He Was Not Briefed

In response to reports that Russia offered bounties to Taliban fighters to kill US troops in Afghanistan, the White House has denied that President Trump was "personally briefed" on the matter, claiming that the intelligence "wasn't verified."

But a US official familiar with the latest information told CNN on Monday that intelligence about the Russian bounty was included in the President's Daily Briefing (PDB) sometime in the spring. The written document includes the intelligence communities' most important and urgent information. On Monday night, The New York Times reported that the information was included in a written briefing to the President in late February.

  

Trump is known to not read his daily briefing, and instead prefers an oral briefing a few times a week. But even in those sessions, participants have described him as distracted. The President receives a copy of the PDB every day, but Trump is notorious for not reading it. Even after intelligence analysts added more photos and charts to make it more appealing, the document often goes unread, according to people familiar with the matter.

These latest revelations come as numerous former senior intelligence officials are pushing back on the White House denials, saying it was "absurd," "ridiculous," and "inconceivable" that the President would not have been briefed on such critical intelligence that potentially put US soldiers in harm's way.

Cover Your Freakin' Face

New from Randy Rainbow:

Randy's persuasive skills must have worked!

Snap Out of It

Even though they [senior administration officials] are aware that Mr. Trump’s mishandling of the virus presents a threat to his re-election, his campaign advisers agreed to his demand for the rally last Saturday at an arena in Tulsa, Okla., hoping the adulation he would receive there would snap the president out of a funk he has been in for months.

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excerpted from The New York Times
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Icky

A Texas republican said:

Tom Diamond, a Republican in Fort Worth, Texas, said he planned to vote for Trump but would do so with real misgivings. He called the president a “poor leader” who had mishandled the pandemic and said Biden seemed “like a guy you can trust.”

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The Late Show With Stephen Colbert     06/24/2020

Rally in Tulsa

The Trump Campaign declared the Tulsa Rally:

President Donald Trump is "furious" at the "underwhelming" crowd at his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday evening, a major disappointment for what had been expected to be a raucous return to the campaign trail after three months off because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to multiple people close to the White House.

While the Trump re-election effort boasted that it would fill Bank of Oklahoma Center, which seats more than 19,000 people, only 6,200 supporters ultimately occupied the general admission sections, the Tulsa fire marshal told NBC News.

Empty seats in the BOK Center

The campaign was so confident about a high turnout that it set up an overflow area, which it had expected to attract thousands. But the plan was scrapped at the last minute when only dozens gathered at the time the vice president and the president were set to address the crowd inside.

"It's politics 101: You under-promise and overdeliver," a Trump ally said, conceding the missteps the Trump 2020 team took in the lead-up to the event by saying nearly 1 million people had responded to requests for admission.

It is reported that a coordinated effort on TikTok in the days leading up to Trump's Saturday rally, encouraged people to register online for the free event and not show.

Trump returns to the White House following the Tulsa rally

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NBC News

I Made Juneteenth Famous

Donald Trump is seeking to take credit for making Juneteenth -- a day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States -- "very famous," after rescheduling his first rally since the start of the pandemic to avoid further criticism for seeming to co-opt it.

"I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous," Trump said in reference to the rally date in an interview published Thursday. "It's actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it."

Juneteenth is the oldest regular U.S. celebration of the end of slavery. It commemorates June 19, 1865: the day that Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and told a group of enslaved African-Americans that the Civil War had ended and they had been freed.

Trump didn't seem to know that his White House had been putting out public statements commemorating the day throughout his tenure in office. "Oh, really? We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?" Trump said, adding that that was "good."

3 Years Ago

from The News-Gazette  06/13/2017  --  less than 5 months after Trump's inauguration

Morning Walks

As seen while walking this morning:

Normally I would post this in my Morning Walks album on Facebook.  But it's "too political" for me on a public forum.  I just do not want to hear a conversation.

Conspiracy Theory

President Donald Trump tweeted a conspiracy theory Tuesday about a Buffalo man injured by police that has circulated around fringe, far-right online media in recent days, adding to efforts from the president and other conservatives to cast protesters as part of a shadowy "antifa" movement.

Trump suggested that Martin Gugino, 75, who is in serious but stable condition in a Buffalo hospital after being pushed by two police officers at a protest, may be an "ANTIFA provocateur" who was "scanning" police equipment when he was pushed.

Trump's claims appeared to have been ripped from a conspiracy theory that aired Tuesday morning on One America News Network, a far-right cable news channel. The theory was originally posted to an anonymous conservative blog.

Trump and many of his supporters have claimed with little evidence that antifa has been executing plans to cause unrest and spark violence during recent protests. Antifa, a loosely organized network of groups that use direct action to confront far-right and fascist groups, in reality has been found to have little involvement with the protests despite rumors circulating online and claims from some law enforcement officials.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo weighed in, saying that there was no factual basis for the tweet. "How reckless. How irresponsible. How mean. How crude. I mean, if there was ever a reprehensible, dumb comment," Cuomo said. "And from the president of the United States."

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NBC News     06/09/2020

Gugino, identified as a longtime peace activist, is a member of two nonprofits: PUSH Buffalo, which focuses on affordable housing, and the Western New York Peace Center, a human rights organization. He is also part of the Catholic Worker Movement and politically active on social media, frequently criticizing Trump.

