We have a couple of scandals today. First, CNN/Politics is reporting that Hillary won’t be locked up:
During the presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton, would join crowds of his supporters in chants of “lock her up!” and said to her face during a debate that if he were president, “you’d be in jail.”
But now that he actually will be president, Trump says he won’t recommend prosecution of Clinton, who he told New York Times reporters has “suffered greatly.”
What’s more, he said the idea of prosecuting Clinton is “just not something I feel very strongly about.” …
He said the issues have been investigated “ad nauseum” and he added, according to Haberman, that people could argue the Clinton Foundation has done “good work.”
Sort of a reverse scandal, which may cause a little disturbance in his more zealous followers.
And just now I see CNN/Politics reporting that Trump may be reversing his stand on climate change, which would be a great relief.
President-elect Donald Trump conceded Tuesday there is “some connectivity” between human activity and climate change and wavered on whether he would pull the United States out of international accords aimed at combating the phenomenon, which scientists overwhelmingly agree is caused by human activity.
The statements could mark a softening in Trump’s position on US involvement in efforts to fight climate change, although he did not commit to specific action in any direction. During the campaign, he vowed to “cancel” the US’s participation in the Paris climate agreement, stop all US payments to UN programs aimed at fighting climate change and continued to cast serious doubt on the role man-made carbon dioxide emissions played in the planet’s warming and associated impacts.
The report goes on to note that a noted climate change denier is involved in the transition efforts with regard to the EPA. This may be his way of changing his position from all out denial to something a lot softer. Given his propensity for lying, we may find out he lied to his own base even on strict ideological positions.
I must admit to a certain horrid fascination concerning his SCOTUS pick (aka the IJ). What if his pick were … reasonable? We might have to name him President Zagzig.
The other scandal has to do with Trump Foundation, as David Farenthold is reporting in WaPo:
President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has admitted to the IRS that it violated a legal prohibition against “self-dealing,” which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity’s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families.
The admission was contained in the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s IRS tax filings for 2015, which were recently posted online at the nonprofit-tracking site GuideStar. A GuideStar spokesman said the forms were uploaded by the Trump Foundation’s law firm, Morgan, Lewis and Bockius.
The Washington Post could not immediately confirm if the same forms had actually been sent to the IRS.
In one section of the form, the IRS asked if the Trump Foundation had transferred “income or assets to a disqualified person.” A disqualified person, in this context, might be Trump — the foundation’s president — or a member of his family or a Trump-owned business.
The foundation checked “yes.”
My goodness. And the chant was “Crooked Hillary”, eh?
