Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Thank God This Isn't a Leap Year

Rich Galen

Thursday January 4, 2017

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Yesterday was Day 3 of 2018. Today is Day 4. There are 361 days to go. I don't know how many more days like yesterday we can absorb.
There was Donald Trump comparing the size of his nuclear button with the size of North Korea's Kim Jong-un's nuclear button size. (Trump's is bigger).
Was that a sexual reference? Yeah. It probably was. Trump is from Queens and that's the way people from Queens roll and we've seen this before.
To be fair, Trump was responding to a taunt from Kim Jong-un suggesting he could launch a nuclear missile with the press of a button. He can't.
With their usual sense of humor when it comes to Trump, much of the media rushed its defense experts to the fore to explain that there is no button for him to push in the Oval Office, either.
Then there was former Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Justice Department and Robert Mueller claiming Mueller's investigation into, and indictment for alleged financial misdeeds is outside the scope of what the Special Counsel's office was charged with examining.
The Washington Post quoted a Justice Department spokesperson as saying, "The lawsuit is frivolous, but the defendant is entitled to file whatever he wants." The Post also pointed out that the suit "comes amid Republican allegations of partisan bias among members of Mueller's team."
Wait! We're only just getting started.
Donald Trump has steadfastly claimed that were it not for the three-plus-million votes cast by illegal aliens he would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.
To prove this, he appointed a special commission to investigate voter fraud. States - even states led by Republican Governors - refused to share their voter files with the commission which had no legal way to compel cooperation.
The voter fraud commission couldn't help Trump's case so, yesterday, he disbanded it.
Just so you know, here is the final popular vote result from the Federal Election Commission;
Clinton: 65,853,516 (48.18%)
Trump: 62,984,825 (46.09%)
Johnson: 4,489,221 (3.28%)
Hillary Clinton got 2,868,691 more votes than Donald Trump nationally. However, she beat Trump by 4,269,978 in California alone, so Trump did beat her head-to-head in the aggregate of the other 49 states.
Unfortunately, California's votes counted, so …
But even that wasn't the big news of the day. That award goes to excerpts from a new book by New York based reporter Michael Wolff.
Wolff's Twitter bio reads:
Columnist--USA Today, Vanity Fair, Hollywood Reporter, British GQ, New York Magazine, the Guardian
He has written a book that will be officially released next Tuesday that is not all that kind to Donald J. Trump. He heavily quotes - or at least heavily leans on - Steve Bannon who has turned on Donald J. Trump and all of the rest of the Trump family.
On the infamous meeting with Russians in Trump Tower, the New York Times (which "obtained" a copy of the book) quotes Wolff's discussion with Bannon as:
"suggesting that Donald Trump Jr.; Jared Kushner, his brother-in-law; and Paul Manafort, then the campaign chairman, had been 'treasonous' and 'unpatriotic' for meeting with Russians after being promised incriminating information on Hillary Clinton during a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor - with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers,"
Bannon was happy to claim credit for Trump's electoral college victory. He got himself appointed "Chief Strategist" for the Trump Administration and quickly moved to do things way out of his lane like the Executive Order establishing the first travel ban that was quickly tossed out by Federal courts.
Bannon was in many Oval Office photos. He was on Air Force One. He was in the front row at public events.
Bannon got fired in August 2017, apparently as part of Chief of Staff John Kelly's continuing efforts to bring order to the West Wing.
The President responded quickly and with justifiable fury. In a statement, Trump said of Bannon:
"When he got fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind."
Thank God this isn't a leap year. I'm not sure I could take 362 more days like this.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Lots of great stuff. Links to the nuclear button story, to the Paul Manafort lawsuit, to the voter fraud commission, to Steve Bannon and to the President's statement about Bannon. P>The Mullfoto is a screengrab of the Japanese horror movie Rodan from Turner Classic Movies.

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