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Month: May 2017

QOTD: Joe Lieberman

Published by digby on May 19, 2017

QOTD: Joe Lieberman

by digby

Your front runner for FBI Director, ladies and gentlemen:

“To me, The New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, and whether they have committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department.”

I think we can see why Trump likes him so much. Lieberman hates the first amendment almost as much as he does.

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There is no longer any question why he fired Comey

Published by digby on May 19, 2017

There is no longer any question why he fired Comey

by digby

It’s done. This is it:

President Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office this month that firing the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a document summarizing the meeting.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”

The conversation, during a May 10 meeting — the day after he fired Mr. Comey — reinforces the notion that Mr. Trump dismissed him primarily because of the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives. Mr. Trump said as much in one televised interview, but the White House has offered changing justifications for the firing.

The White House document that contained Mr. Trump’s comments was based on notes taken from inside the Oval Office and has been circulated as the official account of the meeting. One official read quotations to The Times, and a second official confirmed the broad outlines of the discussion.

I’m sure the Russians were relieved to hear that.

Think about that for a minute. He said that directly to the Russian ambassador and the foreign minister. He was basically telling them that he’d taken care of their little problem.

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How to hustle the mark

Published by digby on May 19, 2017

How to hustle the mark

by digby

We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t sell California for a handful of beads:

For foreign leaders trying to figure out the best way to approach an American president unlike any they have known, it is a time of experimentation. Embassies in Washington trade tips and ambassadors send cables to presidents and ministers back home suggesting how to handle a mercurial, strong-willed leader with no real experience on the world stage, a preference for personal diplomacy and a taste for glitz.

After four months of interactions between Mr. Trump and his counterparts, foreign officials and their Washington consultants say certain rules have emerged: Keep it short — no 30-minute monologue for a 30-second attention span. Do not assume he knows the history of the country or its major points of contention. Compliment him on his Electoral College victory. Contrast him favorably with President Barack Obama. Do not get hung up on whatever was said during the campaign. Stay in regular touch. Do not go in with a shopping list but bring some sort of deal he can call a victory.

“If you were prepping people for Donald Trump, the two or three points would be: one, bear in mind this is still a guy who focuses on wins,” Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to the United States, said. “He likes to have wins for America and wins for himself from bilateral meetings.”

He’s an imbecile so it shouldn’t be too hard to convince him he’s winning. Just flatter his massive electoral college win that’s almost impossible for Republicans to win.

Oh and there’s this:

When President Donald Trump sits down for dinner in Saudi Arabia, caterers have ensured that his favorite meal — steak with a side of ketchup — will be offered alongside the traditional local cuisine.

I hope they have some ice cream on hand. He gets very, very cranky when he doesn’t get his ice cream. And who knows what he’ll do?

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Trump’s other horrifying comment to Comey

Published by digby on May 19, 2017

Trump’s other horrifying comment to Comey

by digby

I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

President Donald Trump had a news conference with the Colombian president on Thursday when he said, among other things, “There is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself — and the Russians, zero.” No, those are not remarks translated into Spanish by Colombian reporters and then back again. He actually said that.

To be fair, what Trump seems to have meant was that he and his campaign had not colluded with the Russians. And for the first time he appears to have made a disclaimer that he is only speaking for himself. Still, it’s so garbled that he could have meant almost anything, including that he literally always speaks for himself and the Russians.

In the past few days, Trump’s persecution complex has reached new heights. At his commencement address to the Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday he lamented, “Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media. No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly.” He has taken to calling the Russian investigations a “witch hunt,” even going so far as to boast about it on Twitter on Thursday morning:

Naturally he thinks he’s been targeted in the biggest and greatest witch hunt ever. Apparently, he doesn’t know that there were real witch hunts where people were killed and political witch hunts that destroyed lives of many innocent people. He is certainly unaware that there were leaders who suffered at the hands of political opponents in ways that Trump in his golden palaces eating his two scoops of ice cream and extra sauce every night can only imagine.

I have never seen a more whiny, petulant 70-year-old person in my life. In that one respect Donald Trump may indeed hold the title of “the greatest.”

