Things that Make No Sense

 

EXCLUSIVE: Trump told his White House team he needed to protect Russiagate documents ... which he called his 'evidence' of a deep state plot against him.https://t.co/MBHBkGWFcB

— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) September 8, 2022

I can't really remember which one of the Trump hangers-on who opined something on Twitter to the effect of "What if the documents Trump took to Mar-A-Lago had information that was exculpatory about the Russia investigation?" (If your Twitter-fu is better than mine--please help me dig up who that was. I thought it was Mulvaney, but that wasn't it.) And it struck me, that was just stupid.

For one thing--there's the whole Senate Intelligence Report to contend with.  We know the Russia investigation started with George Papadopoulos shooting his mouth off.  We know that Trump constantly referred to the "Russia, Russia, Russia" thing (I for one, always hear "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" when I see that, but of course, I am a person of a certain age) as a "hoax", but then again, he thinks climate change is a hoax too, and no, it is very real. 

(We don't really talk about how Hurricane Maria was Trump's "worse than Katrina" but I wish we would.)

I also remember AG Bill Barr, the latest truth-telling former Trump SOB flying around to Italy and elsewhere looking for exculpatory stuff to defend Trump on Russiagate, for whatever reason. And by the way, what have we heard from Durham, lately?

If there was anything at all exculpatory regarding Trump and Russia, he would have held 1) a press conference 2) a parade and 3) the nuts of anyone who shafted him to the fire. It doesn't make any sense that he would just ferret the stuff away at Mar-A-Lago, per his own folks' (well, Kash Patel, and he certainly a stable dude, right?)  public statements, with a standing order to declassify, and say absolutely nothing about it at all. 

If Trump had anything in his possession that somehow meant that Russia did not wage a digital campaign against Hillary Clinton and APT 29 did not hack the DNC and spill info through Wikileaks and that Roger Stone and other friends of the campaign weren't in touch with Assange, and Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity weren't spouting Russian disinfo talking points, well, boy, I dunno.  That would surely be really different from the reality I know. 

What makes more sense to me is, there is something in there tangential to Russia that actually screws him over that isn't even being talked about. (Every denial is a confession.) And he would really rather it not get looked at, which is why he "secured" it. But because he took it and it got seized, eventually everyone is going to look at it. Unless it's one of the missing docs that hasn't been recovered yet because it ended up somewhere other than Mar-A-Lago. 

Which is why I don't care if subpoenas/search warrants are still ready for elsewhere in Trump's domain. TBH.  

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?

Smokey the Barr

Only an Attorney General could do the job Trump seems to require: blowing enough smoke to obscure the things his campaign and presidency so far appear to be liable for, and setting up distractions to divert attention away from the general White House weirdness.  It sure does look like Trump has got himself an Attorney General, by gawd. And based on the job he seems to be doing, I think I will dub him "Smokey the Barr."

Because only he can prevent Trump reputational fires. Maybe. Basically Trump's reputation is like the coal pit in Centralia, PA that has been burning for decades, but you know what? Barr feels up to the thing. I have no idea why. To me it looks like Nothing But Trouble. 

Ahem. Anyway, Barr said on Wednesday he thought it was very serious business if the Trump campaign was spied on (Great shades of Trump's March 2017 Tweet regarding the "Wiretap"!) and also said he was going to look into whether things like that were going on--maybe he didn't have a group yet, but he could! damnit! Maybe there wasn't proof for it either but--you get the idea! 

If that doesn't half-sound like someone coddling the delusions of a boss one knows to be tetchy about things, I don't even know. Of course we could investigate Comey and Sztrok and Page and the Steele Dossier and relitigate whether Clinton's emails were a case. Whatever!! So long as we don't think too hard about why the obstruction still seems to have happened (via numerous parties related to the 2016 Trump campaign lying about stuff) , and whether the underlying case (not about Trump, per se, but about Russia's interference) was valid. And the Russian interference bit actually seems pretty solid. 

And Barr should well understand the difference between spying and a counter-intelligence investigation 

Barr is doing a whataboutism whenever he gets away from whatever is in Mueller's report. It really just comes down to, what does it say, and why is he being so cagey with it?

Is he really doing the heavy lifting regarding the Constitution that he signed on for (his oath)? Or is he here to put out Trump's reputation fires? 

Until I know, based on what I've been hearing, he's Smokey the Barr to me. Trump's mascot in the deep woods, trying to prevent a wildfire encroaching on Trump's presidency.

