#Trump

Dr. Deborah Birx, who helped run the coronavirus pandemic response for former President Donald J. Trump, told congressional investigators earlier this month that Mr. Trump’s White House failed to take steps that could have prevented tens of thousands of deaths.

In closed-door testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, Dr. Birx said that tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented after the initial phase of the pandemic if Mr. Trump had pushed mask-wearing, social distancing and other efforts to slow the spread of the virus.

“I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range,” Dr. Birx testified, according to excerpts provided by the committee.

The committee’s interview with Dr. Birx was conducted on Oct. 12 and 13. In her testimony, she also lashed out at Dr. Scott Atlas, a former Stanford neuroradiologist who became an adviser to Mr. Trump and advocated for allowing the virus to spread through much of the population in order to let otherwise healthy people build up immunity against it.

She told the committee that Dr. Atlas had relied on incomplete information to draw dangerous conclusions that she felt could have long-term consequences for people who were infected with the virus and got sick.

“I was constantly raising the alert in the doctors’ meetings of the depth of my concern about Dr. Atlas’ position, Dr. Atlas’ access, Dr. Atlas’ theories and hypothesis, and the depths and breadths of my concern,” she said, referring to a group of doctors involved in the White House response who gathered regularly.

Dr. Atlas did not immediately respond to an email sent Tuesday morning. But in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last December, he continued to argue against lockdowns and other measures for containing the virus.

“Lockdown policies had baleful effects on local economies, families and children, and the virus spread anyway,” he wrote.

During her testimony, Dr. Birx said she repeatedly pushed Mr. Trump and others in the White House to do more to embrace efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus, especially in the fall of 2020. That was a period when Dr. Atlas was at the White House and Dr. Birx spent most of her time on the road, traveling from state to state to urge them to embrace prevention measures.

Asked whether Mr. Trump did everything he should have to counter the pandemic, she said: “No. And I’ve said that to the White House in general, and I believe I was very clear to the president in specifics of what I needed him to do.”

"It's appalling the way AstraZeneca has been treated. I wouldn't blame them if they were thoroughly fed up and decided to bow out of the Covid vaccine business."

That was the view from one of the biggest institutional investors in the UK.

It's not a view the pharmaceutical giant and its talismanic boss Pascal Soriot would have expected to hear, having developed a safe, effective vaccine at breakneck speed, signing contracts to deliver nearly two billion doses and doing it all without making a profit.

Mr Soriot could be forgiven perhaps for thinking he would be getting a medal.

Instead he is getting brickbats from EU politicians like Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts, who has accused the company of dishonesty and arrogance, in the way he alleges, it has "over-promised and under-delivered".

Some are suggesting that the whole endeavour has been more trouble than it is worth.

• Who will make money from Covid vaccines?
  
• France accuses UK of 'blackmail' over jab exports
  
• Why is the EU having vaccine problems?
  

AstraZeneca has foregone over $20bn (£14.5bn) in revenue, while becoming a household name in the EU and the US for all the wrong reasons.

Some investors have even questioned Pascal Soriot's position as chief executive.

Astra has become a political football in a European blame game.

One minute his compatriot, the French President Emmanuel Macron, is describing the vaccine as "quasi-ineffective", and the next, President Macron is volunteering to have the jab himself and backing a move to block exports outside the EU.

Donald Trump denied ever enjoying "golden showers" during a posh Thursday event with Republican donors, defending himself against years-old allegations that he hired two Moscow prostitutes to urinate on a bed together. 

"I'm not into golden showers," Trump said at a National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) retreat, which hosted sitting senators. "You know the great thing, our great first lady – 'That one,' she said, 'I don't believe that one.'"

Trump's remarks, first reported by The Washington Post, are a clear reference to allegations first floated in 2016 when British spy Christopher Steele released a dossier probing Trump's alleged collusion with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy in the 2016 election. Steele's dossier reportedly contained a video – now colloquially known as the "pee tape" – that shows Trump instructing two prostitutes at Moscow's Ritz-Carlton Hotel to urinate on a bed that President Obama had previously slept on. The video was allegedly taped as part of surveillance done by FSB, Russia's main state security agency, and had been lightly corroborated by a number of Steele's sources who had second-hand knowledge of the dossier, according to The New Yorker. 

