I just watched an interview on CNN with Dr. Peter Hotez, Dean, National School of Tropical Medicine, at Baylor University, regarding the spread of the coronavirus in the southwest especially his home state of Texas. He reviews the ever escalating number of cases, the burden on the hospital system, and the increasing death rate as indicators that unchecked, the country will be in deep trouble. He went so far to say that “we will not have a country by fall”. I hope he is wrong but he is right to sound the alarm.
If you think Dr. Hotez is just another expert who supports CNN’s views, he is one of the few doctors who you can see on both CNN and Fox News.
California’s Governor Gavin Newsom yesterday clamped new restrictions on businesses, and the state’s two largest school districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, and said children would not return to class for the new term as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations soared.
Newsom ordered bars closed and restaurants, movie theaters, zoos and museums statewide to cease indoor operations. He also said churches, gyms and hair salons must close in the 30 hardest-hit counties.
“It’s incumbent upon all of us to recognize soberly that COVID-19 is not going away anytime soon, until there is a vaccine and/or an effective therapy,” Newsom said at a daily news briefing.
The governor called the move critical to stemming a new surge in COVID-19 cases that have strained hospitals in several of California’s rural counties.
The public school districts for Los Angeles and San Diego, two of the country’s largest with a combined 706,000 students and 88,000 employees, said in a joint statement they would hold online-only classes, citing “vague and contradictory” science and public health guidelines.
Sadly, I think we will see other states following California.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationhas an article this morning questioning the effectiveness of a distance learning model identified as HyFlex that purportedly originated in 2006 at San Francisco State University. It is basically a synchronous videoconferencing model that was around well before 2006. I described it in my book, Distance Learning: Making Connections Across Virtual Space and Time in 2001. The Chronicle article evaluates HyFlex as colleges seek to provide alternatives to face-to-face instruction for the fall semester. Here is an excerpt.
“John Nolan likes running an active classroom. A lecturer in the college of business at the University of Nevada at Reno, he favors the Socratic method as he walks among his 150 or so business-law students.
So when the university announced that it will offer courses under a hybrid model known as HyFlex, in which professors teach simultaneously to students in the classroom and others beaming in remotely, Nolan wondered how that could possibly work. If he walks away from the podium, he moves out of sight of the camera. If a student in the back of class asks a question, those tuning in on their laptops might not hear. And how can he foster lively discussions, let alone group work, when half his students are masked, sitting six feet apart because of Covid-19 restrictions, and the others are virtual?
“HyFlex doesn’t really do anybody any good,” he says. “It’s basically, you take the worst parts of in person and online teaching and mix it together.”
Nolan’s skepticism is shared by a growing number of faculty members, as more colleges choose the HyFlex model for the fall. It also reflects a rift between administrators and professors, who are raising alarms over the health risks of teaching in person, and about the logistical, technical, and pedagogical complications of the model itself. Search HyFlex on Facebook and Twitter and you’ll come across comments like this one: “Whoever the hell thought of this is a bean counter, not an educator, and an idiot.”
But as colleges scramble to figure out how to re-open campuses, it’s easy to see why HyFlex holds appeal. It offers something to everyone: Students who can’t come to campus can still receive “live” teaching. Those who want a residential experience can have one. And classes are able to hew to social-distancing guidelines by following schedules in which on-campus students divide and rotate between in-person or online attendance.
HyFlex itself is a precise term, describing a teaching model started at San Francisco State University in 2006 to accommodate working adult students in a graduate program. The “flex” in HyFlex is supposed to mean that students — not administrators — choose how to attend class on any given day. That kind of flexibility isn’t an option under Covid-19, because colleges will need to control how many students are in the classroom. But the broader idea, of offering a course that is taught simultaneously in person and online, has been adopted and branded by universities looking to reassure students that they have all bases covered. Northeastern University is touting NUFlex. Northern Arizona University offers NAUFlex, and Shenandoah University has created ShenFlex.
