Donnie Deadbeat

Trump has a longstanding habit of just walking away from his commitments whenever he thinks the people he owes can't or won't do anything about it - even when he loses in court.

Color me unsurprised.

Donald Trump in breach of $381K British court order against a former MI6 agent

Donald Trump is in trouble again and this time in the UK. Reportedly, he has failed to pay £300K to a former spy after losing a case against him in a British High Court.

Donald Trump’s road to November’s election is getting rockier by the day. After his guilty verdict in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, his potential departure to jail is still in question. Just when he was dealing with this new blow, claims of his racist behaviour on The Apprentice have resurfaced.

And looks like that isn’t enough. The former POTUS is understood to be in trouble again but this time in the UK. Reportedly, he has failed to pay a former spy £300K after losing a court battle against him.

Donald Trump fails to pay £300K legal costs to former MI6 spy

The 77-year-old has failed to comply with a UK High Court order that instructed him to pay £300,000 in legal costs to former spy, Christopher Steele. The former MI6 agent compiled a dossier alleging Russian interference in the 2016 US election. The largely discredited dossier was commissioned by Trump's political opponents including Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). They hired the former British intelligence officer Steele to carry out the research in 2016.

According to Newsweek, it contained unverified intelligence reports about Trump’s relationship with Russia. Many Russian experts have dismissed it. Trump sued Steele’s company Orbis Business Intelligence and lost the case in London High Court earlier this year. The court ordered him to pay an initial £300,000 ($381,000) in legal fees, which the GOP leader is in breach of. Taking to X (formerly Twitter) Steele wrote on Friday:

Earlier this year, when he lost his English High Court case against us, the judge ordered Donald Trump to pay Orbis an initial £300k in costs. Trump, who claims to respect the UK, has now been in breach of this order for two months and faces enforcement if he travels here again.

Trump - who may also have to face international travel restrictions after his historic conviction - did pay £10,000 to the court as security against costs ahead of the hearing on a Judge’s order. This amount was transferred to Steele in February.

Christopher Steele reveals Trump’s breach of UK court order

Despite Trump owning assets in the UK, Steele cannot obtain his money through them. Trump’s extensive British assets also include the Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, Scotland but it is owned by a Trump Organization subsidiary. Steele told Sky News:

"The fact is we were awarded a £300,000 initial cost order in February, which was confirmed when his right of appeal was turned down at the end of March. And so he's been in breach of that order for two months now."

"Cost is the key issue in all litigation, and particularly in what we call lawfare, which we think this is. It is an attempt to take vengeance against us or to keep us quiet."

Steele claimed that Trump is intentionally trying to ‘put off’ a lot of his legal cases until what he thinks would be his re-election in November so that he can then ‘tell us all to go and jump, basically.’ If Trump doesn’t settle, Steele’s only option would seek repayment in the US - which would incur more costs.

BTW, don't forget, Steele has said - on the record - that while it was never verifed, The Pee Tape "probably does exist".

Confronting his critics, Christopher Steele defends controversial dossier in first major interview

The British ex-spy opens up in the ABC News documentary "Out of the Shadows."

Former British spy Christopher Steele is stepping out of the shadows to "set the record straight" about his bombshell dossier for the first time since his name splashed across headlines in early 2017, defending his work, his name, and the decision to include some of its most controversial elements.

George Stephanopoulos sits down with former MI6 spy Christopher Steele for his first interview since the publication of intelligence reports now known as the "Steele dossier."

"I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it," Steele told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos in the forthcoming documentary, "Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier" -- an exclusive preview of which aired Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

In his first major interview, Steele described how and why he wrote the 17 reports that made up the so-called "Steele dossier," which accused former President Donald Trump's campaign of conspiring with the Russians to tilt the result of the 2016 election.

Steele’s dossier has come under immense scrutiny since its release. And yet in many ways, it proved prescient. The Mueller probe found that Russia had been making efforts to meddle in the 2016 campaign, and that Trump campaign members and surrogates had promoted and retweeted Russian-produced political content alleging voter fraud and criminal activity on the part of Hillary Clinton.

- more -

Bought And Sold

Why rich people should be flogged - and filleted as necessary.

Today's Reddit

It was an obvious theatrical stunt. He did it to suck up to the ammosexuals, and to reinforce the notion that the law is whatever he says it is at any given time.

ie: The 2nd amendment is absolute and unlimited, so there's no way it can be illegal for me to buy a gun - no matter the circumstances.

Today Trump's spokesman confirmed Donald Trump illegally purchased a gun. Marjorie Taylor Greene on video also verifying it as she was there.
byu/justalazygamer inParlerWatch

Indicted Trump Asks to Buy a Glock at Campaign Stop—Which Would Be Illegal

A spokesperson later corrected himself and said the transaction hadn’t actually gone through.

