Michael Wolff’s sensational new book on the early days of the Trump administration is riddled with errors and dubiously sourced claims.
Here’s what The Daily Caller has found so far:
1. The most striking portrait of Wolff’s carelessness in checking basic facts occurs in the early chapters of the book where he misspells a CNN political analyst’s name, misidentifies the position commerce secretary Wilbur Ross was nominated for at the time, and places a reporter at a restaurant he says he has never been to.
2. Wolff parroted a claim that the president once skipped a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in order to get a haircut. Washington Post White House reporter Ashley Parker noted several journalists heard the claim, “but no one wrote it bc every source w first-hand knowledge said it simply wasn’t true.”
McConnell’s chief of staff Don Stewart followed up on Parker’s tweet, saying the incident absolutely had not happened.
3. Wolff printed an unsubstantiated claim that Trump had no idea who former House speaker John Boehner was after the election. Trump, however, has tweeted about the former House speaker seven times since July 28, 2011 referencing ongoing political events.
Boehner even told a Stanford audience in April of 2016 that Trump was his “golfing and texting buddy.” Worse, Wolff claimed Boehner was forced to resign from intra-party strife four years earlier than he actually did so.
4. Wolff’s book claimed that CNN is the outlet which published in full the unsubstantiated salacious dossier on the president compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. BuzzfeedNews is the outlet which published the dossier in January 2017.
5. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted to reporters Thursday that Wolff printed communications director Hope Hicks’ age as 26 when she is actually 29.
6. Several persons included in the book have denied outright quotes attributed to them by Wolff in the book. Former UK prime minister Tony Blair said a supposed recreated conversation between him and Jared Kushner was “categorically absurd” and “simply untrue.” Several former Trump aides quoted at length in the book have vehemently denied quotes attributed to them, including former deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh and Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon.
7. Wolff appears to have gotten one of his own quotes wrong writing in one column that media-mogul Rupert Murdoch called the president a “fucking moron” and writing elsewhere that he said “fucking idiot.”
8. Wolff characterized counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway as a “small time pollster” never involved in a national campaign.” Pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson noted however that Conway in fact was involved in a number of major national corporate projects prior to joining the Trump 2016 campaign and previously was a national pollster for former House speaker Newt Gingrich.
Wolff’s sourcing note in an excerpt explains many of the myriad inaccuracies, saying, “Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.”
The author added, “Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”
Why do the liberals hate this black man? He is a lot smarter than Obama but they praise that fraud.
Justice Clarence Thomas is in his 27th term in the U.S. Supreme Court, and he agreed to become the 341st leader interviewed for my Daily Caller News Foundation series.
Now at age 69, he is looking back on his life with gratitude and discernment with valuable lessons for others.
People often want to define you by the bad things that happen in your life, he says, but there has been so much good amidst the challenges he told me, his wife, in this exclusive interview for TheDCNF.
From a life that launched from economic deprivation, illiteracy, family dysfunction and even time as a radical leftist, his accomplishments now reach to the U.S. Supreme Court — where he faces constant vilification and defamation. He says he learned the value of humility, patience, and persistence, but the bedrock of his rules for living came from simple aphorisms from his illiterate grandfather.
At a young age, he learned how to build bridges and find something in common with other people, be it sports, a hobby, religion or experiences, rather than focusing on differences and divisions. “Everyone has inherent value and is worth listening to,” he believes.
Looking back, he credits divine providence for the path of his life. From the burning of a house, to being raised by his grandparents, to the nuns who taught in Savannah’s inner city, to attending the seminary and to getting his first job with Missouri Attorney General Jack Danforth who was interviewing at Yale. Nothing could have foreseen his sitting on the Supreme Court today.
Faith, he says, gives him “the strength to do what I have to do every day, to assert the independence, to be willing to take the beatings, the criticism, the unfairness.” When he attends daily mass, he says, it helps him do his “job, a secular job, in the right way and for the right reasons.” It reminds him that his work has nothing to do with what is said about him, but is rather about doing what he took an oath to do.
Justice Thomas frequently turns to the “Litany of Humility,” which helps focus and insulate him from the distractions, criticisms, or praise that can come from this world. In his view, what really matters is whether you do what you are called to do.
As we talked about the biggest blessings of his life, he named being born in America, his faith, his son, and our marriage. He also spoke of his love of University of Nebraska athletics, motor homing over the last 18 years through “fly over country,” and the gift of being able to read. When you grow up surrounded by illiteracy with adults asking, “What this paper say?” reading becomes a true blessing. “It is like Christmas every day” when he reads.