But the screwed up thing of it is, Trump is the arsonist of his own reputation, too. And Barr is going to need unearthly hustle to try and put out fires faster than Trump creates them, because after all, Trump had a head start. 

Nielsen Bites the Dust

One of the worst moments, perhaps, of outgoing DHS chief Kirstjen Nielsen's tenure was probably the time she sat in a Mexican restaurant and got hollered out by DSA activists. How in the hell was she there appreciating the food of Mexican culture, likely prepared by people of Mexican and maybe other non-US western hemisphere descent, after defending policies that treats these human beings like they are not properly human? Because this is the inflex point between understanding people are people, and not seeing them as such. She didn't think about where she was and how it connected to what she was doing. What was happening at the border was not supposed to intersect with her life.  Who were these illegal entrants to the US, and who were their support group, anyway? 

There are so many really bad moments to choose from in Nielsen's DHS admin. Her hearings were closemouthed and clueless. Who admits they don't exactly know how much how much border wall there is and how many kids have died in CBP or ICE custody or acts shocked that separation policy psychologically damages children? She boldly stated that asylum seekers were illegally entering the US, when this is the only way they can seek asylum, and denied there was a separation policy, when this very policy had to be later defended and was rejected by the courts. 

(And they still do.)  ("Defensive asylum" can be claimed wherever the claimant got through, and it should be up to a court to determine the validity of the claim, however loose the proofs of such might be--but this isn't up to DHS. This is why Trump is currently going fucknuts about judges.  He just hates immigration he can't control, period.)

Anyway, a more detailed story about her resigfiring (my term for people who have been told by the administration to go get up on their shield and ride it out) might be made that includes her attempts to warn Trump of how continuing legally-scrapped policies would be unwise or how isolated she was in terms of supporters, but I can't see how it matters. When being asked to do immoral things, she declined to leave.

I don't know what I should think about the removal of Secret Service director "Tex" Alles, either--especially having happened so precipitously on the heels of the arrest of the woman who was rather conspicuously not supposed to be at Mar-A-Lago.

(Can I just address this bit:

Secret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich, who interviewed Zhang on the day of her arrest, testified at the hearing. He stated that when another agent put Zhang’s thumb drive into his computer, it immediately began to install files, a “very out-of-the-ordinary” event that he had never seen happen before during this kind of analysis. The agent had to immediately stop the analysis to halt any further corruption of his computer, Ivanovich testified. The analysis is ongoing but still inconclusive, he said.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article228963409.html#storylink=cpy

Um, I think Q did this sort of thing in Skyfall  and everyone was like, "Shit, this millennial Q is such a rookie why is he even?" and it was one of the only bad things in Skyfall.)

Anyway, my theory of Trump is he wants all his shit super compartmentalized to maintain lots of control, so of course he does not like Secret Service being really hands-on. He loves people having access at his Winter WH and probably tries to maintain an own-brand security perimeter that keeps actual government agency professionals at a distance.

Because he loves crimes. Also hates transparency. And also needs lackeys to keep up his super dubious border crisis position. So that is my opinion of Trump and I know, I have said all these things before.

UPDATE: Here is part of Nielsen's legacy. I don't know if CNN or Fox has an option on her already, but please, think about whether what she accomplished was truly reprehensible before offering her ass a job in any opinion-making forum. Her opinions are contemptible.

TWGB: A Case of Bricks and Bits

The interesting thing about the Trump/Russia connection with respects to his eventual presidential campaign in 2016 and then, presidency, is that it is a story about actual bricks and mortar real estate, which is some respects is the real cradle story of Donald Trump's life, and the digital warfare world of modern democracy. The screencap at the top of this post is from a video posted on Twitter that seems to depict Trump meeting with city officials in Moscow in 1995.  I haven't found a word for word translation of the voice-over, but that Trump definitely did make visits to Russia and discussed plans for building there over a thirty year period is just known.  

It's with that in mind that I note that the closest thing that we have to news from the end of last week (How jaded am I that I want Fridays to bring announcements of indictments? Is it not enough that I know that several are still under seal and will be revealed in due time? But what about my time?!) is that we finally know who was at the end of one of the blocked numbers that Donald Trump Jr. dialed after the meeting with Veselnitskaya and all of them. It was Howard Lorber. Which kind of sounds anticlimactic if you didn't know that Lorber had deep ties to Russia and has accompanied Trump Sr. on one of his jaunts to seek the Holy Grail of a Trump Tower Moscow. Knowing that, it kind of makes you wonder if Don Jr. was a little more in the loop regarding Sater and Cohen's talk about a connection between the hope of a Moscow Trump Tower and the hope of a Trump White House than he informed Congress of. (And in any event--maybe Mueller will be getting his hands on the complete transcripts to crosscheck the lad's accuracy?)