In a PR stunt gone terribly wrong, former President Donald Trump went gun shopping on Monday with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and asked to buy a Glock pistol on camera—which would have brazenly violated the very same law that recently landed Hunter Biden criminal charges.

Federal law prohibits anyone under indictment from attempting to buy a firearm. Trump has been criminally indicted four times in as many jurisdictions—Atlanta, Miami, New York, and Washington—facing dozens of felony charges that could land him in prison for decades.

So, what "a spokesman" said about the transaction not going thru makes no difference. Trump made the attempt, he did it on camera, he's guilty of yet another felony, and it appears there will be no direct consequences for his obvious violation of federal fucking law.

“I wanna buy one,” Trump said while taking a tour of Palmetto State Armory, a federally licensed gun dealer in South Carolina that's widely revered by firearm enthusiasts.

“Sir, if you want one, this one’s yours,” a person on the tour said, seeming to divert the president away from making an actual purchase.

“No, I wanna buy one,” Trump insisted.

It only added to the fiasco when those present pulled South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson into the photo op—as well as his brother, Julian Wilson, an executive at the private equity company that owns the gun dealer. They are both Republican Congressman Joe Wilson’s sons.

The disaster started when Trump's campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, tweeted that his boss actually went through with the sale.

"President Trump purchases a @GLOCKInc in South Carolina!" he posted Monday afternoon.

But the campaign went into damage control mode as soon as firearms journalist Stephen Gutowski and others pointed out that the entire transaction would be blatantly illegal.

“Did he actually go through with the purchase?” Gutowski asked openly in tweet.

Cheung later claimed to CNN that Trump never actually went through with the purchase—and deleted his original statement. The Daily Beast could not immediately independently confirm whether Trump finalized the deal.

The irony is that the federal law Trump appeared to almost violate is the very same one that the feds used to indict President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

The federal law that restricts how someone may buy or sell firearms is 18 U.S. Code § 922, the go-to statute for prosecutors seeking to imprison felons who manage to acquire guns after serving time in prison, straw purchasers who buy a gun with the specific intent to sell it to another person, and other people who aren’t allowed to acquire them. That law is why anyone buying a gun from a licensed dealer must fill out what's called an ATF Form 4473, which asks: “Are you under indictment or information in any court for a felony, or any other crime for which the judge could imprison you for more than one year, or are you a current member of the military who has been charged with violation(s) of the Uniform Code of Military?”

Answer “yes,” and no gun shop can legally sell you a gun. Trump, who is facing criminal charges across the eastern seaboard, would have to answer in the affirmative.

Republicans—and Trump in particular—have been calling on the Department of Justice to hold Hunter Biden accountable for violating the same statute, in his case, for lying about drug use on that form.

This New America

We're living in a new America now - not a nation of laws, but a nation of, "make me".

"I do what I want" is our new national motto. Right and Wrong have become fungible. There's no honor in the way we're doing things.

Which is why it's the perfect atmosphere for a Donald Trump.

This is not a guy who does what's right because it's the right thing to do. And he doesn't restrain himself from doing what's wrong simply because it's wrong and people shouldn't do it.

Trump will sign on the dotted line and then have no problem reneging when it comes time to settle up.

The approach is that he'll do what he's promised to do only if his lawyers convince him that your lawyer's can force him to do it.

So notice how he's constantly going after the courts. He's trying to bring social pressure against specific judges in order to sway their decisions. 

And he's getting lots of help from Mitch McConnell, who's been very busy stacking the federal bench with ideologues who have no real function other than to find ways to agree with the Daddy Staters.

This shit gets worse until Trump is forced out of office, but then we have to concentrate on moving against the other elements of the Daddy State - which, conveniently enough, happen to be largely Republican, so we keep hammering away at the GOP until the "moderates" can get back in the saddle over there.

Murder Is Just Alright

Today's Asshole Alert via WaPo's Robert Costa and Karoun Demerjian:

Hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom.

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights.


So, standard GOP playbook shittiness - "he was no angel" - with every Virginian's favorite Bull-Conner-wanna-be, Corey Stewart, chiming right in, on cue and in perfect harmony:

The message was echoed on the campaign trail. Virginia Republican Corey A. Stewart, who is challenging Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), told a local radio program Thursday that “Khashoggi was not a good guy himself.”

And WaPo puts up an appropriate defensive fact for Khashoggi (something I certainly didn't know) - but buries it in the 9th paragraph.

