RNC Wants $5 From You Deadbeats

 

Elections are coming,
Trump's wallet is not fat,
please to put a fiver in
the MAGA hat--
If you haven't got a fiver
an IOU won't do--
scrape together something
or God damn you! https://t.co/jyESHERGa1

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) April 5, 2024

I'm taking the tone of my song parody from the Christmas round but also from the weird history of Trump fundraising emails, which are a whole art to themselves for pretending to personalize a message by way of a threat.  Like--"Hey Bill Jones, we at Mar-a-Lago couldn't help but notice you haven't donated lately...and we've been talking about you..." The money-hungry Trump campaign will try anything, They will have repeat donations forever. 

The GOP broke people should just figure out what the value of their need for tribal belonging is, relative to the need to have food or rent money ready. 

I would prioritize paying for your necessities, and asking yourself what this moneyed creep would even ever do for your future, before coughing up any funds on his terrible behalf. 

A Predator With "Friends"

"It's an indictment of the legal system that allows well-connected, well-heeled, wealthy individuals to avoid accountability for obvious, horrific crimes with victims."

Jeremy Bash on Jeffery Epstein's 2008 plea deal with Alex Acosta.https://t.co/DAmdVIPfZC

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 9, 2019

There's a lot that's hard to stomach in reading about the extensive abuse Jeffery Epstein is charged with, but the chilling thing to me is that he seems pretty damn guilty and got let off the hook once, and it looks for all the world like it was because money and influence can do that for a person, no matter how reprehensible they are. Now, stories are flying around about important people whose names and reputations will go down in flames, or who will face criminal liability for any involvement. And good--that's what should happen. Knowing that something evil is happening and saying nothing, risking nothing, is enabling it to persist. To me, it isn't political in the least, but about what justice means. Justice should be blind with respect to party or class. It shouldn't be something that can be bought off or threatened away.

It's also chilling in hindsight that there were lots of signs that Epstein's world was a deeply weird construction of mysterious deals (probably lots of financial shenanigans) and the cultivation of "friends" in a oddly useful sort of way. A lot of people are making the connection now that his investments might actually in part equal "A fuckton of blackmail." What does this sound like:

Finally, despite having been previously convicted of a sex offense involving an underage victim, the defendant has continued to maintain a vast trove of lewd photographs of young-looking women or girls in his Manhattan mansion. In a search of the New York Residence on the night of his arrest, on July 6-7, 2019, pursuant to judicially-authorized warrants, law enforcement officers discovered not only specific evidence consistent with victim recollections of the inside of the mansion, further strengthening the evidence of the conduct charged in the Indictment, but also at least hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of sexually suggestive photographs of fully- or partiallynude females. While these items were only seized this weekend and are still being reviewed, some of the nude or partially-nude photographs appear to be of underage girls, including at least one girl who, according to her counsel, was underage at the time the relevant photographs were taken. Additionally, some of the photographs referenced herein were discovered in a locked safe, in which law enforcement officers also found compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: “Young [Name] + [Name],” “Misc nudes 1,” and “Girl pics nude.” The defendant, a registered sex offender, is not reformed, he is not chastened, he is not repentant;6 rather, he is a continuing danger to the community and an individual who faces devastating evidence supporting deeply serious charges.

so much as a trove of evidence to be used as leverage later on the off-chance it would come in handy? But also looking back at pieces written about Epstein from mere years ago, the nebulousness of his income stream and odd hedonism comes through in ways that seems a bit like foreshadowing.

From Vicky Ward's Vanity Fair piece:

Unlike such fund managers as George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller, whose client lists and stock maneuverings act as their calling cards, Epstein keeps all his deals and clients secret, bar one client: billionaire Leslie Wexner, the respected chairman of Limited Brands. Epstein insists that ever since he left Bear Stearns in 1981 he has managed money only for billionaires—who depend on him for discretion. “I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit a billion dollars or more,” he tells people freely. According to him, the flat fees he receives from his clients, combined with his skill at playing the currency markets “with very large sums of money,” have afforded him the lifestyle he enjoys today.

