For the most part they don't, name the last incumbent president who was not given his party's nomination to run again...
Tillerson confirms Trump is a criminal
- Thread starter exGOPer
- Start date
For the most part they don't, name the last incumbent president who was not given his party's nomination to run again...
Breathtaking.
I hold totally opposite opinion, as tainted as she is, she would be a shining star when compared to Trump.
Trump Fumes Over Rex Tillerson’s Claim That Putin Out-Prepared Him
“I don’t think Putin would agree,” the president tweeted, calling his former secretary of state “dumb as a rock.”
President Donald Trump on Thursday tore into former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson over comments he reportedly made to members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week.
“I don’t think I have to prepare very much,” Trump said ahead of his first summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last year. “It’s about willingness to get things done. ... It’s a question of whether or not people want it to happen.”
“I don’t think Putin would agree,” the president tweeted, calling his former secretary of state “dumb as a rock.”
President Donald Trump on Thursday tore into former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson over comments he reportedly made to members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week.
“I don’t think I have to prepare very much,” Trump said ahead of his first summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last year. “It’s about willingness to get things done. ... It’s a question of whether or not people want it to happen.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...uliani-client-facing-doj-charges?srnd=premium
Trump Urged Top Aide to Help Giuliani Client Facing DOJ Charges
Tillerson refused, arguing it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation of the trader, Reza Zarrab, according to the people. They said other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request.
Tillerson immediately repeated his objections to then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in a hallway conversation just outside the Oval Office, emphasizing that the request would be illegal. Neither episode has been previously reported, and all of the people spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the conversations.
The White House declined to comment. Kelly and Tillerson declined to comment via representatives. Another person familiar with the matter said the Justice Department never considered dropping the criminal case.
Zarrab was being prosecuted in federal court in New York at the time on charges of evading U.S. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. He had hired former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Giuliani, who has said he reached out repeatedly to U.S. officials to seek a diplomatic solution for his client outside the courts.
The president’s request to Tillerson -- which included asking him to speak with Giuliani -- bears the hallmarks of Trump’s governing style, defined by his willingness to sweep aside the customary procedures and constraints of government to pursue matters outside normal channels. Tillerson’s objection came to light as Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders face intense scrutiny following the July 25 call with Ukraine’s president that has sparked an impeachment inquiry in the House.
The episode is also likely to fuel long-standing concerns from some of Trump’s critics about his policies toward Turkey and his relationship with its authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Zarrab’s release was a high priority for Erdogan until the gold trader agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in New York.
It isn’t clear whether Trump considered his request for Tillerson to intervene to be improper or was just testing the bounds of what he could do as president on an issue that could provide diplomatic benefits while also helping Giuliani, a longtime supporter. The Oval Office meeting occurred in the second half of 2017 and Giuliani wasn’t the president’s personal lawyer at the time, as he is now.
‘Prisoner Swap’
In a phone interview this month, Giuliani initially denied that he ever raised Zarrab’s case with Trump but later said he might have done so. He said he’d been speaking with U.S. officials as part of his effort to arrange a swap of Zarrab for Andrew Brunson, an American pastor jailed in Turkey who was later released in 2018.
“Suppose I did talk to Trump about it -- so what? I was a private lawyer at the time,” Giuliani said. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe at some point I dropped his name in a conversation. Or maybe one of his people talked to him about it because I was trying to do a prisoner swap.”
Giuliani said he discussed the Zarrab case with State Department officials and disclosed that two years ago, although he declined to say if he ever spoke directly to Tillerson about the case, saying “you have no right to know that.”
State Department Alarm
Concerns about Trump’s close alliance with Erdogan were exacerbated this week after Trump abruptly announced on Sunday that he would clear U.S. troops from the path of a planned Turkish invasion in northeast Syria. The weekend announcement drew quick criticism from top Republican lawmakers, who said it endangered Kurdish forces the U.S. relied on to defeat Islamic State. Those Kurdish-led forces are now under attack.
Trump followed his weekend decision with an announcement Tuesday that he has invited Erdogan to the White House in November.
As he was with Ukraine, Giuliani was so steeped in events in Turkey that State Department officials grew increasingly alarmed. Earlier in 2017, he had traveled to the country and met with Erdogan as part of his effort to seek a resolution in Zarrab’s case.