Ex-FBI Director James Comey, who in 2017 testified about the Trump campaign's alleged relationship with Russia, wrote in his book that the former president was fixated on the rumor, dead set on dispelling it from the national discourse.

"I'm a germaphobe," Trump reportedly told Comey, per the book. "There's no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way."

In 2018, Comey told ABC News back that he couldn't be sure whether the rumor was true. "I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don't know whether the current President of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013," the ex-FBI director said. "It's possible, but I don't know."

Besides dredging up old rumors unprompted, Trump reportedly cast himself as the "GOP's savior" during Thursday's event, stressing that he has held the party together over the past several years. "It was a dying party, I'll be honest," he said, according to the Post. "Now we have a very lively party." 

The former president also castigated a number of his Republican detractors, including Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Ben Sasse, R-Neb, stressing that the party needs to "stick together" rather than splinter off into pro and anti-Trump factions. 

Later, Trump reportedly reiterated his equally baseless conspiracy that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" by President Biden, telling the crowd that Democrats "cheat like hell."

"It's a terrible thing what they did in Georgia and other states," he said. "You look at Texas, you look at a lot of states — they are correcting all the ways we were all abused over the last election ... last two elections if you think about it."

There continues to be no significant evidence that the 2020 election was marred by outcome-altering fraud.

• We should note that the small vanguard Babbitt was in had an opportunity to threaten House members because AZ -R Paul Gosar continued speaking for 15 minutes after lockdown was called.  Gosar was one of the original organizers of the "Stop the Steal" movement and has been accused by multiple House members of orchestrating the attack.  Gosar is also the first politician to start demanding the name of the officer who killed Ashli Babbitt, which is strange because almost nobody on Earth is in a better position to know that individual's identity than Gosar.
  
• Gosar was one of the last to leave the chamber so unlike us, he can see the identity of the officer on the far side of the door, protecting Gosar's escape.
  
• We can see from the video that the man holding the gun is wearing a suit and probably black.
  
• Metropolitan police confirmed that the shooter was a plainclothes Capitol Police officer.
  
• Given Gosar's proximity  to the shooter and the fact that there can't have been many extra officers hanging around 90 minutes after the violence began I think its very likely that the shooter is the security officer seen advising the House to don masks at 26:09.  That's the back of Gosar's head in the foreground.
  
• The Congressional Record only list the speaker as "a security officer" but its seems hard to believe that Gosar couldn't id a guy he works in the same room with all day or at least look him up in the congressional directory
  
• Further, it's public knowledge that the officer has not returned back to work.  I might not be able to figure out who shot Babbitt from a list of black plainclothes floor security officers who haven't been to work for 6 months but I assume that's a simple task for Gosar.
  
• I see no reason not to conclude that Gosar's (and by extention, Trump's) supposed ignorance is all pantomime.
  
• Nevertheless, I think the shooter's name should be released.  I understand this information exposes an officer who has already sacrificed much in service to our Legislature to increased vitriol and harm but I can't see how the public can maintain oversight of police violence without public access to individual names and records.  Trump's reasons are entirely scummy but we should release the name anyway.
  

BARTIROMO:....And I know that you have had some time to reflect on what took place on that day, January 6.

Talk to us about what you're thinking about as you reflect. What happened that day, from your standpoint?

TRUMP: So, there was a big rally called. And, actually, when I say big, who knew? But there was a rally called.

And a tremendous number of people, the largest one I have ever spoken before, is called by people, by patriots. And they asked me if I'd speak. And I did. And it was a very mild-mannered speech, as I think has been -- in fact, they just came out with a report in Congress, and they didn't mention my name, literally.

But what they were complaining about and the reason, in my opinion, you had over a million people there, which the press doesn't like to report at all,

because it shows too much -- too much activity, too much -- too much spirit and faith and love. There was such love at that rally.

