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Showing posts with label prostitution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prostitution. Show all posts

21 June 2026

The Unquiet American: Charles Kushner Brings Trump Diplomacy to France 20JUN26

 


CHARLES Kushner is a repulsive drippings*, self-centered, self-righteous, greedy, without any redeeming social qualities and and a raging holocaust hypocrite. It is no surprise NOT MY pres drumpf/trump appointed him as an ambassador since kushner's son married a spawn of drumpf/trump and they share the no class all trash characteristics of corrupt narcissistic families. Apologies to our French friends for sending kushner to you, please forgive us. ( *Drippings-the best part of him / her ran ( dripped ) down someone's leg )This from the New York Times.....


Ivanka & Jared: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) 23APR17


The Unquiet American: Charles Kushner Brings Trump Diplomacy to France


The U.S. envoy to Paris has emerged as the embodiment of combative diplomacy in the age of President Trump, riling the French establishment notably with his accusations of antisemitism.


Four days before marking the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, Charles Kushner, President Trump’s ambassador to France, made a quieter pilgrimage to a military cemetery in eastern France. There, he recited the Kaddish prayer over the graves of five Jewish American soldiers killed in World War I.

It was a solemn act of commemoration for Mr. Kushner, an Orthodox Jew who puts his faith at the heart of his diplomacy. But it is his full-throated advocacy on behalf of Jews living in today’s France that has drawn more attention, and reproach, in Paris, where he has cut a Trumpian swath through its decorous salons.

Mr. Kushner, whose son Jared is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, clashed with his French hosts weeks after arriving last July when he accused them of not doing enough to combat antisemitism. Nearly a year later, he contends the problem has gotten worse — so much so that he has suggested the Trump administration grant refugee status to French Jews, even as it otherwise scales back asylum provision.

“It would be an objective of mine to have, for the Jewish population here, more options to go to America rather than the option of only going to Israel,” Mr. Kushner said in an interview last week in his baronial residence in Paris. “They live in fear and they feel abandoned by this government.”

Statements like that, which he first put in an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron last August, have burned his bridges with the French Foreign Ministry. Mr. Kushner, 72, has been summoned twice to be rebuked for interfering in France’s internal affairs — snubbing both requests — after which the foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, threatened to forbid him from meeting with French officials.

In February, he was called in after the U.S. Embassy reposted State Department comments that raised concerns about the beating death of a young far-right activist by far-left gangs. Mr. Barrot rejected what he called efforts to politicize a tragedy, saying, “We have no lessons to learn from the reactionary international movement.”

Such clashes, which once would have raised doubts about Mr. Kushner’s suitability for a diplomatic post, mark him as a fitting emissary for the age of Trump. He is not merely an in-law given a plum job but also a faithful messenger of Mr. Trump’s hostility toward Europe, whether that means pushing the fight against antisemitism or meeting with far-right political leaders. Mr. Kushner is among the best connected of a corps of ambassadors who have cast aside diplomatic niceties to channel a disdainful president.

“You know, America and France disagree on a lot of issues,” Mr. Kushner said in our interview. “This is not Charlie Kushner versus Barrot or Macron. America has a lot of issues in the world now that they have a very different opinion on than Europe and France, in particular.”

Mr. Kushner — joined in the interview by his wife, Seryl, and his influential chief of staff, Gabriel Scheinmann — was unrepentant about refusing to report to the French Foreign Ministry. Being summoned, he said, was “disrespectful to me personally” and “disrespectful to the United States government.”

A billionaire real estate developer from New Jersey, Mr. Kushner served more than a year in prison after he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and witness tampering, having hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with investigators against him, and then sending a videotape of the encounter to his sister. He was later pardoned by Mr. Trump.

Regarding his post in Paris, Mr. Kushner conceded that he did not have the “natural ingredients for diplomacy.” But he said, “We’re very results-oriented, so if that shakes things up sometimes, maybe we shake them up.”

