Category Archives: Donald Trump

Former President Trump lashed out on Tuesday at the Club for Growth, a leading conservative group, after he was left off the guest list of its annual donor retreat.

In apost on his social media site, Truth Social, Trump ripped the group as the Club For NO Growth and recounted how his ties to the group fell apart after disagreements over his endorsements in high-profile races in Alabama and Ohio last year.

He also blasted the club for initially opposing his candidacy in 2016 before repeating his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him.

The Club For NO Growth, an assemblage of political misfits, globalists, and losers, fought me incessantly and rather viciously during my presidential run in 2016, Trump wrote. They said I couldnt win, I did, and won even bigger in 2020, with millions of more votes than 16, but the Election was Rigged & Stollen.

They asked to get together on Endorsements of candidates, we did, and had MANY WINS & NO losses. Relationship broke up over my Endorsement of certain great people in Alabama & Ohio. I won them all!

Trumps comments came after the Clubs president, David McIntosh, told reporters on Monday that the group had invited several prospective Republican presidential contenders to its annual donor retreat in Florida, but had left Trump off its list. Trump is so far the only declared candidate in the race.

Among those invited to the gathering are former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

Weve invited all of the folks listed here, McIntosh said. Not Trump. But weve invited the others.

While he hasnt announced whether he intends to run for the White House in 2024, DeSantis has emerged as an early favorite for the Republican nomination and perhaps the biggest threat to Trumps hopes of recapturing the White House.

Anew poll from the Club for Growthreleased on Monday showed DeSantis leading Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head 2024 primary match-up, with the Florida governor taking 49 percent of the vote to Trumps 40 percent.

McIntosh told reporters on Monday that he hoped to have DeSantis deliver one of the keynote speeches at the clubs donor retreat, but said that the Florida governor is still finalizing his schedule.

McIntosh also expressed concern about the GOPs prospects of winning the presidency in 2024 if Trump is once again the nominee, saying that Republicans should be open to another candidate.

McIntoshs comments and Trumps subsequent attack were the latest signs of just how bitter the relationship between Trump and the Club for Growth has become. While the Club initially opposed Trump in 2016, it eventually rallied to his side in the general election.

After he captured the White House, Trump and the Club formed something of a political alliance, coordinating endorsements in key races.

But things soured last year after Trump and the Club backed opposing candidates in the GOP Senate primary in Ohio. Trumps decision to rescind his endorsement of former Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) in Alabamas Republican Senate primary also caused friction between him and the Club, which continued to stand behind Brooks.

In November, on the eve of Trumps latest campaign launch, the Club for Growth released a batch of internal polling that showed DeSantis leading Trump among GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states that will kick off the Republican nominating contest next year.

Al Weaver contributed reporting.

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Trump rips Club for Growth after he wasnt invited to donor retreat

Briefers would also be willing to discuss Beijings similar operations in East Asia, South Asia and Europe over the last several years, the official said.

The proposal to brief the Trump officials is the latest development following the militarys shootdown of a Chinese spy balloon on Saturday, seven days after it entered U.S. airspace. Republicans and former Trump officials said this week that they would have downed the airship as soon as it appeared, and criticized President Joe Biden for waiting until the balloon was over water before bringing it down.

Yet on Saturday, a senior Defense Department official said that Chinese spy balloons entered American airspace three times during Trumps tenure and once before during the current administration. The administration officials didnt detail how they learned of those events long after they happened.

Still, it helps explain why five senior Trump administration officials POLITICO spoke with on Sunday said they were never told of such incidents occurring when they were in office. This never happened. It would have never happened, Trump told Fox News on Sunday.

Im not aware of a single civilian national security leader from the Trump administration who heard of this, a Trump administration national security official said.

But the difference between past instances and the one from last week, Defense Department officials said, is that those balloons never stayed above U.S. territory for a significant period of time. When pressed for specifics, such as the date, location and duration of those instances, Biden administration officials refused to provide them to POLITICO, citing the classified nature of that information.

Some officials did speak in generalities, however. DoD tracks hundreds of balloons every day, but they are typically not deemed a threat. Their presence close to or over the United States would not be brought to the attention of senior leaders unless their behavior was completely out of the ordinary, like this one, said one senior Pentagon official.

At lower levels, officials have tracked multiple instances of balloon activity over U.S. territories in recent years. One of the Trump-era balloons hovered over Guam, according to two U.S. officials. And in 2020, the intelligence community assessed that much smaller balloons detected off the coast of Virginia were Chinese radar-jamming devices, according to a former senior DoD official.

