Now lets take the damn gloves off and expose who is right damit!
President Donald Trump denounced his former top strategist, Steve Bannon, on Wednesday, saying that he “lost his mind” after leaving the White House last summer.
“When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump said of Bannon in a statement the White House issued. “Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look.”
The statement represented an emphatic break from the person considered the architect of Trump’s presidential campaign. Bannon continued to enjoy access to the president after he left the White House, but that has ended, one person familiar with the matter said.
Earlier on Wednesday, New York Magazine published excerpts of a forthcoming book by author Michael Wolff in which Bannon criticizes Trump’s campaign as well as the president and his family. The Guardian published excerpts of the book in which Bannon predicts that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will “crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV” over the president’s son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016.
Bannon also called Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the lawyer, in which he expected to receive damaging information on Trump’s election opponent Hillary Clinton, “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” according to the Guardian.
Bannon, reached by Bloomberg News, declined to comment on the remarks published by the Guardian. Two people close to him said he wasn’t bothered by the president’s statement. They asked not to be identified discussing Bannon’s reaction.
265-Word Statement
In his 265-word statement, Trump went on to indict Bannon for some of his activities at the White House and afterward. He blamed him for the loss of a Republican Senate seat in Alabama in a special election last month and accused him of leaking to news reporters while he served as the White House chief strategist.
“Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country,” Trump said. “Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself.”
Bannon backed former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore over Trump’s preferred candidate, incumbent Senator Luther Strange, in a primary election for the Alabama seat. Moore lost to Democrat Doug Jones in the special election after several women accused him of sexual misconduct while they were teenagers.
Trump Jr. also declined to comment, but re-tweeted a Bloomberg News reporter’s tweet about the outcome of the Alabama election with the comment: “Thanks Steve. Keep up the great work.”
“Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was,” Trump said. “It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”
Statement from the President of the United States:
Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.
Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans.
Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.
We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.
In addition to Wolff’s book, titled “Fire and Fury: Inside Trump’s White House,” Bannon was the subject of a best-selling book published last year by Bloomberg Businessweek writer Joshua Green, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.”
Trump complimented Bannon when he left the White House in August, saying he “would be a tough and smart new voice at” his website, Breitbart news. “Maybe even better than before. Fake News needs the competition!”
And Bannon boasted at a private luncheon in Hong Kong in September that he spoke with Trump by phone every two to three days, according to two people who attended.
After Trump issued his statement on Bannon, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign staff tweeted a GIF image of the Kentucky Republican sitting at his desk, grinning. Bannon, a populist and nationalist who considers much of the Republican establishment corrupt, has said Senate Republicans should replace McConnell and has sought to recruit people to run against McConnell’s favored candidates in Republican primaries, including in Alabama.
Wolff’s Revelations
Wolff, who New York Magazine said conducted more than 200 interviews for his book including with the president and most of his senior staff, also reported that Trump never expected to win the election and had promised his wife, Melania, that he wouldn’t be president. She “was in tears — and not of joy” on election night as it became clear Trump would beat Clinton, Wolff reported.
“The book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction section,” Melania Trump’s spokesman, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement. “Mrs. Trump supported her husband’s decision to run for president and in fact, encouraged him to do so. She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did.”
Wolff reported that friends Trump phoned at night after leaving the Oval Office for the day would leak details of the conversations to reporters and that many of them consider him ignorant. Rupert Murdoch, co-chairman of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. and a close Trump confidante, called him an “idiot” — preceded by an expletive — after one such call, Wolff wrote.
Trump’s longtime friend Thomas Barrack called the president “not only crazy” but “stupid,” Wolff reported. Barrack denied making the comments on Wednesday.
Wolff portrays Trump’s top three advisers at the beginning of his presidency — Bannon, senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former chief of staff Reince Priebus — as consumed by infighting and frequently unable to coordinate strategy.
He wrote that a former deputy chief of staff who also left last year, Katie Walsh, was frustrated by the chaos of Trump’s White House and by the president himself, and quoted her saying that working for him was “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”
Other revelations may prove more damaging to the White House in the long-term. Michael Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, allegedly justified a pre-election speaking engagement paid for by Russians by saying it would only present a conflict of interest “if we won.”
“This book is filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “Participating in a book that can only be described as trashy tabloid fiction exposes their sad desperate attempts at relevancy.”
Wealthy New York City elites are preparing to flee the state because the Republican tax bill is going to make them face the full brunt of Mayor Bill de Blasio and Democratic state leadership’s tax rates.
“Everybody I speak to brings this up. Every NYC resident I speak to asks about the feasibility involved in doing it,” Wall Street tax expert Robert Willens told Yahoo Finance. “I’ve been doing this more than 40 years, and never heard more discussion about relocating than recently.”
Wealthy New Yorkers can currently lower their federal taxable income by more than $100,000 through a provision of the tax code known as the State and Local Tax Deduction, or SALT. The average SALT deduction in the Manhattan area is at least $60,000.
