Beet L. Jooz

A pro-Israel group is calling for CNN contributor and Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill to be fired for comments it deemed as  "virulent anti-Semitism."

The Kremlin has no official information on U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to cancel a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Argentina, Interfax news agency quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Thursday.

Catch worth over $20,000

It is unclear what the catalyst for the sudden plunged in Twitter shares - down over 6% since the open - but some have suggested concerns at a reinvigorated crackdown on accounts after a Putin-impersonating account with a million followers was deleted...

As AP reports, an unverified bogus Twitter account claiming to belong to Russian President Vladimir Putin has been suspended after going undetected for six years.

The account, @putinRF_eng, managed to attract more than one million followers and was mentioned in tweets sent by several high profile names, including former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, and former Argentina president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

"We suspended @putinRF_eng for impersonation based on a valid report we received from Russian officials," Twitter announced.

Earlier this year, the Kremlin confirmed to the Press Association that the account in question was not run by Mr Putin nor managed by a member of his team.

Is this why the stock is plunging?

Twitter Says It Suspended Account That Impersonated Putin

According to twitter “Impersonation on Twitter is a violation of the Twitter Rules”.

So half of twitter will soon be banned

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 29, 2018

Additionally, we note that Fox News has boycotted the service for three weeks now.

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Former president speaks out against media polarisation while condemning Donald Trump

The statue will be moved to a new location in front of the New York Stock Exchange

"Law & Order: SVU" star Ice-T said he's had his first bagel since his post about never eating one blew up on Twitter.

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'Nothing could be further from the truth'

Southwest Airlines apologized after a mother accused a gate agent of mocking her five-year-old daughter’s name and posting the child’s boarding pass on social media.

Truly divisive individuals are left alone.

President Trump on Thursday abruptly canceled a planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at this weekend's Group of 20 (G-20) summit, citing Moscow's military tensions with Ukraine.The announcement, which Trump made on Twitter, came...

Conveniently, criticism of the liberals' leading funder is beyond the pale, but featuring an intellectual who pals around with a guy who calls Jews termites is okay.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani called Michael Cohen a liar on Thursday in a response to his plea deal with Robert Mueller.

Cohen, a longtime former lawyer for President Donald Trump, pled guilty in federal court Thursday morning for lying to Congress about the timeline of Trump’s business dealings with Russia. The president returned fire by calling Cohen a “weak person” who’s lying in order to get his sentence reduced.

Now, Trump’s current attorney is joining the war of words. In a statement, Giuliani called Cohen a “proven liar” with legal troubles that have “nothing to do with the Trump Organization.”

Giuliani also accused Robert Mueller of trying to disrupt Trump as he attends the G20 summit in Argentina.

Read the full statement here, via NBC News’ Hallie Jackson:

Addendum: Giuliani called Cohen “honorable” and “honest” earlier this year.

— —

>> Follow Ken Meyer (@KenMeyer91) on Twitter

'This despicable targeting of our brave service members will never be tolerated'

'I don't think I've seen anything like it,' seismologist says

Hart has spoken out after he and his wife celebrated their son Enzo's first birthday with a cowboy-and-Indians-themed bash

A Uighur mother who survived a Chinese re-education camp is calling on Congress to intervene in China's mass internment of the Muslim minority group."Over the last three years, I was taken to China's government detention centers three times. I spent...

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President Trump and Congressional Republicans have already abandoned two previous attempts to secure funding for the president's promised border wall after forcing two brief partial government shutdowns. But with Democrats preparing to take control of the House in January, the president is ready to give it one last shot.

At least that's what he told Politico during an interview published Wednesday morning. The president said he would veto any funding bill that doesn't include $5 billion in appropriations to start building his wall on the border. To avert a shutdown, Congress must pass - and the president must sign - seven appropriations bills that have already been negotiated before midnight on Friday Dec. 7.

President Trump apparently still believes that Republicans wouldn't suffer any political fallout from a shutdown (particularly if it's done in the name of border security); instead, Democrats would shoulder most of the blame. And given the increasingly violent confrontations between border patrol agents and members of a caravan of migrants from Central America, Trump believes the political winds right now are particularly favorable for approving the wall.

Sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, with a stack of papers, magazines and a soda at the ready, Trump said he now believes that a pitched battle over the border is a "total winner" politically for his party, and a loser for Democrats.