Why do billionaires choose him as their trustee? Because the problems of the mega-rich, he tells people, are different from yours and mine, and his unique philosophy is central to understanding those problems: “Very few people need any more money when they have a billion dollars. The key is not to have it do harm more than anything else…. You don’t want to lose your money.”

Why the mega-rich? Because under the right circumstances, they'll let you hold their money for them so nothing bad happens. They're more anxious than other people--they have more to lose.

Or take this piece from 2002 at New York Magazine:

But beautiful women are only a part of it. Because here’s the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. “I invest in people – be it politics or science. It’s what I do,” he has said to friends.

It seems corny: "I invest in people". Sure. If one is a philanthropist, great. And "To Serve Man" is a cookbook to a man-eater. And sometimes, those people being invested in are a network of abused underage girls who are traded like units without any regard for their wellbeing.

This will be very ugly. I see that AG William Barr has recused due to prior associations. Time will tell us whether that means anything. And in a very rare concurrence with myself and the Concerned Women of America, I agree that Alex Acosta needs to be removed from Trump's cabinet, because defending himself regarding the sweetheart plea deal he made with Epstein should be his new full-time job.


UPDATE: Oh, it's like that, then:

NEW: DOJ official says that AG Barr will remain recused from any review of the 2008 #Epstein case due to past legal work, but after consulting with ethics officials, he will NOT recuse from the current #Epstein case led at #SDNY

— Brooke Singman (@brookefoxnews) July 9, 2019

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag Tries to Keep Up

Sometimes, I think the dumbest thing about the "collusion/no collusion" argument regarding the 2016 presidential campaign is that what Trump's campaign relied on never was all that low-key. Trump was pretty openly loving the Wikileaks' release of carefully curated DNC emails. Russian bots retweeted Trump and WikiLeaks material very heavily in the final push of the campaign. (And, for what it's worth, Russian bots are still giving Trump's agenda a digital assist.) This wasn't subtext--it was text! Trump was briefed on the intel about Russian hacking, and publically continued to deny it was even a thing. Everything, he contended, was rigged against him. Even though, you know...her emails. 

It turns out that WikiLeaks, for their part, really were trying to help Trump! Who knew? (Everyone.)  And Assange seems sympathetic to Russia, and in addition is misogynistic and anti-Semitic. Which probably should make him more of a Pepe peep (I am still kind of salty about people on The Left who have a soft space for this fail-souled Bond villain.) The things you learn, and from The Intercept, at that. Huh.

In other news, a couple days back, it was revealed in a Senate Intelligence Committee sit-down with the IC agency heads that the Trump Administration didn't order the least little thing to do with stopping Russia from interfering with future elections, even though Russia is so totally going to interfere, because that is their thing. This would be kind of shocking, except it isn't because Trump's still pretending he can shout "No collusion" and then on the other hand not enact sanctions that Congress overwhelmingly passed against Russia. For the election interference. Which Trump still denies. 

You might think that sort of thing would disturb more people. Because once again--it isn't even in hiding but plain sight. Trump does not give a shit about whether Russia interfered because it benefits him, and America First is a neat slogan with a racist past, but it essentially does not mean Trump is putting America First. He puts himself first.

You know who else puts Trump first though? The NRA. They gave a record amount to the Trump and other Republican campaigns in 2016,  but it appears they also received some money from Russia. Could that have been some money laundering right into the Trump Campaign?  That would be a great avenue of inquiry.  (Needless to say, I'm feeling some kind of way about the NRA right now and after every horrifying mass shooting event.)

Now, money laundering--that comes up a lot when I do these TrumpWorld Grab-Bag things. That seems to have been a Paul Manafort specialty,  but there is a interesting thing that has happened in that corner of Bob Mueller's investigation--Manafort's partner Rick Gates looks to be cooperating, and he was active with the campaign even after Manafort was out.  That seems significant. It also strikes me as damn fascinating that Steve Bannon has given about 20 hours of his precious time to Mueller's team (and 4 hours to the Congressional Committee, which might be saying something about the respect accorded to the different investigative bodies). He is sticking with an "executive privilege" line with the Congress critters, but I don't know what he might have given Mueller and his team. I wonder if Trump has any idea?

