Trump Team Knew Flynn Was A Foreign Agent––Didn't Care

Andrea Mitchell's interview with Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, peels another layer of the onion on the Kremlingate treason scandal.

The Trump transition team knew that Michael Flynn was a foreign agent, working on behalf of the Turkish government. They didn't care. Rachel Maddow walks us through what they knew and when they knew it in the second part of her opening segment.

And The Hill newspaper summarizes it here.

A quick look at the Trump White House team members who have already left or been fired gives us a picture of a sloppy, crony-dominated, and unfocused White House. (Reported here in the Washington Post.) The transition team didn’t do its job because they didn’t know what its job was or didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to know which hires were agents of foreign governments, which were guilty of corruption. If you were a friend of a friend that was enough. Depending on the day of the week you ask him, Trump might be friends with anybody. Or he might be lying about knowing him or lying about never having met him, the way Michael Flynn and Carter Page admit and deny their Russian employment in successive sentences in the same interviews.

It was reported in reputable newspapers that Michael Flynn was a paid lobbyist working for a foreign dictator, but Mike Pence claims he had no idea. Pence got a letter telling him Flynn was in the pay of a foreign government and Pence has no recollection. Is he stupid or is he involved in a coverup? Or both?

We’ve since learned that the Turkish lobbying was paid for by the Russians. What is that all about? Does the White House know? Does it care? Is it part of their Secret Plan?

If Donald Trump leaves office because of his collusion with Russia, Pence becomes president. Is it proper that the guy who wasn’t paying attention or knew and didn’t care becomes president? Is cluelessness a qualification for the highest office in the land? What if it’s careful, intentional cluelessness? Sergeant Schultz level cluelessness: “I know naaaah-thing. Naaaaa-thing!”

The real question is this: Why do the guys who fucked up so dangerously (and possibly traitorously) on the transition to this president get to manage the succession of the next president. They did a very bad job 100+ days ago and since, either ignoring warnings of Russian involvement or being absolutely cool with it. And then covering it all up, obstructing the investigations, deceiving the public, misleading the FBI and the Congress.

There are so many crimes here. Crimes, potential crimes, malfeasances, screw ups, incompetence, missteps, etc. Treason? It smells like treason to me. It’s hard to imagine any other president getting away with it.

Serious, qualified, honest presidents get investigated very hard, but silly, unqualified, dishonest ones like Trump get an easy ride because…

Because everybody knows he’s silly, unqualified and dishonest? Also ignorant, delusional, corrupt, and a traitor? "That's cool. We already knew."

Like Mike Pence we are expected to wave it all through. Never mind.

“Forget about it, Jake, it’s Chinatown."

'Concrete Evidence of Collusion Between Trump Team and Russia'

Those are the words used to describe the newest information the British intelligence agency GCHQ has given to American investigators.

It was an interesting opening segment on Rachel Maddow last night. All about Russia/Trump connections.

Let’s recount the Trump people now revealed as in private/secret contact with Russian agents: AG Sessions, President-in-all-but-name Jared Kushner, Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page (whose Russia links justified a FISA warrant), National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (since fired for his Russia connections), and now Erik Prince, founder and head of Blackwater, the global security firm in the vanguard of privatizing warfare and spy craft. This doesn’t even count the more shadowy figures in the White House team who have a trail of breadcrumbs leading from them back to Russian outposts in Eastern Europe, people like Sebastian Gorka. And Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the hero of Putin’s big plan to supercharge Russia’s oil industry…which really is Putin’s oil industry.

And, in my thinking, Tillerson might explain a lot. Russia lives off oil revenue. Oil prices have dropped in recent years, which has caused a major drop in Russia’s GDP. The Russian GDP per person dropped from around $16 per person to around $9. Low to begin with, even lower now, about half. Tillerson received that medal from Putin for something. Maybe he saved Putin’s bottom line, the way Putin’s mobster friends saved Trump’s bottom line over the years. They rescued Trump in the 90s and a recent story reported they saved him again in 2008 when the economy began to fall apart. These people are desperately trying to keep each other afloat. In a world where quid pro quo used to be a huge black mark on a politician, the Trump administration seems to be a Jackson Pollock fresco of huge black marks, big quid pro quos all over the place, with Turkey, with Russia, with China. Tillerson was saving Putin’s bacon, Putin had saved Trump’s. And over the past year we’ve seen many Trump people scurrying back and forth between Moscow and Trump Tower. Notably Jared Kushner, who has a deep personal interest in his father-in-law’s solvency.