He and Mukasey said in a letter to the judge in Zarrab’s case that they notified then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions of their plans before holding a meeting with Erdogan.
Erdogan repeatedly spoke with Trump and, before 2017, Obama administration officials about Zarrab’s case when it was before the Southern District of New York as part of a broader investigation into a scheme to evade sanctions on Iran.
At one point, the State Department under Tillerson got involved in discussions over possibly swapping Zarrab for Brunson, the jailed pastor, but the matter was eventually dropped because Turkey kept escalating its demands, according to another person familiar with the timeline of events.
Tillerson has said publicly that the president frequently asked him to do things that were illegal.
“So often, the president would say ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it,’ and I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way,”’ Tillerson said in an on-stage interview with Bob Schieffer in Texas last year. “It violates the law, it violates treaty you know and he just, he got really frustrated when we’d have those conversations.”
Opulent Lifestyle
pleaded guilty and testified against Mehmet Hakan Atilla, who headed international banking at state-owned Turkiye Halk Bankasii AS, known as Halkbank. Zarrab said Erdogan knew of and supported the laundering effort on behalf of Iran. Erdogan and other senior Turkish officials repeatedly rejected the accusations, saying they were fabrications.
Atilla was eventually convicted of helping Iran evade economic sanctions on billions of dollars of oil revenue and served 28 months in U.S. prison before returning to Turkey in July to a hero’s welcome. Turkey has so far managed to avoid U.S. penalties over the sanctions-evasion scheme.
Despite Erdogan’s demands and Giuliani’s efforts, Zarrab was never sent back to Turkey. Once he agreed to testify, he was moved to a county jail for safekeeping, and he stayed there until after Atilla’s trial was over. By then, Zarrab’s home and assets in Turkey had been seized by Erdogan.
Trump Urged Top Aide to Help Giuliani Client Facing DOJ Charges
- Secretary of State Rex Tillerson refused to interfere in case
2017 episode bears hallmarks of Trump approach to Ukraine call
Tillerson refused, arguing it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation of the trader, Reza Zarrab, according to the people. They said other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request.
Tillerson immediately repeated his objections to then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in a hallway conversation just outside the Oval Office, emphasizing that the request would be illegal. Neither episode has been previously reported, and all of the people spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the conversations.
The White House declined to comment. Kelly and Tillerson declined to comment via representatives. Another person familiar with the matter said the Justice Department never considered dropping the criminal case.
Zarrab was being prosecuted in federal court in New York at the time on charges of evading U.S. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. He had hired former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Giuliani, who has said he reached out repeatedly to U.S. officials to seek a diplomatic solution for his client outside the courts.
The president’s request to Tillerson -- which included asking him to speak with Giuliani -- bears the hallmarks of Trump’s governing style, defined by his willingness to sweep aside the customary procedures and constraints of government to pursue matters outside normal channels. Tillerson’s objection came to light as Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders face intense scrutiny following the July 25 call with Ukraine’s president that has sparked an impeachment inquiry in the House.
The episode is also likely to fuel long-standing concerns from some of Trump’s critics about his policies toward Turkey and his relationship with its authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Zarrab’s release was a high priority for Erdogan until the gold trader agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in New York.
It isn’t clear whether Trump considered his request for Tillerson to intervene to be improper or was just testing the bounds of what he could do as president on an issue that could provide diplomatic benefits while also helping Giuliani, a longtime supporter. The Oval Office meeting occurred in the second half of 2017 and Giuliani wasn’t the president’s personal lawyer at the time, as he is now.
‘Prisoner Swap’
In a phone interview this month, Giuliani initially denied that he ever raised Zarrab’s case with Trump but later said he might have done so. He said he’d been speaking with U.S. officials as part of his effort to arrange a swap of Zarrab for Andrew Brunson, an American pastor jailed in Turkey who was later released in 2018.
“Suppose I did talk to Trump about it -- so what? I was a private lawyer at the time,” Giuliani said. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe at some point I dropped his name in a conversation. Or maybe one of his people talked to him about it because I was trying to do a prisoner swap.”
Giuliani said he discussed the Zarrab case with State Department officials and disclosed that two years ago, although he declined to say if he ever spoke directly to Tillerson about the case, saying “you have no right to know that.”