You will notice that Trump’s main nemesis is still the press, which he has villainized since he began his campaign. One suspects that this started out as shtick, building on the thousands of hours of talk-radio research that his lieutenant at the time, Sam Nunberg, provided to him. Beating up on the press is a staple of right-wing media and it gets a huge response from conservative crowds. But up until he started the campaign Trump had always reveled in media attention and went to great lengths to draw it. In fact, he considered himself a member of the club. But over the course of time the hatred has obviously become very real and very personal. He loathes the press and considers it the source of all of his problems.

Obviously, he isn’t the first president to feel this way. Richard Nixon famously kept an enemies list which included a large number of journalists. But Trump is taking this in a dangerous direction. The New York Times story about James Comey’s memo rightly focused on the fact that the president may have tried to obstruct justice by taking the FBI director aside privately to ask him to let Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, off the hook. But Trump said something else in that meeting which has received less attention:

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

First of all, the FBI doesn’t put people in prison. Trump seems confused about how the justice system works in general, so he probably didn’t know that. One only hopes that he doesn’t figure it out because when he does he’ll realize that his most loyal collaborator, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is the man to talk to about that. It’s true that Sessions is busy at the moment ramping up the drug war and making life miserable for people of color, but he could probably find time to put a few journalists in jail if it would make the boss happy.

Trump’s warm affinity for strongmen like Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is not a good omen in this regard. Every one of those leaders have jailed journalists and worse for being critical of their leadership. Obviously, the U.S. has not yet gone nearly as far as they have, but there are some alarming examples of press harassment since Trump took office.

Just last week a West Virginia journalist was arrested and jailed after following Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price down a hallway asking him about health care policy. On Thursday, John Donnelly,a reporter for Roll Call, was manhandled and escorted out of the building by security guards for asking questions of the FCC commissioners. (Ironically, Donnelly is chairman of the National Press Club’s Press Freedom Team.)

This is not normal. Neither is it normal for State Department officials to speak to reporters the way communications adviser R.C. Hammond spoke to CNN’s White House correspondent, Michelle Kosinski, who reported this exchange on her Facebook page:

Monday night, as the story of the President giving classified information to the Russians was in full evolution, I get a call from … RC Hammond, the State Department’s communications advisor, who had his facts wrong about what was reported and by whom.

But he kicked off the conversation with a venomously irate “What the hell are you doing??!!” Followed up with full-on DEMANDS — over and over, and over again — to tell him who my sources were. He kept pushing, as if he thought this was ample reason. Then, “Why won’t you tell me who they are?” he bellowed repeatedly, again demanding I at least tell him what jobs they held at State, or in what areas.

I had to explain to him that wasn’t how it worked.

It got worse from there.

Granted, the Trump administration is obviously under tremendous stress. But these three random incidents don’t reflect the administration alone. They also reflect an attitude on the part of law enforcement and security officials toward the media that is becoming increasingly hostile. People in authority are taking their cues from the president and that’s disturbing.

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Can liars tell the truth when it counts? by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 19, 2017

Can liars tell the truth when it counts?
by Tom Sullivan

Now what? Now that the FBI has appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 elections and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters Thursday, “It was a counterintelligence investigation before now. It appears to me now to be considered a criminal investigation.”

President Trump on Thursday called the investigation a “witch hunt,” telling reporters, “There is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself, and the Russians, zero.” Trump’s word-salad delivery seemed to suggest he is speaking both for himself and the Russians. Whether that was a poor choice of words or a Freudian slip Mueller will have to sort out.

Trump has spent his shady career in business among a host of sketchy partners and investors, including Russian oligarchs and convicted mobsters. Now his relationship with former national security adviser Michael Flynn has brought on an FBI investigation.

Zack Beauchamp writes at Vox:

Trump has loved Flynn for a long time. In November, he loved Flynn enough to appoint him to be his national security adviser despite knowing that Russia had paid Flynn $45,000 to attend a dinner with Vladimir Putin. Trump loved him enough to keep him on despite, as the New York Times reported late on Wednesday, Flynn informing the Trump transition in early January that he was under FBI investigation for secretly lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government.

