A White House Run By Remote Control

New from the Daily Beast: an article about National Security Advisor McMaster's efforts to rid the White House of a dangerous infestation. It started me thinking.

Imagine a personal enemy had a remote control device so he could get you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do, like walking up to a stranger and picking a fight or phoning your most important friend and accusing him of things, destroying the friendship, or behaving irrationally in public causing a loss of confidence and trust.

I worry that Russia has a whole array of remote control devices they’ve implanted in our collective brain, in our national Republican leadership, in our White House, and implanted by White House appointment in various other top strategic posts.

Reading this DailyBeast article this morning suggests this concern may be shared by some of the national security professionals, including General McMaster, who is trying to remove people put in place by General Michael Flynn, who was himself removed once his ties to Russia were revealed. What ties might Flynn’s appointees have with Russia, or with Russian proxies? How did these White House officials land where they did? Who put them there? Who are they loyal to? Who pulls their strings? People being manipulated from outside should not get into top White House posts.

There is a lot we don’t know, but we are the public, it’s not our job to know. We trust the government to do this. The vetting and clearing of key national security appointees is a serious task, and it appears that it was not done fully and responsibly. Who was in charge of this? Who ran the transition from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration? Whose job was it to check the new people out? That means not accepting the word of some friend of the president who gave a million dollars or was hired to run his campaign. Several people ran Trump’s campaign. One of them is now the focus of a grand jury investigation, possibly two, as is the former general who was Trump’s global strategic mastermind. Who vetted these people? Nobody, apparently. They came in on the nod.

The person charged with taking resumés and deciding who filled what role in the new administration was Vice President Mike Pence. Pence has spent the past year looking interviewers in the eye and praising the expertise and trustworthiness and honesty of the president and everyone around him, and the president and staff have mostly turned out to be dishonest, non-expert stumblebums no sane person would trust with anything. (This embarrassing incompetence may be separate from the apparent manipulation by the Russians, but they might be part of the same thing. One thing the Russians would like is for us to malfunction. We are malfunctioning in a major way now.)

Mike Pence is like the upright, square-jawed, white haired, cardboard figure we've seen in hundreds of corruption scandals, the handsome plausible stooge the crooks put in place to mollify the shareholders while they loot the operation. The role President Warren G. Harding served during the Teapot Dome Scandal.

There are indications that Pence is being positioned as the hero who will ride in and replace Trump when he resigns or is removed. He’s been touring our eastern European allies reassuring them that the U.S. is not as unreliable as President Trump is. However disastrous Trump has been for our alliances and our global security, Pence has been part of that, enabling him, defending him, fending off questions which should have been answered months ago but weren’t because the Republican Party in control, if they didn’t feel entirely comfortable with Trump, did feel comfortable with Mike Pence, the plausible white-haired square-jawed cardboard former governor who stumbled out of that job into this one because nobody else wanted it.

Does the White House have a dangerous rat infestation? Maybe the word mole should be used here instead. Echoes of LeCarré novels and the Burgess/Philby/McClean/Blunt/Blake infestation the Brits didn’t figure out for decades. The Brits also had a serious vetting flaw. I can hear Pence saying the same thing about the applicants for various jobs in the White House security staff: “He’s O.K. He’s 'one of us.’”

There are those who trust Mike Pence to deal with any succession plan like he dealt with the serious work of vetting the Trump team. I’m guessing Pence did this by praying about it. Praying didn’t work so well. And I don’t think you can pray away an infestation like the one they’ve set in place. First of all, moles pray to a different god entirely.

The mindset of the entire Republican apparatus in Washington has been the old familiar one that always fails: If they ignore it and keep people from mentioning it, maybe the problem will just go away. Rather than expending any diligent effort on it, they pray over it. But it won’t work. Trump and his GOP have made the U.S. unreliable and unlikable and a laughingstock around the world. If an enemy of ours had implanted a remote control device to make our government malfunction they probably hoped it would turn out this way but they didn’t expect it to turn out so well.

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.

Trump––Russian Stooge or Traitor? Which is Worse?

Rachel Maddow’s daily explanations of Kremlingate have become must-viewing. Here she goes through some of the riveting testimony in the Senate Intelligence Committee (the one that isn’t being derailed by its Republican chairman) which describes how the Russian cyber war on our democracy worked by employing the cooperation of the Republicans. At least certain key Republicans in the Trump machine.

