Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Sep 02, 2017 1:01 pm

More than most threads, this illustrates how malleable and cynical media frames are. Mike Pence has gone from Dominionist Christian Sleeper Agent to hapless mark stuck on the outside of The Trump Show to the point man & super-fixer for the Putin Mafia. All of this without any actual, real world exertions on Pence's part.

Reality is silly putty. The one constant is we all want our sports team to win.

The story comes first. Always. Once the story is in place, you start trying to line up sources and facts. Minting facts is still mostly the domain of the intelligence sector (Q: Is there an actual line between public and private now? A: No) but sources, sources are the bread and butter of journalism in 2017. America will never lack for willing opportunists.

Raise a glass to those broken few still trying to report the facts at this point. As media accelerates towards a completely bespoke, Patreon-funded model, we'll all find ourselves at the mercy of our fanbase -- and find out, sooner or later, how fickle any fanbase can be. You either keep singing the hits or you get a real job: ask anyone in UFOlogy.

Every breaking story, every revelation that promises to bring the White House crashing down: it's the same template every time. Because it works.
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby Elvis » Sat Sep 02, 2017 4:10 pm

Where did I recently read that The New York Times editors decide twelve months in advance which storylines they'll be assigning to reporters & op-eds?

As I remember, it was an exposé of sorts by a reporter who'd worked there.
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat Sep 02, 2017 8:42 pm

Interesting that the NYT had no mention of Pence in its coverage:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/trump-comey-firing-letter.html
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Oct 12, 2017 4:21 pm

Mike Pence Will Help the Koch Brothers Plot Their 2018 Strategy

Philip Elliott
Sep 29, 2017

Vice President Mike Pence is heading to Manhattan next month to huddle with leaders and donors of the formidable network backed by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

The two-day private retreat, on Oct. 12 and 13, is designed to help the small-government patrons pick their fights in House, Senate and state-level campaigns in next year’s midterms. A third of the Senate is in play, as is the entire House and 36 governors’ offices. The Koch-backed groups expect to spend as much as $400 million during the 2018 election cycle, either directly on these races or on the periphery to push policies that dovetail with the candidates.

“As a legislator, Governor and now Vice President, Pence truly understands how good policies can help all Americans improve their lives,” Koch executive James Davis said in an email announcing the Pence visit.

The strategy retreat will convene officials and patrons from the major Koch-linked groups: the activist-focused Americans for Prosperity; the Hispanic- and Latino-facing LIBRE Initiative; the military-aligned Concerned Veterans for America; and the young-voter targeting Generation Opportunity. An affiliated super PAC, Freedom Partners Action Fund, will also be on hand. Each group is expected to play a role in defending Republican majorities in Congress and pushing programs that boost the Kochs’ vision of a smaller government, less regulation and increased freedoms.

These groups are among the most effective in conservative politics. Democrats have consistently cried foul on their millions in spending because many of its donors are never disclosed. Under campaign finance laws, they do not have to be because their efforts, including television ads, seldom are explicitly about the election. Wiggle-phrases like “Call your Congressman” or “Tell your Senator” give them a loophole to say the messages aren’t about elections and thus not subject to donor disclosure. Cash given to the campaign-driven super PAC, however, is disclosed.

Pence is a familiar face for these seminar participants. Many in the Koch orbit had hoped he would seek the presidency — or that he may yet. The current White House legislative director, Marc Short, ran the Koch network for years and is a former Pence chief of staff from his days in the House. The mind meld between the Koch world and Pence’s office is strong, and a Koch nudge in 2024 may clear the field for him.

That’s not to say the Koch groups have been particularly helpful for the White House’s agenda. Charles Koch in particular is no friend to President Trump and didn’t do much to help his presidential bid. The Koch network was unhappy with the failed outline to scrap Obamacare and is teed up to pick fights as the White House lays the groundwork for a rewrite of the tax code.

Yet one of the top Koch lieutenants, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity was at the White House on Monday for a dinner with the President. He sat to the President’s right.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 02, 2017 9:13 pm

Robert Mueller appears to be targeting Mike Pence after all
Bill Palmer
Updated: 8:01 pm EDT Thu Nov 2, 2017
Home » Politics

Even as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal has continued to move closer to Donald Trump, one of the key questions has been whether the investigation would also target Mike Pence. If Mueller’s findings lead to Trump’s ouster, Pence would inherit the presidency. Now comes evidence that Mueller appears to indeed be targeting Pence, in a move that could have a profound impact on the line of succession.


Mueller has turned his focus to a political entity called America First Policies. The group has ties to Rick Gates, who Mueller had arrested earlier this week in the Trump-Russia scandal. Until this summer, this group was run by a guy named Nick Ayers – until Mike Pence hired him as his new chief of staff (link). Gates was initially believed to have been arrested simply due to his financial connections to Paul Manafort and Russia. However, Mueller’s decision to also target America First Policies suggests that Gates’ arrest may be an attempt at getting to Ayers. In turn, there would only be one logical reason for Robert Mueller to pursue Ayers: to get to Mike Pence.

There is no evidence that Pence was involved in the Trump-Russia conspiracy during the election. However, Pence is documented to have frequently communicated with Manafort during the transition period, without a legitimate reason for doing so (it’s unclear if these phone calls were picked up on the Manafort wiretap). Pence has also repeatedly made false statements to try to cover up Michael Flynn’s interactions with Russia. Even if Pence isn’t guilty of conspiring with Russia, he appears to have conspired to obstruct justice as part of the subsequent coverup.


So what happens if Robert Mueller uncovers evidence that Mike Pence is guilty of felony conspiracy obstruction? It’s important to keep in mind that impeachment and removal from office are entirely a political process, and Mueller doesn’t control that process. He can only demonstrate that Trump is so overwhelmingly guilty that Congress ends up having no realistic choice but to oust Trump. It’s nearly impossible to imagine Congress ousting Trump and Pence simultaneously.

The most likely scenario is that Mike Pence would inherit the presidency, and would then swiftly get eaten alive by his role in the scandal. In such a scenario, Pence would immediately have to nominate a new Vice President, subject to Senate approval. The Senate would likely come to a bipartisan compromise on a consensus pick, and then force Pence to nominate that pick (this is precisely how Gerald Ford became Vice President). Then if Pence is subsequently ousted, that consensus pick would become President (which is how Gerald Ford became President).


stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Nov 02, 2017 4:01 pm wrote:Well slad, I think I found that Gates-Pence connection. Looks like Mueller did too!

Mueller’s next target is pro-Trump group with ties to Mike Pence’s chief of staff: report

Noor Al-Sibai

02 Nov 2017 at 16:20 ET

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Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Nick Ayers (left) and Vice President Mike Pence (right). Image via Ayers/Twitter).

Now that he’s all but bagged one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly set his sights on another target — a pro-Trump non-profit with ties to the vice president’s top staffer.

According to Fox News, America First Policies, a group co-founded by newly-indicted Manafort deputy Rick Gates, recently received a request from Mueller’s office.

Along with the group’s connection to one of Mueller’s latest targets, it also has a friend in even higher places — Vice President Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff Nick Ayers.

According to an ABC published soon after Ayers was confirmed as the vice president’s second chief of staff, the young Republican was a “leader” of AFP.

Ayers made headlines last month when his comments suggesting the GOP should “purge” anti-Trump Republicans at a donor meeting were leaked to Politico.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby norton ash » Thu Nov 02, 2017 10:15 pm

^^^ Those two are definitely fucking.
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby Burnt Hill » Thu Nov 02, 2017 10:51 pm

No kidding they are in love!
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Dec 05, 2017 5:23 pm

God’s Plan for Mike Pence

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

Image
McKay Coppins January/February 2018 Issue

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

When the time comes, Pence takes the stage and greets the crowd with a booming “Hellooooo, Indiana!” He says he has “just hung up the phone” with Donald Trump and that the president asked him to “say hello.” He delivers this message with a slight chuckle that has a certain, almost subversive quality to it. Watch Pence give enough speeches, and you’ll notice that this often happens when he’s in front of a friendly crowd. He’ll be witnessing to evangelicals at a mega-church, or addressing conservative supporters at a rally, and when the moment comes for him to pass along the president’s well-wishes, the words are invariably accompanied by an amused little chuckle that prompts knowing laughter from the attendees. It’s almost as if, in that brief, barely perceptible moment, Pence is sending a message to those with ears to hear—that he recognizes the absurdity of his situation; that he knows just what sort of man he’s working for; that while things may look bad now, there is a grand purpose at work here, a plan that will manifest itself in due time. Let not your hearts be troubled, he seems to be saying. I’ve got this.

And then, all at once, Pence is back on message. In his folksy Midwestern drawl, he recites Republican aphorisms about “job creators” and regulatory “red tape,” and heralds the many supposed triumphs of Trump’s young presidency. As he nears the end of his remarks, his happy-warrior buoyancy gives way to a more sober cadence. “We’ve come to a pivotal moment in the life of this country,” Pence soulfully intones. “It’s a good time to pray for America.” His voice rising in righteous fervor, the vice president promises an opening of the heavens. “If His people who are called by His name will humble themselves and pray,” he proclaims, “He’ll hear from heaven, and He’ll heal this land!”

It’s easy to see how Pence could put so much faith in the possibilities of divine intervention. The very fact that he is standing behind a lectern bearing the vice-presidential seal is, one could argue, a loaves-and-fishes-level miracle. Just a year earlier, he was an embattled small-state governor with underwater approval ratings, dismal reelection prospects, and a national reputation in tatters. In many ways, Pence was on the same doomed trajectory as the conservative-Christian movement he’d long championed—once a political force to be reckoned with, now a battered relic of the culture wars.

Because God works in mysterious ways (or, at the very least, has a postmodern sense of humor), it was Donald J. Trump—gracer of Playboy covers, delighter of shock jocks, collector of mistresses—who descended from the mountaintop in the summer of 2016, GOP presidential nomination in hand, offering salvation to both Pence and the religious right. The question of whether they should wed themselves to such a man was not without its theological considerations. But after eight years of Barack Obama and a string of disorienting political defeats, conservative Christians were in retreat and out of options. So they placed their faith in Trump—and then, incredibly, he won.

In Pence, Trump has found an obedient deputy whose willingness to suffer indignity and humiliation at the pleasure of the president appears boundless. When Trump comes under fire for describing white nationalists as “very fine people,” Pence is there to assure the world that he is actually a man of great decency. When Trump needs someone to fly across the country to an NFL game so he can walk out in protest of national-anthem kneelers, Pence heads for Air Force Two.

Meanwhile, Pence’s presence in the White House has been a boon for the religious right. Evangelical leaders across the country point to his record on abortion and religious freedom and liken him to a prophet restoring conservative Christianity to its rightful place at the center of American life. “Mike Pence is the 24-karat-gold model of what we want in an evangelical politician,” Richard Land, the president of the Southern Evangelical Seminary and one of Trump’s faith advisers, told me. “I don’t know anyone who’s more consistent in bringing his evangelical-Christian worldview to public policy.”

But what does Pence make of his own improbable rise to the vice presidency, and how does he reconcile his faith with serving a man like Trump? Over the past several months, I’ve spoken with dozens of people who have known the vice president throughout his life—from college fraternity brothers and longtime friends to trusted advisers and political foes. (Pence himself declined my requests for an interview.) While many of them expressed surprise and even bewilderment at the heights of power Pence had attained, those who know him best said he sees no mystery in why he’s in the White House. “If you’re Mike Pence, and you believe what he believes, you know God had a plan,” says Ralph Reed, an evangelical power broker and a friend of the vice president’s.

Pence has so far showed absolute deference to the president—and as a result he has become one of the most influential figures in the White House, with a broad portfolio of responsibilities and an unprecedented level of autonomy. But for all his aw-shucks modesty, Pence is a man who believes heaven and Earth have conspired to place him a heartbeat—or an impeachment vote—away from the presidency. At some crucial juncture in the not-too-distant future, that could make him a threat to Trump.

Pence’s public persona can seem straight out of the Columbus, Indiana, of his youth, a quiet suburb of Indianapolis where conformity was a virtue and old-fashioned values reigned. His dad ran a chain of convenience stores; his mom was a homemaker who took care of him and his five siblings. The Pences were devout Irish-Catholic Democrats, and Mike and his brothers served as altar boys at St. Columba Catholic Church.

Young Mike did not initially thrive in this setting. He was useless at football (he later sized up his own abilities as “one grade above the blocking sled”), and he lacked the natural athleticism of his brothers, who were “lean and hard and thin.” Pence was “a fat little kid,” he told a local newspaper in 1988, “the real pumpkin in the pickle patch.”

But by the time Pence arrived at Hanover College—a small liberal-arts school in southern Indiana—he had slimmed down, discovered a talent for public speaking, and developed something akin to swagger. The yearbooks from his undergraduate days are filled with photos that portray Pence as a kind of campus cliché: the dark-haired, square-jawed stud strumming an acoustic guitar on the quad as he leads a gaggle of coeds in a sing-along. In one picture, Pence mugs for the camera in a fortune-teller costume with a girl draped over his lap; in another, he poses goofily in an unbuttoned shirt that shows off his torso.

Pence wasn’t a bad student, but he wasn’t especially bookish either, managing a B-plus average amid a busy campus social life. As a freshman, he joined Phi Gamma Delta and became an enthusiastic participant in the Greek experience. Dan Murphy, a former fraternity brother of Pence’s who now teaches history at Hanover, told me that the “Phi Gams” were an eclectic bunch. “You had in that fraternity house everything from the sort of evangelical-Christian crowd to some fairly hard-core drug users.” Pence was friendly with all of them, and in his sophomore year was elected president of the fraternity.