Anyway, Buzzfeed, which I am mad at for firing many extraordinary super people and doing it in a really shitty slow-torture way (also Vice and others, and I really wish I could win the lottery and hire everybody and start a Strangely News Empire), is still punching up with the mad journalism, by going further than the Trump Moscow Tower LOI or the tentative blueprints, to showing there was actually discussion of sites.  

Trump was bald-faced lying pretending there was no relationship to Russia at all, but the degree is starting to seem really inconvenient in retrospect, especially now that a person connected to that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Rinat Akhmetshin, seems to have gotten funds after that meeting that would make sense if he was being paid for lobbying to get Magnitsky sanctions dropped. It really looks like people associated with Russia thought Trump was their conduit to get things done, and the obvious leverage they had was his ego and his thirst to get a Moscow deal done. 

Is there any wonder then, that intelligence professionals from other nations are asking whether information Trump receives in intelligence briefings is being transmitted to Russia? They have ample reason already to think that Trump is beholden to Putin. And his behavior never makes that seem less possible. 

But this is just the brick and mortar side of things, darlings! There is also the weirdly parallel investigations into what Wikistrat (which prefers to think of itself as not being a part of Psy Group) "guessed" about cyber-mercenaries in 2015, that kind of sort of dovetails what actual possible mercenaries like Cambridge Analytica did.

Whatever happens in digital space has resonance in meat space, no? So the investigation of the loads of money sloshing about during the woefully-attended Trump inauguration is a worthy thing. 

I am describing the Trump/Russia case as existing in bricks (potential--an as yet unbuilt Moscow Tower) and bits (actual--as in so many emails and texts). This is also the way I see the Mueller case as being built--by indictments and public records that can't be erased. There has always been a discussion about the Mueller report as a final product that winds everything up in a neat little package that we all will see eventually. I don't know that this is what is happening. I think it is unfolding now, little by little, but the entire end product might be blocked from our view.

This is why I try to faithfully report the things I think we learn a little bit at a time. It matters that we have a grossly incompetent and badly compromised Chief Executive. This is a kind of national insecurity that we have a duty to democratically remove. There are means. We only need the knowledge and the will. 

TWGB: But What Does it Mean?!

George Papadopoulos deleted this tweet (using: Twitter for iPhone). #GeorgePapadopoulos #GeorgePapa19 #deletedtweet #screenshotbot #sshotbot pic.twitter.com/2eIKQixQy8

— Screenshot Bot (@sshotbot) December 29, 2018

There's something mysterious in the air lately, and, welp, I have no idea what's up with any of it. Nope. No freakin' clues. The above linked Tweet from George Papadopoulos regarding Maria Butina seems to pertain to the impression Russian tv is creating the Butina appears to have been "groomed" (in more ways than one) to perform some kind of campaign in the US. It appears to be a denial that this is even the case (and really, is it out of the way to suppose that Russian tv is not--GASP!--totally honest?) but frankly, what does he know?

I'm guessing he assumed the less said the better, in any case, which is a lesson better learned late than never, no?

In other fascinating news from McClatchy, it looks like a story they reported in spring may have firmed up a little, to the extent that Michael Cohen's phone (at least) appears to have been in the vicinity of Prague at the time when the Steele Dossier indicated that he was meeting with Russian officials to arrange a payment to hackers. This story from the dossier was originally met with by Cohen with a hard disavowal and a picture of the outside of his passport for some reason, and he still pretty firmly denies it--but a bit intriguingly:

He's never been, he says (although maybe he had, but it's been a while!) And yet, "#Mueller knows everything!"

Mueller knowing everything sounds good--but what does it mean?! (Stay tuned, I guess.) Sometimes these breadcrumbs we're following in this case seem like they are simply "for the birds". (I mean, honestly, one of the companies engaging in trolling during the 2016 campaign still appears to be trolling, filing a motion that tantalizingly refers to a "nude selfie".  Children, please do not let such sugar plums dance in your heads! It is probably nothing. Much.)