Contradictory Stories

Attorney General William P. Barr sat for a lengthy interview June 8 with Fox News, during which he very notably contradicted the White House’s claim that Trump did not retreat to the White House bunker in the face of protests recently.

The confirmation was merely the latest example of the White House’s dodgy and false narratives colliding with one another.

Reports of Trump’s bunker retreat surfaced last week, when The New York Times reported and others including The Washington Post confirmed that Trump had retreated to it on the night of May 29 during particularly heated confrontations on the streets of Washington, D.C. This is a narrative that Trump didn’t like — for obvious reasons — and he quickly set out to deny it.

Trump at first suggested he had not gone to the bunker, but then confirmed he did — but only for an “inspection.”

“Well, it was a false report. I wasn’t [there]," he said. He then added: “I went down during the day, and I was there for a tiny little short period of time, and it was much more for an inspection. There was no problem during the day.”

Barr’s flub emanates from two very contradictory and suspect narratives that the White House is peddling. On the one hand, Trump is suggesting that he was not actually retreating in the face of unrest; on the other hand the White House has tried to argue that the scenes in Washington were so bad that they necessitated the violent advance on the protesters on the evening of June 1 that just so happened to precede Trump’s visit to the vandalized church for the photo op.

St. John's Episcopal Church before Trump posed in front of it, June 8

Barr wants to defend his role in clearing the protesters, and so he has understandably erred on the side of playing up the supposed dangers that existed just outside the White House. Unfortunately for him, in doing so, he contradicted something the president himself had claimed about the scene.

Now he is in the position of either correcting himself — despite sources continuing to confirm that Trump had indeed retreated to the bunker that evening because of the unrest — or leaving it out there as having confirmed a scene that cuts to the core of Trump’s attempts to portray himself as an impervious and tough president in the face of violent protesters.

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The Washington Post     06/09/2020 

Just a couple more things:

Ivanka egged him on
The Times reports that Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser, “urged” him to take the short walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where a small fire briefly burned during protests Sunday night. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has given her even more credit, telling some people that the whole thing was her idea. In either case, Ivanka later accompanied her dad to the church, carrying a Bible in her $1,540 handbag.

Ivanka accompanies her father

No one thought about what Trump would do when he got to the church

With their attention turned to how to get Trump through a throng of protesters, White House officials tell the Times they gave little thought to what the president would do once he got there. And so he stood, showing off a Bible, and posing for photos.

Defender of the Constitution?

Scores of retired military and defense leaders are denouncing President Donald Trump and accusing him of using the U.S. Armed Forces to undermine the rights of Americans protesting police brutality and the killing of George Floyd.

The condemnation Friday came in an op-ed in The Washington Post, signed by 89 former defense officials, and in a letter in support of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, signed by 55 retired military leaders. It comes days after law enforcement officers used tear gas and deployed flash bangs to disperse a peaceful protest near White House shortly before Trump walked to the area to pose with a Bible in front of a damaged church.

The Post op-ed accuses Trump of betraying his oath of office “by threatening to order members of the U.S. military to violate the rights of their fellow Americans.” The op-ed was signed by a mix of Republicans and Democrats, including former defense secretaries Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, Ash Carter and William Cohen; former national intelligence director James Clapper; former CIA director Michael Hayden; and former Navy secretaries Sean O'Keefe, Ray Mabus and Richard Danzig.

Separately, Trump's former defense secretary James Mattis, a retired Marine general, and John Allen, a retired four-star general in the Marine Corps, have also denounced Trump's behavior over the protests. Mattis wrote, “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

Crybaby-in-Chief

Just a blurb from today's News-Gazette:

Tiny, Little, and Short

President Donald Trump on Wednesday denied media reports that he was rushed for his safety to the White House bunker while protests raged in the streets outside. "It was a false report," Trump told Fox News radio, before elaborating that he did go into the secure area but only for a "tiny, little, short period time."

Outside the White House, in Lafayette Square, crowds of people protesting police brutality fought running battles with officers and set fires. According to Fox News, Trump was taken to the bunker on Sunday. Trump said he'd gone down but only during the day, not the night, as reported, and that he was partly doing so to carry out an "inspection."

Reports of Trump taking shelter sparked a wave of online mockery, which is believed to have contributed to his decision on Monday to make a controversial walk across Lafayette Park to visit the partly damaged church of St. John's. Officers violently dispersed mostly peaceful crowds of protesters to clear a path for Trump. To cap his show of strength, he stood outside the church for pictures of him holding up a Bible.

  

American religious leaders castigated Donald Trump for posing in front of the church. "It was traumatic and deeply offensive, in the sense that something sacred was being misused for a political gesture," Washington's Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde said.

Other Episcopalian leaders denounced Trump's visit to the church as "disgraceful and morally repugnant." "Simply by holding aloft an unopened Bible he presumed to claim Christian endorsement and imply that of The Episcopal Church," bishops from New England said in a statement.

GOP senators criticized also:

The News-Gazette  06/03/2020

On Tuesday the president and his wife followed up with a visit to the St John Paul II National Shrine in the capital's northeast, immediately infuriating the country's Catholic leadership as well. "I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles," Washington's Archbishop Wilton Gregory said in a statement. The pontiff, who died in 2005, "certainly would not condone the use of tear gas and other deterrents to silence, scatter or intimidate them for a photo opportunity in front of a place of worship and peace," he added.