Murphy and Pence lived in neighboring rooms, and made a habit of attending Catholic Mass together on Sunday nights. On their walks back home, they often talked about their futures, and it became clear to Murphy that his friend had a much stronger sense of his “mission in the world” than the average undergrad. Pence agonized over his “calling.” He talked about entering the priesthood, but ultimately felt drawn instead to politics, a realm where he believed he could harness God’s power to do good. It was obvious to his fraternity brothers, Murphy told me, that Pence wanted to be president one day.

Pence underwent two conversions in college that would shape the rest of his life. The first came in the spring of 1978, when he road-tripped to Kentucky with some evangelical friends for a music festival billed as the Christian Woodstock. After a day of rocking out to Jesus-loving prog-rock bands and born-again Bob Dylan imitators, Pence found himself sitting in a light rain, yearning for a more personal relationship with Christ than was afforded by the ritualized Catholicism of his youth. “My heart really, finally broke with a deep realization that what had happened on the cross in some infinitesimal way had happened for me,” Pence recounted in March 2017. It was there, he said, that he gave his life to Jesus.

The other conversion was a partisan one. Pence had entered college a staunch supporter of Jimmy Carter, and he viewed the 1980 presidential election as a contest between a “good Christian” and a “vacuous movie star.” But President Ronald Reagan won Pence over—instilling in him an appreciation for both movement conservatism and the leadership potential of vacuous entertainers that would serve him well later in life.

Murphy told me another story about Pence that has stayed with him. During their sophomore year, the Phi Gamma Delta house found itself perpetually on probation. The movie Animal House had recently come out, and the fraternity brothers were constantly re-creating their favorite scenes, with toga parties, outlandish pranks, and other miscellaneous mischief. Most vexing to the school’s administration was their violation of Hanover’s strict alcohol prohibition. The Phi Gams devised elaborate schemes to smuggle booze into the house, complete with a network of campus lookouts. Pence was not a particularly hard partyer, but he gamely presided over these efforts, and when things went sideways he was often called upon to smooth things over with the adults.

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By college, Pence had slimmed down and developed something akin to swagger. The yearbooks from his time at Hanover College, in southern Indiana, depict him as a popular, square-jawed hunk. (Hanover College)

One night, during a rowdy party, Pence and his fraternity brothers got word that an associate dean was on his way to the house. They scrambled to hide the kegs and plastic cups, and then Pence met the administrator at the door.

“We know you’ve got a keg,” the dean told Pence, according to Murphy. Typically when scenes like this played out, one of the brothers would take the fall, claiming that all the alcohol was his and thus sparing the house from formal discipline. Instead, Pence led the dean straight to the kegs and admitted that they belonged to the fraternity. The resulting punishment was severe. “They really raked us over the coals,” Murphy said. “The whole house was locked down.” Some of Pence’s fraternity brothers were furious with him—but he managed to stay on good terms with the administration. Such good terms, in fact, that after he graduated, in 1981, the school offered him a job in the admissions office.

Decades later, when Murphy read about Pence vying for a spot on the presidential ticket with Donald Trump, he recognized a familiar quality in his old friend. “Somewhere in the midst of all that genuine humility and good feeling, this is a guy who’s got that ambition,” Murphy told me. And he wondered, “Is Mike’s religiosity a way of justifying that ambition to himself?”

For all Pence’s outward piousness, he’s kept the details of his spiritual journey opaque. Despite his conversion to evangelical Christianity in college, he married his wife, Karen, in a Catholic ceremony and until the mid‑’90s periodically referred to himself as an “evangelical Catholic.” That formulation might befuddle theologians, but it reveals the extraordinary degree to which Pence’s personal religious evolution paralleled the rise of the religious right.

Indeed, it was just a year after Pence’s born-again experience in Kentucky that Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a national movement that aimed to turn Christian voters into a pavement-pounding political force. In the decades that followed, white evangelicals forged an alliance with conservative Catholics to fight abortion, gay marriage, and an encroaching secularism that they saw as a threat to their religious freedom. With conservative believers feeling under siege, denominational differences began to melt away.

In 1988, at age 29, Pence launched his first bid for Congress. He garnered attention by riding a single-speed bicycle around his district in sneakers and short shorts, dodging aggravated motorists and drumming up conversations with prospective voters on the sidewalk. It was a perfectly Pencian gimmick—earnest, almost unbearably cheesy—and it helped him win the Republican nomination. But he was unable to defeat the Democratic incumbent, Phil Sharp.

Pence tried again two years later, this time ditching the bike in favor of vicious attack ads. The race is remembered as one of the nastiest in Indiana history. In one notorious Pence campaign spot, an actor dressed as a cartoonish Arab sheikh thanked Sharp for advancing the interests of foreign oil. The tone of the campaign was jarring coming from a candidate who had nurtured such a wholesome image, a contrast memorably captured in an Indianapolis Star headline: “Pence Urges Clean Campaign, Calls Opponent a Liar.” He ended up losing by 19 points after it was revealed that he was using campaign funds to pay his mortgage and grocery bills (a practice that was then legal but has since been outlawed).

Afterward, a humbled Pence attempted public repentance by personal essay. His article, “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” ran in newspapers across the state. “Christ Jesus came to save sinners,” the essay began, quoting 1 Timothy, “among whom I am foremost of all.”

With two failed congressional bids behind him, Pence decided to change tack. In 1992, he debuted a conservative talk-radio show that he described as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.” The quaint joke belied the meticulousness with which Pence went about building his local media empire. “He knew exactly what he wanted his brand to be and who his audience was,” says Ed Feigenbaum, the publisher of a state-politics tip sheet, whom Pence often consulted. Most of his listeners were “retirees and conservative housewives,” Feigenbaum says, and Pence carefully catered to them. Over the next eight years, he expanded his radio show to 18 markets, started hosting a talk show on a local TV station, launched a proto-blog, and published a newsletter, “The Pence Report,” which locals remember primarily for its frequent typos and Pence’s lovingly drawn political cartoons.

“His Mikeness,” as he became known on the air, began each radio show with a signature opening line—“Greetings across the amber waves of grain”—and filled the hours with a mix of interviews, listener calls, and medium-hot takes. Pence’s commentary from this period is a near-perfect time capsule of ’90s culture-war trivia. He railed against assisted suicide (“Kevorkian is a monster”) and fretted about the insufficient punishment given to a female Air Force pilot who had engaged in an extramarital affair (“Is adultery no longer a big deal in Indiana and in America?”). He mounted a rousing defense of Big Tobacco (“Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill”) and lamented parents’ growing reliance on day care (pop culture “has sold the big lie that ‘Mom doesn’t matter’ ”).

Pence also demonstrated a knack for seizing on more-creative wedge issues. For instance, a 1995 initiative to reintroduce otters into Indiana’s wildlife population became, in Pence’s able hands, a frightening example of Big Government run amok. “State-sanctioned, sanitized otters today,” he warned, ominously. “Buffaloes tomorrow?”

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After two failed bids for Congress, Pence was elected in 2000 and served until 2013, when he became the governor of Indiana. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP)

Despite Pence’s on-air culture-warring, he rarely came off as disagreeable. He liked to describe himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” and he was careful to show respect for opposing viewpoints. “Nobody ever left an interview not liking Mike,” says Scott Uecker, the radio executive who oversaw Pence’s show.

By the time a congressional seat opened up ahead of the 2000 election, Pence was a minor Indiana celebrity and state Republicans were urging him to run. In the summer of 1999, as he was mulling the decision, he took his family on a trip to Colorado. One day while horseback riding in the mountains, he and Karen looked heavenward and saw two red-tailed hawks soaring over them. They took it as a sign, Karen recalled years later: Pence would run again, but this time there would be “no flapping.” He would glide to victory.

To his colleagues on Capitol Hill—an overwhelmingly secular place where even many Republicans privately sneer at people of faith—everything about the Indiana congressman screamed “Bible thumper.” He was known to pray with his staffers, and often cited scripture to explain his votes. In a 2002 interview with Congressional Quarterly, for example, he explained, “My support for Israel stems largely from my personal faith. In the Bible, God promises Abraham, ‘Those who bless you I will bless, and those who curse you I will curse.’ ” He became a champion of the fight to restrict abortion and defund Planned Parenthood.

Pence didn’t have a reputation for legislative acumen (“I would not call Mike a policy wonk,” one former staffer told the Indianapolis Monthly), and some of his colleagues called him a nickname behind his back: “Mike Dense.” But he did have sharp political instincts. Before long, he was climbing the leadership ranks and making connections with key figures in the conservative-Christian establishment. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has documented Pence’s close ties to the Koch brothers and other GOP mega-donors, but his roots in the religious right are even deeper. In 2011, as he began plotting a presidential run in the upcoming election cycle, Pence met with Ralph Reed, the evangelical power broker, to seek his advice.

Reed told Pence he should return home and get elected governor of Indiana first, then use the statehouse as a launching pad for a presidential bid. He said a few years in the governor’s mansion—combined with his deep support on the Christian right—would make him a top-tier candidate in the 2016 primaries.

Pence took Reed’s advice, and in 2012 launched a gubernatorial bid. Casting himself as the heir to the popular outgoing governor, Mitch Daniels, he avoided social issues and ran on a pragmatic, business-friendly platform. He used Ronald Reagan as a political style guru and told his ad makers that he wanted his campaign commercials to have “that ‘Morning in America’ feel.” He meticulously fine-tuned early cuts of the ads, asking his consultants to edit this or reframe that or zoom in here instead of there.

But he wasn’t willing to win at all costs. When the race tightened in the homestretch, Pence faced immense pressure from consultants to go negative. A former adviser recalls heated conference calls in which campaign brass urged him to green-light an attack ad on his Democratic opponent, John Gregg. Pence refused. “He didn’t want to be a hypocrite,” the former adviser says.

Pence won the race anyway, and set about cutting taxes and taking on local unions—burnishing a résumé that would impress Republican donors and Iowa caucus-goers. The governor’s stock began to rise in Washington, where he was widely viewed as a contender for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Then, in early 2015, Pence stumbled into a culture-war debacle that would come to define his governorship. At the urging of conservative-Christian leaders in Indiana, the GOP-controlled state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed religious business owners to deny services to gay customers in certain circumstances. Pence signed it into law in a closed-press ceremony at the statehouse, surrounded by nuns, monks, and right-wing lobbyists. A photo of the signing was released, and all hell broke loose. Corporate leaders threatened to stop adding jobs in Indiana, and national organizations began pulling scheduled conventions from the state. The NCAA, which is headquartered in Indianapolis, put out a statement suggesting that the law might imperil “future events.” The Indianapolis Star ran a rare front-page editorial under an all-caps headline: “FIX THIS NOW.”

Caught off guard by the controversy, Pence accepted an invitation to appear on This Week With George Stephanopoulos, where he intended to make the case that the law wasn’t anti-gay but rather pro–religious liberty. What took place instead was an excruciating 12-minute interview in which Pence awkwardly danced around the same straightforward question: Does this law allow a Christian florist to refuse service for a same-sex wedding? “George, look,” Pence said at one point, sounding frustrated, “the issue here is, you know, is tolerance a two-way street or not?”

For Pence—and the conservative-Christian movement he represented—this was more than just a talking point. In recent years, the religious right had been abruptly forced to pivot from offense to defense in the culture wars—abandoning the “family values” crusades and talk of “remoralizing America,” and focusing its energies on self-preservation. Conservative Christians had lost the battles over school prayer, sex education, and pornography censorship, and the Supreme Court was poised to legalize same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, a widespread decline in churchgoing and religious affiliation had contributed to a growing anxiety among conservative believers. By 2017, white evangelicals would tell pollsters that Christians faced more discrimination in America than Muslims did.

To many Christians, the backlash against Indiana’s “religious freedom” bill was a frightening sign of the secular left’s triumphalism. Liberals were no longer working toward tolerance, it seemed—they were out for conquest. “Many evangelicals were experiencing the sense of an almost existential threat,” Russell Moore, a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, told me. It was only a matter of time, he said, before cultural elites’ scornful attitudes would help drive Christians into the arms of a strongman like Trump. “I think there needs to be a deep reflection on the left about how they helped make this happen.”

After seven chaotic days, Pence caved and signed a revised version of the religious-freedom bill—but by then it was too late. His approval ratings were in free fall, Democrats were raising money to defeat him in the next gubernatorial election, and the political obituaries were being written. Things looked grimmer for Pence, and the religious right, than they ever had before.

Deliverance manifested itself to Mike Pence on the back nine of Donald Trump’s golf course in New Jersey. It was the Fourth of July weekend, and the two men were sizing each other up as potential running mates. Each had his own hesitations. Coming into the game, Trump had formed an opinion of the Indiana governor as prudish, stiff, and embarrassingly poor, according to one longtime associate. Pence, meanwhile, had spent the primaries privately shaking his head at Trump’s campaign-trail antics, and had endorsed Senator Ted Cruz for the nomination. But as the two men played golf, Pence asked what his job description would be if they wound up in the White House together. Trump gave him the same answer he’d been dangling in front of other prospective running mates for weeks: He wanted “the most consequential vice president ever.” Pence was sold.

Before flying out to New Jersey, Pence had called Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump adviser, whom he’d known for years, and asked for her advice on how to handle the meeting. Conway had told him to talk about “stuff outside of politics,” and suggested he show his eagerness to learn from the billionaire. “I knew they would enjoy each other’s company,” Conway told me, adding, “Mike Pence is someone whose faith allows him to subvert his ego to the greater good.”

