Week of October 4 – October 10, 2019 • EAGLE NEWS MEDIA— A SECTION OF HOME REPORTER AND BROOKLYN SPECTATOR • 11
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OPINION BREAKFAST WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP
was honored to be a guest at last week’s breakfast with President Trump held at Cipriani’s on 42nd Street across from Grand Central. Considering that tickets for the sell-out event started at $2,800 per person and went as high as $35,000 for VIP entrance that included a picture with the president, it was a guest invite for me or I was having breakfast at the Dunkin Donuts on 76th Street in Bay Ridge. I was allowed to offer one ticket to a person of my choosing, so naturally I brought the Conservative Party’s Brooklyn Chairperson Fran Vella-Marrone. The president’s 25 minutes of generally humorous remarks had a serious point to them. As we all know, it was United Nations Week and he had been going back and forth to the UN or the
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U.S. Mission for meetings and events. He spoke to us about trade, foreign wars, U.S. troop commitments and his interactions with foreign leaders. He indicated that many foreign leaders have been surprised at his resolve on various issues. A case in point was rough conversations he has been having with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Apparently, the United States spends around $15 billion annually protecting South Korea. That runs the gamut from the cost of keeping tens of thousands of troops in country to direct spending on South Korean assets. In turn, the United States receives an approximately $500 million payment from South Korea. All this has apparently been going on for years. The president does not approve of this
arrangement, especially considering that South Korea is a rich nation. The president is looking for an increase from $500 million to $2 or $3 billion annually. President Trump told us, in what I would describe as colorful and humorous terms, of how incredulous Moon was at the thought that South Korea was being told that it would need to increase its reimbursements to the U.S. significantly. The United States and the president, not surprisingly, won the argument. The president did bring up the impeachment threat being made by the Democratic members of the House. In fact, the day before, Democratic members — including Max Rose — voted unanimously to move forward with an investigation aimed at supporting an impeachment
The president did bring up the impeachment threat being made by the Democratic members of the House. resolution. The president had a simple response. He pulled a handful of stapled pages out of his pocket and waved them to the crowd, indicating that he was holding a transcript of the conversation in question, and urged everyone to read it and draw their own conclusions. As you can imagine, traffic was a nightmare coming into Manhattan. I parked quite a few blocks away and simply walked over through what did not seem extensive security until we came upon
BLOWING THE WHISTLE
ast week, City Councilmember Joe Borelli urged President Trump to locate his presidential library on Staten Island, but it’s unclear if there will ever be a Trump presidential library. The 13 existing such National Archives-affiliated libraries store and make available presidential records, but sharing his records isn’t something President Trump is interested in. Dozens of times, the Trump administration has refused to release information requested by Congress through its constitutional oversight responsibility. And now, after the whistleblower complaint caused the president to share a transcript of the call with the Ukrainian president at the center of that controversy, we have learned that his administration has gone to great lengths to keep even more presidential
records hidden. In fact, it moved that same transcript of that call to the most secure computer server reserved only for the most classified state secrets. This call didn’t fit that definition, as evidenced by the fact that Trump ultimately released the transcript of the call to the public. News has broken that other calls, not normally moved to this server, were placed there as well. These were calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but further revelations are proving that, in this matter, a conspiracy is not a theory. Secretary of State Pompeo participated in the call in which President Trump pressured the Ukrainian leader to dig up dirt on his potential campaign adversary. President Trump and
Attorney General Barr have urged the governments of Australia, Ukraine, Italy and the U.K. to assist in contesting the fact that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. A Sept. 30 CBS News poll showed a dramatic change in support for an impeachment inquiry, with 55 percent now in favor, while 45 percent disapprove.
The president and his highest aides have been using the federal government to pressure multiple foreign nations to counter the conclusions of their own intelligence community, strictly for the purpose of benefiting his reelection campaign. The question of whether to move forward with an impeachment inquiry had heated up as the summer wore on. Due to the fact it
COMMON SENSE BY JERRY KASSAR Cipriani itself, which had the usual multiple security zones manned by the NYPD and the Secret Service. We were asked to arrive more than an hour before the president so everyone would have no problem getting into the event. When the president is in a building, the building is sealed with no one getting in or out. Even our cell phones were placed in locked holders so that we would not have access during the event, even to take pictures. The scene was different when we left. We were allowed out as soon as the president had entered his limo and was moving. Outside, we now found 42nd Street entirely closed from east to west, from the East River to Broadway. There were hundreds of police lining the route and what
appeared to be a very long motorcade coming together like a parade, with vehicles moving into the motorcade from side streets. Some of the vehicles were carrying what looked like heavily armed troops (they could have been a special heavy weapons Secret Service detail) in unmarked vans. There was a helicopter overhead and sanitation trucks blocking any street that was not being used by the motorcade. All this was to move the president maybe a handful of blocks. I guess it is all the drama that goes with the presidency, although I think it would be great if we could get back to a time when presidents, like Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy, walked with a handful of security personnel. That’s just a dream, I suspect.
MATTER OF FACT BY JAY BROWN
was a foregone conclusion that a Senate trial would not result in removal, many Democrats believed it risky, with the election just a year away. But, the past week has changed the calculus. A Sept. 30 CBS News poll showed a dramatic change in support for an impeachment inquiry, with 55 percent now in favor, while 45 percent disapprove. A Quinnipiac poll from the same day found that on the question of impeaching and removing the president, 47 percent approve and 47 percent disapprove, whereas just a week before there had been a 20-point gap. With more information becoming available, more support an inquiry. The inquiry itself will make even more known to the public.
W hen impeachment hearings against President Nixon began in 1974, only 38 percent of Americans supported them, versus 55 percent favoring them today in the case of President Trump. Nixon received 60 percent of all votes cast in the election held prior to the impeachment hearings, winning the electoral college 520-17. Trump was elected with 46 percent of the popular vote, winning the electoral college 304-227. This process should ultimately move forward because it is the right and just action to take, but if there are concerns over the fact that it is a political process and it may have political consequences, one need only look to 1974, when far fewer Americans supported beginning impeachment hearings against a president who had won his election with a far
more resounding victory. President Trump’s response to recent events has been, arguably, impeachable. He has said that if the process leads to his removal, Americans will have civil war. He has used the words “spies” and “treason” to refer to the whistleblower and a Congressional chairperson investigating him and pined for the “good old days” when “we used to handle it a little differently.” It is almost incomprehensible that we are living in an America in which the president openly states that he wishes he could execute a member of Congress and a whistleblower who brought attention to an offense he has admitted to committing. Future generations may read about this in a library, but it is highly unlikely it will be in a Trump presidential library on Staten Island.
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