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This investigation is likely tying Trump to Money(laundering) ties with Russia


OILERMAN

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28 minutes ago, ben4titans said:

He is under an audit and his lawyer has advised him to not release. Nothing crazy about that. My guess is you will see them at some point. Have you ever heard the phrase, don't throw me in the briar patch? 

Are we sure this guy isn't TN Tux re-incarnated???

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36 minutes ago, ben4titans said:

He is under an audit and his lawyer has advised him to not release. Nothing crazy about that. My guess is you will see them at some point. Have you ever heard the phrase, don't throw me in the briar patch? 

Every president that runs for re-election is under audit as well and yet they always release them. Nothing about being audited prevents someone from releasing their tax returns. Nothing.

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The Plum Line
 Opinion 

The White House’s laughable spin about Comey now lies in smoking ruins

 
 
 
By Greg Sargent May 11 at 10:19 AM 
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(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

THE MORNING PLUM:

For all the talk about the unusual nature of President Trump’s decision to fire James Comey, it actually fits comfortably into a well-established pattern that has defined this presidency from its very first day. Trump makes an emotional, impulsive assertion or decision — and then his underlings are forced into a wild scramble to produce a rationale or justification for it.

In this pattern, the decision or assertion often originated in the same place — deep in the recesses of Trump’s entangled megalomania and sneaking dread of the illegitimacy of his presidency. And the Comey firing, it turns out, may not be an exception to this.

This conclusion is bolstered by some great new reporting this morning on the Trumpian thought processes (if you can call them that) leading to the firing of the FBI director. The reporting reduces the White House’s original spin on the firing — that Trump decided to fire Comey after Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, presented a case rooted in his handling of Hillary Clinton’s emails — to a pile of smoking rubble. 

Pthe New York TImesThe New York Times relays this striking account of what really happened:

In private, aides said, Mr. Trump has been nursing a collection of festering grievances, including Mr. Comey’s handling of the Russia investigation, his seeming lack of interest in pursuing anti-Trump leaks and the perceived disloyalty over the wiretapping claim.

Mr. Comey’s fate was sealed by his latest testimony about the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 election and the Clinton email inquiry. Mr. Trump burned as he watched, convinced that Mr. Comey was grandstanding. He was particularly irked when Mr. Comey said he was “mildly nauseous” to think that his handling of the email case had influenced the election, which Mr. Trump took to demean his own role in history.

The Post’s account offers similar details. It notes that Trump had grown “increasingly agitated” by Comey’s public comments about the Russia probe and “was infuriated by what he viewed as the director’s lack of action in recent weeks on leaks from within the federal government.” Trump decided to fire Comey by last weekend. Then this happened:

First, though, he wanted to talk with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his trusted confidant, and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, to whom Comey reported directly. Trump summoned the two of them to the White House for a meeting, according to a person close to the White House.

The president already had decided to fire Comey, according to this person. But in the meeting, several White House officials said Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive: to explain in writing the case against Comey.

The accounts differ somewhat, probably because different sources picked up different hints of Trump’s pathologies depending on the moment, but it’s perfectly feasible that all of it is true. In both, Trump was angry because Comey was in some manner or other not cooperating with his preferred story line. Comey is either failing to make the Russia probe go away, by not sufficiently playing it down or by not doing enough to combat leaks about it. Or he’s failing to do enough to prop up Trump’s efforts to distract from it with what we might call alternative narratives.

And in both, the chronology is clear — the decision to fire Comey was made before the bogus justification for it was produced. Indeed, The Post reports that Rosenstein — who wrote the memo outlining that justification — reportedly threatened to quit when White House leaks spun a damage-control narrative in which Trump only acted on hisrecommendation. As the Times aptly puts it, the White House justifications for the firing have now been revealed as “shifting and contradictory.”

The common thread here is the constant need to return to the meaning of the election. The Comey letter to Congress about Clinton’s newly discovered emails is widely believed to have helped Trump win; Comey tacitly conceded that this might be true. The Russia probe continues to feed the sense that a foreign power helped tip the election to him; Comey won’t make it disappear. And, of course, there are lingering questions around the fact that Trump fired Comey right after he asked for more resources to prosecute that investigation, which of course would only further feed the sense that the Russian intervention mattered to the outcome.

This has happened again and again, beginning literally on Day One of the Trump presidency. Trump was enraged by the media’s accurate reporting of his relatively small inaugural crowd size, which immediately broadcast with terrifying vividness that he lacked popular support. So administration officials had to scramble to find photographic “evidence” that he was right, while others attacked the media for allegedly obscuring the truth. Trump also falsely claimed based on conservative media that President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones, to suggest that he, too, had been targeted by illicit efforts to undermine him during the election. That forced the White House counsel to go hunting for “evidence” of this, and when that failed, the White House called on Congress to investigate it (i.e., pretend it was real).

Still more: In the face of his loss of the popular vote by nearly 3 million, Trump claimed that he would have won, if millions of people hadn’t voted illegally. This required top officials to go around promising a commission to investigate the phantom “voter fraud” problem — in other words, to prove Trump right. And now that commission is actually going to happen. But that brings us to our next item.

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57 minutes ago, pamo9 said:

Are we sure this guy isn't TN Tux re-incarnated???

No, he's just one more guy that got too emotionally invested in this whole thing and so can't differentiate from fact, from reasonable conclusions, or whatever he is feeling at a given moment.

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3 hours ago, OILERMAN said:

Ben is seriously one of the stupider posters we've seen on here 

There has to be an eventual limit because at some point of stupidity, one would be too dumb to visit the site - is Ben that limit? 

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Just now, ben4titans said:

All Presidents are audited. That is true. However Trump was being audited before he jumped into the race. Therefore you are mixing part fact and part fiction. The current audit isn't a typical presidential audit. It's not the presidential audit that his lawyer are advising him against.

It's an audit. Every president goes through one when seeking a re-election. it's no different than another audit that other people go through. The fact that Presidents can release their tax returns while going through an audit shows that Trump can release one now... the IRS has even said there's nothing preventing him from releasing them.

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1 hour ago, ben4titans said:

All Presidents are audited. That is true. However Trump was being audited before he jumped into the race. Therefore you are mixing part fact and part fiction. The current audit isn't a typical presidential audit. It's not the presidential audit that his lawyer are advising him against.

The IRS has said there is no regulation barring an individual from publishing his or her tax returns while under audit by the agency. In fact, former President Richard Nixon, who started the tradition of elected officials sharing their tax returns, did so in 1973, while he was under audit.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/05/11/trump-admits-audit-has-no-bearing-on-releasing-his-tax-returns/

 

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37 minutes ago, Downtown said:

The IRS has said there is no regulation barring an individual from publishing his or her tax returns while under audit by the agency. In fact, former President Richard Nixon, who started the tradition of elected officials sharing their tax returns, did so in 1973, while he was under audit.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/05/11/trump-admits-audit-has-no-bearing-on-releasing-his-tax-returns/

 

Fake news! 

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21 minutes ago, ben4titans said:

No one is saying he cant but he is being advised not to. Why pay lawyers to advise you and then not listen to them?

Trump said this and you believe him. Do you believe everything he says?  Even when he contradicts himself?  It's entertaining how you pick and choose what the "truth" is. 

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