Reported in the Guardian: The Russian “active measures” to corrupt and shift our democracy how they wanted worked as well as they did, electing their guy, because their guy Trump was actively cooperating with these active measures Russia was using, the false stories, the outright distortions. So Trump was either a traitor or a stooge who didn’t know he was in their control, doing what they wanted. Which is worse?

Russia hates the enormous respect America gets from the rest of the world, so what do they do? They try to degrade our image. They promote a clown as a major party candidate and he wins. And after he wins he continues to sing from their songbook, which compounds American disgrace. Our president is a stooge of a foreign power and behaves like a two year-old on global news media. If we elected him we are as stupid as he is. Did we elect him?

One device the Russians are using is manipulating and energizing and weaponizing our most shameful and disgraceful traits, like racism and xenophobia and sexism. And, presto!, the U.S. is no better than any other country, and by the looks of it is much worse. Game to Russia. Reported by SLATE.

What is upsetting is how clearly these stupid behaviors and prejudices and hatreds and indecencies correspond with core Republican Party values, the negative unAmerican values trumpeted to please the base.

If you track the sudden and alarming changes taking place since January you might even think Russia is managing, through its assets in the White House, to change the U.S. into something much more like Russia, an autocracy where people live under the ruler’s thumb and are lied to daily and because they are so degraded they drink themselves to an early death.

Questions have been raised whether Trump was not only personally compromised by his Russia connections and Russian debts––but was his staff staffed by Russian operatives from the start? From CBS News.

Stories are now circulating that Michael Flynn may have been compromised by the old “attractive female spy” trick the Russians have used for decades. From the Palmer Report.

Follow The Rubles

Looking at Trump’s Russian history it begins to appear that Putin and his cronies saw Trump as a wonderful way to channel laundered money into real estate around the world.

Mother Jones offers a useful and complete chronology

The always reliable Associated Press breaks the story about Paul Manafort, the guy who helped Trump win the nomination last year, and how he was secretly on the payroll of a Putin lieutenant for the past ten years, earning $10 million a year to advance Putin’s interests in the US and the West.

In the Columbia Journalism Review Garry Kasparov describes how Trump’s hatred of the news media is Putinesque and tyrannical.

Trump’s favored news sources, InfoWars and Breitbart are under FBI investigation for conspiring with Russian intelligence. McClatchy is reporting this aggressively and well.

Trump hasn’t begun throwing disloyal people from high windows, not yet, but he does have government employees afraid. This rule by fear and loyalty model is a throwback to crony politics and the writings of Machiavelli. It’s been largely extinct in America for decades. Politico describes the rule of fear in Washington.

Andrea Mitchell said yesterday that she has one source who told her White House staffers are frantically purging their devices of anything incriminating. Which is itself a crime, if this is true. If true it may mean the White House staff prefers being imprisoned for obstruction of justice vs. hanging for treason.

There has been a spate of recent murders and attempted murders and mysterious deaths, by poisoning, bullets and by throwing them bodily from a great height. The targets were either critics of Putin or witnesses in court cases against him.

New York Magazine describes the latest street corner assassination.

Buzzfeed reports on the key witness thrown from a high window.

This kind of brutal brazen skullduggery is the stuff of spy thrillers. Notably Z by Costa Gavras. I recommend watching it. The plot is strangely similar to what is happening here and now, except that it’s set in a minor corrupt democracy with fascist leaders running the police and murdering opponents

Z is available from Criterion Collection.

One of Trump’s Russia deals went down at the Mayflower Hotel. The smell lingers.

Daily Kos has the scoop in a series of Tweets from national news columnist Seth Abramson.

The T-Word, Treason, is in the air, says Nicolas Kristof in the New York Times

Rachel Maddow continues to do great segments and interviews following the Rubles.

Trump’s truthfulness has never been debated because he is untruthful. That is his brand: untruthfulness, deceit, lies, falsehoods.

Here is the recent TIME interview where Trump did his best to explain how lies can be true if you just tap your heels together three times and say “There’s no place like home.”

Great quote “I must be doing all right because I’m president and you’re not.”

Which sounds eerily like when Nixon explained to David Frost that “When the president does something that means it’s not illegal.” Republicans have a problem with truth and legality. They dislike both.

Politifact factcheck the Trump interview.

