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.

House Republicans––Stooges or Traitors?

Last night the New York Times published a remarkable op-ed written by Glenn Simpson (a former Wall Street Journal reporter) and Peter Fritsch, the clients for whom Christopher Steele, the former longtime British intelligence agent, assembled the so-called Steele Dossier.

The opening paragraph is particularly astute:

"A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”

The Dossier has been targeted and rubbished by Republicans for many months because it casts their president in a bad light. Devin Nunes has recused himself from the House Committee trying to investigate the president's Russian entanglements but he has kept his hands on the wheel and he keeps pumping the brakes. He's not in the chair but is definitely running things. Nunes Recused himself unseriously, the way a film star says she doesn't want any attention. Nunes wants attention, hence the drama. He sometimes acts like he wants to be James Bond. His envy may explain why he despises Steele, who was a real James Bond.

The Republicans on the committee have been behaving strangely for over a year, sounding off like children desperate to distract Mother from their own misbehavior, blaming their playmates for the broken window. If there has been a witch hunt it has been Republicans endlessly hunting for evidence to justify burning Hillary Clinton in the public square, evidence that never emerged. They have fantasized about this auto da fé for over a decade in various committees. It is a vendetta. But the FBI doesn't go in for vendettas, so the FBI must be in the Hillary camp, or so the Republican drama queens say. There is a very large and dangerous bear loose in our country, endangering our democracy and our institutions and our national security, but the Republicans whose party spent decades hunting the Russian bear are off hunting rabbits.

It’s strange how closely one R’s agenda aligns with the agenda of the other R out there.

Republican motives and efforts and tactics and actions align very closely with Russia’s. We need to hear this stated more explicitly in news reporting. It is dangerous and disorienting when something so obvious and alarming is not stated clearly. People begin to doubt the obvious that isn't stated. Certainly we need to wait for and respect rules of evidence, but we need to stop hiding and ignoring what is staring us in the face. Distraction and obfuscation is the strategy employed by guilty parties.

Both the Russians and the Republicans want to discredit the Mueller investigation, both want to discredit witnesses testifying to serious crimes. Both Rs make perverse and inverse responses to things to which most Americans would see one clear set of responsible responses: get the truth, contact law enforcement, pay attention, take evidence, do the right thing. There is another apt term for what we need: Due Diligence.

Due Diligence is what Americans deserve from their political parties when they are putting a presidential candidate on the menu. Is he or she sound? Is he or she capable? Is he or she insane? Is he or she a criminal? Is he or she engaged in shady financial dealings with foreign enemies? During the selection process, and the convention, and the campaign, and the transition, the Republicans––notably Mike Pence who chaired the transition and Devin Nunes who worked on it––who were tasked with Due Diligence were not just undiligent, they were the opposite of diligent, they were carefully and aggressively ignoring every warning they heard and silencing the citizens who were warning them. Were they willfully blind and carefully ignorant, or were they obstructing justice?

Try to get your head around this––it isn't easy: When the Republicans in Congress heard people warning about Russian interference in our election, instead of seeking the truth they did everything they could to shut down and discredit the truth. They wanted to hide it. They wanted to shut up the witnesses. What investigators would logically see as a roadmap to finding and nailing the criminals the Republicans saw as a roadmap to protecting the criminals and nailing the people who were calling in the crime. And once the FBI took the warnings seriously they began discrediting the FBI.

The Republicans seem determined to arrest and prosecute people who are doing their civic duty to help protect our democracy from a foreign enemy... (Mr. Pence's Bible names False Witness as one of the ten gravest offenses against God.) How can being a good citizen be criminal or anything less than patriotic? But to listen to Jim Jordan and Chuck Grassley and Devin Nunes and others you would think testifying honestly about a dangerous crime you’ve witnessed is itself a crime. To listen to Republicans you would think the professional lawmen and women in the FBI were dangerous career criminals. (President Trump accuses law enforcement of crimes and accepts the reassurances of Vladimir Putin, one of the planet's most successful criminals.)

Imagine friends learned of organized criminal activity in your neighborhood and notified your elected officials and law enforcement. The law officers begin an investigation but the elected officials (Republicans) do everything they can to discredit the investigation and protect the criminals, using the evidence not as a guide to finding the criminals but a guide to help the criminals find the witnesses, your friends, and shut them up––the way criminals shut witnesses up, permanently.

How many key witnesses against Putin have died mysteriously in the months since this story began to break? We reasonably suspect the Russians are behind some or all of the mysterious deaths. We might ask: Are the Republicans also helping find and terminate or at least intimidate witnesses? Are the Republicans supplying a handy roadmap for the lawbreakers to help them cover up the evidence and derail the enforcement of our laws?

Why would they do this? It seems improbable that a major political party would actively collude with a foreign enemy, but until last year it was improbable that a major political party would nominate, run, and elect a president who our intelligence agencies and the FBI suspect might be in bed with the Russians. This improbability has been a useful cloak for what happened, the way a con man's plausibility and confidence and his nice suits and his nice offices and top public relations staff help to cloak his real business. People need to ask how genuine someone is before they hand him the keys and the nuclear codes. This is called Due Diligence and the Republicans failed to do it.

Now that they are implicated, and they are implicated beyond being plain fools, they must rearrange their mindset to justify what they have done. Republicans who once criticized Trump now praise him and protect him. Why? They have to decriminalize the dodgy things they've done ("That was his job," "Everybody would do the same thing.") They have to decriminalize the criminals they've thrown in with, and then criminalize the responsible behavior of their accusers. They need to make their treason into patriotism. Their accusers, who've done the Paul Revere bit by warning about the foreign threat, they have to recast as traitors.

The Republicans have realigned their policies and strategies and talking points to match their captors'. If you write down a list of Trump's achievements and the Republicans' achievements of the past year they could serve as a wish list for any of America's foreign rivals. Splitting alliances: check. Hollowing out America's global diplomacy: check. Alienating America's allies: check. Debasing America's standing in the world (in many western nations America's poll numbers have declined by as much as 70%): check. Cast doubt on the soundness of the dollar by loading the budget with large unnecessary debt as far as the eye can see (not to secure the prosperity of working Americans but to enrich offshore billionaires): check. Worst of all, perhaps, has been Trump's abandonment of the Paris Accords on climate change; climate change being listed as the #1 threat to American national security by the Pentagon and other agencies whose job it is to warn and prepare for threats. Check. The Republicans and the Russians appear to be working from the same set of plans to do the same kinds of harm to our country. Why would they do this? I've suggested two possible reasons: Blackmail and Bribery.

Putin is reputed to be the richest individual in the world. Most of that wealth having been looted from his own country. Putin placed these billions offshore in more covert ways than the ways American billionaires offshore their wealth. It appears Trump may have been one of his money launderers. But offshore billionaires do have shared interests and goals. This collusion would work like bribery but disguised as shared goals, shared values, simply doing business: there's so much money coming from Russia how can a rich person refuse to accept it when it's offered? Afterwards it would work like blackmail once the transactions became known and began to stink.

Regarding the Russian hacking of public comments on net neutrality and Wall Street fairness: it appears Republicans and Russian mobsters have matching agendas on these issues as well. An internet rigged to favor the very wealthy (and no one is richer than Putin) is easier for the Russians to hack. Unfair wealth markets are easier for the rich both Russian and Republican, to profit from by making the unrich easier prey. Both Rs, the Russians and the Republicans, are working against our national interests, so Americans need to be informed. Newspapers and all journalists need to report it. Connect the dots. Follow the money.

Trump May Have Put Us All Into The Cornfield

Peeksville, Ohio? Anybody been there? Anybody heard of the place?

What about Anthony Fremont? Maybe we forgot.

