The Lie Trump is Servicing

 

While people are wondering whether Ukrainian President Zelenskyy needs to do some backtracking to make proper amends and all that and get back to the table with the US, Russian foreign minister Lavrov is out here calling this man a traitor to the Jewish people and basically a "Nazi". This has been a big part of Russian propaganda. It is, for so many reasons, especially disgusting to project this made-up bullshit to this man, who comes from a heroic family that fought against the Nazis, for the very obvious reasons. 

If the reasons aren't obvious to you--get off the internet, read books, touch grass. What the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you believe stupid made-up shit just because it matches the thing you want to believe? Shouldn't what is actually true matter? 

Trump has proposed that Zelenskyy is somehow the reason, being elected to the presidency of Ukraine in 2019, for the invasion that started in 2014 and which his own good buddy Manafort knows a whole lot about. (I get why Trump faithful try to step around all that. It's messy for them, no?) 

TWGB: Nothing to It

 

To start off this edition of the TrumpWorld Grab-Bag--a riddle:

When is a legal strategy an illegal strategy?

Answer: when the president of the United States who just lost his election in a perfectly legitimate contest tries to engage federal employees in a plot to overturn said election with a pretext based on claims of fraud that were, themselves, completely fraudulent. 

Look, I never said that the riddle was going to be funny, but it kind of is. Buried in the link is one of Trump's current lawyers, Doug Collins, late of Congress, claiming he will do law stuff at people very hard if they overstep in their inquiry into Trump's soliciting of election campaign advice from federal employees due to "privilege". He doesn't cite what flavor of privilege this is supposed to be, but, like, I don't think it should be executive privilege if he's asking them to violate the Hatch Act and since DOJ lawyers aren't his personal attorneys I don't think bog standard attorney/client privilege applies, especially since Trump seems to have been aware that he lost legitimately and claims of fraud were actually just a pretext for engaging in electoral fuckery post facto. So--the fraud claims themselves were a fraud.

I hate to play lawyer on the blog, but that can't possibly be kosher, right? Anyhow, it looks here like Rosen did his best to cover his bases regarding what information he could provide by conferring with the DOJ IG and ultimately told his story before Trump lawyers could enjoin him not to. Which somewhat implies everyone here knew that these revelations are kind of a big freaking deal. 

TWGB: Kraken Up

 

President Trump is said to have floated appointing a special counsel to investigate voter fraud: A lawyer who spread election conspiracy theories. https://t.co/QYv642y5qw

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 19, 2020

It doesn't even seem that long ago that Sidney Powell was deemed even a little bit too out there for Rudy Giuliani (just short of one whole month, in fact). And now Donald Trump is entertaining the idea of unloosing the Kraken as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud. It's kind of funny because it wasn't even that long ago that Trump had a voting integrity commission that was disbanded because it never found any voting fraud. But on they go, into the (alleged) breach.... 

It should probably be bigger news, however, that Trump also entertained Ms. Powell's client, the recently-pardoned Michael Flynn, who, like Lin Wood or the My Pillow guy, has been arguing in favor of martial law so that Trump can get a do-over in the swing states that he lost. I don't believe there is an armed do-over clause in the Constitution, and Flynn has been singing in the key of batshit for so long it's hard to believe anyone does listen to him--but there are people who do! And Trump is apparently being one of them! 

This almost makes Rudy Giuliani's request for DHS to commandeer the voting machines look sane. I mean, it's not. But it almost does. It's almost as if there are constant and visible reminders of where Trump's priorities lie. 

Has Trump ever shown all that much interest in protecting us from COVID-19--not really, and now that there are vaccines he's just about checked out, except to make sure he gets some kind of credit (as if the existence of the disease itself wasn't a perfectly reasonable motivating factor for vaccine development). He stays in complete and vociferous denial that his good buddy Putin is any threat to the US even after news of an invasive cyberattack. (And who the hell knows what Trump's moves re: the Pentagon have to do with it, or will impact the incoming Biden Administration's ability to respond?) 

