Tag: Representative Nancy Pelosi

Trump retweets a message calling Hillary Clinton a ‘skank’ and spreads sexist insults about other prominent female Democrats

President Donald Trump on Saturday shared a series of messages containing sexist taunts and personal insults against prominent female Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In one message retweeted by the president, John Stahl, a conservative who gathered only 3% of the vote in his bid to represent California’s 52nd District in the House in 2012, called the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Clinton, a “skank.”

Like Trump, Stahl is fond of referring to political opponents with insulting nicknames, as seen on his Twitter feed.

In another message shared by Trump, Stahl aimed insulting gibes at Pelosi and Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 race for the governor’s office in Georgia and is a contender for selection as Joe Biden’s running mate in the 2020 presidential race.

[Business Insider]

Trump says Fox, Chris Wallace ‘on a bad path’ after Pelosi appearance on network

President Trump criticized Fox News and host Chris Wallace on Sunday, saying they are “on a bad path” after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) appeared on “Fox News Sunday” for the first time since 2017.

The president in a tweet also called the Speaker “an inherently ‘dumb’ person.”

“She wasted all of her time on the Impeachment Hoax,” he tweeted, referring to Pelosi.

“She will be overthrown, either by inside or out, just like her last time as ‘Speaker,’” he added. “Wallace & @FoxNews are on a bad path, watch!” 

Fox announced last week that Pelosi would appear on its Sunday morning political talk show to “discuss the current state of the U.S. amid the coronavirus pandemic, negotiations to revive the small business loan program and much more.”

During her “Fox News Sunday” appearance, the Speaker said Trump “gets an F” on coronavirus testing. She also said National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci’s testing recommendation “hasn’t been done.”

Trump has defended his administration’s testing efforts, saying during a briefing on Saturday that U.S. capacity is “fully sufficient” to begin reopening the economy. He tweeted Sunday that he was “right on testing” just like he was “right on Ventilators.”

Pelosi also was interviewed on ABC’s “This Week,” where she said, “Frankly, I don’t pay that much attention to the president’s tweets against me.” 

[The Hill]

Donald Trump falsely claims Nancy Pelosi deleted video telling people to go to Chinatown

President Donald Trump joined conservative supporters in accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of covering up her visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown in late February.

“Crazy Nancy Pelosi deleted this from her Twitter account. She wanted everyone to pack into Chinatown long after I closed the BORDER TO CHINA. Based on her statement, she is responsible for many deaths. She’s an incompetent, third-rate politician!” Trump tweeted April 16.

But there’s no evidence Pelosi ever tweeted that video of herself in Chinatown. So she could not have deleted it, as Trump said.

The video Trump tweeted is 17 seconds long, a snippet of a Feb. 24 report by KPIX, a San Francisco Bay Area CBS affiliate. Pelosi in the KPIX report is shown walking through San Francisco’s Chinatown District and encouraging people to visit its shops and restaurants, which were seeing a decline in business since the coronavirus outbreak began in China.

At the time, KPIX reported, there were no active cases of coronavirus in San Francisco. There were 21 active cases in California, but they were in hospital isolation or in quarantine.

Pelosi says in the video: “You should come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken by our city. We know that there is concern about tourism, traveling throughout the world, but we think it’s very safe to be in Chinatown and hope that others will come.”

We wondered if Trump was right that Pelosi deleted that video from her Twitter account. PolitiFact’s fact-checking process includes asking a person who makes a claim for the evidence that supports their statement. So we asked the White House press office and Trump’s re-election campaign for the date of the original post, which account posted it, and when it was deleted. We did not get any information.

Pelosi’s office told PolitiFact that they never posted the video that Trump claimed was deleted.

We did our own digging and found no trace of the video posted from her account.

Politwoops, a project of ProPublica, tracks deleted tweets by elected officials. According to that tracker, @SpeakerPelosi’s latest five deleted tweets span from Feb. 22 to April 13. Not one is about going to Chinatown.