While Khashoggi was once sympathetic to Islamist movements, he moved toward a more liberal, secular point of view, according to experts on the Middle East who have tracked his career. Khashoggi knew bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s during the civil war in Afghanistan, but his interactionswith bin Laden were as a journalist with a point of view who was working with a prized source.


I shit on the press whenever I think they're doing their little Press Poodle show, and I'll continue doing that, but there's always a line that you don't cross. Ever. 

I think everything has something to do with drawing lines; and making decisions about where the lines should be; and trying to make sure we're staying on the "right" side of those lines. You know - Morality and Ethics, and all those silly notions of what it takes to maintain a civilization.

When things are as weird as they are in the middle east, those lines can get pretty fuzzy. And while I'm sympathetic to the frustration, and I've expressed that frustration on at least a few occasions by saying something like, "Fuck 'em - let's just turn the place into the world's biggest glass bowl and let the tourists take over".

But that doesn't work. I know that. Hell, until recently, I thought everybody knew that. But here we are, with Lord Commander Bonespurs at his rally in Montana, telling us that if we just kill enough people - the right people according to him and him alone - everybody gets real polite and agreeable all of a sudden. And the rubes eat it up.

Then, a possible glimmer of sanity via Reuters:

So grave is the fallout from the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi that King Salman has felt compelled to intervene, five sources with links to the Saudi royal family said.

Last Thursday, Oct. 11, the king dispatched his most trusted aide, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of Mecca, to Istanbul to try to defuse the crisis.

World leaders were demanding an explanation and concern was growing in parts of the royal court that the king’s son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to whom he has delegated vast powers, was struggling to contain the fallout, the sources said.

During Prince Khaled’s visit, Turkey and Saudi Arabia agreed to form a joint working group to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance. The king subsequently ordered the Saudi public prosecutor to open an inquiry based on its findings.

“The selection of Khaled, a senior royal with high status, is telling as he is the king’s personal adviser, his right hand man and has had very strong ties and a friendship with (Turkish President) Erdogan,” said a Saudi source with links to government circles.

Since the meeting between Prince Khaled and Erdogan, King Salman has been “asserting himself” in managing the affair, according to a different source, a Saudi businessman who lives abroad but is close to royal circles.


But - did you catch it? - "a joint working group". Erdogan and Prince Khaled are going to investigate the thing to find out if the Saudi government is a bunch of murdering assholes, and whether or not the Turks helped them.

I think we already know how this one turns out.

Panama & Meh

Between $21 trillion and $32 trillion are sheltered in tax havens according to the Tax Justice Network. pic.twitter.com/8H0ts59qx1

— The Int'l Spectator (@intlspectator) April 5, 2016

OK so I'm wrong a lot, and I'm hoping I'm real wrong on this one.  But I don't see much changing because of the outrage over what's being "revealed" in The Panama Papers about a really fucked up system.

Maybe we'll see a lot more about how bad and illegal all this shit is, and maybe we won't.

Maybe we'll get all het up over it and demand something be done, and maybe we'll just shrug it off.

We've been conditioned to accept a coupla things. First, if you're rich enough, then you're well-enough connected to political power, which means you can do just about anything you want and not have to worry about "the law".  We see this shit every time (eg) when some Wall Streeters get caught dirty dealing and then negotiate their way out of it - "agreeing" to pay some skimpy little fine - which may sound enormous until you notice it amounts to about 1/80th of what they fucked us all over for - and which was factored into the cost of doing business from the start.

Second though is a perversion of the Zorro / Scarlet Pimpernel thing. The noble scamp plays at being loyal to the crown while doing everything he can to countervail what he sees as the evil-doings of a corrupted king.

We've accepted the conditioning that Da Gubmint is rotten and that spending Federal Revenue on anything but Defense and Relieving The Tax Burden of The Rent Collectors is nothing but theft, so everything you do that can plausibly be tied to "fighting back" is not only understandable, it's the right thing to do. Tax Evasion is the right thing that all the smart guys are doing.  And all the smart guys are rich because they're smart because they're rich.  And I wanna do what's right for them because I'll be rich and smart some day too, and I'm sure they'll be eager to return the favor.

So we'll sit, and we'll watch, and we'll do nothing.

I'm not advocating anything other than solidly passive and peaceful political resistance - please, nobody do anything stoopid - but I do have to wonder when we can expect to see the first wave of kidnappings and assassinations.

It goes on like this and it's all but guaranteed not to end well for anybody.

Too Close For Comfort

Makes me wonder if "witnesses" and the sketch artist are just having us on a bit, or if we've arrived at the point where the Radical Assholes are feeling so immune to the law that they can do anything they want, knowing they can hide behind a veil of notoriety - claiming Political Witch Hunt if anybody decides to go after 'em.

(tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors is a fucking genius)