Month: May 2017

Oh my God, he’s going overseas now


by digby

I wrote about Trump’s loose lips for Salon today — and what they’re preparing for at the upcoming NATO summit.

Back in January, there was a little-noticed story among all the hubbub surrounding reports of Russian interference in the election and possible ties with the Trump campaign. YnetNews reported the following:

Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration as the next president of the United States is causing Israeli intelligence officials to lose sleep as well. Discussions held in closed forums recently raised fears of a leakage of Israeli intelligence top-classified information, clandestine modus operandi and sources, which have been exposed to the American intelligence community over the past 15 years, to Russia – and from there to Iran

The following month the Wall Street Journal reported this:

US intelligence officials have withheld sensitive intelligence from President Donald Trump because they are concerned it could be leaked or compromised, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter . . .

These reports were received in right wing circles as evidence of ongoing treason by the intelligence community. I recall coming across them and thinking that it seemed paranoid. It was hard to imagine that even Trump could be so dumb or craven as to give secret information to anyone, particularly to the Russian government. Sure, he had a thing for Putin and was precipitously tilting toward Russia for shallow and unstrategic reasons, but the presidency would have to sober him up and require him to operate in a more serious manner.

Nobody in their right minds could ever have believed that within four months Trump would unceremoniously fire the FBI Director over what he admitted were concerns about the Russia investigation and then, the next morning, meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office. The meeting had been previously scheduled, but it looked terrible. It looked even worse when the American press was kept out of the meeting while Russian government media were allowed in. they posted pictures of President Trump grinning like a jack-o’-lantern with Lavrov and a surprise guest at the meeting, Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the man at the very center of the Russia probes.

This was all so unbelievable that you had to wonder whether Trump had cooked up an elaborate trolling exercise designed to let investigators know that he was going to do whatever he wanted and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. As it turns out, receiving Lavrov was a favor to President Vladimir Putin, the man to whom Trump told CBS’ John Dickerson he just couldn’t say no.

None of that could have prepared us for what the Washington Post reported yesterday: Not only did Trump do all those things listed above, he also gave the Russian ambassador classified “codeword-protected” intelligence, putting some vital resources at risk and scaring the hell out of anyone who ever shared information with the U.S. government. If it were anyone but Donald Trump and his Keystone Kop White House, one would be forced to conclude that the president of the United States is an agent of the Russian government.

But this is Donald Trump, a man in so far over his head that it’s amazing he’s still breathing. The most likely explanation is that he’s just too ignorant to know what he was saying. By all accounts he refuses to sit still for briefings and demands that all reports be reduced to single-page bullet points. He has shown absolutely no willingness to bone up on necessary knowledge, he lies and exaggerates constantly and all you have to do is look at his Twitter feed to see that he is as impulsive and combative as a tween bully.

So it’s entirely predictable that he shot his mouth off to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador as a boast. According to the Post he said, “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day” and proceeded to blurt some out to prove it. His warm feelings toward Russia may have been the motivation:

Us intell official says trump was trying to show russians “how cooperative he wants to be with them” in fight against isis. @washingtonpost

— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) May 16, 2017

Those Russian officials were undoubtedly very pleased. They certainly were all smiles in the pictures. American allies and others who have cooperated with the U.S. in sharing intelligence probably weren’t quite so happy about it.

This bombshell couldn’t have come at a worse time. Trump is about to embark on his first international tour and it was already looking to be yet another humiliation for the United States. Foreign Policy reported Monday on the upcoming NATO meeting:

NATO is scrambling to tailor its upcoming meeting to avoid taxing President Donald Trump’s notoriously short attention span. The alliance is telling heads of state to limit talks to two to four minutes at a time during the discussion, several sources inside NATO and former senior U.S. officials tell Foreign Policy. And the alliance scrapped plans to publish the traditional full post-meeting statement meant to crystallize NATO’s latest strategic stance.

The heads of 28 NATO member states will be there and they’re all anticipating a meeting tailored to a petulant child who needs to be entertained:

“Even a brief NATO summit is way too stiff, too formal, and too policy heavy for Trump. Trump is not going to like that,” said Jorge Benitez, a NATO expert with the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

Organizers are scrapping the normal declaration that accompanies such meetings because they think Trump won’t be happy. You see, one of the primary reasons for NATO’s existence is its adversarial relationship to Russia and we all know how Trump feels about that.