Lastly, the Rob Porter situation has laid bare a pretty shocking White House story--130 or so White House staffers have not got permanent security clearances for some reason or other.  Maybe because they could be easily subject to blackmail, or, as they say, the Kompromat! I don't pretend I know, but my word, if anyone says "but her emails" ever again  I surely will think about skull-thumping that person with great vigor. Because, like Rob Porter's wife-beating or Jared Kushner's astonishing debt problems, this represents national security problems that feel deliberate, and, with this Administration, are probably not fixable for the foreseeable. Because this Administration is lead by careless jerks who have always been compromised--for reference, see the entirety of the TrumpWorld Grab-Bag page!

Cheers!

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag is Just a Box of Money

Now, you might think I was paying extra-special attention to Keebler Hate-Elf Jeff Sessions' testimony today regarding what he knows about stuff and whether he remembers any stuff, but he can basically get double-stuffed. (I still love the good people at Keebler and their products and approve in general of any cookie having Double Stuffing. But I am building on a metaphor about a certain bad cookie, and oh Gosh, I think Jeff has not been a good elf at all. I do not believe he would be allowed near a cookie-making facility in all truth.)  But I did not do that, because Sessions can't remember shit. 

Now, CRS (Can't Recall Shit) affects us all, and as I get older, I sometimes dotter into a room and realize I don't entirely know what I was looking for, or absently strike a few keys, and not realize why I'm looking at some computer conversation. But I think Jeff Sessions wants us to believe he can't remember entire meetings with people he knows, or forgets entire people he should very well remember. If he recalls them conveniently after he's been, well, "busted", I tend to think his selective amnesia is bogus. While I think this is obviously BS and some ass-covering self-lawyering, I think the pattern of what he prefers not to reveal until he bloody well has to says more than what he might independently reveal. 

I know this is a little controversial, but Jeff Sessions probably is useless and unable to do the AG thing, recused as he is from Trump-Russia and having in his confirmation hearing recused himself from any of the Clinton investigations Trump (because of course) has pressured the DOJ into.  I know this means an AG who might could fire Mueller, but having an AG this compromised (and kind of bigoted and all) is a bummer. I despise Trump for making me want this asshole to stay on. I just can't with these things. I hope federal prosecutors assigned to this conspiracy theory bullshit, like Uranium One (described ably here by the one missionary among the FOX savages, Shep Smith, who has been dodging the cookpot for I know not how long) just throw down a massive press conference and announce "Stop Believing Bullshit!" after the bare minimum debunking any of it should require.

But I have had it with Trump & Co's dumb retaliatory squid-inking nonsense distractions.  So let me just lower my dumb ass onto what has to be a journalistic claymore: electronic funds from Russia, marked "To Finance Election Campaign Of 2016” . 

No. Seriously. Like, a box of money just sitting out there of rubles that could have been paid for Facebook ads and all that providing a direct link from the Russian government to a disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing various centers of shit worldwide? Like, what dumbfuck would mark this money for doing the thing it was supposed to be surreptitiously doing out loud where the people would find out? That kind of thing would be so stupid!

But I've been doing this TrumpWorld thing for a while, you see?  I don't necessarily think anything is too stupid to be all that credible anymore. 

Sometimes a Sandwich is Just a Sandwich

I guess I have to be a little thankful for David Brooks because he gives me a reason to not blog (again!) about Trump/Russia, and to blog about things I really have always cared about--socioeconomics and food. Basically, he wrote a column where there was so much other stuff, but the thing everyone honed in on was the friend he was going to have lunch with in a gourmet sandwich shop, who seemed put off and so they agreed to have Mexican, instead. He seems to have taken for granted (and maybe I'm compounding the error by 'assuming his assumption") that she was put off by all the exotic Italian words on the menu because she only had a HS diploma. 

