Tag: liar

Trump promotes violence in support of white supremacist rally in Virginia

President Donald Trump slammed Virginia Democrats over several gun violence prevention measures they’re looking to pass in the state, as a white supremacist group gears up to protest at an annual gun rights rally outside the state capitol. 

“Your 2nd Amendment is under very serious attack in the Great Commonwealth of Virginia,” the president tweeted on Friday evening. “That’s what happens when you vote for Democrats, they will take your guns away. Republicans will win Virginia in 2020. Thank you Dems!” 

Trump’s tweet came shortly after law enforcement arrested three suspected white supremacists in Maryland and Delaware who had allegedly talked about opening fire at Monday’s pro-gun rally.

The suspects belong to a violent white-supremacist group called “the Base,” whose aim is “to accelerate the downfall of the US government, incite a race war and establish a white ethno-state,” according to an affidavit filed in Georgia court, as The Wall Street Journal reported.

Several other members of the Base were arrested throughout the country this week on different charges. 

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, announced Wednesday that the state would temporarily ban firearms in Capitol Square prior to Monday’s rally, citing the arrests and threat of a shooting. 

Gun rights groups appealed Northam’s decision, but a federal appeals court judge upheld the temporary gun ban on Thursday, writing that “the Second Amendment right to bear arms is not unlimited.” 

“This is the right decision,” Northam said in a Thursday statement about the ruling. “These threats are real — as evidenced by reports of neo-Nazis arrested this morning after discussing plans to head to Richmond with firearms.”

Virginia Democrats, who control both the state house and senate, are working on passing several gun regulations, including background checks on gun sales, a law that would allow authorities to confiscate a gun from someone they believe is a danger to themselves, a ban on firearms in government buildings. 

Tens of thousands of pro-gun protesters are expected to gather outside the state capitol building in the annual Lobby Day protest.

[Business Insider]

Trump Boasts of Stock Market In Wild Tweet: ‘HOW ARE YOUR 409K’S DOING?’

President Donald Trump touched on a series of topics in his Thursday morning Twitter statements, and in the most recent one, he declared that the stock market is soaring and everyone’s “409K’S” are doing great.

“STOCK MARKET AT ALL-TIME HIGH!” Trump tweeted in all-caps. “HOW ARE YOUR 409K’S DOING? 70%, 80%, 90% up? Only 50% up! What are you doing wrong?”

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1215285845336502272?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Here’s a picture of the tweet before it got deleted:

Long story short, there’s no such thing as a 409k. 401k, sure. Not 409.

[Mediaite]

Trump takes credit for decline in cancer deaths. The American Cancer Society says he’s wrong

President Donald Trump insinuated in a tweet on Thursday that his administration played a role in the US cancer death rate hitting a record low in 2017. The American Cancer Society says that’s not true.

Trump’s tweet appeared to be referring to the findings of an American Cancer Society report released on Wednesday, which said the rate of people dying from cancer in the United States declined in 2017 for the 26th year in a row. Trump took office in January 2017. The report, published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, said that the cancer death rate had fallen “continuously” from 1991 through 2017.

The report also found that from 2016 to 2017, the United States saw its largest-ever single-year drop in overall cancer deaths, a 2.2% decline spurred in part by a sharp fall in lung cancer deaths.Trump’s tweet on Thursday said, “U.S. Cancer Death Rate Lowest In Recorded History! A lot of good news coming out of this Administration.”

[CNN]

‘All is well!’ Trump tweets after Iran targets and injures U.S. forces in missile attack in Iraq

Despite early reports that no Americans were harmed, 11 U.S. service members did sustain injuries in a ballistic missile attack this month that required transport for follow-up care, officials with U.S. Central Command have confirmed.

On Jan. 8, Iran struck Iraqi bases at Al Asad and Erbil, where U.S. and Iraqi troops trained together. The attack was in retaliation for a U.S. airstrike days before that killed Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani. While U.S. officials have not yet released a full accounting of damage sustained on the bases, it was described by President Donald Trump the following day as “minimal.”