After Trump’s shenanigans this past week, let’s just say that it’s unlikely anyone at the meeting will feel all that comfortable sharing anything but small talk with President Loose Lips. According to Foreign Policy:

“People are scared of his unpredictability, intimidated by how he might react knowing the president might speak his mind — or tweet his mind,” the former official said. Or, as another current senior NATO official put it before the meeting: “We’re bracing for impact.”

It’s best to keep your seatbelt fastened at all times. The turbulence gets worse every day.

.

Fireflies in a jar
by Tom Sullivan

By now you know Donald Trump blurted out sensitive information to the Russian foreign minister, the Russian ambassador (a known spy), and also to (no one seems to have paid much attention) the Russian press photographer they brought with them into the Oval Office, something that came as a surprise to the Trump White House. (Who was he and to whom does he report?)

Since the Washington Post broke the story, here is their lede:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

Here is a sampling of this morning’s other headlines on the story:

Trump’s trust problem
Politico

Trump Shared Classified Data With Russians, Officials Say
New York Times

The leakiest White House in history
The Week

Politico reports this problem as a crisis of trust:

“Their credibility is completely shattered. They’ve engaged in serial lying to the American people on issues big and small — beginning with the crowd size photos. It’s unprecedented for an administration, from the top on down, to embrace a strategy of deception and lying,” said Steve Schmidt, a Republican consultant and former campaign manager for John McCain.

“Even people who have built up reputations for integrity over a lifetime of public service, they risk squandering it in this administration,” Schmidt said.

The problem with these and most Trump stories is, because Donald J. Trump is president of the United States, reporters — all of us — reflexively try to understand him as we would another mature adult. We want to divine his motives, see the deeper meaning in them, ask ourselves just where he is going with this. We want learned analysts to examine the implications of Trump’s lack of preparation. It makes for better reading and better understanding. It makes for … normal. Even we who have no respect for the man have a vestigial respect for the office and the officeholder. Therein lies our error.

David Brooks concedes the point this morning in a column titled “When the World Is Led by a Child“:

At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.

First, most adults have learned to sit still. But mentally, Trump is still a 7-year-old boy who is bouncing around the classroom. Trump’s answers in these interviews are not very long — 200 words at the high end — but he will typically flit through four or five topics before ending up with how unfair the press is to him.

[…]

We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.

David Roberts wrote at Vox before this story broke:

We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him. It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next.

But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there’s no there there? What if our attempts to explain Trump have failed not because we haven’t hit on the right one, but because we are, theory-of-mind-wise, overinterpreting the text?

In short, what if Trump is exactly as he appears: a hopeless narcissist with the attention span of a fruit fly, unable to maintain consistent beliefs or commitments from moment to moment, acting on base instinct, entirely situationally, to bolster his terrifyingly fragile ego.

We’re not really prepared to deal with that.

Trump came to political prominence by stoking the paranoid fringe with the kooky notion that Barack Obama could not legitimately be president because he was born in Kenya. Now a superpower is being led by a man Roberts describes as having “the emotional maturity and attention span of a 6-year-old.” Trump himself cannot legitimately be president because developmentally he never reached 35 years of age.

The root question to which there seems no answer is: Is Trump a six-year-old? Or seven? Or ten? It is a question we as a country lack the nerve to confront directly. We are in danger.

“Unimaginative and incoherent” economic policy? Say it ain’t so.

by digby

Copyright 1930

This is what people are writing and saying about our ignorant president:

This week, The Economist published an in-depth interview with Donald Trump about his economic policy. The piece, which described Trump’s economic strategy as “unimaginative and incoherent,” picked up a lot of attention. The president’s speech was riddled with falsehoods and confusion, drawing critics and social media commentators out of the woodwork.

At one point in the interview, Trump claimed to have invented the economics term “priming the pump.” The term that has actually been widely used for more than 80 years, so of course, Twitter responded:

Trump claims he invented the phrase, “Prime the pump.”  Soon he will invent the phrase “Dibs on the top bunk.”  #TrumpRussia

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) May 12, 2017

From what I hear, trump coined the phrase “prime the pump” over dinner with Frederick Douglass just before the Bowling Green massacre.

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) May 11, 2017

The Economist’s own analysis was even more scalding than the snarky tweets. The magazine declared: “The impulsiveness and shallowness of America’s president threaten the economy as well as the rule of law.” The article goes on to compare Trump to a modern-day Henry VIII, which is never a good thing: “Donald Trump rules over Washington as if he were a king and the White House his court. His displays of dominance, his need to be the centre of attention and his impetuousness have a whiff of Henry VIII about them. Fortified by his belief that his extraordinary route to power is proof of the collective mediocrity of Congress, the bureaucracy and the media, he attacks any person and any idea standing in his way.”