I keep seeing articles that remind me of Peeksville and Anthony. For instance the articles telling us how the Wall Street Journal couldn't allow its reporters to report unpleasant stories about Donald Trump, so they delayed them, and shelved them, and quietly sent the writer into the cold. The unpleasant reporting that was never published was in a carefully researched article about Trump's longtime mob connections. But reporting that would have made Donald Trump angry. And making Trump angry is a bad thing. So it wasn't reported or commented on. But the message was received. The staff at the Journal received the message loud and clear.

It's not necessarily a bad thing that employees comprehend the messages their bosses are sending... is it?

New York Magazine is reporting that five staffers at the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (which is already significantly to the right of the more objective news pages) have left in recent weeks, pushing the right wing WSJ voice from Hard Right to the Obedient Right...

But that's a good thing, isn't it? That's a VERY good thing... (Does that ring any distant bells?)

The Obedient Right is the part of the political spectrum that lives in Trump's pocket, who in turn lives in Putin's pocket. Is it safe to discuss who controls whom? Or who is whose puppet? The president has denied it but most people can see the strings if they look carefully at all. Maybe it's safest to just smile and say it's a very good thing.

There was a major tax bill passed by Congress late Wednesday night. Not a lot of Americans know what's in it because Republicans kept it a secret. A lot of them voted for it anyway because they knew what was good for them, and also what would be bad for them. But that too is a good thing, isn't it?

Then on Thursday there was a ceremony on the White House lawn (which these days feels like it is located right in Peeksville, Ohio) where President Trump* bragged about how wonderful the tax bill was, how it was a very good thing to give many billions of dollars of public money to billionaires, and how that holiday generosity would be a very good thing for regular Americans who work for a living.

Then different Republican members of Congress got up and also said it was a very good thing to give billions to billionaires. They didn't say that it was good to take healthcare away from children but they obviously felt good about it, so the atmosphere was very merry all around. Nobody said a discouraging word. They also said Donald Trump was a very good president. Orrin Hatch said Donald Trump was going to be possibly the very very best president America has ever had, and everyone there seemed to agree.

Earlier, inside the White House, there was a meeting of the cabinet. I'd say it was an unusual meeting except it's already happened like this at least once. The agenda of the meeting began with prayers. But they were unusual prayers. The president went around the table and invited his vice president and his cabinet members to take turns offering prayers to him, thanking him for being so wonderful and talking about how his presidency was a very good thing. Saying it out loud to cameras was also a very good thing, wasn't it? (John Cassidy wrote about it in The New Yorker)

Because Good is the opposite of Bad, just as very good is the opposite of very bad, and it's never a good thing to have to send someone into the cornfield, to borrow a phrase they use in Peeksville, Ohio.

Why is it so dangerous to say things about the president that he dislikes? People always say bad things about presidents. Just think of all the really awful things Republicans said about President Obama. But President Obama didn't do bad things to people just because they criticized him or maligned him or lied about him. That's because President Obama wasn't an angry child. Which is one of the reasons I can say "President Obama" without adding an asterisk.

Of course, in the current climate it's probably safest to say it's a very good thing to have an angry child as our president. Actually it's safest to not mention his childishness at all because being childish is irrelevant because he has extraordinary powers, very much like the powers of Anthony Fremont of Peeksville, Ohio. Safest because he seems inclined to use those powers against anyone who makes him angry, which is what Anthony Fremont did when anyone made him uncomfortable. But Anthony Fremont was a little boy and Donald Trump is really a grown up man; he just acts like a little boy. We don't generally give little boys extraordinary powers but what can I say? It's a good thing we did. it's a very good thing.

Anthony Fremont lived in Peeksville, Ohio, which isn't on any maps of the state because it's located in the Twilight Zone.

Anthony Fremont : No kids came over to play with me today, not a single one, and I wanted someone to play with!

Mr. Fremont : Well, Anthony, you remember the last time some kids came over to play. The little Fredricks boy and his sister.

Anthony Fremont : I had a real good time.

Mr. Fremont : Oh, sure you did, you had a real good time, and it's good that you had a good time, it's real good. It's, uh, just that...

Anthony Fremont : Just that what?

Mr. Fremont : Well, Anthony, you, uh, you wished them away into the cornfield. Their mommy and daddy were real upset.

I remember watching that episode on our old black and white TV. It scared the hell out of me to watch grown men and women behaving like this. Lying cravenly. Catering to this child's evil whims like sorry, pathetic cowards, which most Americans didn't feel like in that decade. As if this little boy was a god or something. But he was a god. The evil sort. He had extraordinary powers.

It creeped me out watching the grown ups smile falsely and talk so carefully and fearfully around this malevolent little boy, flattering him, praising him even when he'd murdered his playmates or one of the adults. Because I was a kid myself it was disturbing to watch the framework of what is right and what is wrong twisted so violently by the adults who lived with Anthony, always with a smile and a soft, kind voice because they all hoped to go on living.

Why didn't they fix this? Why didn't they assert their moral authority? They outnumbered him. They were bigger than he was.

The scariest moment came when one of the adults got fed up and told the truth...

Dan Hollis : You monster, you. You dirty little monster. You murderer. You think about me. Go ahead, Anthony. You think bad thoughts about me. And maybe some man in this room, some man with guts, somebody who's so sick to death of living in a place like this, and is willing to take a chance, will sneak up behind you and lay something heavy across your skull, and end this once and for all...

Anthony Fremont : You're a bad man! You're a very bad man!

Dan Hollis : You think that. Go ahead, Anthony. I'm a very bad man! Keep thinking that! Somebody sneak up behind him! Somebody end this now while he's thinking about me! Won't somebody take a lamp or a bottle or something and END THIS?

Anthony didn't send him into the cornfield immediately; first he tortured him, and us, and the adults all around him. He turned this "bad man" into a jack-in-the-box with his head stuck on the end of the bouncing spring. Then the other adults begged him to send the deceased adult into the cornfield. Then they all told him what a good thing it was that he had done.

We are being terrorized by a malevolent child with extraordinary powers. Which is an evil thing. It's not a good thing, it is the opposite. Why doesn't someone do something? It doesn't need to be something violent. We have legal remedies. At least we still did last time I looked. Is it too late for that? I don't think so, but maybe.

Because it isn't just Trump. Sometimes I see Anthony Fremont's smug evil in the smiling face of Paul Ryan. I see enraged faces on FoxNews that suggest the president isn't alone wishing the rest of us into the cornfield.

And I know that Mike Pence would be the first to declare that it was a very good thing if Donald Trump actually acted out one of his fantasies and shot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue or Pennsylvania Avenue. Other members of the house are egging Trump on and threatening his critics. Jim Jordan, the congressman who doesn't own a suit coat, is one. He's from Ohio; is Peeksville located in his district? None of the adults in this episode of Twilight Zone were actively on Anthony's side, they were simply craven and afraid, afraid of evil and the evil that would happen to them if they acted like adults. That is its own kind of evil and we see it in Congress today, but we see a worse kind, a less passive kind, the kind that doesn't just close its eyes to atrocities but puts on the uniform and carries them out.

I see various kinds of evil in the smiling faces of the Republicans who praise Trump. Passive and overt, cowardly and bold, calculating and hypnotized. I see a genuine evil in the Republicans who every week, every day, turn on the rest of us who count on a moral authority, and on the moral rightness of things, to praise what he is doing and threatening to do and abandoning the innocent Americans he is doing these things to. The Republicans who are working every day to take Robert Mueller and the professionals at the FBI, and our security services who keep us safe from foreign enemies, and the professionals who work in areas of science and healthcare and justice, who regulate industry to keep poisons out of the water and the air, and teachers and university professors and social workers and people of color and abused women and wish them into the cornfield.

The Twilight Zone episode titled "It's a Good Life" was terrifying to watch because it was more real than Orwell's 1984 or Animal Farm. It was real people in a real place. It was familiar. The idea was to shiver and enjoy the momentary fear of it, knowing it would never happen here. But now it has.

