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A side-by-side look at the Trump, Biden classified documents
By MEG KINNARD today
The revelation that classified materials were discovered at think tank offices formerly used by President Joe Biden, as well as at his Delaware home, has prompted questions on how the circumstances compare with the seizure last year of hundreds of documents marked as classified from Mar-a-Lago, the Florida residence of former President Donald Trump.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday appointed a special counsel to investigate the matter.
A side-by-side look at the similarities and differences between the two situations:
HOW MANY CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
BIDEN: It’s unclear precisely how many classified materials have been obtained from Biden’s office and home. Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, said Monday that “a small number of documents with classified markings” were discovered on Nov. 2, 2022, in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank in Washington, as Biden’s personal attorneys were clearing out the offices.
Biden kept an office at the Penn Center after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his 2020 presidential campaign. It was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and continued to operate independently of the Biden administration.
On Thursday, Sauber said a second batch of documents with classified markings — a “small number,” he said — had been found in a storage space in Biden’s garage in Wilmington, Delaware, with one document being located in Biden’s personal library in his home.
TRUMP: Roughly 300 documents with classification markings — including some at the top secret level — have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.
In January 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration retrieved 15 boxes of documents, telling Justice Department officials they contained “a lot” of classified material. In August, FBI agents took about 33 boxes and containers of 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago, including roughly 100 with classification markings found in a storage room and an office.
HOW QUICKLY WERE THE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS TURNED OVER?
BIDEN: After the materials were discovered at the think tank, Biden’s personal attorneys immediately alerted the White House counsel’s office, which notified NARA, which took custody of the documents the next day, Sauber said.
“Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives,” Sauber said in a statement.
Part of that cooperation, Sauber said this week, included Biden’s personal lawyers examining other locations where records might have been shipped after Biden left the vice presidency in 2017. That search concluded Wednesday night, Biden told reporters at the White House on Thursday, though he did not say when the second batch of documents was found.
Sauber said the Justice Department was “immediately notified” after the documents were found at Biden’s home and that department lawyers took custody of the records.
The revelation that additional classified documents were uncovered by Biden’s attorneys came hours after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dodged questions about Biden’s handling of classified information and the West Wing’s management of the discovery. She said the White House was committed to handling the matter in the “right way,” pointing to Biden’s personal attorneys’ immediate notification of the National Archives.
TRUMP: A Trump representative told NARA in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago, nearly a year after Trump left office. Fifteen boxes of records containing some classified material were transferred from Mar-Lago to NARA in January.
A few months later, investigators from the Justice Department and FBI visited Mar-a-Lago to get more information about classified materials taken to Florida. Federal officials also served a subpoena for some documents believed to be at the estate.
In August 2022, FBI agents conducting a search retrieved 33 boxes from Mar-a-Lago. The search came after lawyers for Trump provided a sworn certification that all government records had been returned.
COULD EITHER PRESIDENT FACE CHARGES RELATED TO THE DISCOVERY OF THE DOCUMENTS?
BIDEN: Despite the discovery of classified materials, there is no indication Biden himself was aware of the existence of the records before they were turned over.
The administration has also said that the records were turned over quickly, without any intent to conceal. That’s important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness, or an intent to mishandle government secrets, in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.
But even if the Justice Department were to find the case prosecutable on the evidence, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office. Former special counsel Robert Mueller cited that guidance in deciding not to reach a conclusion on whether Trump should face charges as part of his investigation into coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate. Robert Hur, the former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Maryland, will lead the investigation. He is taking over from the top Justice Department prosecutor in Chicago, John Lausch, who recommended to Garland last week that a special counsel be appointed.
TRUMP: The former president possibly faces exposure for obstruction over the protracted battle to retrieve the documents. And, since he’s no longer in office, he wouldn’t be afforded protections from possible prosecution that would apply to a sitting president.
In November, Garland appointed Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor with a background in public corruption probes, to lead investigations into Trump’s retention of classified documents, as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.
WHAT DID THE PRESIDENTS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE DISCOVERY OF THE DOCUMENTS?
BIDEN: Answering questions from journalists at the North American Leaders Summit in Mexico on Tuesday, Biden said he was “surprised to learn” that documents had been found at his think tank. He said he didn’t know what was in the material but takes classified documents “very seriously.”
He said his team acted appropriately by quickly turning the documents over.
“They did what they should have done,” Biden said. “They immediately called the Archives.”
On Thursday, Biden told reporters at the White House that he is “cooperating fully and completely” with a Justice Department investigation into how classified information and government records were stored.
As vice president, Biden would have had the power to declassify some documents, though he hasn’t said that he declassified the ones found in his think tank offices or Delaware home.
In September, speaking of the situation with Trump, Biden told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the discovery of top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago raised concerns that sensitive data was compromised and called it “irresponsible.”
TRUMP: Trump, who had the ability when he was a sitting president to declassify documents, has claimed at times that he did so regarding the documents that he took with him — though he has provided no evidence of that. He said in a Fox News interview in September that a president can declassify material “even by thinking about it.”
The former president has called the Mar-a-Lago search an “unannounced raid” that was “not necessary or appropriate” and represented “dark times for our Nation.”
Of Biden, Trump weighed in Monday on his social media site, asking, “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?”
WHAT ARE THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE DOCUMENTS?
BIDEN: Biden’s document disclosure could intensify skepticism among Republicans and others who are already claiming that politics is the basis for the probes of the former president.
There are also possible ramifications in a new, GOP-controlled Congress where Republicans are promising to launch widespread investigations of Biden’s administration.
Of the latest news, new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said, “I think Congress has to investigate this.” Contradicting several fellow members of his party, he added, “We don’t think there needs to be a special prosecutor.”
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, has requested that intelligence agencies conduct a “damage assessment” of potentially classified documents.
TRUMP: In its immediate aftermath, Trump and his supporters seized on the Mar-a-Lago search as a partisan attack from Democrats who had long been desirous of removing him from office.
During his 2024 campaign launch in November, at the same club agents had searched months earlier, Trump referenced the probes against him, casting himself as “a victim” of wayward prosecutors and the “festering, rot and corruption of Washington.”
___
Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP
___
Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/biden-classified-documents-trump-side-by-side-fb2c4ebccdbdbb9039c1c5e227b1da53?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=RelatedStories&utm_campaign=position_01
Joseph Eskenazi the oldest living Pearl Harbor survivor turns 105
January 11, 2023 by Associated Press
World War II veteran Joseph Eskenazi (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Flag-waving admirers lined the sidewalk outside the National World War II Museum in New Orleans on Wednesday to greet the oldest living survivor of the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor as he marked his upcoming 105th birthday.
“It feels great,” Joseph Eskenazi of Redondo Beach, California, told reporters after posing for pictures with his great-grandson, who is about to turn 5, his 21-month-old great-granddaughter and six other World War II veterans, all in their 90s.
Eskenazi turns 105 on Jan. 30. He had boarded an Amtrak train in California on Friday for the journey to New Orleans. The other veterans, representing the Army, Navy and Marines, flew in for the event.