We also reviewed what Pelosi’s Twitter page looked liked since Feb. 24, based on the history saved by Wayback Machine, an initiative of the Internet Archive. The archived pages of Pelosi’s Twitter account do not show the video Trump tweeted. (Wayback Machine did not have archives of the page as they looked on Feb. 24-26, but any deletion of that video would presumably be more recent.)

Trump suggests that Pelosi is hiding her actions from Feb. 24. But a transcript of her comments that were captured in Trump’s video appear on both her House Speaker website and congressional website. As of April 16, the Chinatown visit was one of the featured photos in the homepage of her congressional website.

Pelosi’s Twitter page currently has a video of her Feb. 24 visit to Chinatown. It shows her making a fortune cookie. Text accompanying the video says: “It was a pleasure to try my hand at making fortune cookies at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory (with a little guidance from owner Kevin Chan, of course). The message inside? ‘United We Stand.’”

On Feb. 25, she posted a series of tweets saying Americans needed a coordinated response to the coronavirus and that the House would advance a funding package “that fully addresses the scale and seriousness of this public health crisis.”

It’s worth noting that throughout January and most of February, U.S. officials said that the coronavirus risk to the American public was low and that they were not seeing community spread of the virus. By Feb. 25, there were 53 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States and no deaths, according to data compiled by the World Health Organization.

On Feb. 28, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor said it was possible that a reported case in California “could be the first instance of community spread — meaning the illness was acquired through an unknown exposure in the community.” But it could also be that the patient was exposed through contact to a traveler who was infected, said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. The immediate risk to the general American public remained low, she said.

The cancelling of mass gatherings was not yet common in the United States in February, the CDC noted in an April report.

Trump’s messaging around this time also did not suggest that people avoid large crowds. The same day of Pelosi’s trip to Chinatown, Trump tweeted: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”Our ruling

Trump tweeted that Pelosi deleted a video of her telling people to go to Chinatown.

Pelosi on Feb. 24 did encourage people to go to Chinatown in San Francisco. But we found no trace of her posting or deleting the video Trump shared.

At the time of Pelosi’s remark, U.S. health officials said the risk of the coronavirus was low to the American public since they had no reports of community spread. Trump during this time also said the virus was under control in the United States.

Neither the White House nor Trump’s re-election campaign provide evidence to support Trump’s claim. In the absence of evidence, we rate this claim False.

[Politifact]

Trump claims Pelosi ripping speech was ‘illegal’

President Trump claimed Friday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) committed a crime by ripping up a copy of his speech at the State of the Union on Tuesday evening, a claim that was immediately disputed as false by legal experts. “I thought it was a terrible thing,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing for a speech in North Carolina. “It’s illegal what she did. She broke the law.” Trump asserted that Pelosi was barred from ripping up the speech because it is an official document, later calling it “very illegal.”

Glenn Kirschner, a legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, disputed Trump’s claim, telling The Hill that a photocopy of a speech is not an official record.

“The federal law prohibiting the destruction of public records or government documents does not apply,” Kirschner said in a text message.

“No prosecutor with half an ounce of common sense would ever charge this case,” said Elie Honig, another legal analyst. “The law isn’t meant to criminalize destruction of copies of ceremonial documents.”

Trump on Friday also described Pelosi’s action as “very disrespectful to the chamber, to the country.”

Pelosi has said she tore up the speech in order to protest the “falsehoods” contained in the president’s State of the Union address and that she felt “very vindicated” by doing so.

The president’s remarks on Friday were his first public reaction to Pelosi’s ripping of his speech at the conclusion of his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

The president told reporters Friday that he didn’t know Pelosi ripped the copy of his speech until members of Congress remarked about it as he left the chamber.

White House aides have repeatedly criticized Pelosi for the move in recent days, though none have suggested her actions were illegal. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told Fox News on Wednesday that she believed Pelosi should be censured.