Unusual Legal Theories Arising From The Trump/Russia Investigation

Among the legal privileges being claimed by the Trump White House:

Attorney Client Privilege: for conversations between Trump and his son Donald Jr. neither of whom are lawyers... Conversations in question were allegedly about how Donald Jr. could deny he'd had meetings with Russian spies when he did have meetings with Russian spies.*

Executive Privilege: commonly claimed by presidents and White Houses in the past for confidential communications with White House staff or outside advisors. But this privilege is being demanded for emails on .gov transition servers for communications during the period before Trump was president. (Does this mean Obama or W or Bill could claim executive privilege for communications after they left office? They could at least claim the title "President" for those communications.)

Right to Privacy: a sacred Constitutional right claimed by presidents and ordinary private citizens. What is odd is how the Trump team flouts that right when they applaud the hacking and release of Democrats' private messages when it's done by Russian spy agencies but demand that absolute right to privacy when they want to cover up their own communications with these same Russian spies and prevent the FBI from using them as evidence of collusion or conspiracy or treason.

Another odd hypocrisy:

With regard to the private emails and texts between two FBI employees: no privacy rights say Trump's lawyers.

But there is a sacred and profound and absolute right to privacy when it comes to Trump campaign officials communicating about their relations and dealings with Russian spies. Even when their communications were conducted on .gov servers during the transition period, and they were informed that all such communications could not be protected from criminal investigations.

So... to summarize:

If you are Trump or working for Trump and are conspiring with Russian spies you are absolutely safe from the scrutiny of the FBI or other law enforcement agencies of the U.S. government.

But if you work for the FBI or other law enforcement agencies your private, personal, non-work-related emails with your closest personal friends about your private personal constitutionally protected political opinions are not protected at all and may be selectively weaponized against you (and your boss who had nothing to do with them) and may be used to derail your career and march your ass off to work in HR purgatory.

(Agent Strzok, the former top FBI counterespionage agent now working in HR, appears to have lost his job because he was not a Trump fan and in fact found his dealings with Russian spies worrying and possibly illegal(!). But he was not a Hillary supporter either. Did not like the Clintons. He was not a Sanders supporter––he expressed contempt for Bernie in at least one unreleased email. He was, in fact, planning to vote for John Kasich. Which raises the question: Will all Kasich supporters in the FBI be exiled to HR or the FBI office in Twin Falls?)

*Attorney Client Privilege: Donald Jr.'s claim of attorney client privilege over talks with daddy could possibly be explained by phonetic confusion. In some parts of Queens the word "lawyer" is pronounced in a way that sounds very much like "liar." But in those parts of Queens the distinction between lawyers and liars is often very hard to make.

Is the FBI Biased? And Which Way?

Lest anyone think the FBI is biased against Trump…

A year ago, just before the election, the FBI put its big fat thumb on the scale to help Trump get elected by announcing a nothingburger* reopening of its Hillary investigation.

Why did they do this?

Why did they loudly announce unfounded suspicions about Hillary at the same time they were being alerted to genuine evidentiary concerns that Trump was in bed with the Russians?

And why did they keep the Russia worries secret while going public about the bogus worries about Hillary?

Stories from various news sources indicated that the FBI’s NY office had a “white hot” hatred of Hillary Clinton. Trump cheerleader Rudy Giuliani was selling this narrative as if FBI agents' bias against her was a good thing.

Today, a year later, instead of investigating a handful of honest opinions by one FBI agent, shouldn’t we be looking at the likely much larger number of anti-Hillary emails sent around inside the deeply anti-Hillary FBI in the run up to the election?

The week before the 2016 election SLATE reported that the FBI's NY office had a deep hatred of Hillary

The Guardian reported this on November 3, 2016:

"Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent."

Business Insider backed up the Guardian story, saying:

"Clinton is "the Antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel," they said. "The reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump."

This hatred for Hillary Clinton inside the FBI was the message we got via unreliable news sources like FoxNews. In 2016 Rudy Giuliani was broadcasting his inside dope from his old friends in the FBI’s NY office that all hated Hillary, apparently, and apparently loved Trump as much as Rudy did.

There was also the damning anti-Clinton story that was reported then retracted by FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal that same pre-election week. Both Fox and WSJ are owned by Rupert Murdoch and were not selected by accident to drop this false bombshell. It fed the anti-Hillary feeling that week. Retracted or not, it did its damage. The fuller story about this dirty trick collusion was reported in The Atlantic on Nov 4. The motive of the dirty tricksters was clear: destroy the Clinton presidency before it began. They ended up installing Trump instead.

Everyone blamed Comey for putting his thumb on the scale. Why had he done that? Reuters reported at the time that his hand was forced by the anti-Hillary partisans inside the bureau who planned to accuse Comey of hiding incriminating Clinton emails... which turned out not to be incriminating at all.

Mark Hosenball reported on Comey's dilemma in Reuters “FBI Director James Comey was driven in part by a fear of leaks from within his agency when he decided to tell Congress the FBI was investigating newly discovered emails related to Hillary Clinton, law enforcement sources said on Thursday.” The Atlantic summarized the bizarre twist this way: "There’s a peculiar logic to this course of action—the only way to stop an unauthorized leak interfering with the election is to turn it into an authorized annoucement!—but the suggestion that Comey is running scared is disconcerting."

Let’s see their emails? How biased is the FBI? Which way are they biased? Maybe all that we’re seeing and hearing is that the FBI has finally figured out they were played for chumps last year by the Trump campaign and the Republicans.

And by the Russians, by Putin, and Putin's spy agencies.

Maybe the FBI has discovered evidence of criminality by the Trump campaign and they are simply following it up. It looks like they are being more reticent about Trump than they were last year about Hillary.

*Re the 2016 Crooked Hillary Nothingburger: Because of the “white hot” anti-Hillary feeling in the FBI’s NY office you would expect anything of any substance that was found would have been made public. What they found may have been “irregular” or it may have simply been guarded and fearful of a law enforcement apparatus that disliked her. Perhaps they just didn’t like her attitude of defiance (some men despise that in women) but nothing was found.

In the ensuing year, after they went all out to find anything to nail Hillary with, might some people in the FBI in fact have bent over backwards to avoid nailing Mr. Trump? And mightn’t this bias have emboldened Trump and his officials to defy the law? Their laxity and evasions regarding full and truthful filings and statements seem to indicate a dangerous overconfidence, a sense that they are above the law or immune from it. Maybe the FBI has simply come to dislike the appearance that they are in Trump’s pocket, because they sense that Trump is in Putin’s pocket.

Republicans Are Learning To Enjoy The Taste Of Fascism

While the vandals holds the White House they also hold the Congress and the Judiciary as hostages. We can change the Congress. The courts are more permanent.

The New Yorker reports on Trump's plan to nail his regime into place via lifetime court appointments.

In Newsweek, Robert Reich describes how Trump's regime is using strategies used against organized crime to shut down the free speech of his opponents.

In the Guardian we learn that Session's DOJ is using video produced by the bogus propaganda outfit Project Veritas as evidence against people who protested at Trump's inauguration.

Recognizing the ironies won't save us. Irony is passive. We need outrage.

Think Trump is too outrageous for most people’s taste? He may win out by becoming ever more outrageous, the way Roy Moore has done, the way many outrageous autocrats have done down through history, by outrunning norms, by harnessing the anger of a minority to cow everybody else. By turning “He won’t do that” into “He did that."

At this point the Republicans in Congress seem uncomfortable with him but they are enabling him. A year ago when he boasted about sexual assault they abandoned him then quickly crawled back to him, a process they have repeated several times since as he has said and done increasingly outrageous, hateful, and insane things.