They were visiting thanks to the Soaring Valor Program, a project of actor Gary Sinise’s charitable foundation dedicated to aiding veterans and first responders. The program arranges trips to the museum for World War II veterans and their guardians.
Eskenazi was a private first class in the Army when the attack occurred. His memories include being awakened when a bomb fell — but didn’t explode — near where he was sleeping at Schofield Barracks, reverberating explosions as the battleship USS Arizona was sunk by Japanese bombs, and machine gun fire from enemy planes kicking up dust around him after he volunteered to drive a bulldozer across a field so it could be used to clear runways.
“I don’t even know why — my hand just went up when they asked for volunteers,” Eskenazi said. “Nobody else raised their hand because they knew that it meant death. … I did it unconsciously.”
He was at the Army’s Schofield Barracks when the Dec. 7, 1941, attack began, bringing the United States into the war. About 2,400 servicemen were killed.
Eskenazi and his fellow veterans lined up for pictures amid exhibits of World War II aircraft and Higgins boats, designed for beach landings.
“Thank you guys for providing us a country that was worth fighting for,” veteran Billy Hall, who rose to the rank of major in the Marines after enlisting in 1941, shouted to well-wishers.
The museum opened in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum and has expanded in size and scope since then.
https://www.newscenter1.tv/joseph-eskenazi-the-oldest-living-pearl-harbor-survivor-turns-105/
Study: Two-thirds of glaciers on track to disappear by 2100
By SETH BORENSTEIN
January 5, 2023
FILE - Chunks of ice float on Mendenhall Lake in front of the Mendenhall Glacier on Monday, May 30, 2022, in Juneau, Alaska.
A study of all of the world's 215,000 glaciers published on Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023, finds even if with the unlikely minimum warming of only a few tenths of a degrees more, the world will lose nearly half its glaciers by the end of the century. With the warming we're now on track to get, the world will lose two-thirds of its glaciers and overall glacier mass will drop by one-third while sea level rises 4.5 inches just from melting glaciers. (AP Photo/Becky Bohrer)
The world’s glaciers are shrinking and disappearing faster than scientists thought, with two-thirds of them projected to melt out of existence by the end of the century at current climate change trends, according to a new study.
But if the world can limit future warming to just a few more tenths of a degree and fulfill international goals — technically possible but unlikely according to many scientists — then slightly less than half the globe’s glaciers will disappear, said the same study. Mostly small but well-known glaciers are marching to extinction, study authors said.
In an also unlikely worst-case scenario of several degrees of warming, 83% of the world’s glaciers would likely disappear by the year 2100, study authors said.
More on shrinking Glaciers:
– As climate clock ticks, aviator races to photograph glaciers
https://apnews.com/article/norway-glaciers-climate-and-environment-07730dc16eeab07675091bf6c16de1f4?utm_source=apnews&utm_medium=relatedcontentmodule
The study in Thursday’s journal Science examined all of the globe’s 215,000 land-based glaciers -- not counting those on ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica -- in a more comprehensive way than past studies. Scientists then used computer simulations to calculate, using different levels of warming, how many glaciers would disappear, how many trillions of tons of ice would melt, and how much it would contribute to sea level rise.
The world is now on track for a 2.7-degree Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature rise since pre-industrial times, which by the year 2100 means losing 32% of the world’s glacier mass, or 48.5 trillion metric tons of ice as well as 68% of the glaciers disappearing. That would increase sea level rise by 4.5 inches (115 millimeters) in addition to seas already getting larger from melting ice sheets and warmer water, said study lead author David Rounce.
“No matter what, we’re going to lose a lot of the glaciers,” Rounce, a glaciologist and engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said. “But we have the ability to make a difference by limiting how many glaciers we lose.”
“For many small glaciers it is too late,” said study co-author Regine Hock, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Oslo in Norway. “However, globally our results clearly show that every degree of global temperature matters to keep as much ice as possible locked up in the glaciers.”
Projected ice loss by 2100 ranges from 38.7 trillion metric tons to 64.4 trillion tons, depending on how much the globe warms and how much coal, oil and gas is burned, according to the study.
The study calculates that all that melting ice will add anywhere from 3.5 inches (90 millimeters) in the best case to 6.5 inches (166 millimeters) in the worst case to the world’s sea level, 4% to 14% more than previous projections.
That 4.5 inches of sea level rise from glaciers would mean more than 10 million people around the world — and more than 100,000 people in the United States — would be living below the high tide line, who otherwise would be above it, said sea level rise researcher Ben Strauss, CEO of Climate Central. Twentieth-century sea level rise from climate change added about 4 inches to the surge from 2012 Superstorm Sandy costing about $8 billion in damage just in itself, he said.
Scientists say future sea level rise will be driven more by melting ice sheets than glaciers.
But the loss of glaciers is about more than rising seas. It means shrinking water supplies for a big chunk of the world’s population, more risk from flood events from melting glaciers and about losing historic ice-covered spots from Alaska to the Alps to even near Mount Everest’s base camp, several scientists told The Associated Press.
“For places like the Alps or Iceland... glaciers are part of what makes these landscapes so special,” said National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serreze, who wasn’t part of the study but praised it. “As they lose their ice in a sense they also lose their soul.”
Hock pointed to Vernagtferner glacier in the Austrian Alps, which is one of the best-studied glaciers in the world, but said “the glacier will be gone.”
The Columbia Glacier in Alaska had 216 billion tons of ice in 2015, but with just a few more tenths of a degree of warming, Rounce calculated it will be half that size. If there’s 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times, an unlikely worst-case scenario, it will lose two-thirds of its mass, he said.
“It’s definitely a hard one to look at and not drop your jaw at,” Rounce said.
Glaciers are crucial to people’s lives in much of the world, said National Snow and Ice Center Deputy Lead Scientist Twila Moon, who wasn’t part of the study.
“Glaciers provide drinking water, agricultural water, hydropower, and other services that support billions (yes, billions!) of people,” Moon said in an email.
Moon said the study “represents significant advances in projecting how the world’s glaciers may change over the next 80 years due to human-created climate change.”
That’s because the study includes factors in glacier changes that previous studies didn’t and is more detailed, said Ruth Mottram and Martin Stendel, climate scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute who weren’t part of the research.
This new study better factors in how the glaciers’ ice melts not just from warmer air, but water both below and at the edges of glaciers and how debris can slow melt, Stendel and Mottram said. Previous studies concentrated on large glaciers and made regional estimates instead of calculations for each individual glacier.
In most cases, the estimated loss figures Rounce’s team came up with are slightly more dire than earlier estimates.
If the world can somehow limit warming to the global goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times -- the world is already at 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) -- Earth will likely lose 26% of total glacial mass by the end of the century, which is 38.7 trillion metric tons of ice melting. Previous best estimates had that level of warming melting translating to only 18% of total mass loss.
“I have worked on glaciers in the Alps and Norway which are really rapidly disappearing,” Mottram said in an email. “It’s kind of devastating to see.”