Trump may be the last person who will admit that the exact feckless and reckless disregard he is showing right now towards towards the country he was supposed to serve is the exact reason for his loss in the this election. It won't necessarily be because he's the last person to realize it--even now he's considering the possibility of returning to a post-presidency not unlike the life he had before. He'll be the last to admit it because he's still milking the marks. (It's what they've always been there for. Always.) 

Is it madness if it's profitable? If it's profitable, is it still sedition? I think--both. He's not a stable genius, but he knows whose priorities to put first. And if you still think that's America, I don't know how to help you at this point.

Trump Has a Favorite Dictator and Other Tales of the Decline

In what will doubtless be a shock to the other dictators, Trump recently (a couple weeks back) voiced the opinion that he did,  in fact, have a favorite dictator (sorry Kim, Putin, etc.!):

Donald Trump once referred to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as his "favourite dictator" as he awaited a meeting with the world leader, according to a new report.

The comment, detailed in a new Wall Street Journal report, was met with stunned silence from American and Egyptian officials, who had gathered inside the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz, France for this year's G7 summit.

"Where's my favourite dictator?" Mr Trump is reported to have said in a loud voice, several people who were in the room told the Journal.

Those witnesses said that they believed his comment was made in jest, but was nonetheless met with muted response. It is not clear if Mr Sisi was in the room, or if he heard the comment.

That's certainly sounding like a case of "the quiet bits out loud" but wow! This isn't really on the order of "things Trump usually says which are merely stupid" and vaults into the level of "things Trump says (like wanting to purchase Greenland, remember that?) which are both weird and can screw up international relations."

He is, though. The international relationships--he's messing them up. Things like firing (if he did) John Bolton, who I once characterized as a "bloodthirsty loon", would seem great if Trump was not likely to put someone in his stead who was as bad, if not worse.

But to be fair, he's messing up national security all around, including domestically. Instead of a wall that Mexico is building, it looks like we have a wall (not yet!) that the US military will build, and instead of a brilliant deal with North Korea for them to stop their nuclear program, we've got a North Korea nuclear program that, well, we're building, inadvertently, because Trump doesn't understand why we need to build up our cyber defense.

But he also doesn't understand our intelligence apparatus at all, either, which is definitely worrisome. He doesn't believe our links with foreign intelligence offices (like the Israeli contact he blew to Lavrov and Kislyak back in 2017), but is weirdly prone to dismissing the possibility of foreign countries trying to scope in on us. (Which you'd think he'd be aware is a real interest, all things considered. I guess it's my distrust of Netanyahu that makes me see "security companies" like Psy Group as possible cut-outs, but I could be wrong.)

He also seems to have abandoned steering our good friend Russia away from weird nuclear ideas. But what the hell? One of Trump's big ideas was pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal with his Fox News-inspired fantasies about pallets of cash to Iran, and his genius negotiating tool to get Iran back to the table (that we had them at, already, and got a deal with, already!) is--pallets-worth of credit--$15 Billion worth.

So, a similar plan, with less trust, that costs the US more? Wow! Mr. Art of the Deal! That is really....

Something. It's not good. None of this is good. We can't expect good from Trump, I'm just saying.

He called Sisi his "favorite dictator." He thinks the way he talks on Twitter is how he can communicate in life, and it doesn't even work that great on Twitter.  MAGA-hats--this is your king?  He's actually pretty stupid. Shouldn't that bother you more?

A TrumpWorld Grab-Bag Full of Interesting People

The G20 (or was it G19?) Summit in Hamburg has given us the first glimpse of President Trump's potential working relationship with respect to the guy many of us have been wondering about, Mr. Steal Your Election, Vladimir Putin. I'm just going to come out with it--it went as one would expect.  Mr. Trump has not ever unequivocally stated that he thought Russia was behind the hack of the DNC and the emails of Clinton associate John Podesta, and in fact, his Tweet just prior to meeting Putin conflated the two separate but important hacks to deride their importance:

Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 7, 2017

Notes: no one was talking about this because the US election happened in 2016 and the hacks are not actually relevant anymore, unless somehow, world leaders are curious about how everything in the US was so shambolic as to somehow result in a Trump presidency--alleging this is not a great look for POTUS. But John Podesta didn't run the DNC, and the CIA had nothing to do with that investigation, and also, the FBI didn't need the server to uncover the DNC hack because they already knew about it. So much wrong in one Tweet? Or--so much deliberate obfuscation when Trump's war to establish his legitimacy will never end because of the Russian asterisk?

