In a letter to author Michael Wolff and publisher Henry Holt and Co., Charles Harder said the book contained “numerous false and/or baseless statements,” though it didn’t specify any. He threatened legal action for defamation, invasion of privacy, and other claims.
.. In recent years, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have often threatened legal action and not followed through. In 2016, he threatened to sue the New York Times for publishing articles about his tax returns and about accusations of sexual assault against him. He also threatened to sue the women accusing him of sexual assault, whose allegations he has denied.
The G.O.P. Is Rotting
A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.
Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist. That’s because Donald Trump never stops asking. First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.
There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.
.. Compare the tax cuts of the supply-side era with the tax cuts of today. There were three big cuts in the earlier era: the 1978 capital gains tax cut, the Kemp-Roth tax cut of 1981, and the 1986 tax reform. They were passed with bipartisan support, after a lengthy legislative process. All of them responded to the dominant problem of the moment, which was the stagflation and economic sclerosis. All rested on a body of serious intellectual work.
Liberals now associate supply-side economics with the Laffer Curve, but that was peripheral. Supply-side was based on Say’s Law, that supply creates its own demand. It was based on the idea that if you rearrange incentives for small entrepreneurs you are more likely to get start-ups and more innovation. Those cuts were embraced by Nobel Prize winners and represented an entire social vision, favoring the dispersed entrepreneurs over the concentrated corporate fat cats.
.. Today’s tax cuts have no bipartisan support. They have no intellectual grounding, no body of supporting evidence. They do not respond to the central crisis of our time.
.. The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational.
Six Women Jointly Sue Harvey Weinstein Over Alleged Assaults
Lawsuit seeks class-action status, claims widespread coverup amounted to civil racketeering
Six women filed a lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein on Wednesday, claiming the movie producer’s actions to cover up sexual assaults amounted to civil racketeering.
The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in New York, seeking to represent what it describes as “dozens, if not hundreds,” of women who say they were assaulted by Mr. Weinstein.
The lawsuit claims that a coalition of companies and people became part of the growing “Weinstein sexual enterprise” and that they worked with him to conceal his widespread sexual harassment and assaults.
‘What About Bill?’ Sexual Misconduct Debate Revives Questions About Clinton
To counter damage from the “Access Hollywood” tape recording him boasting about groping women as well as allegations by a number of women that it was more than just “locker room talk,” Mr. Trump recruited Ms. Broaddrick and other women who had accused Mr. Clinton to join him on the campaign trail last year.
.. “It’s about time,” Kathleen Willey, another woman who accused Mr. Clinton of sexual harassment, said Wednesday in a telephone interview from her home in Richmond, Va. “We’ve waited for years for vindication.”
.. Paula Jones, another accuser, said they were not taken seriously until now. “It’s like me and Juanita and Kathleen have been screaming for years for someone to pay attention to us on the liberal side, and it’s like no one would hear us,” she said by telephone. “They made fun of me. They didn’t believe me. They said I was making it up.”
.. Many chose to defend him for his White House trysts with Ms. Lewinsky because, despite the power differential between a president and a former intern, she was a willing partner. To this day, Ms. Lewinsky rejects the idea that she was a victim because of the affair; “any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath” when the political system took over, as she wrote in 2014.
.. Ms. Willey later said she suspected the Clintons were somehow involved in the death of her husband, which was called a suicide.
.. Nina Burleigh, a journalist, wrote a column at the time joking that she would give Mr. Clinton oral sex for protecting abortion rights.