Federal investigators are looking into a professional relationship former Trump lawyer and hair dye spokesmodel Rudy Giuliani had with a Romanian businessman living in the United States who had paid him to lobby the Romanian government to overturn a fraud conviction, Politico reports.

Giuliani was retained by a firm established by former FBI director Louis Freeh to write a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis to urge Iohannis to dismiss the findings of Romania’s National Anticorruption Directorate, whose work Giuliani claimed was rife with false accusations and bogus convictions. Freeh had hired to work on behalf of a Romanian national living in the London, Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu. Popoviciu owns a number of Pizza Hut and KFC franchises, as well as locations of foreign hotel chains in Romania. He was suspected of fraud for getting land in north Bucharest at a below-market price, and then building a shopping mall, car dealerships and luxury offices on the site, which also houses the US embassy. Already being investigated for corrupt ties to Ukraine and for failing to register as a foreign agent in the United States, Giuliani has claimed that he “never, ever represented a foreign national” and that his business contracts state explicitly that he won’t work for foreign entities. While Popoviciu was being investigated by the Romanian government, he reportedly retained Hunter Biden, a lawyer, to represent him, but Biden dropped the relationship before Giuliani joined in 2018. Giuliani has frequently lambasted Biden for his connections to foreigners.

Huffington Post: “A militant Donald Trump supporter whose photo is featured on an FBI wanted list because he was caught on video battling with police officers at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 attended a political event last week for a Trump-loving Pennsylvania politician who backed the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The event’s headliner: Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who called for ‘trial by combat’ during his speech on Jan. 6 and whose phones and computers were seized in a Justice Department investigation last month.”

“Samuel Lazar, who is Capitol suspect No. 275 on the FBI website, posed for photos alongside right-wing Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) at the May 15 event headlined by Giuliani. A tipster sent the photos to HuffPost after spotting them on Facebook. Both Mastriano and Lazar were at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, though Mastriano claimed he left when he realized the protest was no longer peaceful. Mastriano, whose campaign spent thousands of dollars on buses to bring people to D.C. on Jan. 6, later issued a statement saying those who violated the law must be prosecuted. Mastriano’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Politicians, of course, take photos with people they don’t vet all the time. Yet it illustrates how, even as some conservatives attempt to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 and spread new conspiracy theories about who was really behind the insurrection, the people who actually violently participated in the attack – and in fact instructed the mob with a bullhorn – are still deeply ingrained in the Trump coalition.”

“A lot of these defendants – and I’m going to use this colloquial term, perhaps disrespectfully – but they’re all fucking short-bus people, These are people with brain damage, they’re fucking retarded, they’re on the goddamn spectrum. But they’re our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors, our coworkers – they’re part of our country. These aren’t bad people, they don’t have prior criminal history. Fuck, they were subjected to four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the world has not seen since fucking Hitler” – QAnon Shaman’s attorney Albert Watkins, quoted by Talking Points Memo on arguing mitigating factors in plea agreements for Capitol rioters.

The North Carolina deputies who shot and killed Andrew Brown, Jr. as he drove away from them as they tried to serve an arrest warrant were justified in their use of force, Pasquotank County District Attorney announced Tuesday, CNN reports.

District Attorney R. Andrew Womble said that Brown attempted to strike two of the officers with his vehicle as he fled the scene.  Brown was struck by five bullets, including one in the back of the head.  Witnesses said his car was “riddled” with bullet holes.

Womble showed 34 seconds of police bodycam footage of the shooting, showing Brown in the car trying to flee the officers.  He does not strike any of them as he maneuvers his vehicles out of a streetside parking spot.  As he turns the car into the street, two officers are positioned about 10 to 15 feet in front of his car, when he begins to drive.  One officer does not move as Brown tried to drive away, leaving himself in the path of the car, which was directed at the road when police start shooting. 