The Republican bill will cap the deduction amount at $10,000, meaning wealthy New Yorkers who currently write off expensive real estate could face an extra six figures in taxable income.
President Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill into law by Christmas, which is why many hedge fund and private equity managers are seriously considering getting out of New York.
New York is a state run by Democrats and one that taxes its citizens at a higher rate than any other state in the nation. The state’s combined state and local income tax burden tops California’s at 12.7 percent. That amounts to roughly $6,993.42 per New York taxpayer.
For the first time, many wealthy Manhattanites will finally feel the full burden that their state legislators and city leadership have put on them.
De Blasio is actually trying to increase millionaire New York City taxpayers’ loads as Republicans put the finishing touches on their bill.
The mayor is trying to levy a 14 percent tax increase on the city’s millionaires to pay for improvements to the city’s subway system. The governor-elect of New Jersey is looking to pull a similar tactic to raise money for public schools in the state.
Birmingham, ALABAMA — An organization partnered with a George Soros-financed group and led by a radical leftist who is the half-brother of the infamous controversial Rev. Al Sharpton has been diligently working over the past few weeks to register convicted felons across Alabama.
The aim of the effort has been to get as many felons as possible on the roster before last Monday, the deadline to register in order to vote in Alabama’s Dec. 12 senate special election that pits Republican Roy Moore against Democratic challenger Doug Jones. The man spearheading the campaign has stated outright that his effort is meant to ensure a Democratic victory in Alabama.
The thousands of felons reportedly newly registered over the past few weeks were most likely not included in any recent polling on the Alabama senate race put out by major firms.
Jones himself is tied to some of the specific organizations associated with the drive to register felons here. Indeed, as Breitbart News first reported, Jones spearheaded a project for a massively Soros-financed legal activist group demanding full voting rights be given to felons released from prison, including those convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes.
AL.com reported that Pastor Kenneth Glasgow has been at the forefront of the statewide effort, which has successfully registered thousands of felons across Alabama in recent weeks. Glasgow has been aided in his efforts here by other Soros-financed groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The Village Voice previously described Glasgow, Sharpton’s half-brother, as an “ex-con and recovering crackhead turned street preacher.”
Glasgow is currently president of a group he founded in 1999 calling itself The Ordinary People Society (TOPS). And he is a former leader of another organization, the radical Free Alabama Movement (FAM), which has for years been making inroads into Alabama’s prison population.
Glasgow told AL.com that in the last month alone “I think we registered at least five- to ten-thousand people all over the state” – referring to his efforts here in Alabama.
“I’ve got people all over the state registering people with my TOPS branches in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Montgomery, Enterprise, Dothan, Abbeville, Geneva, Gordon, Bessemer, we have a lot,” he added.
Speaking on his radio program, Glasgow charged that “swarming the polls” with newly registered convicts could swing the vote, pointing as a template to the Virginia governor’s race. In that state, Gov. Terry McAuliffe used his executive power in April to restore voting rights for over 200,000 felons.
“We have the chance to do the same thing they did in Virginia,” Glasgow stated. “We can turn it blue. Well not blue, but we can add some color. Make it pink or purple.”
Glasgow has been taking advantage of a change made last May, when Alabama’s Gov. Kay Ivey signed a law that defined a clause in the State constitution denying the right to vote to anyone who has committed a crime that demonstrates “moral turpitude.”
The new law generated a list of about 50 crimes that fit under the “moral turpitude” banner, including murder, kidnapping and sexual abuse. Glasgow was involved in the activism promoting the law.
This means that Glasgow is free to register felons whose crimes do not fit under the state’s definition of a “moral turpitude” conviction.
Glasgow’s activism is intended to fill the void left by Alabama’s legal refusal to actively notify potentially tens of thousands of former felons that they regained their voting rights. A federal judge in July sided with Alabama, affirming that the state does not need to make such notifications after Ivey signed the law restoring rights to some felons.
A Soros-funded group called the Campaign Legal Center filed the lawsuit against Alabama last year calling for a public educational campaign to inform felons of their regained right to vote. The litigation is still ongoing.
“This is not a Democratic or Republican issue; it’s a democracy issue with a lower case d,” Danielle Lang, a Campaign Legal Center lawyer, stated after spending a week earlier this month in Alabama holding educational clinics on the matter.
Besides funding from Soros, the Campaign Legal Center documents that it receives financing from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation and from the Soros-funded Brennan Center for Justice.
Doug Jones himself has spearheaded numerous Brennan projects, including one seeking full voting rights nationwide be given to all felons released from prison regardless of their crimes.
The Brennan Center has been the recipient of numerous grants from Soros’s Open Society Foundations totaling over $7,466,000 from 2000 to 2010 alone.
The Soros-funded ACLU of Alabama also filed a lawsuit seeking to force the state of Alabama to inform convicted felons that they can vote.