True to form, Pence spent much of their time on the course kissing Trump’s ring. You’re going to be the next president of the United States, he said. It would be the honor of a lifetime to serve you. Afterward, he made a point of gushing to the press about Trump’s golf game. “He beat me like a drum,” Pence confessed, to Trump’s delight.

The consensus among the campaign’s top political strategists was that a Trump–Pence ticket was their best shot at winning in November. After a bitter primary season, Trump’s campaign had moved swiftly to shore up support from conservative Christians, who advisers worried would stay home on Election Day. Trump released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees with unimpeachably pro-life records and assembled an evangelical advisory board composed of high-profile faith leaders.

One of the men asked to join the board was Richard Land, of the Southern Evangelical Seminary. When the campaign approached him with the offer, Land says, he was perplexed. “You do know that Trump was my last choice, right?” he said. But he ultimately accepted, and when a campaign aide asked what his first piece of advice was, he didn’t hesitate: “Pick Mike Pence.”

Nonetheless, as decision time approached, Trump was leaning toward New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a fellow bridge-and-tunnel loudmouth with whom he had more natural chemistry. The candidate’s advisers repeatedly warned that the “Bridgegate” fiasco would make Christie a liability in the general election. But they were unable to get through to Trump.

Then, on July 12, a miracle: During a short campaign swing through Indiana, Trump got word that his plane had broken down on the runway, and that he would need to spend the night in Indianapolis. With nowhere else to go, Trump accepted an invitation to dine with the Pences.

In fact, according to two former Trump aides, there was no problem with the plane. Paul Manafort, who was then serving as the campaign’s chairman, had made up the story to keep the candidate in town an extra day and allow him to be wooed by Pence. The gambit worked: Three days later, Trump announced Pence as his running mate.

On the stump and in interviews, Pence spoke of Trump in a tone that bordered on worshipful. One of his rhetorical tics was to praise the breadth of his running mate’s shoulders. Trump was, Pence proclaimed, a “broad-shouldered leader,” in possession of “broad shoulders and a big heart,” who had “the kind of broad shoulders” that enabled him to endure criticism while he worked to return “broad-shouldered American strength to the world stage.”

Campaign operatives discovered that anytime Trump did something outrageous or embarrassing, they could count on Pence to clean it up. “He was our top surrogate by far,” said one former senior adviser to Trump. “He was this mild-mannered, uber-Christian guy with a Midwestern accent telling voters, ‘Trump is a good man; I know what’s in his heart.’ It was very convincing—you wanted to trust him. You’d be sitting there listening to him and thinking, Yeah, maybe Trump is a good man!

Even some of Trump’s most devoted loyalists marveled at what Pence was willing to say. There was no talking point too preposterous, no fixed reality too plain to deny—if they needed Pence to defend the boss, he was in. When, during the vice-presidential debate, in early October, he was confronted with a barrage of damning quotes and questionable positions held by his running mate, Pence responded with unnerving message discipline, dismissing documented facts as “nonsense” and smears.

It was the kind of performance—a blur of half-truths and “whatabout”s and lies—that could make a good Christian queasy. But people close to Pence say he felt no conflict between his campaign duties and his religious beliefs. Marc Short, a longtime adviser to Pence and a fellow Christian, told me that the vice president believes strongly in a scriptural concept evangelicals call “servant leadership.” The idea is rooted in the Gospels, where Jesus models humility by washing his disciples’ feet and teaches, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave.”

When Pence was in Congress, he instructed his aides to have a “servant’s attitude” when dealing with constituents. Later, as the chairman of the House Republican Conference, he saw his job as being a servant to his fellow GOP lawmakers. And when he accepted the vice-presidential nomination, he believed he was committing to humbly submit to the will of Donald Trump. “Servant leadership is biblical,” Short told me. “That’s at the heart of it for Mike, and it comes across in his relationship with the president.”

Another close friend of Pence’s explained it to me this way: “His faith teaches that you’re under authority at all times. Christ is under God’s authority, man is under Christ’s authority, children are under the parents’ authority, employees are under the employer’s authority.”

“Mike,” he added, “always knows who’s in charge.”

On Friday, October 7, 2016, The Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape that showed Trump gloating about his penchant for grabbing women “by the pussy,” and instantly upended the campaign. Republicans across the country withdrew their endorsements, and conservative editorial boards called on Trump to drop out of the race. Most alarming to the aides and operatives inside Trump Tower, Mike Pence suddenly seemed at risk of going rogue.

Trump’s phone calls to his running mate reportedly went unreturned, and anonymous quotes began appearing in news stories describing Pence as “beside himself” over the revelation. One campaign staffer told me that when she was asked on TV the day after the tape came out whether Pence would remain on the ticket, she ad-libbed that, yes, he was 100 percent committed to Trump. She remembers walking away from the set and thinking, “I have no idea if what I just said is true.”

It’s been reported that Pence sent Trump a letter saying he needed time to decide whether he could stay with the campaign. But in fact, according to several Republicans familiar with the situation, he wasn’t just thinking about dropping out—he was contemplating a coup. Within hours of The Post’s bombshell, Pence made it clear to the Republican National Committee that he was ready to take Trump’s place as the party’s nominee. Such a move just four weeks before Election Day would have been unprecedented—but the situation seemed dire enough to call for radical action.

Already, Reince Priebus’s office was being flooded with panicked calls from GOP officials and donors urging the RNC chairman to get rid of Trump by whatever means necessary. One Republican senator called on the party to engage emergency protocols to nominate a new candidate. RNC lawyers huddled to explore an obscure legal mechanism by which they might force Trump off the ticket. Meanwhile, a small group of billionaires was trying to put together money for a “buyout”—even going so far as to ask a Trump associate how much money the candidate would require to walk away from the race. According to someone with knowledge of the talks, they were given an answer of $800 million. (It’s unclear whether Trump was aware of this discussion or whether the offer was actually made.) Republican donors and party leaders began buzzing about making Pence the nominee and drafting Condoleezza Rice as his running mate.

Amid the chaos, Trump convened a meeting of his top advisers in his Manhattan penthouse. He went around the room and asked each person for his damage assessment. Priebus bluntly told Trump he could either drop out immediately or lose in a historic landslide. According to someone who was present, Priebus added that Pence and Rice were “ready to step in.” (An aide to the vice president denied that Pence sent Trump a letter and that he ever talked with the RNC about becoming the nominee. Priebus did not respond to requests for comment.)

The furtive plotting, several sources told me, was not just an act of political opportunism for Pence. He was genuinely shocked by the Access Hollywood tape. In the short time they’d known each other, Trump had made an effort to convince Pence that—beneath all the made-for-TV bluster and bravado—he was a good-hearted man with faith in God. On the night of the vice-presidential debate, for example, Trump had left a voicemail letting Pence know that he’d just said a prayer for him. The couple was appalled by the video, however. Karen in particular was “disgusted,” says a former campaign aide. “She finds him reprehensible—just totally vile.”

Yet Pence might also have thought he glimpsed something divine in that moment of political upheaval—a parting of the seas, God’s hand reaching down to make his will known. Marc Short told me that in moments of need, Pence turns to a favorite passage in Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Short said, “Mike believes strongly in the sovereignty of God, and knowing that the Lord has a plan for him.”

Whatever God had planned for Mike Pence, however, it was not to make him the Republican nominee that weekend. Trump proved defiant in the face of pressure from party leaders. “They thought they were going to be able to get him to drop out before the second debate,” said a former campaign aide. “Little did they know, he has no shame.” Indeed, two days after the tape was released, Trump showed up in St. Louis for the debate with a group of Bill Clinton accusers in tow, ranting about how Hillary’s husband had done things to women that were far worse than his own “locker-room talk.” The whole thing was a circus—and it worked. By the time Trump left St. Louis, he had, in pundit-speak, “stopped the bleeding,” and by the next day, Pence was back on the stump. The campaign stabilized. The race tightened. And on the night of November 8, 2016, Pence found himself standing on a ballroom stage in Midtown Manhattan—silently, obediently, servant-leaderly—while Trump delivered the unlikeliest of victory speeches.

Back in Indiana, Pence’s Trump apologia on the campaign trail surprised those who knew him. In political circles, there had been a widespread, bipartisan recognition that Pence was a decent man with a genuine devotion to his faith. But after watching him in 2016, many told me, they believed Pence had sold out.

Scott Pelath, the Democratic minority leader in the Indiana House of Representatives, said that watching Pence vouch for Trump made him sad. “Ah, Mike,” he sighed. “Ambition got the best of him.” It’s an impression that even some of Pence’s oldest friends and allies privately share. As one former adviser marveled, “The number of compromises he made to get this job, when you think about it, is pretty staggering.”

Of course, Pence is far from the only conservative Christian to be accused of having sold his soul. Trump’s early evangelical supporters were a motley crew of televangelists and prosperity preachers, and they have been rewarded with outsize influence in the White House. Pastor Ralph Drollinger, for example, caught Trump’s attention in December 2015, when he said in a radio interview, “America’s in such desperate straits—especially economically—that if we don’t have almost a benevolent dictator to turn things around, I just don’t think it’s gonna happen through our governance system.” Now Drollinger runs a weekly Bible study in the West Wing.

But the president has also enjoyed overwhelming support from rank-and-file conservative Christians. He won an astonishing 81 percent of white evangelicals’ votes, more than any Republican presidential candidate on record. And while his national approval rating hovers below 40 percent, poll after poll finds his approval rating among white evangelicals in the high 60s. The fact that such an ungodly president could retain a firm grip on the religious right has been the source of much soul-searching—and theological debate—within the movement.

On one side, there are those who argue that good Christians are obligated to support any leader, no matter how personally wicked he may be, who stands up for religious freedom and fights sinful practices such as abortion. Richard Land told me that those who withhold their support from Trump because they’re uncomfortable with his moral failings will “become morally accountable for letting the greater evil prevail.”

On the other side of the debate is a smaller group that believes the Christians allying themselves with Trump are putting the entire evangelical movement at risk. Russell Moore, of the Southern Baptist Convention, has made this case forcefully. In a New York Times op-ed in September 2015, Moore wrote that for evangelicals to embrace Trump “would mean that we’ve decided to join the other side of the culture war, that image and celebrity and money and power and social Darwinist ‘winning’ trump the conservation of moral principles and a just society.”

Moore and others worry that conservative Christians’ support for Trump has already begun to warp their ideals. Consider just one data point: In 2011, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” By 2016, that number had risen to 72 percent. “This is really a sea change in evangelical ethics,” Robert P. Jones, the head of the institute and the author of The End of White Christian America, told me. “They have moved to an ends-justifies-the means style of politics that would have been unimaginable before this last campaign.”

But even as the debate rages on, there is one thing virtually all conservative Christians seem to agree on: Mike Pence. “He’s an incredibly popular figure,” Moore told me. “Evangelicals who disagree about all sorts of things still respect Mike Pence. Regardless of how they voted or what they think about Trump, they feel a sense of identification with him, and trust in him.”

Some prominent evangelicals have gone even further to describe Pence’s role—reverently invoking biblical heroes who aligned themselves with flawed worldly leaders to do God’s will. One pastor compared Pence to Mordechai, who ascended to the right hand of a Persian king known for throwing lavish parties and discarding his wife after she refused to appear naked in front of his friends. Pence has also drawn comparisons to Daniel—who served a procession of godless rulers—and to Joseph of Egypt, the valiant servant of God who won the favor of an impetuous pharaoh known for throwing servants in prison when they offended him.

Pastor Mark Burns—a South Carolina televangelist who was among the first to sign on as a faith adviser to Trump—told me Pence’s role in the administration is like that of Jesus, who once miraculously calmed a storm that was threatening to sink the boat on which he was traveling with his disciples. (Burns, who stressed that he was not equating Pence with the Savior, said Trump is represented in this analogy by one of Jesus’s more “foulmouthed” apostles.) “Mike Pence is there praying over the White House every day,” Burns said. And in this tempestuous political climate, the success of Trump’s presidency may depend on those intercessions. “It takes somebody who knows when you’re headed toward a storm to be there praying for you.”

The religious right began reaping the rewards of Trump’s victory almost immediately, when the president-elect put Pence in charge of the transition. Given wide latitude on staffing decisions, Pence promptly set about filling the federal government with like-minded allies. Of the 15 Cabinet secretaries Trump picked at the start of his presidency, eight were evangelicals. It was, gushed Ted Cruz, “the most conservative Cabinet in decades.” Pence also reportedly played a key role in getting Neil Gorsuch nominated to the Supreme Court.

Pence understood the price of his influence. To keep Trump’s ear required frequent public performances of loyalty and submission—and Pence made certain his inner circle knew that enduring such indignities was part of the job. Once, while interviewing a prospective adviser during the transition, Pence cleared the room so they could speak privately. “Look, I’m in a difficult position here,” Pence said, according to someone familiar with the meeting. “I’m going to have to 100 percent defend everything the president says. Is that something you’re going to be able to do if you’re on my staff?” (An aide to Pence denied this account.)

Trump does not always reciprocate this respect. Around the White House, he has been known to make fun of Pence for his religiosity. As Mayer reported in The New Yorker, he has greeted guests who recently met with Pence by asking, “Did Mike make you pray?” During a conversation with a legal scholar about gay rights, Trump gestured toward his vice president and joked, “Don’t ask that guy—he wants to hang them all!”