Mr. Kushner and Mr. Barrot have since talked by phone, and Mr. Kushner’s access to French officialdom appears intact. He met for breakfast recently with Mr. Macron, accompanying Tom Barrack, who is Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Iraq. Mr. Kushner said he had a constructive relationship with the economics minister, Roland Lescure, for whom he organized a round table with executives from American technology companies.

Mr. Lescure said in an interview that he appreciated that Mr. Kushner did not impose the White House’s views at that session. But he said he shared his colleagues’ dismay at some of Mr. Kushner’s public statements.

“I don’t know any real estate guy who has become an ambassador,” Mr. Lescure said. “I’m not sure he’s fully learned to behave like one.”

Mr. Macron’s top advisers still steer clear of one-on-one meetings with Mr. Kushner, current and former French diplomats said, because they viewed his letter to the president as a personal attack on their boss. The French officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The tensions with Mr. Barrot, according to a senior American official, began after he did not warn Mr. Kushner at their first meeting in July 2025 that Mr. Macron planned to announce that evening that France would recognize the state of Palestine. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

A spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry said that there was no intention to conceal and that France’s movement toward recognition was well known. The ministry declined to comment more broadly on its relations with Mr. Kushner; Mr. Macron’s office did not answer requests for comment.


The Trump administration has voiced no misgivings about Mr. Kushner’s conduct. A spokesman for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, said, “From his leadership in commercial diplomacy to his strong advocacy against antisemitism, Ambassador Kushner is committed to advancing the ‘America First’ foreign policy vision.”

Few French officials dispute that Mr. Kushner has a point in warning about antisemitism in France. According to the French Interior Ministry, the number of violent acts against Jews rose sharply after Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023 and Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, even if the rate dropped slightly last year.

Antisemitism is on the rise across Europe and in the United States. In France, which has large Jewish and Muslim populations, the debate is especially layered in history. In World War II, the Nazi-backed regime that controlled southern France helped to deport French Jews to concentration camps. More recently, France’s recognition of Palestine — which Mr. Kushner called “a gift to Hamas” — stirred questions about whether the move would fuel anti-Jewish feeling in the country.

Yet experts contend that Mr. Kushner is wrong to say that the French government is not doing anything to counter antisemitism. France, they say, possesses a stronger legal arsenal to combat antisemitism than almost any other country, and it has significantly reinforced security at Jewish institutions.

“The ambassador, who is right to take an interest in this issue and who hopes that France could improve its measures, should use more diplomatic language if he wants to be heard,” said Marc Knobel, a historian and expert on antisemitism in France. Mr. Kushner, he added, would be well advised “to also concern himself with the antisemitism taking place in his own country.”

Mr. Kushner granted that. “If you told me 10 years ago that we would have the antisemitism here today, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy.’” He said the difference was that Mr. Trump had taken robust action against it. The administration has sued institutions like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania on the contested claim that they tolerated antisemitism on their campuses — while, Mr. Kushner noted, France had not taken comparable steps against French universities.

Mr. Kushner’s strong words have made him a hero among some Jews on both sides of the Atlantic. Before the ceremony at the military cemetery, American Jews lined up to thank him for his advocacy.

“He didn’t say it like the French would have liked, and it wasn’t very diplomatic,” said Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, a former director of the Europe branch of the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group. “But to have a U.S. ambassador who says he clearly cares about it, and this is a No. 1 priority — that is very reassuring,” she added.


As a child of Holocaust survivors, Mr. Kushner said that he deplored acts of hatred against any people of any religion. He said he had met with Catholic priests and Muslim clerics to discuss interfaith tensions. Hassen Chalghoumi, an imam in Paris known for his outreach to Jews, said that Mr. Kushner’s family ties to Mr. Trump gave his efforts greater impact.


“The ambassador is not just an ambassador,” Mr. Chalghoumi said. “He is directly linked to the president’s family.”


