Poison Tag

We are watching a game of "poison tag" being played out in Washington.

Poison tag being a game we played as kids. One kid is poison, and if he tags you you are poison too, or you are poisoned, depending on how it's being played. Shrieks and running around are involved. In the DC game of poison tag the game begins when the Republican Party declares someone is poison and everyone runs from them. Anyone who touches this person or is touched is out of the game. The Republicans have declared Christopher Steele poison. Why? First, it isn't a game. It's very serious national security business and Steele is one of America's most reliable friends. Why make Steele a pariah for everyone to shun?

Steele ran the Russia desk for MI6, the intel agency of our closest ally. A serious professional who did serious work for many years keeping the free western democracies like Britain and the U.S. and our NATO allies free of interference from the Russian spies we all grew up fearing because of James Bond novels. Russia is no longer communist but it is now ruled by a former KGB boss, Vladimir Putin. Steele has a well-earned dislike of Putin having seen what he does. Example: since the Russian involvement in hacking our election became known several witnesses to it, western sources of information and Putin critics, have wound up suddenly violently dead. One of them was poisoned twice––not a game––and survived to talk about it.

The reason Steele is being maligned and shunned by half of Washington is simple. He saw an alarming pattern of contacts and business dealings and involvements, some of them possibly very compromising, between the Republican candidate for president of the United States and the Russian government and its spy agencies and President Putin's closest allies, the oligarchs. He did what any friend would do: he told the FBI about this. He did so knowing it would not be a good thing for America to have a president who was on the hook to the Russians. Steele discovered this in 2016, and the more he looked the more he discovered, and the more worrying it was. Why was he looking? He was hired by a research firm, FusionGPS, a respected firm founded and led by former Wall Street Journal investigative journalists.

Full disclosure: the Wall Street Journal is a very right wing newspaper, but it has a highly respected newsroom. Did this make observers concerned that FusionGPS might have a right wing bias? Apparently Fusion was hired by Republicans during the Republican primary to find out more about Donald Trump. Republicans were worried about Trump. Let's face it, he is a dodgy character, with longtime mob ties, multiple bankruptcies, suspicious sources of financing, a long history of sexual misbehavior, etc. Who wouldn't be concerned. Republicans were concerned, but as soon as Trump won the nomination they dropped their research and let FusionGPS go.

FusionGPS was subsequently hired by the Democrats who were running against this dodgy character named Trump. It was at this point that the Fusion research team realized they needed fuller information about Trump's Russian connections, and who better to hire than a former MI6 Russia desk chief named Christopher Steele. Steele had gone into private business after he was thrown out of Russia by Putin for treading on Putin's toes. Spy career over. At least Putin didn't assassinate him the way he does others who tread on his toes.

Why is Steele "poison" today? Don't we like James Bond? In the Bond movies there are lots of characters who are operating illegally or dangerously in the Russian orbit. America doesn't usually run one of them for president. In fact that would make a great Bond novel. (I would cast Christopher Walken in the movie.) Why is James Bond now the bad guy? Why is this Bond villain being run by the Kremlin the hero?

This is a bizarre game of poison we're playing. What is right is wrong. What is legal is illegal. What is patriotic is treason and what used to be treason is now the urgent instruction coming from the party. In this case it's the Republican Party, the least likely group to be suspected of favoring the Russians in a war with the FBI.

Everything is upside down.

A trusted former counterespionage official from Britain calls American law enforcement and reports a possible crime in progress. Because he is a professional in these matters it's more than a possible crime, it's likely, and he is deeply concerned. He shares information with the FBI. He shares all he knows, suspicions that have been confirmed and those bits that are just raw intel. He does not edit out the worrisome salacious bits because the Russians have a long history of using honey traps to lure Americans into compromising situations for blackmail purposes. The FBI listens. They listen with greater interest because Steele's "dossier" overlaps with much of what the FBI has learned in its own investigations. The FBI began investigating on their own, having heard from their Australian counterparts that a member of the Trump campaign was boasting about having important and useful connections with the Russian government.

This kind of broadly corroborated information is not the sort of thing a counterintelligence agency discards out of prudery. They don't stop following the trail because it gets embarrassingly close to a major party presidential candidate, but that is what the Republicans are saying they ought to have done. Apparently, by Republican standards, NO information that shows a Republican presidential candidate––god forbid a Republican president––has become a puppet of the Russians should EVER be believed or disseminated.

Such information should be disbelieved at once! Anyone who discovers such a crime in progress must be shunned and discredited at all costs! Even if the person with this urgent information about a crime in progress is a career professional in counterintelligence from our oldest ally, Great Britain, he must be shut out! He is poison! Don't listen to him!

