#T-rump a congenital pathological liar

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 *** “We need to know everything, and the president’s national security team needs to know everything” about the leaders’ two-hour meeting in Helsinki on July 16, Susan Rice, national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.    Rice said it was an “historic mistake” to allow T-rump -- or any U.S. president -- to sit down with Putin without note-takers or aides present in the room. “We have no idea what transpired,” she said.    “The Russians are feeding their line of what happened,” Rice said. “We are hearing no rebuttal or comment from the United States. Russia is dictating the public perception -- the global public perception of what transpired in that meeting, and we have no basis for countering it.” ***

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*** pre-sident T-rump's Mar-a-Lago Club has applied for permission to hire 61 foreign workers to serve as waiters and cooks during the winter social season in Palm Beach, Fla., according to data posted this week by the Labor Department.    The latest data was posted late Thursday on the department's website: T-rump's club has asked to hire 21 cooks from overseas and employ them from October to May.  At the end of that term, the workers would be expected to return home.    Earlier on Thursday, another posting showed T-rump's club also wants to hire 40 foreigners to serve as waiters and waitresses at the club. Mar-a-Lago is a for-profit social club, catering to the wealthy wintertime residents of Palm Beach, FL. ***

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   *** “What we’re seeing here is the standard process of Trump launching a series of lies into our media ecosystem and then watching it bounce around and amplify through the system,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at The University of Virginia. “So to respond with anything reasonable to the fact that the president basically made stuff up is to extend the message and to throw a bomb” into the political debate.  ***

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 (((The order basically allows a member of Crooked Donald’s so-called voter fraud commission to see the reports and findings of T-rump’s short-lived panel.  Findings are likely to disprove the claim by Crooked Donald that thousands of votes had been tallied in 2016 for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.)))    *** A federal judge has turned down the Trump administration's bid to lift an order requiring officials to disclose internal records of a now-defunct commission set up to pursue pres-ident Donald T-rump's own unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud.    U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled last December that a member of the panel, Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, was improperly denied access to materials prepared and submitted by his fellow commissioners.***

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  *** The agency released its decision Friday, two years after the complaint was filed during the 2016 primaries, when then-candidate T-rump plugged T-rump-branded wine, steaks and golf courses during political events and held news conferences at T-rump properties. The complaint from American Democracy Legal Fund alleged that represented a use of campaign funds to further T-rump’s business and personal interests in violation of campaign finance law.  Additional complaints alleged that T-rump had “charged his own campaign significantly more money” for events than he had charged others for similar events.    But the FEC dismissed the complaints on a 3-1 vote, with Democratic commissioner Ellen Weintraub dissenting, after the agency’s general counsel recommended against moving forward. ***

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 *** T-rump said Saturday evening that he had instructed U.S. officials to withdraw support for a joint statement with other member nations he had backed just hours earlier, saying the United States would not join after Trudeau publicly criticized T-rump’s trade policy. ...  Trudeau criticized T-rump’s recent decision to place tariffs on steel and aluminum from the European Union, Canada and Mexico, saying it was “insulting” that T-rump cited U.S. national security as his reason for doing so. ***

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  *** Across four polls conducted during the Clinton administration, an average of 72% of U.S. adults said it was very important for the president to provide moral leadership for the country.  A May 1-10 update of the question finds 66% of Americans holding that view.The modest change at the national level obscures more significant shifts among partisans -- a 23-percentage-point decline among Republicans and a 13-point increase among Democrats.***

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  ***  Mueller's team has questioned associates about Stone's finances, including his tax returns.  The special counsel recently subpoenaed John P. Kakanis, who has worked as Stone's assistant and has insight into some of Stone's business deals, according to a person familiar with the situation. Reuters first reported on the subpoena.     The interest in Stone's finances could be tied to Mueller's charge of investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential collusion, though another possibility is Mueller is pursuing something unrelated that turned up in the course of the investigation. ***

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  ** Fifty-nine percent of Americans said in the poll that Trump administration officials' ethics are poor or not goodThe majority of Americans have largely given past administrations positive ethics ratings. ***    ((( So WTF is wrong with the 37 percent?  Russian trolls? )))

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  *** As has been revealed across several reports stemming from the release of the Trump Inaugural Committee's tax return, the excess of funds may have been used for more than just trying and failing to convince Paul Anka to perform "My Way" at the Inaugural Ball.    (Scrutiny of) the inauguration money was reinvigorated last Friday, when ABC News revealed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating foreign donations to T-rump’s inaugural fund, particularly those coming from individuals with ties to Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.  Those questioned by investigators – including billionaire Thomas Barrack, who chaired the inaugural committee – were reportedly asked about specific donors, including Andrew Intrater, the CEO of Columbus Nova, one of the companies that paid Michael Cohen's LLC for "consulting" advice in 2017.    Columbus Nova is an affiliate of a larger company owned by Intrater's cousin, Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Intrater donated $250,000 to T-rump's inauguration, and both he and Vekselberg were in attendance, as were several other figures with close ties to Russia. ***

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 *** In a newly released transcript of his testimony, T-rump Jr. repeatedly couched his answers about that June 2016 T-rump Tower meeting by saying he did not “remember” or that he didn’t “recall” certain things. Even when he was pretty sure, he'd say “not that I recall” or something like that. The result was a pretty cagey piece of testimony.  ***

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   *** The revelations add another dimension to the depth of discussions between T-rump's organization and his family and individuals in Russia, many of them close to its leader, Vladimir Putin. T-rump has long insisted, including in early 2017, before he took office, that "I have nothing to do with Russia."    A statement from Donald T-rump Jr. given to the Senate Judiciary Committee was among the more than 2,500 pages of congressional testimony released unexpectedly by the panel on Wednesday. The documents involved some of the players in the now infamous June 2016 meeting between a Russian lawyer and T-rump campaign officials at T-rump Tower. ***

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  *** "Mr. Benczkowski's representation of the Putin-allied Alfa Bank and his refusal to recuse himself from Russia-related matters mean that he will not be able to credibly oversee the Division's involvement in Special Counsel Mueller's investigation and other sensitive matters such as the criminal investigation of Michael Cohen," the senators wrote Wednesday. ...    Questions about the Alfa Bank's activity first arose when a group of computer scientists raised concerns about Internet records that showed that Alfa Bank servers repeatedly looked up the unique internet address of a Trump Organization computer server in the United States.  Authorities never alleged any wrongdoing on the bank's part and the bank denied any misconduct. ***

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  *** West is an influential artist, but there is no proof that black men's views of Trump are shaped significantly — or at all — by the rapper. If anything, support for West may have declined after he blamed enslaved black people for their enslavement, implied that African Americans who vote Democrat are not “free thinkers” and endorsed views expressed by Candace Owens, a black conservative activist who says liberal blacks are on “the Democratic plantation.”  ***