Tag: Face The Nation

IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY Trump says he will ‘strongly consider’ testifying in House impeachment probe

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President Donald Trump said Monday that he is “strongly” considering testifying before the impeachment probe in light of recent comments from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who said he is more than welcome to present his case personally before the House Intelligence Committee.

“Our Crazy, Do Nothing (where’s USMCA, infrastructure, lower drug pricing & much more?) Speaker of the House, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, who is petrified by her Radical Left knowing she will soon be gone (they & Fake News Media are her BOSS), suggested on Sunday’s DEFACE THE NATION that I testify about the phony Impeachment Witch Hunt,” Trump tweeted. “She also said I could do it in writing. Even though I did nothing wrong, and don’t like giving credibility to this No Due Process Hoax, I like the idea & will, in order to get Congress focused again, strongly consider it!”

Speaking with CBS’s “Face the Nation” in an interview that aired Sunday, Pelosi said Trump can “come right before the committee and talk, speak all the truth that he wants, if he wants to take the oath of office, or he could do it in writing.”

“He has every opportunity to present his case,” she said, adding that if Trump “has information that is exculpatory, that means ex, taking away, culpable, blame, then we look forward to seeing it.”

But Pelosi, calling Trump’s efforts at having Ukraine investigate the Bidens and a debunked conspiracy theory about the 2016 presidential election, said the president’s conduct “was so much worse than even what Richard Nixon did.”

“At some point, Richard Nixon cared about the country enough to recognize that this could not continue,” she said.

Public calls for the president to testify before the committee have ramped up recently. After an extended rant during Wednesday’s public impeachment hearings from Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, in which the Trump ally said investigators need to have “the person who started” the probe, meaning the first whistleblower, come testify, Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., retorted, “I’d like to see the person who started it come testify. President Trump is welcome to take a seat right there.”

Speaking with Fox News on Monday, Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., one of Trump’s top allies in battling impeachment, said his advice to the president on testifying before impeachment investigators would be “heck no.”

Earlier this month, Trump decried the idea of the whistleblower providing written answers to Congress, saying they would be “not acceptable.” Trump refused to supply former special counsel Robert Mueller with live testimony, instead opting to provide written answers to a series of questions related to Russian electoral interference. In his more than 400-page report, Mueller said those written answers were “inadequate.”

[NBC News]

Trump: U.S. Must “Start Thinking About” Racial Profiling

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Donald Trump said Sunday that in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, it’s time for the United States to start looking at racial profiling as a preventative tactic.

The presumptive GOP nominee said in a phone interview with CBS’ Face the Nation:

Well I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country. Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully. And I hate the concept of profiling but we have to start using common sense and we have to use our heads.

“It’s not the worst thing to do,” he added.

Trump’s comments come one week after 49 people were shot and killed in a gay nightclub in Orlando, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Following the massacre, Trump renewed his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S., saying it would have prevented the attack despite the fact that shooter Omar Mateen was born in the U.S.

On Sunday, the GOP politician also said attacks like Orlando would stop if those in the Muslim community would “report” suspicious things.

“When you look at, when you look at people within the Muslim community and where people are living and they don’t report, and a good example of that would be San Bernardino,” he said. “I mean, they had bombs all over their apartment floor and people saw it and nobody reported them, and 14 people were killed, many injured.”

Mateen, Trump added, had definite “red flags” before the attack. “You look at his past, I mean? I’ve never seen a past quite like that,” he said of Mateen. “You look at his record in school, you look at a lot of other things. There were a lot of red flags, this was not a very good young man.”

Trump said he’s working with the National Rifle Association on the details of a policy that would ban people on the no-fly list from purchasing guns.

“We understand there are problems with that because some people are on the terror watch list that shouldn’t be on,” he said. “So I’m working with the NRA, we’re discussing it and again the NRA has the best interests of our country, it just has the absolute best interests of our country.”

Asked about GOP leaders’ criticism of him in recent days, especially over his renewed focus on the Muslim ban, Trump said those Republicans should stop “talking so much” and just “do their job.” The issue is compounded, he added, when the media focuses more on his detractors in the GOP than his supporters.

“I think that honestly they should go about their business and they should do a wonderful job and work on budgets and get the budgets down and get the military the kind of money they need and lots of other things, and they shouldn’t be talking so much,” he said. “They should go out and do their job, let me do my job.”

(h/t CBS News)

Reality

However according to Trump’s suggestion, we should be racially profiling white Christian males because you are more than 7 times as likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than by Muslim terrorists.

UNC Professor Charles Kurzman and Duke Professor David Schanzer explained last June in the New York Times, Islam-inspired terror attacks “accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.” Meanwhile, “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.”

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Trump, Again, Flip-Flops on His Libya Position

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Donald Trump reversed his stance on U.S. military intervention in Libya on Sunday, saying he would have authorized “surgical” strikes to take out strongman Moammar Gaddafi — even though he’d previously said the world would be better with Gaddafi in power.