The Republicans are creeping toward fascism. They are saying they dislike it but are obviously trying very hard to get used to the taste. Soon they will ask for seconds. Then they will put it on the menu. Then it will be the only menu item. Then the menu will be made compulsory.

By refusing to seat judges appointed by an elected president for two years they violated norms. By seating and supporting this president (who the evidence increasingly indicates gained office with the help of a foreign enemy, who boasts about sexual assault, who lies daily, who hurls insults at our foreign allies and flatters foreign enemies, whose businesses have apparently engaged in massive money laundering for decades, who obsesses over conspiracy theories any ten year-old would know are bogus, who is loudly racist, who admires Nazis and Klansmen and foreign dictators, who appears to be losing his mind) the Republican Party is engaged in a bizarre ritual. They say they abhor the behaviors of this president then they solidly support and defend him.

As if they have discovered a gang rape in progress––for the past year they have said they are not in favor of what is going on and plan to halt it… just as soon as they have had their turn…

How America Is Adopting The Russian System

Can anyone else see this administration getting their orders from a foreign enemy? That’s what appears to be going on. They don't wake up every morning thinking "How can I weaken America today?" but the orders they carry out do just that. Shutting down the foreign service leaves us blind and deaf and mute. What country would do that to itself? Alienating allies isn’t a wise policy. Doing the bidding of a foreign rival in key parts of the world is also unwise but that is what Trump is doing in Europe and the Mideast. The world that used to admire and work with us now distrusts us. (MinnPost's Eric Black writes about the sudden decline in America's standing in the world)

We base our policy on what we know and we secure our safety with intelligence gathering. What do the Republicans do? They shut that down. (Here is a POLITICO article about one piece of that shutting down of our intelligence gathering system) Partly because the intelligence agencies found out that Trump was working under the direction of a foreign enemy, that his national security advisor was on the payroll of that enemy and various other Trump officials were also employed by the Russian spy agencies. The solution, say the Republicans, is to shut down our spy agencies. Why have spy agencies when our orders are coming from the spy agencies of our enemy? OK, I exaggerate, but this year has unfolded in an exaggerated and unlikely fashion. This is the direction we are headed in.

But it isn’t as simple as that. The Republicans’ BIG IDEA has always been to privatize everything. Private schools, private healthcare, privately run roads and public lands and waterways owned and operated by rich corporations run by rich friends. Now the idea is privatized national security. Why have oversight by democratically elected officials when you can have the spies run by rich friends. You’re more likely to gain intelligence that matches your preconceptions and your delusions. Intelligence that you can weaponize without anyone stopping you.

The Intercept has a new article about how the Trump junta is seeking to create its own private spy service, under the direction of Erik Prince, one of the intermediaries who sought to create back channels between Trump and his masters in Moscow)

This extreme privatization of the public sector is the Russian model. After the collapse of Gorbachev the entire Soviet infrastructure was sold off cheap (or given outright) to the cronies of the new leaders. Putin’s oligarchs are the former mobsters who ran the criminal underworld and black market under the Soviet system. Everything now belongs to them, the water rights, the mineral rights, the forests, the land, the industry, the roads, the railroads, the workers, everything. The people are dependent on these things owned by the Putinists so they hear and obey what their new masters tell them. And the new masters hear and obey Putin who can jail and execute any oligarch who crosses him or fails to pay him his kickbacks. This is the new model being set up by the radical Republicans and Trump: a kleptocracy as ugly as any central African state where the oligarchs are obscenely rich and own everything. The biggest, baddest, richest autocrat of them all is now the boss of our president. In effect Vlad Putin is our leader now. Trump, by comparison, is a small time hoodlum and con artist. A petty criminal.

Is it any wonder millennials have doubts about capitalism? (Today's NYTimes column by Michelle Goldberg is about this) Weaponized capitalism is something that’s evolved in recent decades, after the Lewis Powell memo and the Reagan Revolution, as Americans stopped questioning the absolute unquestionable perfection of the capitalists. The Republican tax bill nails down the absolutism of the people who own for a living and the impoverishment and submission of the people who work.

If there were any question about Republicans’ contempt for working people it was clarified perfectly in the comments of Senator Grassley and Senator Hatch. We are now a divided people: a handful of extremely rich people on top and below them, far below them, a rabble of workers half of whom despise the system and half who worship and obey the capitalists without question.

Our history didn’t need to lead us here.

After capitalism failed in 1929-33, FDR saved it and put it on a fairer and stabler footing with the New Deal. Capitalism in this form created several decades of prosperity and contentedness from 1945 to 1980 or so.

Then Reagan began reconverting it into the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover model that triggered the 1929 collapse. This reconversion eventually led to inequality and unfairness and predatory fraud and instability and collapse in 2008, when Obama rescued it again.

After eight years spent blocking Obama’s efforts to restore the fairness and stability we enjoyed for those great decades the Republicans have regained power and are making the final draconian changes that will restore the bad old days. Perhaps they realize they’ll need to uphold this with a fascist government, full surveillance and a removal of free and fair and honest information. Their goal is to make our misery and deprivation and ignorance and deception as profitable as possible.

Keeping Our Eye On The Ball

While the Congress enacts mass transfers from working people to the very rich we can't let ourselves forget why this is happening and how it happened.

This kleptocratic government that's screwing us is set up along the lines of Russia's kleptocracy. The rubles that Putin is using to buy our government was first stolen from his own people. Now it's our turn.

Why does Trump defer to Putin and act like he’s Putin’s poodle?

From NYMagazine: Trump defers to Putin like he's his boss

How Putin got his hooks into Trump, explained by former intel director

John McClaughlin in Politico

How Trump walked into Putin's web.

The Long Read from the Guardian

How Trump is being played by Putin…

In Vanity Fair

When our leader is under the thumb of an enemy power, this stuff happens… His administration puts our Russian embassy in the control of the Russians.

From the BBC: How Trump gave our Moscow embassy security operations to Putin's former KGB boss

Putin's control over Trump via an army of trolls. From Bloomberg

Why are open democracy’s vulnerable? From the New Yorker

Trump has fascist tendencies, says Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in the Guardian.

Trump is corrupt, therefore his administration is corrupt. It does as he does. Reported by VOX

There is a new media model out there to enable and empower dictators and suppress and manipulate people. Trump loves it.

The global armies of fake news trolls being used to fuck with democracy, reported in the Guardian.

With Trump in the White House, the mob is in control. But the mob is under his control. And he is under Putin’s control. And the control of the billionaire class. Only they get real information, by sucking it up via our social media. What they force back out on us via social media is disinformation. Which is why they fear real journalists and real journals. From the NYTimes

The key to fascism is to routinely and vigorously poison the public discourse, make people fear and hate each other. Trump learned this trick from Putin.

In the New York Review of Books, the great Russia watcher Masha Gessen.

Why do Americans feel more stressed and afraid than ever? Because they can sense our democracy is in peril. Along with our entire planet. Reported out by APA

Trump And The End Of American Democracy

The authors of new books about Trump's degradation of American democracy appeared on Morning Joe today.

The Steel Dossier allegations are being corroborated making it clearer all the time that Putin had his hooks into Donald Trump from the beginning. That Donald Trump has been and continues to be a Putin puppet.

What does Putin want? Besides overturning the sanctions the US imposed on his oligarchs after the invasion of Crimea, Putin wants to create chaos in the U.S.

Where have we heard that before?

Chaos is Steve Bannon's brand

Steve Bannon has compared himself to Lenin, which is odd enough for a right wing operator. His overarching theory or goal is to create chaos. He has said this repeatedly in his safari jacket TED style talks. He sees this moment as his “Fourth Wave” where the whole system is overturned. He thinks of himself as a Robespierre figure, a Lenin, an agent of mass destruction tearing down democratic institutions he doesn’t like. His goal, apparently, is to create a new American dictatorship with himself at the top, securely fastened there by his connections to shadowy billionaires whose fortunes came from disruption.