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a House Armed Services Committee member, tweeted Sunday that the Pentagon had informed his office that several Chinese balloon incidents have happened in the past few years - including over Florida.

Why werent they shot down? he added. And according to several Trump Admin national security officials - they were never informed of these intrusions by the Pentagon.

The other time a similar airship appeared with Biden in the White House was last February near Hawaii.

Those and potentially other events were seemingly not discovered in real-time. One senior administration official said the events went undetected.

Weve gotten better at detection over time, a second senior Biden administration official said, noting that those responsible for surveilling Chinese spy balloons can remain in government even with a new president in the Oval Office.

Before the Biden administrations new offer, Trump officials denied any of this ever happened. I dont ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States, Trumps second Defense Secretary Mark Esper told CNN on Friday.

This never happened in the first two years of the Trump administration, a former senior DoD official said. A senior Trump intelligence official said nothing like what transpired over the past week happened during all four years of the previous administration.

Bidens team has given no indication it will downgrade intelligence to make a public case that there were past examples of Chinese spy balloons above the U.S. from 2017 to 2021. At this point, all briefings will apparently take place behind closed doors.

In fact, all senators will receive a briefing on the just-downed vehicles flight on Feb. 15, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday.

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Biden admin offers to brief Trump officials on past Chinese spy balloon ...

1. DeSantis on Trump's attack: 'I don't spend my time trying to smear other Republicans'  POLITICO
2. DeSantis responds to Trump's latest attack: 'Don't spend my time trying to smear other Republicans'  ABC News
3. Well, Trump Is Now Suggesting Ron DeSantis Is a Pedophile  Rolling Stone

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DeSantis on Trump's attack: 'I don't spend my time trying to smear other Republicans' - POLITICO

1. Mark Pomerantz on investigating Donald Trump - 60 Minutes  CBS News
2. Indict Trump? Prosecutor who built NY case pressed on MSNBC  MSNBC
3. Trump Does Not React Well to Prosecutor Declaring He Should Be Indicted Immediately  Vanity Fair

Link:

Mark Pomerantz on investigating Donald Trump - 60 Minutes - CBS News

1. Trump Stages His Own State of the Union After Bidens Official Speech  The New York Times
2. Trump on Biden's State of the Union address: "Give him credit."  Slate
3. Donald Trump Responds to State of the Union Address  C-SPAN

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Trump Stages His Own State of the Union After Bidens Official Speech - The New York Times

Gaelen Morse/Reuters

Donald Trump tried to deny reports on Sunday that China launched spy balloons over the U.S. during his presidency, saying the claims were an attempt to deflect embarrassment over the half-week debacle.

Three other spy balloons have traveled over the continental U.S. in the past, officials told the Associated Press, including twice during the Trump administration. That has not stopped Trump and his acolytes, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, from claiming otherwise.

Video Shows Chinese Balloon Being Shot Down Over Atlantic Ocean

The Chinese Balloon situation is a disgrace, just like the Afghanistan horror show, and everything else surrounding the grossly incompetent Biden Administration. They are only good at cheating in elections, and disinformation, Trump said in a post on his social network Truth Social.

And now they are putting out that a Balloon was put up by China during the Trump Administration, in order to take the heat off the slow moving Biden fools. China had too much respect for TRUMP for this to have happened, and it NEVER did.

But U.S. officials said Saturday that the Chinese spy balloonwhich spawned the most-watched news event since last years Super Bowlwas not the first of its kind.

Still, that did not stop Trump from employing his tried-and-true line of defense: labeling facts he does not care for as fake news.

JUST FAKE DISINFORMATION! he wrote.

A senior administration official who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity, however, claimed that while a series of balloons did fly over the U.S., the previous occurrences were discovered after the Trump administration left office.

The source did not go into detail surrounding how the prior discoveries were made.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Donald Trump Tries to Deny That Spy Balloons Also Flew Over U.S. During ...

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New York prosecutors feared they would have to prove that Donald Trump was not "legally insane" as they investigated his business practices, according to an upcoming memoir by a lead attorney on the team.

"To rebut the claim that Trump believed his own 'hype,' we would have to show, and stress, that Donald Trump was not legally insane," lawyer Mark Pomerantz writes in the memoir, seen by The Daily Beast.

"Was Donald Trump suffering from some sort of mental condition that made it impossible for him to distinguish between fact and fiction?" he queries in the book.

Pomerantz said that lawyers advising the Manhattan District Attorney's office "discussed whether Trump had been spewing bullshit for so many years about so many things that he could no longer process the difference between bullshit and reality."

