Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

He really is that stupid.

The lights are all blinking red.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

Hot air and ill-informed banter

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

In my day, never was longer.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Events / Floriduh Woman: Personal Grooming Edition

Floriduh Woman: Personal Grooming Edition

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Don’t do this!

Internet punsters are celebrating Megan Barnes as Florida’s “Pubic Enemy,” others are chattering about her “razor sharp focus.”

The 37-year-old Barnes catapulted to instant fame for an alleged multi-tasking mash-up that earned the bottle-blonde’s mug shot a spot on hundreds of Web sites.

According to a startled Florida Highway Patrol trooper, Barnes was shaving her bikini area while driving south on the famed Overseas Highway when she crashed into the rear of an SUV March 2.

In the police report obtained by ABC News, the trim job was apparently essential because the arresting officer, trooper Gary Dunick, said the Indiana native told him she was heading to Key West visit her boyfriend.

“She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit,” Dunick told the Key West Citizen.

It gets weirder. In order to pay full attention to her sensitive regions, police say Barnes enlisted her ex-husband, Charles Judy, who was riding shotgun, to hold the wheel.

Yes, her ex-husband.

Much more information at the link.

Reader Interactions

83Comments

  5. 5.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mike J: According to Gary Kasparov and his assistant, if you want to know what the President-elect is going to tweet just pay attention to English language Russian news media 24 hours prior.
    https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/817184126121943041

    Follow

    Garry KasparovVerified account
    ‏@Kasparov63 Garry Kasparov Retweeted Mig Greengard
    Yes, if you read the Russian propaganda you can predict what Trump will tweet next with uncanny accuracy.Garry Kasparov added,
    Follow

    Mig Greengard
    ‏@chessninja Mig Greengard Retweeted Donald J. Trump
    It’s handy that you can get most of Trump’s tweets a day in advance by browsing the Kremlin-friendly Russian web. True during campaign, too.

  6. 6.

    hovercraft

    So is it the air in Floridah or what, this woman is from Penceville and yet she’s behaving like a local? That is some serious “still friends” relationship they have there. What was he going to do when they got to Key West? Was he going to wait in the other room while they got busy?

  7. 7.

    dexwood

    Read Carl Hiaasen’s Razor Girl in which one of the characters engages in this practice to aide her kidnapping activities for the mafia. Hiaasen said he got the idea for her MO from a news story about a Florida woman who was doing the same thing when pulled over for a traffic violation.

  8. 8.

    Mnemosyne

    I realize this marks me as some kind of sooper jenius in Florida, but she didn’t tell her ex-husband to drive while she shaved because … ?

    (Actually, I’ll bet he lost his license because of too many DUIs. Any takers?)

  9. 9.

    Anyone but Trump

    @dexwood: I just read that book, and it’s the first thing I thought of when I started reading this thread. I love his books…

  10. 10.

    SiubhanDuinne

    You do realize that this story is from March 2010, right? Before the PPACA was even signed into law. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a great story, but not exactly breaking news, even of Florida.

    //

  14. 14.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Anyone but Trump: me too, and I just realized I never picked up Razor Girl. I took a look at Hiassen’s website and I see he finally devoted a whole book to Skink!

  22. 22.

    Mnemosyne

    So I saw a production of The King and I for the first time last night and really enjoyed it. I think it’s probably been slightly retooled since the 1950s (or it was directly differently), because Anna’s uptight Victorianism comes across as just as strange and foreign as anything the Asian characters do. It probably helps that all of the Asian characters are now played by actual Asian-American actors, not white actors in yellowface.

    Interesting trivia: Anna Leonowens, the woman whose story the play was based on, was herself of mixed European and Asian (Indian) heritage, something she went to great lengths to conceal during her lifetime. Casting a part-Asian actress in that part could be an interesting experiment — maybe Phillippa Soo could give it a shot once she’s done with the stage version of Amelie?

