TPM Reader BM has a theory that is at first glance ridiculous. In fact, on second glance it is also ridiculous. But when it comes to trying to figure out why Donald Trump is asking legislators in Denmark, Iceland and Australia to send him political contributions, I’m really not sure it’s more ridiculous than the other theories. Here’s BM …
I have a purely speculative alternate hypothesis for how this train wreck of funding solicitations to foreign legislatures came about.
First, posit that DJT and the rest of his clan have now, and/or have had in the past, business interests in the UK (golf courses), Iceland (google “FL Group”), Australia, Canada, etc.
I’m curious why we’re not hearing more about this. On the terrorist/jihadist web, ISIS fighters and supporters seem downright giddy for a Trump presidency, a mockable clown who will tank the US economy and draw the US into the land war they’re hoping for.
I still can’t quite believe that even as big a huckster as Donald Trump thinks he can get away with this. But it’s starting to seem like Trump was probably lying when he announced with great fanfare a week ago that he was converting some $50 million of loans to his campaign into simple contributions. This would mean that he could no longer use future contributions to pay himself back for those loans. In other words, he couldn’t have either small donors or GOP fat cats reimburse him for his “self-funded” primary campaign.
This news comes from Ari Melber and Alexandre Jaffe at NBC News. Back on June 23rd, on the heels of the Trump campaign’s catastrophic and humiliating May FEC report, he grandly announced that he was forgiving the debt and that he would file the relevant paperwork with the FEC that day.
But that apparently never happened. The FEC has no record of such a filing.
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So Tim Watts is my new best friend in the Australian federal parliament. MP Tim Watts. Needless to say, we’re pals now because he’s getting bombarded by the Trump campaign asking for money to fight ‘Crooked Hillary’. Among other things, Tim’s a Labor party member. So even apart from it being illegal for Trump to solicit funds from Tim (remember, Tim’s not an American citizen, being from Australia), their politics likely don’t line up. So as we’ve been researching Trump’s top foreign countries for fundraising, I’ve been curious whether the Trump campaign has now taken the actually quite simple steps required to purge its list of at least foreign government officials at their government email addresses.
The answer is: no. As recently as last night (US time) Tim was getting emails from Trump begging for more money ahead of the critical June FEC deadline – which we discussed yesterday.
But here’s where things got significantly weirder.
So now we have our answer: There won’t be any charges against Hillary Clinton or anyone else in the ’email server scandal’ which has played such a huge role to date in the 2016 election. It is important to understand what James Comey said. The relevant statutes are broad enough that lots of people could conceivably be charged under them. And there are occasional cases where prosecutors do use that expansive nature to charge people they really have no business charging. But, as Comey said, “no reasonable prosecutor would bring” charges in this case.
What is most notable about this news from a political and news perspective is that this outcome was entirely predictable, indeed almost inevitable, based on the facts that were publicly known about the case.
We now know that Donald Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic image which in fact came from a notorious white supremacist/anti-Semitic Twitter account. The most notable fact about this incident is that while it would likely destroy most presidential campaigns, in Trump’s case it will likely be no more than a two or three day story. This is in part because, at this point, it’s just not terribly surprising (dog bites man, as journos say) but also because Trump is sure to embrace or broadcast some other racist or anti-Semitic meme within a day or two. The next blow up will push this off the front pages. The second most notable thing is that the Trump campaign can’t seem to decide what its story is: unfortunate but inconsequential mistake the campaign quickly corrected? example of political correctness run amok? or it’s a Sheriff’s badge just like these nine other Trump supporter accounts are pointing out? Trump has thus far managed the genuine feat of simultaneously holding the support of a significant chunk of the right-wing Zionist community and virtually all online anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, an accomplishment we should not overlook.
It all raises the question: is Donald Trump really an anti-Semite?
Tonight Donald Trump accused Attorney General Loretta Lynch of accepting a “bribe” from Hillary Clinton to clear her in the email probe.
Meanwhile, right now I’m watching CNN and the anchor is asking Jeff Toobin if it’s possible Trump is right and that Hillary Clinton did bribe Lynch and get Comey to recommend against prosecution.
After the UK voted to leave the European Union a week ago, there was a lot of talk about how the polls blew the result, predicting a “Remain” win when in fact “Leave” managed a close but clear victory. The rejoinder to this criticism – I think a valid one – was that the balance of polls showed “Remain” in the lead but only barely. A better interpretation of the data was that the race was too close to call.
Beyond the statistical margin of error, there were aspects of the contest that made it difficult for pollsters to accurately model. If we combined statistical with what we might call methodological margin of error, the margin of the “Remain” lead was well within this combined margin of error.
But now TPM Reader DF sends me an email with a link to a study which puts the whole picture in a very different light – and even suggests, by implication, that Donald Trump might be doing better than we think.
Former Fox host Gretchen Carlson files sexual harassment lawsuit against Fox News supremo Roger Ailes.