The Republicans are saying that the reliable friend who is reporting this ongoing crime against America is himself the criminal. This is the game of "poison" the Republicans are playing.

Republicans are upending various kinds of illogic to peddle this poison. They are not saying that a Democrat phoned in the crime report, they say a professional investigator of good standing hired by a company that was paid by a Democrat phoned in the crime report. If being hired by a company hired by Republicans but now paid by a Democrat discredits you, we have a problem. It discredits an awful lot of people. It means more than half of all Americans cannot expect to be believed when they call law enforcement, either because they are Democrats or because they know someone who is. And if they have their neighbor phone the FBI for them the FBI will be expected to hang up––because if the FBI believes the crime report or seeks to verify it they will be complicit in a crime, so the Republican argument goes.

The FBI believed Steele (Republicans hadn't called him poison yet) because his information corroborated much of their own information discovered in an investigation begun independently. But the Republicans are saying that the FBI's investigation is fatally biased and all its warrants are fatally biased because the FBI answered the phone when Steele phoned in the warning that Russians were involved in multiple ways with the Republican presidential candidate. The warrants the FBI obtained required something called "probable cause", but the Republicans are discrediting those warrants because they say "probable cause" means the FBI was biased against Donald Trump. Finding credible evidence of wrongdoing, the Republicans say, creates a fatal bias in the investigating agency. Oddly this is not something Republicans charge when Arizona sheriffs count the brownness of a suspect's skin as probable cause.

What this all means is this: if you want to commit a crime and avoid investigation and prosecution the safest thing to do is be a Republican candidate for president or a member of his campaign, because these things make you immune to all suspicion and invalidates any investigation that might be opened or may have already been ongoing into your dodgy business practices that look like money laundering or fraud or conspiracy, especially your pattern of conspiring with Russian spies. Probable cause to seek evidence of crime means you are too biased to investigate. Only law officers who swear everlasting fealty and loyalty to the Leader are to be trusted. Everybody else must be fired.

James Bond supposedly had a license to kill. Not really true but it made a good story. He did have a license to investigate Russians, though, and he knew how to do this. But Bond's license to investigate Russian conspiracies is hereby suspended because he had the gall to investigate a Republican. Mr. Bond is persona non grata. Poison. Nobody should talk to him or listen to him or believe what he says. If you do nobody will believe you either. The crimes Bond is reporting are not crimes at all. Mr. Bond is a criminal. The Russians do issue licenses to kill and without any friends in America Bond, I mean Steele, had better not come here anymore because the president who used to be very "mobbed up" is now very "Russianed up" and you never know when they might arrange for someone to fall out of a high window or meet with an accident on the sidewalk. All of this sounds like something dreamed up by Ian Fleming (too bizarre for John LeCarré) but it's now true. Because false is now true.

Good is now evil. Bad is good. Criminal is legal and the crime-fighters are now the criminals. Treason is now patriotism and what used to be patriotism is now treason. Republicans sleep with Russians and this is a good thing. If you oppose the surrender of American sovereignty to the man in Moscow you are unAmerican, because that is what Trump has done and what Trump does is now the rule. It doesn't even matter if Russian prostitutes were filmed doing strange things with Mr. Trump in Moscow because the American Evangelicals, our highest authorities on superChristianity, have given President* Trump a license to do strange things with prostitutes or wives of his friends or complete strangers exactly as he sees fit. God help us all.

The Nunes Memo Casts More Suspicion on the GOP Than It Casts On The FBI

In early 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

In March, their parliament passed the Enabling Act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers.

In December 1933, the oaths sworn by members of the armed forces, law enforcement and the civil service, were changed from an oath to serve Germany to an oath to obey Adolf Hitler. A loyalty oath. A personal loyalty oath.

This recent news about Trump’s demand of personal loyalty from DOJ officials and FBI officials has a very dark precedent not from American tradition but from Nazi Germany.

I am not surprised Donald Trump would go this way. I am dismayed and disturbed to see how Republicans are enabling him. (See the Enabling Act, above)

When will Republicans stand up for American law and order and push back?

Republican leaders are charging that the FBI, the DOJ, and our intelligence agencies are biased. The President* sees this bias in anyone who threatens him by investigating matters that might incriminate him, anyone who threatens him by fulfilling his or her duties, who won't swear an oath to Donald Trump. The latest fears of Donald Trump stem from FBI agents following probable cause to investigate matters that seem to involve the president himself.

