https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/grab-that-record-how-trumps-high-school-transcript-was-hidden/2019/03/05/8815b7b8-3c61-11e9-aaae-69364b2ed137_story.html?utm_term=.548f2e093652
In 2011, days after Donald Trump challenged President Barack Obama to “show his records” to prove that he hadn’t been a “terrible student,” the headmaster at New York Military Academy got an order from his boss: Find Trump’s academic records and help bury them.
The superintendent of the private school “came to me in a panic because he had been accosted by prominent, wealthy alumni of the school who were Mr. Trump’s friends” and who wanted to keep his records secret, recalled Evan Jones, the headmaster at the time. “He said, ‘You need to go grab that record and deliver it to me because I need to deliver it to them.’ ”
The superintendent, Jeffrey Coverdale, confirmed Monday that members of the school’s board of trustees initially wanted him to hand over President Trump’s records to them, but Coverdale said he refused.
“I was given directives, part of which I could follow but part of which I could not, and that was handing them over to the trustees,” he said. “I moved them elsewhere on campus where they could not be released. It’s the only time I ever moved an alumnus’s records.”The former NYMA officials’ recollections add new details to one of the allegations that Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, made before Congress last week. Cohen, who told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that part of his job was to attack Trump’s critics and defend his reputation, said that Trump ordered him “to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.”
Trump has frequently boasted that he was a stellar student, but he declined throughout the 2016 campaign to release any of his academic records, telling The Washington Post then, “I’m not letting you look at anything.” [continues]
While reading the above, keep in mind this quote:
The fact of the Watergate cover-up is not nearly as interesting as the step into making the cover-up. And when you understand the step, you understand that Richard Nixon lied. That he was a criminal.
– Bob Woodward
here’s the link and headline of wapo story
‘Grab that record’: How Trump’s high school transcript was hidden
[after detailing more of the cover-up efforts, the story concludes]
.
hello from the wild and effing cold north. It has taken me a few days to figure out that I had to use our Amazon fire tablet to comment. My iPhone is forbidden. Bink is correct…. WordPress sucks! I am reading Everything Trump Touches Dies by Rick Wilson. Best book about Trump I’ve read yet…. and it’s hilarious to boot! The hot tub is great!
!laissez les bons temps rouler!
from nyt best of late night:
President Trump has responded dismissively to congressional Democrats’ push to investigate him. He told reporters on Tuesday that the House Judiciary Committee’s broad inquiry into his activities was merely an effort to overshadow his achievements.
“No administration has accomplished — probably you could say this with absolute surety — in the first two years anywhere near what we’ve accomplished,” Trump asserted.
By now, Stephen Colbert is used to hearing Trump speak in superlatives — but he couldn’t countenance that claim.
—-
At an event on Monday, a reporter asked Trump whether he would cooperate with Representative Jerry Nadler, the head of the House Judiciary Committee, who is investigating whether the president committed obstruction of justice. Trump shot back: “I cooperate all the time with everybody.”
James Corden cried foul.
—-
Jimmy Kimmel welcomed the arrival of Mardi Gras with some old-fashioned cynicism.
in re reprimand discussion yesterday
the hill: Progressives come to Omar’s defense
[…]
IfNotNow, a Jewish progressive activist group, started a petition urging Democratic leaders to withdraw the resolution, arguing the focus should be on white nationalism. A coalition of Muslim and left-leaning Jewish advocacy groups also plan to hold a press conference on Wednesday in support of Omar and urge Democratic leaders to “equally condemn” anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and racism.
[continues]
Renee, cold in the White Mountains in February – who could have guessed that? I’ve been cold there, too. As long as the lifts are still running enjoy the hot tub and think about Rick freezing his ass off on his way up the mountain. Any deals you just couldn’t pass up at Lahouts?
I’m not sure why you and Bink (and Sturge) can’t access and comment on your iPhones – I don’t have that problem, but then again mine is a coal fired iPhone 7. It does have a few limitations with respect to the display and accessing the link feature for the first couple of lines of text, but other than that, it works with the platform (although I do agree with the WordPress comments).
OK, so SFB and his minions did a full Court Press to bury his academic records. ~~I can’t imagine that he was anything less than a stellar student ~~ The guy’s a phucking idiot now and I bet he was a phucking idiot then – otherwise he’d be holding the goddam transcript up in front of every camera within sight.
Here’s me.
patd, I have great deal of trouble shrinking cartoons, pictures, etc to get them to post – got any tips?
Reported in WaPo today:
I guess the tariff talk, blustery bullshit and bringing jobs back isn’t working out as SFB hoped. He’s so far out of his depth he couldn’t see the surface to save his life.
