Puerto Rico’s Governor Officially Sick of Trump’s Shit
Samantha Grasso
Today 1:13pm
Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló and President Donald Trump
Following a very strange, inaccurate presentation by President Donald Trump to Republican senators earlier this week on the amount of federal disaster relief funds given to Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló has sent a message to the president essentially telling him that he’s tired of Trump’s bullshit.
“If the bully gets close, I’ll punch the bully in the mouth,” Rosselló said in an interview with CNN. “It would be a mistake to confuse courtesy with courage.”
Rosselló is currently in Washington to meet with members of Congress in an effort to grant Puerto Rico statehood, CNN reported, which Rosselló views as necessary to receive the disaster recovery funds it needs to continue the nearly-two-year-long process after Hurricane Maria.
At a weekly policy lunch on Tuesday, Trump, with the help of a misleading visual aid, questioned why Puerto Rico was getting $91 billion in aid, when Texas received $29 billion and South Carolina got $1.5 billion in aid for disaster recovery from storms. Puerto Rico, in fact, has not received even close to $91 billion—that figure is closer to the amount of damage the hurricane caused to the island, according to the Washington Post.
Following Trump’s joust at Puerto Rico, the latest in months of attacks on the island’s finances and accusations that it’s spending irresponsibly, Rosselló said Trump’s comments “are below the dignity of a sitting President of the United States. They continue to lack empathy, are irresponsible, regrettable and, above all, unjustified.”
“I invite the president to stop listening to ignorant and completely wrong advice,” Rosselló said at the time.
His thoughts shared with CNN today hit at Trump even harder. From CNN (emphasis mine):
Rosselló said the President is working off of bad information provided by White House officials.
“It’s unfortunate that we are having to hear this. These statements lack empathy, but more so they lack the true facts of the matter,” Rosselló said in response to Trump’s comments. “They’re not aligned with the truth and reality, No. 1. And No. 2, I just think we have to end this battle of words and just recognize we’re not his political adversaries, we’re his citizens,” the governor added.
[…]
“He treats us as second class citizens, that’s for sure,” he said. “And my consideration is I just want the opportunity to explain to him why the data and information he’s getting is wrong. I don’t think getting into a kicking and screaming match with the President does any good. I don’t think anyone can beat the President in a kicking and screaming match. What I am aiming to do is make sure reason prevails, that empathy prevails, that equality prevails, and that we can have a discussion.”
It’s not just Trump treating the Puerto Ricans with disrespect, but his administration too. Puerto Rican officials told CNN that on Wednesday, they were told by White House senior officials including trade adviser Peter Navarro that Puerto Rico was being too adamant in setting up a meeting between the governor and Trump. “You guys have to fucking stop with the meeting request,” one official reportedly said, while Navarro reportedly added: “Your governor is fucking things up.”
I don’t know, y’all. Maybe if the president actually gave a shit about helping Puerto Rico and the people who live there recover from the worst disaster to hit the island in modern history, Puerto Rican officials wouldn’t have to hound him for a meeting. But sure, Rosselló’s the one “fucking things up” here.
Either way, if Trump thinks dealing with Puerto Rico is going to get any easier any time soon, he’s got another thing coming—last week, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, an even more ferocious critic of the president and his response to Hurricane Maria, announced that she would run for governor of Puerto Rico in 2020.
Splinter Staff Writer, Texan
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It took Trump 90 seconds to lie about the “Mueller report” during Michigan speech
The president then took a victory lap.
By Aaron Rupar on March 28, 2019 9:40 pm
Less than two minutes into President Donald Trump’s speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he lied about special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.
“The collusion delusion is over,” Trump said on Thursday night, in his first speech since Attorney General Bill Barr announced some of Mueller’s key conclusions on Sunday. “The special counsel completed its report and found no collusion and no obstruction.”
It is not true, however, that the special counsel exonerated Trump of obstruction of justice. While we still can’t say for sure what the special counsel said — all we know of Mueller’s final report came by way of a brief summary of it sent to Congress on Sunday by Barr, Trump’s hand-picked attorney general — even Barr’s letter acknowledged Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction.
“While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” says Mueller’s report, according to one of the few direct quotations from the special counsel’s report included in Barr’s summary.
Barr, together with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, made the subsequent decision to clear Trump of possible obstruction of justice charges. The public still hasn’t seen the final report, which the New York Times reported on Thursday is over 300 pages long. It remains unclear if the special counsel intended for Barr and Rosenstein to resolve the obstruction question, or if he primarily meant to use his report to present evidence to Congress.