Teaching experts and others familiar with hybrid teaching say that HyFlex can work, but it requires effective technology, careful planning, instructional support, and creative course design. That’s not always possible when colleges are still operating in crisis mode, with instructors worn out from the spring pivot to remote teaching and wary of returning to the classroom in the fall. Tight budgets and speedy decision making can add to those stresses.”
Many of the concerns of this approach have been well documented. The article is worth a read as a caution for colleges moving forward with their Fall 2020 plans.
Yesterday I saw two interviews with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos: one was with Dana Bash on CNN and other with Chris Wallace on Fox News. In both cases, she was unable or unwilling to answer questions in a straight-forward manner. She stumbled and bumbled her way through these interviews and made anyone watching questioning why she is in the position she is. To be fair, she was defending the Trump administration’s aggressive push to reopen schools in the fall amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic. Here is a review courtesy of NBC News.
“Speaking with CNN’s “State of the Union,” DeVos also refused to say whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines for schools should be followed uniformly.
“The CDC guidelines are just that, meant to be flexible and meant to be applied as appropriate for the situation,” she said.
Those guidelines state that children meeting in groups “can put everyone at risk,” adding that kids “can pass this virus onto others who have an increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19.” Those guidelines also call for six-feet of social distancing and other measures to decrease the risk of spread.
With coronavirus running rampant throughout much of the southern U.S., where record caseloads and increased hospitalizations are being reported, schools are scrambling to figure out plans for the imminent school year.
Some districts, such as the New York City public schools, are planning on such a hybrid model. In recent days, President Donald Trump and his administration have pressed for schools to fully reopen, with the president claiming that Democrats want schools to stay closed to hurt his election chances. He’s also threatened to withhold money from districts that do not reopen in the fall.
“School leaders across the country need to be making plans to” have students in the classroom, DeVos said. “There will be exceptions to the rule, but the rule should be kids go back to school this fall. And where there are little flare-ups or hotspots, that can be dealt with school by school or a case by case basis. There’s ample opportunity to have kids in school.”
Speaking with ABC’s “This Week,” Assistant Secretary of Health Adm. Brett Giroir said “we have to do this safely but kids not being in school risk their social and emotional health, risk many people with nutrition, the recognition of child abuse, child sexual abuse, it’s really important to get kids physically back in school.”
“But we do have to do that safely,” he added. “And the first thing we need to do is we need to get the virus under control. When we get the virus more under control, then we can really think about how we put children back in the classroom.”
Of the Trump administration’s guidelines, Giroir said they “tend to be a little bit academic and long,” adding that the administration is working to make additional school guidelines “much more concise so people can really follow them and understand them.”
Responding to DeVos on “State of the Union,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the administration’s top education official’s interview was evidence of “malfeasance dereliction of duty.”
“This is appalling,” Pelosi said of the push to have kids back in school. “The president and his administration are messing with the health of our children. We all want our children to go back to school. Teachers do. Parents do. And children do. But they must go back safely.”
“And when you hear what the administration is saying, we know they have no appreciation for the failure that has brought us to this point,” she added. “Going back to school presents the biggest risk for the spread of the coronavirus. They ignore science and they ignore governance to make this happen.”
She said the CDC guidelines should be a requirement for schools and said Trump should implement the Defense Production Act to help provide necessary personal protective equipment and testing supplies to school districts.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Florida’s Miami-Dade County Public Schools district, said the district is “going to obviously do our very best in our community considering where the health data currently is.”
“Positivity rate of 29.1 percent. A month ago, it was at 6 percent,” he said of his area. “Our start to the school year is six weeks from now.”
He said that if people follow social distancing guidelines and wear masks, among other measures, “conditions may be appropriate and healthy for students to return to the very best model of teaching and learning, which is in-person.”
“But we need the community’s collaboration, we need the science to drive the practice rather than politics influencing what is legitimately a community concern,” he added.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told “Fox News Sunday” that issuing an ultimatum for schools to open is wrongheaded.
“Mandating it under a tough timeline is the wrong approach,” he said, adding, “There are going to be many challenges to opening schools safely.”
NBC News is reporting that the White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, as it works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings in the U.S. coronavirus response.