“I think it shows you how petty and peevish and partisan the Democratic Party has come,” Conway said on Fox News. “And for all the people out there who fancy themselves the armchair psychiatrist trying to analyze certain people, they ought to shift their craft over to Nancy Pelosi.”

Trump has regularly attacked Pelosi over his impeachment by House, but their relationship plummeted to a new low this week following the State of the Union and the president’s acquittal in the impeachment trial by the GOP-controlled Senate.

When Trump entered the House chamber before his remarks, Trump also appeared to snub Pelosi, not taking her hand as she reached out to shake his as is customary at the beginning of the president’s joint address to Congress.

During two separate appearances on Thursday — including one at the National Prayer Breakfast when the House Speaker was sitting just feet away — Trump took a shot at Pelosi for invoking religion during his impeachment.

“Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person. And she wanted to impeach a long time ago,” Trump said during remarks from the East Room Thursday afternoon, disputing Pelosi’s claim that she prays for him. “She may pray, but she prays for the opposite. But I doubt she prays at all.”

[The Hill]

Reality

The assertion is rich given Trump’s well-documented penchant for ripping papers into tiny pieces after he’s done reading them. Politico reported in 2018 that White House aides could not convince the President to break his paper-ripping habit, so it became the job of career staffers in the records management office to tape official documents he’s torn into bits back together.

This all came from a tweet from conservative bullshit artist Charlie Kirk.

According to a fact check from the Tampa Bay Times:

The statute in question deals with the “concealment, removal, or mutilation generally” of records and reports. It sets a penalty for anyone who “conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys” any government record “filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States.”

The statute also says that any person with “custody” of a government record cannot “willfully and unlawfully” conceal, remove, mutilate, obliterate, falsify or destroy it.

“The point of the statute is to prevent people from destroying records in official repositories like the National Archives or in courts,” said Georgetown Law professor Victoria Nourse.

Pelosi is in the clear, experts said, because her copy of Trump’s speech wasn’t a government record.

Media

Trump slams Democrats and Romney at prayer breakfast

President Donald Trump began his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast by taking veiled shots at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was on the stage with him as he spoke, and Sen. Mitt Romney, the morning after the GOP-controlled Senate acquitted him.Romney, citing his Mormon faith, was the only Republican to vote against his party and join Democrats in voting to convict Trump.Beginning his speech at the bipartisan annual event, Trump criticized “dishonest and corrupt people” who “badly hurt our nation” — an apparent reference to Democrats who pursued his impeachment over what they claimed was an abuse of power in holding up aid in Ukraine.

The President thanked “courageous Republican politicians and leaders (who) had the wisdom, fortitude and strength to do what everyone knows was right.”

He then obliquely referenced Romney and Pelosi.”I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that’s not so. So many people have been hurt and we can’t let that go on,” Trump said.”We have allies, we have enemies, sometimes the allies are enemies but we just don’t know it. But we’re changing all that,” Trump later remarked.Pelosi has previously said she prays for the President daily and Romney brought up his faith in a speech announcing his vote on impeachment. Later Thursday after the breakfast, Pelosi called Trump’s remark about faith as justification for doing something wrong “completely inappropriate” and “particularly without class.””This morning the President said when people use faith as an excuse to do … bad things … was just so completely inappropriate, especially at a prayer breakfast,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference.”I don’t know what the President understands about prayer or people who do pray, but we do pray for the United States of America,” she said. “I pray hard for him because he’s so off the track of the Constitution, our values, our country.””He really needs our prayers, so he can say whatever he wants … but I do pray for him and I do so sincerely and without anguish,” Pelosi added.Trump walked into the annual, bipartisan breakfast and immediately picked up the newspaper laid on his place setting, a hard copy of USA Today, with the headline “ACQUITTED.” He displayed the headline to the room and to the cameras, to laughter from the audience.Pelosi, at the news conference, said that the President’s talking points were outside of religiously oriented issues was also inappropriate at the breakfast.”To go into the stock market and raising up (the newspaper) and mischaracterizing other peoples’ motivation, he’s talking about things he knows little about — faith and prayer,” she said.The President’s arrival at the breakfast was soon followed by a prayer to the breakfast group by Pelosi. Pelosi prayed for the poor and the persecuted around the world. The House speaker did not bring up politics or impeachment.”Let us pray that the names of the persecuted always live on our lips and their courage carried through our actions. And let us pray that we honor the spark and divinity in them and in all people including ourselves and that we treat everyone with dignity and respect,” Pelosi said.Prefacing Trump’s speech, Dr. Arthur Brooks, discussed the “crisis of contempt and polarization that’s tearing our societies apart.”He called for those at the breakfast to do what was preached in the Bible: “Love your enemies.”Brooks spoke at length about how politicians from differing parties need to treat each other with love.”Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you,” Trump told the audience after approaching the dais. “I don’t know if Arthur is going to like what I’m going to have to say.”