It’s also not not quite the case that Mueller said “no collusion,” as Trump claimed. According to another quotation from the report included in Barr’s summary, Mueller concluded that “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” But not establishing a conspiracy is not the same as finding no evidence of collusion at all.
After falsely claiming total exoneration, Trump used Barr’s letter to go on the attack against some of his most prominent Democratic critics — including the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who went viral earlier in the day when he responded to a Republican effort to compel him to resign during a hearing by reciting the major pieces of evidence suggesting the Trump campaign did in fact collude with Russia.
“Little pencil-neck Adam Schiff,” Trump said, prompting boos from the crowd. “He has the smallest, thinnest neck I have ever seen. He is not a long-ball hitter. But I saw him today — ‘well, we don’t really know, there could still have been some Russia collusion.’ Sick. Sick. These are sick people.”
While Trump and his allies have spent the week crowing over the fact that the special counsel apparently won’t be indicting Trump or any additional associates of his, it remains unclear when members of Congress or the public will be able to see more of the Mueller report beyond the less than 100 words quoted in Barr’s summary.
Following a phone call with Barr on Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (NY) said the attorney general made it clear that he won’t meet an April 2 deadline Democrats set for making the report public.
“We’re not happy about that, to put it mildly,” Nadler said, according to the Times.
During his speech in Michigan, Trump did not bother trying to explain the apparent disconnect between his misleading declarations of total exoneration on one hand, and his administration’s apparent reluctance to release the Mueller report on the other. After all, if the report is as exonerating as Trump has indicated, then why not make it public and take yet another victory lap?
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Dee Margo, the Republican mayor of El Paso, met with Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan when the federal official visited the border in the city on Wednesday and declared the system there to be “at breaking point”.
Margo told NPR shortly after that that the idea of shutting the border in response to the current migration surge would not be helpful.
He put the problem down, in the big picture, to the lack of “intestinal fortitude” exhibited on either side of the aisle in Congress on immigration laws for the past three decades.
Immediately on the ground, if the president closes the border next week, the effects will immediately be dramatic, if that’s not stating the obvious. Just in El Paso, Margo pointed out that:
“We have a hundred billion-plus in trade back and forth in imports and exports. We have six of the 28 bridges that cross from Texas to Mexico…We have 23,000 legal pedestrians that come north every day. We’ve got 13 million vehicles that come north every year.
“It affects us all the way around, from commerce - and the wait times on the bridges are approaching two hours, that’s an environmental issue, while cars are just sitting there idling. It’s a major problem.
“But the issue is not just Mexico and whatever they’re doing. The issue is the lack of action by our Congress to deal with this.”
Updated at 1.11pm EDT
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Politicians disagree about whether there is a crisis at the border and, if there is, to what extent it is self-inflicted by America’s own dysfunctional immigration policies.
My colleagues Amanda Holpuch, taking to experts from her well-informed purchase in New York, and Nina Lakhani, who’s based south of the US-Mexico border and reports from Mexico City, analyze the latest and jointly write today:
US authorities’ failure to keep up with a steep increase in Central American families seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border has left El Paso aid workers, churches and city government scrambling to respond.
After a sudden surge in arrivals, migrants have been crowded into hotels, churches and even held under a bridge behind a chain-link fence and razor wire while their asylum claims are processed.
The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner, Kevin McAleenan, said the number of new arrivals in March is expected to reach 100,000, including 55,000 family members. “The immigration system is at breaking point,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
The chaotic scenes in El Paso are the result of a regional crisis in which growing numbers of Central American families flee violence, corruption and poverty – only to come up against failed migration polices in Mexico and the US.
Comedy writer and political observer Nick Jack Pappas isn’t laughing.
He tweeted: “$558 billion in goods flow across the U.S.- Mexico border in both directions, making Mexico our third-biggest trading partner for goods. Closing the border would cost billions.”
Pappas then continues, including a think tank quote: “If you are thinking about a total shutdown of the border, then it’s hundreds of millions of dollars A DAY – maybe a billion.” - Duncan Wood, director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute. Our economy would stall. The U.S. would become one of Trump’s failed businesses.
The Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies demand the detention of migrants entering the US unlawfully, even if they are claiming asylum after escaping violence and crushing poverty in Central America.
Most migrants are arriving from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, a region my world affairs colleague in Washington, Julian Borger, has described, politically, as “a hell the US helped create” with its foreign policy.
The federal agencies on the front line, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are overwhelmed.
