Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier In January, after a long day at his London office, Christopher Steele, the former spy turned private investigator, was stepping off a commuter train in Farnham, where he lives, when one of his two phones rang. He’d been looking forward to dinner at home with his wife, and perhaps a glass of wine. It had been their dream to live in Farnham, a town in Surrey with a beautiful Georgian high street, where they could afford a house big enough to accommodate their four children, on nearly an acre of land. Steele, who is fifty-three, looked much like the other businessmen heading home, except for the fact that he kept his phones in a Faraday bag—a pouch, of military-tested double-grade fabric, designed to block signal detection. A friend in Washington, D.C., was calling with bad news: two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, had just referred Steele’s name to the Department of Justice, for a possible criminal investigation. Even before Steele became involved in the U.S.
Ohio Republican wrongly says Sherrod Brown likes communism | PolitiFact Ohio Republicans have long attacked U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, as an ultra liberal, but now one of Brown’s hopeful Republican challengers has cast the incumbent as someone who is so far to the left that he likes communism and Marxism. Mike Gibbons, a wealthy Ohio investment banker, criticized Brown’s philosophy in an interview Feb. 20 with the Republican Liberty Caucus of Ohio. Gibbons said that Brown "majored in Russian studies at Yale University and when he majored in it -- because he would have been in (the same year as) my class -- Russia was a communist country. Gibbons, who was the finance co-chair for a joint committee for Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee in 2016, has made comments about Brown studying Marxism or Russian multiple times on the campaign trail. Gibbons’ claim is disingenuous. Brown majored in Russian studies, then started political career Brown did receive a bachelor of arts in Russian and Eastern European studies from Yale in 1974. Our ruling
From 'Slimeball Comey' to 'Crooked Hillary', why Trump loves to brand his enemies Donald Trump has branded the former FBI director James Comey a “slimeball” during another Twitter tirade. The tweets were a reaction to unfavourable excerpts released in advance of Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, in which Comey likens the president to a mob boss and dismisses “the forest fire that is the Trump presidency”. After Trump’s tweets, Merriam-Webster dictionary reported a 60,000% spike in searches for the definition of “slimeball”, which it defines as “a morally repulsive or odious person”. Just like the mob, Trump likes to dole out nicknames, especially to his opponents. It’s a trick he may have learned from professional wrestling and World Wrestling Entertainment, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2013. So who else has Trump rebranded? ‘Crooked Hillary’ ‘Little Marco’ Marco Rubio earned his moniker after poking fun at Trump’s “small hands” during the 2016 Republican presidential campaign. ‘Crazy Bernie’ ‘Sloppy Steve’ ‘Rocket man’ Al ‘Frankenstien’ Since you’re here …
Trump has announced massive aluminum and steel tariffs. Here are 5 things you need to know. President Trump meets with steel and aluminum executives on March 1, 2018. Flanking him, from left, are Roger Newport of AK Steel, John Ferriola of Nucor, Dave Burritt of U.S. Steel and Tim Timken of TimkenSteel. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press) President Trump has reportedly decided to impose new tariffs of 25 percent on imports of steel and 10 percent on imports of aluminum. Imposing trade restrictions to protect national security would be an unprecedented shift in U.S. policy. This kind of protection would have tremendous economic and institutional repercussions well beyond the two cases currently on Trump’s desk. 1) This cuts a significant amount of imports. The two investigations cover about 2 percent of total U.S. goods imports in 2017: Imports of steel were $29 billion and aluminum $17 billion. [ President Trump’s solar and washer tariffs may have now opened the floodgates of protectionism ] And the proposed cuts in imports are sizable. When the George W. politics monkey-cage true false
Two minutes to midnight: did the US miss its chance to stop North Korea’s nuclear programme? | News Pyongyang International is one of the world’s quieter airports. The country’s chronic isolation means that there are not many places to fly, and few foreigners keen on visiting. At least until a new terminal was built in 2012, many of the flights on the departure boards were just for show, giving the appearance of connection with the outside world. They never actually took off. Against this melancholy backdrop, one day in late May 1999, something quite extraordinary happened. An official plane bearing the blue-and-white livery of the US government and emblazoned with the stars and stripes landed and taxied along the runway. The flightpath followed by Perry’s plane, which had taken off in Japan, had not been used since the Korean war. Perry was arriving at a moment of high tension. By the time the US delegation arrived in Pyongyang, a 1994 agreement between Washington and Pyongyang, intended to prevent North Korea from ever becoming a nuclear weapons state, was fraying. And potatoes.
