Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy Read online

  Some of the Republican hesitance in the Senate may be due to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ strong criminal justice position, which emphasizes the punitive approach. I agree with that for violent criminals, but Sessions doesn’t seem to consider the total cost to society of recidivism, including monetary costs to taxpayers, the social cost of the repeat offenses, and the opportunity costs of all those services better-prepared former inmates may have contributed to society through gainful employment.

  Whatever their reasons, it’s time for Republicans to stop dragging their heels on this and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I’m not saying sentencing reform isn’t needed, but this bill will start chopping away at the overall problem immediately. Pass the First Step Act and then continue the debates on sentencing reform.

  Are you listening, Mitch McConnell? You have a chance to do something that will help your country and your party in this November’s mid-term elections. Yes, it will also reflect positively on the president, but you’ll just have to put your RINO instincts aside for a change. Order this bill to the floor of the Senate for a vote.

  Even Kim Kardashian has done more than RINO Mitch to move this bill forward. She visited the White House and met with the President and Jared Kushner to discuss ways she could get involved in the prison reform effort. Kardashian instantly brought a national spotlight to this important issue and helped put pressure on the Senate to bring the bill to the Senate floor.

  The implementation of risk assessments could help overcome resistance to this bill. Risk assessments collect information on behavior and attitudes associated with lower rates of recidivism. This is generally known as the Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) model. The concept is often criticized for being correlated with race and therefore discriminatory. If the assessments are discriminatory, fix them. But they should be used extensively throughout the criminal justice system, from pre-trial detention through release considerations. Not only will the success rates be higher, but those with legitimate concerns about this approach will know we aren’t just releasing anyone and everyone to cut costs and address overcrowding in prisons.

  The president has led on this issue. His administration has reached across the aisle to get a bill through the House and into the Senate’s hands. It’s time for senators in both houses to stop playing politics and for Mitch McConnell to bring this forward for an up or down vote.

  Rebuilding America First

  One issue that should be bipartisan, even in today’s polarized political environment, is national infrastructure. The United States is the richest, most powerful country in the world, but its roads, bridges, airports, and other infrastructure often look more like a third world country’s. And with the enormous debt his predecessor ran up, rebuilding our country might seem like a very uphill battle.

  It probably would be for most politicians, but not for a billionaire real estate developer. Drawing on the distinctly American history of private infrastructure development, President Trump has outlined a plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure with $200 billion in federal funds that would spur at least $1.5 trillion in private investments across America. To streamline the federal permitting process for infrastructure projects, federal agencies have signed the One Federal Decision memorandum of understanding (MOU). The president will make getting his plan through Congress a key part of the second half of his first term.

  The president removed a major obstacle to energy independence and new jobs by approving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, expediting pipeline approval and production, and improving the permitting and approval processes for liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and exports. He also ended the Obama administration’s war on coal, rolling back harmful regulations and policies, including the Clean Power Plan and Stream Protection Rule.

  Empowering Women in America

  When the so-called Women’s March descended on Washington, DC, on January 21, 2017, I was out on the street with a microphone. I’d been interviewing people since early in the morning, hoping to get a few quotes for the “Street Justice” segment that runs at the end of my show. I’d brought along two Navy SEALs, just in case. I really did. Wherever I went, the SEALs stood on either side of me. My camera crew, as usual, was in front, getting it all on film. For the most part, the interviews went fine. I got to argue with a few people with whom I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye, and tried my best to learn what the heck this “movement for all women” was about.

  Not much, as it turned out.

  There were some women who believed the march had been organized to impeach Donald Trump, others thought it was one big abortion rally. One woman told me she didn’t care what happened as long as the Democrats took the midterm elections.

  At some point, after we’d been out for a few hours, the feeling in the streets shifted. The crowd was getting bigger and the signs were getting angrier. I’ve been in protests that turned to riots, back in the ’70s when I was in Europe. I knew when a crowd was starting to become hostile. I moved a little closer to my SEAL friends, hoping we could get out fast. Before long, people were hurling insults my way. They called me and my crew names I don’t care to repeat in print—and I’m not exactly a shrinking violet. A mob mentality had taken charge, for certain. It was as if their human brains shut down and something primitive took over when they saw the Fox News logo on my microphone.

  By that afternoon, every Fake News station in the country had fawning coverage of the marches, making them seem like peaceful little knitting circles rather than open rebellions against our newly elected president. I was on the streets. I knew different. I saw the march for what it was. These people were militant. They were marching for women, all right, just not the ones who believe human life is sacred and begins at conception; not the ones who want a strong military; and certainly not the ones who think illegal immigration is out of hand. In other words, not for any of the millions of women who had cast their votes for Donald Trump a couple of months before. Yet, they had the audacity to tell the world that they spoke for all women.

  It wasn’t until I got home that the irony of it all dawned on me. If you had told me when I was a little girl that I would become a prosecutor, a judge, one of the first female district attorneys in the state of New York, and then the host of a television show, only to be spit at and ridiculed during a march “for all women,” I’m not sure I would have believed you. In those days, the goal was equality of opportunity. It was making sure everyone had a fair shot. The women who raised me and the women I grew up with only wanted the same opportunities and the same rights as their male counterparts. They weren’t easy to get, but they fought hard. And my generation carried the same torch.