You had over a million people there. They were there for one reason, the rigged election. They felt the election was rigged. That's why they were there. And they were peaceful people. These were great people.

The crowd was unbelievable. And I mentioned the word love. The love -- the love in the air, I have never seen anything like it.

And that's why they went to Washington.

BARTIROMO: You know, Mr...

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: And, by the way, I can tell you that I thought -- because I was hearing from a lot of people there are going to be a lot of people coming there, much bigger than anybody ever anticipated by many times.

And I had suggested to the secretary of defense, perhaps we should have 10,000 National Guardsmen standing by. And he reported that, as you know, but I -- we should have -- and he was turned down. I said, it's subject to Congress. They run it. Nancy Pelosi runs it. So, it would be subject to the Capitol Police and the other things, whatever they need.

But I said, perhaps you need 10,000, because I think the crowd is going to be very large. Who knows? Maybe two people will show up. But I think it's going to be very large.

Anyway, he had that. He went to them. They said it won't be necessary. They were the ones that were responsible. They were the ones. And this came out very loudly in the report.

BARTIROMO: Yes, that report showed FBI operatives potentially aware.

But there are unanswered questions here. What did the FBI know? Why weren't your Cabinet secretaries briefed? What did Speaker Pelosi know, Chuck Schumer, McConnell?

Do you have any answers to that? They continue to call this an armed insurrection.

TRUMP: Oh, I think they knew plenty.

BARTIROMO: And yet no guns were seized, Mr. President.

TRUMP: Right. There were no guns whatsoever.

And yet Antifa, which went into Portland and went into so many other places, Seattle -- they took over a big part of Seattle. People died. And there were plenty of guns there, by the way -- and in Minnesota, in Minneapolis. They got -- there was no repercussions for them. And yet they have people still in jail. There were no guns. There were no guns.

And, by the way, while you're at it, who shot Ashli Babbitt? Why are they keeping that secret? Who is the person that shot...

BARTIROMO: Well...

TRUMP: ... an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman, right in the head? And there's no repercussions.

If that were on the other side, it would be the biggest story in this country. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? People want to know, and why.

BARTIROMO: Well, that's right.

And I want to talk about that, because Ashli Babbitt, a wonderful woman, fatally shot on January 6 as she tried to climb out of a broken window.

Her family has spoken out. Her family has been on "Tucker Carlson." And they want answers as far as why this wonderful woman, young woman who went to peaceful protests was shot.

Do you have any information? There is speculation that this was a security detail in a leading member of Congress' security detail, a Democrat.

(CROSSTALK)

BARTIROMO: What can you tell us in terms of who shot Ashli Babbitt? What do you know, Mr. President?

TRUMP: So -- so, I have heard that.

I will tell you they know who shot Ashli Babbitt. They're protecting that person. I have heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official, a Democrat.

And we will see, because it's going to come out. It's going to come out.

PHOENIX (AP) — A Republican-backed review of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona’s largest county ended Friday without producing proof to support former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.

After six months of searching for evidence of fraud, the firm hired by Republican lawmakers issued a report that experts described as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, even that partisan review came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden won by 360 more votes than the official results certified last year.

The finding was an embarrassing end to a widely criticized, and at times bizarre, quest to prove allegations that election officials and courts have rejected. It has no bearing on the final, certified results. Previous reviews of the 2.1 million ballots by nonpartisan professionals that followed state law have found no significant problem with the vote count in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. Biden won the county by 45,000 votes, key to his 10,500-vote win of Arizona.

For many critics the conclusions, presented at a hearing Friday by the firm Cyber Ninjas, underscored the dangerous futility of the exercise, which has helped fuel skepticism about the validity of the 2020 election and spawned copycat audits nationwide.

“We haven’t learned anything new,” said Matt Masterson, a top U.S. election security official in the Trump administration. “What we have learned from all this is that the Ninjas were paid millions of dollars, politicians raised millions of dollars and Americans’ trust in democracy is lower.”