This "bias" Trump is objecting to appears to be based on something called probable cause. Probable cause is information that hasn't been proved yet, but probable cause prompts further investigation and these elements of probable cause are part of the application for a warrant.

The key point is this: Probable cause to investigate a crime does not vacate any investigation because of bias.

If law enforcement has probable cause to investigate they are obligated to investigate. Saying otherwise amounts to dangerous blindness to official duty. Saying otherwise indicates a greater loyalty to a probable lawbreaker than to the law.

What makes this especially alarming is we see Republicans, the majority party––with enormous power that they are asserting maximally–– stating a strange opinion that reaching a level of high suspicion or concern, rather than bolstering the case for further investigation, by some bizarre logic undermines the case.

The Republicans in Congress are siding with a president who may in fact be compromised by the Russian government, who has throughout his career shown a great tendency to lie, to cheat, to show bias and act in a bigoted manner, to hire and work with organized criminals, to admire criminals, to associate with and admire foreign dictators, and to side with foreign dictators, enemies of this country, and their intelligence apparatus, against our own intelligence professionals whose job is to protect our national security.

The Republicans are siding with someone who has triggered mountains of probable cause concern against the law enforcement professionals who are seeking to find out if these concerns are borne out by further evidence. (Imagine if a career mobster were to raise these arguments. He would be laughed at by Americans from both ends of the political spectrum.)

We face not only a constitutional crisis but a national security crisis and we are being led by a Republican Party that behaves like a criminal organization with close ties to the Russian president.

What sources of anti-terrorist intelligence or intelligence that might strengthen our national security will feel confident enough to share that information with us when Republican in high office will misuse it and expose the sources of the information?

Where are the elders of the party? Where are the responsible Republican officeholders, if any remain?

"R" Is For Russian. "R" is for Republican

Important reporting from Reuters shows a strategy of coverup by the Republicans

According to the latest reporting by Reuters, Devin Nunes (the recused chair of the House Intel Committee) is still very unrecusedly busy trying to derail any and all investigations into the ways Russia hacked our election. His approach is very Republican: if he can make sure Americans don’t learn about what happened that will mean nothing happened. Nunes’ strategy is to project blame onto officials in the Obama administration who correctly and in line with standing protocols and procedures, asked a special panel for the names of the Americans who were discovered talking with Russian agents during the campaign. They sought to know because it was their job to protect American democracy and they followed the rules in doing so.

Nunes’ theory is simple and simpleminded: Until it becomes known that Americans were colluding with a foreign enemy Nunes believes he can insist no Americans were colluding. Until the colluding Americans are known by name, Nunes can say they don’t exist and the conversations never took place. And how dare these professionals in the Obama administration seek to learn who those people were! In Nunes’ mind it isn’t criminal to collude with a foreign enemy, but it is criminal to investigate that collusion.

The Republican idea is that wrongdoing isn’t the problem, Americans knowing about the wrongdoing is the problem.

What we don’t know can’t hurt them.

Republicans look back at all previous Republican White House scandals in a different way than most of us do: the faked criteria for the Iraq War; the outing of CIA agent because her husband disclosed the truth; Iran Contra, where the Reagan White House illegally traded weapons with Islamic terrorists to arm our own terrorists in Central America; all the way back to Watergate. They all have one main idea: keeping Americans in the dark.

They see Watergate not as a broad criminal conspiracy and a stain on American democracy; Republicans see Watergate as a failed coverup. If it had been properly covered up there would have been no problem. Undiscovered crimes are not crimes just as covering up industrial causes of climate change means that those causes do not exist. Serious problems are not serious or even problems as long as Americans do not know about them. This is called whitewashing. This is coverup pure and simple.

On the day after 9/11 we need to understand that America is again under attack. Not by terrorists in airliners but by Russians and their American proxies trying to destroy our democracy.

Politico describes what's known as the Gerasimov Doctrine, the Russian attack plan which put Trump into the White House.

"In 2013 General Valery Gerasimov—Russia’s chief of the General Staff, comparable to the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff… took tactics developed by the Soviets, blended them with strategic military thinking about total war, and laid out a new theory of modern warfare—one that looks more like hacking an enemy’s society than attacking it head-on. He wrote: “The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness. … All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character.””

The Daily Beast explains how Trump's and Russia' Facebook strategy had such a powerful cascading effect on the election.

