Jacob Frey

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump has gone on a tweet war with Jacob Frey,  the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, over a security bill for over $500,000.  Trump claimed yesterday that Frey is trying to bully him out of holding a rally tomorrow in the city by sticking his campaign with the excessive security charges.

“Someone please tell the Radical Left Mayor of Minneapolis that he can’t price out Free Speech,” Trump said in a tweet. “Probably illegal! I stand strongly & proudly with the great Police Officers and Law Enforcement of Minneapolis and the Great State of Minnesota! See you Thursday Night!”

“The lightweight mayor is hurting the great police and other wonderful supporters,” Trump said in another tweet, adding that Minnesotans should “dump” Frey and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn, a frequent target of the president’s ire.

Frey responded in a tweet that “someone” should “tell the President of the United States that he can afford to help pay for the extra time our officers will be putting in while he’s in town.”

“Welcome to Minneapolis where we pay our bills, we govern with integrity, and we love all of our neighbors,” Frey said in another tweet.

In a Monday night statement, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale accused Frey of “abusing the power of his office and attempting to extort President Trump’s re-election campaign by conjuring a phony and outlandish bill for security in an effort to block a scheduled Keep America Great rally.”

The feud broke about after officials in Minneapolis sent the Target Center, where Trump’s Thursday rally is slated to be held, a $530,000 bill for policing and other costs associated with the event. The Target Center then forwarded the bill to the Trump campaign, threatening to keep them from using the venue.

The Trump campaign responded by threatening to sue the Target Center’s management firm for breach of contract, adding that U.S. Secret Service is “solely responsible for coordinating security.” The campaign pointed to then-President Barack Obama’s 2009 healthcare rally at the arena, which rang up a significantly lower security bill.

When Trump first announced the Minneapolis rally late last month, Frey said he would not be able to prevent the gathering but said Trump’s “message of hatred will never be welcome in Minneapolis.” On Monday, city officials told the Minneapolis Star Tribune they were unsure of the total cost for the rally, but that they expected it to be expensive.

The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News asking why the bill was so high. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request from NBC News asking why this bill was any different from other security bills that municipal governments have sought to have the campaign pay — which in many cases, it did not, as an NBC News/Center for Public Integrity report earlier this year found.

That report detailed 10 city governments that were still waiting on the Trump campaign to pay similar, albeit cheaper, invoices in connection to Trump rallies as of June. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to NBC News asking if it has since paid any of those bills.

In total, Trump’s campaign as of June owed city governments a sum of over $841,000. The largest invoice came from the president’s El Paso, Texas, rally from earlier this year, where city officials billed the campaign more than $470,000.

The Secret Service does not reimburse local governments for assistance during campaign events because it is not funded to do so, a spokesman told NBC News in June.”

Trump never paid his bills before he was president. That is why so many of his businesses went bankrupt.

Tony

Ken Frydman, Rudolph W. Giuliani’s Former Press Secretary

Dear Commons Community,

Ken Frydman, a campaign press secretary to Rudy Giuliani,  said yesterday his former boss now “looks like a right-wing conspiracy nut.”

“There was an old Rudy and a new Rudy,” Frydman, who worked on Giuliani’s successful 1993 New York mayoral campaign, told MSNBC’s Ari Melber.

“The old Rudy listened because he wanted to win,” he explained. “The new Rudy doesn’t listen anymore because he won and you can’t tell him anything he doesn’t know.”

“I don’t think, as many people think, he’s unhinged or suffering from dementia,” Frydman said. “I think that he is zealously trying to protect his golden goose, frankly, the president.”

But Frydman said Giuliani is “not doing a good job” because he is “not telling the truth and it’s clear that he is fumbling and bumbling in his attempts to do that.”

Frydman’s comments echoed those he made in a scathing op-ed that The New York Times published yesterday, and are in stark contrast to an article he wrote for the New York Daily News in 2018 in which he said he still respected Giuliani for “playing hardball like he always has.”

In the article — titled “What Happed to Rudy Giuliani?” — Frydman lamented how “‘America’s Mayor,’ as Rudy was called after Sept. 11, is today President Trump’s bumbling personal lawyer and henchman, his apologist and defender of the indefensible.” 

He accused Giuliani of now doing Trump’s “dirty work” in “trying to cover up the Ukrainian cover-up and attacking a Democratic presidential front-runner, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter.” 

“Watching and reading Rudy’s ferocious lying for Mr. Trump, whether on Fox or CNN, forced me to re-examine his last 25 years, especially the profiteering from Sept. 11,” Frydman wrote. “But Ukraine was the coup de grâce. We who admired him for so long expected much more from Rudy Giuliani and his legacy.”

Rudy has indeed become a bumbling Trump toadie who looks like he is about implode!  A far cry from 9/11!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

October is the month that Nobel Prizes are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences!