State Department Alarm
Concerns about Trump’s close alliance with Erdogan were exacerbated this week after Trump abruptly announced on Sunday that he would clear U.S. troops from the path of a planned Turkish invasion in northeast Syria. The weekend announcement drew quick criticism from top Republican lawmakers, who said it endangered Kurdish forces the U.S. relied on to defeat Islamic State. Those Kurdish-led forces are now under attack.
Trump followed his weekend decision with an announcement Tuesday that he has invited Erdogan to the White House in November.
As he was with Ukraine, Giuliani was so steeped in events in Turkey that State Department officials grew increasingly alarmed. Earlier in 2017, he had traveled to the country and met with Erdogan as part of his effort to seek a resolution in Zarrab’s case.
He and Mukasey said in a letter to the judge in Zarrab’s case that they notified then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions of their plans before holding a meeting with Erdogan.
Erdogan repeatedly spoke with Trump and, before 2017, Obama administration officials about Zarrab’s case when it was before the Southern District of New York as part of a broader investigation into a scheme to evade sanctions on Iran.
At one point, the State Department under Tillerson got involved in discussions over possibly swapping Zarrab for Brunson, the jailed pastor, but the matter was eventually dropped because Turkey kept escalating its demands, according to another person familiar with the timeline of events.
Tillerson has said publicly that the president frequently asked him to do things that were illegal.
“So often, the president would say ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it,’ and I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way,”’ Tillerson said in an on-stage interview with Bob Schieffer in Texas last year. “It violates the law, it violates treaty you know and he just, he got really frustrated when we’d have those conversations.”
Opulent Lifestyle
pleaded guilty and testified against Mehmet Hakan Atilla, who headed international banking at state-owned Turkiye Halk Bankasii AS, known as Halkbank. Zarrab said Erdogan knew of and supported the laundering effort on behalf of Iran. Erdogan and other senior Turkish officials repeatedly rejected the accusations, saying they were fabrications.
Atilla was eventually convicted of helping Iran evade economic sanctions on billions of dollars of oil revenue and served 28 months in U.S. prison before returning to Turkey in July to a hero’s welcome. Turkey has so far managed to avoid U.S. penalties over the sanctions-evasion scheme.
Despite Erdogan’s demands and Giuliani’s efforts, Zarrab was never sent back to Turkey. Once he agreed to testify, he was moved to a county jail for safekeeping, and he stayed there until after Atilla’s trial was over. By then, Zarrab’s home and assets in Turkey had been seized by Erdogan.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...reinforce-how-trump-justice-is-transactional/
Bolton’s book appears to reinforce how Trump views justice as transactional
President Trump’s relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has always been unusual.
Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was doing paid work linked to the Turkish government at least through Election Day 2016. Once inaugurated, Trump extended an unusual level of graciousness to Erdogan, even as the Turkish leader leveraged a coup attempt in his country to establish an authoritarian state. After a questionable vote granting Erdogan new power, Trump offered his congratulations, in contrast with the criticism coming from the State Department. During a visit to Washington in 2017, Erdogan’s bodyguards attacked protesters, possibly at Erdogan’s direction. None of this deterred Trump from referring to Erdogan as a friend and himself as a “fan” of the leader.
To some extent, Trump clearly admired — perhaps envied — Erdogan’s style of leadership and consolidation of authority. But Trump also approached Erdogan the way he has other authoritarians who in the past would have or did have strained relationships with the United States: as potential economic and political partners, regardless of their backgrounds.
In October, Trump unexpectedly handed Erdogan a big geopolitical victory, agreeing to withdraw most American troops from northern Syria and allowing Erdogan to take action against Kurdish forces in the region. A Kurdish independence movement has long frustrated Erdogan, who positions the Syrian Kurds as dangerous terrorists. Trump’s withdrawal was seen as giving a green light to Erdogan to quickly eradicate the Kurds — putting a group that had been allied with the United States at significant risk.
In response to criticism that he abandoned the Kurds to Erdogan, Trump wrote an unusual letter to Erdogan.
“Let’s work out a good deal!” the letter began. Erdogan didn’t “want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people,” Trump wrote.
“I have worked hard to solve some of your problems,” the letter later continued. “Don’t let the world down. You can make a great deal.”
