'Get Over It.' Trump Tied Ukraine Funding to an Investigation of the DNC, Says Mick Mulvaney

https://time.com/5703826/trump-ukraine-dnc-investigation-mulvaney/

“The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the things he was worried about in corruption with that nation. And that is absolutely appropriate,” Mulvaney told reporters in the White House briefing room. In response to a question about whether the White House told Ukraine that funding will not flow to the unless the investigation into the Democratic server happened as well, Mulvaney said: “We do that all the time with foreign policy.”

Mulvaney confirmed that Trump had also brought up the debunked conspiracy that Ukrainian individuals were involved in the investigation into the Russian hacking of the DNC server in 2016. There was no such involvement. “Did he also mention to me in [the] past the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely,” Mulvaney said of a conversation he had with Trump. “No question about that. But that’s it, and that’s why we held up the money.”

Political influence in foreign policy is “going to happen,” Mulvaney said. “I have news for everybody: Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy,” said Mulvaney. “That is going to happen. Elections have consequences, and foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.” One consequence — domestic politics bleeding into Trump’s foreign policy — has now spilled into the open.

The US and Turkey reached a Syrian ceasefire. But what does that mean?

https://www.vox.com/2019/10/17/20919566/turkey-syria-us-ceasefire-erdogan-pence-kurds

According to Pence, Turkey has agreed to a 120-hour (five-day) ceasefire, during which time fighters in the YPG — the main Syrian Kurdish fighting force in the region that has helped the US fight ISIS for several years now — would withdraw from a 20-mile “safe zone” near the border with Turkey. The agreement also requires the YPG to turn over its heavy weaponry and dismantle its fortifications.

In exchange, the United States will not place any more sanctions on Turkey, and if a permanent ceasefire goes into effect, then the US will remove the sanctions and penalties already placed on Turkey for its invasion.

”We got what we wanted. This is not a ceasefire. We [will] only halt our operations,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said.

The guardrails are off the Trump presidency

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/18/politics/donald-trump-impeachment-turkey-kurds-g7-mulvaney/index.html

That apt mission doctrine for a presidency blazing with abuses of power, conflicts of interest and unhinged behavior is the work of White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, whose barn burner of a briefing on a day of political train wrecks, staggering misdirection and reality bending sent a clear message.

Democrats can impeach President Donald Trump, Republicans can bemoan his betrayal of the Kurds and the media can fact-check him till the cows come home -- but nothing is going to restrain or moderate him. In fact, he's becoming ever more incorrigible.

The President's brazen willingness to do exactly what he wants -- key to his appeal to voters angry with the political establishment in 2016 -- shone through a wild few hours that briefly stole the spotlight from the Democratic impeachment inquiry.

Trump unhappy with Mulvaney's press briefing in which he acknowledged quid pro quo, source says

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/17/politics/trump-unhappy-mulvaney-quid-pro-quo/index.html

President Donald Trump is not pleased with acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's press briefing and his acknowledgment on Thursday of a quid pro quo, according to a source close to the President.

"He was not happy," the source said.

Mulvaney shocked reporters when he admitted the Trump administration had held up military funding to Ukraine to press the country to investigate the handling of a Democratic National Committee server hacked in the 2016 election. When told that he had described a quid pro quo arrangement for the military funding, Mulvaney said, "We do that all the time with foreign policy" and later added, "Get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy."

How Amazon Has Transformed the Hasidic Economy

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/nyregion/hasidic-jews-amazon.html

Amazon has become a lucrative place to do business for many Hasidic Jews, offering anonymity to a largely insular community and allowing women to work from home.

Donald Trump and Bill Barr Are Setting a Religious War Trap

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/donald-trump-bill-barr-setting-religious-war-trap.html

Paul Krugman was not wrong to observe that there was a reason these three people, all at the epicenter of a sprawling national scandal over a shadowy foreign policy dedicated to boosting Trump’s 2020 electoral fortunes, might choose this as their path of deflection:

This outburst of God-talk is surely a response to the way the walls are closing in on Trump, the high likelihood that he will be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. Trump’s response to his predicament has been to ramp up the ugliness in an effort to rally his base. The racism has gotten even more explicit, the paranoia about the deep state more extreme. But who makes up Trump’s base? The usual answer is working-class whites, but a deeper dive into the data suggests that it’s more specific: It’s really evangelical working-class whites who are staying with Trump despite growing evidence of his malfeasance and unsuitability for high office.

In Krugman’s view, this comes down to the “the efforts of Trump’s henchmen to use the specter of secularism to distract people from their boss’s sins.”

