Trump and Haley boast about punishing UN over not following US line


Developments on Day 340 of The Trump Administration:

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Reduced Budget Follows Ambassador Haley’s Anger at UN

The Trump Administration has hailed its influence in a reduction of the UN budget by $285 million.

The US Mission to the United Nations announced the cut on Sunday, and said that its backing of the UN’s management and support functions will also be scaled back.

The Administration’s proposed budget, which still has not been presented to Congress, proposed deep cuts in US funding. The US has also withdrawn from UNESCO, the UN’s cultural organization.

However, the funding reductions have been highlighted in the past week by the Administration’s repeated linkage of support to compliance with US demands.

Before last week’s General Assembly vote on a resolution opposing recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Donald Trump and US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley threatened any country that did not back Washington and Israel. Trump said, “Let them vote against us. We will save a lot,” while Haley said she would take names and remember them the next time the US was asked for financial help.

Despite the warnings, the General Assembly voted 128-9, with 35 abstentions, in favor of the resolution.

Haley issued a statement on Sunday emphasizing the US role in the reduction of the UN’s 2018-2019 budget to $5.4 billion and warned of more slashing of funds:

We will no longer let the generosity of the American people be taken advantage of or remain unchecked….You can be sure we’ll continue to look at ways to increase the U.N.’s efficiency while protecting our interests.

Under a formula based on economic size and established under an article of the UN Charter, the US is responsible for 22% of the UN operating budget. Washington paid about $1.2 billion of the 2016-2017 budget of $5.4 billion.

The US also contributes 28.5% to separate funding for UN peacekeeping operations, which have been allocated $6.8 billion in 2017-2018.

When that funding was cut in June by more than $500 million, Haley exulted, “We’re only getting started.”

Louis Charbonneau, the UN director at Human Rights Watch, said of Sunday’s announcement: “There’s nothing wrong with increasing efficiency and eliminating waste at the UN. But it’s crucial that we don’t curtail the UN’s ability to monitor, investigate and expose human rights abuses or its ability to save the lives of men, women and children worldwide.”


Has Bannon Thrown Kushner Under the Trump-Russia Bus?

We have been summarizing Vanity Fair’s revealing profile of Steve Bannon — the hard-right former White House chief strategist and executive officer of the attack site Breitbart — including his possible Presidential run in 2020 and his dislike of “Javanka”, Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

But in his interviews with the magazine, has Bannon gone even farther by throwing Kushner to Special Robert Mueller, investigating the Trump-Russia links?

While claiming there is no merit to the inquiry, Bannon then implicated Kushner over contacts with Kremlin-linked officials:

He’s taking meetings with Russians to get additional stuff. This tells you everything about Jared. They were looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin. That’s his maturity level.

While focusing on Kushner — who failed to disclose more than 100 meetings with foreign officials on his White House forms — Bannon may also have indirectly pointed at Donald Trump Jr., who elevated the contacts with Moscow by meeting three Kremlin-linked envoys in June 2016 to get anti-Clinton material.

Bannon did not specify the Kushner meetings with Russians, but they include a December 2016 discussion with the head of a Russian State bank, Sergey Gorkov, which Moscow said was about “financial matters”. That may have included a Kushner request for hundreds of millions of dollars in loans for his troubled New York skyscraper project.

Days later Kushner and other Trump transition officials directed Michael Flynn, later the National Security Council, in his phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Topics included a request to the Kremlin not to retaliate against sanctions imposed by Barack Obama over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell denied Bannon’s implications, “Steve Bannon may regret not being in the White House anymore, but that is not an excuse for him peddling false stories about Jared or anyone else.”