This transactionalism in service of preventing a genocide was tonally strange. But that line — “I have worked hard to solve some of your problems” — was pointed. Trump was suggesting that Erdogan had made requests and that Trump was working to fulfill those requests. When the letter was published, we walked through some of the possibilities, including the possible extradition of a cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who resides in the United States (and whom Flynn reportedly discussed surreptitiously extraditing and sending to Turkey).
A copy of a new book from one of Flynn’s successors, former national security adviser John Bolton, offers some additional insight into what Erdogan asked — and what Trump promised.
The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey obtained a copy of the book, which will be released next week. Dawsey writes:
“In May 2018, Bolton says, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan handed Trump a memo claiming innocence for a Turkish firm under investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for violating Iranian sanctions.
‘Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people,’ Bolton writes.”
That firm is presumably Halkbank, a state-owned bank in Turkey. It allegedly sits at the center of an effort undertaken several years ago to evade sanctions imposed on Iran by using gold to buy Iranian oil. Reza Zarrab, a gold trader with ties to both Turkey and Iran, was indicted for his role in the alleged scheme and provided testimony linking both Halkbank and, less directly, Erdogan to the plan.
At one point before agreeing to aid American investigators, Zarrab retained former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani as counsel. Giuliani is now Trump’s lawyer. During a meeting in 2017, with Giuliani in the room, Trump asked then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to get the charges against Zarrab dropped, according to previous Post reporting. Tillerson declined. Later that year, Zarrab flipped. In early 2018, a senior bank official was convicted on charges related to the alleged evasion.
That set the stage for the May 2018 conversation reported by Bolton, who at that point would have been on the job for about a month.
We’ve known for a while both that Erdogan was pushing Trump to abandon the prosecution and that Trump was receptive to the idea. Bloomberg News reported in October that Trump told Erdogan in an April 2019 call that Attorney General William P. Barr and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin would be tasked with handling the case — a pledge that Bloomberg News describes as an “unusual intervention by a president to get his top cabinet officials involved in an active federal investigation.” Since then, of course, we’ve seen Barr’s Justice Department be actively involved in other prosecutions with political significance to Trump, including that of his former ally Roger Stone and the prosecution of Flynn himself for lying to investigators.
“Discussions over a deal that would resolve the issue out of court made little headway before Barr took over as attorney general in February and then became involved in the discussions,” Bloomberg News reported at the time. In February, CNN reported that Barr had, in fact, pressured the U.S. attorney handling the Halkbank case to make a deal.
What the Bolton revelation reinforces is the extent to which Trump infused the Justice Department’s activity with politics. It wasn’t simply that Erdogan raised valid points about Halkbank’s innocence, making a compelling case to Trump. Instead, Trump appears to have seen an opportunity both to deliver a victory for his ally and to uproot prosecutors whom he hadn’t appointed — and who, in the ongoing context of his feud with a perceived “Deep State,” were therefore presumably hostile to his goals.
Step back a bit and consider what Bolton outlines: that Trump agreed to try to help bury a criminal case centered on evading sanctions against Iran. Such sanctions, of course, have become a central part of Trump’s relationship with Iran after he decided to abandon the agreement that scaled those sanctions back in exchange for limits on Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons. In service of this goal, Bolton indicates, Trump actively disparaged federal prosecutors and, seemingly, worked to deliver what Erdogan wanted.
There’s no obvious geopolitical reason for Trump to be so gracious to Erdogan, particularly given the relationship between the United States and Turkey. It’s hard not to remember, though, that Trump’s relationship with Erdogan predates his time in politics.
Thank you Prime Minister Erdogan for joining us yesterday to celebrate the launch of #TrumpTowers Istanbul!
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) April 20, 2012
Whatever the reason, there’s plenty of evidence that resolving the Halkbank issue was central to Trump’s concerns about Turkey. In August, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) engaged in two phone calls with someone he believed to be Turkey’s minister of defense but who was actually a Russian radio personality. In the second of those calls, which the Russian later published, Graham noted Trump’s interest in the Halkbank case.
“He was very keen on the bank case,” Graham said of a conversation he’d had with Trump after the first conversation with the impostor. “You know the one involving the Turkish bank? He does not want that case to hurt our relationship. He mentioned that twice.”