Ouch.

We at The World have been somewhat obsessed with this interview, and we were dying to hear more. So we spoke to The Economist’s Washington bureau chief David Rennie, who was on the team of four reporters that conducted the interview. Rennie, with his classic British understatement, confessed that Trump’s responses to questions of trade and fiscal policy were “not 100 percent reassuring.” 

The World: What did Trump say that made you nervous?

David Rennie: On trade deals, for example, he seems to think that if there’s a deal between, say, Mexico and America, if the Mexicans seem to be doing well out of the deal at all, then that shows you that others are taking advantage of America. And that’s just not how trade works. 

[This is exactly right. If you paid attention to what he said during the campaign and over the years prior it was obvious that his only criteria is that it’s not enough for Americans to win, the rest of the world must also lose. That’s it. That’s the extent of his trade “policy.” This is how his mind is organized.]

We asked him about the whole saga of how he was on the very point of withdrawing from NAFTA. He told us the back story, that he’d been ready to do it, but then he’d had a nice phone call from the prime minister of Canada and the president of Mexico. And they asked him “could you think again? Maybe we should renegotiate instead of withdraw completely?” And so out of respect for them, he agreed to do that.

Now that’s actually slightly different from the story that we heard from people in the inner circle who said it was a lot more chaotic as a process. 

TW: What did you learn about how Trump’s NAFTA about-face actually went down?

DR: So we heard some fairly startling stories. From our other interviews, we learned that the reason the Canadians and the Mexicans called the president was that people in the inner circle of team Trump were very anxious about what was about to go down. They called [Canada and Mexico] and said, “You need to call [the president]. Right now.”

People inside the White House also called the new Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. Perdue had only been confirmed, like, a day or two earlier. And they called him in, [saying], “You need to come over here now! You need to! He’s about to withdraw from NAFTA.”

So Sonny Perdue literally asked his staff to draw up a map of the bits of America that had voted for Donald Trump and the bits of America that do well from exporting grain and corn through NAFTA. [The map] showed how these two areas often overlap. So he went in, said to Donald Trump, “Actually, Trump America, your voters, they do pretty well out of NAFTA.” And the president said, “Oh. Then maybe I won’t withdraw from NAFTA.”
TW: So this interview was in the Oval Office. What did the atmosphere there feel like?

DR: It’s kind of like being in a royal palace several hundred years ago, with people coming in and out, trying to catch the ear of the king. That’s the feel at the Trump Oval Office. He likes to be surrounded by his courtiers.
TW: Your magazine described it as being a little bit like Henry VIII.

DR: There is a “Tudor court” side to it. And the role of some pretty senior figures, including cabinet secretaries, was to chime in and agree with whatever the president had just said, rather than offering candid advice.

There was a moment with Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary.

We were talking [to Trump] about China and currency manipulation. On the campaign trail, Trump was very ferocious about [calling China a currency manipulator.] [In our interview], he said, “As soon as I started talking about China being a currency manipulator, they cut it out.” Actually that’s not true. China [stopped manipulating the currency] two or three years ago.

What was striking was, when he made that point, Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, chimed in and said, “Oh yeah. The day he became president, they changed their behavior!” And factually, that’s just not right. It’s quite striking to see a cabinet secretary making that point in that way.
TW: Did you get any evidence of the schism between Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner?

DR: A lot of the reporting has said that there are two completely different factions [in Trump’s inner circle]: One is a moderate, globalist one led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. And then the other is a dark, nationalist, angry view [led by his chief strategist Steve Bannon.] And somehow, those two factions are locked in a fight that one of them might win and then set the policy.

We came away with a different impression.

Fundamentally, Donald Trump is a nationalist with a grievance. He thinks that the world has taken advantage of America for too long, and it’s time for America to be tougher and gruffer and more assertive and more selfish.

If there are different voices, it’s a question of tactics, of “how do you cut the best deal?” Do you bang your fist on the table? Or do you offer concessions? That’s where the schism is. I don’t think that a globalist, moderate wing is somehow going to win the argument and change Donald Trump. He is who he is.

And, by the way, he has said many times that he would use the military to those ends. [See: his comments on the South China Sea…]

.