David Frum, The Atlantic: “Two questions have dominated politics throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Democrats and public-health experts have asked: What should we do? Former President Donald Trump, for his part, minimized the need to act. He instead spoke incessantly about a very different question: Whom should we blame? ‘In recent months, our nation and the world has been hit by the once-in-a-century pandemic that China allowed to spread around the globe. They could have stopped it, but they allowed it to come out,’ Trump said as he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination in August 2020. ‘It’s China’s fault. It should have never happened,’ he said at a presidential debate with Joe Biden in September 2020. ‘We built the greatest economy in the world; it was horribly interrupted by something that should have never happened, came in from China – the plague. The plague from China,’ he said on Fox and Friends on the morning of Election Day.”

“There are hundreds of similar examples from the president and his inner circle. In November 2020, a solid majority of American voters decided that the first of the two questions – What should we do?­ – was more urgent, and that Biden and his party offered the better answer. But now that Biden’s administration is succeeding at bringing the pandemic under control within the United States, Trump’s preferred alternative question – Whom should we blame? – is reclaiming attention.”

“Trump’s question was of course, from the beginning, politically motivated. He and his supporters hoped that if enough Americans blamed China for creating the problem, that blame would somehow exonerate Trump from so callously mismanaging it. More than that: Trump and his supporters hoped that if enough Americans blamed China for creating the problem, they would agree that he ranked as its most pitiable victim. As Gabriel Sherman reported for Vanity Fair in May 2020: As he headed into Memorial Day weekend… ‘He was just in a fucking rage,’ said a person who spoke with Trump late last week. ‘He was saying, ‘This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!’ The public’s rejection of Trump’s attempt to deploy blame as an excuse does not, however, make the question go away.”

Financial services juggernaut Bank of America, the largest commercial bank in the United States with more than $3 trillion in assets, announced Tuesday that it will increase its minimum wage for all employees to $25 per hour, CNN reports.

The announcement comes as Democrats push for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, a change that will be implemented over the next four years.  The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour, or roughly $15,200 annually for someone who works 40 hours per week and doesn’t take a single vacation day.

“It costs us a few hundred million dollars a year … but it’s an investment,” the bank’s CEO Brian Moynihan said, adding that it’s about maintaining a “great standard of living for our teammates.”

Being woke is a religious cult.

Bowing to the false god of social, racial, and climate justice in the freest country in the world is a fools pursuit.

It leads to devastating socialism and communism, or some awful form of both.

George Soros is the father of it and he funds it.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 18, 2021

Damon Linker, The Week: “Donald Trump’s presidency was a product of the country’s political polarization, but Trump himself pushed that polarization much further than it was before he took office. His actions during his final weeks in the White House – above all, his denial of his own loss in the 2020 election and his incitement of the insurrection against Congress’ formal certification of electoral votes on Jan. 6 – brought the country to the brink. But the brink of what? Most liberals and progressives assume we were facing a coup that would have kept Trump in office in defiance of both the popular and Electoral College vote. That would have overturned American democracy in favor of a form of authoritarianism. But that wouldn’t have been the end of the story. It would have been the beginning – the start of a series of events that culminated in something that looks much more like a second American civil war. That is the ominous possibility that we need to keep in mind as we advance toward turbulent elections of the future.”

“The chilling events of Jan. 6 were made possible by profoundly deep differences between Democrats and Republicans – not over policy or morals, but over reality itself. That was Trump’s decisive contribution to our civic breakdown. On top of the substantive partisan disagreements that have piled up over the decades, Trump built on and radicalized the polemical style of right-wing media, combining it with the lies and intentional distortions of a well-practiced conman who considers it unacceptable ever to concede a loss. Long-standing, low-grade paranoia on the right about voter fraud now became an outright conspiracy theory denying that any result other than a victory for Trump could be considered legitimate. That got us to the insurrection on Capitol Hill. But the events that followed – dozens of Republicans voting against certification of state electoral votes, Trump’s continued denial of his own loss, the bulk of his party in Congress punishing the few daring to call out the former president’s Big Lie, polls indicating that the Republican base continues to believe in it, and state election officials who certified Biden’s victory being replaced by Trump loyalists – show that the story isn’t over.”