Pomerantz, a former special assistant district attorney, was recruited by then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. to work on the criminal investigation into Trump and his family businesses. He joined the team in February 2021.

He and another lawyer Carey Dunne quit in protest a year later, with Pomerantz citing his frustration with Vance's successor Alvin Bragg Jr. indicating he had doubts about plans to indict Trump.

Bragg has since ramped up the investigation into Trump's businesses and has revived an investigation into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.

The Daily Beast received an advance copy of the book "People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account," which is due to be released on Tuesday.

According to The Daily Beast, the book provides insight into how investigators put the case against Trump together and considered how to proceed with charging the former president.

In the book, Pomerantz says that he believes evidence proves Trump lied on financial documents and that he and Dunne believe this was the best way to prosecute Trump, according to The Daily Beast.

"The right way to proceed, we thought, was to bring felony charges based on the full panoply of false business records that Trump had helped to generate: the phony documents relating to the hush money payment and Michael Cohen's reimbursement, the false financial statements, the false accounting spreadsheets that were created to support the financial statements, and so forth," Pomerantz said.

In the book, Pomerantz also reportedly compares Trump to mob boss John Gotti, whose son Pomerantz once successfully prosecuted, according to The New York Times.

"He demanded absolute loyalty and would go after anyone who crossed him. He seemed always to stay one step ahead of the law," Pomerantz wrote of Trump.

"In my career as a lawyer, I had encountered only one other person who touched all of these bases: John Gotti, the head of the Gambino organized crime family."

A lawyer for Trump recently sent Pomerantz a letter threatening legal action over the book, according to The New York Times.

"If you publish such a book and continue making defamatory statements against my clients, my office will aggressively pursue all legal remedies," Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina said.

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Prosecutors worried they'd have to prove Donald Trump was not 'legally ...

Chinese officials claim the balloon is just for research and not spying, but its presence has some people, such as Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), worried that it is actually carrying bioweapons.

After the Pentagon decided against shooting down the balloon out of concerns of hurting people on the ground, Trump took to Twitter to suggest a plan that may not have been even slightly feasible as anything but red meat for his base.

Former President Donald Trumps eldest son advised Montana citizens to take matters into their own hands and shoot down the balloon themselves:

If Joe Biden and his administration are too weak to do the obvious and shoot down an enemy surveillance balloon perhaps we just let the good people of Montana do their thing I imagine they have the capability and the resolve to do it all themselves.

Yes, he asked Montana residents to shoot their guns in the air at a balloon, and many Twitter users felt obliged to note the idiocy of the suggestion.

Many also pointed out a nagging issue: The balloon is extremely high in the sky.

Some people noted that having bullets falling from the sky after failing to hit a balloon miles above might not be safe for bystanders.

Others pointed to the possibility that the balloon might be holding dangerous cargo.

And one person tweeted that Trumps plan proved he was indeed his fathers son.

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Donald Trump Jr.'s Solution To Chinese Balloon Gets Mocked | HuffPost ...

1. Club for Growth Distances Itself Further From Trump  The New York Times
2. Trumpism Without Trump  The Atlantic
3. Koch network plans to back a Republican -- other than Donald Trump -- in the 2024 presidential primary  CNN

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Club for Growth Distances Itself Further From Trump - The New York Times

Donald Trump Jr. decided not to let reality stop him from offering an impractical solution to that Chinese balloon currently flying over the skies of Montana.

Chinese officials claim the balloon is just for research and not spying, but its presence has some people, such as Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), worried that it is actually carrying bioweapons.

After the Pentagon decided against shooting down the balloon out of concerns of hurting people on the ground, Trump took to Twitter to suggest a plan that may not have been even slightly feasible as anything but red meat for his base.

Former President Donald Trumps eldest son advised Montana citizens to take matters into their own hands and shoot down the balloon themselves:

If Joe Biden and his administration are too weak to do the obvious and shoot down an enemy surveillance balloon perhaps we just let the good people of Montana do their thing I imagine they have the capability and the resolve to do it all themselves.

Yes, he asked Montana residents to shoot their guns in the air at a balloon, and many Twitter users felt obliged to note the idiocy of the suggestion.

Many also pointed out a nagging issue: The balloon is extremely high in the sky.

Some people noted that having bullets falling from the sky after failing to hit a balloon miles above might not be safe for bystanders.

Others pointed to the possibility that the balloon might be holding dangerous cargo.

And one person tweeted that Trumps plan proved he was indeed his fathers son.

See the article here:

Donald Trump Jr.'s Solution To Chinese Balloon Is Deservedly Mocked