A White House official told NBC News that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things” The official provided NBC News with a lengthy list of past comments by Fauci earlier in the pandemic that did not age well, including Fauci saying in January that coronavirus was “not a major threat” and “not driven by asymptomatic carriers” and Fauci’s comment in March that “people should not be walking around with masks.”
Many of the past statements the White House is criticizing Fauci for are ones that were based on the best available data at the time and were widely echoed by Trump himself, other members of the task force and senior White House officials. As Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CBS News on Sunday, “When you learn more, you change those recommendations. Our recommendations have changed.”
The list circulated by the White House bears striking resemblance to the opposition research that political candidates often circulate to the media about their opponents.
The White House yesterday declined to provide further comment about Fauci. White House spokesman Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday declined to say whether Trump still has confidence in Fauci. Fauci did not immediately return a request for comment.
The attempt to discredit Fauci comes amid signs of growing tensions between Fauci and the president. Fauci said last week he hadn’t seen Trump in person since June 2 and hadn’t briefed him in person in at least two months. Trump told Gray Television’s Greta Van Susteren last week that Fauci has made mistakes and added, “I disagree with him.”
The attacks on Fauci will not work. He has the most credibility in Washington, D.C. for telling the truth while Trump has the least.
Former special counsel Robert Mueller has an op-ed in The Washington Post defending his office’s prosecution of Roger Stone and saying he is still a convicted felon and “rightly so” in light of President Donald Trump’s commutation of Stone.
“Congress also investigated and sought information from Stone. A jury later determined he lied repeatedly to members of Congress. He lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks. He lied about the existence of written communications with his intermediary. He lied by denying he had communicated with the Trump campaign about the timing of WikiLeaks’ releases. He in fact updated senior campaign officials repeatedly about WikiLeaks. And he tampered with a witness, imploring him to stonewall Congress,” Mueller wrote in the op-ed posted Saturday evening.
“The jury ultimately convicted Stone of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness. Because his sentence has been commuted, he will not go to prison. But his conviction stands.”
Trump on Friday commuted the prison sentence of his longtime friend, who was convicted of crimes that included lying to Congress in part, prosecutors said, to protect the President. The announcement came just days before Stone was set to report to a federal prison in Georgia. As reported by CNN.
“Stone was convicted in November of seven charges — including lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing a congressional committee proceeding — as part of Mueller’s Russia investigation. Among the things he misled Congress about were his communications with Trump campaign officials — communications that prosecutors said Stone hid out of his desire to protect Trump.
“Russian efforts to interfere in our political system, and the essential question of whether those efforts involved the Trump campaign, required investigation. In that investigation, it was critical for us (and, before us, the FBI) to obtain full and accurate information. Likewise, it was critical for Congress to obtain accurate information from its witnesses. When a subject lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable. It may ultimately impede those efforts,” Mueller said in the op-ed.
Mueller also pointed out that the people involved in the investigations and prosecutions acted with the “highest integrity.”
“We made every decision in Stone’s case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law. The women and men who conducted these investigations and prosecutions acted with the highest integrity. Claims to the contrary are false,” Mueller wrote.
Stone’s commutation appears to have broken the floodgates with Mueller and his tight-lipped team after a year of silence about their investigation. Throughout the investigation, Mueller’s office refused to comment except in a few rare circumstances. Andrew Weissmann, the special counsel’s office prosecutor who led the investigation of top Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, began tweeting about Stone on Friday night.
Mueller, for his part, has been silent since he testified reluctantly under subpoena to Congress last July. And even then, he was circumspect and hesitant to elaborate on his investigation’s findings.
Famously, he gave the convoluted summary about his obstruction findings: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
Mueller was appointed in May 2017 to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller, who began his career with the Department of Justice in 1976 as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco, has overseen some of the highest-profile cases of the last few decades.
He also has a reputation for not discussing politics. Lisa Monaco, who served as Mueller’s chief of staff when he was FBI director, described him as “apolitical. He’s non-partisan. He is, as I think it has become quite clear, a pretty law-and-order guy.”
