On Sunday, as I was having flashbacks to 2003 and stress-eating way too many KitKats, Donald Trump tweeted out that he’d just love to commit some war crimes. Namely, the war crime of destroying important cultural sites in Iran.
During an interview on Sunday evening, he reiterated his passion for committing war crimes. “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people,” he told the New York Times. “And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”
As Vox wrote, “[N]o matter what the president wants to target specifically, he’s threatening to hit some kind of location frequented by civilians with no military value, practically the textbook definition of a war crime.”
[Washington Post/New York Times/Vox]
Reporter Andrea Bernstein has written a book about the Kushners, and an excerpt published in the New Yorker shares some extremely interesting details about Jared Kushner’s family, especially his crime guy father Charles. Namely, that Charles attempted to pay his friend Jimmy O’Toole to hire a sex worker named Susanna to entrap the husband of his sister Esther, whom he believed was working with then-federal prosecutor Chris Christie to bring him down. Some of these details have been written about elsewhere, but what is new (to me at least!) is that Charles was already acquainted with Susanna and would regularly “avail himself of Susanna’s services,” as Bernstein delicately puts it.
More from the New Yorker:
It wasn’t a coincidence that Charlie had told Jimmy O’Toole to call Susanna and tell her he was a “friend of John’s.” Prosecutors learned that, for years, Charlie had been living a double life, using the pseudonym John Hess to travel to Manhattan and avail himself of Susanna’s services, seven people with knowledge of Charlie’s activities told me.
John Hess!
- Speaking of flashbacks, it’s Judith Miller, back to torment us with her warmongering and her bad haircut.
- Does Benjamin Netanyahu even want the Rapture to happen?
- Meanwhile, Iranian Americans traveling back into the U.S. are now being detained and questioned by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. [Politico]
- Hey, remember Donald Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial? War Mustache, also known as John Bolton, is now saying he’s willing to testify before the Senate if he’s subpoenaed, which, fat chance of sentient corpse Mitch McConnell letting that happen! Really sticking his neck out there, isn’t he. [HuffPost]
- Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke to New York magazine about her first year in office. And while there are lots of headline-grabbing tidbits in the article, such as her characterization of conservative Democrats as the “Tea Party of the left,” I was personally most interested in what she had to say about how her life has changed since her election, namely that at home, there’s been “a shift in chores” between her and her boyfriend. Give us the goss that we want! [New York]
- In news that brings me no small amount of joy, Andrew Yang’s campaign made a rookie mistake and through their own incompetence failed to qualify for the ballot in Ohio, and is now launching a write-in campaign in the state. [CNN]