This symbiotic relationship between Trump Tower and the Kremlin appears to explain why Putin’s personal think tanks masterminded the result of the 2016 presidential election. Can we interpret these events any other way? The Putin Think Tank role is reported here by Reuters.

In the past week, while the news has been mostly silent about the Kremlingate story, while we’ve all been shocked and awed by a rocket show set off by Trump, “concrete evidence” of Trump/Putin collusion during the election has been turned over to the investigators. Reported in the Independent from London.

And another line of stories is emerging out of Hungary, Russia’s intelligence network’s station in western Europe, reported by a prominent expert on Russian interference in the democratic process in various western countries, Dr. András Göllner, reporting in the Hungarian Free Press, naming several other Trump allies and proxies and advisors have been acting hand-in-glove with the Russians. He mentions Steve Bannon and Bannon’s predecessor Paul Manafort, and a longtime Trump advisor, Arthur J. Finkelstein (who first introduced Manafort to Putin), and J.D. Gordon, a close advisor to Jeff Sessions, and Sebastian Gorka, the White House "terrorism advisor” who wears the pin of a Hungarian fascist organization in his lapel. Göllner calls this network that worked via Hungary “The Budapest Bridge”.

Here is the first of a two part series by Göllner in the Hungarian Free Press.

Ask yourself: does this seem more worrying or less worrying than Hillary Clinton’s private email server?

The constant focus on Hillary’s email server and various other bogus obsessions of the past year manufactured to derail Hillary Clinton’s campaign were engineered out of Moscow and Budapest and Macedonia and various other outposts of the Russian spy network, and the Republican Party took their instructions and collaborated with them.

Americans were told to distrust the previous president because he was black and the probable next president because she was a woman and persuaded to choose instead a deranged and comical puppet of the Russian government.

And presto! Trump became our first Russian puppet president.

But it wasn’t entirely the Russians who accomplished this. They had massive and well-funded help from American right-wing billionaires like the Prince family and the Mercer family and the Murdoch family, and from the huge right wing media world of talk radio and FoxNews and Breitbart and InfoWars and the Wall Street Journal.

They also had the willing and eager collaboration of the Republican Party. The GOP has spent the past few months demanding extreme vetting of child refugees but they haven’t bothered to vet their own president or his staff or his partners or his finances. Maybe they’ve not bothered because they already know their party is in the bag for Putin and Russia.

We used to call this kind of thing treason. A year ago the Republicans in Congress defined treason as any Democrat using a private email server.

Donald Trump Is Filling the Swamp With Alligators

Trump won millions of votes by promising to drain the swamp in Washington.

But Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston describes how Trump is not draining the swamp as promised but is enlarging it and filling it with larger alligators.

From the Daily Beast

Trump’s new Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin, foreclosed on a 90 year-old woman’s home because she made a 27¢ error on her payment.

Reported by Politico

Mnuchin’s bank milked the last financial crisis for profit, reported in The Nation.

Science is in the hands of zealots who seek to corrupt it.

The Guardian reports that Trump and the Republican Congress are already finalizing plans to end climate research.

The Justice Department has been entrusted to a career bigot. NPR reports on Jeff Sessions' career spent ignoring racial injustice. "The KKK is OK, except for the pot smokers."

The Dept of Health and Human Services will be led by someone who pushes junk science and ideologies.

Reported at ScienceBlogs

The New Yorker's financial reporter John Cassidy explains how the Republicans' repeal of Obamacare will hit working people and poor people the hardest. Kicking Down while Kissing Up.

National Security advice will be coming from a fan of conspiracy theories who is eager for another world war.

Reported by the Washington Post

The environment will be in the hands of someone who has spent recent decades blowing smoke for the fossil fuel industry, turning scientific consensus on its head and pushing ideologically driven b.s and corporate non-science.

The fossil fuels/climate-change-denying career of Myron Ebell reported by the Washington Post

Myron Ebell's dangerous career reported in Scientific American

(In case you believe Climate Change worries are confined to the left wing fringes, the US Military has been sending urgent warnings about the dangers, as reported by The Guardian. Among the feared results will be massive surges in refugees. What is happening to Europe would begin happening here.)

It now appears, after haranguing Hillary Clinton for using unauthorized email (without any security breaches), Trump may appoint a man convicted of breaching security as his Sec of State. The Hill (Congress’s newspaper) reports that Petraeus will need to inform his probation officer before he accepts the position. An interesting start to what promises to be a corrupt administration.