“I’m pleased to inform you: The American people should be extremely grateful and happy no Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” Trump said in a Jan. 9 address to the nation. “We suffered no casualties, all of our soldiers are safe, and only minimal damage was sustained at our military bases.”

On Thursday, however, DefenseOne first reported that 11 troops were actually hurt in the blast, requiring medical evacuation to locations in Germany and Kuwait.

In a statement released late Thursday night, CENTCOM spokesman Navy Capt. Bill Urban confirmed the reporting.

“While no U.S. service members were killed in the Jan. 8 Iranian attack on Al Asad Air base, several were treated for concussion symptoms from the blast and are still being assessed,” he said. “As a standard procedure, all personnel in the vicinity of a blast are screened for traumatic brain injury, and if deemed appropriate are transported to a higher level of care.”

Eight individuals were transported to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, he said, and three were moved to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait for follow-on screening in what Urban described as an “abundance of caution.”

“When deemed fit for duty, the service members are expected to return to Iraq following screening,” he said. “The health and welfare of our personnel is a top priority and we will not discuss any individual’s medical status.”

In a Thursday briefing, Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman credited military early warning systems with detecting incoming missiles and allowing troops to reach shelter as the strikes began.

Follow-up reporting, though, has made clear that missiles did come frighteningly close to where troops sheltered and operated. One Army drone operator told the New York Times “it was like a scene from an action movie;” photographs from the publication show the wreckage of a hangar and other structures destroyed by the blasts.

[Military]

Trump’s evidence that Suleimani posed an imminent threat was ‘razor thin’: US officials

On Saturday, New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi laid out on Twitter the basic points of evidence cited by the Trump administration that Iranian military leader Qassim Suleimani posed an imminent threat to Americans in the region — and how they do not really hold water:

https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1213421769777909761


https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1213423621349224448

https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1213424489679196161

https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1213427304413777923

https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1213430242079125505

[Raw Story]


Trump tells evangelical rally he will put prayer in schools

 U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said his Democratic opponents would tear down crosses and pledged to bring prayer to public schools at a re-election rally to shore up evangelical support.

Trump spoke on the outskirts of Miami at the King Jesus International Ministry, a “prosperity gospel” church that teaches that the faithful will be rewarded with health and wealth on earth. 

“We are defending religion itself, it’s under siege,” Trump said. “A society without religion cannot prosper.”

More than 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2016 election. But a crack in evangelical support opened up last month when the magazine Christianity Today wrote a blistering editorial on Trump’s “grossly immoral character.” 

Attendees, some of them wearing Trump’s signature red campaign hats, nearly filled the room, which the church says holds 7,000. Some raised their hands in a sign of praise and swayed while music played loudly over the speakers before the president entered the room. 

Pastors gathered around Trump on the stage for an opening prayer, while much of the audience remained standing with their hands aloft. 

In his speech, Trump mocked Democratic challenger Pete Buttigieg, the Indiana mayor, for having what he said was an unpronounceable last name, and told attendees Democrats were waging war against religion. 

“These angry radicals want to impose absolute conformity by censuring speech, tearing down crosses and symbols of faith and banning religious believers from public life.” 

He got a big reaction from the crowd when he promised to bring religion into U.S. schools. A clause in the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from promoting one religion over the other, which means public schools don’t promote prayer or religious symbols. 

“Very soon I’ll be taking action to safeguard students and teachers’ First Amendment rights to pray in our schools,” Trump said. “They want to take that right along with many other ones.”

According to a 2019 survey here by the Pew Research Center, 43% of U.S. adults, or some 110 million people, identify with Protestantism; 59% of those, or 64 million are born-again or evangelical Christians. 

Christian support for Trump remained relatively constant from his inauguration until March of 2019, Pew Research shows. Some Christians believe that support has frayed since. 