On inter-racial marriage he says, “if I were more progressive or liberal it [our marriage] would be considered progressive to be in an inter-racial marriage, but if you are not, then you are selling out.” He adds, “I don’t think of it as some statement. You’re my wife.”
Only after public outrage and congressional resolutions condemning the Smithsonian Institution’s refusal to honor Thomas in its African American museum did an exhibit get modified. Ritual defamation by an antagonistic cultural elite who hope to reduce his popular currency and make his views radioactive, especially for any black American to emulate, has become the way of life for him.
Although he knows the difficulty of taking the public beatings for his views, he often remembers his grandfather’s advice in the 1980s of “Boy, you have to stand up for what you believe in.” He acknowledges a certain peace that comes from knowing you did the right thing, and he talks about the importance of not allowing the critics to make you into someone you are not by overreacting negatively to them. He quotes the black author Richard Wright who said, “the worst I’ve ever been treated is when I told the truth.”
In an epic speech some 20 years ago to black judges in Memphis, Thomas boldly stated that he came not to defend his views, “but rather to assert my right to think to myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black.” He wrote that speech, he says today, to draw attention to, “the right, among blacks, to think for themselves, the right to be that invisible man, to be the one who lays claim to his own thoughts.”
On the best part of being a justice, he praises our marriage to share the experiences, but also the joy of his four clerks each term. He promises his clerks that they “will leave this job with clean hands, clean hearts and clear consciences” They are “just a delight.” He enjoys the company of his colleagues and misses those who have retired and passed away.
Don’t miss his jovial ending where he wanted to turn the tables on the interviewee.
For more on Justice Clarence Thomas, read his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son,” see these articles or watch any of the 264 C-Span covered events of speeches he has given. To me, he is the best man walking the face of this earth!
A Burlington man faces attempted murder charges after allegedly attacking a woman with a machete.
“It’s pretty scary yes,” said Carl Mcmahon.
Mcmahon is staying at Harbor Place in Shelburne. Harbor Place provides temporary emergency housing with services, run by the Champlain Housing Trust. Early Friday, police responded to calls of a man with a knife smashing out car windows.
“On arrival we found that this person who was reported to have a knife, had actually attacked an elderly female,” said Corporal Jon Marcoux of Shelburne Police.
That female, was a 73-year-old Meals on Wheels volunteer who was dropping off meals on the regular route. It is unclear what provoked the attack, but police say 32-year-old Abukar Ibrahim was the one with a machete. He attacked the woman who sustained multiple injuries. She was sent to the hospital, and later released.
“He barricaded himself in the room. After two and a half hours, he came out on his own,” said Marcoux.
Corporal Marcoux says the Shelburne Police Department gets a fair number of calls, responding to Harbor Place.
“I think anytime you put a lot of people in a place, not necessarily Harbor Place, but any place, the more contact people have with others, especially under trying circumstances, I think generates more calls,” he said.
Just a couple of steps away from Harbor Place is the Natural Mattress Company. The owner says he sees police activity often, but says it hasn’t negatively affected his business.
“I don’t think most of my customers probably know that this is going on behind there, so I don’t really think it effects business, or that people are avoiding my store because it’s there,” said Michael Hassenberg; owner of the Natural Mattress Company.
When it comes to their safety, the reaction was mixed amongst the people we spoke with at the temporary housing facility.
“I’ve actually never felt safer, because this place has cameras all around the entire hotel and you could have someone knocking at your door and the office is calling you before you can even get to the door to answer it,” said Carol Van Wormer.
“I feel not safe,” said Mcmahon.
Ibrahim is scheduled to be arraigned on Monday, on the charge of attempted murder. He is being held at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility.
Why don’t Trey Gowdy talk to someone about getting these SOB’s locked up?
This damn government is so damn corrupt that it is not possible to have a proper investigation. How is it possible that no one is being indicted and locked up. This video proves the FBI and the DOJ is corrupt all the way up to Barack Obama.
Will anyone ever get locked up for all of this corrupt behavior.
This is what liberals do. They waste taxpayers damn money.
DeWitt, N.Y. — In 2014, the development arm of SUNY Polytechnic Institute agreed to build, with $90 million in state money, a factory in DeWitt for an LED light bulb manufacturer.
The company, California-based Soraa, agreed to create 250 full-time, high-tech jobs at Collamer Crossing Business Park and to encourage Soraa contractors and suppliers to create another 170 jobs in Central New York.