“Florida Rep. Val Demings is planning to run for the U.S. Senate, rather than governor, providing Democrats with a big-name candidate to take on Republican Sen. Marco Rubio next year. For months, Demings mulled which statewide office to pursue, but decided she could do the most good by taking on the two-term senator, according to several Democrats familiar with her thinking. ‘I would’ve supported her running for governor, but this is the right fit for her and for us,’ said Alex Sink, a former Florida chief financial officer who narrowly lost her 2010 bid for governor against Rick Scott, who is now a senator. ‘She’s going to draw a contrast between who she is and how she represents Florida vs. Marco Rubio, who a lot of people where I live never see him'” Politico reports.

“Sink said she was recently on a Zoom call with Demings and activists with Ruth’s List, the Florida-based organization dedicated to electing women who support abortion rights, and it was clear that she and national Democrats felt she would represent the party’s best chance to put Republicans on defense as they try to take back the U.S. Senate. Demings, 64, was first elected to the House in 2016 from Orlando and held the distinction of being the city’s first Black woman police chief. She rose to national prominence as the only non-lawyer on the first House impeachment committee to charge President Donald Trump with wrongdoing. As a Black woman and law enforcement officer, her background made her uniquely situated to be a national Democratic spokesperson for policing and race issues – it helped catapult her to President Joe Biden’s shortlist as a possible running mate in 2020. A top adviser to Demings compared her personal biography to Rubio this way: ‘She’s the daughter of a maid and a janitor who became the first Black woman police chief in Orlando. He’s the son of a maid and a bartender who’s a career politician.'”

“Andrew Giuliani, the son of former New York City Mayor and former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, formally announced his bid for governor of New York Tuesday, saying he will ‘fight’ to make the state the ‘greatest’ in the country. ‘I’m in,’ Giuliani told Fox News Tuesday, confirming he is launching a bid to take on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2022. ‘New York deserves a leader who will fight to make it the greatest state in America once again,’ Giuliani said. ‘If New Yorkers choose to elect me Governor, I will bring New York back from the precipice of ruin to the shining STATE on the hill once again!’ He added: ‘I think it will be the fight of the century'” – Fox News.

“In response to lawsuit filed by Swalwell, lawyers for Rudy Giuliani argued in a court filing that the personal lawyer to the President hadn’t literally advocated for an insurrection when he told Trump supporters on January 6 to engage in ‘combat'” reports CNN’s Manu Raju.

https://youtu.be/HlU6hzKSDSE

Colorado Congresswoman (and person who thinks The Flintstones was a documentary) Lauren Boebert (Q-CO) tells a no-name Newsmax guest host desperately trying to co-opt Tucker  psychopathic laugh that she’s going to be Speaker of the House one day, and she’ll take out the metal detectors members are required to pass through to get to the chamber.

Boebert refused to say whether she carries a gun around the Capitol, but said she acts as her own security, to which the Carlson wannabe laughs WAY too hard.

While it largely went through 2020 with the coronavirus contained, Japan has seen two significant waves of the virus sweep through the nation, causing consumer spending to plunge and its economy to shrink 5.6% in the first quarter, the Associated Press reports.

Through most of 2020, Japan recorded fewer than 800 coronavirus cases per day.  The number of cases started to rise steadily in November, hitting a peak of 7,800 in early January, when the nation implemented strict lockdowns.  The trend lowered over the succeeding three months to mid-March.

However, as restrictions were lifted, a new wave of infections swept the country, again peaking at 7,800 just a week ago.  Now, much of Japan has been under a state of emergency, centered around early closures of restaurants and bars, to curb the spread of the virus at places where crowds gather.

https://youtu.be/enCffkFuFwc

Man without intelligence (and person who’s just burning the cocaine that’s stored in his fat cells, allegedly) Donald Trump, Jr. took to a Fox News Propaganda Hour to boast about how funny he was in saying President Joe Biden isn’t the next FDR, but instead is the next Jimmy Carter.