During Mr. Trump’s first term, Jared Kushner helped engineer the Abraham Accords, agreements under which several Arab countries normalized diplomatic relations with Israel. Unabashedly proud of his son’s achievement, the ambassador gives visitors signed copies of his son’s memoir, “Breaking History.” Mr. Kushner is cultivating Middle East ambassadors in Paris, he said, in the hope of persuading more countries to join the accords.

One of those envoys, Rabih El Chaer of Lebanon, said that Mr. Kushner had floated a meeting in the United States between Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, an old friend of Mr. Kushner’s. When Mr. El Chaer hesitated, he recalled Mr. Kushner telling him, “I am a man of deals.” Mr. El Chaer said he replied, “I come from the Middle East, where we don’t simply skip over history.”

For Mr. Kushner, too, history hangs over this assignment. Next month, he will celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence with a party at his residence, at which guests will be serenaded by the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. Mr. Kushner has renovated the building, an 18th-century villa that was once owned by the Rothschilds and requisitioned by the Nazis during their occupation of Paris.

To fund the repairs, Mr. Kushner said that he had raised $10 million, much of it from the chiefs of France’s largest companies, whom he asked to contribute $250,000. Other diplomats said that such high-dollar donations were unusual, at least before Mr. Trump became president. Mr. Kushner is, he joked, the project’s “site super.”


There is a measure of rehabilitation for Mr. Kushner himself.

“If somebody wrote my story,” he said of the twists that carried him from prison to Paris, “I’d probably be put in the fiction section of a store rather than nonfiction.”

Yet when asked whether he viewed his ambassadorial post as a chance to write a different ending, Mr. Kushner shook his head.

“This is not retribution for me,” he said.

Catherine Porter contributed reporting.

Mark Landler is the Paris bureau chief of The Times, covering France, as well as American foreign policy in Europe and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.

The Latest on the Trump Administration


  • Kennedy’s Special Education Role: Alienated by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claims about autism, advocates for disabled students are sounding the alarm about the Trump administration's shifting of special education programs to his department.

  • New Air Force One: President Trump has unveiled the red, white and blue 747 Boeing jetliner donated by the government of Qatar, and he said he expected the plane to lead a flyover of Washington on July 4.

  • Ambassador to France: Charles Kushner has emerged as the embodiment of combative diplomacy in the age of Trump, riling the French establishment notably with his accusations of antisemitism.

  • Frayed Relationship with Giorgia Meloni: Trump said the Italian leader had “begged” him to take a photo together at the Group of 7 summit in France. Meloni called Trump’s statements “totally invented.”

  • Military Budget: Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are resisting Trump’s calls to raise the Pentagon’s budget to its highest level in modern history, signaling a looming fight over military spending as the administration refuses to detail the cost of the war with Iran.

  • National Intelligence Agency: With Bill Pulte, one of Trump’s aides who has most relentlessly pursued the president’s passions for retribution, likely to take over the agency, officials are bracing for the potential for even more efforts by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to influence the midterms. Some lawmakers want to shrink the office.

16 July 2025

TIM NOLAN, NOT MY PRES DRUMPF'S / TRUMP'S KENTUCKY CAMPAIGN MANAGER & PEDOPHILE & Former District Court Judge Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison for Human Trafficking 4MAI18

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WHY was he only sentenced to 20 years? It should have been 50 years with no possibility of parole. Big surprise he is an associate of NOT MY pres drumpf / trump. From Kentucky.gov.....

Beshear: Former District Court Judge Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison for Human Trafficking

Nolan to pay $100,000 in asset forfeiture, $10,000 to human trafficking victims fund   

FRANKFORT, Ky. (May 4, 2018) – Attorney General Andy Beshear today announced that former Campbell County District Judge Timothy Nolan was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to numerous charges related to human trafficking.