The ACLU has also worked with Glasgow’s TOPS to register felons. The groups co-hosted a Voter Rights Restoration training session in Selma, Alabama in July, after the law was first changed. The ACLU dedicated a special section of its website to getting supporters to register for the Alabama senate race. The organization has used its Twitter account in recent days to promote the voter registration drive in Alabama.
The Soros-funded Campaign Legal Center has released an Alabama Voting Rights Restoration Toolkit aiding felons in registering to vote. Soros’s Open Society is listed as a donor to the group.
The League of Women Voters of Alabama has also been advocating for voter turnout. Soros’s Open Society has donated to the League of Women Voters Education Fund.
The Soros-financed MoveOn.org, which advocates for voting restoration to felons, has been heavily active in Alabama, where they claim they have 43,000 members.
In October, Glasgow dismissed a lawsuit against Alabama state officials after they agreed to sign documents indicating they should not have prevented him from entering prisons for the purpose of registering felons. His lawsuit was facilitated by the NAACP, which is financed by Soros.
Earlier this week, Think Progress, a project of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, suggested that “tens of thousands of newly registered felons could swing (the) Alabama Senate election.”
Glasgow’s TOPS, which has been registering the Alabama felons, is financed by the Open Philanthropy Project, a non-profit financed by Cari Tuna and her husband, Dustin Moskovitz, co-founders of Facebook and Asana.
TOPS is openly partnered with the Soros-financed Drug Policy Alliance, which seeks to decriminalize drug offenses. The Alliance’s main aim, according to its website, is to create a world in which people “are no longer punished for what they put into their own bodies but only for crimes committed against others.”
Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave a whopping $50 million to the Alliance to aid its decriminalization efforts.
Breitbart News previously reported that Jones pushed reduced sentencing for drug offenders in an effort he spearheaded for the Soros-funded Brennan Center. Jones’s project sought to fundamentally transform the role of U.S. Attorneys from one of prosecuting criminals to activists that enact a so-called progressive criminal justice agenda.
Glasgow, meanwhile, has been petitioning for voting rights for felons in Alabama for over a decade, including in 2008 when he used TOPS to push for changes in law. “There would be a lot of difference in our legislators, our elected officials and our presidents that we’ve had,” he said at the time, referring to the possibility of felons voting. “It would definitely change the political spectrum of Alabama.”
Glasgow has been cited by the news media as the spokesperson for the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), a radical network that has been leading activism, including prison strikes, within Alabama’s prison population for years. FAM itself calls Glasgow its “outside” spokesman.
GAM has been advocating for the repeal of Alabama’s three strikes law. The group also demands a re-write of Alabama’s “drive-by-shooting law” to apply only to gang-related activity.
Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, a founder of the FAM, has peddled conspiracy theories about the 13th amendment, which allows for “involuntary servitude” as “a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Ra-Sun claimed the U.S. uses the 13th amendment “to maintain control” of “black people as tools or machines of production.” Glasgow has also repeatedly preached against the 13th amendment.
Last year, CNN reported on a national inmate strike that began in September 2016 organized by Glasgow’s FAM. Glasgow claimed to the news network that an inmate who had previously gone on a hunger strike was being denied water because of his activism, a charge refuted by the Alabama Department of Corrections. Glasgow told CNN the case drew the attention of activist lawyer Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.
The Equal Justice Initiative is financed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Breitbart News previously reported that the Initiative is listed with five other groups on Doug Jones’s personal website as among organizations that Jones advocates for supporters to “get involved” with on “matters of justice and equality.”
Glasgow’s FAM has worked with the radical Industrial Workers of the World, as well as a slew of other far-left groups such as the Anarchist Black Cross Federation, the Black Autonomy Federation, the Black Militia Nation and the National Lawyers Guild.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is famous for defending protesters from extremist groups who get arrested during disruption campaigns. A notable former member of the National Lawyers Guild is Bernardine Dohrn, the NLG’s first national student organizer. Dohrn was a leader of the Weather Underground anti-American domestic terrorist group along with her husband, former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.
Doug Jones is currently listed on the Democracy Restoration Act (DRA) information page of the Soros-financed Brennan Center’s website as among the “Groups and Individuals who support the DRA,” which calls for voting to be restored to convicted felons. Listed alongside Jones is the National Lawyers Guild.
Glasgow has been involved with his half-brother Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN). Glasgow keynoted a Montgomery, Alabama NAN anti-police demonstration in April 2013 over the Trayvon Martin case. The event was co-sponsored by TOPS.
In 2014, Sharpton opened a NAN office in Birmingham. “We will, out of this office, coordinate our work throughout the South against those new measures that have been designed to suppress the vote,” Sharpton said. “Make no mistake about it, these are designed to suppress the vote and we are here to fight against voter suppression.”
Sharpton’s national group boasts that it is involved in efforts to “support” voter registration while “fighting voter suppression” in numerous states, including Alabama.