Included in a lengthy report from Time on Russia’s social media disinformation operations in 2016, is news that U.S. intelligence last May intercepted a Russian military intelligence officer bragging to colleagues that the GRU “was getting ready to pay Clinton back” for what Vladimir Putin perceived as her support as secretary of state of protests in Russia. “The GRU, he said, was going to cause chaos in the upcoming U.S. election.” What seems like a red flag now at the time lacked context for senior intelligence officials to know what it meant.

Mueller’s investigation will seek to uncover just how much of the Russian effort was aimed at undermining Clinton and how much was part of a wider, sophisticated effort to undermine “the credibility of American democracy,” and how much Trump and his campaign knew about it or were part of it.

Steve Benen (The MaddowBlog) believes Trump’s “speaking for himself” statements indicate Trump is circling the wagons around himself:

A not-so-subtle picture is starting to emerge. The president seems to realize that people around him – officials at the highest levels of his political operation during the campaign – may be brought down by the Russia scandal, but Trump is prepared to throw them under the bus and keep driving, as quickly as possible, to protect himself. He likely assumes that so long as there’s no evidence of him personally chatting with Vladimir Putin, helping coordinate Russia’s attack on the U.S. election, then Trump is personally in the clear.

Trump may be alarmed at the consequences of sending that message to current staff and his former campaign, Benen says.

The Hill reports that online bettors in the U.S. and the U.K. are “putting their money on the odds that Trump will be impeached before the year’s end.” And that might have nothing to do with the Russians.

Because whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, Donald Trump will be under harshest legal scrutiny of his life. So long as he was a creature of real estate, he could use his wealth to out-lawyer any wronged contractor who sued him. He could afford clever tax attorneys to minimize the bottom line on his 1040. As a reality TV star, he could leverage celebrity to get what he wanted and insulate himself from the consequences.

Now after a career spent using intimidation and bravado to get his way — and to win the presidency — Trump faces a special counsel who will not be intimidated by him, and situations where “truthful hyperbole” and “alternative facts” amount to perjury. For Trump, lying “isn’t just a tactic, but an ingrained habit,” something he seems to do “for the pure joy of it.” A habitual liar, a pathological liar even, Trump faces an investigation where, innocent or not, the habits of a lifetime can get him impeached if not land him in federal prison. And not only him, but any staff, family, and friends who follow his lead and lie with him and for him.

Connections to the Russians won’t get Trump impeached. His own nature will.

Sessions must go

Published by digby on May 19, 2017

Sessions must go

by digby

The artists doing these projections are awesome:

In case you were wondering, that was projected on the Department of Justice tonight. 
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Dumb as a box of rocks

Published by digby on May 19, 2017

Dumb as a box of rocks



by digby

I know it’s hard to guess to whom that title refers these days — there are so many possibilities — but today it’s our friend from Utah, Jason Chaffetz:

Two days after threatening to use his “subpoena pen” to get his hands on James Comey’s reported memos describing his encounters with President Donald Trump, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) on Thursday expressed skepticism as to whether they actually existed.

Chaffetz — in addition to many other members of Congress on both sides of the aisle — has called on Comey to testify in a public setting and provide his memos to Congress. He serves as the powerful chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

This came on the heels of a New York Times report, based on one of the fired FBI director’s memos, that Trump had attempted to suppress the FBI’s investigation of ousted National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in February.

“I do think in the light of day in a public setting he should be able to tell us about not only the materials, if they’re there, and I question whether or not they’re actually there, but if they’re there, and then how did he take them?” Chaffetz told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“Why do you question that?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“Well, nobody’s seen them,” Chaffetz said. “Even the reporter that did the story hasn’t seen them. Nobody I know of, even the reporter, has not [sic] actually seen these documents.”

The New York Times report described how Comey shared the memos with senior F.B.I. officials. An unnamed associate of Comey’s read parts of one memo to a Times reporter.

That’s just idiotic. Various news agencies have verified through different sources that they exist. Apparently Chaffetz thinks it’s all “fake news.”

He’s reportedly going to Fox News so maybe he’s just practicing.

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Spooks are spooked

Published by digby on May 18, 2017

Spooks are spooked

by digby

The Israelis seem a tad perturbed about Trump:

Shabtai Shavit, who led the Mossad in the 1990s, said that were he in charge of the intelligence organization today, he would not be inclined to share more information with his American counterparts.