___
Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
https://apnews.com/article/glaciers-two-thirds-to-disappear-by-2100-b5d622f140072f9b9848bf4c47047e49
Study: Two-thirds of glaciers on track to disappear by 2100
By SETH BORENSTEIN
January 5, 2023
FILE - Chunks of ice float on Mendenhall Lake in front of the Mendenhall Glacier on Monday, May 30, 2022, in Juneau, Alaska.
A study of all of the world's 215,000 glaciers published on Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023, finds even if with the unlikely minimum warming of only a few tenths of a degrees more, the world will lose nearly half its glaciers by the end of the century. With the warming we're now on track to get, the world will lose two-thirds of its glaciers and overall glacier mass will drop by one-third while sea level rises 4.5 inches just from melting glaciers. (AP Photo/Becky Bohrer)
The world’s glaciers are shrinking and disappearing faster than scientists thought, with two-thirds of them projected to melt out of existence by the end of the century at current climate change trends, according to a new study.
But if the world can limit future warming to just a few more tenths of a degree and fulfill international goals — technically possible but unlikely according to many scientists — then slightly less than half the globe’s glaciers will disappear, said the same study. Mostly small but well-known glaciers are marching to extinction, study authors said.
In an also unlikely worst-case scenario of several degrees of warming, 83% of the world’s glaciers would likely disappear by the year 2100, study authors said.
More on shrinking Glaciers:
– As climate clock ticks, aviator races to photograph glaciers
https://apnews.com/article/norway-glaciers-climate-and-environment-07730dc16eeab07675091bf6c16de1f4?utm_source=apnews&utm_medium=relatedcontentmodule
The study in Thursday’s journal Science examined all of the globe’s 215,000 land-based glaciers -- not counting those on ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica -- in a more comprehensive way than past studies. Scientists then used computer simulations to calculate, using different levels of warming, how many glaciers would disappear, how many trillions of tons of ice would melt, and how much it would contribute to sea level rise.
The world is now on track for a 2.7-degree Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature rise since pre-industrial times, which by the year 2100 means losing 32% of the world’s glacier mass, or 48.5 trillion metric tons of ice as well as 68% of the glaciers disappearing. That would increase sea level rise by 4.5 inches (115 millimeters) in addition to seas already getting larger from melting ice sheets and warmer water, said study lead author David Rounce.
“No matter what, we’re going to lose a lot of the glaciers,” Rounce, a glaciologist and engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said. “But we have the ability to make a difference by limiting how many glaciers we lose.”
“For many small glaciers it is too late,” said study co-author Regine Hock, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Oslo in Norway. “However, globally our results clearly show that every degree of global temperature matters to keep as much ice as possible locked up in the glaciers.”
Projected ice loss by 2100 ranges from 38.7 trillion metric tons to 64.4 trillion tons, depending on how much the globe warms and how much coal, oil and gas is burned, according to the study.
The study calculates that all that melting ice will add anywhere from 3.5 inches (90 millimeters) in the best case to 6.5 inches (166 millimeters) in the worst case to the world’s sea level, 4% to 14% more than previous projections.
That 4.5 inches of sea level rise from glaciers would mean more than 10 million people around the world — and more than 100,000 people in the United States — would be living below the high tide line, who otherwise would be above it, said sea level rise researcher Ben Strauss, CEO of Climate Central. Twentieth-century sea level rise from climate change added about 4 inches to the surge from 2012 Superstorm Sandy costing about $8 billion in damage just in itself, he said.
Scientists say future sea level rise will be driven more by melting ice sheets than glaciers.
But the loss of glaciers is about more than rising seas. It means shrinking water supplies for a big chunk of the world’s population, more risk from flood events from melting glaciers and about losing historic ice-covered spots from Alaska to the Alps to even near Mount Everest’s base camp, several scientists told The Associated Press.
“For places like the Alps or Iceland... glaciers are part of what makes these landscapes so special,” said National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serreze, who wasn’t part of the study but praised it. “As they lose their ice in a sense they also lose their soul.”
Hock pointed to Vernagtferner glacier in the Austrian Alps, which is one of the best-studied glaciers in the world, but said “the glacier will be gone.”
The Columbia Glacier in Alaska had 216 billion tons of ice in 2015, but with just a few more tenths of a degree of warming, Rounce calculated it will be half that size. If there’s 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times, an unlikely worst-case scenario, it will lose two-thirds of its mass, he said.
“It’s definitely a hard one to look at and not drop your jaw at,” Rounce said.
Glaciers are crucial to people’s lives in much of the world, said National Snow and Ice Center Deputy Lead Scientist Twila Moon, who wasn’t part of the study.
“Glaciers provide drinking water, agricultural water, hydropower, and other services that support billions (yes, billions!) of people,” Moon said in an email.
Moon said the study “represents significant advances in projecting how the world’s glaciers may change over the next 80 years due to human-created climate change.”
That’s because the study includes factors in glacier changes that previous studies didn’t and is more detailed, said Ruth Mottram and Martin Stendel, climate scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute who weren’t part of the research.
This new study better factors in how the glaciers’ ice melts not just from warmer air, but water both below and at the edges of glaciers and how debris can slow melt, Stendel and Mottram said. Previous studies concentrated on large glaciers and made regional estimates instead of calculations for each individual glacier.
In most cases, the estimated loss figures Rounce’s team came up with are slightly more dire than earlier estimates.
If the world can somehow limit warming to the global goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times -- the world is already at 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) -- Earth will likely lose 26% of total glacial mass by the end of the century, which is 38.7 trillion metric tons of ice melting. Previous best estimates had that level of warming melting translating to only 18% of total mass loss.
“I have worked on glaciers in the Alps and Norway which are really rapidly disappearing,” Mottram said in an email. “It’s kind of devastating to see.”
___
Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
https://apnews.com/article/glaciers-two-thirds-to-disappear-by-2100-b5d622f140072f9b9848bf4c47047e49
McCarthy: GOP wants ‘solution’ as speaker pressure builds
By LISA MASCARO and FARNOUSH AMIRI ,15 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pressure mounting, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy huddled privately with GOP colleagues Thursday at the Capitol after two days of failing to win enough votes from them to become House speaker. He emerged determined to persuade holdouts to end the stalemate that has blighted his new GOP majority.
“We’re having good discussions and I think everyone wants to find a solution,” McCarthy told reporters shortly before the House was prepared to gavel into session again.
But despite endless talks, signs of concessions and a public spectacle unlike any other in recent political memory, the path ahead remained highly uncertain.
What started as a political novelty, the first time in 100 years a nominee had not won the gavel on the first vote, has devolved into a bitter Republican Party feud and deepening potential crisis.
McCarthy is under growing pressure from restless Republicans, and Democrats, to find the votes he needs or step aside, so the House can open fully and get on with the business of governing. His right-flank detractors appear intent on waiting him out, as long as it takes.
