Trump’s sister calls him ‘cruel’, ‘liar’ on secret recordings: report
Trump ‘Has No Principles’ And ‘You Can’t Trust Him,’ His Sister Reportedly Said On Tape
President Donald Trump’s sister was recorded saying that her brother “has no principles” and “you can’t trust him,” The Washington Post reported Saturday.
Maryanne Trump Barry, who was serving as a federal judge at the time, made the slashing comments to her niece Mary Trump, who was secretly recording her, the Post reported. At one point, Barry was discussing Trump’s moves in 2018 to separate immigrant children from their parents.
“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said, according to the newspaper. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean, my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people — not do this.”
She added: “His goddamned tweet[s] and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know, the change of stories, the lack of preparation, the lying — holy shit.”
Trump had earlier suggested on Fox News that he might “put her at the border” and assign his sister to make immigration decisions. She guessed he hadn’t read her decisions or he would know they wouldn’t likely agree on issues.
“What has he read?” Mary Trump asked her aunt. Barry responded: “He doesn’t read.”
At one point, an exasperated Barry said: “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
Barry also noted: “Donald is out for Donald, period.” When her niece asked Barry what her brother had accomplished on his own, she responded: “Well, he has five bankruptcies,” adding: “You can’t trust him.”
The Post obtained the audio excerpts of the taped conversations after Mary Trump told the newspaper that she learned some of the information in her book — “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man” — from 15 hours of face-to-face talks with her aunt in 2018 and 2019. It was her aunt who told her that the president had paid someone to take the SATs for him, Mary Trump told the Post.
Barry has never spoken publicly about her issues with her brother.
Mary Trump told The Post recently that her uncle is unfit to be president and she aims to do “everything in my power” to elect Joe Biden, the newspaper reported.
Check out the entire story here, with audio clips.
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
Trump Accidentally Confirms Key Stormy Daniels Detail During Weird Rally Moment
President Donald Trump on Thursday inadvertently confirmed a key detail in the account of Stormy Daniels, the porn star who claims she had an affair with him in 2006.
“He is obsessed with sharks,” Daniels said in an interview with In Touch magazine in 2011. “Terrified of sharks. He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’”
On Thursday, Trump made very similar comments while speaking to supporters in Pennsylvania as he went off on a tangent.
“I’m not a big fan of sharks,” he said. “I have people calling me up, ‘Sir, we have a fund to save the shark, it’s called Save The Shark.’ I say ’no thank you, I have other things I can contribute to.”
Daniels was paid $130,000 just before the 2016 election to keep her allegations of an affair quiet. Trump has denied the affair, which Daniels said took place in 2006 when Trump’s third wife, Melania Trump, was caring for the couple’s infant child.
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
Op-Ed: The Belarus crisis is a problem for Moscow. Here’s how Putin might respond
What could provoke Putin into more overt action would be signs of Western interference. Demands for closer relations with the European Union or NATO might also spark a harsh reaction.
In phone calls with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France on Tuesday, Putin warned that any outside intervention would be “unacceptable.” Spokesman Peskov complained this week that “attempts at such direct intervention are taking place.”
To reassure Moscow, the newly-formed Coordinating Council of the Belarus opposition issued a statement on Wednesday pledging not to change the country’s “constitutional order and foreign policy course.” It called on Lukashenko to halt violence, release political prisoners and hold new elections under a new electoral commission.
For their part, EU leaders said Wednesday that they would not recognize the results of the Aug. 9 election. But echoing Putin’s words, they also insisted that there should be no outside interference. “Belarus must find its own path for itself,” Chancellor Merkel said.
That path will require skillful balancing. Lukashenko has survived for 26 years by playing Russia against Europe while concentrating power at home. But the civic maturity shown by Belarusian protesters suggests society has outgrown its dictator. Lukashenko’s day may be over — if not now, then soon. But his successors will need both talent and toughness to build a thriving democracy while holding Russia at bay.
Daniel Treisman is a professor of political science at UCLA. He is the editor of “The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia.”
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – SUPREME LEADER OFFICE/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Iran has offered to allow UN nuclear inspectors to visit two controversial nuclear sites as part of its diplomatic charm offensive to have the international arms embargo against Tehran lifted, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN-sponsored body responsible for monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities, has been highly critical of the Iranian regime over its refusal to cooperate with inspectors over claims that it has undertaken illicit activities at two nuclear facilities.The IAEA took the unprecedented step earlier this year of issuing a special report publicly rebuking Iran for its non-cooperation on a number of key nuclear issues, and denying inspectors access to two key Iranian nuclear installations at Marivan and Amad, which inspectors believe have been used for developing and storing nuclear material and form part of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme.Iran has consistently refused to allow the IAEA access to the sites despite signing the 2015 nuclear deal with the US and other major world powers.But in a belated attempt to improve relations with the IAEA and the UN, Iran has now reached an agreement to allow the inspectors to visit the sites, according to Western diplomatic sources.The stalemate is said to have been broken earlier this month following a visit to Iran by Rafael Gross, the IAEA’s director general, where he had talks with Dr Ali-Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran.Western diplomats believe that, in return for gaining access to the two sites, the IAEA has given Tehran undertakings that it will no longer insist on investigating historic issues relating to Iran’s nuclear programme.“Iran is desperate to get the arms embargo lifted at the UN, and so has decided to cooperate with the IAEA to improve relations with the UN,” said a senior Western diplomat.“Tehran believes that if it cooperates with the UN, there is a greater possibility that the arms embargo will not be renewed.”