It was announced earlier this morning that three scientists won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in understanding how the universe has evolved, and the Earth’s place in it.

The prize was given to James Peebles “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology,” and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star,” said Prof. Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that chooses the laureates.  Hansson credited the three for their “contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe, and Earth’s place in the cosmos.”

The prize comes with a 9-million kronor ($918,000) cash award to be shared a gold medal and a diploma. The laureates receive them at an elegant ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel in 1896, together with five other Nobel winners. The sixth one, the peace prize, is handed out in Oslo, Norway on the same day.

This was the 113th Nobel Prize in Physics awarded since 1901, of which 47 awards have been given to a single laureate.

Yesterday, Americans William G. Kaelin Jr. and Gregg L. Semenza and Britain’s Peter J. Ratcliffe won the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine, for discovering details of how the body’s cells sense and react to low oxygen levels, providing a foothold for developing new treatments for anemia, cancer and other diseases.

Nobel, a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite, decided the physics, chemistry, medicine and literature prizes should be awarded in Stockholm, and the peace prize in Oslo.

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry will be announced Wednesday, two Literature Prizes will be awarded on Thursday, and the Peace Prize comes Friday. This year will see two literature Prizes handed out because the one last year was suspended after a scandal rocked the Swedish Academy.

Congratulations to all!

Tony

President Trump and Energy Secretary Rick Perry

Dear Commons Community,

It appears that there is a connection between Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Donald Trump and the phone call that is at the center of the Ukraine scandal.  As reported by the Associated Press:  

“Energy Secretary Rick Perry encouraged President Donald Trump to speak to Ukraine’s president — but on energy and economic issues, Perry’s spokeswoman said Sunday, addressing Perry’s role in a telephone call that’s at the center of a congressional impeachment probe for Trump.

“Secretary Perry absolutely supported and encouraged the president to speak to the new president of Ukraine to discuss matters related to their energy security and economic development,” Perry’s Energy Department spokeswoman, Shaylyn Hynes, said in an email.

Hynes’ remark comes as Perry becomes the latest administration official drawn into inquiries in a House impeachment probe of Trump. Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the July 25 call to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter — sparking a whistleblower complaint and now the impeachment inquiry.

Trump on Friday evening told House Republicans that it was Perry who had teed up the July call with Ukraine, according to a person familiar with Trump’s new comments who was granted anonymity to discuss the private conference call.

But Trump did not suggest that Perry had anything to do with the pressure on Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, or a U.S. holdup in military aid to the country, the person said. Trump’s remarks on the late Friday call was first reported by Axios.

Perry, the former governor of Texas and up to now a lower-profile but active member of Trump’s Cabinet, has made repeated trips to Ukraine and met often with Ukranian officials, including Zelenskiy. Perry and his agency say his involvement with Ukraine was part of U.S. policy, predating the Trump administration, to increase U.S. natural gas, coal and other supplies to Eastern Europe to lessen Russia’s control of the region’s energy market.

“He continues to believe that there is significant need for improved regional energy security,” Hynes said. Perry was heading to Lithuania again Sunday night, and would meet with nearly two dozen European energy officials, including those from Ukraine, she said.

Hynes did not immediately answer questions Sunday about whether Perry had discussed the Trump administration’s push for help investigating Trump’s Democratic rivals in his meetings with Ukraine.

But Perry told an evangelical Christian news outlet, CBN News, in an interview aired Friday that he had never heard anyone in the administration bring up Biden or Biden’s son, who served on a board of a Ukraine natural gas business, in dealings with Ukrainian officials.

“Not once, as God as my witness, not once was a Biden name — not the former vice president, not his son — ever mentioned,” Perry told the outlet. “Corruption was talked about in the country but it was always a relatively vague term of, you know, the oligarchs and this and that and what have you.”

Glad to see that Trump has his energy secretary’s back.  Perry will likely be gone soon!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As posted on Saturday, it has been confirmed that a second whistle-blower has decided to come forward in the Ukraine scandal.  The second whistle-blower is said to have firsthand knowledge of President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.  As reported this morning in the New York Times:

“An intelligence official with “firsthand knowledge” has provided information related to President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and is now protected from retaliation as a whistle-blower, lawyers representing the official said on Sunday, confirming that a second individual has come forward in the matter.

Much is unknown about the official, who has been interviewed by the intelligence community’s inspector general but has not filed a formal complaint.

But the individual has hired the same legal team as the first whistle-blower. That, and the claim of “firsthand knowledge,” suggests testimony that might bolster the impeachment case against Mr. Trump and further undermine one of his main defense claims: that the accusations against him are based on inaccurate, secondhand information.