Prosecutors from Beshear’s Special Prosecutions Division accepted a guilty plea from Nolan Feb. 9 on 21 counts, including human trafficking of adults, promoting human trafficking of minors and unlawful transaction with minors, against 19 victims. At that time, prosecutors’ recommended sentences totaling 20 years in prison.

As part of his plea agreement, Nolan will pay $110,000 in asset forfeiture and to the Human Trafficking Victims Fund –  within the executive branch’s Justice and Public Safety Cabinet – which was established in 2013.

Nolan paid $10,000 to the victims fund and $40,000 in asset forfeiture today. He is to pay an additional $60,000 in asset forfeiture.

Nolan, 71, of California, Ky., a former local school board member, was originally charged in a criminal complaint by the Campbell County Police Department for crimes that occurred between 2010 and 2017. That complaint alleged that Nolan committed human trafficking with a minor by subjecting a child under age 18 to engaging in commercial sexual activity.

He was later indicted on 28 felony counts and two misdemeanor counts.    

“The punishment in this case does not undo the trauma inflicted on the victims, but it brings closure and some justice,” Beshear said. “I want to thank the Campbell County Police Department and our special prosecutions team for working this case.”

Nolan is subject to lifetime sex offender registration.

A core mission of Beshear’s is to bring justice to victims of rape, sexual assault and human trafficking.

Beshear’s Special Prosecution Division is responsible for assisting local prosecutors in complex or sensitive cases, as well as handling cases in which local prosecutors recuse themselves.

16 October 2010

Choose Your Own Abduction, Army Edition from MOJO 11OKT10

THIS is disgusting, and it is pathetic the military allows this to exist. Human trafficking is a serious problem and those in the military that are responsible for this should be disciplined. 
Pop quiz, hotshot. You're a mid-career Army officer. Your bosses have (finally) issued some guidelines condeming human trafficking by soldiers and contractors. And they want you to develop the training curriculum for the troops. What do you do? What do you do?
Do you:
A) Stick to the military M.O. and make a dry, dull, text-heavy, official-sounding PowerPoint slide? Or, do you:
B) Make it hip and toss in some stuff soldiers dig, like Choose Your Own Adventure books, shady foreign nightclubs, heavy drinking, and ethnic stereotypes?
US Army: Army Knowledge OnlineIt's true, somebody in the Army's got a peculiar sense of humor. In late 2005, media reports began to highlight the federal government's inability to enforce the anti-trafficking guidelines at its installations abroad. (Such reports continue to this day; they include stories about foreign women pressed into service as prostitutes for contractors and soldiers in Iraq). As the attention grew, the Army issued its first human trafficking policy in 2006 to cover soldiers and DOD civilians. "Trafficking in Persons is the third largest and fastest growing criminal activity in the world," the policy states. "A grave violation of human rights, it is a world-wide criminal threat to security, civil rights, and stability—and a direct threat to our national foreign policy goals."
Translation: Human trafficking is no laughing matter. And yet the screenshot above shows how the Army trains its uniformed personnel to be vigilant against trafficking in persons, via an online module at the password-protected Army Knowledge Online (AKO) portal. Soldiers are told to picture themselves in a seedy foreign bar with a "petite and attractive Asian" bartender. Do you answer that call on your cell phone, or ask her if she's in danger? When that last beer makes you queasy and you can't find the bathroom, do you make for the exit, or do you head to the kitchen? When there's a misunderstanding, how do you tell the proprietor: "I just thought you were offering lap dances...I...have to go."* (Note: That's an actual quote from the Army's training.)
To be fair, the Army issues a caveat to the training:
WARNING: This training deals frankly and candidly with the realities of trafficking in persons (TIP), which capitalizes on human misery and exploitation. To some people, being exposed to the details about trafficking in persons (TIP) may be considered distasteful. This TIP training addresses what some may see as an upsetting look at the realities of the problem. For all, that is the nature of the problem. This training is intended to increase everyone's awareness of that issue and to help serve to end it.
Distasteful, sure. But does the module provide a "look at the realities of the problem"? Army officer Crispin Burke, who edits the milblog Wings Over Iraq, took the entire training session on AKO. Then he provided Mother Jones with additional screenshots of the module, which would be funny if they weren't so sad (see them all below). Burke also used WOI to express his misgivings over the training:
Don't get me wrong:  I applaud the US Army's efforts in combating human trafficking, a racket which rakes in $32 billion annually. Yet, developing a choose-your-own adventure which features prostitutes, child laborers, and strippers probably isn't the best way to encourage troops to combat trafficking. If there's one thing I've learned about video game culture, it's that incorporating these elements into video games only encourages otherwise law-abiding citizens to unleash their Jungian dark side in a virtual, consequence-free environment.
There's no question military culture and video game culture are converging in interesting ways. But Burke makes an interesting point: Could the Army's human-trafficking awareness program ironically aid in dehumanizing the crimes and their victims? Whatever the service's good intentions were, "I just found it bizarre that the Army would make its point with an interactive game," Burke says. "With graphics."
All screenshots below are via the US military's Army Knowledge Online portal for internal soldier communications:
Passing the bar:: Are you sure this is the place?

