BY BRIAN BEUTLER, STILL NOT PRIYANKA
& CROOKED MEDIA

Friday, May 25, 2018

—Stephen King on Vice President Mike Pence

THIS IS AMERICA

Customs and Border Patrol has begun implementing a Trump administration directive to split up families in immigration detention so that parents can be prosecuted while their children, in the words of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, are “put in foster care or whatever.”

In a separate act of comparable inhumanity and incompetence, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lost track of 1,500 of the unaccompanied minors it placed with U.S. sponsors, and it is suspected that some have ended up in the hands of human traffickers.

These stories are just two examples of the Trump administration’s abject cruelty to immigrants. On the same day a CBP agent shot and killed an unarmed Guatemalan woman, the Washington Post published a deep dive on Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who supports all of Trump’s immigration policies. The report includes an anecdote about an Oval Office meeting last year between Trump, Jared Kushner, and Stephen Miller, where Trump mimicked his campaign rallies by making up Hispanic-sounding names and accusing the fictional immigrants of being rapists and murderers. Kushner and Miller laughed. We hope he enjoys a taco bowl with his new invisible friends.

It was just last week that Trump called immigrants “animals,” then pretended he was only talking about MS-13 gang members. Many media outlets and pundits were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and some (cough, Associated Press, cough) corrected their stories. We wonder if they regret that decision today.

For those wondering what they can do about these monstrous policies, the only answer is this: Vote the people who came up with it and support it out of office, and demand that the people we replace them with devise and enforce a humane immigration policy.

After canceling the Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un yesterday, Trump seems to have sellers remorse and now he (and James Mattis) say it might be back on. Kim is still game, too. If you’re a nonproliferation expert, the technical term for this is “goat rodeo.” If you’re Don Jr., it’s “The Art of The Deal baby!!!”

Trump rang in the holiday weekend by kicking government employees in the teeth. He issued three executive orders that made it easier to fire civil servants, limited the amount of time workers can get paid for union work, and directed agencies to negotiate tougher union contracts.  

Harvey Weinstein turned himself in to the NYPD this morning, and will face one first-degree rape charge, one third-degree rape charge, and one first-degree criminal sexual act charge stemming from incidents in 2004 and 2013 that involved two different women. Weinstein has plead not guilty.  

When we learned earlier this week that Donald Trump, Jr. held an August 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Saudi-Emirati agent and an Israeli private intelligence operative, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) noticed it conflicted with Don Jr.’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee—and lying to Congress is a crime. Coons wants the committee’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), to haul Jr. back before the committee in public. Another option would be to refer him to the FBI for making false statements—something Grassley did to Christopher Steele (author of the pee-tape dossier) on a much, much flimsier basis.

A couple from Puerto Rico was denied a room at a Motel 6 in California because the front desk clerk said their Puerto Rican drivers’ licenses weren’t valid U.S. identification. Fun and apparently really fucking obscure fact: Puerto Ricans are Americans.

The Russian oligarch who funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Michael Cohen for “real estate advice” also met with Cohen at Trump tower days before the election to talk about Russia-U.S. relations. Once upon a time, Trump et al denied having any contacts with Russians. But it turns out his personal lawyer had some. As did his son. And his son in law. His campaign chairman, too. And his deputy campaign manager. Oh, and his national security adviser. Also the guy who became attorney general. George Papadopoulos as well. But that’s it. (Well, not counting Carter Page.)

A Georgia jury has ordered a security company to pay 20-year-old Hope Cheston $1 billion, six years after an apartment guard whom the firm employed raped her. The security company is called Crime Prevention Agency.

Bucks star Sterling Brown says he wants to hold Milwaukee police accountable for tackling and tasing him for no reason in an incident that was caught on camera earlier this year. Milwaukee’s police chief apologized to Brown yesterday. Nothing to protest here, amirite NFL?

“Our reporting shows members of President Trump’s inner circle, including [Rudy] Giuliani and [John] Bolton, have deep ties to an Iranian group that was once classified as a terrorist organization,” according to NBC’s Richard Engel. Cool. Totally normal.  

Netflix canceled the U.K. leg of its Arrested Development publicity tour after the show’s male stars acted like huge dicks during a roundtable interview with the New York Times, in which their co-star Jessica Walter opened up about being harassed by Jeffrey Tambor.

"What I did for those 100 days was, I would literally wake up, I’d see all that stuff [on Twitter], and then I’d say to myself, ok what is one thing that I’m grateful for today?”

—Diana Butler Bass to With Friends Like These host Ana Marie Cox on coping in the early days of the Trump administration.

Listen →

“In 1999, Scott Pruitt, then an Oklahoma state senator, introduced a bill to grant men ‘property rights’ over unborn fetuses, requiring women to obtain the would-be father’s permission before aborting a pregnancy. Pruitt, now the embattled administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, submitted the legislation again in 2005.”

Scott Pruitt: Somehow, the corruption isn’t the worst of it!

Facebook wants its content moderators to know it doesn’t “allow praise, support and representation of white supremacy as an ideology.” Emphasis in the original. But in case any of those moderators are confused, they are also advised that Facebook does “allow praise, support and representation of white nationalism as an ideology [and] white separatism as an ideology,” according to internal documents leaked to Motherboard.

Since this newsletter was super heavy, here’s a story about 20 great Americans who helped a dog get home to his family.

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