QOTD: Ana Navarro

by digby

On The Lead with Jake Tapper:

To me it feels like [Republicans] have fallen prey to a Donald Trump cult.They are ceding their loyalty not to the constitution, not to the country, not to their constituents but to this president of their party but who wasn’t even a Republican until a few years ago. They’ so desperate to want to play, to want to be invited to dinner at the white house that they are willing  to remain silent in the face of a president who is attacking our institutions.

I thought what James Clapper said yesterday, that our institutions are being attacked both externally and internally, was spine chilling. And it’s something that we should take so seriously. This president started off by attacking the Intelligence Community. He has tweeted against judges. He has tweeted intimidation to Sally Yates on the day of her testimony. He has tweeted a veiled threat to the former FBI Director.

So I have to ask Republicans over and over again. What is it going to take for you to wake up and recognize your duty is to country and not to this one man. How far does it have to go? What does he have to do for you to wake up and speak up and do what you need to do?

That’s a very good question. It’s clear they aren’t there yet. And one cannot help but worry that “what it will take” is something so catastrophic that it will be too late.

Update: She said this an hour before the latest info about Trump spilling secrets to the Russian ambassador broke.

I’ll bet she’s drinking a tall Mojito right about now.

.

He was just bragging about his big, swinging, intel is all

by digby

Light Treason

The Washington Post just reported:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information Trump relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

The revelation comes as Trump faces rising legal and political pressure on multiple Russia-related fronts. Last week, he fired FBI Director James B. Comey in the midst of a bureau investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trump’s subsequent admission that his decision was driven by “this Russia thing” was seen by critics as attempted obstruction of justice.

One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — a key figure in earlier Russia controversies — into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details about an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

[…]

“It is all kind of shocking,” said a former senior U.S. official close to current administration officials. “Trump seems to be very reckless, and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it’s all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.”

In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” Trump said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States only learned through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence gathering method, but described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

The Washington Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.

“Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said that the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russia’s presence in Syria. Moscow and would be keenly interested in identifying that source and possibly disrupting it.

There’s more at the link. Read it all. It’s more than a little bit disturbing.

And it raises the question once again about why he invited the Russian ambassador and the foreing minister to meet like this in the first place and kept the appointment even after he fired Comey.

I don’t know if he’s just an imbecile or something more sinister but it’s hard to imagine him doing anything more suspicious that what he has done.

My God.

.

What Trump and Putin really have in common

by digby

… they are both spoiled little tweens at heart who refuse to take responsibility for their shortcomings:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday an impromptu piano rendition he gave on the sidelines of a meeting in Beijing had been hampered by an out of tune instrument.

Putin was captured on camera on Sunday sitting down at a grand piano in a Chinese state residence, and performing a few slightly hesitant chords of two popular Soviet-era compositions, “Moscow Windows” and “Evening Song.”

Asked at a news briefing in Beijing on Monday about his performance, Putin said he had just been idly toying around with the keys while he waited for his meeting to start with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of an international forum.

“It’s a pity that the piano was out of tune,” Putin said. “It was quite hard to play, even for me, someone who plays with two fingers. I cannot say I played, I was just pressing the keys with two or three fingers.

“I thought that if Mr Peskov is filming, it’s probably for personal use, for the archive,” Putin said, referring to his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. “But they decided to post it. But never mind. I think I didn’t let you down.”

It could have been Trump except that Trump would have said he’s the greatest pianist since Shostakovich. Or more likely, Liberace who is undoubtedly the only pianist Trump has ever heard of.

.

Even the military wives…

by digby

Good lord. Amanda Marcotte’s Salon piece today about what some people say about military wives is just stomach churning. They call them “The Dependas”:

But while most of the military is gracious towards the long-suffering spouses of servicemen and women, there is a dark counter-narrative that percolates through military circles, both online and off. According to purveyors of this counter-narrative, all too many military wives are gold-digging sluts. Some portray the ranks of military wives as stuffed full of “dependas,” which is military slang for a wife who leeches off her hard-working husband, sucking him and the government dry — and then who has the nerve to complain about not getting even more, or even to sleep around behind his back.