Pogo…it’s below zero at the top of Loon today. Rick is skiing today with two friends who came up… I expect them back here at this condo soon. Next week it’s going into the 40s and 50s even this far north. I bought a very colorful pair of running sneakers at Lahouts… I’ll be styling this summer! And trumpty dumpty is still an effing idiot…
On yeah… I forgot to say that I own an iPhone 7 plus. I can go anywhere on the world wide internet with it except for this blog.
“He’s so far out of his depth…”
pogo, considering his many bankruptcies, failed casinos, marriages, etc this economic disaster he’s brought on seems rather consistent. and you know what consistency denotes: small mind hobgoblins.
as far as knowing how to shrink cartoons, i’m lucky they get posted at all, too large or too small. I just point and click and hope for the best.
*
politico via msn:
Donald Trump is in trouble in Florida, a state that’s crucial to his reelection hopes.
Just 40 percent of Florida voters said they believed the president should be reelected, while 53 percent were opposed to a second term, according to a new Bendixen & Amandi International poll.
Trump’s approval ratings were also poor, with 43 percent having a favorable impression of Trump, and 52 percent viewing him unfavorably — and 46 percent very unfavorably. Trump’s approval ratings look even worse when compared with the man he helped make Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who has a 50 percent approval rating while only 23 percent disapprove.
“Trump is in trouble,” pollster Fernand Amandi said, noting that 23 percent of all Florida Republicans said he doesn’t deserve reelection. “When that many people from your own party don’t support you, it means you have to spend more time consolidating your base.”
[continues]
Patd, your last posted pic is priceless. And doesn’t trump have some sort of property in Florida? And with his orange visage I’m surprised he’s not viewed as a native.
You get what you pay for, and WordPress is free.
So, before this forum dies, as all things do, i’d like to thank Mr. Crawford for providing it, free of charge, and apologize for any personal contribution to its demise- i’m sure my tactless presentation of my strong opinions has run at least one contributor off. Thanks, also, to those who have taken the time to read and consider my musings, in this contemporary world of near-infinite options for the consumption of information and such.
While the benefit, or lack thereof, of my, or our, participation may always be in question to those who have perused these pages, and to others beyond, i’m both proud and ashamed to say that Trailmix has always been the exclusive home of my internet-based blathering.
Thanks for the opportunity, Mr. Crawford.
“When that many people from your own party don’t support you, it means you have to spend more time consolidating your base.” -from above quoted article
-good news, considering that is all he spends his time doing.
for those who missed a particularly entertaining Nicole show on MSNBC the other day here’s rawstory :
Wallace then introduced a New York Times column by Garrett Graff that she described as explaining, “how pursuing Trump-world as a mob operation could take down Trump and his entire empire.”
“Indicting the whole Trump Organization as a ‘corrupt enterprise’ could also help prosecutors address the thorny question of whether the president can be indicted in office; they could lay out a whole pattern of criminal activity, indict numerous players — including perhaps Trump family members — and leave the president himself as a named, unindicted co-conspirator,” Graff explained.
“Such an action would allow investigators to make public all the known activity for Congress and the public to consider as part of impeachment hearings or re-election,” Graff continued. “It would also activate powerful forfeiture tools for prosecutors that could allow them to seize the Trump Organization’s assets and cut off its income streams.”
[…]
Wallace noted the “theme emerging” with House Intel Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) hiring former Russian mob prosecutor — and former MSNBC legal analyst — Daniel Goldman as director of investigations.
“It’s in the context of this devastating legal peril that the president appears to be spiraling into meltdown mode, tweeting, ‘presidential harassment’ in his outside voice as a refrain and publicly attacking the numerous investigations into his conduct that are now encircling the White House, his family, his business and his closest allies.”
Frank Figliuzzi, the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI and a MSNBC contributor, explained the mechanism for going after Trump as a mafia don — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO.
“There’s a way we address mob families and organizations and it’s called RICO,” he explained.
“The basic notion is that the sum is greater than the parts,” he explained. “So you can go ahead and attack an organization by hitting individuals with prosecutions on this charge and that charge — and it’s very unwieldy and takes a long time and then you really never essentially get to the boss.”
“RICO is designed to get to the boss, because if you charge the underlings and they don’t talk because they use the omertà code — the code of silence — we’ve seen that even in this organization, then you may never get him,” he continued. “So RICO says, look, all of this together is much larger than the individual parts, and there’s a leader behind this. And that’s what RICO’s designed to do.”
