Marcinkova, 29, is now a pilot and the chief executive of Aviloop, a website selling discounted flying lessons and other deals related to aviation. Kellen, 34, states that she is the owner of SLK Designs, a renovations firm.
However according to public records, both businesses have operated from addresses in a building on East 66th Street in Manhattan majority-owned by Epstein’s brother Mark, a wealthy property magnate.
…Marcinkova’s company is officially registered with New York authorities at the building. Import records show that Kellen’s company takes deliveries there.
Amongst all of this horror it seems crass to mention i,t as if it diminishes the depravity of what the man has done, but it’s just so weird:
Various news profiles over the years have speculated about how he made his vast fortune, calling him an “International Moneyman of Mystery’’ and “The Talented Mr. Epstein.’’
This much is known: He got his start on Wall Street after being offered a job by the father of one of his students. At Bear Stearns, he became a derivative specialist, applying complex math formulas and computer algorithms to evaluate financial data and trends.
He then struck out on his own.
…He has never been in the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, largely because the magazine has never been able to determine the source [emphasis: mine] or the size of his wealth.
…A former business partner, Steven Hoffenberg, sued him in 2016, claiming that Epstein was the mastermind behind a $500 million Ponzi scheme that Hoffenberg was imprisoned for in 1995.
But deceiving Trump into, in all likelihood, parroting Manafort’s lies in his written answers to Mueller — which would also serve as evidence that Manafort was acting as a Trump spy within the investigation.
…That public airing will now come at a hearing wherein a judge will decide whether Manafort has indeed broken his plea deal as Mueller alleged in a Monday United Stated District Court filing. At that hearing, Mueller’s team of prosecutors will reveal their evidence that Manafort has been untruthful with them – and to do so they must show their evidence of collusion, if indeed that was the subject of Manafort’s alleged lies.
…Mueller is believed to have already handed down “dozens” of sealed indictments in the case — indictments which because they are in the court system are now beyond Whitaker’s control.
Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them. That means they didn’t really need his testimony, at all. It also means they had no need to keep secrets — they could keep giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors, all while reporting misleading information to Trump that he could use to fill out his open book test. Which increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers to those questions full of lies.
And that “detailed sentencing submission … sett[ing] forth the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies” that Mueller mentions in the report?
There’s your Mueller report, which will be provided in a form that Matt Whitaker won’t be able to suppress. (Reminder: Mueller included 38 pages of evidence along with Manafort’s plea agreement, which I argued showed how what Manafort and Trump did to Hillary was the same thing that Manafort had done to Yulia Tymoshenko.)
“Anything from cybersecurity, biosecurity, information technology and privacy issues are all things the government now has the responsibility to be worried about,” she says. “Those are all things that scientific and technical backgrounds can be used for.”
…She is one of the nine STEM-related professionals – one senator and eight members of the House of Representatives — voted into office during the 2018 midterms. All are Democrats except for one Republican and the cohort includes an ocean scientist, an aerospace engineer, a software engineer and a biochemist.
Not that I have much confidence that it will making a fucking bit of difference in terms of our domestic approach to climate change and keeping petroleum products and chemicals out of the ocean and other waterways and keeping our seafood and water supplies from becoming contaminated with toxicity and poisons but it’s a start. And a start is a good thing.
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
“Following the defendant’s sentencing, he made a variety of public statements that appear to be inconsistent with his stated acceptance of responsibility at sentencing,” they wrote.
In one instance prosecutors pointed to, Papadopoulos tweeted from his public Twitter account that the FBI’s investigation was “the biggest case of entrapment!” The next day, Papadopoulos said he was considering withdrawing his guilty plea because he believed he was framed.
Several days later, he tweeted that he had been sentenced “while having exculpatory evidence hidden from me.”
…And on November 9, prosecutors wrote, Papadopoulos tweeted that his “biggest regret” was pleading guilty.
…His lawyers argued in their motion that he should be allowed to stay out of prison “pending appeal,” but Mueller’s office said there is no pending appeal in his case.
The Coast Guard has ordered the company responsible for an oil spill that has been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico for 14 years to clean up the environmental catastrophe or face a $40,000 per day fine.
…Taylor allowed a broken oil platform off the coast of southeast Louisiana to leak an estimated 10,500 gallons to 29,000 gallons of oil per day, five to 13 times larger than the government’s initial estimates.
…Taylor’s oil spill has been a source of concern for some time. The site — Mississippi Canyon-20, which lies south of the Mississippi River delta — took a hit from Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The storm wrecked Taylor’s platform and triggered the massive spill, resulting in years of legal back-and-forth between the company and the Interior Department, which has contended that Taylor has an obligation to fix the oil wells at the site.
…Taylor no longer produces oil and a trust account was established in 2008, which the government required in order to allow the company to decommission its wells. Nine of the 28 wells at the Mississippi delta site have been plugged and Taylor says it can’t reach the others without risking more spillage. The company now wants the rest of the $666 million trust to be returned to it, arguing it has done everything it can, but the Interior Department says Taylor needs to finish plugging the remaining wells.
