What a week. First Sean Spicer resigns as White House Press Secretary. Then they appoint Anthony Scaramucci as WH Communications Director, who spent a good amount of his time deleting old tweets that either were critical of his new boss or went against a lot of his positions (e.g. he acknowledged climate change is real and something should be done about it). He's trying to divest from his hedge fund Skybridge by selling his controlling interest, worth ~$120 million, to two firms: American investment firm RON Transatlantics, and Chinese firm HNA Capital. This despite the fact that HNA Capital is under
"some scrutiny for its opaque financial and ownership structure", which includes
a 9.92% stake in Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, in May 2017. The European Central Bank, a regulatory institution that watches over central banks in the eurozone, is reportedly considering opening an inquiry into HNA’s financial standing as a result of the company’s Deutsche ownership. Officials are worried that HNA’s capital is fueled by large loans from the Chinese state banks.
Then the current occupant of the White House gave a totally inappropriate speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree, turning it into a political rally in front of an audience who will not even be eligible to vote until at least 2021.
Then in the Senate,
Mitch McConnell tried again to remove the health care from at least 11 million people (and from as many as 32 million people), under the lie that Obamacare is "imploding", etc. Last night, the vote was scotched as every Democrat in the chamber and three Republicans -- including Lisa Murkowski (R, Alaska) and Susan Collins (R, Maine) -- decided to finally put the good of their countrymen and women ahead of this bizarre Obama Derangement Syndrome from which they've been suffering since 2008. McConnell was so eager to kill his fellow Americans that he dragged John McCain from his sickbed after his diagnosis of brain cancer to come and vote on this mess ("the skinny repeal") in the dead of night.
McCain mavericked outta there. Then on Thursday,
"Democrats and their allies off the Hill pushed back hard...after a report that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke threatened projects important to Alaska in retribution for Sen. Lisa Murkowski's vote against health care legislation."Later on that day,
Ryan Lizza (a reporter from the
New Yorker) revealed that the day before, the new WH Comms Director had gone on a rant to him, saying in part:
“What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the president’s agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people..." He told Lizza that he believed Priebus had been a confidential source to the New Yorker. Scaramucci threatened to fire all of the assistants to the president to smoke out leakers, and he said that Priebus would be resigning soon.
“Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said.
Scaramucci added that he was not seeking publicity for himself personally.
“I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he told the New Yorker. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president. I’m here to serve the country.”
Apparently, like his boss, he had forgotten that just because it was "a leak" didn't necessarily mean that what was leaked was not true. (To be the best of my recollection, none of the "leaks" from the current White House has ever been proven false, nor have they been denied.)
Speaking of his boss, earlier today, he went to Long Island, New York, and
gave a rambling speech (what else is new?) ostensibly about the fight against MS-13 gang members in which he said:
"One by one we're liberating our American towns. Can you believe that I'm saying that?...It's like I'd see in a movie. They're liberating a town, like in the old Wild West, right?"
"They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful, quite neighborhoods into blood-stained killing fields...They're animals. We cannot tolerate, as a society, the spilling of innocent, young, wonderful, vibrant people [sic] — sons and daughters, even husbands and wives."
"When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, 'Please don't be too nice.'"
In other words,
he's encouraging authorities to rough up undocumented immigrants and gang members suspected of committing crimes.In the past few minutes, three more pieces of news have come up.
One, via Twitter, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus has been replaced by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. (Sarah Huckabee Sanders claims that this had nothing to do with Scaramucci's earlier rant.)
Two, Scaramucci's 2nd wife, Deidre Bell, has filed for divorce after three years.
According to The New York Post:
One source told Page Six, "Deidre has left him and has filed for divorce. She liked the nice Wall Street life and their home on Long Island, not the insane world of D.C. She is tired of his naked ambition, which is so enormous that it left her at her wits’ end. She has left him even though they have two children together.”
...The source said, “Deidre is not a fan of [the current occupant of the White House], and she hasn’t exactly been on board and supportive of Anthony and his push to get back into the White House.”
The friend added, “Anthony is focusing on his chi!dren, his work for the president and the American people. There is nothing more important to him.
“I don’t know who Deidre thought she was marrying but anyone who knows Anthony knows he’s an ambitious man.”
And three:
Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was murdered in Washington, DC, on the eve of a planned meeting with the US Justice Department, according to two FBI agents whose assertions cast new doubts on the US government’s official explanation of his death.
Mikhail Lesin’s battered body was discovered in his Dupont Circle hotel room on the morning of Nov. 5, 2015, with blunt-force injuries to the head, neck, and torso. After an almost yearlong "comprehensive investigation," a federal prosecutor announced last October that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of **93** falls “after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.” His death was ruled an "accident," and prosecutors closed the case.
But the two FBI agents — as well as a third agent and a serving US intelligence officer — said Lesin was actually bludgeoned to death. None of these officials were directly involved in the government’s investigation, but they said they learned about it from colleagues who were.
“Lesin was beaten to death,” one of the FBI agents said. “I would implore you to say as much. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can't get into.”