  Before I was the DA of Westchester, I was an assistant DA. It was during that time that I started one of the first domestic violence units in the country. To do that I had to convince the police chiefs from forty-three municipalities in Westchester County—all men—to allow us to work with their departments. Back then, many of them didn’t think domestic violence cases even belonged in the criminal justice system. They felt they were social problems, not criminal justice problems. The DA scheduled a breakfast meeting, so I could lecture on the legal requirements of the domestic violence legislation to a roomful of hardened, armed cops. Just when I was about to begin, one of chiefs said to me, “Hon, before we start can you get me a cup of coffee?” Inside I was burning. I wanted to grab him right by the throat, but an angel on my right shoulder calmed me. Jeanine, it said, you’ve got a mission, and this meeting is not about this S.O.B. It’s about victims. “Cream and sugar?” I asked, just as sweet as can be. Then I sat down and told them what we expected and what we wanted them to do. We got their cooperation, and my unit became a national model for the prosecution of batterers and set records for convictions.

  When I marched in the middle of the protestors in Washington with a cameraman in tow, I asked what they were protesting. Between curse words, they said they want equal rights for women. I asked wh
at rights they were fighting for. None of them could come up with a straight answer. “What right does a man have that you don’t?” I asked. “Just name one.” My questions were met with nothing but stammering and blank stares. All along, they’d been pretending they were marching for something, when their march was nothing more than a hissy fit, thrown because someone they didn’t like managed to win an election.

  All they knew about Donald Trump is what the Fake Press fed them. So, they didn’t know him at all. Since he was a real estate developer in Manhattan, the president has promoted the causes of women—and also promoted women. In the ’80s, at a time when very few women were working in construction and development, Trump had several female development and construction project managers. while other women, if they were in the industry at all, were working in sales and marketing. He created opportunities for women in the male-dominated construction industry long before it was fashionable or socially responsible to do so. In the Trump Organization, a woman who started as a secretary or a low-level office worker could have a reasonable expectation of rising through the company’s ranks within a few years. All it took was hard work and a few good ideas.

  In fact, it was a woman who handled much of Donald Trump’s day-to-day business when he had too much to do. Norma Foerderer, one of Trump’s most-trusted employees, started with the Trump Organization in 1981, when it was only seven or eight people in a room, and ascended the corporate ladder all the way to the boss’s right-hand side. During the campaign, a former representative for Donald Trump told the Washington Post that Foerderer would advise Trump on everything “from what color tie to wear to whether or not he should purchase a building.” When Foerderer died from a heart attack during surgery in 2013, Donald was devastated.

  He hired Deirdre Rosen as a VP of human resources, Jill Martin as assistant general counsel, Louise Sunshine as an executive vice president, and Amanda Miller as head of marketing. And, of course, there’s Rhona Graff, his treasured longtime personal assistant. Today, according to company representatives, there are far more women than men working in the Trump Organization. That’s better than most Fortune 500 companies. It’s certainly better than most of the law firms I’ve dealt with, and it’s not the kind of thing that happens overnight. In business, Donald Trump cared about the advancement of women long before there were hashtags and half-assed marches to bring the issue into the public eye. In the years when I, as a young prosecutor, was fighting to convince judges and juries that a man didn’t have the legal right to beat his wife, women at the Trump Organization were able to lead fulfilling lives at home and in the office. Equal opportunity is bred into the culture of the Trump Org, and it comes straight from the top.

  For the past decade, the Trump Organization’s largest deals were spearheaded by another woman, his daughter Ivanka Trump who oversaw the acquisition and development of their largest projects.

  Trump had a famous line in the ’80s, which I always found a little funny. Someone had asked him whether men were better than women in business. “Men are better than women,” he said, going along with the joke. “But a good woman is better than ten good men.” His daughter Ivanka fits this bill.

  Nowhere does President Trump show more respect for women than in his relationship with his daughter, while no one is treated with more hypocrisy by the press. Let me give you an example. In March 2015, less than three months before her father announced he would run for president, Vogue published a flattering feature in their magazine power issue on Ivanka subtitled: “Full-speed at work and hands-on at home, Ivanka Trump knows what it means to be a modern millennial—the exact demographic she wants to dress.”

  Almost immediately after her father announced, the same magazine began to publish one negative article after another about her. Where Ivanka was the poster girl for Millennials before the campaign, she was a “faux feminist” after; where she had been an entrepreneur before he announced, she was an “opportunist” after. Previously described as true to herself, once her father announced his presidency, the media claimed her views were, “hypocritical bullshit.”

  I’ll tell you what’s bullshit. Anything Vogue has written about Ivanka since June 16, 2015.