Cyber Ninjas acknowledged in its report that there were “no substantial differences” between the group’s hand count of ballots and the official count. But the report also made a series of other disputed claims the auditors say should cast doubt on the accuracy and warrant more investigation.

Trump issued statements Friday falsely claiming the review found widespread fraud. He urged Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican vying for his party’s U.S. Senate nomination, to open an investigation.

Brnovich, who has been criticized by Trump supporters for not adequately backing the review, did not commit: “I will take all necessary actions that are supported by the evidence and where I have legal authority,” he said in a statement before the report was made public.

Republicans in the state Senate ordered the review under pressure from Trump and his allies, subpoenaing the election records from Maricopa County and selected the inexperienced, pro-Trump auditors. It took months longer than expected and was widely pilloried by experts.

Still, the Arizona review has become a model that Trump supporters are pushing to replicate in other swing states where Biden won. Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general sued Thursday to block a GOP-issued subpoena for a wide array of election materials. In Wisconsin, a retired conservative state Supreme Court justice is leading a Republican-ordered investigation into the 2020 election, and this week threatened to subpoena election officials who don’t comply. Backers also called for additional election reviews in Arizona on Friday.
None of the reviews can change Biden’s victory, which was certified by officials in each of the swing states he won and by Congress on Jan. 6 — after Trump’s supporters, fueled by the same false charges that generated the audits, stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent certification of his loss.

The Arizona report claims a number of shortcomings in election procedures and suggested the final tally still could not be relied upon. Several were challenged by election experts, while members of the Republican-led county Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections, disputed claims on Twitter.

“Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election,” county officials tweeted.

Election officials say that’s because the review team is biased, ignored the detailed vote-counting procedures in Arizona law and had no experience in the complex field of election audits.
Two of the report’s recommendations stood out because they showed its authors misunderstood election procedures — that there should be paper ballot backups and that voting machines should not be connected to the internet. All Maricopa ballots are already paper, with machines only used to tabulate the votes, and those tabulators are not connected to the internet.

The review also checked the names of voters against a commercial database, finding 23,344 reported moving before ballots went out in October. While the review suggests something improper, election officials note that voters like college students, those who own vacation homes or military members can move to temporary locations while still legally voting at the address where they are registered.

“A competent reviewer of an election would not make a claim like that,” said Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.

The election review was run by Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, whose firm has never conducted an election audit before. Logan previously worked with attorneys and Trump supporters trying to overturn the 2020 election and appeared in a film questioning the results of the contest while the ballot review was ongoing.

Logan and others involved with the review presented their findings to two Arizona senators Friday. It kicked off with Shiva Ayyadurai, a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic who claims to have invented email, presenting an analysis relying on “pattern recognition” that flagged purported anomalies in the way mail ballots were processed at the end of the election.
Maricopa County tweeted that the pattern was simply the election office following state law.

“‘Anomaly’ seems to be another way of saying the Senate’s contractors don’t understand election processes,” the county posted during the testimony.

Logan followed up by acknowledging “the ballots that were provided for us to count ... very accurately correlated with the official canvass.” He then continued to flag statistical discrepancies — including the voters who moved — that he said merited further investigation.

The review has a history of exploring outlandish conspiracy theories, dedicating time to checking for bamboo fibers on ballots to see if they were secretly shipped in from Asia. It’s also served as a content-generation machine for Trump’s effort to sow skepticism about his loss, pumping out misleading and out-of-context information that the former president circulates long after it’s been debunked.

In July, for example, Logan laid out a series of claims stemming from his misunderstanding of the election data he was analyzing, including that 74,000 mail ballots were recorded as received but not sent. Trump repeatedly amplified the claims. Logan had compared two databases that track different things.

Arizona’s Senate agreed to spend $150,000 on the review, plus security and facility costs. That pales in comparison to the nearly $5.7 million contributed as of late July by Trump allies.
Maricopa County’s official vote count was conducted in front of bipartisan observers, as were legally required audits meant to ensure voting machines work properly. A partial hand-count spot check found a perfect match.

