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.

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

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

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

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

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

What we don’t know can’t hurt them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Divine Right of Kings––The Trump Version

Trump seems to fancy himself an absolute monarch on the old European model. Which means he doesn’t know what the American Revolution was about.

Jonathan Chait compares Trump to the French monarchs who were deposed by the French Revolution.

Millions of Americans voted for the Trump they saw on television. Trump the tyrant. Trump the bully. Trump the tough guy. Trump the “nobody’s fool.” Trump the guy who nobody pushes around, the guy who will not take orders from anyone.

It has become clear Trump is what Hillary said he was: an obedient and craven puppet of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. (We need a list of the major policies he has refashioned to please the Russians. The latest being his reversals on Syria.)

Vanity Fair examines how Trump has been played by a better con-man than himself.

If we lacked evidence before (we didn’t) the NYTimes interview proves President Trump is astonishingly ignorant, foolish, petulant, self-centered, vindictive, paranoid, and mentally deranged. With nuclear missiles.

Slate's Will Saletan parses the bizarre NYTimes Trump interview.

VOX does its own analysis of the interview.

Trump believes the presidency he won became his personal tool, his power to use and abuse as he saw fit. And with Trump all power is there to benefit Trump and only Trump. All power is also there to punish his opponents, critics and enemies, a list that now includes everyone who doesn’t share his concept of presidential power, who doesn’t believe we live in a dictatorship.

The New Republic looks at the authoritarian potential of the Trump juggernaut.


This is nothing like Watergate, it’s far worse. There were things Nixon would not do, like pardoning his aides and himself. Also Nixon hired his burglars in America, he didn’t bring in the Russian spy agencies. Nixon let his major donors buy his California spread for him but he wasn’t bailed out of bankruptcy by Russian mobsters. Key differences. Nixon was on the hook to entrenched powers here in America but he also resented and opposed those entrenched powers, the Eastern Establishment. Trump hates the same Establishment for not admiring and accepting him so he outsourced his power base to a foreign dictatorship and its powerful criminal allies.

Comparisons are also being made with Clinton and Whitewater. No comparison. Clinton did not interfere or threaten or obstruct that investigation. The first Whitewater special counsel, a lifelong Republican, was fired for not being sufficiently ideological. They fired him for failing to find evidence of guilt and appointed a super-ideologue in Ken Starr who promised to find Clinton guilty of something. Eventually he had to rely on stories from the anti-Clinton Mellon-Scaiffe nexus to devise a trap, which eventually got the president to dissemble about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, which the inquisitors already knew about and had rigged testimony to turn any Clinton denial into perjury. The offhand total of dissembles/lies/perjuries by the current president runs into four digits and his deputies multiply that.

Michael Tomasky reminds us of how partisan the Clinton prosecution was. The Mueller investigation is one of the most urgent and necessary investigations our nation has ever seen. It's not trivial. Just as Trump is less trivial and amusing than he seems.

Angry 70 Year Old Man Barricaded In DC Mansion

We wake up every morning wondering if it’s still true. Is Trump still president. If a President Hillary Clinton had presided the way Trump has these 100+ days she’d be on her way out. Congress would have had bills of impeachment prepared before she’d given her victory speech on November 9th. The pitchforks and torches and nooses were out for Hillary from the moment she announced her candidacy. From that date on the Republican Congress had busied itself with hearings and subpoenas. The investigative committee chairs had installed a teleport to transport them quickly onto FoxNews the moment they left the floor.

Jason Chaffetz was one of the most dogged accusers. He never let up. His goal in life was to jail Hillary Clinton. When FBI director James Comey found “carelessness” but no criminality, the Republicans were furious. They felt betrayed, as if they had a contract promising them that the investigation would serve her up to them. The line in Alice In Wonderland is “Sentence First. Verdict Afterwards.” Jason Chaffetz embraced the role of the Red Queen. He’d turned his congressional seat into a prosecutor’s office, an inquisitor’s office.