We see the damage he’s doing in every government department where Trump has appointed disruptors to top positions. The nominees may just as well have been sent from Moscow. The Dept of Energy, which safeguards our nuclear stockpile, is run by a doofus who wanted to shut down the department. His Health chief was a pawn of big Pharma. His Environmental Protection chief built his career on defending and lobbying for polluters. Their mission is focused on destruction and dysfunction.

Putin whispers in Trump’s ear and Trump insults our allies, undermines our alliances, rubbishes our treaties, exits global agreements American leadership crafted, seeks to pit one ally against the others. And then Trump gives big warm kisses to the worst dictators and kleptocrats around the world. He admires and envies the skill with which democracies have been destroyed and coups have been accomplished. He envies the mass murders of Duterte in the Philippines. He does nothing when Turkish dictator Erdogan brings his dark-suited thugs into the heart of Washington to attack and brutally beat peaceful protesters. This is the style Trump admires and envies. This is how Trump has disgraced the American brand and degraded American leadership in the world.

The Trump junta has had a plan from the start: destroy American democracy and the American way of life, create an angry mob, and ride that angry mob into dictatorial power.

James II/ Duke of Windsor/ Nixon/ Trump

It's easy to see troubling historic parallels in Trump's behavior as president. Is Trump turning America into a client state like Vichy France? Like Jacobean England? Like the client state Hitler hoped to install––with the Duke of Windsor restored as a puppet king? He also appears to be in the pocket of wealthy Americans, the way Nixon was. That has been a concern in America for decades, but domestic puppetry is less worrying than having foreign puppet masters.

Here are some parallels from history.

James II [like Trump] was compliant and deferential to a foreign power, the French “Sun King”, Louis XIV, who [like Putin] gave him massive financial support. James II was on a foreign allowance. It appears Trump has been on a foreign allowance for decades now.

The Duke of Windsor [like Trump] was flattered, manipulated and seduced by the Nazis [think Putin] who feted him and flattered him and squired him around during his Nazi-paid tour of Germany in 1937. (There's considerable evidence Windsor shared secrets of the allies' defense plans with his Teutonic pals and made it easier for the Germans to blitz France in 1940.)

I also see resemblances between Trump and the way Nixon was bribed by the committee of California bankers, oilmen and real estate magnates who paid into his slush fund in the early 50s––after Nixon made it clear he couldn’t get by on the measly salary paid to members of Congress. The Checkers speech fooled a lot of Americans. Anthony Summers’ Nixon book picks those deceptions apart pretty effectively. Nixon’s financial allowance from his rich backers came in the form of a slush fund, which he hid and denied. Bribery? Slush Fund? Or proper Tribute to a Great Man? Which way do you think Nixon interpreted it? Trump does the same.

If you were to look at these two analogies in a single context, what Trump is involved in seems to fit the definitions of both treason and bribery. Because of his narcissism it’s possible Trump doesn’t understand what treason is. But he appears to have been bribed and lived on bribery from Russia since his empire collapsed in the 90s. He’s lived like a wastrel heir dependent on an allowance managed by his guardians, who are Russian not American. America let him go bankrupt. America refused to bankroll his life ever since, but Daddy Russia does support him, giving him the respect he deserves. The respect a dog owner gives to the pug sitting on his lap.

Nixon’s rationalization for accepting money from wealthy backers resembles Benedict Arnold’s rationalization for his treason: he deserved better pay. And Arnold subsequently felt a greater loyalty toward those who paid him what he was worth. Gen. Arnold also felt slighted by his countrymen’s failure to recognize his genius, which fits the ease with which Putin can manipulate Trump via flattery and praise. (Nixon was less easily manipulated in this manner.)

The Duke of Windsor’s tour of Nazi Germany was one long parade of military pomp and fancy parties, very much like the Asian tour which has transformed Trump from someone who accuses China of rape and theft into someone who happily praises the Chinese and shifts all blame onto his fellow Americans.

Trump has a reputation for loving military pomp. He envies the Russian parades of nuclear missiles and probably even envies the North Koreans’ mass rallies and parades. When these displays are put on for him he is putty in their hands because he is told it is all for him. They bring out all the toys for him which his own people won’t let him play with.

Putin's Plan For US

If a foreign enemy wanted to harm the U.S., wanted to knock us out of our dominant position in the world, what would they do?

The first thing they’d probably do is blind us so we can’t see what is going on in the world.

They’d make us mute so we couldn’t assert ourselves or persuade other nations to find common cause.

That is what has been happening this past year under the Trump presidency.

VOX reports on what Trump is doing to our State Department

Rachel Maddow reporting on the same story

Rachel Maddow has been telling this story for months now. (Her report back in March) Trump’s degradation of our State Dept, our eyes and ears and voice in the world, is exactly what a foreign enemy would want done if they wanted to knock us out of our leadership position in the world, wanted to make us impotent.

Why are so many people becoming a obsessively focused on the Russia story? Because it fits what is happening. It explains what is happening. The puzzling events of this past year make more sense when you acknowledge this unthinkable possibility.

As the Russia connections among Trump appointees multiply you begin to realize this is the kind of administration Putin would appoint––if we let Putin appoint our government…

Politico lays out the web of Trump/Russia connections

CNN describes the cast of characters

The #2 post in the Executive Branch is the Secretary of State. Trump appointed Rex Tillerson, whose most notable accomplishment was his recent mega oil deal with Putin. For which Putin gave him Russia’s most prestigious medal. Tillerson’s oil deal was iced after Putin invaded Ukraine. Is this Tillerson’s main motive for taking the post? If Putin wanted to appoint our Secretary of State I think he would have picked Rex Tillerson. Someone who shares his, Putin’s, interests and goals.

It goes beyond Tillerson. The Secretary of Commerce is Wilbur Ross, co-owner of the Russian oligarchy’s favorite money laundering bank, a business partner with Putin’s son-in-law. Wilbur Ross's Russia connection via the Guardian

Trump’s campaign was run during the key period where he won nomination by Paul Manafort, who earned millions advancing Putin’s interests, including switching a plank in the party platform that armed independent Ukraine with one that didn’t. Manafort earned his Russian millions strategizing for pro-Russians in Ukraine hoping to return Ukraine to the Russian empire.

There are more, officials high and low, some of them pro-Russian, some simply eager to do things the Russians would love to see us do to ourselves. Degrading education, degrading our environment, degrading alliances, breaking agreements, sowing disunity abroad and at home, abandoning key strategies like the ones opposing climate change (our military has called climate change our biggest current and future threat globally.) Putin has to be enormously pleased at all the stupid shit we are doing to ourselves. He must be astonished that our president and his team are happy to oblige.

Did Putin appoint the president and his team?

Why were the Republicans cool with this?

The Ballad of Sam Clovis via NYMagazine

The sorry saga of Jared's Russia complicity from the Atlantic

From MSNBC, the long story of Trump's Russia connections

The Unholy Cult of Trump

As the White House gets weirder and the stink of corruption and treason gets stronger the superChristians only get louder in their praise for Donald Trump. God help us.

From the LATimes: Trump’s base believes he is their blessed savior sent by God. We are being governed by a cult leader who believes this… All the elements of cult worship are there.

A leading Trump-supporter, pastor, and conservative writer for the Federalist says God was answering the prayers of the victims of the bloody Texas church massacre by letting them be murdered. Reported by RawStory

This was also the story told Monday on Fox And Friends––which is Trump’s daily briefing on events, the source he always believes and parrots––that this is how every good Christian would want to die, gunned down in a church where he or she is close to God.

Video here

From Newsweek we get the following disturbing confirmation that the White House is becoming a weird cult...