When I asked Marc Short, who now serves as the White House director of legislative affairs, about these exchanges, he dismissed them as good-natured razzing between friends. “I think it’s fun for him to tease Mike,” Short told me, “but at the same time, the president respects him.” Not everyone is so sure. When it was reported last January that the Pences would be moving some of their family pets—which include two cats, a rabbit, and a snake—into the Naval Observatory, Trump ridiculed the menagerie to his secretary, according to a longtime adviser. “He was embarrassed by it; he thought it was so low class,” says the adviser. “He thinks the Pences are yokels.”

Pence’s forbearance hasn’t always yielded concrete policy victories for the Christian right, a fact that was highlighted during a skirmish over religious freedom early in the Trump administration. Social conservatives had been lobbying the president to issue a sweeping executive order aimed at carving out protections for religious organizations and individuals opposed to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and transgender rights. The proposed order was fairly radical, but proponents argued that it would strike a crucial blow against the militant secularists trying to drive the faithful out of the public square. At first, Pence’s office reportedly worked to build support for the executive order inside the White House—but the effort was torpedoed when a draft was leaked to The Nation magazine, which warned that signing it would “legalize discrimination.” There proceeded a noisy backlash from the left, and hasty backpedaling by the White House. By the time Trump got around to signing the order, several months later, it was dramatically watered down.

Conservatives blamed Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner for gutting the order. But according to one Trump associate with knowledge of the debate, Pence barely put up a fight. The surrender infuriated Steve Bannon, who was then serving as the chief White House strategist. “Bannon wanted to fight for it,” says the Trump associate, “and he was really unimpressed that Pence wouldn’t do anything.” But perhaps Pence was playing the long game—weighing the risks of taking on Trump’s kids, and deciding to stand down in the interest of preserving his relationship with the president. Pence, after all, had his future to think about.

In an embattled White House, the question of the vice president’s ambition for higher office is radioactive. When The New York Times reported last summer that Pence appeared to be laying the groundwork for a 2020 presidential bid, he denied the “disgraceful and offensive” story with theatrical force. But Pence has shown that his next move is never far from his mind—and he’s hardly the only one weighing the possibilities. One senior GOP Senate aide told me that pundits miss the point when they speculate about what kind of scandal it would take for the president to face a serious defection from lawmakers of his own party. “It’s not a matter of when Republicans are ready to turn on Trump,” the aide said. “It’s about when they decide they’re ready for President Pence.”

What would a Pence presidency look like? To a conservative evangelical, it could mean a glorious return to the Christian values upon which America was founded. To a secular liberal, it might look more like a descent into the dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale. Already, in some quarters on the left, it has become fashionable to fret that Pence’s fundamentalist faith and comparative political savvy would make him an even more “dangerous” president than Trump. He has been branded a “theocrat” and a “Christian supremacist.”

There is, of course, nothing inherently scary or disqualifying about an elected leader who seeks wisdom in scripture and solace in prayer. What critics should worry about is not that Pence believes in God, but that he seems so certain God believes in him. What happens when manifest destiny replaces humility, and the line between faith and hubris blurs? What unseemly compromises get made? What means become tolerable in pursuit of an end?

On the night of May 3, 2017, members of the president’s evangelical advisory board arrived for a private dinner at the White House. They were scheduled to appear the next day in the Rose Garden to cheer Trump on as he signed an executive order most of them considered a disappointment. Instead of creating the far-reaching protections for believers that they had been hoping for, Trump’s order merely made it easier for pastors to voice political opinions from the pulpit—a conspicuously self-serving take on religious freedom. Some social conservatives were already voicing their discontent. Ryan Anderson, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, called the order “woefully inadequate”; David French, a writer for National Review, dismissed it as a “sop to the gullible.”

But inside the West Wing, the president’s faith advisers were getting the full Trump experience. After dining on shrimp scampi and braised short ribs in the Blue Room, they were treated to a tour of the private residence. Trump led them onto the Truman Balcony, and waved off Secret Service agents who tried to stop them from taking pictures. The faith leaders pulled out their smartphones and snapped selfies, intoxicated by the VIP treatment. “Mr. President,” Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, said at one point, “we’re going to be your most loyal friends. We’re going to be your enthusiastic supporters. And we thank God every day that you’re the president of the United States.”

For many of the attendees, though, the most memorable moment came when Pence stood to speak. “I’ve been with [Trump] alone in the room when the decisions are made. He and I have prayed together,” Pence said. “This is somebody who shares our views, shares our values, shares our beliefs.” Pence didn’t waste time touting his own credentials. With this crowd, he didn’t need to. Instead, as always, he lavished praise on the president.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby 82_28 » Tue Dec 05, 2017 11:27 pm

Trump thought it was ‘low class’ for Pence to bring pets to VP residence: report

An adviser to President Trump reportedly said Trump was “embarrassed” by the Pence family’s desire to bring their pets with them to Washington, D.C.

The adviser told The Atlantic Trump told his secretary that he thought it was “low class” for the Pences to bring their pets to the Naval Observatory.

“He was embarrassed by it, he thought it was so low class,” the adviser said, according to the publication. “He thinks the Pences are yokels.”

At the time, the Pences had two cats, a rabbit named Marlon Bundo and a snake. After one of the cats died in June, the family adopted a new puppy and a kitten.

Trump is the first president in 150 years to not have a pet in the White House, according to the New York Post.

Trump has reportedly mocked Pence throughout his presidency over the vice president's far-right views on abortion and LGBTQ rights.

The president once said that Pence “wants to hang” all gay people, The New Yorker reported in October.


http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... pets-to-vp
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 06, 2017 12:32 am

As head of the transition team, he was informed by Rep. Elijah Cumming’s November 2016 letter about Flynn’s lobbying on behalf of Turkey. Flynn didn’t lie to him about that, because Pence already knew.

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Pence allies worried he'll be called to answer questions from Mueller: report
BY JACQUELINE THOMSEN - 12/05/17 07:06 PM EST 752

Vice President Pence’s aides are anxious that Pence will be summoned for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, CNN reported Tuesday.

Those close to Pence’s office told CNN that since former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and Pence, it will open the door for Mueller to question Pence.

Pence knew that Flynn had contacted Russia but didn’t know the two had discussed Russian sanctions, transition officials told the network. Pence was leading the Trump transition when Flynn called then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to discuss sanctions implemented against Russia by the U.S.
A person close to Pence told CNN that his aides are “preparing” to be called for an interview with Mueller.

"Chairing the transition would make it possible regardless of who it was,” the person said.

Pence’s office denied that they are preparing for a possible interview with Mueller.

"Nothing could be further from the truth. The vice president is focused on passing the largest tax cut in American history," Pence spokeswoman Alyssa Farah told CNN.

Court documents revealed that several other top Trump transition officials knew of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak, according to CNN. And White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly told Trump that he believed Flynn had lied to Pence and the FBI in January, 18 days before Flynn was fired.

Flynn pleaded guilty last week to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials. He is cooperating with Mueller’s probe into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... om-mueller


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Vice President Pence Has Cause to Support Trump’s Kremlin-Friendly Agenda
Posted by Bill Conroy - May 29, 2017 at 8:28 pm
Two of his biggest Indiana corporate backers have significant business interests in Russia
The ongoing congressional and FBI investigations into the Trump administration’s entangling alliances with the Kremlin have so far left Vice President Mike Pence on the sidelines.
Pence claims to be clueless about key moments in the still-unfolding scandal.
When President Donald Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, spoke clandestinely with Kremlin officials this past December about the status of US sanctions against that nation, Pence defended him initially — but claimed later that Flynn lied to him about the content of the conversations.
Despite the fact the Trump administration was informed by a member of Congress in November of last year that Flynn was working as a paid agent of the Turkish government while advising Trump on national security matters, Pence insists he only learned of Flynn’s Turkish lobbying pact through the media this past March.
Pence’s claimed ignorance of these events, until they became public via the media, is even more surprising in light of the fact he was responsible as head of Trump’s transition team for overseeing the vetting process for White House appointees like Flynn.
There is another side to Pence and his political agenda, however, that betrays the “Dudley Do-Right” image he has cultivated with respect to his knowledge of Trump’s Kremlin lemon.
In fact, one of Pence’s main corporate backers, Eli Lilly & Co., was charged by U.S. officials with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in 2012 in relation to its business practices in Russia. That same year, Eli Lilly was a leading contributor to Pence’s bid to become governor of Indiana, a race he won by only 3 percentage points against his Democratic challenger.
While serving as a US congressman from 2001-2013, and thereafter as governor of Indiana until this past January, when he took on the vice president’s job, Pence also served the interests of another Indiana-based corporation that has deep business roots in Russia — Cummins Inc.
These two Indiana-based Fortune 500 companies with major business interests in Russia — diesel-engine manufacturer Cummins and drug-maker and distributor Eli Lilly — ranked as the No. 2 and No. 3 donors, respectively, to Pence’s federal campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The leading donor, at $90,762, was the arch-conservative Club for Growth and its political action committee (PAC).
The Center for Responsive Politics, through its blog and via data maintained by its OpenSecrets.org campaign-donation tracking service, reported the following about Cummins’ and Eli Lilly’s PAC and employee donations to Pence’s six congressional campaigns:
Cummins Inc, an engine manufacturer, and Eli Lilly & Co, a pharmaceutical company, round out Pence’s top three campaign contributors. Employees and PACs of these Indiana-based corporations gave $78,500 and $64,350, respectively.
Although the donations made to Vice President Pence’s campaign coffers by Cummins and Eli Lilly may not be huge sums in the scheme of today’s multimillion-dollar political campaigns, they do represent a finger on the scale in terms of the interests of those corporations. The two industry giants generate millions of dollars annually in taxes and multiple billions of dollars annually in sales revenue — as well as account for a significant block of jobs, employee votes and associated corporate political power in Pence’s home state of Indiana.
In addition, Pence will be looking for donations from corporations in the future, including Cummins and Eli Lilly, as evidenced by the political action committee, or PAC, (called the Great America Committee) that he recently set up to raise money for his future political aspirations.
The Russian Front
Eli Lilly has had a business presence in Russia for a quarter century and sells numerous medications in the country. In 2014, it announced a contract with the Russia-based pharma R-Pharm to begin local production of several Eli Lilly insulin products. An industry newsletters targeting pharma executives, called The Pharma Letter, reported that Eli Lilly’s sales in Russia in 2013 totaled $130 million, while the potential market for insulin products alone in Russia topped $300 million as of the same year.
The Russian market was deemed valuable enough to Eli Lilly’s corporate interests that the company took some shortcuts to secure market share in the country that led to charges being filed against the Indiana drug maker in 2012 by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The SEC alleged that Eli Lilly had violated the anti-bribery provisions of FCPA:.
“The SEC alleges that the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company’s subsidiary in Russia used offshore ‘marketing agreements’ to pay millions of dollars to third parties chosen by [Russian] government customers or distributors, despite knowing little or nothing about the third parties beyond their offshore address and bank account information,” the SEC alleged. “These offshore entities rarely provided any services and in some instances were used to funnel money to [Russian] government officials in order to obtain business for the subsidiary.”
Ultimately, Eli Lilly agreed to settle the bribery case brought by the SEC — which also accused the company of FCPA violations in Brazil, China and Poland. As part of that court settlement, Eli Lilly did not admit or deny the charges, but did agree to pay $29 million in fines and restitution.
In addition to being a leading contributor to Pence’s congressional and gubernatorial campaigns, Eli Lilly also donated $15,000 to an economic development fund used by Pence “to travel overseas, rent luxury sports suites, lobby lawmakers and fly to Iowa ahead of its first-in-the-nation presidential nominating contest,” according to an investigation by the Indianapolis Star. One of the junkets financed by the so-called economic development fund was a trip to China, where Pence visited a Cummins production center in Beijing.
Eli Lilly’s media spokesperson did not reply to requests for comment for this story.
Pence’s other major corporate backer, engine-maker Cummins, also has a deep history in Russia. Its operations in the country date back to the 1970s, when its engines were installed in mining trucks imported into the market. Cummins opened a regional office in Moscow in 1985 and in 2006 inked a joint venture to produce engines for Russia’s major truck manufacturer, KAMAZ — a pact that is still in place. Cummins, according to a website for its Russian operations, was authorized by the Russian government as of 2013 to “raise its local sales” quota in the country to $700 million — which provides some insight into the size of its market in Kremlin land.
Jon Mills, media spokesman for Cummins, stressed that the company has “no concern about our perception” with respect to donations made to Pence’s political campaigns over the years or because of the fact Vice President Pence’s brother is an executive at Cummins.
“We have a highly transparent and ethical culture. We take great pride in the work we do, how we do it and we are committed to providing high-quality jobs and making our communities stronger across the world,” Mills said in an email sent to Narco News. “
Mills’ email response continues:
Contributions from the Cummins Political Action Committee to then [U.S.] Representative Pence over the years are in line with other candidates in states where we have significant operations.
And, our contributions were substantially less than the federal-election contribution limits. We do not give corporate money to any candidates for political office. [The contributions made by Cummins, as reported by The Center for Responsive Politics, include donations from Cummins employees, their family members and the company’s PAC.]
… Ed Pence [Vice President Pence’s brother] has never lobbied his brother on behalf of Cummins. Ed Pence has been with Cummins for more than 30 years, pre-dating Mike Pence’s political career. Ed Pence has always been a great employee of Cummins and lives our values….”
One federal law enforcer told Narco News, with respect to Pence’s brother and his executive role at Cummins, that any investigation of the Trump administration’s potential collusion with the Kremlin should take note of “and document” the fact that Vice President Pence has a brother who is an executive at Cummins, which is a company that does business in Russia.
That’s not to say Pence’s brother has done anything wrong, but he would be considered a potential target of a foreign intelligence service looking to compromise the vice president, the law enforcer said.
Lobbying Pond
Cummins’ potential perception issues on the Russian front are not limited to its political contributions and family connections to the White House.
President Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp in Washington, and he didn't. So now that swamp, and the lobbyists and special interests that exist in its mire, are starting to suck the life out of his administration.