Trump Org: a magnet for dirty businessmen By Inti Pacheco, Manuela Andreoni, Alex Mierjeski and Keenan Chen In late 1997, Donald Trump was beginning to bounce back from near financial ruin. Two years earlier, his financial losses had totaled $916 million following a string of bankruptcies at Trump casinos and other properties earlier in the decade, according to tax records published in late 2016. But then, Trump stumbled upon a deal that would change the course of his real estate business. In Seoul, South Korea, a proposed tower on the banks of the Han River needed a name to convey luxury to prospective buyers. Video: This is how the Trump licensing business works Abraham Wallach, then the Trump Organization’s executive vice president for development and acquisitions, said he traveled to South Korea with Trump and saw in the project an intriguing formula: profit with virtually no investment. According to Wallach, anyone can become a Trump partner, as long as they’re willing to pay his fee. 1Villa Trump BrazilBrazil 14Trump Int. L.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Putin Attacked the U.S. Election Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Putin Attacked the U.S. Election Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has been widely documented but not thoroughly investigated. I. After the election, political leaders from multiple parties have reiterated Reid’s call for an investigation. Over the summer, 17 intelligence agencies concurred that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. In summary, leaders from the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the Green Party; intelligence officials from the CIA and the NSA; and the White House itself have stated that Russia interfered with the election. II. * Economic vulnerability. * Expansion of territory and the NATO obstacle. * The threat of Hillary Clinton. III. US officials have been warning about Russian attempts to install political leaders abroad for some time. IV. V. During the 2016 presidential election, Russians took their cyber espionage to a level beyond quietly snooping and pulling emails. VI. VII.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is confusing. This timeline will help If you need evidence of the US retail sector’s precarious condition, consider that more than 9,000 stores closed last year, and another 12,000 are on the chopping block this year, according to commercial property firm Cushman & Wakefield. Despite a 4.2% rise in 2017 over the previous year, US retail growth is lumpy and clearly not firing on all cylinders. Every week brings gloomy news of bankruptcies or downsizings. Online sales, meanwhile, have been climbing, underpinning the sector’s overall growth. US retail is at a crossroads, with brands and retailers still trying to decide whether e-commerce is friend or foe. The future of retail is happening now, in China Online sales penetration in China is the highest in the world, but brick-and-mortar retail still accounts for more than 80% of total retail sales. Leading the way is Alibaba, which operates the country’s largest e-commerce platforms and has more than half a billion consumers shopping on its marketplaces. And what about malls?
Did Trump inherit a mess? 8 charts show otherwise In his address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump revived a theme he had unveiled less than two weeks earlier, when he said at a marathon press conference that he’d inherited "a mess" from his predecessor, Barack Obama. Speaking in the House chamber on Feb. 28, Trump offered a series of statistics that collectively painted a dire picture of the U.S. economy. To be sure, there are shortcomings in the economy. But while Trump had a point with some of these assertions, many of the talking points on his list leave out crucial context, gloss over nuance, or both. At most, the list of economic shortcomings that Trump offered in the House chamber provides a partial portrait of the economy — a portrait carefully crafted, in the reverse of the old song lyrics, to accentuate the negative and eliminate the positive. What Trump said "More than one in five people in their prime working years are not working. There definitely is a downside to today’s economy. Employment Bankruptcies
Trump: The real menace to national security Opinion | Did Trump obstruct justice? Look at the facts. President Donald Trump says the Justice Department is politically biased against him. President Trump and the GOP-led Congress are conveying an utter lack of will and competence when it comes to national security. More than 130 political appointees working in the Executive Office of the President did not have permanent security clearances as of November 2017, including the president’s daughter, son-in-law and his top legal counsel, according to internal White House documents obtained by NBC News. The lack of concern with the basic operation of the White House is not simply a matter of politics; it’s also a threat to national...