Friday’s rally “is Trump’s desperate response to the realization that he is losing his primary voting bloc — faith voters,” said Doug Pagitt, the executive director of Vote Common Good, a progressive Christian group, on Friday.


[Reuters]

Mike Pence shares 9/11 conspiracy theory about Qassem Soleimani in attempt to justify killing

Mike Pence has promoted an unsubstantiated theory linking the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Iran in his defence of the Trump administration’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani.

Donald Trump‘s vice president posted a Twitter thread on Saturday in which he described Iran’s top military commander as “an evil man responsible for killing thousands of Americans”.

In the thread, Mr Pence claimed Soleimani had “assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States”.

However, his accusation is undermined by the conclusions of the official government report on the attacks.

The 9/11 commission report found “no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack”.

The report added: “At the time of their travel through Iran, the al-Qaeda operatives themselves were probably not aware of the specific details of their future operation.”

Soleimani’s killing is a major escalation in US-Iran tensions and has sparked fears of a direct war between the two countries.

The White House has said the assassination was a “decisive defensive action to protect US personnel abroad”.

In response to the vice president, foreign policy experts were quick to point out there were 19 terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, not 12, and the majority of them came from US allies Saudi Arabia.

Katie Waldman, Mr Pence’s press secretary, later clarified that the vice president was referring to 12 of the 19 hijackers who “transited through Afghanistan”.

“For those asking: 12 of the 19 transited through Afghanistan. Ten of those 12 were assisted by Soleimani,” Ms Waldman wrote, without providing any further evidence for the commander’s involvement.

The 9/11 report does acknowledge at least eight of the hijackers “transited Iran on their way to or from Afghanistan”, but this is thought to be because they were “taking advantage of the Iranian practice of not stamping Saudi passports”.

Although Soleimani was a senior figure in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at the time of the attacks, he is not named in the 9/11 commission report.

It is also unclear why the commander, a leading military figure in a majority Shia Muslim country, would have assisted al-Qaeda, a militant Sunni Islamist group with links to Saudi Arabia.

In a 2018 study by the think tank New America, al-Qaeda is said to view Iran as a “hostile entity” and found “no evidence of cooperation between al-Qaeda and Iran on planning or carrying out terrorist attacks” in the documents studied.

Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, said in 2019 he had no doubt “there is a connection between the Islamic Republic of Iran and al-Qaeda.”

[The Independent]

Reality

See pages 240-241.

Pompeo Tweet About Iraqis ‘Dancing in the Street’ Dismissed as Deeply Misleading, ‘Propaganda in Wartime’

Hours after the United States killed Iran’s top military commander Major General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike Thursday evening, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that the people of Iraq were celebrating Soleimani’s demise by publicly “dancing” in the streets.

“Iraqis — Iraqis — dancing in the street for freedom; thankful that General Soleimani is no more,” Pompeo tweeted, along with a 22-second video purporting to show the aforementioned celebration in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square. Soleimani, who had American blood on his hands, was the commander Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, which the Trump administration designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in April.

The tweet received a great deal of attention on the social media platform, garnering more than 175,000 likes and nearly 60,000 re-tweets, including the State Department’s Farsi Twitter account.

President Donald Trump even sent the post out to his 68.7 million followers.

But witnesses to the celebration depicted in Pompeo’s video told the New York Times that while the clip is authentic, his characterization of what happened was, at best, extremely hyperbolic and very misleading:

Witnesses in Iraq said that only a handful of men carrying Iraqi flags had run — not danced — along a road while the voice of a man speaking near the camera was heard praising the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani of Iran in a targeted United States airstrike on Friday at Baghdad International Airport.

The man whose voice is heard in the video exclaims that General Suleimani’s death has avenged the deaths of Iraqis protesting Iran’s presence in their country.

The witnesses said the men carrying the flags were celebrating General Soleimani’s death but that the group was very small — about 30 to 40 people in a crowd of thousands — that no one else joined in and that the minor demonstration was over in less than two minutes.

