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On Friday, writing for Business Insider, Camila DeChalus outlined an outlandish — but possible — scenario in which former President Donald Trump is charged with a crime, but Vladimir Putin's government steps in to prevent him from being prosecuted.
"Imagine this scenario: Former President Donald Trump boards his private plane and leaves the US to resume his international business dealings in Russia," wrote DeChalus. "The day after Trump lands in Moscow on a bright September afternoon, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announces a grand jury has formally indicted the former president on several criminal counts. Vance wants Trump to immediately return. But the US and Russia have no extradition treaty or formal process through which a wanted person is arrested. Since Trump would be on Russian soil in this scenario, he would be under no legal obligation to cooperate with the US government. Trump then could petition Russian President Vladimir Putin for political asylum."
This is a highly unlikely scenario on many levels, noted DeChalus — but it is legally possible.
"Trump hasn't formally announced plans to travel abroad this year and isn't known to have left the US since his term ended on January 20," said the report. "Nevertheless, Trump, like any other American citizen, is free to leave the US since he hasn't been charged with a crime ... The possibilities of where Trump could hide to avoid prosecution are plenty. There were more than 70 countries that did not have an extradition agreement with the US as of 2020. These countries included China, Belarus, Russia, Saudi Arabia — and Indonesia, where Trump's company is in the process of constructing new hotels and golf courses."
Trump was infamous for his close relationship with Putin, whose government worked to interfere in the presidential election in 2016 and 2020. So if Trump wanted to avoid extradition, Russia would be an obvious choice.
"Trump is under investigation in Washington, DC, New York City, New York state, and Fulton County, Georgia," noted the report. "Investigators in New York are looking into Trump's finances and his business dealings. In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump's January 2 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. During the call, Trump pressured him to 'find' votes to overturn the election results in the state that Biden won in the November presidential election. In Washington, prosecutors are also looking at the role Trump played in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol."
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Trump attacks his own 'pathetic' Joint Chiefs chairman for defending the study of critical race theory
June 25, 2021
Gen. Mark Milley, the current Trump-appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went viral this week when he defended the study of critical race theory by military leaders.
Former President Donald Trump, however, was not happy to hear Milley's explanation for why it's good for military leaders to learn about systemic racism in the United States.
"General Milley, and I watched his statement, it was pathetic!" the former president fumed during an interview on Newsmax. "I watched the statements of some others -- your head of the Navy. It was pathetic and they didn't talk that way when I was around, I can tell you they didn't talk that way or I would have gotten rid of them in two minutes!"
Trump also claimed that critical race theory was "terminated very strongly" during his administration and has only made a comeback since President Joe Biden took over six months ago.
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06 25 2021 08 26 12 www.youtube.com
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Country music festival in Lauren Boebert’s vaccine-resistant district creating ‘perfect storm’ for COVID-19 explosion
June 25, 2021
A country music festival and a surge of the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus are posing a grave public health threat to Rep. Lauren Boebert's vaccine-resistant Colorado congressional district.
The three-day Country Jam music festival that kicked off Thursday is expected to draw at least 50,000 people to Mesa County, where health officials have been scrambling to contain a new outbreak of COVID-19 among vaccine-hesitant residents in the deeply conservative region, reported The Daily Beast.
"I've never seen anything like this in my 20 years in health care," said Dr. Thomas Tobin, the chief medical examiner in Community Hospital in Grand Junction. "Pretty much everyone that's coming into the hospital is unvaccinated. Some of those people swear they don't believe in COVID all the way up to when they're in their hospital room, strapped to machines."
The county, where Donald Trump won more than 62 percent of the vote and Boebert won nearly 62 percent, is approaching nearly 300 cases of the Delta variant that's resulting in more hospitalizations and deaths, even as infection rates plummet in areas of the U.S. with higher rates of vaccination -- which tended to back President Joe Biden.
"Vaccine hesitancy is making the Delta variant a bigger problem than it needed to be, so we will see the variant spread rapidly in an unvaccinated population," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "[This variant is] 50 to 60 times more contagious than the Alpha variant, so why roll the dice?"
More than half the state's 534 cases of the Delta variant are in Mesa County, where only 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated and 44 percent have gotten at least one dose, and hospitals are already nearing capacity.
"Our COVID-19 numbers are getting close to what we saw in November and December, when we had hit our apex, and the primary reason is people not getting vaccinated," Tobin said. "We are frustrated, we're tired, and it's upsetting to look around our state and the country and see other places having to drop COVID-19 numbers while we are surging."
COVID-19 conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment are prevalent in the county, which earlier this month hosted a seminar spreading coronavirus disinformation organized by Boebert's campaign manager Sherronna Bishop, featuring a Nigerian doctor hyped by Trump who claims sexual dreams about demons cause many health problems.
Boebert herself has cast doubts on the vaccines and masks, and has pushed back against mandatory inoculations.
"Every time we think we're getting out head above water, we're back in the trenches, back to where we were months ago," Tobin said. "We're treading water, hoping that a life vest will be thrown and it doesn't come."
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