"On Wednesday, Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, revealed that Russia had “likely” used 470 fake accounts to buy about $100,000 worth of advertising promoting “divisive social and political messages” to Americans. It was Facebook’s first public acknowledgment of the role it unwittingly played in the Kremlin’s “active measures” campaign. Stamos’ statement was also conspicuous by what it omitted: Facebook has refused to release the ads. More significant, it hasn’t said what kind of reach Russia attained with its ad buy.
"There may be a reason for that. On the surface, $100,000 is small change in contemporary national politics, and 3,000 ads sounds like a drop in the pond when Facebook boasts 2 billion monthly users. But it turns out $100,000 on Facebook can go a surprisingly long way, if it’s used right. On average, Facebook ads run about $6 for 1,000 impressions. By that number, the Kremlin’s $100,000 buy would get its ads seen nearly 17 million times.

"But that average hides a lot of complexity, and the actual rate can range from $1 to $100 for 1,000 impressions on an ad with pinpoint targeting. Virality matters, too. Ads that get more shares, likes, and comments are far cheaper than boring ads that nobody likes, and ads that send users to Facebook posts instead of third-party websites enjoy an additional price break. Finally, there are network effects, which can vastly multiply the number of users who see a promoted Facebook post."


What makes this especially interesting is the striking similarity between Russia’s strategy of relying on Facebook and Trump’s own strategy. Trump’s campaign used ONLY ads on Facebook. Russia and Trump shared that strategic focus.

The question now is: Were Russia’s Facebook attacks guided by Trump’s own intel. Or were they both directed by intel and analysis from another player in the Trump fold? (Was it, perhaps Cambridge Analytica?)

Further analysis from Medium on how the Facebook strategy weaponized social media for the Russians and the Republicans

"There may be some fake news on Facebook, but the power of the Facebook advertising platform to influence voters is very real. This is the story of how the Trump campaign used data to target African Americans and young women with $150 million dollars of Facebook and Instagram advertisements in the final weeks of the election, quietly launching the most successful digital voter suppression operation in American history.

"Throughout the campaign, President-Elect Donald J. Trump shrewdly invested in Facebook advertisements to reach his supporters and raise campaign donations. Facing a short-fall of momentum and voter support in the polls, the Trump campaign deployed its custom database, named Project Alamo, containing detailed identity profiles on 220 million people in America.

“With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners."

More analysis from WIRED. Both of these articles came right on the heels of the election when it became clear how the gambit had succeeded but details remained unclear or were undisclosed because they were part of ongoing intelligence investigations.

A Bridge of Lies Leads Back to the White House

Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo:

"People who don't even appear to be that close to the action keep getting pulled under for what seem like needless deceptions. When we see this kind of pattern, the answer is usually that the stuff at the center of the scandal is so big that it requires concealment, even about things distant from the main action, things that it would seem much better and less damaging simply to admit."

From WhoWhatWhy.org:

"a two-month WhoWhatWhy investigation has revealed an important reason the Bureau may be facing undisclosed obstacles to revealing what it knows to the public or to lawmakers.

"Our investigation also may explain why the FBI, which was very public about its probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails, never disclosed its investigation of the Trump campaign prior to the election, even though we now know that it commenced last July.

"Such publicity could have exposed a high-value, long-running FBI operation against an organized crime network headquartered in the former Soviet Union. That operation depended on a convicted criminal who for years was closely connected with Trump, working with him in Trump Tower — while constantly informing for the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), and being legally protected by them."

From The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza:

“The evidence is now clear that the White House and Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, have worked together to halt what was previously billed as a sweeping investigation of Russian interference in last year’s election.”

They believe what we don’t know can’t hurt them. Their aggressive cover-up indicates there must be a lot to cover up.


Pulitzer Prize winning financial reporter David Cay Johnston asks you this question: Why do you think Trump appointed Putin’s and Russian mobsters’ favorite money launderer as our new Secretary of Commerce?

The Guardian reports here on Wilbur Ross’s partnership with the Russian mobster in the Cypriot bank where Russian mobsters launder their money.

Bloomberg reports here on the network of Russian oligarchs who Trump has ties with.

USAToday, the very middle American newspaper that caters to the great silent majority, is beginning to describe Trump’s behaviors and connections as criminal. They’ve also noticed that he is a pathological liar. You can read their story here.

"Trump told reporters in February: "I have no dealings with Russia. I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia. I have no loans with Russia at all.”

Yet in 2013, after Trump addressed potential investors in Moscow, he bragged to Real Estate Weekly about his access to Russia's rich and powerful. “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” Trump said, referring to Russians who made fortunes when former Soviet state enterprises were sold to private investors.

Five years earlier, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. told Russian media while in Moscow that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets" in places like Dubai and Trump SoHo and elsewhere in New York.