One lobbying firm, in particular, which has not been on the public radar, merits a closer look in the context of Trump's unfulfilled promises. That lobbying firm also happens to have been paid some $800,000 in fees over the past five years by Cummins.
The lobbying firm’s chairman is Charles Black, a past business partner of Paul Manafort, who is a longtime Trump advisor and his former campaign chairman. Black’s lobbying firm, Prime Policy Group (PPG), also did work for the government of Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 when its president was Kremlin puppet Victor Yanukovych. Black’s former business partner, Manafort, helped to get Yanukovych elected as president and served as a political consultant to Yanukovych at the same time PPG was representing his Russian-aligned government.
Black and Manafort were partners in a lobbying firm called Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (BMSK) from 1982 until 1996 — when the firm was sold. In the ensuring years, the partners went their own ways. Former BMSK partners Manafort and Roger Stone, both former Trump advisors, are now in the scope of the various investigations into the Trump administration’s ties to the Kremlin, according to media reports, with the Senate Intelligence Committee recently requesting documents from both of them.
The tangled web of connections doesn’t stop there. PPG also inked a contract this past September to do work for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). The TRNC is occupied by Turkish troops and closely allied with the Turkish government — which, through a subcontractor, also employed the Flynn Intel Group this past August.
Trump’s former national security advisor, Flynn, the founder of the Flynn Intel Group, is now the target of an FBI investigation related to his failure to properly disclose his paid work for both the Russian and Turkish governments. In fact, that misstep cost retired Lt. Gen. Flynn his White House national security post and it, and the continuing cover-up, could well wind up costing him his freedom as well.
All of these strings connect to a common ball of yarn. They all lead back to lobbying activities on the part of individuals who have, in the past, represented some of the most oppressive strongmen and governments in the world. Now, many of these same individuals (Flynn, Manafort and Stone) are in the legal fire pit because of their political work for the Trump administration — and potentially for its counterpart in Moscow.
Black, whose lobbying firm has seemingly fished for business in the same pond as Flynn, Manafort and Stone over the years, is not now in the legal spotlight with his former business partners, however.
When contacted by Narco News, Black said neither he or anyone else at PPG have been contacted by the FBI or congressional investigators looking into the Trump administration’s alleged Kremlin ties. Black also said no one at PPG played any role in suggesting potential vice presidential candidates to the Trump administration.
“Paul Manafort left our firm in 1996, and neither the firm, nor I, have done any business at all with him since then,” Black said in an email response to Narco News.
Still, Black and the lobbying firm he chairs, PPG, have definitely dealt with some of the same players — Ukrainian and Turkish government interests — that are at the root of Manafort’s and Flynn’s woes. But there are some lines not to be crossed, even in the morally elastic world of lobbying, and Black insists PPG has not crossed those lines.
Cummins also insists its relationship with PPG is on the up and up, according to its media spokesperson, Mills:
We have used Prime Policy [PPG] as a consultant for many years primarily for support on policy matters in the United States like tax policy and emission regulations, for example. They do not lobby foreign governments on behalf of Cummins.
No one has ever had contact with Paul Manafort. He has never serviced our contract at Prime Policy Group. We are not aware of any consulting arrangement he has with Prime Policy. And no one at Cummins was involved in suggesting or vetting VP [vice presidential] candidates for the Trump campaign, nor were we ever involved in conversations with the Trump campaign about VP candidates.
Country Bumpkin?
Pence, while governor of Indiana, flew to China to visit and tout a Cummins factory there. He has a brother who is an executive at the company. And Pence received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from Cummins’ PAC and employees during his career as a congressman.
In addition, Cummins, which has major operations in Russia, is represented by a lobbying firm, PPG, whose chairman has a history of doing consulting for some of the same oppressive regimes represented in the past by longtime Trump insider Manafort.
Likewise, Eli Lilly, a corporate giant with significant operations in Russia and a history of allegedly skirting U.S. bribery laws to expand sales there, supported Pence in both his congressional and gubernatorial campaigns and contributed money to Pence’s economic-development slush fund.
With those facts on the table, it seems a stretch to believe Pence — a former member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — is just a country-bumpkin politician who was completely clueless about Flynn’s entangling foreign alliances, or lacked the curiosity to examine closely all the clues. The clues included a notice sent this past January by Flynn’s attorney informing Trump’s transition team that Flynn was being investigated by the FBI as well as a letter addressed to Pence from U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings exposing Flynn’s lobbying transgressions.
From Cummings Nov. 18, 2016, letter:
Dear Vice President-Elect Pence:
I am writing to raise questions about the apparent conflicts of interest of the Vice Chairman of the Presidential Transition Team, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who reportedly has been selected by the President-elect [Trump] to be his national security advisor.
Recent news reports have revealed that Lt. Gen. Flynn was receiving classified briefings during the presidential campaign while his consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, Inc., was being paid to lobby the U.S. Government on behalf of a foreign government’s interests.
Some media outlets, including CBS News and the Daily Beast, have reported that behind the scenes Manafort played a key role in convincing Trump to pick Pence as his vice presidential running mate. Is it possible that Manafort took an interest in Pence, in part, because he saw him as a Moscow-friendly ally, if push came to shove?
The corporate donations by Cummins and Eli Lilly to Pence’s political war chest were not illegal of course, but they are a clear indication that Pence has a history with these corporations — one of which, Cummins, is based in Pence’s home town of Columbus, Indiana. As both a congressman and governor, Pence represented their corporate interests as major players in the Indiana economy.
Cummins’ and Ely Lilly’s corporate interests also extend deep into the Russian economy, where both companies have been active for decades and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales annually. “As Cummins grows and thrives in these markets [such as Russia and China], more high-wage jobs in engineering and R&D are created at home,” Pence said during his 2015 visit to Cummins’ engine plant in China.
Given his home state’s reliance on these two huge employers and their past financial support of his political career, it can’t be ruled out that Pence is willing to carry some water for Trump on the Russian front, if that path dovetails with Cummins’ and Eli Lilly’s investment interests in Russia’s economy. The money trail certainly seems to lead in that direction, despite Pence’s reliance to date on pleading ignorance as a defense.
Stay tuned……
https://narcosphere.narconews.com/noteb ... dly-agenda
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 21, 2019 11:27 am

Graham got to visit head office with Pence's blessing?


Pence is ready to take over.

That's why Manafort picked him. ....where is Paulie?......in prison for the rest of his life!

They knew Trump would go down, because he's an idiot. :shrug:

Why was Franklin Graham schmoozing with a sanctioned Russian official this month?

Graham described his meeting with one sanctioned Russian official as an "honor"—and claimed Mike Pence signed off on it.

CASEY MICHEL
MAR 20, 2019, 5:24 PM

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Why did Franklin Graham (left) travel to Russia this month to meet with Vyacheslav Volodin (right), a Russian official sanctioned by the U.S.? CREDIT: INSTAGRAM
WHY DID FRANKLIN GRAHAM (LEFT) TRAVEL TO RUSSIA THIS MONTH TO MEET WITH VYACHESLAV VOLODIN (RIGHT), A RUSSIAN OFFICIAL SANCTIONED BY THE U.S.? CREDIT: INSTAGRAM

Franklin Graham, America’s most prominent evangelical leader, says Vice President Mike Pence signed off on his trip to Russia earlier this month. While there, Graham met with sanctioned Kremlin officials — even as U.S. investigations ramped up into Moscow’s election interference efforts. One official Russian governmental social media account touted the meeting as a way to “[intensify] contacts between the State Duma and the U.S. Congress.”

In an interview with RIA Novosti, a major Russian state-run outlet, Graham said he called Pence directly to tell him of the trip. “He was very happy to hear the news,” Graham said. “And he admitted that he fully supported my decision.”

Neither Pence’s office nor the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association responded to ThinkProgress’s requests for comment.

According to interviews in Russian media and photos on his own social media accounts, Graham, currently the chair of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, traveled to Moscow earlier this month to meet with a number of prominent Russian figures. Most notably, Graham had a sit-down meeting with Russian Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who is close to President Vladimir Putin and who has been sanctioned by the U.S. since 2014 for his role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.


Per a captioned photo re-posted from the Duma Instagram account to Graham’s own Instagram account, the meeting with Volodin focused “on the current state of U.S.-Russia relations,” including “the possibility of intensifying contacts between the State Duma and the U.S. Congress.”

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Volodin (left) and Graham (right) sat down to discuss, among other things, how to strengthen ties between American and Russian legislators. CREDIT: INSTAGRAM
VOLODIN (LEFT) AND GRAHAM (RIGHT) SAT DOWN TO DISCUSS, AMONG OTHER THINGS, HOW TO STRENGTHEN TIES BETWEEN AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN LEGISLATORS. CREDIT: INSTAGRAM
Graham added in a separate post that it was an “honor” to meet Volodin, whom Graham described as “a very gracious man.” That meeting was also promoted on the official Instagram account of the Russian Duma.

Graham also posed in front of a map of Russia and next to a portrait of Putin.




While in Russia, Graham also met with a number of Russian religious figures. One of those figures included including Patriarch Kirill, allegedly a former KGB agent.

On Twitter, Graham described the meetings with Russian officials as a “blessing.”

Franklin Graham

Verified account

@Franklin_Graham
Follow Follow @Franklin_Graham
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I’ve been in Moscow this week & had the privilege of meeting w/Patriarch Kirill of Moscow & All Russia. It was also a blessing to meet w/evangelical leaders & other officials while there. Pray for them & for more opportunities to share the truth, hope, & life found only in Jesus.
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Graham directly addressed the tensions between the Kremlin and Washington in his first post from Russia, writing, “#Collusion? I’m in Russia right now — Moscow to be exact — and I’m meeting with the Russian churches on how we can share with more young people about faith in Jesus Christ! That’s not ‘collusion,’ but it is collaboration for the sake of souls. #GoodNews”

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Graham, the son of arch-evangelical Billy Graham, is arguably America’s most prominent evangelical figure, and often defends President Donald Trump against concerns that the thrice-married president isn’t sufficiently Christian.

Partners in Moscow
Though American evangelicals have been building ties with Russia for years — Graham even met with Putin himself, in 2015 — no one of Graham’s stature in the evangelical community has ever crossed American sanctions to meet face-to-face with a Russian official sanctioned by the U.S. The White House has personally identified Volodin as one of the key figures responsible for Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, the first forced annexation in Europe since World War II — a fact that seemed to matter little to Graham.


Far-right Christian groups have other ties to sanctioned Russians: Later this month the U.S.-based World Congress of Families (WCF) — a Christian fundamentalist group that has previously been linked to sanctioned Russian oligarchs like Vladimir Yakunin and Konstantin Malofeev — will be hosting its annual conference in Italy. Just last year, the WCF hosted sanctioned Russian official Elena Mizulina as one of its featured speakers at its 2018 conference. The WCF’s Russian representative is also Alexey Komov, who works directly for Malofeev.

John Eastman, Jim Garlow, and Sean O'Hare are among the Americans slated to speak at next month's World Congress of Families conference in Verona, Italy. PHOTO CREDIT: GETTY, ILLUSTRATION BY DIANA OFOSU
These prominent Americans are speaking at far-right Russia conference linked to sanctioned oligarchs
Graham himself has a track record of praising the Kremlin, such as when he lauded Putin for “protecting Russian young people” via Moscow’s virulently anti-LGBTQ policies. He has previously called for the U.S. to “ally” with Russia in the “fight against Islamic terrorism,” and, in 2015, traveled to Russia to complain about former President Barack Obama “promot[ing] atheism.”

During that 2015 trip, Graham met directly with Putin. It was around the same time that Russia began launching its social media interference operations, that Russian agent Maria Butina began infiltrating the highest ranks of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and shortly before Russian hackers stole Democratic emails that were then funneled to Wikileaks for public dissemination.




Franklin Graham

Verified account

@Franklin_Graham
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I was in Russia in 2015 and met with President Vladimir @PutinRF_Eng.

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As Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar noted in All the Kremlin’s Men, his 2016 book examining Putin’s inner circle, Volodin — described as the Kremlin’s “gray cardinal” — has also played a seminal role in attempting to unwind Washington’s Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned Russian officials responsible for the death of Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky. Those sanctions, according to Zygar, left Volodin “livid.” Volodin helped craft the Russian response, which included specifically banning U.S. citizens from adopting Russian children.


The participants in the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting — including Donald Trump, Jr., as well as Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort — used Russian adoptions and the Magnitsky Act as pretext for that face-to-face meeting.

But Magnitsky-related sanctions aren’t the only pieces of American legislation in which Volodin has taken a special interest. In 2014, America targeted Volodin with sanctions for his role in Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Per the Treasury Department, “Putin’s decision to move into Crimea is believed to have been based on consultations with his closest advisors, including Volodin.”

Volodin, bending Putin’s ear, has also played an outsized role in crafting the Kremlin’s hard-right turn following Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. From pushing to target civil society groups as “foreign agents” to defending the rollback of protections for victims of domestic violence, Volodin has grown his influence over Russian domestic policy as much as he’s cultivated a hardline, anti-democratic view. Russian anticorruption activists like Alexey Navalny have accused Volodin of massive graft along the way.

