Friday, Apr 20th
Last update05:20:13 AM GMT
9/11 Glance
When Rick Gates struck a plea deal last month with special counsel Robert Mueller, the 45-year-old former Trump campaign official likely avoided decades behind bars and salvaged a chance to watch his children grow up.
The question is what Gates offered Mueller in return. Though it is a virtual given that Gates will sell out his business partner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, less understood is the direct threat Gates could pose to President Donald Trump.
This was exactly what the contributors to the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump warned about six months ago. The psychiatric professionals who contributed to the book have monitored and come to know Trump’s character better than most clients they have treated or people they have interviewed. As the special prosecutor’s noose tightens around the president and his cultish family, it is increasingly clear that he is an imminent danger to the public, and this impinges on professionals’ duty to society. Sheehy wrote about the book and its genesis in these pages last October (Sheehy and Sword also contributed to the book).
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office said Friday that a grand jury indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for alleged interference in the 2016 presidential elections, during which they boosted the candidacy of Donald Trump.
The indictment says that the defendants by early to mid-2016 were "supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump ... and disparaging Hillary Clinton."
The indictment said "the organization," known as the Internet Research Agency LLC, "sought, in part, to conduct what it called 'information warfare against the United States of America' through fictitious U.S. personas on social media platforms and other Internet-based media."
White House chief of staff John Kelly has ordered sweeping changes to the White House's security clearance process, in light of circumstances surrounding former White House staff secretary Rob Porter, accused of being violent with his ex-wives.
In a five-page memo dated Friday, Kelly said he has called for a number of changes, including regular status reports on security clearance cases still in process, an end to top secret clearance statuses issued on an interim basis, briefings on any "significant derogatory information about senior staff" within 48 hours, and a timeframe for any new interim clearances.
EPA on Wednesday retracted its claim that Administrator Scott Pruitt has received a “blanket waiver” to fly first class whenever he travels, after POLITICO pointed officials to federal travel rules that appeared to bar such arrangements.
Pruitt has been routinely flying first class at taxpayers’ expense after securing what EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox had described as "blanket waiver,” POLITICO reported Tuesday. But the General Services Administration says federal rules require agencies’ oversight staffers to sign off on officials’ first- or business-class travel "on a trip-by-trip basis ... unless the traveler has an up-to-date documented disability or special need.”
Before his sudden firing last week, the Pentagon official who oversaw military commission trials at Guantánamo Bay was exploring potential plea deals to end the long-delayed prosecution of five suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks, a move that would foreclose the possibility of execution, according to several people familiar with the matter.
No deal was imminent, the people said, but the talks were active and contemplated the defendants — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the attacks — pleading guilty and probably receiving life sentences. Most of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.
“Peoples [sic] lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new,” Trump wrote. “There is no recovery for someone falsely accused—life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”
TVNL Comment: The Donald Dilemma: If he admits that the womens' complaints are credible, he has to admit that the dozen women with accusations against him also are credible. He has to support the abusers because he is one of them.
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