  I’ve known Ivanka since she was a teenager, before she got her degree at Wharton or joined the Trump Organization, and long before she had to deal with the press. Even when she was a kid, you could tell she’d be better than a few hundred good men. When Ivanka joined her father’s business in 2006 at the age twenty four, and she proved her competence every day. She’d already worked two years at an outside firm to learn the ropes of real estate, not wanting to seem as if she was taking handouts from her father and had learned a few things of her own. Within just a few years, she worked with her brothers to oversee the expansion of the core real estate business and co-found her own branch of the business, a successful management company for luxury hotels called the Trump Hotel Collection.

  By the time she was a co-judge on Celebrity Apprentice, the press had fallen head-over-heels in love with her. She was everything a successful woman should be, they said at the time.

  Fortune magazine named her one of its “40 under 40”—the magazine’s famous list of the most influential young people in the business world. She helped found the Girl Up initiative at the United Nations foundation, which provides adolescent women and girls in the developing world with opportunities to succeed and thrive as leaders in their communities. She was described at the National Women’s Summit as a woman “with a drive to support other women.” She won the Diamond Empowerment Fund’s Good Award for helping promote education in diamond-producing African nations.

  In business, she received the prestigious Joseph Wharton Award For Young Leadership from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and was given the Young Global Leader Award from the World Economic Forum, the Ace Breakthrough Award for Excellence in Accessories, and the FABB Achievement Award from the Fashion Accessories Council for her innovative brand.

  Ironically, the Left most shows its bias and hypocrisy in its treatment of women—well, certain women.

  While they saw Hillary Clinton as an independent woman and not held responsible for the actions of her husband Bill, Ivanka Trump was ostracized for being Donald Trump’s daughter. Recently, in a Vogue article about fashion designer Georgina Chapman, the magazine says that she shouldn’t be judged by her monster husband Harvey Weinstein. But if you’re a conservative or a Trump, the rules are different. In February 2017, one month after Donald J. Trump took office, a female Nordstrom’s executive proudly trumpeted that Nordstrom’s would be dropping Ivanka Trump’s fashion line.

  The genesis of this was an online campaign started by a marketer, Shannon Coulter (no relation to Ann), who didn’t much like the president. So, she decided to take it out on his daughter, creating the hashtag “grab your wallet.” Her campaign sought to punish the Ivanka Trump brand for the supposed misdeeds of Ivanka’s father. It was clear this was a political hit job because Ivanka’s brand revenue went up 21 percent from 2015 to 2016. Six months before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, Ivanka was invited to open Nordstrom’s new flagship department store in Vancouver where she appeared alongside the Nordstrom family and Anna Wintour of Vogue. If the brand had not been selling well in Nordstrom’s, they wouldn’t have ordered more products for the spring 2017 season.

  Ironically, Ivanka is not political. Ivanka clearly cares about policy, just not Swamp politics. She admitted as much at the Republican convention saying that she was neither Republican nor Democrat. She became involved in the campaign with the intention of talking about women and their advancement; including what her father taught her, how he advanced women in his company, and what he would do to empower women in the American workplace. This has been proven to be true now that we see the lowest female unemployment rate in eighteen years.

  After her father became president, she left the family business she’d been groomed to run from the time she was a lit
tle girl. (Yes, a woman groomed to run what most see as a male-dominated business by the very man these hashtagging women despise.) She left to continue to advocate for women in the workforce. She left her own business and its talented team of women, leaving her home and a comfortable life for the Washington shark tank.

  Ivanka continues forging ahead in her decade-long effort to empower women in the workplace. So, to all the hashtag haters and classless women, as well as the stores that capitulate to them, I have news for you. She is stronger than you and, amazingly, is every bit as strong as her dad.

  The very so-called feminists who marched to advance strong independent women are the ones rallying to suppress a woman who epitomizes everything these women claim to champion.

  I challenge them to explain their blatant hypocrisy asking Ivanka to answer for her dad, when Chelsea Clinton never has to. Chelsea is currently making the rounds for her book, She Persisted. Is anyone asking her about her father ’s many accusers, one of whom accused him of rape, as well as his consensual sex in the Oval with an intern while in office? I don’t think so.

  I challenge them to tell you why Melania Trump, one of the most beautiful women in the world, has been on the cover of only one women’s national magazine, while Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton were featured extensively.

  Recently, one early spring Sunday, I visited Ivanka and Jared in their beautiful home in the Kalorama section of Washington. I was met at the door by Ivanka and Jared’s four-year-old son Joseph who extended his hand to greet me and introduced himself. I smiled, thinking what an adorable and proper young man. Then he stunned me with a question in perfect diction: “May I get you a drink?” I turned and looked at the Secret Service agent behind me. He nodded to me, as if to say yes. I turned back, looked at Joseph, and said, “Yes, thank you!” To which he inquired, “Would you like a Shirley Temple?” I burst out laughing, and thanked him. Ivanka was dressed in a two-piece white knit outfit, looking casual yet stunning. Together, we walked into a lovely dining room with a table set for lunch. Large windows looked out on a small backyard filled with bikes, toys, and a child’s jungle gym. The yard was a feature that helped sway Ivanka and Jared to take the house, she said. Having lived in Manhattan, backyards are a luxury.