One of the things that does feel like "something" is that Russians appear to have actively promoted Jill Stein during 2016 to leech left-leaning votes away from Hillary Clinton as part of a protest contingent. This was enough to impact the totals for certain key swing states. (Although useless knob Gary Johnson impacted vote totals in my damn state by more apparently without Russian fuckery.) And remember her fascinating fundraising to try and get recounts? Well, it's paying for her legal defense, now. (And her ties to Russia aren't her only problem.) But all in all, the "something" I hope most people take away from this is that in America's two-party dominated system, right now, you have to vote your goals, not your feelings, and that might mean casting a vote for someone you don't love. It strikes me that I don't know if the problem is more about lack of civics or just innumeracy, but it gnaws at me that either deficiency could be so exploitable.

In another interesting "something" --look, I'm just going to post the lede of this Leopold and Cormier story and admit this is messed up and I also don't know what it means, either:

US Treasury Department officials used a Gmail back channel with the Russian government as the Kremlin sought sensitive financial information on its enemies in America and across the globe, according to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

The extraordinary unofficial line of communication arose in the final year of the Obama administration — in the midst of what multiple US intelligence agencies have said was a secret campaign by the Kremlin to interfere in the US election. Russian agents ostensibly trying to track ISIS instead pressed their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens.

Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers.

And why in the hell would there be any cooperation when the information asked for was this? If there's any transparency, it looks like transparent fuckery!

But nope, I can't fit it all into the big, messy, clearly fucked-rotten story about what happened during the 2016 presidential election. It just looks like one more way among several that a foreign entity wanted to skew the election against Clinton--and in favor of Trump.

TWGB: The Messy Things Called "Details"

Even though I'm just a normal person who waits with bated breath for things like surprise indictments of peripheral Trump/Russia figures or who refreshes Twitter threads about secretive federal Grand Jury hearings like a twitchy addicted lab animal looking for a fix (especially on Fridays), I'm also kind of relieved that Saturday was relatively quiet on the news front, so I could finally catch up with some of the hanging news out there. There are times when taking in Trump World news is a little like trying to drink from a fire hose.

On Thursday, Maria Butina plead guilty to engaging in a conspiracy to infiltrate the political sphere of a certain political party with the goal of influencing US/Russia relations as a foreign agent working in hand with Russian billionaire Alexander Torshin. Some people might quibble over whether political folks who met her through the NRA should have been a little suspicious over whether she was just a little...obvious or whether being an agent of Russia or a spy are different things, but I think The Daily Beast article includes a pretty valuable perspective:

John McLaughlin, former deputy director and acting director of the CIA, described Butina as an example of Russian “espionage lite,” operating openly but hiding the direction and support she got from the Russian government.

Steve Hall, a former CIA chief of Russian operations, said Thursday, "It's my theory that Butina is not actually a staff officer of any Russian intelligence service. She is somebody who has been co-opted by somebody else in the Russian government to do a job."

So maybe not a spy like a "secret agent"--but some kind of agent, anyway.  I kind of suspect her gun rights org was a cut-out but what do I know? But did US people think this back when she was making friends and influencing people--and did they care?  Eh, details!

In other news, we got a further corroboration of the activities of Individual One with respects to Michael Cohen's activities: Donald Trump was in the room with Cohen and AMI's David Pecker when they discussed what to do about Trump's long and winding road vis a vis horndoggery--in August 2015. So the idea that Trump would be making arrangements regarding the silencing of troublesome wenches was not a spur of the moment post TMZ video thing; it was known to Trump that this would be a problem (how big, though--a real quote from Steve Bannon in Wolff's Fire and Fury suggested Trump's other attorney, Marc Kasowitz, handled maybe "a hundred"). It was a part of Trump's entire campaign strategy to minimize a seedy existence (which may entail snorting Adderall and sleazing on underage beauty contestants--stuff which was known about, but never really addressed, by MSM during 2016 when it might have mattered--thanks!) But eh, details!

It also turns out that Paul Manafort, of the maybe kinda/sort of JDA with the Trump defense even since his plea deal and the being too close to Russia to stay on as campaign manager in 2016, but who still shaped the Trump transition, also gave Trump advice about how to discredit the lawful investigation of his activities by the FBI. Who would have thought? But there was so much suggestion of obstructing justice and lying to create a bad opinion about the FBI's work. And it really seems in retrospect like this is what Trump did--with a will! Take the regular snipes against McCabe (who offended Trump I guess because of the opening of an obstruction of justice investigation that was totally well-deserved?) and the low-hanging fruit of the Strzok/Page relationship, which, while interesting, never resulted in any leaks from their Clinton investigation or from their general distaste for Trump, and never actually resulted in any out of the way cover-up by the FBI of their texts. Some RW pundits are maintaining that the standard resetting of returned electronic devices to factory specs (as is procedural) was somehow a "wiping" (great shades of the "acid-washing" of Hillary Clinton's emails!) of damaging material--but no. Information was recovered because that is how data retention works. But eh, details!