The New York Times reported on Friday that an intelligence official who has more direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine than the first whistle-blower, and who had grown alarmed by the president’s behavior, was weighing whether to come forward. The second official was among those interviewed by the intelligence community inspector general to corroborate the allegations of the original whistle-blower, one of the people briefed on the matter said.

For Democratic lawmakers seeking to build their case for impeachment, the new whistle-blower could serve as an important witness for both validating what they know and potentially providing new leads for investigators. Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who is leading the House’s impeachment inquiry, urged other potential whistle-blowers to come forward on Sunday night.

“We thank them for their courage,” he said. “We thank them for their patriotism. And we hope others will follow their courageous example.”

One member of the legal team confirmed on Twitter that the firm was now representing “multiple whistleblowers” but declined to say how many. The inspector general has said that to corroborate the first whistle-blower’s complaint, he interviewed multiple people who would be afforded protections, and it was unclear if the lawyer could be referring to those people or other people.”

Anyone for dominoes?

Tony

Susan Collins

Dear Commons Community,

“I thought the president made a big mistake by asking China to get involved in investigating a political opponent,” said Maine’s Republican senator, Susan Collins.

Yesterday, she criticized President Donald Trump for urging China to investigate political rival Joe Biden, calling it “completely inappropriate.”

“I thought the president made a big mistake by asking China to get involved in investigating a political opponent,” Collins told the Bangor Daily News at a local event. “It’s completely inappropriate.”

Trump told reporters in front of the White House Thursday that “China should start an investigation” into Biden and his son. Hours later CNN reported that Trump had raised the political prospects of the former vice president and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — both Democratic presidential candidates — during a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping in June.

A similar phone call by Trump in July to Ukraine’s president to investigate Biden and his son — while withholding U.S. military funds — is now the focus of a formal impeachment inquiry. 

Collins would not comment on evidence in the impeachment inquiry. But she said the process should be carried out with the “seriousness that any impeachment proceeding deserves.”

“Should the articles of impeachment come to the Senate — and right now I’m going to guess that they will — I will be acting as a juror as I did in the Clinton impeachment trial,” Collins said. Clinton was acquitted in 1999 on perjury and obstruction of justice concerning his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Collins faces re-election in 2020 in a state that voted for Hillary Clinton for president.

She joins only two other Republican senators to date who have criticized Trump’s attempts to involve foreign governments in probing his political opponent.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) slammed Trump’s appeal to China Thursday. 

“Americans don’t look to Chinese commies for the truth,” Sasse told the Omaha World-Herald. “If the Biden kid broke laws by selling his name to Beijing, that’s a matter for American courts, not communist tyrants running torture camps.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) attacked Trump invitation to Ukraine — and now to China — to interfere in American politics as “wrong and appalling.”

That makes a total of three Republican senators who have had the guts to criticize Trump!

Tony

Anthony Scaramucci

Dear Commons Community,

Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci, former friend and short-time White House communications director for Donald Trump, called the President a “traitor to the U.S.” who is struggling mightily to “gaslight” America.

“The American president is a traitor to the United States” for inviting foreign governments to meddle in U.S. politics, Scaramucci said Friday on CNN. “This is a full-blown disaster.”

Trump has responded to the House impeachment inquiry, triggered by the revelation of his July 25 phone call pressing Ukraine’s president to investigate political rival Joe Biden, like “somebody who doesn’t have any principles or any morals,” Scaramucci said.

“I hear rank criminality,” he explained. “I hear pressure on American diplomats coming from above to push them to do things that are actually a revocation of the Constitution.”

But he also criticized Republicans who are doing nothing to call Trump out on his actions.

“We predicted [Trump’s] meltdown … what I’m shocked by is that there are 53 senators who haven’t really come out and spoken out,” he told CNN’s Don Lemon in an interview Thursday (video below). “It’s reprehensible. James Madison is rolling in his grave.”

There’s also a “little bit of sadness for the country,” he told Lemon. “When the Reuters reporter asks him a very simple question, ‘What did you want to get out of the phone call,’ and he goes up like a Saturn 5 rocket and he’s doing it on the international news, there’s a little bit of sadness for the country.”

Go get’em  Mooch!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that a second intelligence official who was alarmed by President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine is weighing whether to file his own formal whistle-blower complaint and testify to Congress.    

Supposedly, the official has more direct information about the events than the first whistle-blower, whose complaint that Mr. Trump was using his power to get Ukraine to investigate his political rivals touched off an impeachment inquiry. The second official is among those interviewed by the intelligence community inspector general to corroborate the allegations of the original whistle-blower, one of the people said.

The inspector general, Michael Atkinson, briefed lawmakers privately yesterday about how he substantiated the whistle-blower’s account. It was not clear whether he told lawmakers that the second official was considering filing a complaint.