“…The man who advises President Donald Trump’s nine fundamentalist Cabinet members has shared his favorite superstitions, including that Earth was created in six days, that women can’t teach men, that the U.S. government is required by God to “moralize a fallen world through the use of force” and that Trump is “an adjudicator of wrongdoing.”

"Ralph Drollinger, a former NBA player who founded Capitol Ministries (CapMin) 20 years ago, preaches a flinty fundamentalism that dispenses with Jesus’s teachings about compassion, love and tolerance in favor of a more tribal, Old Testament world view in which God disapproves of government aid to the poor, and of liberals in general."

From the Daily Beast we get a frightening inside look at the "superChristian" life of the Walmart Killer. He lived alone with a stack of Bibles and no furniture...

From The New York Times we learn that some of the Russian paid ads on Google and Twitter told Americans that voting for Hillary meant voting for Satan

Russia Occupies the White House...How We Got Here...What Comes Next?

From the excellent John Nichols at the Nation we have an article explaining how the Manafort/Gates indictments and the Papadopoulos guilty plea cast a shadow over Trump but also over Vice President Mike Pence.

Pence was the man charged with supervising the assembling of the personnel that filled the Trump administration. Pence was and is the Extreme Vetter In Chief, but of course no vetting took place at all. Everyone came through on the nod, like people entering a speakeasy: “Joe sent me.” So we may get rid of a criminal and traitor president and find he is replaced by a President Doofus, a bland, pious, doltish Sgt. Schultz figure who "knows nothing and hears nahhhh-thing.” (Has Pence been bribed with strudel?) Pence may play stupid to save himself, but he has continued a relationship with Manafort beyond the campaign after Manafort left under a cloud. There is now discussion of Pence and the cabinet using the 25th amendment to oust the president. The remaining conspirators would be joined in a serious pact of inter loyalties not resembling any democratic norm we know of. Loyalty is something Trump discusses with people he hires. It isn’t loyalty to the Constitution.

We know that when Trump tweets it is often in the words he just heard on Fox N Friends… but he also follows a narrative set down by Russian bots which are directed by the people in the Kremlin we suspect might be his Russian masters… He acts like a dog on a leash following the order to attack whatever his master tells him to attack. When he lashes out at Clinton and Mueller, how closely do his words echo the words of his master, Putin? Is he even aware of this?

From Newsweek: Russian bots operating Trump's mouth

“I hire the best people!” ~Donald J. Trump

Trump rails about “extreme vetting” for people wishing to enter this country, but he followed no vetting procedures when it came to hiring personnel for the White House or the various critical cabinet posts or appointing people to judicial seats. No vetting, no problem. No resume, no problem. No expertise, that was an actual plus in Trump’s mind.

Sometimes idiocy is a positive asset in a Trump hire. Take Rick Perry. The Hill reports the Sec of Energy recently stated that fossil fuels are vital to prevent sexual assault… I’ll let that sink in for a minute. (We also have a head of EPA who believes his job is to protect the fossil fuel industry from environmentalists.)

A year ago, when Trump hired Manafort, an article appeared in Bloomberg summarizing Manafort’s sleazy and criminal associations. In some quarters he was called the Torture Lobbyist because he specialized in advancing the interests of brutal dictators in Washington. (This may explain why his daughter once characterized her father’s income as “blood money.”)

Here is the Atlantic’s retrospective analysis of the Manafort hiring

The campaign acquired George Papadopoulos on the fly, because no known or accredited foreign policy people would have anything to do with Trump. When asked by a reporter who his foreign policy people were Trump immediately mentioned George Papadopoulos as one, “smart guy,” and also cited Carter Page, who was also already under scrutiny by the FBI for shady associations with Russian spy figures. Extreme vetting? Nothing like that happened in the Trump entourage. Flattery was enough to get in the door. To get into the country Trump demands extreme vetting, but to get access to the highest levels of national security operations all you needed to do was flatter Donald Trump. And be capable of lying big, because that is Trump’s style.

The Daily Beast on the rise of Papadopoulos

Here’s a useful roadmap of Russia-White House connections:from the NYTimes

A handy FYI and FAQ also from the NYTimes

Fear is rippling through the White House staff, which may result in pleas being copped and stories being told to Mueller’s investigators.

Reported by Vanity Fair

The Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross, interestingly enough, co-owned one of the Cypriot banks Paul Manafort and his Russian friends used to launder money. Ross was Vice Chairman of the bank. Will Ross be questioned about this, or about the $2 billion missing from his financial disclosure forms?

Senator Tom Udall asks the $2 billion question about Wilbur Ross

Russian bots and trolls are in the news, but the Mercers, who bought and owned Breitbart and bought and owned the Brietbart subsidiary named Steve Bannon, are themselves heavily invested in troll farming, and election rigging via their massive data crunching firm Cambridge Analytica.

Bill Moyers on the Mercers

There is also a Bizarro version of the Russia conspiracy in which Hillary conspired with Putin (who despised her) to lose the election…

NYMag explains the upside down defense of Trump

And this reporting from VOX, same bizarro topic

Seems ludicrous but it has an enormous press empire pushing it into the public mind. Kind of like how Putin did it.

But even in FoxWorld there are people jumping ship having had enough of lying and treason.

Reported by CNN-Money

Russiagate Is Like Rosemary's Baby

The Trump presidency, with all of its bizarre manifestations and plot twists, has made Americans feel like we are watching a familiar movie.

A horror movie.

Appropriately enough, since the president is a sexual predator, it's a horror movie directed by a sexual predator.

It's Rosemary's Baby. We are all living in Rosemary's Baby, all living in creepy apartments at the Dakota, listening for the tiptoeing of witches, or is it Russians?

Here is a useful Who's Who...

The White House is the Dakota Apartment House.

Trump is Guy Woodhouse who sells his wife to Satan for greater fame and financial gain.

Putin is Beelzebub/Satan.

Roman Castevet is either Steve Bannon or Paul Manafort.

Kellyanne Conway is Minnie Castevet, played by Ruth Gordon without the charm.

Jeff Sessions is the absentminded witch played by Patsy Kelly. (Sarah Huckabee Sanders is understudy.)

General Flynn is Dr. Sapirstein.

Sebastian Gorka, Stephen Miller, Omarosa Manigault, Jared Kushner, Melania, Ivanka, Roger Stone, Donald Jr., Carter Page, etc. play all the other devil-worshippers in the room at the end...

Actually the whole Republican Party is in that room. (This new version of Rosemary's Baby really needs to be a cable series, there are so many wonderful parts. I see crowd scenes filled with Nazis carrying tiki torches. And everybody at FoxNews should have cameos. Not sure who should get William Castle's cameo as the guy waiting for the pay phone.)

Ben Carson is Dr. Bombay and is obviously in the wrong story.

Soviet ambassador/spymaster/bullfrog manquée Kislyak is Dr. Shand.

Jeb Bush is Donald Baumgart (the actor who goes blind to advance Guy Woodhouse’s career.)

James Comey is Dr. Hill (the naive "good guy" who unwittingly hands Rosemary back to the Satanists.)

Mr. Nicklas (Elisha Cook Jr.) is played interchangeably by the major network anchors.

Barack Obama is Rosemary's loyal friend Hutch, who the Satanists are determined to rub out.

Hillary is Rosemary’s friend Terry who gets thrown out of an upstairs window (very Russian.)

Neil Gorsuch, as far as I can tell, is the baby. (What have they done to his eyes?)

We are Rosemary.

Republicans hope reinvestigating Hillary will help Americans ignore investigations of Trump

Rep. Trey Gowdy* is preparing to begin year eight of the Benghazi Investigation into what happened in the city of that name where American diplomats were killed by terrorists. Most of Mr. Gowdy’s and his predecessor Darrel Issa’s prior inquisition has focused on the slowness with which the tragic sequence of events were described to the public by the White House team of then President Obama and then Sec of State Hillary Clinton. In the fog of war, the facts about what happened can be slow to emerge and confirm. (The first reports are often filled with rumor.) Try as they might, they cannot stop investigating Hillary. She is that fascinating…

Mostly, though, it appears to be an effort to distract from how the Russians punked our election to put Trump in the White House.

