More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

The Felon's BBC Lawsuit Backfires

The Felon likes to file lawsuits to intimidate both critics and the news media outlets that accurately report on his failed policies and misdeeds.  Often the targets of the Felon's intimidation either roll over and pay money to make the lawsuits go away or reach some other kind of settlement. One such defendant, the British Broadcasting Corporation ("BBC") is not rolling over as the Felon expected and the rules of federal court discovery in lawsuits now has the Felon - and other Trump family members - dodging depositions where testimony would be under oath and perjury charges could be applied to parties giving false testimony (the only thing that comes out of the Felon's mouth). The Felon hates anything and any forum where he is not free to lie at will. As pieces in the New Republic and Politico lay out the Felon is again trying to dodge being deposed and is claiming to be unavailable until after the court ordered discovery period is over.  Hopefully, the court will force him to testify or dismiss the case with prejudice so that it cannot be revived down the road.  Here are excerpts from The New Republic:

[The Felon] President Trump is trying to get out of testifying in a lawsuit that he initiated.  As part of his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC, Trump was scheduled to sit for a deposition with the U.K. broadcaster’s lawyers on Friday. However, according to a court filing Tuesday, the president’s attorneys canceled the session, saying he would be unavailable for about two months, well after the discovery period in the case ends, Politico reports. . . . The broadcaster is trying to get a federal judge to force Trump to commit to a date for the deposition.

“Nearly eight months into discovery, after seven depositions of BBC witnesses, and with only two months of discovery remaining, the BBC still has not been able to depose, and does not even have a schedule to depose, the most central figure in this case: Plaintiff himself,” BBC attorney Charles Tobin wrote in the filing. “There is hardly a more crucial and relevant piece of discovery in a defamation lawsuit than the deposition of the Plaintiff.”

Trump’s lawyers had reportedly agreed in July that Trump would testify on October 16 as long as both sides agreed to keep the location and other details secret. But on September 28, the president’s attorneys said that the previously agreed date no longer worked. This past Friday, they finally suggested moving the deposition to the second or third week of January, nearly one month after the discovery period ends.

Now the BBC’s lawyers want the judge on the case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett, to add the deposition’s scheduling to the agenda of a hearing scheduled for next week.  

Trump sued the BBC last year, claiming the broadcasting company funded by the British government defamed him by deceptively editing one of his speeches on January 6, 2021, for a documentary aired one day before the 2024 presidential election. 

Since then, the lawsuit has backfired for him, as the court ordered the release of Trump’s finances, as well as records from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Even Trump’s children are dodging subpoenas from the BBC’s lawyers for records related to the January 6 Capitol insurrection.   

The BBC is trying to get Trump’s case thrown out entirely, pointing out that the documentary never aired in the U.S. and that the south Florida federal court where Trump filed the lawsuit doesn’t have jurisdiction over the case. Trump’s refusal to testify on camera is probably going to help the BBC’s efforts and expose his attempts to browbeat news organizations he doesn’t like. 

The piece in Politico notes how the Felon has avoid being deposed in other lawsuits of his own instigation:

In 2023, Trump dropped a lawsuit he’d filed against his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, after a judge ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in the case and refused further requests to change the established date. Trump said through a spokesperson that he had elected to “pause” the suit, rather than cancel a campaign rally he had planned in New Hampshire for the same day as the testimony. The suit was never refiled.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Trump’s October Surprise: Helping Russia Again

Continuing the theme of yesterday's posts, there is much discussion of the Felon's decision to ignore a law he signed himself last month and to stop sanctions against Russia and to import Russian diesel supplies.  The move is claimed to be an effort to reduce diesel prices domestically, yet the Russian imports would do little to actually lower prices even though some in MAGA world are ignoring that reality, not to mention the fact that the USA is EXPORTING diesel stocks. An easier way - although still not very effective - way to reduce domestic diesel prices would be to cease diesel exports, something the fossil fuel industry would likely oppose. Thus, the correct take away from the Felon's action is that the real motivation is to help Putin and Russia with millions of US dollars flowing into Russia from the USA.  As noted, it makes it difficult not to see the Felon as a Russian asset perhaps compromised and reeled in by Russia as far back in the late 1980's. The Felon's behavior betrays decades of America's efforts to promote democracy abroad and displays his catering to dictators - or in the case of Putin - war criminals.  It's an embarrassing time to be an America when treason is on display at the White House. An column in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's deference to Putin:

It rained most of Sunday in Washington, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias washed over the East Coast. Unable to golf, and stuck inside the White House, [the Felon] President Trump spent part of his morning on social media touting the size of his rallies and defending Christopher Columbus. He also declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt strikes against each other’s energy infrastructures. Except that he hadn’t first confirmed that with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and Russia spent the hours that followed bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones, hitting a Kharkiv power plant.

Trump’s inability to bring the Iran war to a close has left him incensed but also oddly paralyzed, two people close to him told us. One of them, an adviser, said that Trump “is used to snapping his fingers and having the whole world—Republicans, world leaders, the media—come to attention, and he is losing his mind that Iran won’t listen.” Iran has resumed menacing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the average price of diesel in the United States has crossed the $6-a-gallon mark, raising the cost of goods that travel the nation’s highways on trucks.

Republicans are panicked that those high energy prices could help Democrats take control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, which are now only three weeks away. Trump has been searching for a scapegoat, and appears to have settled on Ukraine. Although blaming a European country that’s fighting for its existence for the rise in global oil prices might seem implausible, Trump seems to prefer that to accepting responsibility for his decision to attack Iran. His broadsides against Ukraine, moreover, are consistent with his decade-long deference to Vladimir Putin.

A U.S. president siding with the Kremlin is quite an October surprise. But in just the past few days, Trump appears to have fully turned against Ukraine. He announced on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Putin to import Russian diesel fuel, undercutting the new sanctions bill against Moscow’s energy industry that Trump signed into law last month. Even if the roughly 2.25 million barrels headed to the U.S. only marginally ease fuel costs, the deal allows Trump to tout efforts to help Americans while also providing Russia with additional revenue.

Despite the opposition of European allies and some Republicans on Capitol Hill, [the Felon] Trump has followed up by placing even more pressure on Ukraine. He called for Zelensky to be replaced.

Ukraine has expanded its strikes deep into Russian territory in recent months, targeting the larger nation’s oil refineries. Those attacks sparked an energy crisis in Russia and were cheered across Europe—but not in the White House. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in response, which added more pressure to global diesel markets already under strain from the war in Iran. Zelensky told Trump and his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that he was willing to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if the Russians halted attacks on Ukrainian power plants, a White House official told us. But Trump doesn’t see the strikes as equivalent—and demanded that Ukraine first stop attacking Russian refineries, the official said. Zelensky refused.

[The Felon's] Trump’s next move against Ukraine came, as it so often does, after a phone call with Putin. . . . Trump spoke with Putin on Friday to wish him a belated birthday, even though some in the White House counseled against the call, the adviser told us, believing it would yield little. During the 90-minute conversation, Trump told Putin that he would lift the sanctions on Russian diesel exports.

That undermined sanctions applied in 2022 and undercut the tougher Russian-sanctions bill that Trump signed last month; the law was named in honor of one of its champions, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. A bipartisan group of lawmakers was infuriated by the move, and some Republicans denounced Trump for siding with Putin. Four GOP senators—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of ⁠Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and John Curtis of Utah—joined some of their Democratic colleagues to release a statement yesterday saying that lifting the sanctions “runs directly counter to that law” and that the U.S. should not provide “Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.” . . . . Even if Trump wouldn’t fully support Ukraine, officials in Kyiv had hoped he would not actively hurt their cause. That hope may be fading.

Recent talks between Kushner, Witkoff, and Putin have included the promise of massive business deals that Russia could strike with U.S. interests once the war concludes, according to reports. Ukrainian officials have long believed that Trump’s foreign policy focuses on opening up business deals—and the potential enrichment of the president’s family and friends—over the defense of democracy, human rights, or territorial sovereignty.