“I’ll tell you when the light bulb went off over my head, I said this has got to be a RICO consideration, which is Michael Cohen’s testimony,” he noted. “Michael Cohen’s testimony did it for me.”
“This was essentially a mob informant talking about the [caporegime] and I’d be surprised if Southern District or some other prosecution arm is not seriously approaching this as a RICO,” Figliuzzi concluded.
miami herald via msn:
MIAMI – Just days before a Friday deadline, the Justice Department has reassigned the Jeffrey Epstein victims’ rights case to the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta, the attorneys representing Epstein’s victims said Tuesday.
Miami federal prosecutors, in a letter to attorneys for the victims Monday, said they had recused themselves from the case, according to Brad Edwards and Jack Scarola, representing Epstein’s victims.
The reassignment means that the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Byung J. “BJay” Pak, will oversee the case for the government. Pak, a former Georgia lawmaker, was appointed Atlanta’s chief federal prosecutor by President Donald Trump in October 2017.
The Justice Department is still under a Friday deadline for prosecutors to confer with the victims’ attorneys in an effort to settle the case. On Feb. 22, U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra in Palm Beach County ruled that federal prosecutors, under former Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, broke the law when they concealed a plea agreement from more than 30 underage girls in Palm Beach who had been sexually abused by Epstein, a multimillionaire New York hedge fund manager.
Marra stopped short of voiding the agreement, which granted Epstein and an untold number of accomplices immunity from federal prosecution for sex trafficking crimes, provided Epstein plead guilty to minor charges in state court. At the time of the plea deal, federal prosecutors had gathered enough evidence against Epstein to write a 53-page federal indictment, court records show.
An investigation by the Miami Herald, “Perversion of Justice,” found that after Acosta met privately with one of Epstein’s lawyers, the government agreed to seal the plea agreement so that no one – not the victims, not even the state court judge who sentenced Epstein – would know the full extent of his crimes. Epstein, now 66, was allowed to plead guilty to prostitution charges and served 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail, where he was given liberal work release, and allowed to travel to New York and his private island in the Caribbean during his subsequent house arrest. He was released in 2009, and now divides his time between New York, Palm Beach and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The Herald interviewed four of Epstein’s victims, who were as young as 13 at the time they were abused by Epstein. They said they felt betrayed by state and federal prosecutors, who treated them like prostitutes instead of victims. Two of them sued the federal government in 2008 under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, which grants crime victims the right to be informed about plea deals and to confer with prosecutors.
Marra, in a 33-page opinion, said prosecutors not only intentionally violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, but they misled the girls into believing that the FBI’s sex trafficking case against Epstein was ongoing – when, in fact, prosecutors had secretly closed it after sealing the plea bargain from the public record.
Marra, noting that he reviewed affidavits, depositions and interrogatories, said “Epstein worked in concert with others to obtain minors not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others.”
The victims’ attorneys – Edwards, Scarola and Paul Cassell – have asked the Justice Department to throw out Epstein’s plea agreement and reopen the criminal investigation.
Edwards, who brought the victims’ rights case against the government, said transferring the case to another jurisdiction is a prudent decision.
“I think it’s good that we’re going to get fresh eyes and a fresh opinion on the way the case was handled,” Edwards said Tuesday. “We were obviously in an adversarial posture with the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami because they handled the case to begin with.”
Miami’s new U.S. attorney, Ariana Fajardo Orshan – who was appointed by Trump in September – did not respond to a request for comment.
Edwards predicted that it would take some time for Pak’s office to review the case, which includes more than 500 docket entries and thousands of documents. He said if the sides can’t agree on a resolution, then Marra would likely have to come up with one. The case is being closely watched by crime victims’ rights advocates, as it will likely set a precedent.
Acosta, who was appointed by Trump as the U.S. secretary of labor in 2017, is the focus of a separate Justice Department investigation into whether there was any prosecutorial misconduct in the Epstein case. That probe, by the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was initiated in response to demands from a bipartisan group in Congress, led by Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida.
In the meantime, a court hearing will be held Wednesday in New York in another Epstein-related case. A federal appeals court will hear oral arguments in a motion by the Herald, supported by 32 other news organizations, asking the court to unseal documents that could reveal details about the extent of Epstein’s crimes and any other people who may have been involved.
Three of Epstein’s former attorneys – who helped negotiate his plea deal in 2008 – wrote a letter published in The New York Times on Monday, defending the plea bargain cut with Acosta as a fair deal. The letter was in response to a Times editorial that called on Congress and the Trump administration to hold Acosta and others involved in the case accountable.