Two months later, Erdogan publicly ignored Trump’s letter in which the president reminded him of how he’d tried to deliver on his behalf. The Turkish president went so far as to tell the world that he threw the letter in the garbage. On Oct. 10, the day after the letter was sent, Erdogan moved his troops into the Kurdish territory in Syria.
On Oct. 15, the Justice Department announced an indictment against Halkbank.
Rex Tillerson Screwed Up Investigation Into Cuba 'Sonic Weapon' Attacks, New Report Says
https://gizmodo.com/rex-tillerson-screwed-up-investigation-into-cuba-sonic-1846239729
A newly released report says Rex Tillerson’s State Department responded in a slow, disorganized fashion to the “Havana syndrome”—the mysterious rash of neural disorders that has plagued U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Cuba and other locations since 2016.
A previously undisclosed report from the State Department’s Accountability Review Board paints a picture of dysfunction, miscommunication and excessive secrecy during Tillerson’s tenure as Secretary of State, the likes of which prevented a thorough investigation into the rash of weird incidents that has left more than a dozen bureaucrats with brain injuries. The report was published Wednesday by the National Security Archive.
The disturbing incidents, first publicized in 2017, have seen foreign officials—mostly CIA agents—afflicted with a range of bizarre symptoms consistent with significant brain trauma. The symptoms were initially attributed to pesticide exposure and crickets, but the conversation has evolved to suggest the injuries resulted from an attack via some sort of “sonic weapon,” likely involving concentrated microwave radiation. Though the first incidents occurred in Cuba, similar episodes have since been reported in China and Uzbekistan, among other places.
Whatever the cause, the one thing we do know is that Tillerson’s State Department botched the initial response. The newly released ARB report depicts the agency’s efforts as bungling and inept, calling its response “stove-piped and largely ad hoc.” Apparently no single person was ever put in charge of coordinating a response to the incidents, nor was any State Department task force developed to address the crisis. Tillerson did make the decision to dramatically reduce staffing levels at the Embassy in Havana, but a “cost-benefit” analysis was not conducted to ensure that this decision would not lead to further dysfunctions, the report claims.
On top of this, inter-agency communication regarding the illnesses were conducted largely outside of normal “channels,” making it harder to retrospectively piece together the work that actually had been done. The report also says Tillerson’s personal failure to fill positions at the State Department contributed to the agency’s failure to respond effectively.
(More at above url)
https://gizmodo.com/rex-tillerson-screwed-up-investigation-into-cuba-sonic-1846239729
A newly released report says Rex Tillerson’s State Department responded in a slow, disorganized fashion to the “Havana syndrome”—the mysterious rash of neural disorders that has plagued U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Cuba and other locations since 2016.
A previously undisclosed report from the State Department’s Accountability Review Board paints a picture of dysfunction, miscommunication and excessive secrecy during Tillerson’s tenure as Secretary of State, the likes of which prevented a thorough investigation into the rash of weird incidents that has left more than a dozen bureaucrats with brain injuries. The report was published Wednesday by the National Security Archive.
The disturbing incidents, first publicized in 2017, have seen foreign officials—mostly CIA agents—afflicted with a range of bizarre symptoms consistent with significant brain trauma. The symptoms were initially attributed to pesticide exposure and crickets, but the conversation has evolved to suggest the injuries resulted from an attack via some sort of “sonic weapon,” likely involving concentrated microwave radiation. Though the first incidents occurred in Cuba, similar episodes have since been reported in China and Uzbekistan, among other places.
Whatever the cause, the one thing we do know is that Tillerson’s State Department botched the initial response. The newly released ARB report depicts the agency’s efforts as bungling and inept, calling its response “stove-piped and largely ad hoc.” Apparently no single person was ever put in charge of coordinating a response to the incidents, nor was any State Department task force developed to address the crisis. Tillerson did make the decision to dramatically reduce staffing levels at the Embassy in Havana, but a “cost-benefit” analysis was not conducted to ensure that this decision would not lead to further dysfunctions, the report claims.
On top of this, inter-agency communication regarding the illnesses were conducted largely outside of normal “channels,” making it harder to retrospectively piece together the work that actually had been done. The report also says Tillerson’s personal failure to fill positions at the State Department contributed to the agency’s failure to respond effectively.
(More at above url)