MSNBC hosts Mehdi Hasan and Ayman Mohyeldin shared their thoughts on the double standard exposed by the recent hate crime in Buffalo and explore Tucker Carlson’s culpability in the crime. Francis Maxwell reacts.
The feds are now looking into how Trump’s billionaire friend Tom Barrack successfully stripped mentions of 9/11 in the 2016 GOP platform to please the Saudis.
Jose Pagliery
Political Investigations Reporter
Michael Kovac/Getty
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The Justice Department has updated its indictment of former President Donald Trump’s billionaire buddy Thomas Barrack, documenting how he quietly tweaked the GOP platform at the 2016 Republican National Convention to avoid mentioning the Saudi royal family’s connection to the 9/11 hijackers.
On Monday, the DOJ replaced its original 46-page charging document with an expanded 55-page superseding indictment that more closely details how the financier allegedly exploited his proximity to Trump to make secret deals with the United Arab Emirates.
In the latest version of the indictment, federal prosecutors documented the role Barrack played at the run-up to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. As a congressional investigation has since uncovered, Barrack had already allowed the Saudis and Emiratis to edit a major Trump campaign speech about energy, in which he made a pledge to “work with our Gulf allies.” Then, as Barrack’s relationship to the Emiratis got tighter, the meddling increased.
Seven weeks before the Republican convention, according to the revised indictment, someone only referred to as “Person-1” emailed Barrack about developing the GOP talking points at the convention. (The news site Middle East Eye, which initially broke news about the existence of these emails has surmised that this person was criminal political strategist Paul Manafort.)
“We need to talk about language for me to put in [the national political party] platform at national convention. Can be much more expansive than what we did in speech,” this person wrote to Barrack, adding a notable caveat that the “platform language” would be “based on what you hear from your friends.”
But just a week before the start of the GOP convention, the draft platform was deemed too problematic by “Person-1.”
Trump had previously promised to release the infamous 28 pages missing from a House and Senate joint intelligence report documenting the plane hijackers’ connections to the Saudi government and royal family—classified details that victims, activists, and journalists had long sought to make public. But on July 13 that year, this person wrote to Barrack that Republicans would have to back down from mentioning that.
This person wrote to Barrack that any mention “that was anti the Saudi Royal Family was removed from the platform.”
According to federal investigators, who have acquired suspects’ communications, Barrack then turned around and forwarded that email to UAE businessman Rashid Al-Malik. (The DOJ has also indicted Al-Malik, who is accused of passing along information to UAE government spies.)
In his note to his UAE contact, Barrack allegedly wrote that the email was “very confidential but you can share with HH. Please do not circulate any further since it is very sensitive.”
According to the feds, Al-Malik then forwarded that email to an unnamed Emirati official. But Barrack is also accused of passing that information along to a yet another unnamed Emirati official whom other journalists have identified at UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba. Barrack allegedly told him the information was “really confidential but important.”
Otaiba still retains that post in Washington, D.C. The Emirati embassy did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
The long-awaited missing 28 pages were eventually released—albeit with redactions—by President Barack Obama that very summer. The New York Times called it a “frustrating time capsule” whose importance grew over the years, but which ultimately showed that the tenuous connections between the 9/11 terrorists and Saudi leadership did not prove to be the vast conspiracy many suspected.
Brian McGlinchey, an independent journalist in San Antonio, Texas, who played a pivotal role in aggressively pushing for their release, told The Daily Beast that he welcomes the DOJ’s new focus on Barrack’s alleged role in having the GOP avoid the subject.
“It underscores the hypocrisy of the Trump camp, because at that time, there was an active presidential campaign going on,” he said. “You’ve got the candidate out front raising deep suspicions about Saudi involvement, at the same time you have these back channel maneuvers at the Republican convention to help the Saudis avoid embarrassment.”
When reached for comment, the Republican National Committee told The Daily Beast it was unaware of what transpired.
“The DOJ has not reached out to the RNC on this subject, nor do we have knowledge of this issue. Additionally, current RNC leadership was not involved with the 2016 platform,” said Emma Vaughn, the group’s spokeswoman.
The DOJ on Monday also hit Barrack with two additional criminal charges of making “material false statements” for allegedly lying to the FBI during a June 20, 2019 interview. Although some of the allegations were lumped together in the original set of charges, the revised indictment is now charging him separately for allegedly lying about only having one phone when he actually had a dedicated line for secretly communicating with the Emiratis.