Epstein’s lawyers said the editorial’s conclusions were “in profound conflict with the reality,” noting that there was no evidence that Epstein committed federal sex trafficking offenses. The letter was signed by former Epstein lawyers Kenneth Starr, Jack Goldberger and Lilly Ann Sanchez, as well as Epstein’s current attorney, Martin G. Weinberg.
patd, jace – one’s in the queue,
Bink, I predict this blog won’t die. And strong opinions might drive some away, but who the hell wants to hang out where strong opinions aren’t expressed? The blog’s in a lull right now, but we’ve seen this before. People come, people go. But those who give a shit stay.
No Presidential Debate For fox news
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democratic-national-committee-rejects-fox-news-for-debates-citing-new-yorker-article/ar-BBUsto7?ocid=spartanntp
trump Admin Wants More Debt, QUICK !
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mnuchin-asks-congress-to-raise-debt-ceiling-as-soon-as-possible/ar-BBUpgXi?ocid=spartanntp
Got a new tool, a photo slide or negative viewer and converter. I grabbed a couple of boxes of slides out of a bag and took a peek. 1973 on top of Pike’s Peak, including when my jeans split up the back as I was climbing on the altitude sign, 14,110 feet summit. Ooops. Second box 1981, my oldest son’s second birthday party. What memories. Now to go through a few thousand of the slides and make a nice photo album to send back.
So SFB thinks he is above the law. I am waiting to see how he weathers the spring and summer.
Trump Worried About Biden
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-asked-top-political-advisors-whether-he-should-worry-about-running-against-joe-biden/ar-BBUsJLx?ocid=spartanntp
Goopers to the Dems Please don’t throw me in the Briar Patch
what can we do to get sturg back
trump Boys Harbor The ‘Dangerous’, ‘Disease-Spreading’, ‘Murdering,’ ‘Terrorist,’ Fugitive ‘Illegal Alien’ That We Need A Wall To Keep Out
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-presidents-sons-entrusted-their-private-hunting-retreat-to-a-caretaker-he-was-working-in-the-country-illegally/ar-BBUsgOE?ocid=spartanntp
KC, beats shit out of me, but I wish I knew how.
Here’s a story that should FUNKING tell you all you need to know about trumpofuckingnomics. If it doesn’t, tell me why.
Bink,
I like this place because it is the only place on line that I can express an opinion and have it batted down intelligently. Although KGC has been known to be a bit rough. Bless her heart.
Any where else on the web my opinion just gets lost in the noise. no rational feed back. Howcan you learn if somebody doesn’t knock you idiot opinions down. While I sometimes think you are a bit pessimistic…….
Fact is my pessimistic self tends to win the bets, damn him anyway.
Jack
Pogo
Gm is just closing down the car lines they created to get the bailout from Obama. Small energy efficient cars are a loss leader. If they were smart they would retool one of those plants and start making the Hummer again. Double the price and it will still sell. It is the Harley Davidson of 4 wheelers. There are a number of older Hummers in the neighborhood and they never have dirt on them, they always shine.
Jack
Jack. You’re either full of shit or right as rain. If gas is expensive you’re full of shit. If it’s cheap you look like an economic genius. Regardless, I enjoy your musings. I’m of the same school of thought of course I know I may be right and will think twice about my opinion here.
Pogo
the Hummer was an American classic especially out here among the working class set. If you are the boss/owner of a framing crew driving one of those on the construction site, it was the same as driving a Cadillac back down home in your and my parents’ generation. Proof that you had made it. Gas be damned.
Jack
one other thing
The auto industry is changing and damn fast, Ford has quit making sedans and is doubling down on the f150 and SUVs.
Will it be a good bet? we will see.
BTW Tesla is down sizing to meet demand A lot of money to be made and loss if the right bet is made.
Jack
Yeah. I hear ya about the Hummer. Iconic military vehicle homogenized for civilian use. Basically a big fucker that folks who didn’t drive one but wished they did held in high esteem and people who wouldn’t drive one on a bet held in disdain. But no matter. Lordstown was the home of the Cruze. I literally do not know anyone who owns one.
Pogo,
Got your post.
Many Thanks.
jace
It seems that the trump boys had their personal ‘illegal alien’ fill out forged immigration documents.
It’s time to re-open Alcatraz.
Lock ’em ALL up.
We had a 2012 Cruze that was a really great car until a guy in a sparkling, shiny monster truck ran over it while I was sitting at a stop light. I guess the Cruze was too insignificant to see. Anyway, I liked the Cruze a lot more than our ’13 Altima that replaced it.
GM will suffer for this decision, cuz the price of oil is rising and the stock market is flailing. The gas hog will not be the car of choice later this year.