  26. 26.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: His defection is a signal to those in the Intel Community that worked for him/started under him that its okay to get out. DNI Clapper’s remarks today, DCI Hayden’s tactful remarks on various networks, even GEN (ret) Dempsey’s tweet in support of IC personnel – both analysts and opps – are all warning shots. They are warnings to the incoming Administration not to pick this fight. They are warnings to the GOP majorities in both chambers of Congress about who does the unseen, uncredited, dangerous work that no one knows about when it goes right (most of the time) and who aren’t acknowledged (no purple hearts, no public memorials, no names on “In Memoriam” plaques), except to receive blame, when things go wrong. And a warning to the men and women in the IC that their leaders, past and present, know what they do, appreciate them, and that they should do what they need to to protect themselves.

    While it may have looked like the three senior IC leaders were restrained today at the SASC hearing, if you know anything about them, or about leadership within the IC, they were furious. DNI Clapper’s remarks about getting out as much info as possible in the unclassified report for public release was one sign of that.

  32. 32.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: I only know he went in whole hog for a lot of the most out there, conspiracist, and extreme paint with the broadest brush possible anti-Islam stuff possible post 9-11. That’s what I meant by odd. As DCI he seemed okay.

  36. 36.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mary G: I have no real idea. I saw the WSJ article last night. I saw the different walk backs by Spicer and other transition officials this morning. LTG Flynn has been arguing for over five years that the IC needs to be reconfigured in terms of how we collect information, where we collect, who collects it and where, how we analyze it, etc. I intend to go back and reread his CNAS report where he lays out a lot of his reform arguments and then I’ll be able to post on it. I haven’t looked at it since it came out. Though I did write a response at the time:
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/01/18/the-flynn-report-v-how-to-feed-the-beast/

  39. 39.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: I think the “their time in office” seemed to be somewhat of a strange way to express sentiments for an effective and successful administration. Sort of sounded ominous like the time in office would be limited or shortened. It might just be a sort of strange way of stating something completely innocuous.

  42. 42.

    rachel

    Much more information at the link

    …for those of you who don’t feel you know more than you wanted to about these people already.

  43. 43.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman: I got that impression too. I can’t imagine anyone choosing “their time in office” instead of “wish them all the best” or “wishing the new administration great success” or something more general unless they want to send some kind of message about the “time” part. As in, it could be limited.

    I hate that I’m already doing the Kremlinology analysis stuff. We shouldn’t be in the position of feeling like we have to do that to have any understanding of what the people who work for us are doing.

  44. 44.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Adam L Silverman: Yes, and also limited to success in office. Not wishing any more success than is absolutely necessary to be polite.

    Typical Trump sycophant sign-off is: “I wish him all the success as he Makes America Great Again!”

    I mean, gotta compare and contrast a bit.

  45. 45.

    Yarrow

    This tweet is from hours ago, so it’s hardly “breaking” anymore, but it’s still interesting.

    BREAKING: US intelligence identified the go-betweens Russians used to provide stolen emails to WikiLeaks, officials say— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) January 6, 2017

  49. 49.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Yarrow: Am I right in thinking this is the biggest shitshow of a transition anyone can remember? (I can only remember back to Obama)

  50. 50.

    Another Scott

    I just heard a teaser that Ber Wilmer is going to be on NPR’s Morning Edition in the morning to tell us that Team D lost (even though they had 2.8M more votes) because they’re the “party of Wall Street” and “addicted to big money”.

    The man has no awareness of who Donnie is appointing to his Administration, apparently. He still thinks his speech from April 2015 is just as good today, I guess…

    (sigh)

    :-/

    Cheers,
    Scott.
    (“Can I get a refund of my very early donation?”)

  51. 51.

    Yarrow

    @Dog Dawg Damn: I can’t think of a bigger shitshow of a transition. I think Clinton to W. was probably kind of a mess because the election decision dragged on so long. But not a mess like this. And Twitter wasn’t a thing and even if it was, W. probably wouldn’t have tweeted his narcissistic comments all day throughout the transition. I’ve never heard of a president-elect going on a ‘victory tour.’ The horrors just continue to mount.

  52. 52.