But as to the actual meeting between Putin and Trump--the warm handshake and backslap instead of Trump's usual tug-o-war approach to manual greetings? The supposedly 30 minutes scheduled that became nearly 2 1/2 hours? The lack of note-taking and the letting Russia get out their message first: that Putin expressed that he had nothing to do with the hacks and Trump accepted that, getting right under the statement the WH and US State Department wanted to make about Trump "confronting" Russia with the allegations?

It's fucking dumb, and we have no reason at all to believe Trump really pressed an issue he is pathologically incapable of dealing with publicly. He still wants to have it both ways--deny Russia had bugger-all to do with anything, and blame the previous administration for not doing more. Why would that somehow change now that he's meeting his hero, who points out the mean reporters who insults him with the kind of menace only an autocrat-lover can really appreciate?

But what can I say that doesn't sound obvious to people who know my point of view? Trump's entourage think (publicly) that Trump handled himself brilliantly.  I'd respect them more if I had a sense their nonpublic thoughts were any different. Trump never seems able to act like his ass isn't owned by Putin. He wanted his foreign policy team to provide "deliverables" and had no foreign policy "asks" of his own set up. He ended up with a possible commitment to partner on cybersecurity with a nation that is trying to hack us on the regular.  Because if I'm mugged, I want to go fight crime with my mugger. It's insulting to any functioning intelligence, is what it is.

There's more grab-bag than just Trump's conduct at G20, though. The NYT just came out with a fascinating story about Donald Trump Jr. meeting with Paul Manafort and a Kremlin-backed lawyer.  This is crazy-interesting. For one thing, most folks know what Manafort was about. But the lawyer in question, Natalia Veselnitskaya, is interesting because of a thing called the Magnitsky Act, which targets human rights abusers. Russia has done considerable lobbying to try and effect US position on this. It's not Trump Jr's first connection with dodgy Russian business.  It just seems to go to show that weird Russian connections were a family affair. But keep in mind, Magnistsky is also about money-laundering.  I feel like this will come up in future Mueller-related proceedings, in which money-laundering and assorted business contacts could feature heavily.

All this is just to say that while Trump wants to "move on" and Putin wants to "move on" from the 2016 election interference, this is not likely to happen. They still have some stuff to answer for.

A Trump Abroad

I'm not by nature a pessimistic person, which regularly shocks me--my generation is known for cynicism and snark and sarcasm. But I sometimes am hopeful about things, like maybe that the White House plans hotel bookings for the President when he does important stuff abroad so he doesn't have to schlep a room in an embassy like he was Julian Assange or something. (He's staying in Hamburg's Senate house--it's nice, and I am just being mean.) Sigh. I wish I felt better about his being out and around people, is all.

Maybe he would just give a great speech in front of a sympathetic bussed-in crowd. Maybe it wouldn't be a weird white nationalist rant about Western Civilization. Maybe he wouldn't get some historical thing, like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, really wrong. Maybe he wouldn't mention his election results. 

I also was hopeful that the US President who took an oath to the Constitution would not actually deride freedom of speech and the press which is a big thing, really. (That hope got dashed.) And if I was looking for some kind of acknowledgement that Trump understood that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections and probably was going to try it again, well, again, disappointment.  Trump basically agreed Russia could have been involved but so could anyone and anyway nothing is proven, blah blah blah. Which is itself fake news. There is a lot of consensus that meddling came from Russia to benefit Trump.  And that they will try it again. Right now, they seem to be trying out our nuclear plants. 

I would like to think that a person who put "America first" would be mad about this kind of invasive attack by any foreign government on our infrastructure--whether our electoral infrastructure upon which our faith in government might depend, or on our electric grid. That someone who was speaking for the US interest in, well, anything, had a plan.

