Who the hell knows where he went? It’s already been proven susPence obviously can’t read.
(I heard he was chosen for the VP slot because they knew he wouldn’t be a showboat and show up the boss by, you know, being able to read.)
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Just ask Pencey’s wife. The leash she has Pency wear apparently has a GPS tracking chip in it, as well a a Breathalyzer, and estrogen detector.
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None of their options are good. They decided this was their least bad option. If they did know that Flynn was under investigation, that makes Mike Pence either hopelessly stupid (well, he still is) or a liar who knew about it, but allowed Flynn to be hired anyway. They figure they have a fighting chance with “nuh-UH”
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Pence isn’t claiming anything about Flynn being under investigation, Pence is claiming he didn’t know Flynn was lobbying for Turkey, which is an outright and proveable lie.
Vice President Mike Pence, who led Trump’s transition, on Thursday nevertheless stood behind his claim that he did not learn about Flynn’s lobbying work for the Turkish government until March.
Pence was told in mid-November about the Lobbying work by Rep. Cummings (and surely if HE knew, then the lead on the Trump transition team knew!) AND Flynn’s lobbying was public knowledge in Politico and other news outlets prior to Cumming’s letter to Pence. Either Pence is getting his lies confused or he’s simply too stupid to know what he should be lying about, but it’s an outright lie that Pence didn’t find out about Flynn’s lobbying until March, whenever everyone else in the country knew in November.
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Flynn’s going to sing like the Mormon choir. Book it.
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Good point. So much nonsense I can’t even keep the lies straight.
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Or the person pulling their strings is a lot scarier than the US media, members of Congress, and Pence’s wife.
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Total distraction. Where was the vetting? “He never told us he was under investigation, Mommy!”
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The letter is addressed to Pence dated November18 AND cc’d to Chaffetz. Turkey and Russia are both addressed in the letter. Pence also had to know about Flynn’s calls to Kislyak. Pence’s deposition maybe a bigger deal -although not as entertaining- as Trump’s.
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After reading this, I’m thinking there very well could be tapes of the conversations, including the one with Priebus. Doctored ones, perhaps?
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Are they dumber than the average GOP’er? We are well aware that they can not understand the concept of recording, since they seem to think that they can deny making statements that were recorded…but for Team Trump they also seem to be unable to understand the concept of a paper trail.
It won’t be pretty but they are going down and hard.
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I would have expected Preibus to be somewhat smarter, but they all seemed pretty sure they were, shall I say, bulletproof.
Hmmm.
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Somewhat off-topic, but well worth a visit. This was an essay written by John Rogers of the much-lamented Kung Fu Monkey blog about “shame” or, more accurately, the lack thereof. It was aimed at the Bush administration but, if anything, it’s even more applicable today. A couple of excerpts below but the whole thing is definitely worth a read.
According to the Dictionary of Video Game Theory, an “exploit” is – an exploit can be defined as a case where a player knowingly uses a flaw in a game to gain an unfair advantage. In many concrete cases, it can be difficult to distinguish between cheats, exploits, and players who optimize their strategies for playing.
…
As I watched Congressmen and Senators stumble and fumble and thrash, unable to bring to heel men and women who were plainly lying to them under oath, unable to eject from public office toadies of a boot-licking expertise unseen since Versailles, it struck me. The sheer, simple elegance of it. The “exploit”.
The exploit is shame.
Our representatives – and to a great degree we as a culture – are completely buffaloed by shamelessness. You reveal a man’s corrupt, or lying, or incompetent, and what does he do? He resigns. He attempts to escape attention, often to aid in his escape of legal pursuit. Public shame has up to now been the silver bullet of American political life. But people who are willing to just do the wrong thing and wait you out, to be publicly guilty … dammmnnnn.
…
I cannot help but think that as Nixon walked to the chopper, somewhere in the darkened hallways of the White House Dick Cheney shook his head, spit, and whispered: “Pussy.”
Edited to add that this is h/t the good folks over at the Balloon Juice blog.
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WARNING THE FOLLOWING COMMENT CONTAINS ADULT SUBJECT MATTER
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“Pushes Back?” It’s like attempting to push fecal matter back into their large intestine. That shit just won’t fly.
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There are only six possible explanations for why Mike Pence has gone out in front of the American public and repeatedly given false information about Flynn, Comey, and other topics:
He has knowingly lied
He was kept of the loop with his knowledge to give him deniability
He was kept out of the loop without his knowledge to give him deniability
He was kept out the loop because Trump needed a stooge
The communication channels in the campaign team and White House are slipshod; to wit, those who need to know, don’t.
He is an incredibly incurious, dangerously incompetent man
Pence seems bright enough. A lack of curiosity is unlikely.
The idea that as head of the Trump transition team he would not be naturally informed about material relevant to the appointment of Flynn to one of the most important posts in the White House that others in the administration knew (his Turkish agent work) is at the very least testimony to incredible sloppiness. It leads to the question, “How many other compromised individuals are currently in sensitive posts because of such sloppiness?”
However, because we have seen sequenced layers of defenses across the administration when found out - false, just joking, …, the slipshod defense quickly falls apart. If he was repeatedly used as a stooge, any self-respecting person would have resigned, unless Trump has something on him. I will not be surprised to learn that Trump has something on everyone who works for him. There is something terribly sinister afoot that Mueller will now examine thoroughly. We also need a 9-11 type commission as well because this attack on our country is, as hard as it was originally to believe, is even worse. Democracy itself is endangered.
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The NYT is out for blood … just in –
and …
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Dude should have kept a dog handy to take blame for any documents that disappeared.
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OT – Projected onto the building at DoJ tonight.
Yup.
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^^^ And this is this issue’s key article. ^^^
Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America
This is Putin’s playbook that they are looking into – less attention seems to have been paid to Bannon on this front than regarding his role as “President Bannon,” but I suspected Bannon was one of Putin’s men and he and Breitbart were invested in by him – that’s only logical because Putin did this again and again with right-wing fringe media outlets to infiltrate in European politics.
@randyabraham
@inversion
@matthew1961
@irasdad
@spencersmom
As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia’s role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics company hired by the campaign that is partly owned by deep-pocketed Trump backer Robert Mercer; and Breitbart News, the right-wing website formerly run by Trump’s top political adviser Stephen Bannon.
The congressional investigators are looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the U.S. believes are Russian fronts, a source familiar with the investigations tells TIME. “Nobody can prove it yet,” the source says. In March, McClatchy newspapers reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing whether far-right sites like Breitbart News and Infowars had coordinated with Russian botnets to blitz social media with anti-Clinton stories, mixing fact and fiction when Trump was doing poorly in the campaign.
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