Barrack’s legal team declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing case, which is currently set for trial in the late summer.
The superseding indictment adds two new charges of making false statements to investigators to Thomas Barrack's, a longtime friend of former President Donald Trump and chair of his 2017 inaugural committee, 2021 indictment. https://t.co/x66wOLyhnn
Trump friend Thomas Barrack sought hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from the UAE while lobbying the Trump admin for the UAE, say prosecutors. By @annaschecter + @anblanxhttps://t.co/bSQ1lYuIMf
— NBC Investigations (@NBCInvestigates) May 17, 2022
The House on Wednesday passed a $28 million emergency spending bill to address the nationwide shortage of baby formula — and 192 Republicans voted against it. Tony Michaels reacts.
No one knows better than Nevadans when it’s time to put our cards on the table. The Editorial Board, and Nevadans as a whole, are facing an agonizing problem. We have endorsed Republicans in the past and might do so again in the future.
Yet as we survey the field of Republican candidates across the state, we are struggling to identify those who are not an active threat to American democracy or the institutions of government that have sustained our republic for 250 years.
Of the five leading Republican candidates for the governorship of Nevada, every one of them has gone on record as both supporting and contributing to the Big Lie. In doing so, they have all made a choice to subvert our democracy, undermine the integrity of our elections, and ignore the Constitution of the United States.
Nevada Freedom Tour for Joey Gilbert This is about our constitutional republic & our freedoms. This is about life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.@joeygilbertinc Get Tickets here: https://t.co/oqiz3UAVoG Las Vegas, Nv May 21st at The Ahern Hotel
Conservatives and assorted anti-trans reactionaries like to claim that trans kids don’t understand their own identities, and that almost all young trans people will eventually end up identifying with their birth gender. But a new study is blowing that assertion out of the water.
Published this month in the medical journal Pediatrics, it reveals the findings of a five-year longitudinal study of trans youth conducted by Princeton University’s Trans Youth Project. Out of more than 300 young trans-identifying people aged 3-12, only 2.5% identified as cisgender at the end of the five-year period, with 94% identifying as trans girls or boys and 3.5% identifying as nonbinary.
This stands in sharp contrast to inflated figures cited by anti-trans pundits, who often claim that a majority of trans youth will “detransition” and experience significant psychological distress as they return to presenting and living as their birth gender. (The Princeton team uses the term “retransition” in place of the more loaded term “detransition,” which other researchers have noted has “become associated with politically motivated attempts to impede access to gender-affirming care.”)
“These results suggest that retransitions are infrequent,” the Princeton study authors concluded. “More commonly, transgender youth who socially transitioned at early ages continued to identify that way.”
This doesn’t mean the researchers believe retransition is so rare as not to be worth studying; to the contrary, they argue that “understanding retransitions is crucial for clinicians and families to help make them as smooth as possible for youth.”
And this study did uncover some early data about children who retransition. “Later cisgender identities were more common amongst youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6,” the study noted, with most of those children retransitioning to a cisgender identity before age 10.
This new data blows previous datasets out of the water, particularly the thoroughly debunked (but still widely cited) studies which claim as many as 80% of trans-identified young people will eventually “desist” from their gender identity. Those statistics have been used to stoke fears that prepubescent children are undergoing “irreversible” medical procedures that most of them will regret, as seen in the language of anti-trans bills like South Carolina’s S1259 and journalist Abigail Shrier’s infamous book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
The legislation aims to protect families of trans youth who have fled their home states.
Contrary to such hyperbolic claims, hundreds of thousands of lives are not in the process of being ruined as we speak. “I think the critical piece is that we’re seeing the retransitioning happening before the ages at which kids were beginning medical transition,” said Kristina Olsen, the study’s lead author, in comments to NBC News.
Only one child in the cohort later identified as cisgender after being prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy, and the others who re-identified as cis did so “before blockers were even on the table,” Olsen added.
After two years of bewildering opposition to wearing masks during a pandemic, we won’t hold our breath for conservatives to listen to this science either. But the Trans Youth Project’s work — which Olsen says will continue for a total of twenty years — is giving doctors and health providers more data to work with, and shoring up what many trans people already know to be true: trans-affirming care works, and it can change countless lives for the better.