So when the Trump presidency debuted with its own palpable and juicy prosecutable charges hung round the president’s and his staff’s necks you’d expect an eager prosecutor would get to work.

But Chaffetz seemed bored with the allegations against Trump. Betraying our country to Russia? Meh. Using the presidency to enrich himself? Who cares. Chaffetz’s response when asked about Trump’s many disturbing and possibly incriminating financial entanglements and the glaring conflicts of interest was especially peculiar:

“He’s already rich.”

Meaning? The only meaning we can deduce is that Jason Chaffetz and his fellow Republicans believe it’s OK for a rich person to engage in criminal behavior. A rich person is allowed to enrich himself further by illegal means. A rich person is allowed to turn the Oval Office into a moneymaking machine. When a relatively middle class person enters the White House, say a Bill Clinton, it’s a different matter. Then they investigate. Republicans are immune. Rich people are immune.

Reported in The New Yorker

Reported at greater length in The Atlantic

The danger Trump presents is increased because the Republicans in Congress are so craven, so obedient, so partisan. James Fallows writes about this in The Atlantic, giving five reasons why Kremlingate is worse than Watergate.

This article from The American Interest examines Trump’s Russia entanglements.

"Whatever the nature of President-elect Donald Trump’s relationship with President Putin, he has certainly managed to accumulate direct and indirect connections with a far-flung private Russian/FSU network of outright mobsters, oligarchs, fraudsters, and kleptocrats. Any one of these connections might have occurred at random. But the overall pattern is a veritable Star Wars bar scene of unsavory characters, with Donald Trump seated right in the middle. The analytical challenge is to map this network—a task that most journalists and law enforcement agencies, focused on individual cases, have failed to do.”

It appears that Donald Trump has been a very useful asset in a massive and long-running Russian money laundering scheme.

Vanity Fair explains why a note from your lawyer won’t get you off the hook, especially if that lawyer was named Russia’s Lawyer of the Year.

When I heard Trump promise that a “certified letter” would clear him of any wrongdoing I laughed. As if the Post Office, for an additional fee, will certify the truthfulness of a letter. (That joke appeared on SNL last night so I wasn’t the only one who thought of it.)

This Dutch documentary goes into Trump’s deep ties to Russian mobsters. All Russian mobsters still living operate as Putin henchmen.

Google Trump and Bayrock and Russia and you find some interesting stories, all about money laundering, the looting of the Russian economy, and the rescue of a bankrupt Trump over the years. There's more than one way to launder a ruble.

This one's from the Guardian.

The reliably conservative Chicago Tribune has this to say:

“We have the tin-pot leader whose vanity knows no bounds. We have the rapacious family feathering their nests without regard for the law or common decency. We have utter disregard for values at home and abroad, the disdain for democracy, the hunger for constraining a free press, the admiration for thugs and strongmen worldwide.”

The New Yorker's Amy Davidson analyzes the problems Trump created in his Lester Holt interview.

Trump’s business dealings are under scrutiny by the Senate. From the New Yorker.

Mother Jones gets down to the facts in the Russia story.

The White House staff meanwhile is in turmoil. Staffers responding with “Jesus!” when they see Trump’s latest tweets. From The Daily Beast.

The Trump White House In Cover Up Mode Over Russia Collusion

Today’s Republicans remember Watergate differently.

They don't remember it as a major corruption scandal. They remember Watergate as a failure to cover up a major corruption scandal. (Hunter Thompson knew better.)

Republicans in Congress share this mindset: if something bad is going on and nobody is told, that means nothing bad is going on.

The scandal is that people are finding out.

The criminals are the ones alerting the public to the crime. Sounding the alarm is a crime, according to Republican leaders. Republican leaders are obeyed by all Republican followers. Republicans are very obedient.

The senator who's supposed to be leading the probe into the White House's Russia ties is Richard Burr, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The guy who agreed to deter the press from reporting White House ties to Russia. (This kind of story by Politico might be why Politico is banned from the White House.)

There are labels for this kind of behavior, this kind of ritual.

Omertà.

Keep your mouth shut or you're dead.

