Tag: NBC

Trump Says Election Meddling ‘Could Be Russia’ But ‘Nobody Really Knows for Sure’

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he thinks Russia was behind 2016 election meddling, but added that he feels “it could have been other people in other countries” and that “nobody really knows for sure.”

“I think it very well could be Russia but I think it could very well have been other countries,” Trump said during a news conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda in which he also slammed the news media, including CNN and NBC. “I think a lot of people interfere.”

Trump, asked about the fact the United States intelligence community has said it was Russia, compared that assessment to the eventually debunked claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

“I think it was Russia but I think it was probably other people and or countries. I see nothing wrong with that statement,” Trump said. “Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows for sure.”

He added, “I remember when I was sitting back listening about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, how everybody was 100% certain that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? That led to one big mess. They were wrong and it led to a mess.”

The intelligence community assessment spans both Obama and Trump administrations, however. Intelligence officials nominated by Trump have publicly said they have no doubt that Russia was behind the election meddling.

Russian meddling in the 2016 election is the subject of numerous investigations in Washington, casting a pall over the White House. The swirl of Russia investigations — and possible connections between Trump’s orbit and Russian officials — has caused friction on Capitol Hill, hampering Trump’s ability to score a number of legislative victories.

Trump slammed former President Barack Obama’s handling of Russian interference as he stood next to Duda, arguing that the former president “did nothing” to combat the interference.

“Why did he do nothing about it? He was told it was Russia by the CIA … and he did nothing about it,” Trump said. “They said he choked. I don’t think he choked. Well, I don’t think he choked. I think what happened was he thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election and he said let’s not do anything about it. Had he thought the other way, he would have done something about it.”

Obama confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin over election meddling, though, during the 2016 G20 meeting in Hanghzhou, China. Photos of the meeting showed a stern Obama staring down Putin.

Obama later revealed that he told Putin “to cut it out” in his meddling in the 2016 election or “there were going to be serious consequences if he did not.” The Obama administration also later expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the United States and shuttered Russian compounds in Maryland and New York.

Trump’s comments come during the first day of his foreign trip to Poland and Germany, the second international trip of his presidency. Trump did not formally take questions from reporters on his first trip, so the bilateral press conference with Duda on Thursday was Trump’s first official conversation with reporters on foreign soil.

Attacks news coverage

Trump, standing next to Duda, also slammed American media, particularly CNN and NBC.
Trump, as he has done many times before, criticized CNN as “fake news” after being asked about CNN’s coverage by David Martosko of the Daily Mail.

Trump’s critique — which came during his first formal press conference in nearly a month — came in response to CNN’s coverage of the video the President tweeted that showed him body-slamming a man with the CNN logo over his head.

“I think what CNN did was unfortunate for them. As you know, they now have some pretty serious problems. They have been fake news for a long time. They have been covering me in a very dishonest way,” Trump said.

Martosko met with Trump to pitch him the idea of writing a book about the President, CNN has reported. Numerous reports have also indicated that the reporter was considered for a press job in the White House. Martosko later tweeted a statement pulling him out of consideration for any White House job.

“Since you started the whole wrestling video thing, what are your thoughts about what has happened since then? CNN went after you and has threatened to expose the identity of a person,” Martosko asked before being cut off by Trump.

CNN did not threaten to expose the identity of anyone behind the video, but did contact the Reddit user who originally posted the video that Trump tweeted.

A spokesman for the news network said CNN decided not to publish the name of the Reddit user out of concern for his safety and that “any assertion that the network blackmailed or coerced him is false.” The user, who had a long history of posting anti-semitic, racist and anti-Muslim content, apologized for his posts after being contacted by CNN but before speaking to the network.

Martosko was standing directly behind a number of smiling Trump aides when he asked the question. Martosko shook hands with Dan Scavino, Trump’s director of social media, after the news conference.

After slamming CNN as fake news, Trump turned to Duda and asked, “Do you have that also, Mr. President?”

Duda has been accused of curbing press freedoms in Poland. Though he denies the criticisms, the fears of curbs being put on reporters have led to protests throughout the country.

[CNN]

Trump Says He Didn’t Know Michael Flynn in 2015, Which Is a Big Lie

Last night, President Trump spoke with Lester Holt in an interview for NBC News. It’s truly a jaw-dropping conversation for a number of reasons, but there’s one important lie that everyone seems to have missed. Trump said that he didn’t know Michael Flynn in 2015. This simply isn’t true.