A new complaint, particularly from someone closer to the events, would potentially add further credibility to the account of the first whistle-blower, a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to the National Security Council at one point. He said that he relied on information from more than a half-dozen American officials to compile his allegations about Mr. Trump’s campaign to solicit foreign election interference that could benefit him politically.

This would really put Trump and company in the impeachment crosshairs.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign announced yesterday that the Senator had a heart attack earlier this week.  As reported by the New York Times and the Associated Press.

“Mr. Sanders, 78, had entered the hospital on Tuesday night after experiencing chest pain at a campaign event, and doctors had inserted two stents in a blocked artery, a relatively common procedure. But the campaign did not confirm that Mr. Sanders had had a heart attack until Friday, inviting questions about his condition, and his campaign’s transparency, as he remained off the campaign trail this week.

Television cameras filmed Mr. Sanders as he left the hospital Friday, waving to onlookers and pumping a fist, then driving off in a sport utility vehicle. He will remain in Las Vegas on Friday night and return to his home in Burlington, Vt., on Saturday, campaign officials said.

“After two and a half days in the hospital, I feel great, and after taking a short time off, I look forward to getting back to work,” Mr. Sanders said in a statement.

While much of the conversation in the Democratic race has centered on issues like health care and student debt, Mr. Sanders’s heart attack is likely to heighten scrutiny on age in a primary where the top candidates are all in their 70s. In addition to Mr. Sanders, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is 76 and Senator Elizabeth Warren is 70. President Trump is 73.

But if Mr. Sanders has, until this week, largely avoided questions about his health — he has projected an image of fitness as a candidate and has maintained a blistering schedule on the campaign trail — the spotlight is now squarely on him. The ages of the current leaders notwithstanding, many Democratic voters have expressed discomfort with nominating a septuagenarian candidate, a notion that some political strategists say Mr. Sanders’s heart attack is unlikely to dispel.

“Running for president is a physical and emotional trial, and the presidency itself is even more demanding,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama. “While we all wish Senator Sanders well, this has to be a big flashing light for him. And given his age, it may be for some voters, as well.”

I think Mr. Axelrod has this right!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Republican Senators Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse were highly critical yesterday of President Trump’s appealing to Ukraine and China to investigate the Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.   As reported by NBC News.

“Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, slammed President Donald Trump for urging Ukraine and China to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son, calling the appeals “appalling.”

“By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling,” Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, tweeted yesterday.

He also mocked Trump’s insistence that he is motivated by concerns about corruption.

“When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated,” Romney wrote.

Trump was asked by a reporter earlier if he’d ever asked “foreign leaders for any corruption investigations that don’t involve your political opponents.”

“You know, we would have to look,” Trump answered.

Romney’s comments came hours after Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska became the first sitting Republican senator to publicly criticize Trump for his comments on China Thursday.

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine,” Trump told reporters Thursday.

In a statement to the Omaha World-Record, Sasse said, “Hold up: Americans don’t look to Chinese commies for the truth. If the Biden kid broke laws by selling his name to Beijing, that’s a matter for American courts, not communist tyrants running torture camps.”

Despite Trump’s accusations of corruption, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the former vice president or his son.

In the same statement, Sasse took aim at House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, while also appearing to subtly push back against threats from the president and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to sue the California lawmaker.

“Congressman Schiff is running a partisan clown show in the House — that’s his right because the Constitution doesn’t prohibit clown shows, but fortunately, in the Senate, we’re working to follow the facts one step at a time,” Sasse said.

Trump has called Schiff “a liar” and “a fraud” who should “resign is disgrace” for how he paraphrased and characterized a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president where the president asked him to investigate the Bidens. Schiff prefaced his remarks as saying they were “the essence of what the president communicates,” but Republicans have said they were deeply misleading.

Sasse is a long-time critic of the Chinese government. While Trump tweeted his congratulations to the Chinese government on the 70th anniversary of Communist Party rule earlier this week, Sasse issued a statement decrying its history of “communist oppression.”

Sasse and Romney also criticized Trump last week — Sasse after reading a whistleblower’s complaint about Trump pushing for Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and Romney after a summary of the call was released by the White House showing Trump had indeed done so.

Most other Republicans shrugged the revelations off, which Romney also decried at an appearance at the Atlantic Festival.

“I think it’s very natural for people to look at circumstances and see them in the light that’s most amenable to their maintaining power, and doing things to preserve that power,” he said.

Trump responded to Romney at the time by tweeting out a clip of Romney’s reaction to losing the presidential election to Barack Obama in 2012.

Sasse was once a frequent Trump critic, but has taken a softer tone toward the president in recent months.

Trump even plugged Sasse’s re-election effort last month, tweeting that he “has done a wonderful job representing the people of Nebraska. He is great with our Vets, the Military, and your very important Second Amendment. Strong on Crime and the Border, Ben has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

A small but noticeable crack among Republicans.

Tony