But this self-interested SOB can't even admit that Russia is a problem. He is going to go into his meeting with Putin with a handful of people--Tillerson, Lavrov, some translators. And I don't feel good about this based on his meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak.  But maybe we will see, despite efforts to keep this meeting very closed. 

I'm a Big Deal in Romania

Ok, so I don't know what this is all about, but it seems like whenever there is news about how Donald Trump is basically so owned because of Eastern European Hackers working at the behest of Vladimir Putin (p.s., I highly recommend the book The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election by Malcolm Nance--it's a great explainer of how we ended up with 17 US intelligence agencies thinking Russia was trying to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 presidential election--you might not agree, but it's well-sourced and the result of multitudes of reporting) I get a spike in blog visits from Romania.

I have an English-language only D-list political blog that doesn't really concentrate on foreign policy that much. These sort of "false-positive" Romanian-located hits don't make a lot of sense, but only really started after about May 2016. Is this a thing other political blogs have been experiencing? May 2016 is right about when the DNC leak was reported right? I don't think this has anything to do with spamming, because no spam comments. But what are the visits for?     

I dunno, I just wouldn't mind other, smarter bloggers' input about this weird phenomenon.        

This Russia/Trump/Comey Thing Bugs Me

On Friday, legislators were angered by FBI Director Jim Comey's lack of candor regarding his agency's investigation into the connection between the Trump campaign and the Russian hack ops waged against the DNC and John Podesta in a closed-door meeting. It's one thing that he was cagey about what information he had in a public venue, but it's a bit something else to be less than forthcoming in that environment. This has raised questions about whether Comey ought to really resign for showing a double standard, having offered a kind of "October Surprise" in his openness to discussing FBI workings regarding Hillary Clinton, but a tendency to not even pretend to be half-interested in the real concerns regarding Donald Trump. The concerns raised about this lack of proper investigation lead to some further questioning of President-Elect Trump's legitimacy.

What bothers me about this is the report that the former MI6 agent who had gathered the information in the dossier was reportedly agitated that the FBI had not been acting on the information provided immediately. This sort of makes me wonder if the agency experienced a kind of institutional "slow-down" with respects to looking seriously into a Republican candidate's very real (or at least, plausible and serious) corruption, while still flogging Democratic candidate's Clinton's (despite Rep. Chaffetz's burblings) dead letter.

It bothers me because it implies that our own institutions aren't as good or fair as they ought to be. It's disturbing because some of the information is not just plausible but probable, and the sources of the information aren't that hard to get at. It bothers me because we now have agencies globally trying to research what dirt might be had on our President-elect, and I'm pretty sure there's a lot of it, just based on very public information like the Howard Stern radio program or TMZ, or the business pages of any good newspaper. You really don't have to look that hard to find evidence of "Trump + debt" or "Trump + womanizing". There is plenty of cringe-worthy data right out in the open.

But the results of that compromise are hard to get around--imagine US IC warning our allies, like Israel, that maybe they don't want to share information with Trump for fear it will spread from Russia to Iran.  Imagine this subhead from The Times:

"Britain fears leak of its secrets to Moscow." Since Trump's first moves seem to be to meet with Putin, and to, as Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov predicted, end sanctions, what else could anyone think, but that he's turned?

Which isn't even to say this connection is for real, although the Trump team hasn't tried hard enough to make it look otherwise. (Gen. Flynn, by the way, is just not the right guy for any position if Trump wants to do away with allegations of Russian coziness. ) It's that once the FBI had something to work with, they could have worked at either finding out he had indeed connections, or clearing him if he did not, whatever the case might be. We'd know for sure. Trump wouldn't be going into this inauguration under a cloud--that extends beyond our borders, but affects his administration's dealing with any other government.

That, right there, is the real price of a dereliction of duty--it's not just "What if Trump is guilty of colluding with a foreign power to win his election?" It's "What if Trump isn't actually guilty of that thing, but we don't know yet because the FBI didn't work on answering it?" I have been covering Trump's Russian connections and the possibility that the hack was for his benefit as a serious thing since July, but only because I had no research that told me different from trusted professionals. (And I continue to lean "pro-Trump compromised", based on all the circumstantial things. Also I hate every cabinet pick and most policy positions. So there.)