TWGB: She's a Real Pistol and He's a Son of a Gun

The new pleading from Maria Butina in the Trump/Russia, changing her admission of guilt from "not guilty" to "guilty", with the potential of a cooperation agreement, is apt to be down-played and misunderstood, and I definitely understand why. Butina was apparently very good at making friends and influencing people and a catalog of Google images with her and numerous different people in the Republican milieu  is uncomfortable extensive....to conservatives. Among people she has met with--Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal. Meh. Donald Trump, Jr. 

Wait a minute. Donald Trump, Jr.? It sort of seems that Maria Butina's status as an agent of Russia falls somewhere between Anna Chapman (who her handler indicates she may have "upstaged") and Natalya Veselnitskaya. I don't think it's far-fetched to consider her status as "spy"--she apparently successfully and intentionally infiltrated a known very conservative-oriented social political group with the intent of coming into the orbit of prominent political figures. Making kissy-faces at NRA politics has been a big part of the Republican party for yonks. 

And of course, people meet people and have all kinds of interesting international contacts all the time. But there is reason to believe Russian money got funneled through the NRA to the Republican party, and that the NRA illegally coordinated with the Trump campaign. A very worrisome thing is that the first introduction we have to Maria Butina regarding the 2016 GOP race is in 2015.   Meaning Russia already, before the primary had taken off in earnest, had an interest in Trump (which could have developed in 2013, or 2011, or thirty years ago--this is how far back Trump has had Russian involvement in his affairs).

And yet, Trump wants to allege that somehow, the connections are only being drawn to himself and Russia because he won the 2016 election. Not even close. The timeline on the investigation into the DNC hack started well before Trump ever won. But in the meanwhile, at least 16 Trump associates have been found to have been contacted by Russia, which is more than the "zero" he once claimed, and certainly his very own family's contacts should have been known to him. Not in the least because his family and immediate associates are a terribly chatty lot.

I mean, is it even coincidental that potential front-running AG pick, William Barr, who has written such favorable things about Trump's defense and delusions was previously contacted by Trump prior to his pick for AG as a possible attorney for Trump's defense? (Which would be a very good reason, were he to take the job as AG, to promise to recuse, that sort of thing being very ethically troubling. But I think he's a throwback nutter in several ways, so who knows what he'd do?)

In the also "funny, but that likely merits a recusal" vein, Jared Kushner (last seen bucking up Prince MbS from the "just killed a guy and got caught" doldrums) had met with acting AG Matt "Hot Tub Time Machine Bigfoot DNA Big Dick Toilets" Whitaker, and presumably sipped tea and didn't mention at all the shit he was liable to be indicted for. Because why would that even come up. right?

And this is why people like Nick "Silver Spoons looking got $50 million from consulting and shit MF" Ayers does not even want to be WH COS, even if that would be a really cherry thing to put on the old resume in one's mid-thirties. But the job is poison, now. Being a Trump-wrangler is not worth it, even with hazard pay. Even Mark Meadows has too much sense (as of last I checked).

I have said it before, but it stays current: This looks bad because it is bad. The Trump Administration has to throw lies after other lies are proved to be wrong, because the truth is not good. Other members of the GOP defend this for reason I can not fathom at this point, unless there is also leverage against them (real or imagined).

But the overall picture: not good. And among the potential casualties, the NRA now wonders if they are not able to survive, and are cutting things like NRATV "talent".

To which I say: "Good".

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag Has Been Out Drinking

The New York Times tale of how the FBI investigation into the Trump-Russia connection really began, not with the Steele dossier, but with an Australian diplomat being told interesting and alarming things by Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, is an absolute delight. It squares away some important details--for one thing, the Steele dossier (which is not, despite the best efforts of Trump and his supporters to pretend it is, actually discredited) did not spur the investigation, but the actual behavior of the Trump campaign folks did.

It also highlights a disturbing feature of the Trump campaign--when presented with various contacts alleging that illicitly gained "dirt" had been obtained by Russia, a hostile actor regarding US interests, and that said dirt was being peddled with the intent of fuxx0ring a US election, instead of bringing this to the attention of anyone involved in national security like responsible patriotic citizens would have done, the Trump boys rolled with it. It was up to Alexander Downer, an Australian, and Christopher Steele, a Briton, to do the necessary and give the US government a heads-up about what was going on. Which either means that the Trump folks never understood the intent or implications of what these various Russian contacts were for (undermining democracy and helping either sway an election, or effectively dirtying a nascent Clinton Administration so badly as to render it ineffective) or simply did not care.  Or both. Both is also a possibility, and a sickening and grave one.