William Barr’s Wild Misreading of the First Amendment

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/william-barrs-wild-misreading-of-the-first-amendment

This 5-Hour Window Could be Key to Trump’s Impeachment Inquiry

Litany of Defeat: Trump Defends Rising Costs of "Strategically Brilliant" Mideast Retreat

https://time.com/5702769/litany-of-defeat-trump-defends-rising-costs-of-strategically-brilliant-mideast-retreat/

Trump said it was “a good thing” that Russian forces had begun supporting the Kurds. On Tuesday, Russians were already sleeping in bunks at bases that American troops had spent years building and provisioning only to abandon them in haste just hours earlier. Trump’s former counter-ISIS envoy Brett McGurk wrote on Twitter that U.S. forces were “executing [an] emergency ‘break glass’ evacuation procedure reserved for an extreme worst-case scenario.” The result, says Hagel is a big win for Russian president Vladimir Putin. “Russia comes out the big winner in the Middle East,” Hagel said. “Putin n

129 REPUBLICANS REBUKE TRUMP AS HOUSE VOTES TO CONDEMN PRESIDENT'S SYRIA TROOP WITHDRAWAL

Trump claimed that as U.S. soldiers are extracted from Syria amid Turkey's military offensive, "our soldiers are not in harm's way."

"The Kurds are much safer now. They know how to fight," he said. "Like I said, they're not angels... but they fought with us."

The president continued: "They have a problem with Turkey. They have a problem at a border. It's not our border... They've got a lot of sand over there. There's a lot of sand that they can play with."

However, a senior Department of Defense official told Newsweek that Trump's assertion that U.S. soldiers were not in harm's way was not true.

New York trial court declares "Get Law" unconstitutional- Despite Recent Ruling, "Second Get Law" Is Constitutional

/https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/despite-recent-ruling-second-get-law-is-constitutional/2017/08/04/

The Jewish Press- August 4, 2017

Confronted with a request to apply the colloquially dubbed “Second Get Law” (DRL 236B6(o)) in a matrimonial matter, Judge Bartlett, an Orange County, New York judge, reviewed the statute and declared that she found it unconstitutional as applied to the case at hand, and possibly unconstitutional on its face. Judge Bartlett is the first judge to do so since the law was passed in 1992.

Trump Levels Sanctions on Turkey in Attempt to Contain the Chaos Wreaked By His Syria Withdrawal

https://time.com/5699970/trump-sanctions-turkey-syria/

President Donald Trump announced Monday his intention to level economic sanctions, hike tariffs and halt trade negotiations with Turkey as a result of its military incursion against U.S.-aligned Kurdish forces in northern Syria.

“I will soon be issuing an Executive Order authorizing the imposition of sanctions against current and former officials of the Government of Turkey and any persons contributing to Turkey’s destabilizing actions in northeast Syria. Likewise, the steel tariffs will be increased back up to 50 percent, the level prior to reduction in May,” Trump said in a statement. “The United States will also immediately stop negotiations, being led by the Department of Commerce, with respect to a $100 billion trade deal with Turkey.”

GOP REP. LIZ CHENEY TELLS FOX NEWS TURKEY INVADED SYRIA BECAUSE DEMOCRATS LAUNCHED IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY AGAINST TRUMP

https://www.newsweek.com/gop-liz-cheney-fox-news-turkey-invaded-syria-because-democrats-impeachment-inquiry-trump-1465003

Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney claimed in an interview with Fox News on Monday morning that Democrats are to blame for Turkey's invasion of Syria because they launched an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, despite the fact that the president withdrew U.S. forces from the Middle Eastern nation to give the Turkish forces the greenlight to enter.

"I also want to say that the impeachment proceedings that are going on and what the Democrats are doing themselves to try to weaken this president is part of this," Cheney, who represents Wyoming and is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, argued.

"It was not an accident that the Turks chose this moment to roll across the border," she claimed. "And I think the Democrats have got to pay very careful attention to the damage that they're doing with the impeachment proceedings."

TRUMP AND ERDOGAN 'JUST GOT PLAYED' BY PUTIN SAYS TERRORISM EXPERT, AS KURDS IN SYRIA STRIKE DEAL WITH RUSSIA AND BASHAR AL-ASSAD

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-erdogan-just-got-played-vladimir-putin-says-terrorism-expert-michael-smith-1465008

A foreign policy and terrorism expert believes President Donald Trump and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, "just got played" by Russian President Vladimir Putin, after Turkey was permitted to launch its current attack into northeastern Syria.

The offensive, labeled Operation Spring Peace by the Turks, was launched on Wednesday after a phone call between Trump and Erdogan the previous Sunday. Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria's border with Turkey soon after the phone call.

Following the withdrawal, Trump was accused of betraying the region's Kurdish population and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—a force that was instrumental in quashing the influence of militants from the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in the region.

Pelosi Didn’t Raid Social Security for Impeachment Inquiry

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/10/pelosi-didnt-raid-social-security-for-impeachment-inquiry/

Quick Take

A viral, made-up story sowed confusion among social media users over whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has diverted Social Security money to the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. She didn’t.

Full Story

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not taken money away from Social Security in order to fund the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

That hoax is the product of America’s Last Line of Defense, a self-described “satirical” publication whose viral headlines across a network of websites often deceive social media users. Its story was published Oct. 4 on one its websites, potatriotsunite.com, with the headline, “Pelosi Diverts $2.4 Billion From Social Security To Cover Impeachment Costs.”

Observant users who clicked through to the full story might have noticed the many tags littered throughout the page indicating its fictitious nature: A banner at the top of the website, for example, reads, “Potatriots unite for satire, ridicule and mockery.”