Trump’s decision to commute the sentence of his friend and political adviser is the crescendo of a months-long effort to rewrite the history of the Mueller investigation. This has included selective declassification of intelligence materials, a ramped-up counter-investigation into the origins of the Russia probe and attempts to drop the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The President has broad constitutional power to pardon or commute sentences. But Trump is unlike almost any other president in how he’s used the power proactively to save political allies.
Trump’s move spared Stone from having to serve prison time after Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced him in February to 40 months in prison.”
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has a piece today entitled The Republicans Who Want to Destroy Trump. He analyzes the aims of George Conway (Lincoln Project) and Charlie Sykes (The Bulwark) who have mounted campaign ads against Trump and who will endorse Joe Biden. Their ads are minute-long masterpieces of derision and miniature operas of contempt, designed to get into President Trump’s head and deep under his skin. One Lincoln Project ad from late May (above) that begins with a close-up of body bags and then pulls back until those bags form an American flag. These words appear over it: “100,000 Dead Americans. One Wrong President.”
Bruni refers to a conversation he had with Sykes who spoke of “a revelation” that he has experienced, courtesy of Trump. “The heart of politics is not about the policy,” he told me. “It’s about the values. I can disagree with you on eight out of 10 issues, but if you’re an honorable, honest, empathetic human being, we can do business.” Trump is none of those things. Biden is most or all of them — and will get Sykes’s vote in November.
Should you have any doubt about how passionately George Conway and the other Never Trumpers at the Lincoln Project want to defeat the president, check out their ads.
There are dozens at this point, and the best are minute-long masterpieces of derision, miniature operas of contempt, designed to get into President Trump’s head and deep under his skin. That’s exactly where they’ve burrowed.
After the release of “Mourning in America,” which turned Ronald Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” commercial on its head, Trump had one of his trademark Twitter meltdowns. He shrieked at Conway in particular, mentioning his marriage to one of Trump’s brashest aides.
“I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband,” the president tweeted, “but it must have been really bad.”
Such grace. But if George Conway can just shake it off and the Lincoln Project succeeds, he and his fellow refugees from Trump’s Republican Party will find peace and a place in a restored, recognizable political order on the other side. Right?
Wrong. They don’t hope to regain control of the Republican Party, because they expect that Trump-ism will survive Trump and that Trump himself won’t shut up simply because voters shut him down.
“I personally think that the Republican brand is probably destroyed,” Conway told me. “It’s destroyed by it having become essentially a personality cult.” He said that he formally left the party, changing his voter registration to unaffiliated, some two years ago, and he doesn’t envision being able to return anytime soon.
But the Lincoln Project’s full-court press for Joe Biden, which involves social media and grass-roots organizing as well as internet and television ads, doesn’t mean that Conway and company are looking for a welcome mat in the Democratic Party. Not at all.
That’s what’s so fascinating about their quest. They’re not fighting to come in from the wilderness. The wilderness is a given. They’re just fighting to get rid of this one sun-hogging, diseased redwood — or orangewood, as the case may be.
I asked Conway, “So you’ll be a man without a party for the rest of your days?”
“Probably,” he said. “It makes me tremendously sad.”
It’s easy to miss or minimize how remarkable the Never Trumpers — at the Lincoln Project and elsewhere — are. That’s partly because they’ve been around almost since Trump’s presidential campaign commenced, so they’ve lost their novelty and some of their luster.
But they’ve gained in ranks and grown in determination, to a point where you have to go back to 1972 — when many prominent Democrats endorsed President Richard Nixon, a Republican, over George McGovern, the Democratic nominee — to find anything close.
And even that precedent doesn’t quite hold up. As the historian Timothy Naftali told me, the Democrats for Nixon split with him primarily along ideological lines, and they weren’t trying to undermine an incumbent president. Never Trumpers are doing precisely that, and while they have ideological quibbles with Trump, they’re motivated principally by their belief that he’s something of a monster.
