Trump And Putin Continue Mutual Protection Pact. We’re talkin’ diesel fuel this time:
President Donald Trump said he has struck a deal to obtain diesel from Russia, a stunning reversal of years of U.S. pressure on Moscow over its war with Ukraine and an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
Trump said on social media on Friday that he struck the deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call in which he was expected to discuss a suspected case of plague in Russia. Instead, Trump announced that Russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by an additional 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons “immediately thereafter.” Russia will deliver an additional 3 million tons “within a short period of time” after that, he wrote.
Trump’s shocking announcement comes after he signed a sweeping Russia sanctions law last month that aimed at clamping down on Russia’s energy revenues, among other areas, that fuel its war against Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it, “a weak decision, unfortunately, a weak decision by strong partners,” according to a statement released by the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington.
How Ken Paxton Stiffed The Taxpayers For Millions For Lavish Travel:
In the summer of 2023, after he was impeached on charges of abusing his office for personal gain, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was suspended and barred from conducting any official business for more than three months while awaiting trial in the state Senate.
So, he traveled.
Paxton, a Republican who is now running for U.S. Senate, took at least 17 trips over three months, including to resort destinations Park City, Utah, and Vail, Colorado. He visited the Oklahoma town where he owns a vacation lodge and a Utah community with a golf resort, where he later bought four condominiums.
State police joined him each time, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars for trips unrelated to his job as attorney general. The Texas Senate ultimately acquitted him on the impeachment charges.
But Paxton’s use of the taxpayer-funded detail did not begin or end there. In fact, it stands out compared with his predecessor, fellow elected officials in Texas and other state attorneys general, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.
Paxton has traveled frequently out of state while listing little on his official calendar, The Associated Press reported last week. ProPublica and the Tribune’s analysis, which included reviewing every publicly available document Paxton’s office says it possesses about his travel, discloses for the first time how few of his trips had a listed business purpose: just 1 in 6.
It also found Paxton’s security has cost taxpayers far more than has previously been reported.
Since assuming office in 2015, Paxton has taken nearly 1,000 trips with a state-funded security detail, costing $3.3 million. The newsrooms’ review of Paxton’s travel records, obtained through the state’s Public Information Act, could only connect 138 of those trips and $553,000 in security costs to state business.
Records detailing the purpose of Paxton’s visits to 36 states and 19 countries do not appear to exist in most cases. These include a trip to a small town in Hawaii months before his family’s blind trust bought land there; 24 trips to Utah, where the trust owns five properties; and 53 trips to Florida, where Paxton and the trust have two houses and a townhome.
Blatant Retribution By Trump, DOJ and Rethugs. They keep going after the same Trump targets:
Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook:
On Friday, President Donald Trump announced the creation of a new committee to investigate Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud, even after those claims were shown to be incorrect, and after the US Supreme Court in June rejected his previous attempts to fire her.
In a written memo, Trump announced that this new committee will hold a hearing at the White House two days after the midterm elections in November and demanded that Cook show up to testify. Trump’s ongoing effort to oust Cook represents the first time the president has tried to fire a member of the Fed’s board in more than a century, since the central bank was established as an independent entity that sets monetary policy free of political influence.
Prosecutors in the justice department’s civil rights division are seeking criminal charges against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top Trump White House aide who gave explosive testimony to the committee that investigated the US attack on the Capitol, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The potential charges involve lying to Congress, the person said.
Hutchinson, a former top aide to the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, told the panel among other things that the deputy chief of staff for operations told her that Trump did not want to return to the White House on January 6 and at one point grabbed the wheel of his SUV to try to join supporters at the Capitol. Republicans have long disputed this account.
The case is the latest example of how Trump has used the justice department to prosecute his enemies. Last year, the justice department indicted former FBI director James Comey on charges of lying to Congress and Letitia James on mortgage fraud. Both indictments were dismissed after a judge ruled the prosecutor overseeing them had been unlawfully appointed. The department has since filed a new indictment against Comey for posting a picture of seashells arranged in a formation that said “8647.”
Oh, and DOJ is still ‘investigating’ E. Jean Carroll.
Court Rules Against Trump’s Latest Election-Stealing Scheme. Nothing’s ever final with that guy, though:
A federal judge ruled on Friday that the US justice department’s policy of collecting states’ unredacted voter rolls to check them against a federal immigration database is unlawful.
The ruling, by the US district judge Sparkle Sooknanan, was a setback for Donald Trump, who has pushed his administration to ramp up investigations into non-citizen voting ahead of the November midterm elections, with control of Congress at stake.
The department’s list maintenance policy, adopted to comply with the president’s election integrity executive order, violated privacy laws and risked disenfranchising voters, Sooknanan said.
“The court vacates a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more – a policy that flies in the face of duly enacted laws designed to protect Americans,” Sooknanan wrote in the 78-page ruling.
Sooknanan said the policy not only violated federal laws, but also that the justice department did not have the authority to enact it because Congress gave the states, not the federal government, control over the maintenance of their voter rolls.
It’s probably understated how much of our ‘Trump exhaustion’ is exacerbated by his never-ending litigation, an approach that yielded him great, and unwarranted, success as a serial deadbeat businessman.
What do you want to talk about?