Related Coverage
'A disaster': Speaker fight exposes GOP leadership vacuum
https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government-us-republican-party-donald-trump-kevin-mccarthy-b6fedeb8ac7a3a543311626493e4943b?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=RelatedStories&utm_campaign=position_01
- US House has no members, no rules as speaker race drags on
https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government-house-of-representatives-us-republican-party-billy-long-5dc5377382e010d1071c7afbfb694f3b?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=RelatedStories&utm_campaign=position_02
- Byron Donalds emerges as GOP alternative for House speaker
https://apnews.com/article/politics-florida-byron-donalds-us-republican-party-kevin-mccarthy-4df9a1bfc27bea5fb6081275af465dee?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=RelatedStories&utm_campaign=position_03
- Against McCarthy: Hard-right members stage GOP rebellion
https://apnews.com/article/congress-mccarthy-hard-right-foes-5edc1d9468e606a3f1230e98702d9a23?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=RelatedStories&utm_campaign=position_04
[...]
https://apnews.com/article/house-speaker-mccarthy-vote-updates-7657a07f1545bf53079c9c9f6cef3a45?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_01
---------------
The GOP in all its Shining Glory
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217521918
'Fearless' Special Counsel Jack Smith arrives in Washington to lead Trump probes
By Sarah N. Lynch
January 4, 2023 1:38 PM CST, Last Updated 4 hours ago
Prosecutor Jack Smith from the United States attends the presentation of Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci,
who resigned and was taken into custody of a war crimes tribunal, at Kosovo Specialist Chambers
in The Hague, Netherlands November 9, 2020. Jerry Lampen/Pool via REUTERS
WASHINGTON, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Jack Smith, the U.S. special counsel named to investigate Republican former President Donald Trump, has a reputation for winning tough cases against war criminals, mobsters and crooked police officers.
Behind the scenes, however, Smith's former colleagues say he is just as tenacious in his pursuit to get criminal charges dropped for the innocent as he is to win convictions against the guilty.
When Smith isn't busy competing as a triathlete in Ironman races, they said, he is working as a dogged investigator who is open-minded and not afraid to pursue the truth.
"If the case is prosecutable, he will do it," said Mark Lesko, an attorney at Greenberg Traurig LLP who worked with Smith when both were prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York City's Brooklyn. "He is fearless."
Smith recently returned to the United States after working from The Hague in the Netherlands since November while recovering from knee surgery following a biking accident, a person familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Wednesday.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith in November to take over two investigations involving Trump, who is running for president in 2024. .. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-justice-department-appoints-special-prosecutor-trump-probes-2022-11-18/
The first probe involves Trump's handling of highly sensitive classified documents he retained at his Florida resort after leaving the White House in January 2021.
The second investigation is looking at efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election's results, including a plot to submit phony slates of electors to block Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden's victory.
Grand juries in Washington have been hearing testimony in recent months for both investigations from many former top Trump administration officials.
SEARCH FOR INNOCENCE AND GUILT
Smith, a Harvard Law School grad who is not registered with any political party, started as a prosecutor in 1994 at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office under Robert Morgenthau, who was best known for prosecuting mob bosses.
Smith's friends credit Morgenthau with instilling in him the skills that made him the prosecutor he is today.
"There was just a real emphasis, from Morgenthau on down, on not just going after convictions," recalled Todd Harrison, an attorney at McDermott Will & Emery who worked with Smith in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and later in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn.
"We were praised if we investigated something and demonstrated that the target of the investigation was innocent."
Once, he and Smith "spent the whole night making phone calls" after learning that a jailed suspect in one of their cases was innocent. The suspect was released the next day.
In 1999, Smith started working at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn.
He won a conviction against New York City Police Officer Justin Volpe, a white policeman who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for assaulting Abner Louima, a jailed Black inmate, with a broomstick.
Smith also won a capital murder conviction against Ronell Wilson, a drug gang leader who murdered two undercover New York City police officers, though a federal appeals court vacated the death penalty verdict.
In 2008, Smith left to supervise war crime prosecutions at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He returned to the Justice Department in 2010 to head its Public Integrity Section until 2015.
Most recently, he worked as chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo, and won a conviction last month against Salih Mustafa, a former Kosovo Liberation Army commander.
Moe Fodeman, an attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who worked as a prosecutor with Smith, said his former colleague is known for being methodical and thinking outside the box.
"He is famous for to-do lists," said Fodeman, adding that the lists would be filled "with ideas that, of course, you should do, but no one thinks of."
Smith is also known for being expeditious, and Fodeman predicted the special counsel's investigations involving Trump will probably move swiftly.
"He's not going to be dillydallying," Fodeman said. "He's going to get the job done."
Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Jonathan Oatis
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fearless-special-counsel-jack-smith-arrives-washington-lead-trump-probes-2023-01-04/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Afternoon-Docket&utm_term=010423
'Fearless' Special Counsel Jack Smith arrives in Washington to lead Trump probes
By Sarah N. Lynch
January 4, 2023 1:38 PM CST, Last Updated 4 hours ago
Prosecutor Jack Smith from the United States attends the presentation of Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci,
who resigned and was taken into custody of a war crimes tribunal, at Kosovo Specialist Chambers
in The Hague, Netherlands November 9, 2020. Jerry Lampen/Pool via REUTERS
WASHINGTON, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Jack Smith, the U.S. special counsel named to investigate Republican former President Donald Trump, has a reputation for winning tough cases against war criminals, mobsters and crooked police officers.
Behind the scenes, however, Smith's former colleagues say he is just as tenacious in his pursuit to get criminal charges dropped for the innocent as he is to win convictions against the guilty.
When Smith isn't busy competing as a triathlete in Ironman races, they said, he is working as a dogged investigator who is open-minded and not afraid to pursue the truth.
"If the case is prosecutable, he will do it," said Mark Lesko, an attorney at Greenberg Traurig LLP who worked with Smith when both were prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York City's Brooklyn. "He is fearless."
Smith recently returned to the United States after working from The Hague in the Netherlands since November while recovering from knee surgery following a biking accident, a person familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Wednesday.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith in November to take over two investigations involving Trump, who is running for president in 2024. .. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-justice-department-appoints-special-prosecutor-trump-probes-2022-11-18/
The first probe involves Trump's handling of highly sensitive classified documents he retained at his Florida resort after leaving the White House in January 2021.
The second investigation is looking at efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election's results, including a plot to submit phony slates of electors to block Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden's victory.
Grand juries in Washington have been hearing testimony in recent months for both investigations from many former top Trump administration officials.
SEARCH FOR INNOCENCE AND GUILT
Smith, a Harvard Law School grad who is not registered with any political party, started as a prosecutor in 1994 at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office under Robert Morgenthau, who was best known for prosecuting mob bosses.
Smith's friends credit Morgenthau with instilling in him the skills that made him the prosecutor he is today.
"There was just a real emphasis, from Morgenthau on down, on not just going after convictions," recalled Todd Harrison, an attorney at McDermott Will & Emery who worked with Smith in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and later in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn.
"We were praised if we investigated something and demonstrated that the target of the investigation was innocent."