“It’s an unprecedented moment,” said Charlie Sykes, a founder and editor-at-large of The Bulwark, a Trump-bashing publication begun in 2018 by Trump-disgusted Republicans like him. Sykes no longer considers himself a Republican. He described himself to me as “a politically homeless contrarian conservative.”
The Bulwark shares personnel and DNA with Republican Voters Against Trump and Republicans for the Rule of Law, all bastions of Never Trumpers. There’s also a new super PAC called 43 Alumni for Biden, a reference to George W. Bush, the 43rd president. It comprises scores of alumni of his administration who want to see Biden beat Trump, and it intends to release testimonials from former senior Bush administration officials.
As for the Lincoln Project, it’s helmed not by a ragtag band of renegades but by a cluster of strategists who worked for Bush, John McCain or Mitt Romney and were well-connected Republican insiders until Trump’s takeover. The anti-Trump rebellion is distinguished by the pedigree of the rebels.
And it exists in paradoxical tension with the equally remarkable loyalty that most Republicans give the president. In the same manner that Trump triggers outsize dissent, he inspires outsize support. He’s just plain outsize. Depending on the moment, about 80 percent to 90 percent of voters who identify as Republican tell pollsters that they stand behind Trump.
They’re the reason that some political observers see what the Lincoln Project and its kin are doing as an exercise in protracted political suicide. Even if Trump and his minions get a resounding comeuppance in November, “It seems unlikely that Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh will apologize to the Cassandras and say, ‘You were right all along!’” Matt Lewis, a conservative, wrote recently in a column in the Daily Beast under the headline “The Never Trumpers May Destroy Him. Then What?”
Sykes at The Bulwark conceded: “It’s naïve to think that the Republican Party is going to snap back to sanity anytime soon. The fact that people are talking about Tucker Carlson in 2024 shows you how far they’ve gone.”
So does that make these Never Trumpers some uniquely high-minded breed? It’s complicated. While they broke with the Republican Party on principle, they may well have expected the Trump fever to break — and for other Republicans to follow them — in short order. Meanwhile, Never Trump-ism had its perks, or at least its consolations.
There’s an especially rapt audience for takedowns of Trump from conservatives, and Never Trumpers have found themselves in high demand as commentators and book authors.
Through some of their anti-Trump organizations, funded by donors, some of them have arranged employment no longer available to them in conventional Republican circles. In The Atlantic recently, Andrew Ferguson fairly called out individual Never Trumpers for inconsistency, hypocrisy and opportunism, and raised questions about the degree to which a few of the people with the Lincoln Project are profiting from it.
But the most important syllable in Never Trumper is Trump, and Never Trumpers are essentially sowing the seeds of their own diminished relevance by working to get rid of him.
That’s why, when I look at them, I see patriotism, though John Weaver — who, along with Conway, helped to found the Lincoln Project — emphasized a different idea when we spoke. He stressed atonement.
Trump’s election made him revisit how he and other Republican strategists had paved the way for Trump. For instance, Weaver worked for the man who was the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump for president.
“Jeff Sessions wouldn’t have gotten to the Senate had I not overseen his race in 1996,” Weaver told me. “Now I look back at that and say, ‘What kind of goddamn penance do I have to pay for that?’”
Sykes spoke of “a revelation” that he has experienced, courtesy of Trump. “The heart of politics is not about the policy,” he told me. “It’s about the values. I can disagree with you on eight out of 10 issues, but if you’re an honorable, honest, empathetic human being, we can do business.” Trump is none of those things. Biden is most or all of them — and will get Sykes’s vote in November.
In exile he and other Never Trumpers have found clarity. They cut to the heart of the matter. That’s reflected in a Lincoln Project ad from late May that begins with a close-up of body bags and then pulls back until those bags form an American flag. These words appear over it: “100,000 Dead Americans. One Wrong President.”
I don’t know that they’ll tip the election. But they sure as hell tell it like it is.
It took four months into the coronavirus pandemic and 134,000 Americans dead for President Donald Trump to get the message to wear a face mask. For the first time in public, on a visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center yesterday, Trump was seen with a face mask.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in early April began recommending that people wear them when they cannot maintain social distance. The agency even released a helpful guide to show you how to make one.