The story moots the central claim from Trumpists that George Papadopoulos was low-level, and therefore, what he knew was not relevant. It also reinforces, to me, the idea that the Trump Campaign openness to this kind of attention from Russia was clearly visible, and not nearly so covert as the geniuses running it seemed to believe. (In rather the same way as the apparent coordination between Russia/WikiLeaks/Trump messaging would turn out.)

From the NYT:

Mr. Papadopoulos was trusted enough to edit the outline of Mr. Trump’s first major foreign policy speech on April 27, an address in which the candidate said it was possible to improve relations with Russia. Mr. Papadopoulos flagged the speech to his newfound Russia contacts, telling Mr. Timofeev that it should be taken as “the signal to meet.”

“That is a statesman speech,” Mr. Mifsud agreed. Ms. Polonskaya wrote that she was pleased that Mr. Trump’s “position toward Russia is much softer” than that of other candidates.

Stephen Miller, then a senior policy adviser to the campaign and now a top White House aide, was eager for Mr. Papadopoulos to serve as a surrogate, someone who could publicize Mr. Trump’s foreign policy views without officially speaking for the campaign. But Mr. Papadopoulos’s first public attempt to do so was a disaster.

That foreign policy speech was attended by the forgettable yet ever-present Sergei Kislyak. In it, Trump called for "an easing of tensions and improved relations".  It was quite the day.  Was it quite the day when the connection got real? I can't say--but the Russians sure were at it again when they contacted Trump, Jr. in June 2016. Because they had not been definitively told to fuck off. And I can't see where they ever were told to fuck off, because if they had been, the Trump folks could point to that "when".

And would have done ages ago. So I think they never told Russia to go away, and that's why they never did.

TrumpWorld Grab-Bags Never Rest

Sometimes I have enough stories to file a TrumpWorld Grab-Bag post, even if I don't entirely get how all the stories fit together...today. Sometimes I magically have a theme, such as "inconsistency" or "disruption", to go by.  Sometimes I pull them together with the best narrative I can pull together--and today, I think I want to meditate on that busy factor of the folks on the periphery of the TrumpWorld. 

You know who never rested? Gen. Mike Flynn. The more we look, the more we find out about one of Donald Trump's most trusted foreign policy advisers. It turns out, there was yet another foreign connection that he had omitted from his security clearance paperwork, this time regarding nuclear power in the Middle East--not at all a fraught concept, I'm sure. He's also recently refused to testify before the Senate Intelligence committee. 

It might just be that he would like immunity--the problem is, the more you shake this guy, the more weird connections fall out of him. Like, right now, Special Counsel Mueller is looking at Flynn's weird adult son, Mike, Jr. because of his connections to Flynn Intel Group and the Trump Transition.  It's kind of weird to think Jr. even was in a position to be important in Flynn Sr's various lucrative consulting gigs with Turkey and Russia and Saudi Arabia, I guess, and all them, and also in any way involved with the Trump Campaign or transition since Jr. was a big old conspiracy theorist, internet trolling whackadoodle. But who knows--maybe that was the point?

How's Flynn Jr. for peripheral? Well, I also don't want you to forget about Devin Nunes. I know, the last I mentioned Nunes was about his trying to obstruct the Trump/Russia probe by being stupid about the significance of the Steele Dossier. But before that, there was the brilliant late night ride to uncover the vicious, probative, "unmasking" things that the Obama Administration was doing! My stars and garters! What ever happened with that?

Well, for starters, folks in the know never thought it was much. And then the testimony of Susan Rice kind of got interesting--it's really all in a day's work to follow-up on why heads of state or their representatives are visiting the US without a heads-up, and it's interesting that the meeting was with Flynn, Kushner, etc.

This should really have people looking into the whole "Logan Act" thing.

In other news, for some reason, the US government agencies are scrapping Russian-backed Kaspersky software products as if they were obviously full of spying malware or something. Maybe they think they could get hacked--I dunno. But maybe the next election won''t even need to be hacked--I mean, who needs to fuck with the votes when the GOP has ways of fuxxoring with the voters? Outside job, meet inside job. (Aw shit, I'm sounding a little like a conspiracy theorist now, maybe?)

But as for the above graphic? That's to commemorate the moment when an Office of Government Ethics decided why shouldn't people raise donations for their legal fees regardless of whether it's possibly payment for past or future favors!