[CNN]

Donald Trump Tweets His Defense by Attacking AOC

President Donald Trump’s lawyers, who launched his defense at his impeachment trial in the Senate Saturday morning, have claimed that they will respond substantively to Democrats’ methodical case for why the president should be removed from office. But shortly before the Senate convened for the first day of the White House defense, the president teed up the proceedings with a tweet strong on name calling and short on evidence. 

His targets include two lawmakers, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Alexandra  Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who have no role in the impeachment trial. Trump also posted tweets quoting Fox Business News host Lou Dobbs praising him. 

Trump’s defenders thus far have not disputed the facts of the case against him. Senate Republicans have complained about comments by Democratic impeachment managers and launched attacks on President Obama’s foreign policy and other topics that are at best tangental. Trump’s lawyers on Saturday have said they will focus on Vice President Joe Biden’s actions related to Ukraine in 2016, and that the president did “nothing wrong. White House counsel Pat Cipollone promised in his opening remarks that Trump’s team will focus on evidence that the House impeachment managers did not include. But their boss appears to have another strategy.

[Mother Jones]

Trump criticizes California on homelessness, threatens federal involvement

President Donald Trump is blaming California’s governor for the state’s homeless crisis and threatening a federal government intervention.

In a Christmas Day tweet, Trump wrote, “Governor Gavin N has done a really bad job on taking care of the homeless population in California. If he can’t fix the problem, the Federal Govt. will get involved!”

This tweet came after cell phone video showed California Gov. Gavin Newsom telling reporters that the Trump administration was “not serious about this issue” and “they’re playing politics.”

This wasn’t the first time the president has chimed in on the issue. Earlier this year he had said he was considering creating a task force on the matter.

California has announced some changes to start solving homelessness. State lawmakers passed legislation that caps rent increases and the governor announced $1 billion in funding to help the homeless. But numbers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development show California has more work ahead.

The annual data from HUD shows homelessness in California increased by 21,306 people. This is up 16.4% from last year. This is higher than the overall national increase of 2.7%.

Maria Foscarinis is the executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. She said affordable housing is the solution.

“It’s a matter of making this a priority and recognizing that this is something that needs a solution, it affects everybody. Homelessness obviously affects homeless people, but it affects entire communities,” said Foscarinis.

Local leaders in California also say that while housing is important in solving homelessness, it’s only part of it. They say there must be other services, such as addiction and mental health treatment.

That is the lesson that other states and cities are learning as they grapple with their own homelessness crises.

California is among the hardest hit by the homelessness crisis but it has affected communities up and down the West Coast. Oregon’s homeless population increased by more than 9% in 2019. And while Washington State showed a slight decline of 3.3%, Seattle continues to struggle to find solutions for its homeless population.

KOMO News recently reported on the intertwined crises of homelessness, drug addiction and restrictions on law enforcement in an extensive documentary, “Seattle Is Dying.” Reporters spoke to residents, business owners and police officers who expressed frustration as they have watched their city change for the worse in recent years.