Disgusting this was allowed to go on for 14 years. George Bush may not have liked black people but (sadly) BHO didn’t give a flying fuck about the Gulf Coast either.
$40,000 a day is chump change com paired to the long-term costs of cleaning it up. There should be criminal charges filed by this point.
Pluggin nine of twenty-eight well is not even close to “everything it can” do and it sure as shit doesn’t even get close to resolving the problems the company created by themselves. Make a mess? Clean it up. All up. Completely. Or face much more dire consequences than a fine to a trust fund should be the rule of law.
Ragland, 31, is both a court-appointed special advocate and a visitation supervisor, so his job is to oversee meetings between kids and the parents who have lost custody of them.
That’s what he was doing at the store — he was supervising an outing between a mother and her 12-year-old son. The boy wanted ice cream, so the three drove to Menchie’s, arrived together and had been sitting there for about half an hour, visiting, when Ragland looked up to find two police officers standing at the table.
Some Democrats are trying to stop the nomination and election of current party leader Nancy Pelosi. Their reasons are understandable, but not persuasive.
…In part, her unpopularity stems from her issue positions. Conservatives think she’s too progressive. Some among her caucus think she’s not progressive enough.
…Congress is unpopular. The institution has a 21% approval rating, while Republicans, Democrats, Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are all way underwater in the public opinion surveys. Which not only puts Pelosi’s rating into context, but also raises a pertinent question: How much more popular would another Democrat be?
…Despite her occasional stumbles, the Democrats have plenty of evidence that Pelosi is up to the task of leadership. Notice that she just led her party to massive gains in the midterm elections.
…She is the Democrat best equipped to handle the institution’s main job, the crafting of laws.
The Affordable Care Act is the prime example. Pelosi shepherded it to passage when many thought that it was dead. Whoever takes the gavel in January will need that kind of skill. The presidency and the Senate are in the hands of the opposite party. Negotiating with Senate Majority Leader McConnell will be a particularly daunting challenge. He may be unpopular, but he is formidable: An inexperienced newcomer would be at risk of being eaten alive.
…Not for nothing but some of the younger, more inexperienced Congresspeople who want the job don’t strike me all that savvy. Take Seth Moulton for example. It takes a special kind of idiot not to have any idea how badly a particular individual’s campaign will be received in the state right next door to you. …And make no mistake, he was a big part of the colossal mistake that was his school chum’s carpetbagger campaign for congress in New Hampshire this cycle. If he wasn’t aware of how poorly that would be received in his own backyard, what does that say about his ability to assess what is and what is not feasible in DC? I’ll answer that one for you. Not frigging much.
Chickenpox has taken hold of a school in North Carolina where many families claim religious exemption from vaccines.
Cases of chickenpox have been multiplying at the Asheville Waldorf School, which serves children from nursery school to sixth grade in Asheville, North Carolina. About a dozen infections grew to 28 at the beginning of the month. By Friday, there were 36, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported.
…Asheville Waldorf has one of the highest religious vaccination exemption rates in the state, according to data maintained by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.
The private school has a higher rate of exemption on religious grounds than all but two other North Carolina schools, the Citizen-Times reported. During the 2017-18 school year, 19 of 28 kindergartners were exempt from at least one vaccine required by the state. Of the school’s 152 students, 110 had not received the chickenpox vaccine, the newspaper reported.
Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules, according to people familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence.
…White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit.
…”There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign,” Evers said. “There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn’t know better. Clearly everyone joining the Trump administration should have been on high alert about personal email use.”
Ivanka Trump and her husband set up personal emails with the domain “ijkfamily.com” through a Microsoft system in December 2016, as they were preparing to move to Washington so Kushner could join the White House, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
The couple’s emails are prescreened by the Trump Organization for security problems such as viruses but are stored by Microsoft, the people said.
Trump used her personal account to discuss government policies and official business less than 100 times – often replying to other administration officials who contacted her through her private email, according to people familiar with the review.
Another category of less-substantive emails may have also violated the records law: hundreds of messages related to her official work schedule and travel details that she sent herself and personal assistants who cared for her children and house, they said.
…Her husband Jared Kushner’s use of personal email for government work drew intense scrutiny when it was first reported by Politico last fall. The revelation prompted demands from congressional investigators that Kushner preserve his records, which his attorney said he had.
But Trump had used her personal email for official business far more frequently, according to people familiar with the administration’s review – a fact that remained a closely held secret inside the White House.
…Trump used her private email to initiate official business.
In April 2017, she used her personal email to write to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s chief of staff, Eli Miller, suggesting that he connect with her chief of staff, Julie Radford. The email chain, obtained by American Oversight, was copied to Radford’s government account.
“It would be great if you both could connect next week to discuss [redacted],”she wrote. “We would love your feedback and input as we structure.”
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