“If tomorrow I were asked to pass information to the CIA, I would do everything I could to not pass it to them. Or I would first protect myself and only then give it, and what I’d give would be totally neutered,” Shavit told The Times of Israel in a phone interview.

“If some smart guy decides that he’s allowed to leak information, then your partners in cooperation will be fewer or just won’t be at all,” he warned.

[…]

Another former head of the Mossad, Danny Yatom, said Israel should penalize the US over Trump’s leak because his acts could endanger Israeli sources.

“We need to punish the Americans, it’s possible, so that we don’t put Trump in a position where he is again tempted, we need to abstain from transferring information to him, or to only give him partial information so that he can’t endanger any source,” said Yatom, who headed the spy agency between 1999 and 2001.

Even though it is Trump’s right to declassify information, if he keeps doing it Israel will “stop sharing in the future,” he estimated, speaking in an interview with Radio 103 FM.

‘We have to reevaluate if we should pass along information and what information we should pass along to the Americans’

On Wednesday morning, the Yedioth Ahronoth daily quoted an unnamed Israeli intelligence official who said the country’s clandestine services could not continue passing along high value information until they are convinced that the United States can be trusted to protect it.

“We have to reevaluate if we should pass along information and what information we should pass along to the Americans. This is our greatest ally, and we share with them heaps of super-secret information,” the source said.

“Until we can be sure that this channel is absolutely secure, we must not hand over our crown jewels through it,” the official added.

Amnon Sofrin, a former head of the Mossad’s Intelligence Directorate, said on Wednesday that while the incident was troubling, he did not anticipate that it would have a tremendous effect on the overall relationship between Israeli and American security services.

“If this really happened and there is some reflection about the source, it can cause a big problem for us because it can put the source at risk and cause damage for our activities,” he said, in a phone briefing with the Israel Project.

“I don’t believe that [this] will cause such a big damage. It might cause small damage… but not a disaster,” Sofrin added.

In an apparent attempt to assuage concerns, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman took to Twitter on Wednesday morning with reassurances that Israeli-American security cooperation would continue to be “deep, significant and unprecedented in their scope and contribution to our strength.”

He added that he was certain that “the Mossad will do all in its power so that the source can keep giving information, but will try to extract him if need be.”

Earlier in the day, Likud MK Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet internal security service, downplayed the severity of the incident, describing it as part of the cost of doing spy business.

“I know of more than a few incident over the years, from different countries, in which they made use of intelligence in far more scandalous ways than how the media has described this,” Dichter, who chairs the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told Army Radio.

But Shavit, the former Mossad chief, scoffed at the notion that it was a one-off incident, chuckling when asked if it was the kind of thing that happened from time to time but was not necessarily indicative of a trend.

“It’s what? One hundred and twenty days since he got into the White House? Foul-up follows foul-up over there,” he said, referring to a number of embarrassing leaks and failures that have come out of the Trump administration.

‘Before he makes any decision, he posts on Twitter. Is that how you run a country? That’s not how you run a corner-store’

“[Trump] is trying to run the country like he ran his private company — and it doesn’t work. What can you do? It doesn’t work. That’s the source of the troubles,” Shavit said.

He also took Trump to task for his social media game.

“Before he makes any decision, he posts on Twitter. He tweets and then checks the responses in order to make his decision. Is that how you run a country?” Shavit asked. “That’s not how you run a corner store.”

Maybe these guys were talking out of school but that’s doubtful. It sounds as though someone wanted a message sent outside the normal channels.

The Israelis have been terrified of Trump’s lack of discipline from the beginning. It’s not that they don’t like his politics. I imagine the conservatives in the government are fine with them. It’s that he’s a childlike imbecile that freaks them out. They live in a dangerous neighborhood.

I would imagine the other middle east governments — hell the rest of the world — are equally freaked out and never more than they have been this week with the news that Trump blurted out secrets to Russian officials without knowing what the hell he was saying. (Or, even worse, knowing what he was saying.)

The world’s only superpower may never have been fully trusted but I don’t think the world thought up until now that it could be this out of control. We are much more dangerous than we’ve ever been.

And that makes everything more dangerous for Americans as well.

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