Shoot the messenger.

Don’t tell anybody what is going on because if you do blow the whistle you pay consequences. The consequences are brutal. The people doing the crime pay no consequences.

Put it another way: the Republicans would have hung Paul Revere.

Today’s Republicans would have erected statues to commemorate the heroism of Benedict Arnold. To the leaders of the GOP, the people selling our country to the Russians are patriots.

One of the memorable phrases from Watergate was “Follow The Money.” Mark Felt (Deep Throat) said it to Bob Woodward when Woodward felt like the trail had gone cold. Follow the money and you will find the answers. You will learn who the criminals are.

Rachel Maddow detailed how deeply it appears our new Commerce Secretary is involved with Russia. Wilbur Mills doesn't just consort with Russian spies he owns the bank in Cyprus where they launder their money. And who are his partners in this bank? Putin's favorite Russian mobsters.

The Daily Beast has the same story.

The Hill, Congress's newspaper, has the story about how hard Republicans are working to keep the public from knowing about Trump's finances. Because the Republican book of rules says there is no crime as long as the public is unaware of it.

The Guardian reports on Reince Priebus's efforts to shut up reporters. Which is why the Guardian is barred from the White House.

That doesn't matter so much when White House staffers will meet you in a bar somewhere and tell you all about what's going on.

Two stories broke last night.

The Attorney General, Jefferson Davis Beauregard Secessions (sic), the man in charge of enforcing the law and overseeing all investigations of possible treasonous collusion with Russians in the recent campaign, appears to have lied under oath about his own collusions with Russians. The Washington Post broke the story. Which is why the Washington Post is barred from the White House.

And in the final days of Obama’s presidency, as new evidence was emerging about Trump campaign complicity with Russia, the departing president ordered all departments in the White House and the executive branch to preserve that evidence, concerned that the new administration would lose or destroy it.

That story from SLATE

Our Allies See Trump's Election As A Russian Coup

Kurt Eichenwald writes how Trump’s many business involvements around the world are an invitation to extortion by global enemies.

Read Eichenwald's story in Newsweek

Because of Trump’s aggressively insulting and threatening attitude towards foreigners it seems likely that his properties will become prime targets. America’s military will become Trump’s own personal security service, protecting him rather than us, spilling American blood to protect Trump’s investments and execute vendettas against groups and individuals and nations abroad who Trump dislikes. He has a famously thin skin and a vengeful nature.

The premier news weekly in Canada isn’t mincing words. They report that Trump’s [victory] (sic) amounts to a Russian overthrow of the American democracy. The United States has been converted into a Russian satellite with the eager cooperation of the Republican Party.

Read the story in McClean's Weekly

Has the Trump/Putin win changed America into Russia’s Mini-Me?

Analysis and background on the Putin Method in the New York Review of Books

The way leading Republicans have joined the Democrats in demanding a full investigation of Russia’s deep involvement in the Trump election reminds me of an earlier Republican crime. Mitch McConnell will play the role of Nixon’s AG Kleindeinst, carefully removing Republican fingerprints from smoking guns and burning incriminating papers and recordings and emails.

The Republicans pretend to investigate the Russian overthrow of America, reported by Politico

The larger irony here is how these same Republicans spent years trying to incriminate Hillary Clinton over the Benghazi tragedy. During the Bush years, 60 diplomats were killed overseas, and prior to the Benghazi attacks Republicans cut funding for President Obama’s requests for better embassy security.

Some of the Electoral College electors are demanding a full intelligence briefing on the dangerous implications of Russia’s interference and the grip Russia’s intelligence services have on the President-elect. But the number making this demand is too small. Most of the electors who might be able to swing this election back toward sanity and securing United States sovereignty are indicating they’d prefer not to know. Which is Trump’s position. “I’m, like, smart. I don’t need intelligence briefings,” Trump said. And this appears to be the Republican Party line: Ignorance is Bliss. They don’t mind being Russian puppets as long as they don’t realize that is Putin’s hand that is creeping up their pant-leg.