None of this information about Volodin — including even American sanctions — seemed to give Graham pause. As Graham wrote on Instagram, “Remember to keep [Volodin] in your prayers.”


https://thinkprogress.org/why-was-frank ... f1aa1af13/


I wonder if Pence told him how to pray away the gay?

657C14BB-8B4E-4416-B4A6-01AB5E2C91C9.jpeg



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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Mike Pence is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 03, 2019 6:04 pm

Pence: Sure I Was Part of the Ukraine Scandal, but I Didn’t Know It Was Wrong!
By Bess LevinOctober 3, 2019
The V.P. insists he had no idea the Ukraine plot he was involved in was anything less than kosher.

Mike Pence Sure I Was Part of the Ukraine Scandal but I Didnt Know It Was Wrong
Chip Somodevilla
If Donald Trump were to be impeached and removed from office, Vice President Mike Pence would obviously take over the Oval Office gig. That notion is alarming for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that he himself allegedly played a key role in the plot to pressure Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden. Though, if you ask Pence, he had no idea he was doing anything wrong—none whatsoever!

New reporting from the Washington Post lays out Pence’s seemingly extensive involvement in the president’s pressure campaign. For starters, he was supposed to attend Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in May, when the new leader was hoping to receive support from Washington. But Trump “instructed Pence not to attend,” perhaps knowing it would put Zelensky in a weak position wherein he might be more open to doing certain “favors.” Later, a top Pence adviser was on the infamous July 25 phone call in which the president tied his demand for a Biden probe to nearly $400 million in military aid, the transcript for which “the vice president should have had access to…within hours.” And if he failed to read it then? Detailed notes of the call would likely have been included in his July 26 briefing book, not to mention the briefing materials he was given in preparation for a September 1 trip to Warsaw to meet with Zelensky, when this happened:

In his meeting with Zelensky, Pence conveyed the news that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Ukraine was not going to be released amid concerns about the country’s lagging efforts to combat corruption…. At that time—following Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenksy—the Ukrainians probably understood action on corruption to include the investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden…former officials said that Pence’s emphasis on corruption probably would have been interpreted by Zelensky as “code” for that issue, whether the vice president intended it or not.

The vice president would very much like to stress that he did not intend to speak in code and knew nothing about Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine whatsoever. Officials close to Pence told the Post that “he was unaware of Trump’s efforts to press Zelensky for damaging information about Biden and his son,” and that even though such efforts were laid out plain as day in the briefing book he undoubtedly received, “he traveled to Warsaw for a meeting with Zelensky on September 1 probably without having read—or at least fully registered—the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with the leader of Ukraine.” (Amusingly, at least one Pence aide could not abide the notion that his boss wouldn’t have read or registered the significance of the call, and “disputed the notion that the vice president was poorly prepared for his meeting with Zelensky,” which kind of blows a hole in the whole “he had no idea what was happening!” defense.)

But sure, say Pence somehow managed to avoid familiarizing himself with the July 25 call—either by reading it himself or chatting with retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, his aide who listened in at the time. Did he also miss all the other glaring red flags?

Pence’s activities occurred amid several indications of the president’s hidden agenda. Among them were the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to [Ukraine]; the visible efforts by the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to insert himself in the U.S.–Ukraine relationship; as well as alarms being raised inside the White House even before the emergence of an extraordinary whistleblower complaint about Trump’s conduct.

That sure seems like a lot to not notice! Though, as New York Magazine points out, it sure sounds like Pence knew exactly what he was doing, given that he couldn’t even tell a reporter, unequivocally, that the $400 million in aid wasn’t being held up unless Zelensky looked into the Bidens:

Q: Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. I wanted to ask you about your meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President and for an update on Ukrainian security aid money. Specifically, number one, did you discuss Joe Biden at all during that meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President? And number two, can you assure Ukraine that the hold-up of that money has absolutely nothing to do with efforts, including by Rudy Giuliani, to try to dig up dirt on the Biden family?

PENCE: Well, on the first question, the answer is no. But we—with President Zelensky yesterday, we discussed—we discussed America’s support for Ukraine and the upcoming decision the President will make on the latest tranche of financial support in great detail. The President asked me to meet with President Zelensky and to talk about the progress that he’s making on a broad range of areas. And we did that.

As President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption. And, fortunately, President Zelensky was elected decisively on an anti-corruption message…. I mean, to invest additional taxpayer money in Ukraine, the President wants to be assured that those resources are truly making their way to the kind of investments that will contribute to security and stability in Ukraine. And that’s an expectation the American people have and the President has expressed very clearly.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10 ... ne-scandal



IRS whistleblower said to report Treasury political appointee might have tried to interfere in audit of Trump or Pence
Josh Dawsey
An Internal Revenue Service official has filed a whistleblower complaint reporting that he was told at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president or vice president’s tax returns, according to multiple people familiar with the document.

Trump administration officials dismissed the whistleblower’s complaint as flimsy because it is based on conversations with other government officials. But congressional Democrats were alarmed by the complaint, now circulating on Capitol Hill, and flagged it to a federal judge. They are also discussing whether to make it public.

The details of the IRS complaint follow news of a separate, explosive whistleblower complaint filed in August by a member of the intelligence community. That complaint revealed Trump’s request of Ukranian leaders to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a political rival. It has spurred an impeachment probe on Capitol Hill.

The IRS complaint has come amid the escalating legal battle between the Treasury Department and House Democrats over the release of President Trump’s tax returns. Part of that inquiry from Democrats is over how the IRS conducts its annual audit of the president and vice president’s tax returns. That process is supposed to be walled off from political appointees and interference.

That was the focus of the whistleblower complaint. The people briefed on its contents said, for the first time, that the complaint pertained to allegations of interference in the audit process by at least one Treasury Department official. They also said, for the first time, that the complaint revealed that the whistleblower is a career IRS official.

The existence of a whistleblower complaint was revealed in a court filing several months ago, but little about it had become public.

The whistleblower’s account focuses on the integrity of the government’s system for auditing the president and vice president’s tax returns.

President Trump has broken decades of precedent by refusing to publicly release his tax returns. Democrats filed a lawsuit earlier this year demanding the disclosure of those filings, invoking a federal law designed to give Congress access to any tax return.

The IRS complaint has received less attention but has divided government officials.

Two administration officials have described the complaint as hearsay and suggested it was politically motivated, but they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Democrats who have reviewed it regard it as a deeply significant allegation that, if true, suggests that political appointees may have tried to interfere with the government audit process, which was set up to be insulated from political pressures.

Key parts of the complaint remain under wraps in part because of strict privacy laws that prevent the disclosure of any details related to the filing of tax returns.

People who described the complaint spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who received the whistleblower’s complaint in July, said in court filings this summer that the complaint contains credible evidence of “potential ‘inappropriate efforts to influence’ the audit program.” Neal has also said the complaint raises “serious and urgent concerns.”

The whistleblower, a career official at the IRS, confirmed in an interview with The Washington Post this week that he had filed a formal complaint and sent it to the tax committee chairs in both houses of Congress, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), and to the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration on July 29.

The whistleblower would not comment on the substance of the complaint itself but focused on the importance of protecting those who come forward to disclose problems in government.

[Confidential draft IRS memo says tax returns must be given to Congress unless president invokes executive privilege]

Trump has closely guarded any details of his tax returns, refusing to release them during his presidential campaign and throughout his presidency. He has given a variety of reasons for refusing to release the returns, often saying they are under audit and therefore should remain private. Vice President Pence also has not made public any of his recent tax returns.

Neal has not revealed whether the whistleblower complaint is about Trump or Pence, but he said in an August court filing that the allegations “cast doubt” on the Trump administration’s contention that there is no reason for concern that IRS employees could face interference when auditing a president’s tax returns.

It is very unusual for political appointees at Treasury to ask IRS career staff about the status of an individual’s audit, according to legal experts and former IRS officials.

“Nobody at the Treasury Department should be calling to find out the status of anybody’s audit,” said John Koskinen, who served as IRS commissioner under both Trump and President Barack Obama. “For a Treasury official to call a career person — even just for information — seems to me highly inappropriate, even if it’s just checking in on how it’s going.”

The Post has been unable to verify the allegation in the whistleblower’s complaint of improper communication between Treasury and IRS on the tax audit program.

A spokesman for the Treasury Department did not comment on details of the complaint. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin previously told Neal he forwarded the complaint to the inspector general’s office.

A spokesman for Neal refused to share any details about the substance of the complaint, citing taxpayer protection rules. Michael Zona, a spokesman for Grassley, also declined to comment, saying the senator does not discuss such confidential complaints.

James Jackson, a deputy inspector general at the Treasury Department, said in September when asked about the whistleblower complaint at a congressional hearing: “We can’t confirm or deny that we may or may not be doing anything. I can tell you, though, that anytime we get any kind of allegation in this world, in this realm, we investigate it aggressively.”

Jackson added: “We are not aware of any misconduct.”

In his interview with The Post, the whistleblower dismissed the contention of critics that the complaint was uncorroborated.

“That’s what investigations are for,” he said.

He also denied his action was politically motivated.

“Anyone who knows me knows I would not hesitate to do the same, as would most career IRS public servants, regardless of any political preference,” he said. “I take very seriously the duty of career civil servants to act with integrity and perform our duties impartially, even at the risk that someone will make a charge of bias.”

The whistleblower also castigated public officials who he said were making federal employees fearful of reporting wrongdoing. Trump has in recent days said he wants to know the identity of the whistleblower in the Ukraine case.

“I steadfastly refuse to discuss the substance or details of the complaint, but I have some legitimate concerns about reckless statements being made about whistleblowers,” he said. He said such statements “attack the messenger when the focus should be on the facts that were presented. I am concerned also by the relative silence of people who should be repudiating these dangerous attacks in the strongest terms.”

Neal told Bloomberg he is consulting with legal counsel about whether to release the whistleblower complaint.

The chairman has “been almost entirely silent about the whole matter” related to the whistleblower in private meetings of the Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee, according to one lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Legal experts and former government officials expressed alarm at the prospect of interference from political appointees with audits conducted by career IRS staff.

The tax returns of the president and vice president must be kept “at all times” in an orange folder and locked in a secure drawer or cabinet when the appointed IRS examiner is not with the documents, according to the IRS’s manual.

“It’s very important that enforcement matters, including audits, be handled independently by the IRS,” said Mark W. Everson, who served as IRS commissioner under President George W. Bush.

The mandatory audit program refers only to the audit of the president and vice president, said Mark E. Matthews, who was a deputy IRS commissioner under Bush and is now a partner at the firm Caplin & Drysdale. Those audits are viewed only by a small number of senior career IRS staff, Matthews said.

The president’s tax returns have already produced divisions between political appointees in the Treasury Department and officials at the IRS. In May, The Post obtained a 10-page memo written by an attorney in the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel finding the administration had to turn over a president’s returns if requested by Congress, unless the president invokes executive privilege. The Treasury Department has denied Congress’s request for the returns, but the White House has not invoked executive privilege.

In April, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin also revealed department attorneys consulted with the White House general counsel’s office about the potential release of Trump’s tax returns before they were formally requested by House Democrats.

Mnuchin, who said he was not involved in those conversations, said the communication between Treasury and White House attorneys was “informational” and that Treasury officials did not ask the White House for permission about whether to release the returns.

The whistleblower said that Treasury investigators, and presumably the inspector general, were aware of his complaint. “I brought my concerns to my supervisors, who advised me to report the matter to the appropriate people with investigatory authority,” he told The Post.

David Barnes, a spokesman for the Treasury inspector general, declined to comment.

The whistleblower complaint was first disclosed by Neal as part of his lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking six years of the president’s tax returns, which the administration refused to turn over despite a 1924 law explicitly giving Congress the authority to obtain them.

Neal told a federal court this summer that House Democrats had received an unsolicited message from a federal employee “setting forth credible allegations of ‘evidence of possible misconduct’ — specifically, potential ‘inappropriate efforts to influence’ the mandatory audit program.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... story.html


Report: Mike Pence aide monitored Donald Trump's call with Ukraine president
Maureen GroppeUpdated 10:37 a.m. ET Oct. 3, 2019
Unleashing an unusual show of anger, President Donald Trump railed against former Vice President Joe Biden, his son, the media and the World Trade Organization at a joint press conference in the White House East Room with Finland's president. (Oct. 2) AP, AP

WASHINGTON – An aide to Vice President Mike Pence listened in on the phone call by the president that sparked an impeachment inquiry, the Washington Post reported in an article Wednesday that provides new details on Pence's involvement in the controversy.

The report said President Donald Trump used Pence in his attempt to pressure the new Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, but is not conclusive on how much Pence knew about Trump's efforts.

Pence's spokeswoman, Katie Waldman, dismissed the article as an attempt to "glorify a grand conspiracy being concocted by a select number of disgruntled former employees."

Waldman said Pence's actions vindicate the administration by showing that Ukraine received military aid after Pence "directly and effectively delivered the president's anti-corruption and European burden sharing messages" to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a September meeting.

But the vice president's office declined to comment on whether Pence's national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, listened to the Zelensky call.

House Democrats on Wednesday threatened to subpoena the White House if it doesn't turn over by Friday a host of documents that include any communication Pence's office had about the July call with Zelensky.

Democrats also want information on Trump's decision not to send Pence to Zelensky's May inauguration and information on Pence's meeting with Zelensky during a trip to Poland in September.

