Talk’st thou to me of ‘ifs’? Thou art a traitor

NY Times editorial board:
Donald Trump: The Russia File
[…]
On Sunday, the new Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, urged his Republican colleagues to back his effort to obtain notes or testimony from the interpreter present at the meetings between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.
“Shouldn’t we find out whether our president is really putting ‘America first?’” Mr. Schiff tweeted.
This is not a new or unexplored possibility, even among Republicans at one time.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” Kevin McCarthy, who was then House majority leader, told his fellow Republicans at a closed-door meeting, The Washington Post first reported, shortly before Mr. Trump won his party’s nomination for the White House in 2016.
Dana Rohrabacher, a 15-term congressman from California who lost his bid for re-election in November, was such a staunch supporter of Moscow on Capitol Hill that the F.B.I. concluded that Russian spies were trying to recruit him.
Mr. McCarthy said later that his line about Mr. Trump being paid by Moscow was a quip that landed flat.
What’s no laughing matter is the unwillingness of the Republican Party to cast a critical eye upon a sitting president who has so flouted accepted practice for dealing with any foreign leader — not to mention one as adversarial as Vladimir Putin. 

courthousenews:
HARTFORD, Ct. (CN) – Heading off a Tuesday disbarment hearing, convicted ex-Trump confidant Paul Manafort submitted his resignation as a lawyer in Connecticut.
 
Represented by attorneys at the firm Ury & Moskow, the 69-year-old Manafort stipulated in the Jan. 9 filing that he is waiving his right “to seek reinstatement at any time in the future.”
[…]
Manafort’s filing in Hartford says Connecticut ethics officials cited Manafort’s guilty plea as evidence of attorney misconduct.
 
“By submitting this Resignation and Waiver, I waive the right to a full evidentiary hearing on both the Presentment and the Grievance and acknowledge that the court will enter a finding of misconduct in the presentment because of my being convicted of a crime pursuant to P .B. Section 2-41,” Manafort wrote in an affidavit.
 
The document says Manafort was admitted to practice law in Connecticut in October 1974 but has no law practice, office, or clients in either Connecticut or the District of Columbia, where he is also a member of the bar. He has no appearances of record before any state or federal court in Connecticut.
 
A judge must still decide whether to accept Manafort’s resignation.
 

.

the guardian:
Chris Christie, who was ousted as chairman of Donald Trump’s White House transition team in 2016, has written a blistering attack on Jared Kushner, whom he accuses of having carried out a political “hit job” on him as an act of revenge for prosecuting his father, Charles Kushner, a decade ago.
 
In his soon to be published book, Let Me Finish, Christie unleashes both barrels on Trump’s son-in-law, who remains a senior White House adviser with responsibilities for Middle Eastern peace, sentencing reform and “American Innovation”.
 
Christie blames this key player in the president’s inner circle for his ignominious dismissal shortly after Trump’s election victory in November 2016. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, writes that Kushner’s role in his sacking was confirmed to him by Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chief, in real time.
As Bannon was carrying out the firing, at Trump Tower in New York, Christie forced him to tell him who was really behind the dismissal by threatening to go to the media and point the finger at Bannon instead.
“Steve Bannon … made clear to me that one person and one person only was responsible for the faceless execution that Steve was now attempting to carry out. Jared Kushner, still apparently seething over events that had occurred a decade ago.”
 
The political assassination was carried out by Kushner as a personal vendetta, Christie writes, that had its roots in his prosecution, as a then federal attorney, of Charles Kushner in 2005. The real estate tycoon was charged with witness tampering and tax evasion and served more than a year in federal prison.
 
Even for a White House that has generated an extraordinary cornucopia of hypercritical kiss-and-tell books, Christie’s is exceptional for its excoriating description of events at which he was present. As he points out in Let Me Finish, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian ahead of publication on 29 January, none of the other authors “has known Trump for as long or as well as I have – or was right there in the room when much of this occurred”.
It is also exceptional as a chronicle of the score-settling and animosity that drove key decision-making in Trump’s nascent presidency. As political scientists look for the roots of the mayhem in the current White House, the book provides new clues.
 
At the heart of it is Christie’s desire to tell the American people that had his transition plan been adopted after Trump’s shock victory on election night in November 2016, the Trump White House would be a much more effective place today. Once he had been tossed overboard, the new transition team led by Vice President-elect Mike Pence had a “thrown-together approach” that led to appalling choices of senior personnel “over and over again”.
 

But the emotional heart of the book is Christie’s account of the actions of Jared Kushner. In this telling, Christie was ditched by a young man who made it his business to discredit and denounce him because of what he had done to his father.
 
“The kid’s been taking an ax to your head with the boss ever since I got here,” Bannon confessed at Christie’s dismissal.
 
Christie was the US attorney in New Jersey when he spearheaded the prosecution of Charles Kushner for witness tampering. The case arose out of a bitter family feud.
[…]
Meanwhile, Kushner is not the only subject of Christie’s wrath. The author is scathing about Michael Flynn, the retired general who was briefly national security adviser before resigning over his dealings with Russia, and who is now cooperating with the special counsel and awaiting sentencing for lying to the FBI.
 
In one of the book’s more memorable put-downs, Flynn is dubbed “the Russian lackey and future federal felon”. Christie also calls the former general “a train wreck from beginning to end … a slow-motion car crash”.
 
However, one central character escapes relatively unscathed: Trump himself. The president is utterly fearless and a unique communicator Christie writes – and his main flaw is that he speaks on impulse and surrounds himself with people he should not trust.
[continues]

kgc,  he can write?

x-r & kgc,  I meant the twit who’s well known for not reading.  therefore I assumed he also was incapable of or reluctant to write. 

readin ritin and rithmatic not in twit’s repertoire

nbc:
LONDON — The British prime minister’s Brexit deal was rejected by lawmakers Tuesday, a widely anticipated result that sends the country’s chaotic preparations to leave the European Union back to the drawing board.
In one of the most eagerly anticipated votes in recent U.K. history, lawmakers rejected Theresa May’s deal by 432 votes to 202, with dozens of members of her own ruling Conservative Party rebelling.
 
The consequences are complex and uncharted, but the prime minister must now present a plan B to the House of Commons.
 
The wider picture is that more than 30 months after Britain voted in a referendum to leave the E.U. — by a vote of 17.4 million to 16.1 million — the politicians have still not agreed how this should work.
Tuesday’s vote was originally meant to happen in December but May postponed it in the face of almost certain defeat.
Now that it has finally happened, lawmakers must figure out what to do next. It’s not clear whether any alternative plan has enough support, and the E.U. has said it won’t budge in the concessions it has already given her.
If May and Parliament cannot agree on another course of action, Britain will crash out of the E.U. on March 29 without a deal, something most experts say would have catastrophic consequences.
Shortages of food and medicine, civil unrest, chaos at ports and airports and even rekindled conflict in Northern Ireland have all been touted as possibilities under a “no-deal” Brexit.
The opposition Labour Party has said it will seek to oust May’s government but it is not clear whether it has the required number of votes.
Other lawmakers want a “softer” Brexit or even another referendum — dubbed “the people’s vote” — which might give the public the choice between May’s deal, no deal, or no Brexit at all.