed an illegal deduction of $576,000 — the equivalent today of more than $3 million.

We don’t know whether Trump’s tax returns contain dubious write-offs, but it seems likely we’ll find that out this year — and also, perhaps, whether the public is more forgiving of him than of Nixon for tax shenanigans.

Both Clinton and Nixon faced impeachment proceedings. 

The House Judiciary Committee voted articles of impeachment in 1974 against Nixon, but the full House never voted on them, and the Senate never held an impeachment trial. He resigned before that — and was promptly pardoned by his successor, his former vice president, Gerald Ford, for any crimes he may have committed. Clinton was impeached by the House and went on to face a Senate trial, which fell far short of the required two-thirds vote for conviction.

I’m betting that, in the end, Trump resigns and gets an advance pardon for himself and his children. That may not happen until 2020, but in the meantime, 2019 will be the worst year of his life.

Jon Wiener is a historian and a contributing editor to the Nation. He is the author of “How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America.”

Donald Trump brand must withdraw from GOP primary

This blog is calling for Donald Trump to withdraw from the presidential nomination, permanently- and never show his political head of hair again. Otherwise, his candidacy will continue to brand the Republican party as an extremist partisan group of storm trooper thugs, as well as negatively tarnsih Trumponian enterprises.

Surely, Donald Trump realizes how the degrading behavior of radicals who attend his rallies, coupled with the lack of a civilized response to the storm trooper violence, will eventually undermine his creditability and taint his business ventures.

Trump Tower in New York city is among the Trumponian enterprises

Cleveland (AFP) - A defiant Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail Saturday, after he called a demonstration a "planned attack" as a reason to shut down one of his rallies. As a result, the Republican is branded by the violence and the party faces scrutiny over the racially-charged tone of Trump's White House bid.

Perhaps the stress of a managing a political campaign has prevented Donald Trump from understanding the negative scope of his horrific leadership. Dear Americans, if Donald Trump manages his political campaign by allowing violence, consider how tyrannical his leadership would be if he were (God Forbid) elected.

Frankly, Donald trump must withdraw from the 2016 presidential campaign. Otherwise, the Trump business brand risks being tarnished by the growing violence and the collateral political damage causes the Republican party to implode.