From the Guardian

What’s ironic is it has taken a considerable amount of time for the Trump administration to tell Americans what happened recently in Niger and nobody is promising an investigation of that. Would it be hypocritical of Democrats to mount the same kind of partisan witch hunt over the Niger incident? Maybe.

The difference between the two tragedies, though, is the Obama information sequence followed protocols for reporting this kind of event: seeking the best available facts before reporting to the public. The delay of several days by the Trump White House appears to be related to casual indifference and detachment and perhaps slow efforts to locate Niger on the map. (Niger is right next door to Nigeria after all. I am guessing the Trump team often confuses the various Dakotas and Carolinas and Virginias.) The problem is the Trump administration dislikes best practices and is very short on professional staff. The unprofessional staff seems secretive and dishonest. Also––and not surprisingly–– the chain of command in this very-generallish White House doesn’t seem to go all the way to the top.

From The Hill newspaper

President Trump on Wednesday said he did not personally authorize the mission in Niger in which four U.S. soldiers were killed, saying “my generals and my military” have decision-making authority.
Asked if he authorized the mission, Trump responded, “No, I didn’t, not specifically.”

“I have generals that are great generals,” he continued. “These are great fighters; these are warriors. I gave them authority to do what’s right so that we win. That’s the authority they have. I want to win. And we’re going to win.”

Trump made the comments to reporters on the White House south lawn as he left for Texas.

“My generals and my military, they have decision-making ability,” he added later. “As far as the incident that we’re talking about, I’ve been seeing it just like you’ve been seeing it. I’ve been getting reports. They have to meet the enemy and they meet them tough and that’s what happens.”

Which prompts me to ask the question I have been asking for months now: “How many generals does it take to screw in a junta?”

(*I have learned from reliable sources that Rep. Gowdy plans to go as Draco Malfoy again for Halloween this year.)

Trump's history in the sordid world of sexual predation and exploitation

While America is fed a 24-7 stream of news about the true ugliness of the Weinstein sex scandal, we need to remember that this is not new. (In fact studio mogul sex predation goes all the way back to high moral scold Louis B. Mayer and his own casting couch.)

This Swedish writer has a good summary of the Trump involvement with the trafficking of underage models and his apparent enjoyment of this "flow of goods" from overseas. Via DailyKos

MotherJones ran this and other stories last year about Trump's involvement in this unsavory trafficking. (We elected him anyway.)

As did POLITICO...

We need to remember this isn’t confined to Hollywood. It exists wherever men have complete power. Not all the men in these environments are predators but that is what the men-only power structure enables and promotes. It promotes it because it enables men to get what they want, and to keep that power unrestricted in all areas of life: money, sex, power, leverage, etc. The women who oppose it or call it out are rubbished, called unattractive scolds and worse. The men who oppose this predation are considered troublemakers and worse. Anyone who reserves judgment because of lack of information and evidence (a large group) is simply doing what Americans have always done: assume innocence until guilt is proven. But the evidence is there. The reporting is there, but because of our legal standards that side with property and power against individual grievances, and our legal acceptance of nondisclosure agreements attached to civil settlements, the disclosures and reporting of previous decades is put into the dead file whenever a case is settled or closed or fails to convict on all counts or charges are pleaded down. It is easier and much more common for a very rich criminal to claim complete innocence than it is for an injured and unpowerful individual, because the rich person knows people in power, and rich people can manipulate people in power via Citizens United’s legalization of bribery, and because the rich person has lawyers and public relations people to flood the courts and the media with SLAP suits and published rubbishing of people who they may have injured who didn’t enjoy the experience.

The point we need to keep in mind is this male power structure and the enabling and promoting of sexual predation are very connected. The men-only mindset is being pushed very aggressively by the new Republican regime because it checks the right boxes and writes the right size checks. This mindset, this total grip on power by money and male clubbiness, is being weaponized because the president himself has a long history of sexual predation; to get what they want legislatively and judicially they need to protect the predator in chief. What makes it especially disturbing is how the so-called Christian Right in this country, in all its prudish piety, is fully behind what Trump represents and have excused or rationalized what he has done, what he has bragged about doing, what he is in favor of making fully acceptable.

The mindset that is protecting and enabling sexual predation is parallel to the other predation that is going on targeting the poor and the uninsured and the marginalized, but the Republican juggernaut is skillfully keeping the injured majority of Americans from uniting against it. The majority of Americans are not super wealthy and are preyed on legally and systematically because of laws written by the Republicans, but they are told to distrust their natural allies if they are black or Latino or female or Muslim. Divide and conquer.

Friends of Trump. Friends of Putin.

The Dutch investigative reporting unit Zembla working with the American newspaper group McClatchy has been tracking the multi-billion dollar transfers of money from around the world into Trump properties, notably Trump Soho, which Trump built with Russian mob figure Felix Sater. This three part documentary follows the money.

The documentary that follows the money trail from central Asia into Trump Soho and other properties.

Trump warned this summer that special prosecutor Mueller had better not look into his financial history. It seems clear why Trump is afraid of this. Trump made loud assurances that he had no investments in Russia. (But did he have Russian millions invested in his properties here and elsewhere?) He said he had no loans IN Russia. (Did he get multi-million or multi-billion dollar loans FROM Russia?)

Trump’s financial history is a roller coaster of boom and bust. Fabulous accumulations of cash followed by spectacular collapses that ruined thousands of investors, but left Trump flush with money. This is how confidence schemes work: draw the money in, then loot the money out, hiding it via multiple shell companies and flipped transactions. In many cases the collapse is carefully planned (think Mel Brooks’s The Producers, minus the comedy.) Much of the cash that built and purchased various Trump properties, notably Trump Soho, is alleged to have been looted from Kazakhstan and other countries, then laundered through hundreds of shadowy companies in financial centers like the Netherlands and London and Cyprus. (One of the banks in Cyprus targeted by money-laundering investigations is co-owned by Trump’s Secretary of Commerce and a Russian oligarch closely allied with Putin.)

This is the pattern of international fraud which loots economies and impoverishes law abiding workers around the world. Trump himself has a long history of stiffing people and companies who do work for him, building and furnishing and servicing his properties, and daring them to sue. So Trump himself behaves like these international crooks by looting the legitimate earnings of working people and hiding those millions where they are hard to locate. One of Trump’s favorite counterarguments when the Russia investigation is raised is to say that we should quit targeting the fine people of Russia. But the investigations are not targeting the fine people of Russia, they are targeting the criminals who stole billions from the fine people of Russia, the working people of Russia and other countries. Trump may not be the biggest villain in the world of global kleptocracy, but he has been in bed with the kleptocrats for decades. The biggest global kleptocrat today appears to be Putin himself, Trump’s role model and possible sugar daddy. While Trump rubbishes the victims of mass theft and fraud in carefully looted and impoverished parts of the world, he praises and kneels to the billionaires who profited from looting them and admires their “leadership”.

Former FBI man Mark Felt gave Woodward and Bernstein some famous advice in 1972 when they were investigating the crimes of the Nixon White House: “Follow the Money.” Following the money has grown more complicated over recent decades as the looting and fraud and money laundering has grown more massive and sophisticated and compliant governments have made the legal system more hospitable to fraud and looting and money laundering. (One example being Trump's abrupt lifting of the financial regulations and safeguards put in place by Obama after the financial crisis of 2008-9.)

Follow the money to discover the crimes of people like Trump, but also examine the company they keep. Trump has been tight with unsavory characters for many years, both the famous and the infamous, shadowy mobsters and nasty celebrities as well as leaders of corrupt and brutal regimes.