Two extra post-election reviews by federally certified election experts also found no evidence that voting machines switched votes or were connected to the internet. The county Board of Supervisors commissioned the extraordinary reviews in an effort to prove to Trump backers that there were no problems.

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors on Monday unsealed criminal charges against two longtime Republican Party operatives, accusing them of illegally funneling a foreign campaign contribution to former President Donald Trump in 2016.

According to an indictment unsealed in federal court in the District of Columbia, Jesse Benton and Doug Wead "conspired to illegally funnel thousands of dollars of foreign money from a Russian foreign national into an election for the Office of President of the United States of America."

U.S. law bans foreign nationals from donating money to presidential campaigns.

According to the indictment, Benton and Wead helped a Russian national get a ticket to a fundraiser with Trump in Pennsylvania in September 2016.

The Russian, who was not identified in the indictment, donated $25,000 to political action committees associated with Trump in order to attend the event, according to prosecutors.

But the true source of the donation was concealed from the Trump campaign, the indictment said, because the payment was secretly funneled through Benton, who acted as a "straw donor."

Benton, 43, previously managed campaigns for Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky before he was convicted for his role in a political endorsement scheme. Benton avoided jail time and received a presidential pardon in December 2020 from Trump.

Wead, 75, worked as a senior adviser on multiple presidential campaigns and ran for Congress as a Republican in 1992.

It was not yet clear if the two had engaged legal counsel.

Bachmann had narrowly defeated Paul to win the Ames Straw Poll in August 2011, an early measure of support in the state. 

A top aide in the 2008 Ron Paul presidential bid, Dennis Fusaro, provided several emails to OpenSecrets.org. According to the address fields in the emails, Fusaro was copied on the messages, which all date from late 2011.

Five days before the caucus, in late 2011, Sorenson abruptly switched his support from Bachmann to Paul, and the Bachmann campaign at the time charged that he had done so for money.

Pro's first contention is that either Trump was President and the Chief Justice had to preside over the trial, or he was not President and therefore could not not be impeached. A catch-22 of sorts, and since the Chief Justice did not preside, the trial was invalid.

Their second contention is an ad absurdum proof that Trump could not be impeached because he was no longer President, and their third are three historical proofs confirming that this viewpoint is in line with tradition up to the present day (well, up to 2009 at least).  I assume the following sentence contains a typo and should actually read "unconstitutional":

"Belknap was acquitted because greater than one third of the senators believed that the trial was constitutional."

Con opens by declaring the pursuit of an "originalist" interpretation of what constitutionality means.  I take this to mean he will show how his position aligns with what the Framers intended. As proof that the Framers understood impeachment to be applicable to former officials, they cite such an instance of a trial occuring in England while the Constitution was actually being written which the authors were aware of.

Their second argument is that impeachment is not only to dethrone corrupt officials, but to present them from running for office again.

Their third argument is also an ad absurdum of sorts; the fact that Pro's position implies a corrupt official could avoid being tried on a technicality, simply by having the preparations for the trial take longer than their remaining time in office.

They list a couple more absurd implications of Pro's position; that a corrupt official cannot practically be impeached if they refrain from corruption until the tail-end of their term, and can avoid being prevented from running for office by merely resigning upon notice of an impending impeachment trial.

I find their first attempt at interpreting the Constitution literally slightly amusing in light of how they previously emphasized that it can't necessarily be taken literally.

Not sure what the significance of the distinction between impeachment and other sorts of trials is.

I agree that the "high crimes and misdemeanours" line is pretty cringe.  President Ford - I mean Con - makes a good point.

As Round 1 closes I find myself favoring Pro since Con's position seems to hinge largely on a single trial on a different continent over 2 centuries ago, although I acknowledge his reductio ad absurdums demand addressing.

I am somewhat confused by Pro's first rebuttal, but their second is an atomic bomb that completely obliterates the primary pillar upholding Con's position so far.  Namely, the fact that impeachment in Great Britain applied to private citizens and therefore the comparison to our impeachment was a false analogy.

The quote from Hamilton is a solid refutation of Con's claim regarding originalism.

