Convicted felon and disgraced president Donald Trump is a corrupt, criminal leader who is destroying American democracy and our nation’s credibility with our allies. After again threating to wipe out the nation of Iran and its children and innocent civilians, the serial liar backed off, again, and claims new negotiations are underway.
Iran says no negotiations are underway and it continues to keep the straits of Hormuz closed while it sends in missles and drones into Gulf allies.
Reports Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times:
President Trump said Monday that he had authorized a new wave of attacks against Iran this week but that he was holding off to make room for “serious negotiations,” after he said three Gulf leaders requested more time to work out a nuclear deal.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to launch new strikes, only to pull back at the last minute from plunging the United States back into an unpopular, expensive war. On Monday, he confirmed plans to strike and canceled them at the same time.
“We were getting ready to do a very major attack tomorrow, and I put it off for a little while, hopefully maybe forever, but possibly for a little while, because we’ve had very big discussions with Iran, and we’ll see what they amount to,” Mr. Trump told reporters.
When Mr. Trump launched the war alongside Israel on Feb. 28, he estimated that it would end in four to five weeks. The conflict is now in its third month, and Mr. Trump is caught between dueling impulses: to force Iran into submission, and to declare victory and move on.
The result has been wildly contradictory statements about the war — at one point Mr. Trump said the war was “over” but the United States still needed to finish the job — and bombastic threats like the one he issued in April, when he warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” (He backed down before his self-imposed deadline.)
U.S. military officials say that the Iranian regime has demonstrated enormous resilience and the ability to inflict significant damage to the region and on the global economy. And so far, Iran’s nuclear stockpile has not been touched.
Still, the military campaign has hit Iran hard: the Pentagon estimates it has destroyed some 13,000 targets, eviscerated the country’s Navy and killed high-level military and intelligence leaders, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for almost 37 years.
The war remains deeply unpopular at home. A New York Times/Siena poll found that 64 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran was the wrong one, with a majority of voters registering discontent about the economic costs associated with the conflict.
While Trump admitted last week that he doesnt really give a damn about the economic hardships created by his war and reckless spending, he has dropped a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service with a deal that will pay out $1.8 billion dollars in payments to his rich allies and the sedition criminals he pardoned for their actions at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
At The Washngton Post, Jeremy Roebuck, Mark Berman and Perry Stein report:
President Donald Trump has agreed to drop his family’s lawsuit against the IRS as part of a highly unusual agreement that establishes a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who, like him, have claimed they have been targets of a “weaponized” justice system.
The deal, laid out in documents released Monday creates what officials described as an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” with broad authority to distribute payments to individuals — all with limited oversight and outside of the normal processes for negotiating legal claims against the government.
It is the latest, and by far the most sweeping, tool the president has aimed at financially rewarding supporters and political allies he asserts have been wronged by Democratic administrations. Under the settlement’s terms, the president and his family would be excluded from receiving any money, officials said.
Legal experts and ethics watchdogs quickly panned the fund as a product of self-dealing that was negotiated between the president and agencies he oversees at taxpayers’ expense.
“This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said Donald K. Sherman, president of the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. He noted that although Trump sued the IRS as a private citizen, the officials representing the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department in settlement negotiations ultimately report to him.
“This is not justice,” says Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York). He “No president should be able to use the Department of Justice as a personal rewards program for the people who helped him attack our democracy.”
Trump doesn’t care. He figures no one will stop his corruption roadshow. So far, no one has.