“I didn’t mind surgical. And I said surgical. You do a surgical shot and you take him out,” Trump said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

It was a notable change from the position he’d staked out at a Republican presidential debate in Texas in February.

“We would be so much better off if Gaddafi would be in charge right now,” Trump said then. He has also hit Clinton over the U.S. intervention in Libya in his stump speech.

It’s the second time Trump has reversed his position on Libya. In a 2011 video, Trump said that “on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.”

On Sunday, he still sought to blame former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama.

“I wasn’t for what happened. Look at the way — I mean look at with Benghazi and all of the problems that we’ve had. It was handled horribly,” he said.

He added: “I was never for strong intervention. I could have seen surgical where you take out Gaddafi and his group.”

While Trump has changed positions on how the United States should have handled Gaddafi, he’s now advocating a sharp escalation in the U.S. military’s role in Libya.

He asked at a rally in Fresno, California, two weeks ago why the United States isn’t “bombing the hell out of” ISIS in Libya.

“ISIS has the oil. And then you say if ISIS has the oil, why aren’t we blockading so they can’t sell it? Why aren’t we bombing the hell out of … ” Trump said, stopping short as he pivoted to slamming Obama as “grossly incompetent.”

He’s also made blasting Clinton’s foreign policy judgment a staple on the campaign trail.
“She doesn’t have the temperament to be president. She’s got bad judgment. She’s got horribly bad judgment,” Trump said two weeks ago in Anaheim. “If you look at the war in Iraq, if you look at what she did with Libya, which was a total catastrophe.”

Clinton, meanwhile, unleashed on Trump as ill fit to serve as commander in chief on Thursday in a high-profile speech.

“He’s not just unprepared — he’s temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility,” Clinton said.

(h/t CNN)

Reality

This is pretty clearly a flip of a flip-flop.

Personal Vlog: Take him out – August, 22 2011

Trump said, “on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.”

Republican Debate: Shouldn’t have taken him out – February, 25 2016

“We would be so much better off if Gaddafi would be in charge right now.”

Interview: Take him out – June 2016

“I didn’t mind surgical. And I said surgical. You do a surgical shot and you take him out.”

Trump’s flip-flip is at the 1:24 mark:

 

Trump: ‘It’s Possible’ a Muslim Judge May Not Be Able To Fairly Evaluate a Case Against Me

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Donald Trump on Sunday hinted at a broader argument that judges of specific religious and ethnic backgrounds may not be fit to hear cases against him.

Last week, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee suggested that Indiana-born Judge Gonzalo Curiel — whose parents are Mexican — should not preside over fraud lawsuits against Trump University, a for-profit university formerly owned by Trump.

In a Sunday interview on “Face The Nation,” Trump also suggested a Muslim judge would not be able to hear a case against him because of Trump’s plan to bar Muslims from entering the US.

“If it were a Muslim judge, do you also feel that they wouldn’t be able to treat you fairly because of that policy of yours?” host John Dickerson asked.

“It’s possible, yes,” Trump replied. “That would be possible, absolutely.”

Dickerson pushed Trump, asking whether the real-estate magnate was unfairly discrediting judges because of their ethnic background.

“Isn’t there sort of a tradition though in America that we don’t judge people by who their parents were and where they came from?” Dickerson asked.

“I’m not talking about tradition — I’m talking about common sense,” Trump said.

Trump’s assertion that Curiel is not qualified to fairly hear Trump’s case because of the judge’s parents’ nationality has ignited a firestorm of criticism from the real-estate mogul’s political opponents.

In a Saturday speech in California, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton slammed Trump’s “prejudiced, bigoted attack” on Curiel.

“This is not just another outlandish, insulting comment from Donald Trump, and it is not normal politics. This is something much, much more dangerous,” Clinton said.

She continued: “Judge Curiel is as much of an American as I am, and he’s as much of an American as Donald Trump is. But he has Mexican roots. So to Donald Trump, that means he can’t do his job. Well, Donald Trump’s not just wrong about Judge Curiel. He’s wrong about America. He’s wrong about what makes this country great.”

(h/t Business Insider)

Reality

So let’s follow Donald Trump’s “common sense” logic that only people who he has not offended can fairly evaluate a case against him.

  • An American judge with Mexican heritage is unable to preside over any of his cases because of his plan to build a wall with the United States and Mexico.
  • An American judge who is of the Islamic faith is unable to preside over any of his cases because of his plan to ban all Muslims entering into the United States and to have a database of every Muslim person living here.
  • An American female judge is unable to preside over any of his cases because of his repeated sexist and misogynist comments towards women.
  • An American judge with African heritage is unable to preside over any of his cases because of his racist tweets and calling black protesters “not people.”
  • An American judge who has disabilities is unable to preside over any of his cases because of how he mocked a reporter with disabilities.

Then according to Donald Trump, only white Christian male judges can be “unbiased” enough for him? Explain how this is not racist and intolerant.

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