Conservative media outlets such as Fox News and The Blaze, however, echoed Pompeo’s narrative.

Syracuse University assistant professor of communications Jennifer Grygiel said that government officials can easily spread “propaganda in wartime” due to social media and the breakdown of traditional news media “gatekeeping.”

“When we think about government communication, it’s public diplomacy in peacetime, propaganda in wartime,” Grygiel told the Times. “Official sources can propagate a narrative they seek without context.”

Iran is already using Pompeo’s tweet to promote a narrative of its own on social media. Javad Zarif, the Iranian Foreign Minister, responded to Pompeo’s tweet on Saturday, calling the Secretary of State an “arrogant clown – masquerading as a diplomat.”

[Law and Crime]

Trump Retweets Attack Article That Names Alleged Whistleblower

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Twitter account retweeted on Thursday a tweet by the president’s re-election campaign account, the official “Trump war room” that allegedly names the whistleblower whose complaint led Democrats to launch the impeachment inquiry. 

“It’s pretty simple. The CIA ‘whistleblower’ is not a real whistleblower!” says the tweet Trump retweeted, which includes a link to a Washington Examiner piece, published Dec. 3, the alleged whistleblower’s name in the headline.

While some right-wing news outlets have named the alleged whistleblower, no major news agency has and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the United States Senate, has argued that the whistleblower’s name must remain private to protect his safety.

[Haaretz]

Trump goes after Pelosi in early morning tweets complaining about impeachment

President Trump assailed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a series of tweets early Thursday, saying she should “clean up” her “filthy” and “dirty” district and suggesting she should face a primary challenger in 2020.

Trump, who repeated his earlier characterizations of Pelosi as “crazy,” continued his theme of lashing out at Democrats roughly a week after the House voted largely along party lines to pass articles of impeachment accusing him of abusing his office and obstructing Congress.

Trump has taken particular issue with Pelosi over her decision to delay sending the two articles of impeachment to the Senate until the rules for the impeachment trial in the upper chamber are made clear. Pelosi has expressed concerns that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will not hold a fair trial.

“The Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats said they wanted to RUSH everything through to the Senate because ‘President Trump is a threat to National Security’ (they are vicious, will say anything!), but now they don’t want to go fast anymore, they want to go very slowly. Liars!” Trump, who is on a two-week stay at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., tweeted early Thursday.

Trump then went after Pelosi and Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, claiming the two had ignored problems in their state.

“Nancy Pelosi’s District in California has rapidly become one of the worst anywhere in the U.S. when it come to the homeless & crime. It has gotten so bad, so fast — she has lost total control and, along with her equally incompetent governor, Gavin Newsom, it is a very sad sight!” Trump wrote.

“Crazy Nancy should clean up her filthy dirty District & help the homeless there. A primary for N?” the president added in a later tweet.

Pelosi, who has served in Congress for more than three decades, is facing three primary challengers in California’s 12th Congressional District, though all are believed to be long shots for the nomination.

Trump is hungry for a trial in the GOP-controlled Senate, which is widely expected to acquit him of accusations that he abused his office by pressuring Ukraine to launch investigations that could benefit his reelection campaign and obstructed the impeachment inquiry into his administration’s dealings with Kyiv.

Pelosi’s decision to withhold the articles, however, has left the timing of a Senate trial up in the air. McConnell has said he will not acquiesce to Democrats’ demands that the Senate call witnesses such as acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to testify at the trial.

Trump has lashed out over impeachment several times in recent days, telling reporters Tuesday that he believed Pelosi would be “thrown out” as Speaker of the House over her decision to move forward with impeachment.

“She got thrown out as Speaker once before,” Trump told reporters following a video teleconference with members of the military.

“I think it’s going to happen again. She’s doing a tremendous disservice to the country, and she’s not doing a great job. And some people think she doesn’t know what she’s doing,” Trump added.

[The Hill]

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