Katy Tur: Donald Trump is not complicated: it’s a very simple formula — how does this affect Donald Trump
Joshua Green: Trump is an incredible intuitive politician (8:29) Sam Nunberg gave him the idea for the wall and he tried it out in Iowa and then he riffed on it: Mexico will pay for it, No one builds like Trump. He tries to figure out what will make the crowd roar.
19:30 He would bury one controversy with another controversy. He would steal coverage from Obama by calling for a Muslim Ban. During the Democratic convention, he asked Russia for help with the emails.
If there is any down time, he needs attention.
Trump wouldn’t have been president without Stephen Bannon, because Bannon brought the focus on immigration and egged him on. After the bad publicity for the Elevator Speech, Bannon had him pay a visit to the border. Bannon had spent years studying how to tear down Hillary.
Bannon, as a finance and Hollywood guy, had a lot of experience manipulating rich men.
28:04” : You can’t calculate how much WikiLeaks helped Trump: October 7, the day that the Access Hollywood tape came out, a few hours later the John Podesta emails were leaked. And the leaks came out every day until the election.
Donald and Stephen Bannon really like propaganda.
Donald Trump was a pioneer of Fake News. He would call Tabloids (Rupert Murdoch’s papers) and make up affairs with Kim Bassinger, Madonna, Carla Bruni.
Donald Trump was too much of a good story and he did/didn’t know who he was.
David Clay Johnson: the New York Times never scrutinized his drug/mafia connections. (40 minutes)
The media isn’t capable of dealing with the Presidency
You can’t say I’m not going to write about today’s story because I haven’t finished reporting on yesterday’s outrage (44 min)
Roger Stone claimed contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016, according to two associates
The second, former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg, said in an interview Monday that Stone told him that he had met with Assange — a conversation Nunberg said investigators for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III recently asked him to describe.
.. “I wish him no ill will, but Sam can manically and persistently call you,” Stone said, recalling that Nunberg had called him on a Friday to ask about his plans for the weekend. “I said, ‘I think I will go to London for the weekend and meet with Julian Assange.’ It was a joke, a throwaway line to get him off the phone. The idea that I would meet with Assange undetected is ridiculous on its face.’ ’’.. “The allegation that I met with Assange, or asked for a meeting or communicated with Assange, is provably false,” he said, adding that he did not leave the country in 2016... Nunberg told The Post that the questions he was asked by Mueller’s investigators indicated to him that the special counsel is examining statements Stone has made publicly about WikiLeaks.“Of course they have to investigate this,” he said. “Roger made statements that could be problematic.”.. He said he did not recall the exact date when Stone told him that he had met with Assange, adding that he did not take the comment as a joke at the time. He said he was glad to hear Stone told The Post that the remark was made in jest.
“No one connected to the president should be connected with Julian Assange,” he added.
.. WikiLeaks has come under intense scrutiny from U.S. officials for its distribution of hacked materials. Last year, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said it was “time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a nonstate, hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors, like Russia.”
.. In response, Assange said that Pompeo had chosen “to declare war on free speech.”
During the 2016 race, the organization released hacked Democratic emails at two key junctures:
- A cache of DNC emails landed on the eve of the party’s national nomination convention and
- a collection of Podesta emails appeared on the same day in October that The Post revealed a tape of Trump speaking about women in lewd terms.
.. On Aug. 8, 2016, in an appearance at the Southwest Broward Republican Organization in Florida, Stone answered a question about what he suspected would be the campaign’s October surprise by saying: “I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”
.. He later said he had not meant that he had communicated with Assange directly.
On Aug. 21, Stone tweeted that something grim was looming for Podesta.
“Trust me, it will soon [be] the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary,” he tweeted.
On Oct. 3, he tweeted: “I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp.”
“Payload coming. #Lockthemup,” Stone tweeted on Oct. 5.
Two days later, WikiLeaks published a cache of Podesta’s hacked emails describing internal conflicts within the Clinton Foundation and excerpts of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street executives.
How Sane Is Sam Nunberg? How Sane Are Any of These People?
Sam Nunberg appeared on CNN, and towards the end of a wild and wide-ranging interview with Jake Tapper, he seemed to ask the host for legal advice on whether he should comply with a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller.
“Do you think I should cooperate? Should I spend 80 hours going over my emails, Jake?” Nunberg asked.
.. It’s really rare for an interview subject to ask a journalist for legal advice — and speaking as a journalist, I’d say it’s an astonishingly bad idea too.
.. “I’m not a Donald Trump fan, as I told you before, okay? He treated me like crap,” and, “Trump may have very well done something during the election with the Russians, and if you find it out if he did that, I don’t know. If he did that, you know what, it’s inexcusable.”
.. It is not often we get to watch, live on television, a man simultaneously risk contempt of court and antagonize the one man who can pardon him.
.. CNN’s Erin Burnett awkwardly told Nunberg on-air that she could smell alcohol on him; Nunberg denied he had been drinking.
.. Page is the strange kind of man who is smart enough to get a master’s degree from Georgetown University and become an energy consultant with Merrill Lynch, but not smart enough to bring a lawyer with him when he testifies to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, or Mueller’s grand jury.
.. In October, Page agreed to appear on the program of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes — light-years away from being a “friendly interviewer” — and his answers were so breathtakingly forward that Hayes was left in disbelief: “I genuinely hope, Carter, that you are innocent of everything, because you are doing a lot of talking.”
.. Perhaps we could push aside Nunberg and Page and give the award for most self-destructive former Trump adviser to Steve Bannon, who invited Michael Wolff into the White House to gather material for his book Fire and Fury and seemed to think he could trash the president’s children on the record and live to tell the tale.
.. a president who
- announces new trade tariffs without informing his own staff,
- runs an ongoing campaign of public humiliation against his own attorney general,
- tweets furiously about what he sees on cable news, publicly fumes in the morning about Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live.
It’s as if the White House mess is serving Tide Pods... Ed Markey claimed, without any evidence, that a “grand jury has been impaneled up in New York” to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russians... Congressman Ted Lieu speculated that a Republican campaign staffer’s suicide was secretly a result of foul play stemming from a conversation with former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn... People are asking, “How sane is Nunberg?” How sane are any of these people? How are cable-news networks supposed to assess the mental health of a former presidential aide when the baseline for “sane” has been adjusted downward so rapidly?
Ex-Trump Aide Sam Nunberg Says He’d Defy Subpoena in Russia Probe
Mr. Nunberg said he couldn’t have been colluding with Russia during the campaign because he was spending his time trying to oust former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. He said he believed former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, whom he called a “weird dude,” had colluded with Moscow.
.. Mr. Nunberg also told CNN that the special counsel’s team asked about a June 2016 meeting arranged by Mr. Trump’s eldest son at Trump Tower between top campaign aides and a Russian lawyer linked to the Kremlin. Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied that he knew about the meeting. In the CNN interview, Mr. Nunberg said he believed Mr. Trump was aware of the meeting.
“He talked about it for a week before, and I don’t know why he did this,” Mr. Nunberg told CNN. “All he had to say was, ‘Yeah, we met with the Russians. The Russians offered us something, and we thought they had something,’ and that was it. I don’t know why he went around trying to hide it when he shouldn’t have.”