In TrumpWorld, Grab-Bag Investigates You!

Imagine that nothing else happened today, but that a president who was accused during his campaign of being a "puppet" of a foreign dictator, who spoke effusively at times of that foreign dictator, when faced with a mandate from congress that overwhelmingly voted to put sanctions on that dictator for interfering in that election, just said "No, because it's such a deterrent to them doing stuff with us." Umph! Like, a deterrent to influencing more of our elections or making other decisions as a sovereign nation? 

It would seem from an actual real-time event like that, just as we have had other real-time events that kind of suggested that Donald Trump was doing the bidding of Russia, this should bother the Congress that passed that act bringing those sanctions, but what actually happened was they decided to release a memo that was made by Devin Nunes, who I will be referring to as Trump's Renfield, and did not release a memo drafted by House Democrats. 

This seems odd. It's like Congressional Republicans both understand that Russian interference was a real thing, but also will only pay the merest lip service to doing anything about it. Huh! And yet, the same House is investigating DOJ decisions for a while, now.  As if the real sin in today's politics is finding fault with Trump.

In other news, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is leaving because there's really only so much a person can put the hell up with before one's legit retirement and maybe one's Director is giving strong hints where the exit door is. He joins a storied company that includes Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and Jim Comey. 

I wouldn't wonder what lessons the DOJ in general and the FBI specifically are taking from this politicized display regarding their office and the approach it shows regarding the rule of law. It might not be what the authors of this deplorable exercise had in mind, though.

In other news, we are sad to hear that Julian Assange is in bad shape because he lacks Vitamin D and the courage to just suck it up and deal with the thing where he took off his condom and tried it.  It's rumored he also doesn't smell great and sent DMs to Sean Hannity parody accounts.  Which does not only suggest Assange's mind has gone a little soft, but also that he and Hannity have possibly had a previous correspondence or so. 

Anyway, what I am saying is, the history of dirt against Trump seems to have been spot on, and the dirt against Clinton and the DNC seems to have been spotty. Trump and his admirers striking out against the investigation seems to me not like they see wrongdoing there, but like they are afraid it will be found with their team.

I'm just saying, as I always do: It looks bad because it is bad.

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag is In Like Flynn

I refrained from jumping the gun this week on doing a "maybe Mike Flynn is cooperating with Special Counsel Mueller" post because that kind of thing is starting to aggravate, you know? Maybe the moon is a heretofore unknown species of green cheese that calcifies into a rocklike mass, huh? Maybe you've never seen Mother Theresa, allegedly deceased, and Lady Gaga in the same place for a reason, people.  I don't want TrumpWorld Grab-bags to be about maybes, my babies. I want pleas, deals and indictments and promises of significant revelatory whatnot. 

This is also why I refrained a bit from posting "Trump so mental" stuff in the past 36 hours, when Trump was basically being kind of extra, enough so that "Is Trump losing control?" was a real concern. Trump, in a very short period of time, spread anti-Muslim propaganda from a small RW-UK party that basically amounted to a Fake News snuff film, propagated a somewhat defunct conspiracy theory that the host of an MSNBC morning show and former congressman, Joe Scarborough, was a potential murder suspect, and had leaks come out that he still believed in conspiracy bullshit--that he might have doubted that the Access Hollywood tape was really his voice, that he was still a Birther, etc. The idea of a "duty to warn" re: Trump isn't new, and I have tried to refrain from taking fully seriously the idea that Trump's present behavior solely stems from some organic mental breakdown--he never was stable or well-behaved. I had a series of posts in 2016 titled :"The Trump Problem" where I detailed his basic unfitness for the job against a backdrop where the GOP base did not even have a metric for unfitness. 

But it was not out of order to also suppose that the manic nature of Trump's behavior had to do with the knowledge that he had some bad news on his horizon. It is also the nature of a narcissist to deflect from bad news, but there are only so many ways to deflect from the news that the guy who Trump bruited as a VP choice at one time and seriously did have as a foreign policy and national security advisor during his campaign and NSA for, like, a month, admitted to contacts with the Russian Ambassador, with the approval of a senior Trump transition personage (believed to be Jared Kushner), to discuss something to do with Israeli settlements. And I don't know--on a different date? He was on the horn with them about sanctions and possibly "Merry Christmas". 