In return, the company would be allowed to lease the factory for $1 a month for 10 years.
But the deal with SUNY Poly’s Fort Schuyler Management Corp. did not require Soraa to spend any of its own money to build or equip the factory. And it contained no penalties if the company did not occupy the building or create the promised jobs. The company never even signed a lease.
So when Soraa recently said it no longer needed the factory and pulled out of the deal just as the state was completing construction of the 82,000-square-foot building, there was nothing the state could do about it.
The state was left with a factory, nearly fully equipped, but no company to use it.
One expert said using state money to custom-build a factory for a specific tenant is bad policy.
Obama did the same thing with Solyndra and liberals said nothing. Look at the beautiful facility that Socialist liberals built for nothing.
“You have a situation where the state could potentially wind up with a white elephant,” said John Bacheller, former head of policy and research for the state’s economic development office, Empire State Development. “I think it’s too much risk. When you provide a grant, the risk is limited to the amount of the grant.”
The state has found another company, but taxpayers will have to spend up to another $15 million to properly equip the building for the new company.
This time, state officials say they won’t repeat the mistake made in DeWitt again.
Empire State Development, a state economic development agency, took over the project from SUNY Poly a year ago after the college’s president, Alain Kaloyeros, was arrested on corruption charges and resigned from the university. ESD said a deal with a new tenant will include financial penalties if the company fails to meet its job commitments.
Alain Kaloyeros, seen here during a visit to Syracuse Media Group in 2015, was president of SUNY Polytechnic Institute when the college agreed to build a $90 million factory in DeWitt for Soraa, a California-based LED lighting manufacturer. He resigned in 2016 after he was arrested on corruption charges. (Ellen M. Blalock | syracuse.com)
Jason Conwall, a spokesman for ESD, said the penalties, or “clawbacks,” will be included in a grant disbursement agreement with NexGen Power Systems, a California start-up. ESD’s board of directors voted Dec. 21 to approve a grant of up to $15 million to NexGen for tooling and equipment for the factory.
In return, the company has pledged to create 290 full-time, high-tech jobs for the production of semiconductors at the facility and agreed to invest $40 million of its own money into the building. It will pay rent of $1 the first year and increasing amounts up to full market value in the 10th year, ESD officials said.
Conwall said the grant will be contingent on the company meeting its job commitments. Details of the grant’s terms will not be available until the grant disbursement agreement is executed later this month, but they will follow ESD’s standard practice of requiring companies to return a grant, or portions of it, if they fail to meet hiring milestones, he said.
ESD’s agreements generally require a company to meet a certain minimum amount of their job commitments within a specified period or be required to return a grant. In some cases, a company is required to return only a portion of the money if it falls just a little short of its hiring commitments.
ESD officials said no such “clawbacks” were put into SUNY Poly’s deal with Soraa because none of the $90 million in state grants used to build the factory went directly to Soraa. All of the money went into the building, which is still owned by the state, so there was no money to take back from the company, they said.
Former state budget director Robert Megna, who was appointed president of the non-profit Fort Schuyler Management Corp. in February 2017 following Kaloyeros’s departure, said the fact that Fort Schuyler retained ownership of the building was a good thing.
“While we can’t speak to the reasoning behind all the terms of the agreement with Soraa, which were made by the previous leadership, the facility was constructed to accommodate Soraa’s gallium nitride lighting business and no funding was provided to Soraa,” he said in a statement.
“All state funds were provided to the not-for-profit Fort Schuyler Management Corporation, and the building and the equipment are all owned by FSMC on behalf of New York State,” he said. “This model enabled the state to quickly adjust to changes in a very dynamic industry and make the facility available to NexGen for its production of gallium nitride semiconductor devices, modules and systems.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks at the Central New York Hub for Emerging Nano Technologies in DeWitt on Oct. 29, 2015, during his announcement LED lighting manufacturer Soraa would operate a state-built, $90 million factory in DeWitt. (Stephen D. Cannerelli | syracuse.com)
Conwall said Empire State Development takes a much different approach. It provides grants to assist companies with the cost of building facilities in the state, but it does not go the riskier route of building entire factories for them, he said.
He said ESD was fortunate to have found a new tenant to go into the DeWitt building. NexGen plans to make semiconductor power devices from gallium nitride, the same material that Soraa uses to make LED lighting. That means that NexGen can use much of the equipment already installed in the factory.
“It worked out because we owned the facility and found another tenant quickly that aligned really well,” the ESD spokesman said.