Dave Rubin finally commented on the backlash he received following the announcement that his husband, David Janet, and he are expecting two children via surrogate later this year. Speaking with Candace Owens on her show, Rubin was asked about how he handled all the naysayers. He replied, “There’s a lot of mean people and trolls and clickbait people and all of that stuff. 99% of what I got, especially from the public people that I’m associated with.”
“So are there gonna be some traditional religious conservatives that are not happy with same-sex marriage and same-sex couples having kids? Of course, there are, I believe in religious liberty. And, as long as your beliefs don’t impede on my life and my ability to have a family and all of that stuff, then I still think we can live in the same country. And I would hope that they can too. You’re allowed to believe what you want.”
On Twitter, the responses to Rubin’s announcement proved striking, with his own fans expressing discomfort, or even disgust, at the thought of two gay men starting a family. Rubin, a gay man in a socially conservative space, has never been been fully accepted by a vocal segment of his audience, or even his peers and supposed “friends.”
Rubin’s family announcement, however, has driven the talk show host to a new low, as his recent interview with Glenn Beck seemed an attempt to win the approval of homophobes and bigots.
The humiliating interview sees Beck, in a twisted attempt to show compassion, comparing Rubin’s sexual orientation to alcoholism. Rubin silently accepts the comparison, and remarkably, attempts to blame “the left” for his own audience’s negative response.
The full Forbes piece is worth your time.
Dave Rubin Comments on Backlash to Surrogacy Announcement With Husband: 'There's a Lot of Mean People' Online https://t.co/iyTo6TJs0b
And, as long as your beliefs don’t impede on my life and my ability to have a family and all of that stuff, then I still think we can live in the same country. You stupid shithead, that’s all any of us want. But it didn’t matter until they did it to you, right? Reap what you have sown, asshole.
He obviously never spoken to a religious conservative. They believe we should be dead. I’m really not seeing his middle ground fantasy. I hope he and his husband are able to keep their children safe from the nutters that they court as a business model, because they didn’t ask for that shit.
My nephew’s wife called me and asked that I reach to family member whose few living close family members called him “a dirty little faggot” and said “We love you, but not your lifestyle.” This young man is devastated and feels he is not worth anything. This is the world they are creating in the name of a faith that preaches love. Fortunately, we are talking to him and he is coming to visit for a couple weeks to get away from this toxic space
As I have often said, nobody in the world can rip a child’s will to live right out of them like a good christian. Many of us have survived similar circumstances and your nephew appears to have some complicated backstory which will complicate things but doesn’t change the fact that he has value and deserves to be loved. There is no forward until the family is permanently out of the picture, if they can’t have their way they will continue trying to destroy him because that’s the love of their god.
The kids will be indoctrinated and likely live in a protective bubble. Much of that will depend on how successfully daddy can erase them from the conversation and then go on with his business model. If that Mercer vampire lady or one of the other oligarchs that are funding the mayonnaise rebellion crowd find him useful, the kids may find themselves sheltered long enough to make daddies little business model a family endeavor.
One hundred percent. What a stupid asshole. What he and other Log Cabinets don’t get is they’re just putting you in a roomier closet. Yeah, you can exist. No, you can’t get married and you can’t have kids. And no, I don’t want to hear about your yucky relationship.
Kansas’ highest court on Wednesday upheld a Republican redistricting law that makes it harder for the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation to win reelection in a big victory for the GOP.
The state Supreme Court declined for now to declare that overly partisan gerrymandering violates the Kansas Constitution. The ruling sets district boundaries less than a month before the state’s June 10 filing deadline for congressional candidates.
The court’s opinion was two paragraphs long, saying only that the voters and voting rights group challenging the map “have not prevailed on their claims” that the map violated the state constitution and that a full opinion would come later.
Photo: Kansas’s only Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids, who is Native American and openly lesbian. She flipped that House seat from red to blue in 2018.
The redistricting hits keep on coming for Democrats. The Kansas Supreme Court has upheld the congressional map drawn by the GOP-controlled legislature that makes Sharice Davids' 3rd District more difficult for her. A lower court had struck down the map.https://t.co/9Mt0NjazHD
Red state courts are allowing these gerrymandering but the blue state courts are not. Often the laws against it are the same in both red and blue states, it is just red state Republican judges no longer care about the law, it is about cementing Republican party power. Scary times folks. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 