Hundreds of migrant families who’ve crossed the border are packed under a highway overpass on the border in El Paso, in western Texas, next to the border processing station, behind razor wire and fencing, as CBP struggles to figure out where to put them.
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DONALD TRUMP DEFENDERS ARE FAILING TO ACCEPT REALITY OVER MUELLER’S REPORT, JOHN BRENNAN’S SPOKESMAN SAYS
By Shane Croucher On 3/29/19 at 7:52 AM EDT
John Brennan Donald Trump Mueller Report
Former Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill, May 23, 2017 in Washington, DC. Brennan has accused President Donald Trump of treasonous behavior.
U.S. DONALD TRUMP RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
A spokesman for former CIA Director John Brennan has accused President Donald Trump and his defenders over the Mueller report of failing to accept reality amid criticism of the ex-intelligence chief.
Trump has claimed total exoneration by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which is confidential and has so far only been briefly summarized in public by Attorney General William Barr.
But Barr’s summary states explicitly that Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, does not exonerate Trump on the charge of obstruction of justice.
The president attacked Brennan in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, calling the intelligence veteran sick and saying he was not good at his former job.
“Let’s not forget that the special counsel’s investigation resulted in indictments against 34 people and three entities on nearly 200 separate criminal charges,” Brennan’s spokesman told Newsweek.
“Five associates of the president have been convicted, and another is awaiting trial. Those who think nothing happened and who are now going after critics of the president aren’t accepting reality and they are just playing politics.”
Trump and Brennan, who was director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, have clashed over the president’s approach to Russia.
The former intelligence head, who has worked for Republican and Democratic presidents, is a fierce and frequent critic of Trump. In response to the criticism, Trump revoked Brennan’s security clearance.
At an infamous joint press conference with Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin after the pair met for private talks, the U.S. president cast doubt on the conclusion of his own intelligence agencies that the Kremlin sought to interfere in the 2016 election.
On Twitter following the press conference, Brennan suggested Trump is a traitor whose comments were impeachable.
“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors,’” Brennan tweeted. “It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”
In the final days before Mueller finished his report and handed it to the attorney general, Brennan speculated that there could be last-minute indictments of Trump family members, though he caveated that he did not know anything about the investigation.
In the end, there were no further indictments. But Trump and his supporters seized on Brennan’s comments to MSNBC, accusing him of making a phoney prediction.
“I think Brennan’s a sick person, I really do,” Trump told Hannity in an interview giving his thoughts about the Barr summary of the Mueller report.
“I believe there’s something wrong with him…For him to come out of the CIA and act that way was so disrespectful to the country, and to the CIA, and to the position he held.
“He was not considered good at what he did. He was never a respected guy. Tough guy, but not a respected guy. But he lied to Congress. And the other night before the report came out, he predicted horrible things. The things he said were horrible.”
Barr has so far only released a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings in his book-length report, which spans more than 300 pages.
The attorney general intends to release at least some of the report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in April.
The U.S. intelligence community concludes that Russia attempted to sway the election in Trump’s favor. Mueller indicted many Russian intelligence officers over election interference.
According to Barr’s summary, Mueller’s report did not find that the president, his campaign, or any of its associates conspired or coordinated with Russia to influence the election.
Barr also noted that Mueller did not exonerate Trump on charges of obstruction of justice related to the special counsel’s long-running investigation.
But the special counsel also did not conclude that the president committed a crime.
Trump’s critics accuse the president of meddling with the investigation by constantly discrediting it as a politically motivated witch hunt, attacking Mueller’s witnesses, and taking action such as firing the former FBI Director James Comey when he had oversight of the probe.
Mueller deferred the decision to prosecute on the obstruction charges to Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who declined to pursue Trump.
“On the issue of obstruction of justice, Brennan believes it is too important to be dismissed by a Trump-appointed AG with a predetermined view on presidential accountability to the rule of law, and that we all need to see the report,” Brennan’s spokesman told Newsweek.
“As for the president and his own actions, Brennan will leave to others how it is possible that one can engage with a foreign power in a most unethical, unprincipled, and unpatriotic way without violating criminal statutes.
“But Mueller determined those actions weren’t illegal and Brennan fully accepts that.”
The spokesman added that Americans should expect much more of a president than the ability to escape criminal liability. “Traits such as decency, honesty, integrity, and competence in our president sure would be nice,” he said.
The president is still the subject of multiple investigations spanning his political, business and personal life.
Among those investigating Trump are various House committees, which plan to use the Mueller report to advance their own probes, including connections between Russia and his campaign, and the Southern District of New York.
Donald Trump on Wind Power Is ‘Malicious Ignorance’
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