Jezebel reprints the interview with the lies redacted.

In this interview former CIA director Woolsey describes Michael Flynn meeting where Flynn plotted or at least suggested kidnapping an inconvenient Muslim cleric that the Turkish dictator wanted eliminated.

Republicans Block Investigation of Russia Connection, Focus on Whistleblowers

The Republicans are following our founding traditions. We all remember when the Founding Fathers hung Paul Revere for waking everybody up at night. We honor their decision to rat out the revolutionaries to the occupying British. Do we even ask why we celebrate Benedict Arnold's birthday every year? We take a day off to worship his memory without questioning it.

In that tradition the Republicans in Congress, led by Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, have decided to hunt down the people who told us that the president's campaign was collaborating with Russian spy agencies instead of investigating the president's ties to Russian spy agencies.

Reported by VOX

And The Hill

CNN reports

The Salt Lake Tribune

At Politico

Is this diversion or is it a cover up? Howard Baker famously said "It's almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble." In this case it's both. Collusion with a foreign enemy is not a second rate burglary.

Howard Baker was a Republican who helped uncover Watergate. There are no more Republicans like him. Modern Republicans have learned that their failure during Watergate wasn't the crime, it was failing to cover it up better. Covering up is something they have gotten expert at since the '70s.

Shoot the messenger.

What we don't know can't hurt them.

Ignorance is bliss. Consuming fake news instead of factual news is even blissier.

Ignorance is bliss might be the survival mantra of Vice President Pence, who the party is desperately insulating from the Russia treason story. When Trump goes, if he does go, we will be gifted with a man who kept his eyes wide shut for most of the past year.

Deliberate, obedient ignorance is the only way Americans will learn to call their new president Dear Leader the way North Koreans refer to Kim Jong Un. This is how we will become more like North Korea and authoritarian Russia.

Is it treason to deliver our sovereignty into the hands of a foreign power? Or is it treason to warn people that is what is happening?

The Intercept has this take on that.

An opinion piece in the Observer (Trump's son-in-law's publication, ironically) had this surprising view.

Is This White House A Clown Car Or A Shit Show?

Here’s Trump’s National Security Advisor (sic) Michael Flynn rebuking Hillary Clinton for compromising national security and leading the chant to “Lock Her Up!"

Video via Twitter feed from NewYorkMagazine writer Yashar Ali.

Flynn has now resigned for lying about his phone calls to the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. Why is it OK for a Republican president to appoint a Russian mole as his top national security advisor?

Flynn's ouster reported by the Atlantic

The hypocrisy becomes colossal when you consider that President Trump persists in using an unsecured android phone.

Reported by TheHill, Congress's daily newspaper

The hypocrisy begins to gallop when you consider that top White House advisors persist in using unsecured private servers for their email.

Reported by Newsweek

And by TheHill

And then there was this circus in Mar A Lago, Trump’s pleasure dome in Florida, where the President learned of and dealt with a major global security issue on unsecured phones, reading top secret briefs using easily hackable devices in full view of resort guests and unvetted, minimum wage wait staff and busboys.

Report and analysis from the Boston Globe

And from media website Jezebel

At some point it becomes hard to distinguish incompetence from crime. Is the Trump administration a whole performing troupe of Russian puppets? While Trump parties and photobombs people’s wedding snaps can we rest assured that a professional somewhere is handling our national security matters? Is that professional working from the Kremlin?

At what point does the Republican Congress stop providing cover for this White House, protecting and advancing their own partisan interests, and start protecting our national interests?

DailyKos's useful chart comparing the high corruption of Republican presidencies and the low corruption of Democratic ones

Obama’s administration was an indictment free breath of fresh air after the 16 indictments and 16 convictions of Bush administration officials.

The sainted Ronald Reagan’s administration had 26 indictments and 16 convictions.

Nixon had 76 indictments and 55 convictions.

And now the Republican Party has gifted us with the Trump crowd, an ethics nightmare, a national security nightmare, an incompetent circus. Does the GOP bother to vet anyone? They scream about national security and then anoint a man who appears to be in bed with Vladimir Putin.

It’s only been three weeks and there’s been one resignation in disgrace. How much damage was done? I’m not asking how much damage was done to the Republican brand (which is the GOP’s only concern right now) but damage to our national security, our national sovereignty, our global reputation?