It's not what you think: There's something about that bartender.
Do you or don't you?: What goes on in foreign bars stays in foreign bars.

Big misunderstanding: Who knew a lap dance could be so fraught?

La nausee: Perhaps it was that last drink. Or sudden awareness of your moral turpitude.

Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' copy editor. For more of his stories, click here or follow him on Twitter.

17 June 2010

My BP Mole Spills the Secrets of BP's Cleanup Ops 3jun10 & MORE ON THE BP GULF COAST "CLEANUP" FROM MOJO'S MOLE 16JUN10


FROM THE GOOD, BRAVE PEOPLE AT MOTHER JONES



My BP Mole Spills the Secrets of BP's Cleanup Ops

| Thu Jun. 3, 2010 7:56 PM PDT
BP's got a mole working on its cleanup team. The company might be able to keep the press from getting to oiled-up Elmer's Island Wildlife Refuge, but as long as people have cell phones, it's going to have a hell of a time keeping Elmer's Island from getting to the press.
Late Wednesday night I talked to a spill worker involved in the efforts to clean up South Louisiana's barrier islands. Let's call him Elmer, because we spoke under condition of strict anonymity. Though he hasn't signed one of the BP contracts that bars workers from communicating with reporters, he has been told "500 times" that if he talks, he's fired. He certainly didn't contact me because his politics are similar to mine. "George Bush was too liberal for me," he explained. But: "I like the media. The country couldn't run without it, and it's important to have media from both the left and right."
He also called because on Tuesday BP told me (again) that I couldn't go to Elmer's Island with a producer from PBS's Need to Know because the road to it "needed more gravel." This was a lie: "Everyone else," Elmer said, "is driving on that road"—about 20 cars and vans going up and down a day, and the re-graveling had happened the day before we arrived. Since BP was making my job so much harder, Elmer wanted to make it a little easier.
BP's got good reason for wanting to keep insiders like Elmer away from reporters. Elmer says that last Thursday, when the Coast Guard was announcing that the top kill seemed to be working, the cleanup supervisors on Grand Isle had already been informed it was a failure—which, of course, was not publicly announced until several days later.
And as more and more oil continues to deluge Louisiana shores, the cleanup efforts are slowing down. Workers have spent inordinate amounts of time sitting around waiting to be utilized, a frustration echoed by other workers who talked to friends of mine who were on a day trip to the beach. The workers are also upset because last Friday, many of them weren't paid as scheduled. According to Elmer, the mostly white foremen (whom he welcomed me to picture as stereotypical gristly union-boss types) told their mostly black subordinates that they didn't want to hear any bitching about it and that if they had a problem they could go home. Such unpleasant work in such an unpleasant environment and for such low pay (as little as $10 an hour) is, not surprisingly, leading to superhigh attrition. Last week, there were 110 workers on Elmer's Island. Right now, there are only 60 cleaning up the 1,700-acre home to fish, shrimp, and crab nurseries. (I called ES&H, the subcontractor running the cleanup show, for comment, but it only has one person who talks to the media, and that person was not available today.)
Elmer's Island was already in bad shape when I was there two weeks ago, but the fire chief of nearby Grand Isle told me yesterday that a massive slick of concentrated oil had been seen just offshore. This morning, Elmer emailed me an update about the forbidden island. "I thought you might be interested to know," he wrote, "there's a LOT more oil out on the beach now."
(If you appreciated Mac's story and the rest of our BP coverage, please consider making a tax-deductible donation.)



