Month: July 2017

‘Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me? Am I a f***ing baby, Paul?’


by digby

Actually he is like a baby.

New gossip:

Author Joshua Green, a senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, writes that Christie had run against Trump for the Republican Presidential candidacy but quit in February last year after the New Hampshire primary.

The next month he shocked the Republican establishment by endorsing Trump and began leading his White House transition team.

According to ‘Devil’s Bargain’, Trump was in his War Room on election night when it started to look like he would pull of his shock victory.

The book says that ‘although he was surrounded by friends, aides and family members, there seemed to be a force field around him that discouraged a direct approach’.

Friends started congratulating Mike Pence instead and saluting him as ‘Mr Vice President’.

Trump sat down to ‘absorb the gravity of what was happening’ and a moment later Christie ‘burst through the force field and sat next to him’.

Christie said: ‘Hey Donald. The President talked to me earlier’ – the two had gotten to know each other after Superstorm Sandy. Christie said: ‘If you win he’s going to call my phone, and I’ll pass it over to you’.

Trump ‘flashed a look of annoyance, clearly resenting the intrusion’ and was repulsed by the idea of having somebody else’s phone next to his face.

Trump told Christie: ‘Hey Chris, you know my f***ing phone number. Just give it to the President. I don’t want your f***ing phone’.

Aides said that Christie’s move was the ‘ultimate mistake’ and one from which he ‘wouldn’t recover’.

Supposedly, it was because he is a germophobe and doesn’t like to handle other peoples phones.

The book also says he didn’t fire either Christie or Manafort himself — he had Kushner do it.

Manafort was hired by Trump as a campaign adviser last March but five months later, by which time he was the campaign manager, he was already out of favor.

The final straw was when the New York Times published a scathing article titled: ‘Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue’ which claimed aides were using TV interviews to give him their message rather than face to face meetings.

Rebekah Mercer, part of the family which had spent $3.4 million on Trump’s campaign, told him that ‘this thing is over if you don’t make a change fast’.

Trump admitted: ‘It’s bad’ but Mercer told him: ‘No, it’s not bad – it’s over, unless you make a change’.

She told him to bring in Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, a pollster and PR executive, and Trump agreed.

The following day at the National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump assembled his staff: Christie, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes, Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates. 

Kushner and Trump’s daughter Ivanka were away on a yachting trip in Croatia.

Trump shouted at Manafort: ‘How can anybody allow an article that says your campaign is all f***ed up? 

‘You think you’ve gotta go on TV to talk to me? You treat me like a baby!

‘Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me? Am I a f***ing baby, Paul?’ 

The room ‘fell silent’, ‘Devil’s Bargain’ says.

Manafort’s dismissal was hastened by a New York Times article that ran the next day saying that he had been paid $12.7 million from a pro Russian party from Ukraine.

Manafort had not only kept this secret from Trump but he had not even told his wife who ‘leaped up from the couch in fury’ when she she found out, the book claims.

Aides said that the story was the ‘kill shot’ for Manafort and that later that week when Kushner returned from vacation he told him:: ‘We’ve really got a problem here. You’re going to have to step down’.

Manafort objected because it would ‘look like I’m guilty’, the book says.

Kushner pressed him and said it ‘would be helpful if you stepped down’.

Manafort resisted and said: ‘Yes, but I can’t do that’.

The book says: ‘At this Kushner’s demeanour hardened and he glanced at his watch. ‘We’re putting out a press release at 9am that says you’ve resigned. That’s in 30 seconds’.

So Kushner got to off his enemy Christie. One can’t help but wonder if Manafort has some tales to tell about his enemy Kushner.

Sad, sad Spicey

by digby

How much more can he debase himself I wonder?

White House press secretary Sean Spicer returned to the podium to brief reporters on Monday, but the briefing remained off camera and out of the public eye.

The White House has not held a televised briefing since June 29. It was Spicer’s first time addressing reporters in the briefing room since June 26.

Here are the key moments from his return to the podium, which lasted about 30 minutes.

Spicer defended Donald Trump Jr.’s decision to meet a Russian lawyer last year in hopes of collecting opposition research about Hillary Clinton.

But his defense of the meeting became convoluted.

“It is quite often for people who are given information during the heat of a campaign to ask what that is, that’s what simply he did,” Spicer said. “The president’s made it clear through his tweet. And there was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for a discussion about adoption and the Magnitsky Act.”

Emails released by Trump Jr. show that the meeting was planned with the intention of obtaining damaging information about Clinton.

That is just pathetic.

And then there’s this:

Spicer defended Trump’s family members for manufacturing some products overseas, despite the fact that this is Made in America week at the White House.

“There are certain things that we may not have the capacity to do here in terms of having a plant or a factory that can do it,” Spicer said. “Some industries, some products may not have the scalability or the demand here in this country. … Think about all of the things that we buy everyday, of course there’s a market because we depend in this country for so many goods and services, some of which are made in America, some of which aren’t.”

