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From The Reporter’s Notebook
The Trump Organization said Thursday that it has terminated three overseas licensing deals: two in Rio de Janeiro and one in Baku, Azerbaijan, TPM’s Esme Cribb reported. The company’s general counsel, Alan Garten, told CNN that the deals were “terminated under the applicable agreements,” which he described as “housecleaning.” But details of the Trump-branded luxury hotel in Azerbaijan vanished from the then-candidate’s website in December 2015, when a sales agent said that the project had been delayed and had no opening date, and Brazilian federal prosecutor Alselmo Lopes opened separate investigations into Trump Towers Rio and a luxury hotel that was part of the Trump Hotels franchise in October and November, respectively.
Agree or Disagree?
Josh Marshall: “It goes without saying that FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC has a very clear understanding of who runs the Democratic National Committee, starting—at the time—with the sitting Member of Congress who ran the organization. Then there’s the executive director. The finance chair. Myriad executive, national committeepersons. If this was a serious business, which obviously it was, and the FBI thought it was important to get the attention of a decision-maker in the organization, it would have been very easy to do. But the way it was handled was something like the equivalent of seeing a problem at a major corporation and leaving messages with the receptionist.”
Say What?!
“It is geopolitics, stupid!”
– The Twitter account for the Russian embassy in the United Kingdom has recently taken a few mocking jabs at the United States.
BUZZING: Today in the Hive
From a TPM Prime member: “Trump and the Congressional GOP are going to have a symbiotic relationship. I think Trump is going to let the GOP Congressional leadership have whatever they want, and in exchange the GOP Congressional leadership is going to let Trump play at being President, doing their best to keep corks on the end of his forks. If he ever threatens to go ‘off the reservation,’ they have the impeachment threat in the back pocket. And I think that, if he had his druthers, as long as he got the ego-stroking, Trump would be fine with that. But something is going to arise. Some challenge.”
Related: A group of former congressional staffers has a message for Democrats dismayed at Trump’s election: act like the tea party.
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