I'm glad that there is interest in the Senate in pursuing an inquiry into this--but I'd have liked the relevant info to have been available sooner. This isn't about Comey's reputation or partiality--it's a damn competence issue. Did Trump and Russia and WikiLeaks not look collusive as all hell? And how big a stick had to hit the FBI Director in the head before he was arsed to think about it?

Carly Fiorina Auditions for Cabinet Apprentice

I don't really think that Donald Trump is seriously considering Carly Fiorina for DNI. Just a feeling-based on watching the past election season pretty closely. She once pointed out that Trump, the outsider, didn't bone up on foreign policy. And although she did endorse him (after running out of Republican options) she rescinded her endorsement.

Do I think Trump is seriously considering her?  Well, we can take a look at her audition reel. 

"(We) spent a fair amount of time talking about China as probably our most important adversary and a rising adversary. We talked about hacking, whether it's Chinese hacking or purported Russian hacking. We talked about the opportunity that the President-elect has to literally reset things, to reset the trajectory of this economy, to reset the role of government, to reset America's role in the world and how we're perceived in the world," she said.

They talked about whether it was "purported" Russian hacking or "gyna!" I feel like she learned how to say the things he wants her to say which is both adorable and disqualifying. (She failed to do the Carter Page/John Bolton maybe US false flag hack thing, tho') And I also think she already pissed him off enough previously for her current suck-up audition to basically be his get-back--her audition will be rejected. The way he might have been playing pore ole Mitt Romney.

Although, for pols thinking of signing on to Team Trump who ever once opposed him--this is a guy who has openly talked about being about the vendetta. So if you're entertaining being on his cabinet--do you want to eat a buttload of shit all at once (he doesn't pick you after you cozied up hard) or eat a little bit of shit everyday (he hires you). Because I assure you, I do not think the shit is optional. I think the shit is the point.

Or he'll make her DNI because she loves the same generals and flattered Trump's screw-loose ass. But I just mostly doubt it. This is reality show 101--build suspense. It's also not normal and weird for an actual presidential cabinet.

No, byte this.

I'm not sure what to make of the claims that North Korea is behind the hacking of Sony Corp, since the FBI sort of thinks they did it, but then again, lots of people think they didn't. I don't think it helps that North Korea's message seems a bit mixed on the matter; they didn't do it, but if the US retaliates, then it is on like Donkey Kong! (Against "the whole US mainland"--so, like, Hawaii should feel pretty secure from one of NK's sturdy Aquatic Annoyance Devices.) Seems kind of defensive to me.

So I also don't know what to make of the situation where North Korea's internet went down.  I mean, really, is there any good reason to think the US directly participated in an attack on that nation's information infrastructure? (Maybe they should just ring their provider or something.) Is that how the US rolls?

I still think it's weird to imagine that this is all over a comedy movie that might even be a bit of a bow-wow.  But it looks like the young dictator is still consolidating power, so killing the odd army minister or uncle or religious proselytizers, or even people who watched soap operas, is just how he validates who is really in charge. So it really doesn't do for him to be lampooned in a movie that will probably somehow still be pirated and watched in North Korea anyway. (I think I like the idea, a little, myself.) In the world of a dictator (whose father was a noted cinephile and probably a very, shall we say, dominating influence on him?) trying very hard to grasp and hold the reins of power, something like a movie that doesn't cast him in the best of lights seems far more significant to him than it might to people in a culture where our elected leaders are regularly shredded in the press and television programs.

It's cheap, of course, to malign North Korea's ruler in a comedic vehicle. His regime is associated with the tactics of starvation, imprisonment, labor camps, rape, and torture. The people of North Korea are suffering under a yoke that is anything but comedy gold. It's actually appalling. And there's only so much any of us can do about it, either.

Except to point out that Kim's Macklemore haircut really isn't as face-slimming as he thinks it is.