Lester Holt: Did you know that [Flynn] had received payments from the Russian government, that he had received payments from the Turkish government?

 

Donald Trump: No, but Obama perhaps knew, because he had clearance from the Obama administration, and this is something they never want to report. He had clearance from the Obama administration—the highest clearance you can have. And I think it’s a very unfair thing that the media doesn’t talk about that. You know, you’re talking about 2015. I don’t know that I knew him in 2015.

Putting aside for a minute the fact that Obama fired Flynn and that Obama even advised Trump not to hire him, it’s important to recognize that Trump is lying about not knowing Flynn in 2015.

In fact, Donald Trump first met with Michael Flynn in August of 2015, just two months after Trump announced he’d be running for president. But you don’t have to take my word for it. We know Trump met with Flynn in August of 2015 because Flynn told us.

From the February 27, 2017 issue of the New Yorker:

In August, 2015, Flynn went to New York to meet Trump for the first time. They were scheduled to talk for thirty minutes; the conversation lasted ninety. Flynn was deeply impressed. “I knew he was going to be the President of the United States,” he told me.

So let’s get this timeline straight.

  • August 2014: Flynn is ousted by Obama at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
  • June 2015: Trump announces his plan to run for president.
  • August 2015: Trump meets with Flynn for an hour and a half at Trump Tower.
  • December 2015: Flynn is paid by the Russian government to speak at a gala in Moscow and is seated at the same table as Vladimir Putin.
  • February 2016: Flynn starts acting as an informal policy advisor to the Trump campaign.

Got all that? Trump said in the interview last night that he didn’t think he knew Flynn in 2015. But he definitely did. Not only that, but by early 2016, Trump was being advised by Flynn on foreign policy matters during the campaign.

You really have to watch the entire interview from last night. It’s so bizarre, not least because Trump explained that he was going to fire FBI Director James Comey regardless of any recommendation made by the Justice Department. That directly contradicts two days of claims by his communications team.

Not to mention the fact that Trump claims Comey asked for the two of them to have dinner, a meeting at which Trump asked if he was under investigation by the FBI. Trump says that Comey assured him that he was not. President Trump also claims that Comey told him over the phone on two other occasions that he wasn’t under investigation.

Needless to say, if Trump’s story is true, it’s all highly illegal and unethical for a sitting president to ask the head of the FBI if he’s under investigation. There’s no way to explain this one away.

If Trump survives the fallout from this week—between firing the man who was leading the investigation against him to the poor optics of meeting with Russian officials the very next day—it’s safe to say that he’s going to serve his full term as president.

It doesn’t get much worse than this for Trump. But he seems to be lying his way through it with little resistance from the only people who can do anything about it: Congressional Republicans.

[Gizmodo]

Reality

Trump claims the media is not reporting that perhaps Obama knew Flynn had received payments from Russia and Turkey. But they did. Just a few days prior Sally Yates sat in front on Congress and told America yes the Obama administration knew of this and they tried to warn the Trump people, who did not taken them seriously because she was a “political opponent.”

Media

Trump Accuses NBC of “Fake News” For Questioning His Job-Creation Claims

President-elect Donald Trump says NBC News was “totally biased” and producing “more fake news” in a report it published Tuesday that pointed out that many companies are pre-emptively, or in many cases retroactively, announcing job-creation plans to avoid being targeted by a man set to become president Friday.

His tweets aren’t well-founded.

The NBC News report spotlighted instances in which companies themselves announced large-scale additions of jobs without mentioning Trump as a reason for their increased investments in the U.S., despite Trump’s having taken credit.

That list includes Amazon.com Inc., with its press release last week promising 100,000 new U.S. jobs, as well as the automobile makers Fiat Chrysler and General Motors . Often the corporate plans had been in the works long before Trump’s election on Nov. 8 or were among annual expansion goals that had been on the companies’ road maps for years.

MarketWatch, similarly, reported last week that Alibaba Group Holding’s claim, after a meeting at Trump Tower between CEO Jack Ma and the president-elect, that it will create a million U.S. jobs, doesn’t include full-time jobs or actual Alibaba jobs at all. MarketWatch also pointed out that Sprint Corp.’s decision to bring 5,000 jobs back to the U.S. from other countries, a move for which Trump took credit, were actually related to a previously announced commitment by Japan’s SoftBank Group to invest $50 billion in the U.S. as part of the global technology fund it announced with a Saudi sovereign-wealth fund in October. IBM Corp., which pre-emptively announced a 25,000-jobs growth plan in mid-December before ever meeting with Trump, falls into this category, as well.