I do believe Pro has satisfactorily rebutted the point about escaping trial by resigning early in order to run for office again, and has accomplished this by pointing out how it didn't occur in any of the cited real-life examples.

I find it funny how Pro makes an ad absurdum out of their opponent's own ad absurdum with the point about impeaching the dead George Washington.

I was confused by the line "Private citizens cannot be impeached nor convicted" because I thought it was a direct quote from the Constitution and so a slam-dunk, but upon closer examination it does not appear to be anything more than their own brief interpretation of a passage.

Regarding the 2 bananas and many apples I will have to scroll back up and remind myself of the context again.  Apparently the apples are the ill-defined "high crimes and misdemeanours" which Pro posits are not relevant to the debate.  I agree.

I find Con's picking apart of the passage containing "Chief Justice shall preside..." cringeworthy, but they do go on to support their hypothesis with an ad absurdum showing how an overly-literal interpretation does imply the Chief Justice has complete power over whether the President could be impeached.

Con's rebuttal regarding Contention II, arguing about Pro's ad absurdum being too absurd, seems to downplay their own ad absurdums as well.  This strategy seems self-defeating.

Con ends Round 2 by putting Pro's 3 real-life examples 6 feet under as far as their relevance to the debate is concerned.  Actually, the one about Belknap seems to support Con's position.

And I agree with Con regarding the meaning of the word "and".

Round 4 begins with Pro defending their stance about the Chief Justice presiding and I admit I don't understand any of it.  The context is too far back in the past of the debate for me to remember.  However, the point that specifically "President" Trump is named in the articles of impeachment is serious ammunition that he has for some reason postponed until now.

The idea that the Chief Justice should be impeached if they refuse to allow the impeachment process is comical, but I find it correct.

I don't recall the meaning of the point about private versus public citizens, but with the point about "semantic" framework they seem to touch on what I already remarked upon regarding the self-defeating nature of Con's argument.  I agree that "President" meaning "current president" is the most straightforward intended meaning in absence of compelling evidence otherwise.

Pro's defense of example A is essentially to point out how dismissing it because it involves a future trial which did not actually materialize, unfairly forces a catch-22 scenario where Pro cannot use this as evidence the trial should not take place because the trial did not take place.  At least, that is what I think Pro is saying.

Honestly I thought example B was beyond hope of rescucitation, but Pro does a good job of reviving it by clarifying that the minority opinion was superior to that of the majority vote because the latter failed to gain the supermajority required to achieve their impeachment, and thus it is indeed the proof of checks and balances in action that Pro held it to be.

Quoting an actual Founding Father literally agreeing with Pro's own position is a nice tactic, and again I wonder why such evidence was saved until now?

They convincingly refute last round's accusation of mind-reading Reid by explaining how there's no other explanation for why the impeachment was not carried forward apart from the accused was no longer in office, and could be prevented from running by other means.

Pro flips me back to their side on the definition of "and".

Con hand-waves away the defenses of the examples as if they do not deserve any more attention, but I do not believe this is at all the case.

His interpretation of the passage about removal from office  "singly" or also with disqualification seems incredibly strained.  I expected some elaboration but there was none.

It is now Day 3 of me writing this reason for voting and in the interest of my own time I shall be more brief.

For me, what the final tally comes down to is the examples, the meaning of the phrase containing "singly", and the Founding Father quotes, of which Pro had most explicitly supporting their own viewpoint.

I do think Pro successfully defended their use of examples because Con's argument is essentially trying to define the standards such that they cannot use any example of a trial failing to materialize as precedent for why a trial should not materialize.

Regarding the passage with "singly", I have not been swayed by Con's arguments to interpret it in a non-literal way.

For these reasons I award argument points to Pro, and not because of the impending sense of doom they emanated by insinuating a vote for Con is a vote to extend the tentacles of Congress to our doorsteps.

I additionally award source points to Pro because of their 3 examples.  I feel Con's single example was inferior if not in quality at least in quantity.

Both sides were very well-written and conduct was equally professional.