“Twitter started trending,” Junior hyper-dramatized.  “‘Donald Trump doesn’t understand that Jimmy Carter’s a nice guy.’  I go, no, no, no, you don’t understand is basic history.  You’re totally missing stagflation.  You’re missing the hostage crisis.  You’re missing a disastrous presidency.”

On the day Americans are due to have their tax returns filed, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden released their taxes, the first time in four years the President made his taxes public, reinstating a transparency that the previous administration blocked after more than 40 years, NBC News reports.

Reporting an annual income of $607,633 for the year, the Bidens paid $162,063 in federal taxes, putting their effective tax rate at 25.9%.  The majority of their income came from pension and retirement plans.  Another $200,000 came from a private corporation set up by the Bidens through which speaking fees were collected, while Dr. Biden received just over $12,000 from her teaching job.

The previous administration refused to release Donald Trump’s personal or corporate taxes, claiming that Trump’s taxes were under audit, even though there is no issue with a person publicly releasing their submitted tax returns.

Business Insider: “Each year of his presidency, Donald Trump donated his $400,000 annual salary to make good on his campaign promise that he wouldn’t keep taxpayer cash if elected. But Trump has been receiving a federal pension since he left office in January, a spokesperson for the General Services Administration confirmed to Insider on Monday. Through May 14, Trump had received $65,600 from a GSA fund that pays for former presidents’ pensions, the spokesperson said. Trump’s net worth is estimated at $2.4 billion. Since receiving the taxpayer-funded payments, it’s unclear what Trump has done with the money – kept it, donated it, or something else.”

“Trump spokesman Jason Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the former president’s pension payments. The US Constitution requires presidents to receive a salary while in office but does not require former presidents to take a pension. Former presidents’ are entitled to pensions under a law called the Former Presidents Act. Their pay is equal to the salary of Cabinet secretaries, which is $221,400 in 2021.”

“The Republican-dominated Maricopa County board of supervisors Monday denounced an ongoing audit of the 2020 vote as a ‘sham’ and a ‘con,’ calling on the GOP-led state Senate to end the controversial recount that has been championed by former president Donald Trump. In a fiery public meeting and subsequent letter to state Senate president Karen Fann, the board members said the audit has been inept, promoted falsehoods and defamed the public servants who ran the fall election. Calling the process a ‘spectacle that is harming all of us,’ the five members of board – including four Republicans – asked the state Senate to recognize that it is essential to call off the audit, which officials have said is only about one quarter complete. ‘It is time to make a choice to defend the Constitution and the Republic,’ they wrote, adding: ‘We stand united together to defend the Constitution and the Republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for the truth.’ In a calculated show of unity, they were joined by the Maricopa’s other elected officials: the sheriff, a Democrat, and the Republican county recorder, who leads the elections office. ‘Our state has become a laughingstock,’ the county officials wrote. ‘Worse, this ‘audit’ is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.'”

“The pushback by Maricopa County officials amounts to their most vehement protest yet of the recount, which began in late April and is being conducted in Phoenix by a private Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive has previously echoed Trump’s false allegations that fraud tainted the 2020 election. Jointly, the county officials agreed that they would refuse to attend a meeting that had been called Tuesday by Fann to discuss what she had termed ‘serious issues’ with the vote that Cyber Ninjas claims to have identified. ‘I will not be responding to any more requests from this sham process. Finish your audit and be ready to defend what you’re finding in a court of law,’ said Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers (R), at the public meeting” – Washington Post.

CBS News: “President Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday night, their second phone call since Saturday. The president is expressing support for a ceasefire, which comes as fellow Democrats are urging him to do more to stop the violence. According to the readout of the call, Mr. Biden ‘reiterated his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks.’ Mr. Biden also ‘encouraged Israel to make every effort to ensure the protection of innocent civilians.’ Mr. Biden ‘expressed his support for a ceasefire and discussed U.S. engagement with Egypt and other partners towards that end,’ the readout said. Additionally, the readout said the two leaders agreed that they and their teams would remain in close touch.”

Jewish lives matter.

So tell your terrorists buddies in Hamas to stop bombing them.#JihadSquad https://t.co/qyOiYQ1I69

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 17, 2021