February 7, 2020

The Trump Revenge-a-Thon Is Proceeding Apace

Sen. Lindsey Graham used to be a good friend of Joe Biden's. But that was pre-Trump. Now he won't rest until he's destroyed Joe Biden's son.Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

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Yahoo News reports that Ukrainegate is far from over:

The Treasury Department has complied with Republican senators’ requests for highly sensitive and closely held financial records about Hunter Biden and his associates and has turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them, according to a leading Democrat on one of the committees conducting the investigation.

….Sens. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee; Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; and Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have focused their efforts in Washington, seeking to extract politically useful information from agencies of the U.S. government. They’ve issued letters requesting records from Cabinet departments and agencies, including the State Department, the Treasury, the Justice Department, the FBI, the National Archives and the Secret Service.

Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement — highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering.

The Treasury Department has complied with the Republican requests in nearly record time. Meanwhile, when it comes to records about Donald Trump that Treasury is legally required to turn over, they’ve told Democrats to “pound sand,” as Sen. Ron Wyden puts it. Welcome to America, our planet’s newest banana republic.

It’s worth noting that this is how Trump works: even if he can’t wreak his vengeance directly on you, he’ll find someone close to you instead. Mitt Romney better watch out for this. He might be personally unassailable, but are his kids? His cousins? His friends? If you don’t think that Donald Trump is looking into this already, you are just hopelessly naive.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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