This Trump Administration has issues that never rest, and it makes me restless. So I share it all with you!

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag is Disruptive

When a member of Duma is so comfortable with the notion of Russia having stolen the US presidential election that he says it aloud, the joke really has gone too far. Whether it's just a kind of boast about Russian capabilities, or a troll about US intelligence lack of capability, it's not actually funny.

It's especially not funny when it's clear that Russia has been very active in trying to influence events here through social media, even using Facebook to arrange anti-refugee and anti-immigration rallies right in the US, that Russian-backed "news" outlets RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik had been part of a propaganda campaign, and that it's possible that UN facilities in New York had been used for some of the operation. 

This is quite a lot of activity going on, with one apparently goal--influence in favor of Trump. There's evidence of Russian meddling in elections in Europe as well, so why not the US as well?

This is why it frustrates me that Rep. Devin Nunes and friends are trying to undercut the Steele Dossier and disrupt the investigation into the Russian hack of the DNC (and really, the election) by trying to discredit it. It just doesn't seem like a good-faith supposition that the real problem with the oppo research dug up in the dossier makes Trump look bad and could have been seeded with disinfo by the Russians for that very effect. The point of oppo is to get factual, damaging information, and this dossier has enough of it. There's not really any reason to believe Trump was not Putin's preference.

After all, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have been a continuation of Obama's foreign policy, at best. But with Trump, they could count on a disruption--and possibly even plan a reset of US/Russian relations. Trump, after all, having been able to elide, omit, deny, anything to do with Russia at all publically, however fallaciously, would easily be able to ignore the enormity of the electoral interference on the most obvious of biases--

It benefited him, so it didn't matter. See? Disruption in action.

The problem with disruption though, is sometimes it is not actually...legal. This is a problem for the Trump campaign, because the evidence is piling up that unauthorized people associated were engaging in effecting foreign policy. (Those adoptions? Those sanctions.) And one person who seems particularly in the midst of this dealing was Jared Kushner, who Trump lawyers rather wanted out of the White House, by now.

But he remains, despite several uncomfortable disclosures.  I feel like this is probably something that will end up...disrupted...at some juncture, not without a number of "Please, Daddy"'s on Ivanka's part.

TrumpWorld Grab-Bags Should Be Less Obvious

The ongoing effort to prove collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia sometimes gets a wee boost, but I would have to say that the best source of your very finest collusion hints comes from the actual behavior of POTUS Trump Himself. Even people sort of in his circle are recognizing a problem when they see it. 

And as per his usual, Trump makes no bones about his doing Putin's bidding, apparently. 

But let's just pretend there was still a little doubt--Russia hands who have witnessed their strategy see similar techniques at work with grooming Trump and associates.  Also, it looks like one of Trump's campaign in-crowd; Paul Manafort, was very indebted to Russian interests and then, for reasons we can only guess at, decided to work for the Trump campaign pro-bono for a bit. 

(But the rot seems to be deeper than Trump's immediate circle--take Rep. Dana Rohrabacker, as an example. A bad example. The "joke" between Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan about who is on Putin's payroll sounds a lot less amusing, huh?) 

It smells a little--odd. Just like Trump's over-eagerness to get Putin's attention at the G20 dinner. Not definitely wrong. Just...a little obvious.

UPDATE: And somehow, there is still more to take a look at--Trump's loans.  Trump has recently said that Robert Mueller to keep out of looking into the Trump family finances. Which also seems a little, I dunno. Obvious.

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag Is Very Familiar

There were a few things that were confirmed today that fascinate me about the Trump/Russia connection--I think I want to start with the pull-aside(?) that Trump had with Putin at the G20 dinner on July 7, because this was already after a nearly 2 1/2 hour meeting that was closed door and had few attendees (Tillerson, some interpreters, Lavrov?) but this one had exactly one interpreter--for Putin. This makes one ask--so, if Trump "pressed" the issue of possible Russian interference in the 2016 elections (and elsewhere), and held any sort of hard line that this behavior was not to be done, how was it that he bonded with the Russian autocrat enough to have another friendly discussion with only Putin's Kremlin interpreter witnessing it, so that no US record exists? What could they have discussed? 