Though ESD has agreed to provide up to $15 million to NexGen for the purchase of tools and equipment, some of the $7 million not yet spent from the original $90 million in grants for the building could be used toward that $15 million commitment, he said. (The state had spent about $83 million of the $90 million on the factory and equipment by the time Soraa pulled out, officials said.)
NexGen was formed in California last year to make semiconductors for the electronics industry. It does not yet manufacture anything. The DeWitt facility will be its first manufacturing operation.
Dinesh Ramanathan, NexGen’s president and CEO and one of its founders, also was CEO of Avogy Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up that planned to make power sources for electronic devices such as computers.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced in 2016 that Avogy had committed to moving from California to a state-owned cleanroom facility in Rochester that the state agreed to upgrade with a $35 million investment of state money. The state never made the investment, however, and Avogy never made the move.
Avogy went out of business later in 2016. NexGen bought its technology and is starting up with new money from investors, according to Ramanathan.
NexGen has not publicly disclosed who its investors are.
Prior to Avogy, Ramanathan served as the executive vice president at Cypress Semiconductor for almost nine years, where he managed the company’s Programmable Systems Division and its Data Communications Division, according to NexGen’s website.
Prior to joining Cypress, Ramanathan held senior marketing and engineering positions at Raza Microelectronics; Raza Foundries, described as an “incubating venture capital company”; and Forte Design Systems, an electronic design automation company, according to the website.
ESD officials said they are confident that NexGen will succeed in DeWitt.
“NexGen is led by a management team and investors with a proven record and decades of combined experience building and operating high-tech businesses,” Empire State Development President, CEO and Commissioner Howard Zemsky said in a statement. “This gives us the confidence that the company will meet its commitment to bring hundreds of new, good-paying jobs to Central New York.”
The state may be fortunate in this case if NexGen is able to use the factory constructed for Soraa. But custom-built factories can be hard to sell or lease if a tenant walks away, Bacheller said.
The state should always require companies to invest more money into a project than the state does so they have a strong motivation to stick around and make the development work, he said.
“You always want the company to have skin in the game,” he said.
He said SUNY Poly may also have made a mistake constructing a factory for an LED light bulb maker, given the fact that LED light bulb production is increasingly dominated by low-cost Chinese manufacturers who have brought the price of LED bulbs almost down to that of incandescents.
“Unless you’re in a niche that the Chinese aren’t in, it’s the kind of business that is very risky,” he said.
NexGen says its semiconductor devices can be used in a wide array of applications such as LED power supplies, solar inverters, data centers and automotive applications.
The company will be getting the use of a building with up to $105 million in state money invested in it. NexGen’s capital investment will be far less by comparison – $40 million.
Bacheller said the state appears to be taking a substantial risk with NexGen, given that the company is a start-up with no manufacturing or sales track record of its own. However, he said Empire State Development may be making the best deal it could after inheriting a bad situation from SUNY Poly.
“They’ve already got a building up and they’re stuck with it,” he said.
Soraa walks away from $90M factory that NY built; $15M more brings new tenant
Soraa said they would not come without “tens of millions” in additional money from NY state.
Liberals can’t stop calling Trump Crazy and and idiot but he is winning.
CNN’s Jake Tapper Cuts Off Stephen Miller: ‘I’ve Wasted Enough of My Viewers’ Time’
by PAM KEY7 Jan 2018
Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House adviser Stephen Miller had a heated interview with host Jake Tapper over Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
Miller said, “The book is best understood as a work of very poorly written fiction.”
Things got heated when Miller said, “Your network’s been going 24/7 with all the salacious coverage and I know it brings a lot of you guys a lot of joy to try to stick the knife in, but the reality is that page after page after page of the book is purely false. I see sections of the book where events I participated in are described and I have firsthand knowledge as they’re described they’re completely and utterly fraudulent.”
Tapper shot back, “Nobody at CNN is sticking knives in anybody.”
After several exchanges where the pair talked over each other, Tapper said, “The only person who has called themselves a genius in the last week is a president.”
Miller said, “Which happens to be a true statement. a self-made billionaire who revolutionized — ”
Tapper quipped, “I’m sure he’s watching and he’s happy you said that.”
Miller shot back “You can be as condescending as you want.”
At one point in the interview, Tapper hushed his guest: “Stephen, settle down, settle down. Calm down.”
Tapper ended the interview saying, “I think I’ve wasted enough of my viewers’ time.”
After the segment aired, President Trump tweeted that Miller “destroyed” Tapper.
Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!