The president-elect went as far, in a separate tweet, as to quote a Wall Street Journal story about Bayer AG’s pledge to invest and add jobs in the U.S. However, as CNN Money pointed out, those jobs aren’t directly tied back to Trump either, but to Bayer’s move to buy Monsanto, announced in September. When Bayer announced the Monsanto deal, it said St. Louis would remain the North American headquarters of Monsanto while San Francisco would serve as the base for their combined farming assets.

A look at a few of the press releases and CEO interviews cited by Trump and NBC News as well reveals varying levels of Trump involvement, from no linkage at all to a direct and causal connection.

On Tuesday, General Motors announced that it would invest an additional $1 billion in U.S. manufacturing and create 7,000 jobs, while moving some axle-producing jobs to the U.S. from Mexico. GM made no mention of the incoming administration or its policy priorities and instead said these latest steps follow similar investments it has made annually since 2009 — a period beginning shortly after the U.S. auto industry bailout. “GM’s announcement is part of the company’s increased focus on overall efficiency over the last four years,” the company said in a statement.

The GM investment commitment, in fact, is nearly $2 billion smaller than the investment in U.S. manufacturing that GM said it announced last year.

And the vast majority of GM’s investment will go to fund new vehicles and advanced technologies, as the company continues to invest in the resources to respond to increased competition from Silicon Valley amid the advent of autonomous-vehicle technology.

Fiat Chrysler, meanwhile, said its plan for a new $1 billion investment in the U.S. and the creation of 2,000 jobs is “a continuation of the efforts already underway to increase production capacity in the U.S. on trucks and SUVs to match demand.” As gasoline prices have tumbled, demand for gas-guzzling trucks and sport-utility vehicles has rebounded, a theme that predates Trump’s election.

Walmart’s press release Tuesday announcing 10,000 new U.S. jobs also excluded any Trump mention and was more tied to the company’s longer-term strategy to expand its retail locations globally and improve its e-commerce services to better compete with the likes of Amazon.

Amazon, for its part, has said it is adding tens of thousands of jobs to staff new but previously announced fulfillment centers in Texas, California, Florida and New Jersey.

Other job announcements, though, were more directly linked to Trump, at least in the sense that they were reacting to him, which was part of the point NBC News was trying to make.

Ford Motor Co. F, -0.40% told reporters in so many words that its decision to cancel plans for a new plant in Mexico and create 700 jobs in Michigan were related to Trump’s pro-business policies.

Lockheed Martin Corp.’s LMT, -0.08% decision to add 1,800 positions and lower the cost of its F-35 program arose following a meeting at Trump Tower. It also followed Trump public statements blasting the company over its prices.

(h/t Market Watch)

Trump Claims NBC ‘Purposely’ Misquoted Nuclear Comments

President-elect Donald Trump claimed Saturday that NBC News “purposely” misquoted his call for an expansion of the U.S. nuclear program last week, despite reports to the contrary.

Trump on Thursday said the United States “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” Saturday he accused NBC of intentionally leaving out the latter, more measure portion of his statements.

“.@NBCNews purposely left out this part of my nuclear qoute: ‘until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.’ Dishonest!” the president-elect tweeted Saturday afternoon.

Trump did not specify when NBC supposedly left out a portion of his comments.

NBC News’ initial report covering Trump’s comments on nuclear expansion, however, cited his comments in full. And the Thursday broadcast of NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt” displayed his comments in their entirety.

Trump’s claim of dishonesty in media coverage has been a calling card of his ascendance to the White House. Since winning the presidency, Trump has repeatedly attacked the media, broadly accusing them of inciting violence against him, singling out individual reporters and blasting the news media as “crooked.”

(h/t Politico)

Reality

Just by watching the NBC report shows Trump was intentionally lying.

Media

http://www.nbcnews.com/widget/video-embed/840644675837

Trump Threatens To Pull The U.S. Out Of The World Trade Organization

Donald Trump on Sunday threatened to pull the United States out of the World Trade Organization (WTO) if his plan to tax imports of U.S. companies that move their operations abroad is foiled.