Once, he and Smith "spent the whole night making phone calls" after learning that a jailed suspect in one of their cases was innocent. The suspect was released the next day.
In 1999, Smith started working at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn.
He won a conviction against New York City Police Officer Justin Volpe, a white policeman who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for assaulting Abner Louima, a jailed Black inmate, with a broomstick.
Smith also won a capital murder conviction against Ronell Wilson, a drug gang leader who murdered two undercover New York City police officers, though a federal appeals court vacated the death penalty verdict.
In 2008, Smith left to supervise war crime prosecutions at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He returned to the Justice Department in 2010 to head its Public Integrity Section until 2015.
Most recently, he worked as chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo, and won a conviction last month against Salih Mustafa, a former Kosovo Liberation Army commander.
Moe Fodeman, an attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who worked as a prosecutor with Smith, said his former colleague is known for being methodical and thinking outside the box.
"He is famous for to-do lists," said Fodeman, adding that the lists would be filled "with ideas that, of course, you should do, but no one thinks of."
Smith is also known for being expeditious, and Fodeman predicted the special counsel's investigations involving Trump will probably move swiftly.
"He's not going to be dillydallying," Fodeman said. "He's going to get the job done."
Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Jonathan Oatis
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fearless-special-counsel-jack-smith-arrives-washington-lead-trump-probes-2023-01-04/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Afternoon-Docket&utm_term=010423
Trump is suffering 'death by a thousand lashes' as his crimes catch up to him: Mary Trump
Story by Tom Boggioni • Yesterday 5:42 AM
During an appearance on the Daily Beast's "New Abnormal" podcast, the niece of Donald Trump was asked what lies in store for her famous uncle as the new year begins, and she explained that he is being overwhelmed by his legal travails.
"2023 Will Finally Be the Year of Accountability for Donald Trump"
https://www.thedailybeast.com/2023-will-finally-be-the-year-of-accountability-for-donald-trump?ref=home
Speaking with hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie, psychologist Mary Trump explained that there it is not certain that the former president will actually be indicted and convicted as the result of the multiple investigations, but that he will suffer continuous blows and humiliations as more evidence comes out against him.
Asked how he is taking the daily onslaught of Jan. 6 revelations and scrutiny into his tax avoidance from 2015 to 2020, Mary Trump claimed it is likely wearing him down.
“Although there is some sense of poetic justice that we seem to have reached, you could call it a tipping point—and I said this a long time ago—it’s going to be, and I mean this figuratively of course, death by a thousand lashes,” she stated before adding a cautionary note.
------
Related video: Trump Organization guilty on all 17 counts of fraud, falsifying business
records and conspiracy (CNBC
As she pointed out, nothing that has come out so far has kept him from announcing a 2024 presidential run and still raking in cash.
"Even though it looks bad on paper and isn't really having much of an impact—well, I’m sure it’s having a lot of an impact on his mood—but it’s not having any impact on his ability to roam free in the world she told the hosts.
Pointing out that despite "fomenting an insurrection," and "spreading the big lie" and absconding with sensitive government documents and taking them to Mar-a-Lago she added, "He’s still not just running free, he’s still raising tens of millions of dollars every month,” she continued before adding, “And what is it he’s doing [with that money]? He’s running for president, for Christ sake.”
You can listen here.
2023 Will Finally Be the Year of Accountability for Donald Trump
https://play.acast.com/s/the-new-abnormal/2023-will-finally-be-the-year-of-accountability-for-donald-t
Recommended Links:
·Republican Party refusing to pay Trump's legal bills over Mar-a-Lago documents scandal: report
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-paying-legal-fees-now/
·'An unambiguous felony': Trump at risk in IRS audit probe
https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-irs-2658789962/
·Trump's problems going 'from bad to worse' with Judge Cannon's 'circus' about to be shut down: legal expert
https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-aileen-cannon-2658789613/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-is-suffering-death-by-a-thousand-lashes-as-his-crimes-catch-up-to-him-mary-trump/ar-AA15VgL2?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=bf647ea21fd24bc9b79f223853277307
JAMES CROMBIE Photographer
James is a renowned multiple award winning photographer based in Ireland.
In 2021 & 2022 James was awarded the title of PPAI Irish Press Photographer of the year.
He is a staff photographer working exclusively with Inpho Sports Photography (www.inpho.ie) in Dublin, apart from his own personal projects.
Over the past 2 winters, James and his friend Colin Hogg have spent their free time capturing and recording the murmuration of starlings at Lough Ennell, County Westmeath, Ireland. James’ other work follows his minimalistic style and is constantly adding to his portfolio.
https://www.jamescrombie.ie/
A look back at 2022
Reuters Pictures of 2022
https://www.reuters.com/news/pictures
AP Photography of 2022
https://apnews.com/hub/photography?utm_source=apnewsnav&utm_medium=navigation
CNN: The year in pictures 2022 --- Watch auto display... or manually scrowl thru each month
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/specials/year-in-pictures/
In pictures: World rings in 2023
https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/in-pictures-world-rings-in-2023-idUSRTSEMCNE
In pictures: World rings in 2023
https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/in-pictures-world-rings-in-2023-idUSRTSEMCNE
Countries across the world ring in the new year
Updated December 31, 2022 8:44 PM ET
Giulia Heyward
The year 2022 turned to 2023 in time zones across the world, starting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Some of the first people who celebrated 2023 live in Kiribati, an island country in the Pacific Ocean, with a population of less than 122,000 people.
Australia, which is one of the first big countries to begin the year, started 2023 with a bang — 7,000 fireworks were launched from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and another 2,000 from the nearby Sydney Opera House, The Associated Press reported.
"Happy New Years, Australia, wishing you all the best for the year ahead," the country's prime minister, Anthony Albanese, tweeted.
Here's a look at how people are celebrating the new year in various countries.
Australia
Japan
Philippines
France
[...]
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/31/1146482233/photos-new-years-celebrations-world
Countries across the world ring in the new year
Updated December 31, 2022 8:44 PM ET
Giulia Heyward
The year 2022 turned to 2023 in time zones across the world, starting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Some of the first people who celebrated 2023 live in Kiribati, an island country in the Pacific Ocean, with a population of less than 122,000 people.
Australia, which is one of the first big countries to begin the year, started 2023 with a bang — 7,000 fireworks were launched from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and another 2,000 from the nearby Sydney Opera House, The Associated Press reported.
"Happy New Years, Australia, wishing you all the best for the year ahead," the country's prime minister, Anthony Albanese, tweeted.
Here's a look at how people are celebrating the new year in various countries.
Australia
Japan
Philippines
France
[...]
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/31/1146482233/photos-new-years-celebrations-world
Yes. Trump, the LIAR, the CON MAN, the THIEF, his MAFIA connections .......never ends
Donald Trump's Mafia Connections:
Decades Later, Is He Still Linked to the Mob?
BY JEFF STEIN ON 01/10/19 AT 7:10 AM EST
Donald Trump, left, owner of the now-defunct USFL's New Jersey Generals, said his league’s $1.32 billion antitrust suit against the NFL will crack “one of the great monopolies in the is country.” At right is his attorney Roy Cohn.
BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY
On a rainy day in the spring of 1976, FBI Special Agent Myron Fuller took the New York subway to Brooklyn to interview Donald Trump. The future tycoon, about 30, was just getting his real estate career off the ground, aided by secret payments from his father. Fuller found Trump working out of a temporary office in a double-wide trailer on a muddy construction site. "There were boards covering wet dirt, in lieu of cement walkways," Fuller recalls to Newsweek. He knocked on the door and went in. "His secretary sat there by the entrance, and Trump was a door away from there." Ushered in, he found Trump sitting behind his desk. The businessman did not get up to welcome the agent. "He never came around, and I do not recall him shaking my hand," Fuller says.
The FBI agent was carrying out an errand for the bureau's Miami office, to follow up on a tip that mobsters had asked Trump to front for them in a purchase of the Fontainebleau hotel. Once a beachside favorite of movie stars and the rich, the hotel was also a notorious hangout for Mafia kingpins like Sam Giancana, who famously met with CIA agents in the hotel's Boom Boom Room to plot the assassination of Fidel Castro. But in 1976, the Fontainebleau was teetering on bankruptcy, and the mobsters needed a straw man to buy it.
Fuller asked Trump a simple question. "Why would your name come up as a possible buyer for them?" The future president of the United States responded calmly that "he did not know." He had "heard about" some people wanting him to buy it, he told Fuller, but not much more. Fuller, with nothing else to go on, closed his notebook. Trump summoned his limo driver to take the agent back to the city.
More than 40 years later, Fuller, who gained fame for the FBI bribery sting dramatized in the movie American Hustle, chuckles ruefully about the encounter, reported here for the first time. "Seeing who he is now, learning more about him in the last two or three years, I do have some regrets that I didn't have a bell and whistle going off there and go further," he says.
And nothing further did connect Trump to the Fontainebleau's eventual sale to a mob front. Nor do public records show the budding real estate operator was ever indicted, much less convicted, in any of the big cases that brought down the five Mafia families who ruled New York. But Fuller's encounter offers a timely window into a history that explains how Trump learned to talk—and act—like a don, even in the hallowed precincts of the White House.
To be sure, Trump's upbringing in Queens, where the Mafia was ubiquitous, helped form his wiseguy persona. So did an apparent behavioral disorder that caused him to buy switchblades and start fights in school. But it's also evident that by the time he was 30, the future president was on the FBI's radar as someone the Mafia might turn to in a pinch. And by the time he was 70, with a business trajectory studded with mobsters, it should've come as no surprise that he was paying hush money to women, allegedly offering a secret hotel deal to Vladimir Putin, calling his longtime former lawyer Michael Cohen a "rat" or denouncing prosecutors for pressuring his associates to "flip."
This was the life he had chosen
[...]
https://www.newsweek.com/2019/01/18/donald-trump-mafia-connections-decades-later-linked-mob-1285771.html
..
Most will be rooting for Italy in its efforts to combat the Mafia and Nazis
"Italy’s ‘Miss Hitler’ Among 19 Investigated for Starting New Nazi Party in Italy" , November 30, 2019
For decades a ruthless mafia has ruled in southern Italy... , December 31, 2022
[...]
But now the Italian state is fighting back. An historic investigation has put more than 300 people on trial for the crime of belonging to, or aiding, the 'Ndrangheta.
Prosecutors have already secured 70 convictions for crimes including money laundering, mafia involvement and extortion. Italians are calling it the "trial of the century". Hundreds more cases are waiting to be heard.
The IRS Really, Really Should Have Audited Trump
The failure to do so is outrageous and needs to be investigated.
By Noah Bookbinder
December 30, 2022, 9:11 AM ET
Six years after Donald Trump should have disclosed his tax returns to the public, they have finally been released. This took advocacy, congressional action, and litigation that went to the Supreme Court—all to obtain basic financial transparency from a president.
But the House Ways and Means Committee’s report on its investigation, released last week in conjunction with the committee’s vote to disclose Trump’s tax returns, revealed new information that may be as astonishing as anything in the returns themselves: The IRS did not even begin auditing Trump’s taxes until 2019, on the same day the committee began asking the agency about them. This is outrageous, and it must be investigated.
Getting Trump’s tax returns should not have been this hard. Every president elected since Richard Nixon—with the exception of Trump—has publicly disclosed his tax returns. Tax returns can tell the American people, and Congress, whether a president is following the law and behaving honestly. Crucially for Trump, who uniquely and inappropriately retained ownership of a massive international business while president, they can provide information about conflicts of interest that may have swayed his decision making.
David Frum: Trump’s reckoning with the rule of law
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/donald-trump-company-tax-evasion-fraud/672383/
Examining Trump’s tax returns and discovering all they can reveal about how his finances may have intersected with his presidency will take time. The committee released an analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation stating that Trump had paid nothing, or close to it, in some years of his presidency. The income information included in that analysis also seems to support the assertion that Trump’s use of the presidency to steer business to himself from the government and those seeking to influence it may have reversed years of financial losses for Trump’s companies and led to hefty profits in 2018 and 2019, until COVID’s arrival in 2020 reversed his fortunes again. Now that the detailed returns are available, we’ll learn much more about those companies’ earnings, losses, and tax payments, and about Trump’s financial interests.
But the revelation about the IRS’s failure to perform the required audit of Trump’s taxes—that it did not happen at all for more than two years, and that, according to the committee, his 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns were not even selected for audit until after he left office—deserves yet more scrutiny. The IRS’s own regulations mandate that a president’s taxes must be audited every year. Not only that, but ongoing audits were the purported reason Trump gave for refusing to disclose his tax returns. Spokespeople for President Barack Obama confirmed that his taxes were subject to routine annual audits during his presidency, and a spokesperson for President Joe Biden said that his have been too. The Ways and Means Committee reported that, despite Trump’s complex finances, when review finally began in 2019, the audit was initially assigned to a single employee, and no audits of the years requested by the committee—2015 to 2020—have yet been completed.
The requirement to audit the president could not have simply evaded notice at the IRS. Trump’s taxes have been a major public issue since he initially refused to disclose them as a candidate in 2016. The IRS is drastically under-resourced, but insufficient resources are unlikely to be to blame, because they didn’t stop the agency from promptly reviewing the tax returns of the president immediately preceding Trump and the one immediately following him. That a unique resource crunch happened to coincide only with Trump’s presidency strains credulity.
So what happened here? It’s possible that the IRS was aware of all the controversy around Trump’s taxes and simply didn’t want any part of it. That’s inexcusable, but it’s not nefarious.
A more troubling explanation is possible—even likely: that Trump used the levers of government to shield himself from scrutiny.
There’s certainly no reason to think that he had qualms about abusing his power for his own benefit. Throughout his presidency, Trump manipulated and misused component after component of the federal government to protect himself and advance his personal and political interests.