The Iranian move is likely to be greeted with deep scepticism in Washington, where the Trump administration has launched a major lobbying effort aimed at maintaining the UN Security Council’s arms embargo against Iran, which is due to expire in October.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been lobbying the three European signatories to the nuclear deal – Britain, France and Germany – to back Washington’s efforts to extend the UN arms embargo, but has met stiff resistance from European leaders who argue the embargo is no longer valid after the Trump administration’s unilateral decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal in 2018.
This prompted Mr Pompeo yesterday to accuse Washington’s European allies of “siding with the ayatollahs” by insisting that the US could not reimpose sanctions on Iran.
Four years later, Republican senators admit, „yes, Trump conspired with the Russians”
It’s a red-letter, if sad, day on the hypocrisy beat when after three years a Republican-majority Senate Intelligence Committee comes out with a 1,000-page report finding there was a whole lot of direct contact between the Trump 2016 campaign with Russian intelligence operators.
You know, the opposite of what Donald Trump has argued forcefully over and over again is a hoax.
Even Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the new committee chairman, says while it does not represent „collusion” — a conclusion that prompted Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) to say Rubio was not reading the same report he did — he did acknowledge a whole lot of interaction between Team Trump and Team Russia.
Of course, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III also would not put the „collusion” label on myriad interactions with Russians, for different reasons, to avoid a political conclusion. That allowed Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr and supporters of the president, including the convicted Roger Stone and former campaign chair Paul Manafort, to repeat that lack of labeling as a launch point to investigate the investigators.
But the Intelligence Committee did „painted a stark portrait of a Trump campaign eager to accept help from a foreign power in 2016, and a candidate closely involved in the effort,” said NBC News.
Here’s a link to the report itself, which highlighted some previously unreported evidence, including three allegations of potentially compromising material relating to Trump’s private trips to Russia that were unconnected to the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, at which Rubio took aim once again.
The committee found that Trump’s team knew ahead of time that emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee by Russian intelligence agents would appear in Wikileaks, and worked with Wikileaks to produce an „October surprise” toward winning that election.
Trump repeatedly has denied this, and has denied discussing the emails with Stone, who worked with Wikileaks. He lied to Mueller and to us, and has whined about it for four years. Now, Trump says he wants to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin again before November and we worry that not enough has been done to forestall new election interference.
The findings
Specifically, the committee said it found evidence that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort may have been connected to the Russian operation to steal and leak Democratic emails. If that had been proven in court, it would have constituted „collusion,” by any definition, but no such charge ever was brought. Manafort was convicted of fraud and tax charges unrelated to Russia.
Still, the report insisted that the Trump transition exposed itself to Russian influence, naming names and labeling the operatives as intelligence agents. „Russian and other countries took advantage of the Transition Team’s inexperience, transparent opposition to Obama administration policies and Trump’s desire to deepen ties with Russia…”
After three years of investigation, the committee „laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian government officials and other Russians, including some with ties to the country’s intelligence services,” said The New York Times.
According to the report, among other things, Russian spies worked to blame it all on Ukrainian officials and spies, identifying Manafort business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence officer.
The report says, „Despite Trump’s recollection, the committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with (Roger) Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”
Now what?
We’ve had the Mueller report. We’ve had the Trump efforts to undo the Mueller report. We even have a Barr-assigned criminal investigation about to pop on some of those involved in the investigation itself. We’ve learned about missteps at the FBI. We’ve been subjected to an onslaught of Trump declarations that he was victimized during this process.
Just Monday, Trump inanely said he deserves a third term, in violation of the Constitution, to make up for poor treatment at the hands of the „deep state” under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Trump repeatedly denies that he favors Russia, just as he denied that he or his team had anything to do with seeking to lean on Ukrainians to throw shade on Biden.
Now we have two Republican-majority committees in the Senate teeing up to continue undercutting the FBI and U.S. investigatory efforts looking at Team Trump behavior. Remember, the Justice Department’s own independent inspector general has found that the FBI had sufficient basis to open the Russia investigation and acted without political bias, though made some mistakes.
This report affirms much of the Mueller effort that there were dozens of contacts between Trump associates and Russian operatives, that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s attempts to sabotage the election and „expected it would benefit electorally” from the hacking and dumping of Democratic emails.
Trump as victim? Hardly.
How does this Make America Great?