    Mnemosyne

    @Another Scott:

    just heard a teaser that Ber Wilmer is going to be on NPR’s Morning Edition in the morning to tell us that Team D lost (even though they had 2.8M more votes) because they’re the “party of Wall Street” and “addicted to big money”.

    Well, that can’t be true, because I had people on this very website telling me today that we had to let go of being angry about Wilmer’s campaign and come together to let bygones be bygones. Could it be that those people don’t realize that Wilmer himself is one of the people who refuses to STFU and stop re-litigating the primary?

  55. 55.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Yarrow: Tin Foil Hat time, but on Twitter, he’ll tweet some “We Need a Minimum Wage” shit right after some Russia bombshell drops.

    Tad Davine has a direct link to Manafort in Ukraine, correct? Anyway, it’s all very bizarre. I don’t want NON-PARTY-MEMBERS to run *in either party*.

    This whole year has seemed like a coordinated attack with two major non-party-member candidates disrupting each party’s process.

  56. 56.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    Has anybody heard anything about this? Seems incoming President Trump (and I’m writing “President Trump” because I’m trying to get used to it) owes $315,000,000 to about 150 companies. This is the Wall Street Journal the link links to, but I don’t have a subscription, so I can’t read the article itself. Maybe somebody here has seen it and can shed a little more light on the whole mess?

    Anyway, all in all, I’d say we’re in for a rough ride over the next four years, and I’m not talking about Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, I’m talking more about Mr. Toad’s Fucked-Up Crack Deal.

  58. 58.

    Mnemosyne

    @Yarrow:

    I’ve been told that it couldn’t possibly be because of Tad Devine’s strong connections to Russia. There must be another, totally unrelated reason, just like all the other totally unrelated connections to Russia in this election, amirite?

  60. 60.

    Mnemosyne

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    The metaphor I’ve been using is that Putin is the guy who goes to the racetrack, bets every which way on every horse, and manages to hit the Perfecta just by the sheer number of bets that he placed.

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    Have you ridden Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland lately? Spoiler alert: at the end of the ride — inside Disneyland — you end up in a fiery hell with demons poking pitchforks at you. Not. Making. This. Up.

  62. 62.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    this woman always struck me as being a bit off, I never thought she’d confirm that so spectacularly

    OAKLAND — As Washington grapples with health care policy again, the head of the 185,000-member National Nurses United is turning her attention to a seemingly unlikely advocate for a single-payer system. “The one I’m counting on the most is Trump,” RoseAnn DeMoro said,
    DeMoro, who serves as executive director of both the Oakland-based National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association, told POLITICO California on Thursday that she is “disgusted” with Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and believes that the president-elect may actually get action.
    “He’s a businessman, he has an international perspective — and his wife comes from a country where they have single payer,’’ said DeMoro, who also is an AFL-CIO national vice president and executive board member. “I think that Donald Trump is not about either party; he’s about something very different. He’s the one who can actually rise above this and do what’s right, and he knows as a businessman, it’s the most cost effective,’’ she said.
    And, she noted, Trump already has signaled to GOP party leaders that he’s willing to buck them on issues like ethics and the TransPacific Partnership.
    “He’s not like these progressive yo-yos who pop off while people are dying,’’ she said, adding that when it comes to single payer health care, “I hope that he has the courage to enact what’s right.”

  63. 63.

    Another Scott

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): I thought the total was ~ $1.5B including minority interests?

    Donnie being in hock to the banks and conflicts of interest has been out there for a long time, we’re just getting more details now.

    Mother Jones from September:

    The US government has charged that the German banking giant misled investors into buying bad mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, and it is demanding that Deutsche Bank pay $14 billion to settle legal claims. The bank is reported to have planned for a settlement of $2 billion to $3 billion, and negotiations between it and the Department of Justice are likely to be contentious and last for months—possibly well into the next administration. Should Trump take the White House, what Deutsche Bank ends up paying for its alleged misdeeds might depend on how tough Trump’s Justice Department will be with the bank to which he owes so much money.