David A. Graham: Trump has nothing else up his sleeve
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/trumps-tax-returns-show-he-has-no-more-tricks/616515/
He and his compliant attorney general Bill Barr misused the Justice Department to undercut investigations of Trump, target perceived enemies, and assist the president’s allies, including by dropping cases, opposing the sentencing recommendations of career prosecutors, and issuing pardons. The Department of the Interior produced videos lauding Trump and arranged for national-park land to be used for his political events. Trump fired or sidelined inspectors general whose investigations harmed him, and he sought to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Senior employees throughout the executive branch routinely praised Trump and attacked his political opponents in violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits most government employees from using their position for politics; Trump ensured that the illegal practice was encouraged rather than punished. And, of course, Trump ultimately tried to use the Justice Department and other parts of government to keep himself in power after losing an election.
Was the IRS’s failure to audit Trump as required by law another instance of the former president’s misuse of the government to protect himself? It is already known that Trump frequently discussed arranging IRS audits of perceived enemies and that two of those enemies, former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, received highly unusual audits; an inspector-general investigation was unable to determine how that happened.
It is also known that Trump installed loyalists at the IRS. In 2018, he appointed Commissioner Charles Rettig, who had previously defended Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns and who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars from renting out units in a Trump-branded property. In 2019, Trump prioritized a longtime associate’s confirmation as the agency’s general counsel. These or other loyalists may have acted to protect Trump out of devotion to him, as so many others throughout the government did. IRS employees may also have acted out of fear, shirking their responsibilities to avoid Trump’s wrath.
The Senate Finance Committee must investigate the IRS’s failure. Its chair, Ron Wyden, has already expressed interest in doing so. The agency’s inspector general should investigate too. The public needs to know whether one more key government function was politicized, allowing a president to shield possible conflicts of interest and escape accountability. The American people need reassurances that transparency, oversight, and accountability will once again become matters of course rather than subjects of prolonged litigation.
Donald Trump attempted to hijack the United States government to keep himself in power, and American democracy almost didn’t survive. His tax returns may have been another part of that effort.
That merits investigation—not over another six years, but now.
Noah Bookbinder is the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/trump-tax-returns-released-house-committee-irs-audit/672582/
Trump’s tax returns released after long fight with Congress
By MICHAEL R. SISAK and JILL COLVIN
an hour ago
Democrats in Congress released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns on Friday, the culmination of a yearslong effort to learn more about the finances of a onetime business mogul who broke decades of political precedent when he refused to voluntarily release the information as he sought the White House.
https://apnews.com/article/be17fb95a8564a88996d1331ebaf763b
The returns, which include redactions of some personal sensitive information such as Social Security and bank account numbers, are from 2015 to 2020.
They span nearly 6,000 pages, including more than 2,700 pages of individual returns from Trump and his wife, Melania, and more than 3,000 pages in returns for Trump’s business entities.
Their release follows a party-line vote in the House Ways and Means Committee last week to make the returns public. Committee Democrats argued that transparency and the rule of law were at stake, while Republicans countered that the release would set a dangerous precedent undermining privacy protections.
RELATED COVERAGE
– View the released Trump tax returns
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tax-returns-documents-index-978260721336?utm_source=apnews&utm_medium=relatedcontentmodule
Trump did not release his returns when he ran for president, a major break in practice, and had waged a legal battle to keep them secret while he was in the White House. But the Supreme Court refused last month to keep the Treasury Department from turning them over to the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.
“The Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it’s going to lead to horrible things for so many people,” Trump said in a statement Friday. “The radical, left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street!”
He said the returns “once again show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises.”
The returns underscore how Trump used tax law to minimize his liability.
A report by Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation released last week showed Trump paid $641,931 in federal income taxes in 2015, the year he began his campaign for president. He went on to pay $750 in 2016 and 2017, nearly $1 million in 2018, $133,445 in 2019 and nothing in 2020.
For 2020, the filings released Friday show, more than 150 of Trump’s business entities listed negative qualified business income, which the IRS defines as “the net amount of qualified items of income, gain, deduction and loss from any qualified trade or business.” In total for that tax year, combined with nearly $9 million in carryforward loss from previous years, Trump’s qualified losses amounted to more than $58 million for the final year of his term in office.
The release, just days before Trump’s fellow Republicans retake control of the House from the Democrats, provide the most detailed picture to date Trump’s finances, which have been shrouded in mystery and intrigue since his days as an up-and-coming Manhattan real estate developer in the 1980s.
Video -- Scrowl down
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-federal-tax-returns-updates-290dd5b563d8d829ee8b89ab4471d2e2?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_01
The disclosures, which focus on Trump’s time in office and include foreign tax credits and charitable contributions, come a month after Trump launched another campaign for the White House in 2024.
The tax returns show that Trump claimed foreign tax credits for taxes he paid on various business ventures around the world, including licensing arrangements for use of his name on development projects and his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland.
Trump, known for building skyscrapers and hosting a reality TV show before winning the White House, did give some limited details about his holdings and income on mandatory disclosure forms. He has promoted his wealth in the annual financial statements he provides to banks to secure loans and to financial magazines to justify his place on rankings of the world’s billionaires.
Trump’s longtime accounting firm has since disavowed the statements, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a lawsuit alleging Trump and his Trump Organization inflated asset values on the statements as part of a yearslong fraud. Trump and his company have denied wrongdoing.
In October 2018, The New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series based on leaked tax records that showed that Trump received a modern-day equivalent of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate holdings, with much of that money coming from what the Times called “tax dodges” in the 1990s.
A second series in 2020 showed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018, as well as no income taxes at all in 10 of the past 15 years because he generally lost more money than he made.
In its report last week, the Ways and Means Committee indicated the Trump administration may have disregarded a post-Watergate requirement mandating audits of a president’s tax filings.
The IRS only began to audit Trump’s 2016 tax filings on April 3, 2019 — more than two years into his presidency — when the committee chairman, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., asked the agency for information related to the tax returns.
By comparison, there were audits of President Joe Biden for the 2020 and 2021 tax years, said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson. A spokesperson for former President Barack Obama said Obama was audited in each of his eight years in office.
The Joint Committee on Taxation report last week raised multiple red flags about aspects of Trump’s tax filings, including his carryover losses, deductions tied to conservation and charitable donations, and loans to his children that could be taxable gifts.
The House passed a bill in response that would require audits of any president’s income tax filings. Republicans strongly opposed the legislation, raising concerns that a law requiring audits would infringe on taxpayer privacy and could lead to audits being weaponized for political gain.
The measure, approved mostly along party lines, has little chance of becoming law anytime soon with a new Republican-led House being sworn in in January. Rather, it is seen as a starting point for future efforts to bolster oversight of the presidency.
Republicans have argued that Democrats will regret the move once Republicans take power next week, and they warn that the committee’s new GOP chair will be under pressure to seek and make public the tax returns of other prominent people.
