Before more time goes by a brief follow up on yesterday’s post about the Trumpian build up for a violent showdown after the election. In his late afternoon press conference yesterday President Trump again found an opportunity to declare his readiness to put down election night “riots” or “protests” by force using the US military. He quickly joined this to a conversation about purported voter fraud and election rigging using mail in ballots.
Meadows: CDC Chief’s 2021 Vaccine Timeline ‘Not Based’ On Info From Those ‘Closest To The Process’
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asserted on Thursday morning that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield didn’t have his facts straight when he told Congress that a COVID-19 vaccine wouldn’t be widely available until 2021, contradicting President Donald Trump’s insistence that the vaccine would be ready in October.
Thompson Blasts Wolf For Defying Subpoena In ‘Dereliction’ Of Duty
Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf defied a subpoena from the House Committee on Homeland Security Thursday, claiming that his status as a pending nominee for the permanent secretary post made him ineligible to testify.
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Feds Considered Removing Peaceful Protesters With Heat Ray For Trump’s Photo-Op
The top brass at the Defense Department’s military police force in the D.C. region considered using a heat ray as part of efforts to remove peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square to make way for President Donald Trump’s infamous photo-op in June, according to a whistleblower at the D.C. National Guard.
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Another Woman Accuses Trump Of Sexual Assault: ‘He Shoved His Tongue Down My Throat’
Former model Amy Dorris has alleged that in 1997, then-real estate businessman Donald Trump “shoved his tongue” down her throat at a tennis tournament and ignored her plea for him to stop.
Dorris, who was 24 at the time, told the Guardian that Trump forcefully gripped her in such a way that she could not escape while he groped her.
“He just shoved his tongue down my throat and I was pushing him off,” Dorris alleged to the Guardian in an interview published Thursday. “And then that’s when his grip became tighter and his hands were very gropey and all over my butt, my breasts, my back, everything.”
Trump’s lawyers told the Guardian that the President has denied ever harassing, abusing or behaving improperly toward Dorris.
Dorris told the Guardian that Trump accosted her outside the bathroom in his VIP box at the U.S. Open in New York in September 1997.
“I was in his grip, and I couldn’t get out of it,” Dorris told the Guardian. She recalled telling Trump “no, please stop” but “he didn’t care.”
“I felt violated, obviously,” Dorris said.
Dorris documented as evidence her ticket to the US Open and six photos of her together with Trump, who was then dealing in real estate and married to his second wife, Marla Maples.
Dorris said her then-boyfriend Jason Binn, who at the time regarded Trump as his “best friend,” took her to meet Trump at his office in Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, on Friday, Sept. 5, before they went together to the US Open and were joined by other friends of Trump in his private box.
“He came on very strong right away,” Dorris said of Trump. “It seemed typical of a certain guy, people who just feel like they’re entitled to do what they want … even though I was there with my boyfriend.”
Several people she told about the alleged incident, including a friend in New York and the former model’s own mother, have also backed up her claims.
Dorris told the Guardian that she called both immediately after the incident. A therapist and friends who were also privy to the alleged encounter also recounted details from the incident that matched Dorris’ retelling of the incident to the Guardian.
Dorris, who is now a mother of two, said she had considered speaking publicly about the incident in 2016, when several women leveled similar accusations against Trump when he launched his first bid for president. She opted not to share her story at that time because of fears that her family might be harmed as a result.
As her daughters become teenagers, her attitude has changed.
“I’d rather be a role model. I want them to see that I didn’t stay quiet, that I stood up to somebody who did something that was unacceptable.”
Barack Obama’s Memoir Gets A Release Date
NEW YORK (AP) — The first volume of former President Barack Obama’s memoir is coming out Nov. 17, two weeks after Election Day. It’s called “A Promised Land” and will cover his swift and historic rise to the White House and his first term in office.
The publication date for the second volume has not yet been determined.
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And Here We Are
One of the major issues of the 2016 election was the claim that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had to recuse herself from any involvement in a charging decision with respect to Hillary Clinton because she briefly met with former President Clinton on a tarmac. Now Bill Barr is saying we need political appointees to personally manage criminal prosecutions and have them all reviewed by the Attorney General, especially when they involve the President’s friends.
860,000 Unemployment Claims Filed Last Week
The Labor Department reported on Thursday morning that 860,000 jobless claims were filed in the week ending on September 12, a continuation of the string of unemployment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before the pandemic hit the economy, the number signing up for jobless aid had never exceeded 700,000 in a week, even during the depths of the 2007-2009 Great Recession.
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Barr Mocks Concerns Over His Meddling In Trump-Tied Cases, Compares Prosecutors To Preschoolers
Attorney General Bill Barr scoffed at concerns over politically-appointed officials such as himself exerting influence in prosecutors’ operations on Wednesday night as he comes under fire for meddling in the Justice Department’s cases involving President Donald Trump’s associates.
NIH Director: Public Mistrust Of Vaccine Driven By ‘Unfortunate Mix Of Science And Politics’
National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said Wednesday that public hesitation about getting a vaccine to protect against coronavirus has been “enhanced” by what he called an “unfortunate mix of science and politics,” adding that politicization concerns need to be urgently addressed to put to rest public mistrust.
“Those who are vaccine hesitant have had their hesitancy enhanced by a variety of things that are happening right now, particularly the unfortunate mix of science and politics,” Collins said at an event hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
In a recent poll, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that more than half of respondents said they would not get the vaccine even if it was available and offered for free ahead of the November election. A majority of respondents (62 percent) also fear that political pressure from the Trump administration will lead the Food and Drug Administration to rush to approve a COVID-19 vaccine before ensuring its safety and efficacy, the poll found.
“I don’t want to have us, a year from now, having a conversation about how we have in our hands the solution to the worst pandemic of more than 100 years, but we haven’t been able to actually convince people to take charge of it,” Collins said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci a top infectious diseases expert and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told the Wall Street Journal in an interview on Wednesday that vaccine won’t help reduce the spread of the virus if few people opt to be vaccinated.
“It’s a combination of how effective a vaccine is and how many people use it,” Fauci said, adding that the “full important effect of having a vaccine,” can only be realized when more people are vaccinated.
His remarks come as an internal memo from the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by ABC News on Wednesday night showed that while the current national trend in new COVID-19 cases has dropped only slightly, the trend in new deaths is way up.
Between Sept. 9 and Sep. 15, a total of roughly 5,900 coronavirus-related deaths were recorded marking an increase of close to 17 percent compared with the death toll of seven days prior, the FEMA memo suggests.
Last week, Fauci pushed back on President Donald Trump’s rosy picture of the country “rounded the turn” on the COVID-19 crisis, saying that the statistics were “disturbing” and that the number of new cases which was leveling off at about 40,000 new cases daily needed to be dramatically decreased going into the colder months as Americans spend more time indoors.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that a vaccine could be available before the Nov. 3 election. He reissued that claim in remarks on Wednesday, contradicting a separate assessment by CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield who told a Senate committee that a vaccine would not be widely available until the middle of next year.
“I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Trump told reporters. “It’s just incorrect information.” A vaccine would go “to the general public immediately,” Trump said, adding that “under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.”
Fauci has said in separate interviews corroborating the remarks made by Redfield, that he, too, anticipates a vaccine will only be ready and proven effective toward the end of the year or beginning of 2021. He told MSNBC on Friday that widespread distribution of a vaccine and a return to something that resembles “normality” would likely not occur until the middle or end of next year.