Not only is Trump lying about his collusions and entanglements with Russia and Putin and Putin's criminal underworld, he is very aggressively preventing others from telling the truth about these things. Read more complete reporting on this at New York Magazine.

When Devin Nunes (who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and is responsible for driving it into the ditch) discovered that former acting AG Sally Yates was going to speak about things that might tend to implicate President Trump he acted like a perfect henchman and immediately put the kibosh on her testifying. Congress's newspaper, The Hill, goes into that duplicity and mischief here.

Politico is also reporting that Sally Yates planned to discuss what she had learned in her investigation of the Russia-Putin-Trump-White House conspiracy, (read Politico's article here) but the Republicans have muzzled her and derailed the committee. It’s bizarre for an oversight committee chair to think it’s his job to help the people being investigated get off the hook. Judging by the way Republicans hounded Secretary Clinton over recent years, it seemed like they felt it was their job to get innocent people on the hook by simple persistence. In both instances their method involves ignoring facts, facts that tend to incriminate Trump and his co-conspirators are ignored or buried, and facts that exculpate any Democrat they want to jail are ignored and dismissed.

It appears that White House officials are feverishly wiping incriminating material off their phones and computers (reported by The Independent of London) which means they would prefer to go to prison for obstruction of justice than be hung for treason. Covering up and lying and obstruction is what sent various Watergate conspirators to jail while their boss retired to his expensive home with its view of the ocean. This might happen again.

This isn’t just a foreign conspiracy, it has its domestic skulduggery too. American conspirators also worked to divert Americans’ attention away from the fealty Trump owed to the Russians and strong-arm the FBI into derailing the Hillary Clinton campaign, which was Putin's ultimate goal. Trump’s little helpers in this were the ubiquitous Rudy Giuliani and private global security tycoon and private army contractor Erik Prince, who used their deep leverage within the FBI to corrupt the investigatory process. (Reported at Huffington Post)

Rachel Maddow has been all over this story, synthesizing and explaining the many complex threads of the conspiracy as they come to light. Last night she turned her attention to Trump son-in-law and male model Jared Kushner:

A good daily routine to follow if you want to track this story is to watch Rachel Maddow's nightly reporting on it.

ThePalmerReport tends to stick its neck out on big stories, sometimes goes out on a limb. Right now Palmer is speculating that Michael Flynn has already cut a deal to testify. (Read the PalmerReport on Flynn's alleged deal here)

ThePalmerReport is also saying that the FISA warrants list Trump as a Russian agent. Since FISA warrants are so highly classified, we have to be skeptical.

Regarding another Palmer story, that Devin Nunes is heavily invested in a winery with Russian connections, SNOPES lists it as unproven. But it is curious when a winery which a congressman has invested much of his wealth in has its only overseas markets in Russia and Switzerland. Russia being a major source of money to be laundered and Switzerland being a major money launderer. It makes people wonder. Maybe, probably, Devin Nunes wasn’t and isn’t on the hook because of this investment, but this kind of company looks a lot like a hook for the kind of criminal transactions Russia engages in. And we are left wondering how many baited hooks have snagged prominent Republicans and White House officials and appointees.

MotherJones explains how Devin Nunes’ is compromising his constitutional role to serve as a check and balance on the president’s power, and how this endangers a crucial constitutional balance. (Especially if the White House itself is in the grip of Russian agents.) Instead of checking and balancing Nunes is carrying water for the president, running interference, blowing smoke, setting up diversions and distractions, discrediting his committee, deceiving the public and behaving like the president is his boss.

The Daily Beast has this: “The White House has found its stooge in Nunes.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R/NC) calls Nunes a bungling Inspector Clouseau, a clown.

The brazenness of the White House’s cover up is hard to believe, but it is consistent with Trump’s sense of impunity. Remember during the campaign when he said he could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. This is who he is.

The Week, on Trump's brazen impunity, his belief that presidents are above the law.

Meanwhile, POLITICO is reporting that the House Republicans are all in with Devin Nunes and his bizarre mishandling of his chairmanship duties. Which, in the words of Kurt Cobain, "smells like team spirit." It smells, certainly.

Something is rotten when a major political party chooses partisanship over national security and national sovereignty concerns. It sounds as if the GOP decided if the only way to regain the power that appeared to be slipping away was to collude with a foreign enemy and its spy network, well, they'd collude with a foreign enemy. Which is what Quisling did in Norway by collaborating with the Nazis. It's what Petain did in France. It's surprising that the ultrapatriotic Republican Party would embrace treason this way. Some of them appear to have done just that and others are busily covering it up.