Flynn is maybe going to roll on all kinds of Trump transition folks. There is no reason to believe that Mike Pence (who, if he was not in the loop regarding Flynn's December phone calls in 2016 got told by Sally Yates that Flynn was a no-good) and Donald Trump had no idea that Flynn had foreign contacts with Russia and Turkey, and they probably knew he had lied about them,. And yet Pence publically said he knew of no one with Russian ties, and Trump called upon former FBI Director Comey to back off of Flynn. 

It's one small guilty plea for Flynn about making false statements, but it's one giant leap in context about how the Trump circle's relationship with Russia is not at all kosher. These people have consistently lied about their relationships to Russia. As if there was a there "there" they preferred no one notice. 

Sometimes a TrumpWorld Grab-Bag is Grand!

Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time & very dangerous low. You can thank Congress, the same people that can't even give us HCare!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2017

Taking notice of the weird relationship between Russia and the current US Administration requires a particular understanding that Russia did not prefer Trump because he was good for the US and would make America any better--it was specifically because a compromised, narcissistic political neophyte as US leader would work to their advantage. Trump is not a fabulous deal-maker with a lot of knowledge about the world, as evidenced by the released transcripts of his peculiar calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. A supposedly great deal-maker whined to Peña Nieto that his failure to help Trump out with his wall promise was something he couldn't live with (desperate and nonsensical--sad!) and told Trumbull that taking in refugees made him look bad, while somehow failing to understand that refugees come to Australia largely by boat because it's an island, how economic refugees are probably not even bad guys, or where the Boston Bombers were even from. 

Trump had to sign a veto-proof sanctions bill, but he also tried to undermine it with statements, one which was obviously written by someone else, and one written by himself. But this isn't good enough for Russia for some reason. Russian Prime Minister Medvedev used some pretty harsh language on Twitter, calling Trump "weak", "outwitted" and described his political hamstringing as "humiliating". So Trump in turn shot back at--US Congress. The Republican-led Congress of his country.  Because they couldn't even take away health care from millions of American people with a very unpopular bill, and also felt like they had to punish Russia for all the hacking--both votes which should make sense to Trump if he really was paying attention, but, um. No.

Trump should want to live up to his campaign promise of making health care better, if he ever meant that. He should care that Russia has had an ongoing plan to interfere with our elections--regardless of who the ultimate beneficiary is, instead of worrying about whether he has flexibility (which should include leverage--we have sanctions as a leverage on Putin--it really should be up to Putin to figure out what we want to get 'em lifted, not the other way around).  But this is more of his weird failure to not act like someone beholden to a foreign state. 

This is why the news that Robert Mueller has impanelled a grand jury feels significant. The Russia probe has moved beyond Mike Flynn and probably onto things Trump et als have done since taking office (especially in the obstructing of justice way), but also with a hard dive into the area Trump specifically preferred was not touched--his finances. And probably Trump Jr's weird meeting. 

But you know, speaking of both Mike Flynn and finances, the erstwhile NSA recently updated his public financial statement to include some income consulting for Cambridge Analytica. Yeah--Cambridge Analytica.  The guys Steve Bannon was running with.   The Mercers' outfit.

I feel like we've rounded a corner here, but this TrumpWorld thing has lots of corners, some of them very sharp!

JFC Another TrumpWorld Grab-Bag?

You know, I started doing these "TrumpWorld Grab-Bag" things because there would just be too many Trump stories, and they sort of held together, and they sort of didn't but there were just too many to do single blog-posts about. I couldn't just pick one and move on with my life. Not at all! I had to gather up the half dozen or dozen links or whatever I was presented with because it all seemed relevant in some way. And then I would do a couple a week or whatever. 

But this last 24 hours? It feels vaguely accelerated. So, let's say you know that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met with Trump, Jr. last year, was in the US as counsel on a money-laundering case that was settled after the US Attorney on that case, Preet Bharara, was fired.  (This itself might not even be all that dodgy--I am no judge of how solid the case was.) What is new though, is that she also represented the FSB in a property dispute. I guess this sticks out as relevant to me because it shows she's done work on the Russian government's behalf and I can see where doing something to relieve sanctions against Russia would be in the same vein. But going back to that thing where US Attorney's offices might be politically compromised, I do note there is a story about Trump breaking with custom (not that he necessarily knows from custom) and meeting with a US Attorney candidate for the District of Columbia before her selection.

I don't know what to make of that, or even if I have anything to make of it--it just strikes me as interesting.