Whistleblowers have been at time essential and detrimental to a country's democracy, but what makes them different than a leaker? We explain. Just the FAQs, USA TODAY

More: Democrats threaten to subpoena White House for documents in impeachment inquiry

The document requests are part of the House's impeachment inquiry launched last week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

The inquiry was prompted by a whistleblower complaint detailing efforts by senior White House officials to "lock down" access to records of the July call in which Trump urged his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Biden.

At the time Trump and Zelensky spoke, the Trump administration was holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid approved by Congress.

More: Poll: Only 4 in 10 Republicans think Trump mentioned Biden on Ukraine call even though he acknowledged doing so

Although Pence did not participate in the call, Kellogg was among those who monitored it, according to the Washington Post. The paper reported that Kellogg didn't hear anything he felt should be relayed to the vice president and Pence and his staff weren't aware afterward that the call had provoked alarm.

An unidentified Pence aide told the paper that his office wasn't told by the White House Counsel's Office about the whistleblower's complaint until the day before it became public.

The whistleblower's report alleged that Trump instructed Pence to cancel plans to attend Zelensky’s inauguration, a detail given in the context of Trump wanting to wait to see how the new leader “chose to act” in office.

This handout picture taken and released by the Ukrainian presidential press-service on September 1, 2019, shows US Vice-President Mike Pence (C) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) walking prior to their talks in Warsaw.
This handout picture taken and released by the Ukrainian presidential press-service on September 1, 2019, shows US Vice-President Mike Pence (C) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) walking prior to their talks in Warsaw. (Photo: HANDOUT, AFP/Getty Images)
When Pence substituted for Trump at the last minute on a trip to Poland, he had a private meeting with Zelensky. During a news conference the next day, Pence was asked whether he discussed Biden with Zelensky.

“The answer is no,” Pence said.

He gave a less direct response to the question of whether he could assure Ukraine that the hold up of military assistance was not related to efforts by Trump allies to try to investigate Biden.

Pence said Trump had asked him to talk to Zelensky “about the progress that he’s making on a broad range of areas.” That included, Pence said, steps Zelensky has taken to address public corruption and restore integrity to the public process.

The Washington Post reported that Trump sent Pence to the meeting to "take the measure" of Zelensky and let him know that military aid wouldn't be released until the administration was sure Zelensky would fight corruption. When Pence returned to Washington, he encouraged Trump to release the aid, two unidentified individuals told the Post.

The aid was released in early September.

Pence spoke by phone with Zelensky on Sept. 18, the Post reported, the same day the paper broke the news that there was a whistleblower complaint.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 847645002/





Trump used Mike Pence to tell Ukraine the US would withhold military aid while demanding that it investigate corruption
Sonam Sheth21 hours ago
President Donald Trump told Vice President Mike Pence to convey to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the US would withhold military aid to Ukraine while demanding that it aggressively investigate corruption, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
The Ukrainians likely understood that Trump's demand to investigate corruption was linked to his desire for them to look into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, The Post said.
The revelation is the latest indication that the US president may have dangled taxpayer dollars to get a foreign government to investigate a rival for political gain.
Trump's direction to Pence came shortly after he pressured Zelensky in a July 25 phone call to investigate allegations of corruption against the Bidens and to help discredit the Russia investigation.
Pence told a reporter that the US had "great concerns" about corruption and wanted to be sure US military aid was going toward "the kind of investments that will contribute to security and stability in Ukraine."
Katie Waldman, the press secretary for the vice president, said in a statement, "it is crystal clear that the Vice President directly and effectively delivered the President's anti-corruption and European burden sharing messages overseas."
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
President Donald Trump used Vice President Mike Pence to convey to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the US would withhold military aid to the country while demanding that it aggressively investigate corruption, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

The Ukrainians likely understood that Trump's demand to investigate corruption was connected to his desire for them to look into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son ahead of the 2020 election, The Post said.

The revelation is the latest indication that the US president may have dangled taxpayer dollars to get a foreign government to investigate a rival for political gain.

Trump's direction to Pence came shortly after his July 25 phone call with Zelensky that's the focus of an explosive whistleblower complaint filed by a US intelligence official in August.

The complaint alleged that Trump used the power of his office to "solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 US election. His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is described as a "central figure in this effort," and it said Attorney General William Barr "appears to be involved as well."

Trump had ordered his administration to withhold the nearly $400 million military-aid package to Ukraine days before the phone call with Zelensky.

While the White House's notes on the call showed that Trump did not directly mention offering aid in exchange for Zelensky's assistance in investigating Biden, they confirmed that Trump brought up how the US does "a lot for Ukraine" right before asking Zelensky to do him a "favor" by investigating Biden and discrediting the former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe.

Read more: Mike Pompeo made at least 4 significantly misleading statements about his role in the Trump-Ukraine phone call

Pence addressed the issue of corruption in Ukraine during a diplomatic trip to Poland earlier this month, before the public learned of the whistleblower's complaint and after it was reported that the US was withholding aid from Ukraine.

Pence held a news conference one day after he met with Zelensky on September 1.

"Did you discuss Joe Biden at all during that meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian president?" a reporter asked Pence. "And No. 2, can you assure Ukraine that the holdup of that money has absolutely nothing to do with efforts, including by Rudy Giuliani, to try to dig up dirt on the Biden family?"

Pence replied: "Well, on the first question, the answer is no. But we ... discussed America's support for Ukraine and the upcoming decision the president will make on the latest tranche of financial support in great detail."

Pence added that Trump had asked him to meet with Zelensky and convey that the US has "great concerns about issues of corruption."

Zelensky, Pence said, assured him that his government had taken steps to "address the issue of public corruption."

Pence said that before investing more taxpayer money in Ukraine, "the president wants to be assured that those resources are truly making their way to the kind of investments that will contribute to security and stability in Ukraine, and that's an expectation the American people have and the president has expressed very clearly."

Read more: The Trump whistleblower told the House Intelligence Committee about their concerns before filing an official complaint

It's unclear what Pence knew about the July 25 call or the whistleblower's complaint ahead of the meeting.

Officials close to the vice president told The Post he had no knowledge of Trump's efforts to pressure Zelensky to investigate the Bidens over their dealings in Ukraine.

Katie Waldman, the press secretary for the vice president, released a statement in response to The Post's report:


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Other officials, however, told The Post that one of Pence's top deputies was on Trump's July phone call with Zelensky and that the vice president should have had access to notes about the conversation.

The whistleblower's complaint detailed how senior White House officials took steps to quickly "lock down" records of the call over concerns that it could prove damaging to the president. It said they took the unusual step of moving the official transcript from the computer system such documents are typically stored in and into a top-secret codeword-level system in the National Security Council that houses information pertaining to US national security.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Pence advised Trump against releasing the summary of his call with Zelensky last week. The vice president was said to have raised concerns about the precedent it could set but eventually sided with other White House officials calling for Trump to release it.

And citing a source familiar with the matter, The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that Trump told Pence not to take a scheduled trip to Ukraine for Zelensky's inauguration in May — something the whistleblower said in the complaint. Pence's aides, however, said that the trip was scrapped because of logistics.

NOW WATCH:
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-p ... be-2019-10

The Impeachment Crisis Just Got Worse for the GOP
Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to bring Pompeo and Pence down with him.

By Joan WalshTwitter Today 11:07 am
donald-trump-press-conference-rtr-img
President Donald Trump during a joint news conference with Finland's President Sauli Niinisto, October 2, 2019. (Reuters / Leah Millis)
Donald Trump came completely unglued twice on Wednesday. But pay no attention to the man behind the meltdown. All the real action in his rapidly escalating impeachment crisis took place outside the White House. (We are all Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, however.)

Wednesday morning, after ducking the question repeatedly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted he was on Trump’s thuggish phone call with Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky in July. But you had to be paying close attention to catch it, given the way Pompeo rushed through and eventually swallowed the admission: “Was I on the phone callIwasonthephonecall.” Just after that, House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff said that rather than merely going to court over Pompeo and other Trump toadies’ stonewalling subpoenas, he would wrap the many counts of defiance into articles of impeachment, under “obstruction of justice.” The day ended with a Washington Post bombshell showing how Trump used Vice President Mike Pence in his efforts to pressure Zelensky to “investigate” Hunter Biden. Team Pence, uncharacteristically, pushed back on Team Trump’s claims.

Schiff’s threat might be most significant. Any White House action to “stonewall” the impeachment inquiry “will be considered further evidence of obstruction of justice,” he said in a crowded press conference. “We’re not fooling around here, though. We don’t want this to drag on months and months and months, which appears to be the administration’s strategy.”

Finally, Democrats are acting quickly in the face of GOP defiance—and I hope they target some of the major players who ignored subpoenas to testify about Robert Mueller’s revelations last spring, especially former White House counsel Don McGahn, who was reportedly asked by Trump to tell then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions to un-recuse himself from the Russia probe—and then told to tell the media he was never asked any such thing.

Meanwhile, things got worse for Pompeo and Pence. The knives are coming out for the secretary of state: Officials at the CIA, which he previously ran, leaked that he was widely despised for abusive behavior, including throwing binders at subordinates, and that his security detail threw an “Emancipation Party” when he left. And while Pompeo insisted Schiff and the Democrats were harassing State Department employees with subpoenas and requests for information about the department’s role in Trump’s Ukraine shakedown, reports emerged that some of those employees are approaching Democrats to volunteer to testify. Former envoy Kurt Volker will testify behind closed doors Thursday; harassed and dismissed former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich, whom Trump called “bad news” and whom he appeared to threaten on his call with Zelensky (“She’s going to go through some things,” he said, like a mob boss) will do so next week.

But The Washington Post’s Pence scoop best underscored what I argued last week: If Trump goes down, he will take as many Republicans with him as possible. Someone told the Post that Pence’s top national security adviser was on the July 25 call with Zelensky. “White House officials,” the Post added, “said that Pence probably would have received the detailed notes of the president’s call in his briefing book on July 26.” The Trump team also revealed that Pence was asked to underscore the administration’s concern about “corruption”—which was repeatedly defined as the Ukrainian government’s failure to dig up or manufacture dirt on Hunter Biden—when he met Zelensky during his trip to Poland in August.

All of that makes it tough for Pence to insist—as he apparently does—that he knew nothing of Trump’s efforts to get dirt on the Bidens or discredit the Russia investigation. It’s even tougher because The New York Times and The Washington Post have been reporting on Trump and capo Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to get Ukraine to produce dirt on the Bidens since the spring. We already knew Trump was trying to slime Pence as insurance against impeachment: Last week, as the news of his phone call with Zelensky broke, he told reporters, “I think you should ask for VP Pence’s conversation, because he had a couple of conversations also.” Trump is trying to make sure his vice president gets as dirty as he is, so that if congressional Republicans ever begin to locate their spines, they will know that impeaching Trump could put the person behind Pence in the line of succession in the White House: Imagine “President Nancy Pelosi.”

All of this is why I wish the media had paid less attention to Trump’s two White House meltdowns on Wednesday. Sure, there were a few pieces of news in them: He suggested Schiff should be investigated for “treason.” He ended his first rant by insisting, “You have corrupt media in this country and it truly is the enemy of the people”—an escalation from his normal attacks on journalists, I’ll admit. But the rest of his twin tantrums were garden-variety Trump: insulting Schiff with a new nickname (“Shifty”) and ultimately getting off the message he wanted on live (cable) television: “Biden and his son are stone-cold crooked.” Trump is trusting that his base ignores the fact that he’s essentially admitted to his impeachable offenses—withholding Ukrainian aid and pressuring the country’s leader for dirt on a political opponent—and gets that single message about Biden: He’s “crooked.” (He’s not.)

The most newsworthy comment in Trump’s two appearances came from Finnish President Niinistö, who gamely endured Trump’s rage. “You have here a great democracy, keep it going,” he told reporters. Finally, Democrats seem to be doing just that. We need the media to do the same.
https://www.thenation.com/article/impea ... peo-pence/


Report implicates VP Pence in intensifying Trump scandal
Steve Benen10/03/19 08:00 AM

The scandal that’s likely to lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment involves a striking cast of characters. In addition to the president himself, there’s a growing list of questions involving Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr, among others, and those questions need answers.

The Rachel Maddow Show, 10/2/19, 9:06 PM ET
Pence, at center of Trump Ukraine scheme, scrambles for cover

But don’t forget about Vice President Mike Pence. The Washington Post reported overnight:
President Trump repeatedly involved Vice President Pence in efforts to exert pressure on the leader of Ukraine at a time when the president was using other channels to solicit information that he hoped would be damaging to a Democratic rival, current and former U.S. officials said.

Trump instructed Pence not to attend the inauguration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in May — an event White House officials had pushed to put on the vice president’s calendar — when Ukraine’s new leader was seeking recognition and support from Washington, the officials said.

Months later, the president used Pence to tell Zelensky that U.S. aid was still being withheld while demanding more aggressive action on corruption, officials said. At that time — following Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenksy — the Ukrainians probably understood action on corruption to include the investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

The timeline of events paints an exceedingly unflattering picture. We know that Trump personally intervened to delay U.S. aid to Ukraine, which was desperate for the American assistance. We also know that Trump soon after had a telephone meeting with Zelenksy in which the Ukrainian leader stressed the significance of the aid package, only to hear his American counterpart say in response, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”

Trump’s wish list included, among other things, Ukraine taking law-enforcement action to undermine Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election.

We now also know that in the wake of that conversation, it was Mike Pence who spoke with Zelenksy in person, reiterating Trump’s expectations.

That’s not a great position for the vice president to find himself in. Trump’s actions are likely to lead to his impeachment, and it now appears Pence may have done something quite similar.

