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June 30th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Trump makes a prediction about future of the Mexican border wall
Former US president Donald Trump is scheduled to visit the US-Mexico frontier, where he will promote the Texas governor’s plan to continue building a border wall using funds from the state and the private sector.
His visit comes after months of trips by Republican members of Congress, who have been hammering the Biden administration over a supposed ‘crisis’ in illegal immigration. Kamala Harris, who has been deputised by Joe Biden to work on the immigration issue, made her first visit to the border last week.
At the same time, Mr Trump is waiting to see if his principal business, the Trump Organization, will be hit with criminal charges by New York authorities. The company is reportedly under legal pressure over its handling of ‘fringe benefits’ paid to top executives, among them some of Mr Trump’s oldest allies.
The potential charges are part of a years-long probe into Mr Trump’s business dealings that has seen the Manhattan District Attorney convene a Grand Jury to weigh up possible cases against the former president and his associates.
Flashback: Trump’s last visit to border as president
As Texas prepares to receive Donald Trump again, it’s worth looking back at his final presidential visit to the unfinished border wall he promised to complete.
At the time, Mr Trump was still campaigning to overturn the election results and avert Joe Biden’s inauguration. The Capitol insurrection had cast his efforts in a new light, and that combined with his failure on the wall led much of the state’s media to reject him outright.
“Trump didn’t keep the promise,” wrote the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle. “After four years, the ‘big, beautiful’ wall he promised from sea to shining sea includes a grand total of 30 new miles. And news flash: Mexico didn’t pay for it.”
Here’s The Independent’s report from the time.
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 14:01
CNN: Trump Organization facing scrutiny for allegedly dodging taxes on employee bonuses
New reports indicate that New York prosecutors are specifically looking at whether the Trump Organization failed to pay taxes on bonuses provided to some employees.
According to CNN, the investigators suspect that the company effectively paid bonuses in cash – and that if it did so while also giving senior employees untaxed fringe benefits, the organisation’s behaviour “could be construed as a company-wide scheme to defraud”.
Read the report here.
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 13:40
Trump’s campaign against 2020 result faces another humiliation
The former president’s continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him is not flattered by the failure of all his attempts to get it overturned. That hasn’t stopped hardcore fans from staging an “audit” of the vote in Arizona – and their fruitless efforts have caused plenty of trouble.
In an embarrassing turn of events, officials in Maricopa County have announced that they will replace all the voting machines handed over to the “auditors” after warnings that the security of the technology may have been compromised by the so-called “Cyber Ninjas” conducting the audit.
The county “will never use equipment that could pose a risk to free and fair elections”, the local elections board wrote.
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 13:20
Has Joe Biden given Kamala Harris an impossible job?
Kamala Harris’s elevation to vice president was a historic moment, and given Joe Biden’s age, she may become his heir presumptive in just three years’ time. But the administration has burdened her with a list of monumentally difficult tasks – immigration reform, championing voting rights legislation, fighting vaccine hesitancy – and as Fordham University political scientist Christina Greer sees it, she may have been set up to fail.
US Secret Service agents stand guard behind Kamala Harris as she speaks to the media at El Paso International Airport in Texas
(EPA)
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 12:47
New book lays out scale of Trump’s failure on Covid-19
Of the many, many forthcoming books picking over the Trump presidency and its downfall, one of the most devastating looks to be Nightmare Scenario, an account of the administration’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to the authors, Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, the point of the book is that the totality of the chaotic pandemic response is far more scandalous than any number of shocking anecdotes could ever be.
Here’s Ms Abutaleb on MSNBC last night.
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 12:20
GOP House members prepare for Trump’s border trip
A delegation of House Republicans travelling from Washington, DC to convene with Donald Trump at the Texas-Mexico border. Last night, some of them took their chance to shoot video of themselves standing in the darkness next to what has been built of the border fence – watch the footage below…
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 11:51
Trump lashes out at “weak”, “pathetic” Bill Barr over book revelations
Another book picking over the Trump administration’s final days has incensed the former president with its description of how his top officials viewed his campaign to overturn the 2020 election – and his false claims that it was stolen.
Jonathan Karl’s Betrayal quotes Mr Trump’s former attorney general Bil Barr reflecting that “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bulls***.”
Mr Trump is predictably furious. “I lost confidence in Bill Barr long before the 2020 Presidential Election Scam,” the former president said in a statement yesterday. “He was afraid, weak, and frankly, now that I see what he is saying, pathetic.”
Nathan Place has more.
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 11:29
Trump books: just how badly did the administration handle the pandemic?
Of the many, many forthcoming books picking over the Trump presidency, one of the most damning is Nightmare Scenario, a deeply reported account of the last administration’s chaotic and disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The two authors, Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damien Paletta, have been giving interviews to put their book in context – that is, to drive home that the totality of the Trump White House’s handling of the pandemic is more devastating than any scandalous anecdote could reveal.
Here’s Ms Abutaleb on MSNBC last night.
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 11:18
Atmosphere around Trump rallies remains dark
CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan, who has become famous for his coverage of the American far right, had some grim conversations with Trump supporters at his Ohio rally this weekend – including one who warned that a new civil war is on the way.
Clips of his encounters have spread fast on Twitter.
Graeme Massie has more.
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 11:01
Reports say Biden could overrule “thousands” of Trump-era deportations
One of the cornerstones of Donald Trump’s immigration policy was the mass deportation of undocumented people from Mexico and Central America. But even after Kamala Harris unambiguously told people migrating north not to come to the US, the Department of Homeland Security says it is “committed to reviewing the cases of individuals whose removals under the prior administration failed to live up to our highest values.”
As John Bowden writes, that could provide hope for hundreds or thousands of people, among them military families and veterans. Read more here.
Andrew Naughtie30 June 2021 10:33
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