    […]

    Deutsche Bank is one of the only big banks willing to work with Trump these days and has provided financing for his various real estate projects. Trump has borrowed as much as $364 million from Deutsche Bank since 2012, and all four of the outstanding loans will come due before 2024—the end of a potential second Trump presidential term.

    Most other major banks stopped lending to his companies long ago, after a number of large banks were burned when earlier Trump projects failed. If Trump becomes president, he could find himself pulled between competing priorities: protecting his relationship with the one big bank that will do business with him or punishing a major player in the financial crash. (Though the terms of the loans are set, Trump could at some point try to renegotiate the loans, as he has done many times before. Consequently, he would have a potential interest in scoring points with the bank and enhancing its financial standing.)

    […]

    Since 1998, Deutsche Bank has lent Trump and his organizations approximately $2.5 billion and has made loan commitments worth another $1 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Currently, Trump owes Deutsche Bank more than $350 million stemming from loans on properties. Some of Trump’s most prized investments were built with money from Deutsche Bank, and three of his signature projects remain tied up in mortgages with the bank. For the Old Post Office project, Trump borrowed $170 million from Deutsche Bank. He has borrowed $125 million from the bank for two mortgages on his Trump National Doral golf course in Miami. For his Chicago skyscraper, he took out a loan in 2014 listed at $69 million on paperwork filed with the Cook County real estate office, although he said it was worth between $25 million and $50 million on the most recent personal financial disclosure form filed this past May.

    I believe that Donnie bought out another investor at the Old Post Office and the additional money came from DB. So, of the ~$200M for the project, Donnie put up ~ $30M and DB loans are the rest. (The link has been posted here before.)

    No conflicts there, no sir.

    (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  64. 64.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    John Schindler ‏@20 committee 7h7 hours ago
    Old #NSA friend tells me that the term used by Kremlin higher-ups to describe Trump is severely unflattering, much worse than “our bitch”.

  65. 65.

    cckids

    From top:

    Much more information at the link.

    Jesus Christ in a sidecar, how much more info can there possibly be?

  67. 67.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think at this point, people are really underestimating how dangerous Donald Trump’s behavior is.

    By signal-boosting Assange and praising him over our intel, he’s exposing himself to liability down the road.

    This is so incredibly obvious, of course, that I can’t believe no one has told him this. Assange has leaked on both prior administrations, and he’s not a Trump fan, so much as an anti-USA guy.

    The short-sightedness of how he’s handling this is revealing. If he handles other crises like this, we’re in for a big fucking.

  68. 68.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    One weird trick to read WSJ articles!

    Take the article’s headline—”Trump’s Debts Are Widely Held on Wall Street, Creating New Potential Conflicts”—and search for it verbatim in Google. One of the top links should be to the story itself on the WSJ site, and if you click on that you can read the whole article.

  69. 69.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    I’m also really annoyed with his surrogates constantly saying 8 years, 8 years, 8 years.

    I find that deeply disrespectful. Should be 4 years, and if American public allows us privilege, 8. But acting like this razor thin margin guarantees him 8 years is spitting in our face.

  70. 70.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: how much more unflattering can you get than “their bitch.” “Their whoring bitch”, gay slur with whoring bitch, gay slur whoring mf’r bitch. The latter slurs don’t really make sense because it makes Putin sound bad too.

  73. 73.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    I don’t understand why Obama’s people gave the exact time of the hacking presser or presentation whatever it’s going to be on Monday at 2pm. Isnt that a heads up to Lumpy to tweet another shiny object at say 1230 pm? I would have announced it for 2pm but done it at 10AM.

  74. 74.

    ThresherK (tablet)

    @Steeplejack (phone): I hear that “Publishers hate it!”

    Transition team? I am old enough and Dem enough to remember when Bill Clinton’s was being made into a punchline on Murphy Brown. That’s when I knew that show was junk for satire.

  77. 77.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Mary G: Yeah, I’ve not been to Disneyland in about 20 years and I always thought it was like that.

    (And I return to lurking to learn everything I wanted to learn about Lightroom and was afraid to ask).