One of the most striking things about the Washington Post’s report on this isn’t just the top-line revelation, but also the behind-the-scenes drama – because reading the article, it seems clear that there are factions inside the White House, one of which is eager to drag Pence into this mess, and one of which is scrambling to keep the vice president out of it.

The trouble with the defense from Team Pence is how underwhelming it is.

The Post article noted, for example, that officials close to the vice president “insist that he was unaware of Trump’s efforts to press Zelensky for damaging information about Biden and his son.” Or put another way, Pence told the Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was on hold, and Pence pressed Zelensky about “corruption” concerns, but the Indiana Republican didn’t fully understand the big picture.

There are problems with the defense. A top member of Pence’s team, for example, was on the Trump/Zelensky call. Pence also had access to the transcript of that call soon after it took place. The Post also reported, “White House officials said that Pence probably would have received the detailed notes of the president’s call in his briefing book on July 26,” the day after the phone meeting.

What’s more, the detailed call summary was likely part of the briefing materials Pence received before his in-person meeting with the Ukrainian president. The article added, “Officials close to Pence contend that he traveled to Warsaw for a meeting with Zelensky on Sept. 1 probably without having read — or at least fully registered — the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with the leader of Ukraine.”

I did appreciate the use of the word “registered” – as if Pence saw the document showing Trump pressing Zelensky on Biden, but the vice president didn’t fully get it.

Team Pence will have to do better than this.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show ... mp-scandal


Mike Pence inexplicably digs himself deeper into Trump’s Ukraine scandal
Dave Goldiner
New York Daily News |

Oct 03, 2019 | 3:03 PM

Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a Southwest Hispanic Leaders roundtable in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month on Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a Southwest Hispanic Leaders roundtable in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month on Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz. (Matt York/AP)
When Trump goes low, Mike goes with him.

Even as President Trump offered new ammunition to impeachment advocates, Vice President Mike Pence Thursday defended the president’s demand for dirt on Joe Biden from Ukraine and repeated unfounded allegations against Biden.

Ignoring the mounting evidence that Trump acted improperly or illegally, Pence parroted GOP talking points there is nothing worrisome in dangling much-needed aid over a key ally while demanding help in a partisan political fight.

“As people take time to read the transcript of the President’s call and reflect on these facts, they’ll come to realize this is more of the same of what we’ve seen from Democrats in the last two and a half years,” Pence said.

Pence insisted that Trump was right to demand a probe into the role of Biden’s son, Hunter, in a Ukraine gas company, even though there has been no credible allegation of wrongdoing against either man.

“The American people have a right to know whether or not the vice president of the United States or his family profited from his position,” he added.

Before now, Pence had said as little as possible about the Ukraine scandal.

The man who would take over as president if Trump is forced out of office has a clear interest in limiting his exposure to the scandal. But Pence also wants to maintain the strong support of his right-wing base by leaving as little daylight between himself and Trump as possible.

Pence’s aides say he was not on the Trump call but the veep has been a key player in several key moments in the Ukraine scandal.

He was supposed to attend Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration but canceled in an effort to put pressure on Kiev. Pence insists that the goal was to win a crackdown on corruption, but in his call Trump made no secret of the fact that “corruption crackdown” was code for a politically motivated probe into the Bidens.

Pence subbed for Trump and met Zelensky in Poland after Trump was forced to stay home to lead the response to Hurricane Dorrian and his controversial false “Sharpie-gate” claim that the storm threatened his stronghold of Alabama.

Again, Pence claimed that he mentioned nothing about the Bidens and simply pushed for action against corruption.

Pence claims that he believed he was actually discussing corruption and had no idea that Ukraine authorities had been told by Trump and his private lawyer Rudy Giuliani that what the president really wanted was dirt on Biden.

The veep also asserts that he never closely read the rough transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky before his own meeting with the Ukraine leader.

Taken together, Pence’s multiple claims of ignorance portrays the vice president as a central player in the scandal, albeit an unwitting one. That may be changing as he steps out to defend Trump in the impeachment storm — and risks being sucked deeper into the mud.

Ironically, Pence’s new statement defending Trump and attacking Biden came just minutes after Trump himself gave more ammo to impeachment advocates by demanding that China also investigate the Bidens.

In further evidence of abuse of power, Trump pointedly mentioned the massive trade deal the two nations are negotiating. Like the Ukraine aid, Trump appeared to be using the trade as a weapon to win a personal political victory.
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politi ... story.html


seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 03, 2019 8:05 am wrote:Déjà vu

Mike Pence insists he didn't know Flynn was under investigation for Turkey lobbying
Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY Published 1:08 p.m. ET May 18, 2017 | Updated 2:37 p.m. ET May 18, 2017
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 101831354/


An important note for media covering Ukraine and Biden. They are not unproven charges. They are false charges. There is a big difference.

The Rudy Dossier

Warsaw, Poland, 13/02/2019 - A press briefing held prior to the rally of the Iranian community in Europe on the prospects for establishing a sustainable and lasting peace in the Middle East and the Iranian regime's d... MORE
By Josh Marshall

October 2, 2019 9:15 pm

Good TPM Readers, I was in the midst of writing out a post explaining how there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that that packet of pro-Trump conspiracy theories the State Department Inspector General brought up to the Hill was actually Rudy Giuliani’s work product: the packet of information he’d assembled in his trips abroad. Rudy likely piped it into the State Department. It got circulated through the Department by State appointees (this part we know). The IG had had it since May. But when he heard the events of the last week, especially Pompeo going on the warpath, the IG decided he wanted to get it out of his hands and into the hands of Congress as soon as possible.

Well, I’m robbed of my genius reconstruction of the evidence! Because now Rudy has admitted that, yeah, it’s his stuff.

Here’s the key passage from a late report from CNN …

Giuliani told CNN on Wednesday evening that some of the documents provided to Congress by the State Department’s inspector general had originated with him.

Giuliani said that in late March, he had “routed” what he called an “outline” of allegations against Biden, as well as Yovanovitch, to the office of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He said he also had sent details of his interviews from earlier in the year with the incumbent and former top prosecutors in Ukraine, who helped provide him with the information in his outline.

Giuliani said he received a phone call shortly thereafter from Pompeo, who told Giuliani he would be referring the documents for investigation.

“They told me they were going to investigate it,” Giuliani told CNN.

So it’s a mix of memos, planted newspaper articles and summaries of the interviews Giuliani conducted in Ukraine. Helpfully (to Congress) Giuliani says Pompeo was receptive to the documents and said he’d make sure they were investigated. The key point here is that the documents not only push the anti-Biden conspiracy theories. They also include attacks on the then-US Ambassador to Ukraine, as well as claims of a Mueller conspiracy against Trump, framing of the Russia, etc. etc. So they apparently got Pompeo to turn against the US Ambassador to Ukraine, who was subsequently dismissed.

Where specifically did the packet come from?

According to a statement released this evening from Chairs Engel, Schiff and Cummings, the State Department IG interviewed Pompeo’s Counselor Thomas Ulrich Brechbuhl.

Here’s the key passage …

“The Inspector General stated that his office interviewed Secretary Pompeo’s Counselor, Thomas Ulrich Brechbuhl, who informed the Inspector General that Secretary Pompeo told him the packet ‘came over,’ and that Brechbuhl presumed it was from the White House.

“Earlier this week, Pompeo attempted to block Brechbuhl, Ambassador Yovanovitch, and other State Department employees from testifying before Congress.

Needless to say, it’s quite clear that Pompeo is deeply implicated in these abuses of power. Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani is happy to provide more evidence of Pompeo’s involvement. Once Pompeo received them, they were circulated within the State Department. It doesn’t say specifically that Pompeo circulated them. But that seems consistent with all the other information we’ve learned.

It seems pretty clear why Inspector General Linick thought this was an urgent matter.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-rudy-dossier



COMMAND + C
Book Alleging Biden Corruption in Ukraine Lifted Passages From Wikipedia

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
In more than a dozen instances, Peter Schweizer’s book “Secret Empires” appears to have copied complete sentences or large parts of them from other sources.
Lachlan Markay
Reporter
Published 10.03.19 5:35AM ET
A book that has fueled corruption allegations at the center of an unfolding impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump appears to have lifted portions of text from news articles and Wikipedia pages without proper citation or attribution.

The Daily Beast found more than a dozen instances in which Secret Empires, the bestselling book by investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, copied complete sentences or sizable portions of them verbatim or near-verbatim from other sources. In a number of instances, those sources were uncited Wikipedia pages created before the book’s publication in early 2018.

Many of the passages included citations of the works from which language was drawn, but did not put that language in quotation marks. In one case, Schweizer’s book used language nearly identical to a post on a website of a prominent progressive think tank, but cited not that think tank, but a news article based on the same data.

The Daily Beast presented Schweizer’s spokesperson and his publisher, HarperCollins, with a detailed spreadsheet comparing the book’s text with that of the sources from which he appeared to have lifted language. That spokesperson, Sandy Schulz, denied that the examples constituted any sort of journalistic or academic misconduct.

“This is not plagiarism,” she said in an emailed statement. “Secret Empires was run through Grammarly’s plagiarism checker years ago. The examples you cite are trivial snatches of words occurring in a straightforward recitation of publicly available facts... If the analysis you apply to these selected passages were to become the standard, research-driven journalism, including yours, would become near-impossible.”

Schweizer’s book unearthed extensive details of allegedly corrupt schemes involving, among others, Hunter Biden, the youngest son of Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden. The most explosive allegations stemming from Schweizer’s reporting, chiefly that the elder Biden helped unseat a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect a company whose board included Biden’s son from investigation, have been largely debunked. But the allegations are nevertheless central to a rapidly escalating scandal that threatens to envelop the Trump administration.

None of the passages examined by The Daily Beast came from the section of the book that deals with the Bidens. The most problematic portion of Secret Empires appears to be a chapter focused on former Chicago mayor Richard Daley. That chapter contains four passages that are largely copied from the Wikipedia page for Daley’s son Patrick. The book’s footnotes cite news stories that are cited in the same Wikipedia page, but the language appears to be lifted from the latter.

https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upl ... der_hl8sjw
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
Three other passages in the book also appear to draw on Wikipedia pages, though with smaller sections of the sentences at issue, and in less specific language.


Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
Other sections of the book more directly cite the sources from which language appears to have been lifted. But those sections nonetheless copy large portions of text from those sources and do not place quotation marks around them.


A section on the family of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, for instance, draws from and cites a Chicago Tribune article about a federal clean energy grant to a Chicago-based company with ties to the Pritzker clan. But significant portions of the passage mirror, word-for-word, language in the Tribune piece, and do not appear in quotation marks.


Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
The Daily Beast found five other instances in which Schweizer uses similar or identical language to sources that are cited in the text, but without denoting any direct quotation.


Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
In one instance, Schweizer appears to have lifted language from a piece on the website of the Center for American Progress, a prominent progressive think tank, regarding Trump’s business activities abroad. The book cites not that piece but a Washington Post story on the underlying data. But Schweizer’s language mirrors not the Post’s, but CAP’s, down to the names of the same four countries, out of 18, in which Trump did business and the order in which they’re mentioned.


Columbia University defines “intentional” plagiarism to include a “direct copy [and] paste” of source text or a “small modification by word switch.” Its definition of “unintentional” plagiarism includes a “failure to ‘quote’ or block quote author's exact words, even if documented” and a “failure to put a paraphrase in your own words, even if documented.”

Hard-and-fast definitions of plagiarism are nonetheless disputed, especially in the digital age. “Both journalism and plagiarism have fallen into a murky new reality in which there’s no clear consensus about the old rules. Even the authorities who make the rules disagree over basic definitions,” wrote Washington Post senior editor Marc Fischer in a 2015 column in the Columbia Journalism Review. “The same technology that has softened the definition of plagiarism has also made it radically easier to plagiarize, intentionally or not.”

According to the acknowledgements in Secret Empires, Schweizer, who leads the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute, received assistance for the book from eight researchers and two interns.

It’s not his first work to upend American politics heading into a presidential election. His previous book, the bestseller Clinton Cash, detailed extensive conflict-of-interest allegations against then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Scrutiny of her family’s charitable foundation dogged Clinton’s candidacy until her eventual defeat.

The investigative work in Secret Empires is sure to have a similar effect if Biden wins the Democratic nomination and challenges Trump next year. But already it’s fueling a national scandal that has congressional Democrats eyeing impeachment proceedings against the president.

The book’s allegations against the Bidens were front and center in Trump’s mind during a now-infamous July phone call with the new president of Ukraine, whom Trump asked to rekindle an official investigation into the elder Biden’s efforts to get the former prosecutor in Kiev fired.


RELATED IN POLITICS

Rudy and Bannon Try a Whole New Way to Slime Biden

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"Corey Lewandowski, U.S. President Donald Trump's former campaign manager and close confidant, checks a copy of the Mueller report as he testifies before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's first hearing of their impeachment investigation on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., September 17, 2019. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts - RC1A11392CA0"
Lewandowski’s House Testimony Devolves Into Total Mess
Trump has also credited Schweizer’s work publicly, quoting and name-checking him in a recent tweet going after Biden.

All the attention has made Schweizer’s book a bestseller once again, as noted by Breitbart News, where he serves as a senior contributor. “Schweizer’s ‘Secret Empires’ Rockets to #17 on Amazon 1.5 Years After Release,” declared a headline on Sunday.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/peter-sch ... a?ref=home




Kurt Volker — the former U.S. envoy to Ukraine — has arrived for his deposition as part of the House impeachment inquiry.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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