"I don't do anything...just for political gain," Trump said. "But I will tell you, politically speaking, that issue is a total winner. People look at the border, they look at the rush to the police, they look at the rock throwers and really hurting three people, three very brave border patrol folks - I think that it's a tremendous issue, but much more importantly, is really needed. So we have to have border security."

His insistence on $5 billion for the wall — "I am firm," he said — does suggest a real risk of a partial government shutdown. Congress must pass seven appropriations bills by next Friday, or risk a lapse of funding that would interrupt operations at the Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department, State Department and other federal agencies. Democrats will take control over a slice of Washington in 37 days, the first time they've controlled any lever of power in Trump's Washington.

A December shutdown would be the third under Trump, and the 20th in the past 40 years.

Trump's insistence that he won't accept anything less than the full $5 billion contradicts a statement he made to the Washington Post on Tuesday, when he said that he would be open to a compromise on border security with Democrats. Asked if he would be open to a compromise on DACA, Trump said he'd prefer for the courts to rule on the legality of the Obama-era policy. If they rule "properly" Trump said, the US will be able to keep the Dreamers, and he wouldn't see any further issues. But while Democrats will almost certainly oppose Trump's demands, the real questions is whether he'll be able to win support from Republican "deficit hawks" like Rand Paul, who have previously balked at allocating the money for such a massive infrastructure project. For what it's worth, Republican Whip Steve Scalise said Republicans must back Trump's plan. "We need to be there for him," he said.

But whether his colleagues in the leadership, who have spent months negotiating the seven funding bills, would be willing to start over remains to be seen.

If Trump doesn't easily win support for the wall funding - a scenario that looks extremely likely - he would risk provoking another drawdown in markets, because with interest rates expected to rise in December and few expecting meaningful progress in China-US trade talks later this week, another anxiety inducing shutdown battle is the last thing the market needs.

Fox News said it is disciplining the staffers involved in feeding scripts and questions to former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt before his interviews on morning show Fox & Friends.

The action taken in response to the controversy — unveiled thanks to emails made public by a FOIA request — was first reported by the Associated Press and confirmed by Mediaite.

Fox News did not reveal who was being disciplined nor what measures were being taken.

The Daily Beast first reported Tuesday morning on the coordination between Pruitt’s team and Fox & Friends producers. Emails showed that Fox News staffers allowed Pruitt — who who left the Trump administration in July amid a torrent of ethics investigations — to choose the topics for his interviews, review questions and even scripts in advance.

Fox News said in response to the story: “This is not standard practice whatsoever and the matter is being addressed internally with those involved.”

In an email chain ahead of a May 2017 appearance on Fox News by Pruitt, his spokesperson corresponded with Fox & Friends producers Andrew Murry and Diana Aloi. Aloi said she would send “pre-interview questions on the agreed upon topic, the new direction of the EPA, and helping communities that were poorly served by the last administration.”

Aloi then sent the script of the segment opener to Pruitt’s team for approval. In Pruitt’s Fox & Friends hit the next day, host Brian Kilmeade read from the script, as it had been approved.

[Featured image via screengrab]

One day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller said that Paul Manafort had lied and violated his plea agreement with Federal prosecutors, and as a result should be sentenced immediately, the NYT has reported that in a "highly unusual" arrangement, a lawyer for Paul Manafort had repeatedly briefed president Trump's lawyer on what he told Mueller and other federal investigators after he agreed to cooperate with the special counsel.

While the arrangement is not illegal, it reportedly inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began "cooperating" two months ago, with some legal experts speculating that Manafort's backdoor cooperation with Trump's legal team was a bid by Trump's former campaign chair for a presidential pardon even as he worked with Mueller in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani acknowledged the arrangement to the NYT, and "defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed."

Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Mr. Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations campaign against Mr. Mueller’s office.

As an example of of what Manafort told the Trump legal team, Giuliani said, Manafort’s lawyer Kevin Downing told him that prosecutors hammered away at whether the president knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Russians promised to deliver damaging information on Hillary Clinton to his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, although this line of investigation is hardly a surprise. Trump has long denied knowing about the meeting in advance, with Giuliani saying that Mueller "wants Manafort to incriminate Trump."