  78. 78.

    Kathleen

    @Another Scott: Peter Daou said on Twitter that Wilmer supposedly praised Trump for penalizing companies who planned to move operations to foreign countries. I don’t have link and I block Wilmer so I can’t confirm if or what he said.

  80. 80.

    Aleta

    @Another Scott: From April 2016, Buzzfeed:

    Trump promised to employ the architect ( Moore) who had, over decades, championed the building’s careful, historic restoration. And he promised the involvement of a multibillion-dollar real estate investment firm with a rock-solid financial reputation.
    After Trump’s team got the nod from the GSA, however, it reversed itself on both these promises. It announced that the architect would no longer be involved. And it informed the government that it would no longer be working with the real estate investment firm.
    To finance the construction, Trump borrowed $170 million from a bank, putting the federal lease on the property up as collateral. According to a former member of his team, “The Trump people said all the right things” in the early stages. “He never intended to stick with it. He thought, ‘Well, let’s get to the next phase and then we’ll do what we want to do.’”
    Several sources said the GSA decided to proceed with the deal, despite all the changes, in part because it feared the political fallout.

    Trump’s firm has applied for a $32 million federal subsidy, in the form of a tax credit, which could help cover its investment in the taxpayer-owned building. But insiders said that Trump’s company has pushed the government to accept design and decorative changes that run counter to the principles of historic preservation, which are the basis on which he applied for a tax subsidy.

    Design was a big part of the GSA’s review process, accounting for 35% of a bidder’s score. Partnering with Moore, whose credibility was unimpeachable, and who had virtually invented the concept of renovating and rehabilitating the building, gave Trump a tremendous advantage.
    To finance the construction, Trump borrowed $170 million from a bank, putting the federal lease on the property up as collateral. Financing was the second big arena in which bidders had to prove themselves. They needed to show the GSA not just that they had the resources to pull off a project of this scale, but also that they would provide a healthy return to the government. But several of Trump’s companies had suffered highly publicized bankruptcies.
    The Trump group teamed up with a partner that had very deep pockets: Colony Capital, one of the biggest real estate funds in the world, which, as of last year, had $28 billion in assets under management.
    … Trump committed to a minimum rent to the government of $3 million, three sources say. And on top of that, he repeatedly pledged that no matter what problems arose, his group could finance the deal and make the project a success, two former members of his team recalled.

    (One former GSA official recalled) a meeting between government officials, Ivanka Trump, and others shortly after Trump won the bidding. Officials said they were concerned about the company’s history of bankruptcies and contentious dealings … The GSA raised one concern in particular, about what’s known as “re-trading the deal.” That’s when a developer agrees to one set of terms, but tries to reopen negotiations after the project is too far along to halt. That was something the GSA let Ivanka Trump know it would not tolerate.
    After the government announced Trump had won the bid, a competing team, backed by Hilton Hotels, protested, citing the developer’s past corporate bankruptcies. The GSA … defended its selection in part by citing Trump’s architect.“Mr. Moore’s experience with the Old Post Office dates back to the early 1970s when he first proposed that the building become a hotel,” a GSA official wrote to the Hilton team. But in September 2012, it was reported that Moore would be taking an indefinite “medical leave of absence.” Moore, who was central to the Trump proposal, was off the project. …The Trump executive now says that Moore “didn’t have the resources” to complete the project…One person recalled seeing him weeks later, working on another project and apparently in fine health.
    Then the Trumps revealed another big change: Colony Capital, the huge equity firm backing their bid, was leaving the team. The Trump executive said the Trumps were concerned that Colony Capital might seek to cash out within a few years. The Trumps wanted full ownership for the long haul. … At this point in the process, experts said, the GSA could still have abandoned Trump and selected another developer. No lease had yet been signed — negotiations on the terms of the complex, 700-page lease took more than a year — and no money had changed hands. But the agency had recently been weakened by a scandal involving lavish spending at its conferences. A single GSA event at a posh Nevada resort had cost taxpayers over $822,000, including $79,000 for light refreshments and breakfast…. Two GSA officials were forced out, including the head of the Public Buildings Service, which oversaw the Old Post Office building. The agency was eager to avoid further controversy, two former GSA officials said, and picking a fight with Donald Trump would certainly cause a storm.
    In August 2013, 18 months after the GSA tapped Trump as its preferred developer, the parties finally agreed on a 60-year lease. According to a redacted version released to the public, the lease required Trump to put down a security deposit of $4 million, not in cash but in a letter of credit. Trump himself was listed as the personal guarantor of the project, records indicate, signing a $40 million guaranty. The $40 million guaranty can be reduced based on how much equity Trump contributes to the project, the GSA said in a report on it to Congress.