KOMO reporters also traveled to San Francisco, a city with one of the highest costs of living in the country and one of the largest homeless populations. The documentary looked into possible solutions that have worked in other cities, including medication-assisted treatment for addiction and rehabilitation programs for homeless persons who enter the criminal justice system.

[ABC News]

Trump Screams ‘PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT’ On Twitter the Day After Impeachment

President Donald Trump got on the Twitter machine to rail against “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT” and “the greatest Witch Hunt in American history,” now that he has been impeached in the House of Representatives.

Here’s what Trump had to say on Thursday morning:

“I got Impeached last might [sic] without one Republican vote being cast with the Do Nothing Dems on their continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history. Now the Do Nothing Party want to Do Nothing with the Articles & not deliver them to the Senate, but it’s Senate’s call! The Senate shall set the time and place of the trial.” If the Do Nothing Democrats decide, in their great wisdom, not to show up, they would lose by Default!”

Trump’s first two tweets refer to how House Speaker Nancy Pelositold reporters on Wednesday that even though the House of Representatives approved the articles of impeachment against the president, she won’t send them to the senate just yet. As Pelosi invoked recent comments from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, she questioned whether the senate’s impeachment hearing will be fair, and suggested that the transfer of the articles could be delayed until certain assurances and rules for the trial are agreed upon.

“We will make our decision as to when we are going to send it when we see what they are doing on the Senate side,” Pelosi said. “So far, we have not seen anything that looks fair to us.”

[Mediaite]

Trump repeats Ukraine conspiracy theory and more debunked lies on 53-minute “Fox & Friends” call

President Trump spent 53 minutes of his Friday morning on the phone with the hosts of “Fox & Friends” — his latest call-in to one of his favorite TV shows.

Driving the news: President Trump spent a chunk of the interview repeating a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election. “That’s what the word is,” he claimed without evidence.

  • The debunked conspiracy theory — frequently referred to as CrowdStrike, the security firm at its center — is based on the idea that Ukraine was complicit in the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee to create false electronic records that Russia was behind the hacking.
  • Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert, said during his impeachment hearing that the Crowdstrike conspiracy theory is “a Russian narrative that President Putin has promoted.”
  • Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top Russia adviser, said during her impeachment hearing that the conspiracy theory is “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”

Worth noting: Trump also said that Crowdstrike is owned by “a very wealthy Ukrainian,” but it’s actually a publicly-traded company. Its largest outside shareholder is Warburg Pincus, a New York City private equity firm from which Trump plucked one of his top economic advisors.

Impeachment-related highlights:

  • The president once again slammed former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, claiming she was “not an angel.” During her impeachment testimony , she agreed that it was Trump’s prerogative to fire ambassadors at will, but asked, “What I do wonder is why was it necessary to smear my reputation also?”
  • Trump said that during a Senate impeachment trial he only wants House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to testify more than Hunter Biden.
  • Trump said that he knows “exactly” who the Ukraine whistleblower is — and insinuated that the “Fox & Friends” hosts did as well — prompting them to attempt to steer the conversation away from the topic live on air.

Other highlights:

  • Trump predicted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t pass the USMCA trade deal, despite it being a priority for some Democratic lawmakers ahead of 2020.
  • He tried to find a middle ground between supporting pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong and not offending Chinese President Xi Jinping as the U.S. attempts to close a “phase one” trade deal with China. “We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi,” he said.
  • Trump denied rumors surrounding his health after a surprise visit to Walter Reed National Medical Center last weekend, calling it “fake, disgusting news.”

2020 lightning round:

  • Joe Biden: “I don’t know if Joe can make it mentally. He’s off.”
  • Pete Buttigieg: “I don’t see him dealing with President Xi. I don’t see him dealing with Kim Jong-un. But maybe he is.”
  • Elizabeth Warren: “I think Pocahontas has come up from the embers.”
  • Michael Bloomberg: “I think his time has come and gone.

[Axios]

Reality

There was multiple fact checks some could only refer to this call as “bananas.”

Media

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

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]

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