In other news, I guess it's no surprise that some people in the White House have made statements about ending Russian sanctions, like, for example, giving back the two compounds that seem to have been used for spying. Seb Gorka is one.  It looks like newly-minted White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci is probably in the same boat--and probably for reasons.

That's pretty interesting, too. It keeps coming back to that sanctions issue.

Which brings me to the big breaking story--AG Jeff Sessions apparently had a meeting with Ambassador Kislyak at the Mayflower Hotel, and they discussed policy relating to the Trump Campaign. My guess, since Sessions ruled out discussion of campaign interference--sanctions! Where did the Trump campaign stand on sanctions, anyway? Would they help Russia out?  After all, it was costing folks money, right?

It's a weird revelation coming so fast on the heels of an interview where President Trump seemed unhappy with Sessions' recusal from matters related to the Russian investigation, and potentially wanted him out. It's sort of a dumb revelation if it came from the White House, because it only goes to show that there was substantive dialogue between the Trump campaign and Russia--which doesn't alleviate the appearance of collusion. It also is kind of dumb if it reveals anything about IC sources that lets other countries know how we're listening. But let's leave open the other possibility--Russia can leak. Hell, just a minute ago, Foreign Minister Lavrov joked about how often Trump and Putin met at G20.  They can pull that kind of shit, now, because this White House is compromised.

But it's possible that this info was already in reporters' hands for awhile, while they tried to vet it.  Again, since Sessions lied about the existence of any meetings at all, anything he says about the existence of meetings or what was said at them becomes suspect.

And just as an aside, since this doesn't fit in (or maybe just--yet) with the rest of this Grab-Bag--Jared Kushner has updated his financial disclosure forms again, having missed 77 assets totaling somewhere between $10 and $100 million. You know. Couch change. Just like his security clearance docs that had to be amended for dozens of foreign contacts--I'm just saying. I wonder if these things are more "advertant" than "inadvertent" when he "forgets" them. Not that I know why.

UPDATE: Aw hell, this last 24 hours was so busy I forgot the thing where Senator Burr confirmed what I was saying about Rep. Devin Nunes' unmasking stuff being an apparent waste.

In Russia, Computer Hacks You!

So, it had to come to pass that the US would no longer pretend that the DNC hack and so forth wasn't identifiably a Russian dezinformatsiya op and would call the actual blackguards out. They are making several Russian operatives persona non grata and dismantling their covers--bye bye spies! The hackers looted the DNC and Podesta but for what it's worth, they didn't loot our ability to find them out and call them out.

What I want noted is that this hack had to do with influencing voters based on biased storylines about one candidate--Hillary Clinton, to a degree to which GOP candidate Trump was not similarly subjected. It wasn't about hacking the actual polling places or election machinery--Greg Palast is a longtime skeptic regarding the accuracy of our elections, but he notes that the problem goes back to who even gets to go to the polls, and who gets to count. There are major systemic problems with our bid at actually achieving full registration of eligible citizens and participation of same. This is different than any idea that the voting machines themselves were necessarily compromised. It's the voting public that was.

But when the issue is brought up to PEOTUS Trump himself, the whargarble that comes out is a little troubling:

“I think we ought to get on with our lives,” he said. “I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind, the security we need.”

Mr. Trump took questions Wednesday from a handful of reporters as Don King, the sports promoter and a longtime friend, stood next to him. He has not held a formal news conference since July, though he promised on Wednesday to hold one in early January.

"We have speed"? Not a comfort to those of us who expected that a little meth made the merrier re: his dry mouth and sniffling in the debates. But his comment that computers made things more complicated, from a guy whose spell check never prevents embarrassment on Twitter? Yes, I think I understand your idea of "complication". He doesn't really understand what "the cyber" is all about.

I sort of feel sympathetic to the idea that at some level, Trump lives in anxiety that he was elected POTUS as a fluke and wants to deny the Russian hack because he wasn't literally in the loop. But I look at who was on his crew, like Carter Page and Paul Manafort, and I feel like if he was up to the job, he would have known. Did Trump not realize he was surrounded by operatives of foreign governments? Did he not know what was happening in and about his campaign, or why WikiLeaks was so helpful to him?

But that sympathy only goes so far before it turns to concern--he doesn't care that a foreign power used information it stole to interfere in our democratic process? Or--he doesn't care because it benefited him?  He says we should "get on with our lives" and just ignore the hack? And his paid liars also just go out and lie about this. (Of course, Russia would never have an intelligence op right here in the US. No, really. She said that.)

It's shameful.