All us East Coast elites like my working class BA in English ass wondered WTF. You don't need a degree to know what you want on a sandwich or to have familiarity with an array of Italian meats and cheeses. I come from the vibrant sandwich culture of Philadelphia, where sandwich literacy begins in grade school and full sandwich literacy is assumed by completion of high school. It isn't a function of class, either. The brokest person you ever saw knows whether they want spicy ham and provolone on their sandwich, or if they're hanging with the American hoagie. They know if they want hot peppers or hold the onions. If you come up in the right neighborhood, you are beyond the what goes into a sandwich and have moved on to the sublime characteristics of what's good bread (Does the quality of the bread depend on the water? Is it the heat of the furnace?) and whether the meats and cheeses are actually authentically sourced (Quiznos--is this Italian salami? No--I ask you!) by adulthood. 

It isn't even a parochial thing. Jewish deli, Italian cheesesteaks, Vietnamese banh mi (but really, order the pho--of which there are more varieties, all great, than you can shake a stick at), if you are from a pretty diverse local culture, you don't balk at Italian on the menu. If I wandered into a Nigerian restaurant (a cuisine I'm not so well acquainted with) I'd ask a server--what do you recommend? What is spicy and what isn't? What is in this? That's not education, and that's not class--I just know you have to assume food is edible and trust that no one likes food that sucks. 

But the forces that made me omnivorous across the cultural landscape didn't make my parents. They don't do sushi. They order mostly the same five or six things from the Chinese take-out.  I don't think they can hit up an Indian buffet and deal with the abundance of distinctly different palate-choices than they grew up with. But trust this--they can figure out an Italian sandwich. They are not Italian--they just got this. They did not need Intro to Salumi 101.They just aren't going to waste a buck or twelve on food they find out they don't want to eat--

Which brings me back to Brooks' friend. Maybe she digested that what was on offer was $20 sandwiches that she could get for $8 anywhere else. Maybe she didn't want aioli breath. Maybe she just knew Mexican almost always offers better value for price since it hasn't been gentrified by third generation pezzonovantes. The thing is--a lot of us middle class/working class people who get to traipse into the upper strata aren't unprepared for the secret handshake--we just balk at the prices. 

I probably could have been a little brighter and applied to schools I knew we couldn't afford--but I chose one I knew we could swing. Was I able to apply for scholarships, etc? (Maybe.) Was I afraid I'd fail? (Always.)  Did that choice make me less competitive as an employable adult? See--I get that the first several of Brooks' paragraphs talk about what I've tried to talk about in my "Know Your Class War" pieces. He's maybe not specifically laying the blame at white privilege and the whole tilted table at specific class prejudices--but he is  bringing some of it up--and I think that's kind of positive, really. But it isn't culturally about the barriers, the sort of intellectual poll tax he's assuming people are not able to pay to enter the upwardly mobile franchise. 

People have knowledge and great opinions and different opinions and a variety of experiences and a host of likes and dislikes--but the entrée to the actual society he's talking about, after all, is still money. To see that Broadway show, to have that leisure time to catch up on news/entertainment/reading, to go eat the world? Takes money. It's always about money. To live in that school district and get the ear of that congresscritter. It isn't the capicollo. It's the Benjamins.

But maybe this also adds color to the times we see some people (even of means) treat Olive Garden like a real taste of Italy, even if they are in a major city where more authentic fare can be had--they want to know what they are getting, and they trust the chains because they did not have an environment that gave them the "eatportunities" a richer cultural environment might have.  People make checkbook decisions. They don't feel like they can afford to have an unpredictable bad time. 

You have to take it all into account--and still recognize that taste is individual, and often based in experiences. Maybe a sandwich is just a sandwich--maybe one column can't really take in the scope of choice versus economic availability. I'm not here to bury or praise Brooks, just to point out that while his example is broken, his broader topic (while he does not have the range to really explore it) is a good jumping-off point for further and better discussion. 