This stereotype is perpetuated by word of mouth, of course, but also through social media, primarily Facebook pages dedicated to public shaming of women deemed “dependas.” Facebook pages like Dear Dependa, The Dependapotamus, AntiDependa and Dependa World have amassed thousands of followers by posting memes and stories that paint military wives as arrogant, overweight, lazy and unfaithful parasites who only married their husbands for the benefits. The sites are typically illustrated with pictures like this, from AntiDependa:

The worst possible choice for FBI Director

by digby

I wrote about Trump’s casting call for the top G-Man for Salon this morning:

It’s hard to know what the next big dramatic turn in President Donald Trump’s reality series will be. He’s always got a surprise or two up his sleeve. The casting of the new FBI director certainly has everyone on the edge of their seats. Remember that Trump does indeed “audition” people for these jobs, rather than vet them, and chooses them for their looks and personality rather than their experience or qualifications. So some of the people on his supposed list are very unlikely choices. I would guess that a woman, for instance, wouldn’t have the image he seeks in an FBI director.

Oh my (Mike, Joe and Kellyanne)

by digby

The knives are really coming out:

“This is a woman, by the way, who came on our show during the campaign and would shill for Trump in extensive fashion,” Brzezinski said. “And then she would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off and she would say, ‘Blech, I need to take a shower,’ because she disliked her candidate so much.”

“And also said, it was very interesting, also said that, ‘This is just like my summer in Europe,’” Scarborough said.

“I’m just doing this for the money,” Brzezinski interjected.

“‘I’ll be off this soon.’ I don’t know that she ever said ‘I’m doing this for the money,’” Scarborough said. “But she said, ‘This is just my summer vacation, my summer in Europe and basically I’m just going to get through this.’”

“‘But first I have to take a shower because it feels so dirty to be saying what I’m saying.’ I guess she’s just used to it now,” Brzezinski said.

Scarborough said that after the Washington Post published a recording of predatory comments Trump made about women in a 2005 conversation with a former “Access Hollywood” host, Conway began to distance herself from him.

“That’s when she started referring to Donald Trump as—” he began.

“Her client,” Brzezinski said.

“‘My client,’” Scarborough said. “Separating. ‘I don’t believe in this guy. He’s just my client. It’s just a paycheck.’”

Normally, I’d find this sort of thing distasteful. But in this case it’s a public service. Any dissension they can sow in the Trump administration is probably a good thing.

Conway is fully entangled in the administration with her husband also serving in the Department of Justice with Jeff Sessions so she can’t really say anything even if she leaves to spend more time with her family. This won’t be comfortable for her.

I don’t feel sorry for her. She’s been a malevolent presence in politics for many a year and her contribution to the Trump campaign will put her in the history books. And not in a good way.

.

Office space
by Tom Sullivan

Ken Starr was an independent counsel. A very special independent counsel. You may have heard of him. He wrote this report. A fetish, softcore porn kind of thing. It was a best seller or something.

But as special as he was, as independent as he was, as relentless as he was, Ken Starr doesn’t think deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should appoint a special counsel now to look into possible collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russians. Because as Ken Starr well knows, there’s no telling what else might turn up on Trump.

(Republicans fear that, LOLGOP observes, “because uncovering what he’s done might require they take a stand.” LOLGOP believes an independent investigation offers false relief from anxiety, anxiety having a way of focusing the mind — and the opposition.)

So current investigations by the Republican-controlled congress should go forward, Starr believes, and FBI investigators should be allowed to do their work. Because while independent counsels are busy scrutinizing, they themselves may come under scrutiny, m’kay? Plus, they are expensive.

Starr told George Stephanopoulos on This Week:

And I’ll just say this, there’s some huge costs. And I think the nation knows this. With the appointment of a special prosecutor. The first is delay. A special prosecutor, a special counsel, is a startup operation. He or she has nothing, absolutely nothing. Got to go get office space, among other things.

But here’s the key, the FBI is going the continue to serve whoever that special counsel is, heaven forbid if we have one. And moreover, that special counsel is likewise going to come under political scrutiny. I can speak for that. Lawrence Walsh in Iran Contra can speak to that. There is no way to insulate an investigation at this level from criticism and the like.

So, let’s trust our guardrails, let’s trust the checks and balances that we have, especially with the Senate intelligence committee. And, again, I think we should be reassured when you have got Chairman Burr and Senator Warner, both very of whom very respected members of the senate, both saying, Democrat and Republican, we’re going to get to the truth of the matter.

I suppose we’ll just have to wait for the start of Trump’s War™ to appoint a special counsel. Because every war is a startup where cost is no object, delays are expected, and office space we pay private contractors an exorbitant markup to build badly, tear down, and build again, or we simply confiscate space from the locals. Problem solved.

Except for the problem of stopping the guy in charge before he starts the war.