Rep. Don Beyer, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee and a Ways and Means Committee member, presided over the routine pro forma session in the House as the tax returns were released. Beyer, D-Va., said the release was delayed as committee staff worked to redact personal and identifying information, a promise Democrats made to Republicans during a closed meeting last week.
“We’ve been trying to be very careful to make sure that we weren’t ‘weaponizing’ the IRS returns,” he said.
The Joint Committee on Taxation report last week raised multiple red flags about aspects of Trump’s tax filings, including his carryover losses, deductions tied to conservation and charitable donations, and loans to his children that could be taxable gifts.
The House passed a bill in response that would require audits of any president’s income tax filings. Republicans strongly opposed the legislation, raising concerns that a law requiring audits would infringe on taxpayer privacy and could lead to audits being weaponized for political gain.
The measure, approved mostly along party lines, has little chance of becoming law anytime soon with a new Republican-led House being sworn in in January. Rather, it is seen as a starting point for future efforts to bolster oversight of the presidency.
Republicans have argued that Democrats will regret the move once Republicans take power next week, and they warn that the committee’s new GOP chair will be under pressure to seek and make public the tax returns of other prominent people.
Rep. Don Beyer, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee and a Ways and Means Committee member, presided over the routine pro forma session in the House as the tax returns were released. Beyer, D-Va., said the release was delayed as committee staff worked to redact personal and identifying information, a promise Democrats made to Republicans during a closed meeting last week.
“We’ve been trying to be very careful to make sure that we weren’t ‘weaponizing’ the IRS returns,” he said.
Every president and major-party candidate since Richard Nixon has voluntarily made at least summaries of their tax information available to the public. Trump bucked that trend as a candidate and as president, repeatedly asserting that his taxes were “under audit” and couldn’t be released.
Trump’s lawyers were repeatedly denied in their quest to keep his tax returns from the House committee. A three-judge federal appeals court panel in August upheld a lower-court ruling granting the committee access.
Trump’s lawyers also tried and failed to block the Manhattan district attorney’s office from getting Trump’s tax records as part of its investigation into his business practices, losing twice in the Supreme Court.
Trump’s longtime accountant, Donald Bender, testified at the Trump Organization’s recent Manhattan criminal trial that Trump reported losses on his tax returns every year for a decade, including nearly $700 million in 2009 and $200 million in 2010.
Bender, a partner at Mazars USA LLP who spent years preparing Trump’s personal tax returns, said Trump’s reported losses from 2009 to 2018 included net operating losses from some of the many businesses he owns through the Trump Organization.
The Trump Organization was convicted earlier this month on tax fraud charges for helping some executives dodge taxes on company-paid perks such as apartments and luxury cars.
___
Associated Press writers Paul Wiseman and Farnoush Amiri in Washington and Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-federal-tax-returns-updates-290dd5b563d8d829ee8b89ab4471d2e2?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_01
Why does Trump's image appear under searches for IDIOT?
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC 2022: The Year in Review
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/pages/topic/best-of-2022?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=vanity::src=ngp::cmp=POTY2022::add=vanityurl
Editions of Jan. 6 report already on Amazon best seller list
today
NEW YORK (AP) — It took less than a day for the Jan. 6 report to go from public unveiling to the bestseller list on Amazon.com.
By late Friday, three editions of the Congressional probe of the 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump were in the top 30 on Amazon.
The editions include one with a foreword by MSNBC anchor Ari Melber, published by Harper Paperbacks;
A Celadon Books release with a foreword by New Yorker editor David Remnick
and an epilogue by Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and member of the House Select Committee;
and a volume by the Hachette Book Group imprint Twelve, published in coordination with The New York Times.
The 814-page document, released late Thursday, is not copyrighted, can be published by anyone and is otherwise available for free on various government and media web sites. Previous government publications, from the Sept. 11 commission report to Robert Mueller’s probe into Trump’s ties to Russian officials when he ran for president in 2016, have been bestsellers. The Sept. 11 report was even a finalist in 2004 for the National Book Award.
As with other government releases, publishers have rushed to get their books out quickly to capitalize on public interest. All three bestselling editions will be out within the next two weeks, along with books from Random House and Melville House Books.
The Jan. 6 report culminates an 18-month investigation, which included more than 1,000 witness interviews and more than a million pages of source material.
The committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans blamed the insurrection on Trump, finding a “multi-part conspiracy” orchestrated by the president and his closest allies in an effort to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump, a Republican, has already announced his candidacy for 2024.
https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-donald-trump-robert-mueller-jamie-raskin-bd9ba0063f394a0a9e5cef27e7c43803?utm_source=Connatix&utm_medium=HomePage
EVERYTHING that Lyin' Trump touches....turns to SHIT
TRUMP WAS WORST PRESIDENT EVER ---- VERIFIED
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164406121
'... I thought Trump fix things...'
2022 National Geographic pictures of the year
By Tori Schneebaum
December 1, 2022 1:50pm Updated
With its Artemis I mission, NASA is kicking off an ambitious plan to return humans to the moon.
For the scheduled launch, this uncrewed trip's commander would be the "moonikin" Campos.
Six- month-old panda cubs snacking and playing as part of her long-term focus on giant panda conservation.
Ami Vitale/National Geographic
At sunset on April 27, Evan Green caught climber Thomas Moore walking
amid the tents pitched at Camp I framed by Everest (at left), Lhotse (center), and Nuptse (at right).
Evan Green
Five weeks into the journey of the National Geographic expedition ship Polar Sun,
photographer Renan Ozturk found himself exploring a bay off the coast of Greenland.
Renan Ozturk/National Geographic
Photographed at night with an infrared camera, a spotted hyena that scientists nicknamed Palazzo submissively grins and lays her ears back as Moulin Rouge, the clan's dominant female at the time, towers over her. Palazzo's cub peers out from between them.
Jen Guyton/National Geographic
Under a harvest moon on a hazy morning in Brazil's Emas National Park, a lowland tapir known to park staff as Preciosa ambles down a road.
Katie Orlinsky/National Geograph
https://nypost.com/2022/12/01/2022-national-geographic-pictures-of-the-year/#1
AP Photos: In 2022, sports brought every imaginable emotion
By The Associated Press
yesterday
https://apnews.com/article/world-cup-winter-olympics-mlb-sports-beijing-4cbf653a251107a814b1156d90068dea
4 of 100 -- Participants recover at the finish line during the Women's Mass Start Free 10km event at the Tour de Ski
People run through the streets ahead of fighting bulls and steers during the first day of the running of the bulls at the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona, northern Spain, Thursday, July 7, 2022. Revelers from around the world flock to Pamplona every year for nine days of uninterrupted partying in Pamplona's famed running of the bulls festival which was suspended for the past two years because of the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)
in Val di Fiemme, Trento, Italy, Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Giovanni Auletta)
https://apnews.com/article/world-cup-winter-olympics-mlb-sports-beijing-4cbf653a251107a814b1156d90068dea
Don't forget LYIN' TRUMP'S L I E S
In four years, President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims
The Fact Checker’s database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump while in office.
Updated Jan. 20, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?itid=lk_inline_manual_11