Ukraine was already bracing for a difficult winter. Moscow has escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s cities. It has grown its missile stockpiles and debuted a jet-powered drone that Ukrainian defenses have had difficulty stopping. Europe has tried to fill the gaps left by Trump’s indifference—and the U.S. being bogged down in Iran—but Zelensky’s aides believe that Putin will use the winter to pummel their cities before making another lunge at Kyiv in the spring. If, suddenly, Ukraine were left without U.S. intelligence or American-made weapons, Kyiv might be in its most vulnerable position since the first days of the war.

Trump’s admiration for Putin has been one of the most enduring geopolitical subplots of the past decade. . . . . he has refrained from holding Putin to account for helping Iran, even after American intelligence agencies revealed that Moscow gave Tehran targeting information to strike U.S. military assets in the region. Some of Trump’s closest outside advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president . . . .

Though Putin has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Trump welcomed him to Anchorage last summer. Trump’s move to undo the diesel sanctions could provide a boost to Russia’s faltering economy. And he has overruled the objections of some in his own party by inviting Putin to this winter’s G20 summit, which the United States is hosting at a Trump-owned golf course in Doral, just outside Miami.

If Putin accepts the invitation to that December meeting, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky has said he’ll be there, and is hoping to meet with Putin to negotiate the end of the war.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

The Felon Is Trying to Force Kyiv to Surrender.

One might assume that Vladimir Putin has once reminded the Felon of the "kompromat" that Putin holds over the Felon given the Felon's latest efforts to force Ukraine to surrender.  Between his diesel fuel purchase from Russia - which hopefully, Congress will block since it will do nothing to lower domestic diesel prices - that would provide billions of dollars to Russia, his constant attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky, and his constant parroting of Putin's talking points while maligning European allies, it is increasing difficult to believe the Felon isn't a Kremlin asset.  Russian strikes are deliberately targeting civilian sites including power plants needed for civilian purposes and Putin is wantonly killing Ukrainian children and entire families, yet the Felon lies and blames Ukraine - which was invaded by Russia and not vice versa - for the war, the high diesel prices withing the USA (even as the USA continues to export diesel) and wants Ukraine to surrender and give up parts of the country to satisfy Putin's megalomania.  Thankfully, Ukraine seems determined to keep fighting and, better yet, to continue to hit Russia's energy facilities and Russian data centers that are the basis for Russia's efforts to cause division both in the USA and around the world. The Felon, in my view, is a traitor and a threat to international law.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's dangerous - and perhaps treasonous - actions.  Here are highlights:

In the past 72 hours, [the Felon] Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while asking nothing from Russia in exchange. He has not criticized Russian attacks on Ukrainian power plants or factories, even those owned by American companies. He has offered no condolences for the recent deaths of Ukrainian children in Russian bombing raids.

He has lied repeatedly. He declared that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an “energy cease-fire,” an announcement that surprised the Ukrainians and that in any case the Russians immediately broke, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv only hours later. He accused Ukraine of blocking negotiations, when in reality the Ukrainians have repeatedly proposed cease-fires and Russia has never agreed to a cease-fire or any meaningful negotiation at all.

He has described Ukraine’s democratically elected president as an obstacle to negotiations and told him to leave office. But on Friday, before making these new decisions, he held yet another long, friendly telephone conversation with the Russian dictator, who really could end the war today. All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else. If Trump knows this, then he does not care.

The [Felon] president has implied that the point of his new policy is to lower fuel prices for Americans. Perhaps he wants to convince voters that the cause of high prices is Ukraine and not his own war of choice in Iran. But this is not a sufficient explanation or justification for these dramatic actions. The amount of fuel that Russia could export is too small, the impact on pricing too slight, the narrative too late to shape electoral outcomes.

This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit. These include deals involving the Nord Stream gas pipelines, mineral mining in the Arctic, the Russian assets frozen in European banks, and more.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, American allies in Europe and elsewhere have tried to explain to the president the significance of the war and the threat that Russia poses to peace and prosperity in Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa. Now it looks as if they have failed, and [The Felon] Trump has followed his oldest instincts to side with Putin. What lessons will they draw?