Maybe the Russian compounds associated with possible espionage operations that Russia would like to have handed back without conditions?  Let's even live it up a little, and speculate that Russian influence might have something to do with decisions like Tillerson's State Department blowing off the cyber threat to the extent of not giving a shit anymore, anyways, or deciding that a War Crimes Office is just such a hassle. After all, Syrian leader Assad looks good for war crimes, but is partnered up with Russia, no?  (Or maybe a US administration that has loosened it's ROE with respects to civilian deaths and already signaled to the rest of the Middle East that they don't care to lecture on the subject of human rights, has simply decided that people in glass houses should be circumspect about durable projectiles.)

It would hearten one attempting any defense of Trump's relationship to Russia if he did not act exactly like a patsy all the time. Just the biggest unaware openly collusive dupe in the whole world. 

Which brings us back to the election 2016 where we left off with Trump, Jr., and the greatest thing to happen to foreign policy, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort (some of these folks will be testifying publicly in a Senate hearing, so, popcorn futures certainly do look bright). The so-called 8th man was Ike Kaveladze--a guy associated with money-laundering. I kind of thought this would come back to the issue of money-laundering, myself. 

The reason why is Trump is wide open for it.  Like, the now-defunct Trump Taj Mahal was even seriously fined because of  money-laundering. It strikes me as funky as all get out that the lure the Russian contacts used for the Trump Tower meeting was to accuse the DNC of financial dealings with Russia--but well, they seem to have made their own in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign, hm? (It also hammers home how babes-in-the woods-ish the Trump family seems to have been--anyone could have been in attendance, but they simply didn't have a concept of vetting or self-protection regarding who might have been there.)

That meeting is still weird for other reasons, though. Jay Sekulow made the tv rounds to influence public opinon about this case (which will most likely not be tried based on public opinion) by suggesting that there couldn't have been anything untoward about the meet because the Secret Service let those Russians into Trump Tower--ha!

But no. For one thing, SS vetting would only really make sense if Trump, Sr., was in attendance and he wasn't, supposedly. Trump, Jr. didn't have a SS detail.  And also, even if Secret Service was involved, their business is to make sure the principles are physically protected, not held harmless from dick-tripping. 

(As a side-note, I have referred to Jay Sekulow as "hind-titterati"--a term of my own dubious art. By which I mean a guy who isn't especially skilled, but benefits solely on the basis of having found biases to milk. That's not to say being him isn't lucrative. The milking resentment can be a cash-cow--it's just udderly weak, in my book. I mean, take Paul Clement. There's a guy who manages to milk resentment, get taxpayer money from red state governments, and get his ass talked about as SCOTUS material. Trump saw Sekulow on Fox News. That's kind of like seeing his name on a bench at a public trans stop, I think.)

Anyway, this Trump Grab-Bag is familiar in the sense that Trump and Putin have settled in like old friends, and the problems with Trump's reality is what is always is--dodginess, secrecy, creative capitalism (let's call it, instead of the more vulgar "grifting"), loyalty to self and disregard for norms. 

Other than all that, Party of Lincoln, how are you enjoying the play?

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. 

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.

A Presidential Trip Abroad 2: Israel

Oh man, watch Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer (on right couch) react when Trump says—in Israel—"We just got back from the Middle East." pic.twitter.com/x7nb4uvqpR

— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) May 22, 2017

I don't know whether I want to say that President Trump misspoke when he said that because he was tired, or because, in his mind, "the Middle East" is Islamic and Israel isn't, even if he intellectually knows better, or, as an even dimmer take, he really didn't know Israel is part of the Middle East in the first place. It would seem that any adult person, on hearing "Middle East crisis" or "conflict" must have heard about Israeli/Palestinian...

But see? My idea of what one must have known is irrelevant, because my experiences are different from Donald Trump's. I know that Israel is in the Middle East, and Donald Trump is a reality tv "billionaire" who became president. He's old enough to be my father, and I am old enough to be his third wife. And I nearly dislike him as much, if a picture is worth a thousand words. Also, it really is hard to gauge the relative awareness of a person who addresses the problem of inadvertently (or "advertantly"?) leaking classified intelligence to Russian representatives by confirming the source of the intelligence:

LIVE UPDATES: Trump Tells Netanyahu He 'Never Mentioned' Israel in Intel Leak to Russianshttps://t.co/XaPL1AbCm5 pic.twitter.com/S0JXqGlygC

— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) May 22, 2017

To me, this all looks like someone who isn't ready for the job and who probably should have spent the weekend on one of his properties in his cleats golf-carting his way through 18 holes planning something cool for a reality show, not someone making a reality show out of other people's property tearing up diplomatic turf with his cleats-like tongue. And digging himself at least 18 holes in the process.

But that's just my broad take on the thing.