MORE ON THE BP GULF COAST "CLEANUP" FROM MOJO'S MOLE 16JUN10
You know the story: Boy calls girl, girl goes to pick up boy, boy and girl go sit on a beautiful beachside deck to enjoy the night breeze and listen to the waves crash as he tells her a bunch of terrible things that are going on at an oil-spill cleanup site. Yes, I had a date with Elmer, my mole inside BP's cleanup operation, and he painted a grim picture of the conditions for both workers and wildlife at Louisiana's Elmer's Island Wildlife Refuge.
First, the workers: The men on Elmer's Island don't wear respirators since BP and OSHA have thrown precaution to the wind and deemed them unnecessary. But the only type of air-monitoring equipment Elmer's ever seen on the island are little multigas meters that are not up to the job: They're designed for indoor use, clog easily, and only measure limited types of pollutants. And despite the known dangers of dispersants and the toxic chemicals in crude (I can attest that contact with the stuff washing up on the beach can burn), workers aren't even wearing protective Tyvek suits anymore. Of course, there are medics on hand to treat anyone who gets hurt or sick. Unfortunately, any worker who asks for a medic's help is automatically drug tested, which, for some, can be a powerful incentive to not report injuries. (Not that keeping a cleanup job necessarily equals getting paid: Elmer says the contractors continue to lose workers' paychecks, a problem he told me about the last time we talked and that has since been confirmed by the local papers.)
Cleanup workers on these South Louisiana beaches aren't the only ones who could use more protections. What Elmer told me echoed the reports that BP isn't exactly doing everything in its power to keep track of the toll the spill is taking on wildlife. In nearby Port Fourchon, where he has also worked, there are markers to denote wildlife nesting areas, but they aren't clearly labeled and no one knows what they mean, so workers drive and trample over sensitive habitats. One day last week, Elmer and his coworkers came upon eight oiled pelicans, but though they called the official number to report their findings, no one had come to collect the birds by the time his shift ended many hours later. (A representative from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has yet to respond to my request for comment.) Workers on Elmer's have not been instructed to report dead animals for collection or autopsy. Elmer said he'd recently come upon a dead crab and, knowing no one was going to come to examine it, decided to slice it open himself. Black oil poured out.
I've seen some pathetic excuses for cleanup out here—were the workers on Elmer's at least making some progress? "They're not being effective out here," Elmer said. "Two days after your article, they bused in twice as many workers, so they're up to 120 guys on Elmer's now, but I can't see any considerable difference. They're only working five sites and it's eight miles of beach. No one seems concerned about cleaning it up. The contractors are getting their money; they don't care. They've got all these people out there, but they're not accomplishing anything."
Oh, wait. Not nothing: "They've brought in prostitutes." No one knows who the "they" that brought in the pack of hookers is, but the gals have definitely arrived, and you can buy time with one for $200. It only took someone a whole month even to figure out that it would be lucrative to sell sex to guys earning 44 hours of overtime a week and living in camps and converted 18-wheelers.
Photograph of Elmer's Island Wildlife Refuge cleanup by US Coast Guard