What is notable is that this kind of joint defense agreement is legal, and while Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Manafort and Mueller’s prosecutors, who on Monday accused Manafort of holding out on them and even lying, despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant. As a result of the collapse of the plea deal, Manafort will now face sentencing on two conspiracy charges and eight counts of financial fraud — crimes that could put him behind bars for at least 10 years.

Just as importantly, Manafort's frequent updates helped reassure Trump’s legal team that Manafort had not implicated the president in any possible wrongdoing, which begs the question just how was Manafort "cooperating" with Mueller for two whole months.

Meanwhile, according to the NYT, Giuliani seized on Downing’s information to unleash lines of attack onto the special counsel.

In asserting that investigators were unnecessarily targeting Trump, Giuliani accused the prosecutor overseeing the Manafort investigation, Andrew Weissmann, of keeping Manafort in solitary confinement simply in the hopes of forcing him to give false testimony about the president.

Meanwhile, in his own repeated Twitter attacks on the special counsel, the president suggested that he himself had inside information about the prosecutors’ lines of inquiry and frustrations. "Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie," Trump wrote on Tuesday, and earlier this month tweeted: "The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want."

As noted above, the basis for Manafort’s legal team keeping Trump’s lawyers abreast of developments in his case is thanks to a joint defense agreement. According to the Times, Trump's team has pursued such pacts as a way to monitor the special counsel’s inquiry. Last month, Giuliani said that the president’s lawyers had agreements with lawyers for 32 witnesses or subjects of Mueller’s 18-month-old investigation, effectively receiving up to date information on virtually every aspect of the Mueller probe.

While joint defense agreements are frequently used by lawyers involved in investigations with multiple witnesses so they can share information without running afoul of attorney-client privilege rules, usually when one defendant decides to cooperate with the government in a plea deal, that defense lawyer typically pulls out rather than antagonize the prosecutors who can influence the client’s sentence. One such example is when a lawyer for Michael T. Flynn withdrew last year from such an agreement with Trump’s lawyers before pleading  guilty to a felony offense and agreeing to help the special counsel.

On the other hand, even after Manafort pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in September and began answering questions in at least a dozen sessions with the special counsel, Manafort’s lawyers maintained their joint defense agreement with the president’s legal team.

Why would Manafort seek the continuation of such an agreement, even if it meant risking his plea deal? Simple: he wants Trump to pardon him.

Manafort must have wanted to keep a line open to the president in hope of a pardon, said Barbara McQuade, a formder United States attorney who now teaches law at University of Michigan. “I’m not able to think of another reason,” she said.

If Mr. Manafort wanted to stay on the prosecutors’ good side, “it would make no sense for him to continue to share information with other subjects of the investigation,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and senior F.B.I. official. He added: “He is either all in or all out with respect to cooperation. Typically, there is no middle ground.”

Whether Manafort gets a pardon, remains to be seen. Last year, a former Trump lawyer allegedly broached the idea of presidential pardons to lawyers for both Manafort and Flynn as prosecutors were building cases against both men, according to people familiar with the conversations. The lawyer, John Dowd, who later resigned from the president’s team, denied ever raising the prospect of a pardon.

However, to keep Manafort's hopes alive, after Dowd's departure Giuliani himself suggested that Manafort and others might be eligible for pardons after Mueller’s inquiry ends, and the prospect has continued to hover over Manafort’s case. On Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said she had no knowledge of any conversations about a pardon for Mr. Manafort. A week ago, after months of negotiations, Trump provided written answers to some questions from Mueller.

That said, even if Manafort lucks out and gets out of prison early, he will be a poor man. The reason is that prosecutors deliberately fashioned Manafort’s plea agreement to counter a possible pardon. As the NYT reports, in forcing Manafort to forfeit almost all of his wealth — including five homes, various bank accounts and an insurance policy — prosecutors specified that they could seize his assets under civil procedures “without regard to the status of his criminal conviction.”

According to UCSD law professor Harry Litman, similar provisions had been used in other such cases, but other legal experts said it seemed tailor-made to ensure Manafort would lose virtually all of his wealth, no matter what Mr. Trump did.

And while Trump will likely end up pardoning Manafort before the president leaves office, whether Trump will also personally fund his former campaign chair's retirement account is an entirely different matter.