The first and most obvious is: Don’t rely on the United States. America is now a capricious, unpredictable power, one whose long-standing foreign policies can be impulsively reversed, from one day to the next. The U.S. has been sanctioning Russia for many years, and now suddenly, at the whim of the president, it is not. Also: Dictators receive better treatment in Trump’s Washington than elected leaders. Canada is a far more reliable energy partner for the U.S. than Russia, and yet Trump has not sought to improve relations with the Canadian government.  European security will be directly at risk in the case of a Ukrainian collapse or surrender, and yet Trump listens to Moscow, not Berlin or London.

Another lesson: This administration is for sale. A few days ago, The New York Times reported that, as part of peace negotiations between the U.S. and Russia, the property of Lukoil, a Russian company, may soon be acquired by a business consortium that includes Middle Eastern partners of Trump’s two lead negotiators in Ukraine, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, as well as Trump’s daughter Ivanka and Witkoff’s son. . . . Even if none of them is ever completed, the mere fact that Trump’s negotiators discuss them gives the Russian regime reason to believe that it can continue the war with impunity.

However, democracies can cooperate without the American president. Ukraine will continue fighting, and will probably continue striking Russian refineries, thanks to its friends in Europe and beyond. French intelligence, German weaponry, and broad packages of aid from Scandinavia, Poland, and elsewhere will help. Everyone else should take note. For the past couple years, Europeans, Canadians, and the Pacific democracies have been building deeper commercial and security links with one another, as well as with India and Latin America. They’ve just been given another reason to make those links stronger.

The Trump-Russia relationship remains intense, important, and very weird. In the end, Trump always adopts Russia’s perspective, whoever the leader. Since his first trip to Moscow in 1987, when it was still the Soviet Union, he has loudly repeated Russian propaganda and reflected Russian views. Upon returning from that trip, he took out full-page advertisements in three newspapers, attacking American alliances in Europe and Asia. For nearly 40 years, he has been saying much the same thing.

He continues to hold these views in defiance of the American military and American intelligence, as well as majorities in the country and in Congress. Immediately after his statement on diesel and his comments about Volodymyr Zelensky, a bipartisan cohort of U.S. representatives and senators attacked the deal and vowed to reverse it. Earlier today, U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, America’s highest-ranking soldier in Europe and the top NATO commander—a job always held by an American—delivered a very different message to Russia. Speaking at a security conference in Warsaw, Grynkewich said that any attack on NATO, something many now genuinely fear, would be met with overwhelming force: “We will stop the attack and deny them the ability to achieve their ​objectives, whatever those ​might be. We will, ⁠in short, ensure any attack, against any ally, proves utterly futile.” He implied that there would be massive retaliation targeting “anything and everything that supports, sustains, and controls” an aggressive force.

This is the kind of language that, if it also came from the White House, might deter Russia from expanding its current campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks in Europe, from continuing to aid Iran, or from committing war crimes in Ukraine. But this president absolutely refuses to use it, and at this point, we have to assume he never will.

As I said, it is difficult to believe the Felon is not a Russian asset at this point. One can only hope that the mid-terms bring a massive blue wave that will allow the Felon to be restrained - impeachment might also find more fans even among some Republicans.

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Can a Blue Wave Rein In the Felon

So far the signs appear to be that Republicans may lose control of both houses of Congress as the Felon's failed policies - think tariffs, trade wars and a war of choice in Iran - are turning previously thought safe seats in red states into contested, toss up districts.  Meanwhile, having driven the economy into a ditch and alienated long time allies, the Felon's corruption and obsession with lining his own pockets would make some crime bosses blush.  Sadly, short of finding 60 votes in the U.S. Senate for an impeachment conviction, the nation faces the prospect of more economic damage and betrayal of allies and citizens alike.   I'm not one to be over confident and it is crucial that anyone and everyone who opposes the ruin the Felon is bringing to the nation get to the polls and vote, preferably early and in person.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at where the nation finds itself and the crime syndicate operating from the White House.  What cannot be predicted is what the Felon will do if he finds himself diminished and better yet reined in by a Democrat controlled Congress and perhaps a re-energized judiciary.  Here are article highlights:

Signs of a midterm blue wave are everywhere, and yet it would be journalistic malpractice not to attach some nervous caveats to any prediction. Polls are sketchy. Campaigns have never been more subject to the desires of the wealthy. What is more, the President of the United States has the impulse control of a toddler, though most toddlers have neither the authority nor the inclination to spark an insurrection, destabilize the Western alliance, live-stream an execution, or threaten to end “a whole civilization.” We are subjected daily to the caprices of a mind both unregulated and amoral. As Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, the Commander-in-Chief is “fascist to the core.” You may prefer milder terminology. Fine. But, after a decade defined by Donald Trump’s unceasing presence, a growing percentage of the American electorate appears to recognize the uniqueness of this President and the mayhem that he has instigated from the Oval Office.

We are, collectively, on guard against undue optimism. Still, if the coming election does result in a blue wave, Trump will be faced with the fact of his diminishment. The rest of us will be faced with the wreckage.

A decade ago, those who believed that Trump’s ascent represented a grave and multifaceted danger, a national emergency, were often met with sneering dismissal. The right generally regarded Trump’s most vocal opponents as pussy-hatted snowflakes, woke snobs indifferent to the struggles of working people. They were, in a word, “deranged.” . . . . All that distinguished Trump was “aesthetics”—“He is vulgar. He is rude.”

In the passage from lame duck to pensioner, Trump still has plenty of time to inflict further damage on the Republic while milking it for profit. He is the sum of his whims and his rages, and, a change in Congress or not, he will likely go on flouting the law, tightening the screws on universities, cultural institutions, and the press. What he seems to value most of late is the humiliation of his enemies and, even more, the accumulation of vast wealth. Since the second Inauguration, the Trumps and their satraps have operated with all the commercial cunning of the Corleone family; the White House is their front, their Genco Pura Olive Oil Company.

Every week brings word of a new grift, a new meme coin, a Melania doc, a pay-for-access club, or fresh funds from Gulf grandees looking for leverage. The other day, we learned that Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald, Jr.,’s ex and the U.S. Ambassador to Greece, texted a maga donor insisting that he pay off her hundred-thousand-dollar Amex bill in exchange for favors from, in no particular order, the I.R.S., Tucker Carlson, and Kid Rock. . . . The Administration counts on an exhausted nation’s distraction. This may well have been the singular lesson that Trump absorbed from his moral instructor, Roy Cohn: if you keep up a steady stream of bullshit, if you keep denying and counterattacking, all of Monday’s trespasses will be forgotten by Tuesday.

What more and more voters are coming to understand is how profoundly they have been betrayed. And this is not just about the price of gas and groceries, though “affordability” is scarcely the joke the President thinks it is. Vladimir Putin long ago set out to mock the United States for its hypocrisies. You are no better than us—that was his message and his cover to crush dissent at home and the liberties of an independent Ukraine. When Trump threatens Greenland and Canada or greases a media merger in his interest, he is proving Putin’s point. When the titans of tech obediently line up at Trump’s Inauguration and fund his ballroom, Putin smiles. . . . because Americans tend to cling reflexively to the fraying notion of national exceptionalism, it is difficult to reckon with the idea that a President might be not merely shambolic and incompetent but something far darker, even evil.

But if we are uncomfortable using a word like “evil,” how else are we to describe the spectacle of the President unleashing Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the history of humankind, to slash the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development? According to an article in The Lancet and the intensive research of Atul Gawande, a surgeon, a former assistant administrator for U.S.A.I.D., and a writer for this magazine, the agency’s support—focussed on fighting malaria, polio, malnutrition, tuberculosis, and H.I.V.—saved at least ninety million lives in the previous two decades. Researchers estimate that the cruelty-by-budget-cut has been responsible for the loss of as many as seven hundred thousand lives.

This is among the many depredations that this supposedly mainstream Administration has committed. In 1788, at a ratifying convention in Richmond, James Madison defended the newly drafted Constitution, but warned that its fulfillment would depend on the quality of the people as well as the document’s written principles. “To suppose that any form of Government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people,” he said, “is a chimerical idea.” Election Day is November 3rd. In some states, voting has already begun.