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 TrumpWorld Grab-Bag with Everything Russia Wants

Russia is seeking to return its diplomatic property in #US🇺🇸 asap.
Otherwise, we will have to take counter measures https://t.co/2MJ4PauEYt pic.twitter.com/kjC1iSQRrc

— Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) May 23, 2017

As the departed comedian Joan Rivers used to say, "Can we talk?" Because it looks like Russia crooks its little finger and the Trump Administration is thinking of giving their spy facilities back. (Who knows what Trump is planning regarding other sanctions against Russia?) Just as with the bizarre exchange Trump had in the Oval Office where he shared classified intelligence and kvetched about what a nutjob former FBI Director Jim Comey was, it just looks really freaking weird. It's like, can Trump & Co. just not act like they really are Russian puppets for a minute?

I dunno. Maybe they can't. There is a problem with the tendency that Trump Administration officials have had towards withholding disclosure: it rapidly becomes difficult to determine what is true, and starts to prejudice opinion against assuming good intent. Take the story that AG Jeff Sessions may have failed to disclose yet another meeting with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. If he failed to disclose one meeting, what prevents him from having failed again? If he did so multiple times, doesn't it look more like he's intentionally leaving those things out? And if he did so, the reasonable question then would be: "Why?" As with Gen. Michael Flynn's shortcomings in making the appropriate disclosures regarding his acceptance of foreign payments, and his history of meetings (presumably about ending sanctions) with Russian officials, and Jared Kushner's repeated failures to disclose his meetings with Russian officials and financial arrangements, it just starts looking like there's a pattern of not wanting people to know things. And that secrecy makes people ask: "Why?"

Take Donald Trump's very own attorney, Michael Cohen. He has been issued a subpoena (along with some other folks) to turn over docs and answer some questions by the House Russia probe. This happened in part because he did not want to comply with an initial request he considered over-broad. This might have a little bit to do with his being implicated in delivering a plan to end the Russian sanctions to Gen. Flynn. (Also up for questioning by the House: Boris Epshteyn. Don't know why, but notice he has Russian connections and is a banker, so...following the money. The mystery fellow of the Trump campaign foreign policy team, Carter page, got a shout-out from Trump on Twitter. Another money guy.)

See that? The thing where we can see an actor in the Trump orbit working to do something the Russians wanted, and then not being totally upfront about it? That's the sort of thing driving this investigation--the weird confluence of the campaign obviously getting help from Russia, apparently making plans to return the favor, and then acting like they'd greatly prefer no one know what was going on. For folks who demand proof of collusion, I have to ask: "Really?" Because while it makes sense to wait on proof of fire, you can't not notice all the smoke, and know that smoke itself is not normal.

In other interesting news on the Russian probe front, Special counsel Robert Mueller has brought on Justice Department fraud chief Andrew Weissmann and Jeannie Rhee, who is familiar with the White House Office of Legal Counsel. The team will likely be "following the money" and considering what defensive maneuvers are open to a Chief Executive under investigation. (Following this sort of thing is exactly my flavor of nerd.) Also, Mueller has cleared Comey to testify to the Senate, and it's expected he will be detailing the President's overtures to him to end the investigation. (Must-see tv?)

I have previously explained that sometimes "things look bad because they are bad". When I look at the direction the House, Senate, FBI, and Special counsel probes are going, it's getting harder not to figure there is a "there" there. Contra Trump, this isn't a witch hunt, but a search for a clear explanation for why it certainly looked like the Russians did him some favors. And whether, Godfather like, someday, there might be a favor he does them in return. And truly, the quid and the quo are already pretty established! (But casting uncertainty over the US commitment to NATO article 5, badmouthing allies, possibly disrupting the Paris accords? In some ways, Trump is like the gift that keeps on giving.)

UPDATE: Let me just sneak in here this story about how in Trump World, rank hath its privileges, but is still rank as all hell. A load of leeway is one way to earn loyalty. And the fear of getting it retracted, too.