  81. 81.

    Aleta

    @Aleta: Two other notes to that:

    (Nov. 2016, from Slate) Lawyers for an LLC owned by Donald Trump and his children will try again to reclaim tax revenue from Washington, D.C., Bloomberg BNA reported on Wednesday. Their first suit, which alleged that the District overtaxed the Trump International Hotel, was dismissed in late October. It is now being refiled in separate petitions for each of the lots that make up the property.

    In two months, Donald Trump will have the power to appoint the head of the GSA, which would handle any contract renegotiations with the hotel, which will apparently be controlled at that point by a trust run by the president’s children.

    But that’s all to come. Back in June, Trump’s team argued that its $1.7 million annual tax bill in 2015 and 2016 was too high because the hotel was only partially completed at that time. They also said the lease, which the city assessed at $98 million and lowered to $91 million on appeal, was only worth about $28 million, according to Politico.

    That’s a huge difference, and interesting in light of the controversy that ensued after Trump won the contract. Back in 2012, when the GSA awarded the bid to the future president’s company, a rival consortium including Hilton Hotels appealed the decision on the grounds that the finances made no sense. “The GSA and US taxpayers will be left with an unrealistic economic model and another failed attempt to redevelop the Old Post Office,” the complaint read, “GSA and the US taxpayers will have no choice but to ‘trade out’ the unrealistic ‘great deal’ it was promised for the far more pedestrian or even more disastrous outcome when it is taken back in default.”

    But in 2012, Trump would have had reason to believe an assessment bonanza was on the way. The Real Property Tax Appeals Commission … was created that year to replace an appeals board that was infamous for giving out huge assessment reductions to commercial property owners. Ninety-three percent of reduced potential revenue came from commercial properties. The old board often approved assessment discounts of about $3 billion a year; the new RPTAC cut that to $1.7 billion in 2013 and $1.3 billion in 2014.

    Presumably, the balance sheet for the Trump International Hotel looks a lot blacker if you cut the assessed value of the lease by $70 million.

    But the owner-friendly board is gone. And the court appeal is unlikely to generate a different result with the lots considered separately than it did when they were considered together.

    (Dec 2016 from USA Today) The lease (Trump signed a lease with the GSA ) reads: “No member or delegate to Congress, or elected official of the Government of the United States or the Government of the District of Columbia, shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom; provided, however, that this provision shall not be construed as extending to any Person who may be a shareholder or other beneficial owner of any publicly held corporation or other entity, if this Lease is for the general benefit of such corporation or other entity.” … But GSA issued a statement Wednesday: “GSA does not have a position that the lease provision requires the President-elect to divest of his financial interests. We can make no definitive statement at this time about what would constitute a breach of the agreement, and to do so now would be premature. In fact, no determination regarding the Old Post Office can be completed until the full circumstances surrounding the President-elect’s business arrangements have been finalized and he has assumed office,” the statement reads.

  82. 82.

    Another Scott

    @Aleta: Thanks for these posts.

    The Old Post Office really is an iconic property (it’s the only building in DC taller than the Capitol). It would be fitting if it ended up being Donnie’s downfall (just like his inflated perceptions led him to vastly overplaying for the Plaza in NYC)…

    The GSA can’t let go of this – they have to make him follow the rules, no matter who he picks to head it.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

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