Pressure has mounted for weeks on Trump to set a good example by wearing a mask for the cameras because of skyrocketing case counts in much of the country. Until today, he resisted the idea. Trump was required to put on a mask during a visit to a Ford plant in May, but he made a point to take it off right away.
“I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it,” Trump said at the time.
He began to change his tone in late June, saying he had no problem with masks and was actually a fan of them. On July 1, Trump claimed that he liked the way he looked in a mask, believing it made him look like the Lone Ranger. [Note: the Lone Ranger covered his eyes with a mask not his nostrils and mouth.]
But at the few rallies and speeches Trump has held since the crisis started, crowds appeared to take their cues from the president ― leaving their masks at home.
Now Trump has taken one baby step to encourage widespread mask usage in the deadly pandemic.
“I think it’s a great thing to wear a mask,” Trump said yesterday, adding, “They have a time and place.”
The time is now. The place is anywhere there are people you don’t live with.
Sorry, Trump, the time was four months ago. Smart people understood that and accepted the advice of experts like Anthony Fauci.
Blake Neff, the chief writer for Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program has resigned after it was revealed he’d secretly posted racist and sexist messages for five years on an online forum, CNN Business reported yesterday.
Blake Neff, who worked for the right-wing Daily Caller before moving over to Fox News four years ago, had been posting the messages under the pseudonym Charles XII and sometimes referred to work he did for Carlson in his messages, according to CNN.
The message board was AutoAdmit — also known as XOXOhth — which often features racist, sexist and vulgar content, CNN reported.
Neff’s messages included racist posts about Black men and a mocking, years-long detailed account of the love life of a woman, who was then harassed by his online followers.
In a 2018 interview on Fox News, Carlson called Neff a “great writer.” He also acknowledged Neff in the credits for his book “Ship of Fools” for research and for “greatly” improving “our nightly show on Fox.”
There was no immediate comment from Carlson. But shortly after the CNN report, Carlson exploded in his program over “cancel culture.” He added: “We are in a situation where it’s … individuals against the mob — online, other news organizations, CNN particularly.”
Neff did not respond to repeated calls by CNN for comment and could not be reached for comment by HuffPost. His social media accounts have been deleted.
Fox News told CNN that Neff had resigned but offered no details.
Carlson’s Twitter critics hailed Neff’s departure — and eagerly awaited any other comment from the Fox News host.
Neff is the kind of employee that we have come to expect at Fox news!
Donald Trump was called yesterday the “most corrupt president in history” after he commuted Roger Stone’s prison sentence just days before he was scheduled to go to prison.
Stone was found guilty last year of seven felonies, including lying to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign worked with Russia to tip the 2016 election. Stone, a GOP operative and adviser to Trump during the election, was sentenced to more than three years in prison.
Trump stood to benefit from Stone keeping his mouth shut, and Stone said as much Friday to NBC journalist Howard Fineman. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him,” Stone told Fineman. “It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.”
Following the president’s action, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Trump “has abandoned the rule of law and made a mockery of our democracy,” adding: “He truly is the most corrupt president in history.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). accused the “lawless president” of treating American justice like his “personal plaything.”
New York Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, and Carolyn Maloney, who heads the Oversight Committee, said in a joint statement that Trump “abused the powers of his office” to reward “an individual that could directly implicate him in criminal misconduct.”
Nadler also accused Trump of infecting the judicial system with “partisanship and cronyism and attacked the rule of law.”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called Stone a “victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump presidency.”
Stone says he will now seek a new trial. The president has commuted his sentence, but he is still a convicted felon.
Stone isn’t the first criminal friend of Trump’s who’s getting a free pass. Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was released early from prison in May to serve the rest of his sentence for tax fraud and conspiracy to defraud the government at home. He was released because of coronavirus fears. He served less than a third of his 7.5-year sentence behind bars.
And Attorney General William Barr is battling in court to drop charges against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, even though Flynn pleaded guilty — twice — to lying to the FBI about his secret negotiations with a Russian diplomat.
Tony
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