What is it about Trump's and Putin's bromances with the ugliest kinds of celebrity, people like Steven Seagal and Gerard Depardieu.

Why does Trump never say a critical or unpleasant word to or about Putin? Maybe he just admires the guy. Or maybe he is afraid to. To paraphrase the saying Gordon Liddy had on the wall in his office “When you have them by their junk [their global investments] their hearts and minds will follow.” We’ve long suspected that Putin holds Trump hostage via money, and Sec. of State Tillerson too. It appears that Russians put Trump’s fortunes in order after at least one bankruptcy. Is he still on the hook to them, and for how much?

Question: why appoint as Secretary of State an oil company CEO who organized the largest oil deal in history with Putin himself?

Big money deals buy a lot of boot-licking but it's not good for America when the licking is being done by our government, with foreign enemies praised and admired while traditional allies are insulted.

I like Gary Kasparov’s phrase “Reputation Laundering”, which describes what Trump is doing for Putin and what the GOP has done for Trump and Putin.

When our president lives off the profits of shady money and global criminality it quickly corrupts how we operate in the world. It stains our national reputation, our global standing.

F.O.P. “Friends of Putin” populate the world of big money. From the Financial Times.

It’s enlightening to look at the kind of scummy creatures who are friends of Putin’s, the kinds of things they do, the things they say, the scummy things they approve of and the decent things and people they ridicule.

It’s also worth looking at the list of Putin’s former friends. Many of them have died in unpleasant and sudden ways.

Reported in March by the Chicago Tribune.

A more recent article about Russian hits on Putin critics––from the New Yorker.

From Vox, a list of the dead.

Misogyny Among White Married Women Helped Elect Trump

Married white women in large numbers went along with their men and rejected Hillary Clinton. The why of this has been hard to determine because it’s difficult to look inside people’s minds. Most of the white women who voted for the Russian backed serial bankrupt assaulter of women and insulter of all races and ethnicities said they did so because they admired him and honestly believed she was a crook and a liar and unpatriotic. (Hillary has often remained seated on the sofa while the national anthem played during the TV broadcast of NFL games.)

My own belief, based on nothing, and roundly rejected by everyone I spoke with, was that women whose husbands or partners loved Trump and hated Hillary simply didn’t want to spend four or eight years being subjected to abuse and ridicule and blame if the first woman president ever did anything wrong. And women are likelier than men to understand that leaders sometimes make mistakes. Maybe some of them or a lot of them trusted the polls and believed Hillary would win anyway, and if bad stuff happened their partners would abuse Hillary but wouldn’t abuse them. Possible? It would be hard to get a woman to admit it.

It was very hard on white male egos to have eight years of embarrassment under a white male Republican president followed by eight non-catastrophic years under a black male president who didn’t blow the budget with a trillion dollar unnecessary and disastrous war and trigger a massive economic crisis. (It was extra humiliating that the black guy rescued the economy from what the white guy fucked up.) But to follow the very competent and cool black guy with a woman was simply too too humiliating for white men. They couldn’t bear it. I am sure their spouses and partners could tell that it would set them off in unpleasant directions for the next four, possibly eight, years. Violence against people of color rose dramatically during the Obama presidency. Would violence against women skyrocket during the first female presidency? And you can bet, just as Republicans swore to block everything Obama tried to accomplish, and the faithful in thousands of white superchristian churches prayed fervently for him to fail, that all the Republicans would do their damnedest to make sure Hillary failed. Because she made every Republican man and lots of Democratic men feel like a failure. Not only had a black man jumped the queue but now a woman had. The natural order of things was being upset. It upset people, especially white people, especially white people with dicks, but also the women who were married to them. So white women joined the Dickish Party. (It didn't hurt Trump's electability that thousands of Russian trolls and bots were pushing this same misogyny and race-worry at white voters in swing states.)

This new study doesn’t make this point but it does explain the pressure, both economic and political, that shaped the Trump vote among white married women. Deference is an old-fashioned idea some women still subscribe to. Maybe it's out of self-defense. Self interest is pretty human; people vote their pocket book. This study combines the two because it says deference to the man’s income shaped the vote of married white women; they voted against women’s economic interests to support their subservience to the man’s economic interests.

The study is reported on in the Guardian.

It’s worth looking at the unfairness at the root of all this. There is a double standard. Women are required to be perfect and at the same time deferential to their male counterparts even if those males are far less perfect than the women. Because failing to be deferential makes the males feel diminished. Some probably feel a greater need for male enhancement products if they are compared unfavorably with a woman, and that male dysfunction is contagious: when one man experiences it all men start to go flaccid and angry. Women may love their men in spite of their faults but men tend to feel uncomfortable around women who outperform them. A ultra competent woman is less attractive than a man who fucks up.

But her emails!

Last fall Newsweek published a story about how many emails George W Bush and Dick Cheney managed to lose to avoid having their Iraq War motives scrutinized. W lost 22 million emails, but nobody minded.

"According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton’s emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016.”

W and his boss Cheney spent trillions on an unnecessary war based on phony reasoning and what we would today call “fake news” and they covered up their machinations by “losing” 22 million emails. That’s million with an M, almost a thousand times more emails than Hillary allegedly lost. (Full disclosure: I delete emails every month, which I suppose makes me a suspicious character.)

The Russians Have Always Preferred American Presidents Who Are Corrupt

One of Alistair Cooke's BBC letters from America has this interesting paragraph, written in 1973, about Watergate. During that earlier scandal, Nixon (like Trump) had a defender in Moscow, who said the charges against the American president were a conspiracy and a hoax cooked up by "reactionary” liberal elements.

Russian Money May Explain Republican Attack on Americans' Access to Affordable Healthcare

1. REPUBLICANS TOOK IN MILLIONS FROM MOSCOW

From that very Texan and very middle American newspaper, the Dallas Morning News...

"Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.
"During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard "Len" Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik's donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik's holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org."


SUMMARY: THE RUSSIANS BOUGHT REPUBLICANS DURING 2015 AND 2016. TOTAL RUSSIAN INVESTMENT (THAT WE KNOW ABOUT): $7.35 MILLION.

(This is separate from the millions which were paid by the Russians to Trump’s campaign manager and national security advisor and millions more laundered through his Commerce Secretary’s Cypriot bank.)

2. RUSSIANS ARE INVESTING MILLIONS IN AMERICAN HEALTHCARE CORPORATIONS

Bloomberg is reporting that Russian billionaire oligarchs (and there are no oligarchs in Russia who are not close to Putin) have invested heavily in corporate healthcare and Big Pharma in the U.S.

(Essentially, Russians are confident that for-profit healthcare and Big Pharma will very soon see a big growth in profits. How do they know this? Maybe they have the Republican Congress and the Republican White House in their pocket.)

SUMMARY: THE RUSSIANS BACKING THE REPUBLICANS ARE BETTING THEY WILL REWEAPONIZE AMERICAN HEALTHCARE

3. REPUBLICANS DO WHAT THEIR BILLIONAIRE BACKERS TELL THEM TO DO

The Russians who gave this big money will expect their Republican congressmen and senators to deliver, why else would they have given them the money? The Guardian is reporting that the Koch Brothers who give millions to Republicans every election cycle have signaled that the money will dry up if the Republicans don’t repeal Obamacare and cut billionaires’ taxes. Republicans are listening because they are afraid. They do what their billionaire donors tell them.

SUMMARY: THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ISN’T AN AMERICAN PARTY, IT IS A MONEY PARTY.

IT ALSO LOOKS AND SOUNDS AND ACTS VERY MUCH LIKE IT’S A RUSSIAN PARTY.

FOLLOW THE MONEY.

FOLLOW THE RUBLES.