The Republican presidential nominee called the international trade body a “disaster” and ratcheted up his anti-trade criticism in calling for the punishment of U.S. firms that move overseas.

He also doubled down on his push to either renegotiate or withdraw the United States from all of their global agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement and the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“There will be a tax to be paid,” Trump told Chuck Todd in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Trump has vowed to impose tariffs — in the range of 15 percent to 35 percent — on companies like Indiana-based Carrier, which is moving its operations to Mexico.

“If they’re going to fire all their people, move their plant to Mexico, build air conditioners, and think they’re going to sell those air conditioners to the United States, there’s going to be a tax,” he said.

When Todd said the import-tariff plan wouldn’t pass muster at the WTO, Trump said that is “even better.”

“Then we’re going to renegotiate or we’re going to pull out,” he said.

“These trade deals are a disaster,” he said. “You know, the World Trade Organization is a disaster.”

When Todd told Trump that his plan would rattle the world economy much like Great Britain’s exit from the European Union has done, the New York businessman didn’t retreat from his hard-line trade stance.

“We’re going to do it. We’re going to do it,” Trump said.

Ed Gerwin, a trade policy analyst with the Progressive Policy Institute, said Trump’s latest trade ideas, “even by his standards, are insane.”

“They would bring about unprecedented global economic chaos, plunge the U.S. into recession and destroy millions of good jobs,” Gerwin said. “They’d make Brexit look like an English garden party.”

Gerwin called Trump’s trade proposals “not only wrongheaded, but they’d be a bureaucratic nightmare.”

“Withdrawing from the WTO would turn the U.S. into the economic equivalent of North Korea — walled off from the global economy,” Gerwin said.

He added that any move to exit the trade body would allow 160 countries to “immediately slap high tariffs and other trade barriers on U.S. exports, putting at risk the millions of good jobs that depend on U.S. exports.”

A WTO exit also runs counter to Trump’s plans to punish China for trade violations, a big focus of the trade arm of his campaign, Gerwin noted.

“Withdrawing from the WTO would also cut the U.S. off from the WTO dispute settlement process, which the U.S. has used with considerable success to get China to change unfair trade practices,” he said.

“All of this is deeply ironic, given that Trump also says he wants to be tougher on China trade and given that Trump also says that he’d eliminate foreign duties on products like U.S. beef the day he gets into office,” he added.

Trade experts argue that raising taxes on companies or countries that Trump deems as violators of trade rules would only hurt U.S. consumers by pushing up prices on imported goods.

The comments created an instant backlash from trade experts on Twitter.

Scott Lincicome, a trade attorney, wrote: “I know trade is complicated, boring, & politically toxic, but Trump’s WTO threat is the econ equivalent of his NATO comments, maybe worse.”

In another tweet he said: “And, of course, withdrawing the US from the WTO would very likely collapse the global economy, crippling US biz, workers, consumers (esp poor).”

(h/t The Hill)

Reality

As president, Trump could not be able to create these tariffs by himself. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution, authorizes Congress to levy taxes. Most of Trump’s threatened tariffs would violate decades of binding trade deals negotiated by previous administrations and agreed to by previous Congresses. However rather than looking into the legality, we will instead explore Trumps question who should care if there is a trade war.

Trump proposed a 35% tariff on American companies who outsource manufacturing outside of the United States and then ship the products for sale back home. A tariff is a tax on an imported good that is passed on to consumers, both individual and businesses. That’s right, you the consumer will pay Trump’s 35% tax which means you will pay more for the products you buy every day.

For example Forbes estimates Trump’s tariff plan would cost American consumers an extra $6 billion dollars per year just on Apple iPhones alone.

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLcL2fSxGKw

NBC Fires Trump

The Celebrity Apprentice

NBC joined the list of companies who fired Donald Trump over his comments about Mexicans during his announcement speech.

NBC entertainment chairman, Bob Greenblatt, had two words Thursday on whether Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump would ever return as host of “The Celebrity Apprentice:” Absolutely not.

Greenblatt said that the show will not be back next season, but will return in the future with a new host.

NBC cut ties with Trump in June days after he made critical comments about Mexican immigrants and NBC canceled its airing of the Miss USA pageant, which Univision also decided not to air.

Reality

Some people may argue about “political correctness run amok” but Donald Trump’s comments were clearly racist. Companies do business with more than just white people.

Links

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/08/13/nbc-officially-fires-donald-trump-from-celebrity-apprentice/

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