“Obviously we want to create an environment in which more things are made here, more things are exported from here,” he added.

Fergawdsakes.

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“Watergate was what it was”

by digby

I highly recommend this interview with Elizabeth Drew by Susan Glasser at Politico Magazine. Drew wrote one of the seminal books about Watergate called “Washington Journals” which everyone should read if you want to to see how that scandal unfolded in real time. She’s watching the Trump scandals today with keen interest although she notes that times have changed and our political system is in a very different place making it much more difficult for it to function as it was intended.

“Watergate was what it was,” as Drew puts it.

Then again, not all of those conclusions could have been foreseen at the time. Back in 1974, Drew points out, the country seemed hopelessly divided into what we would now call Red and Blue America and everyone bemoaned what they saw as an unprecedented rift in the national polity. “I think if I had said then that Washington is going to get meaner and more partisan, people would have said, ‘I can’t believe that. That’s not going to happen,’“ Drew says.

But nonetheless that’s how it looks to her now—or even worse. At least, she says, Watergate showed that accountability was possible, and Congress could function the way the founders intended—a question that is still up in the air in the Trump era. “It was a very different kind of politics then. Bipartisanship was not the oddity. It was really the norm.”

And, if anything, Drew has come to believe that the Trump investigation could yield even more serious abuse of power or failure to execute the office than the years’ worth of Nixon probes. What’s more, the Russia scandal, she says, “is in many ways more complicated than Watergate was,” with billionaire Trump’s finances and those of his wealthy son-in-law, Jared Kushner, still to be examined, and multiple, rapidly proliferating lines of inquiry.

But a lot of what Drew has to say—and what re-reading her book in today’s Washington reinforces—is relevant both to Watergate-era D.C. and to the undoubtedly more noxious, and indisputably cruder, politics of Trump’s capital.

Three takeaways seem especially relevant as we wait to see what the Trump scandals will bring—and whether those who believe this presidency can’t possibly go on a full four years will be vindicated, or simply shown to be victims of liberal establishment wishful thinking, trapped in Watergate nostalgia because it offers a four-decade-old template for ousting an unpopular Republican president.

First, and perhaps most important, nothing in politics is inevitable. In hindsight, Watergate seemed like it had to result in Nixon’s ouster—but as Drew’s book shows, even days before the House Judiciary Committee voted on its historic articles of impeachment, key Republican members of Congress told her they weren’t sure they could really go through with it. As the tumultuous summer of 1974 played out, there were times when it even seemed, according to Drew’s sources, that Nixon might ride it out.

Second is that Congress remains the crucial check on the executive when dealing with presidential overreach—and all its hidden weaknesses, or strengths, will be revealed in such a crisis. House Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino is in many ways the hero of Drew’s tale, and in particular she praises him for running the impeachment process with the explicit goal of capturing the Democratic-controlled committee’s center—and corralling enough Republican votes to convince the public a bipartisan process had been held. “These politicians rose to it,” she recalls of a moment quite different from the politics that would face a GOP-controlled Congress today in dealing with allegations involving a Republican president. “I don’t know if they’re capable of it again, but they really did.”

Finally, never underestimate presidential hubris—or just plain stupidity.

“My stupid theory of the case is that they’ve done such dumb things since he was inaugurated and the dumbest of all was that historic night when he fired the FBI director. Now, Nixon was a much smarter man than Trump is. Nixon read books. Nixon thought. Nixon thought about policy. You could have a coherent conversation with Richard Nixon,” Drew says. “But they both made the same mistake, which was firing your prosecutor. That was really stupid.”

Read the whole thing. I have to say that one of the most astonishing aspects of this Trump presidency to me is the idea that we may very well have two such outrageously corrupt presidents in my lifetime. The system survived one but I don’t know if we’ll make it through this one. It’s almost as if this has happened on a continuum in which the polarization and sorting of the two parties inevitably would lead to sheer partisan power usurping the institutions that were built up through the centuries.

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Polling number OTD

by digby

They will follow him anywhere.

Now imagine if he really decides to go rogue.

I know.

Trump’s herrenvolk

by digby

I’m sick to death of reading about Trump voters as if they are the holy grail of politics. They are a distinct minority of people in this country and just because they managed to eke out a win for their malignant leader doesn’t mean that we have to hang on their every word.

Having said that, this article by Peter Hessler in the New Yorker about the Trump voters in rural Colorado is quite interesting. The angle is how Trump is transforming rural culture in America. Here’s a short excerpt:

Last October, three weeks before the election, Donald Trump visited Grand Junction for a rally in an airport hangar. Along with other members of the press, I was escorted into a pen near the back, where a metal fence separated us from the crowd. At that time, some prominent polls showed Clinton leading by more than ten percentage points, and Trump often claimed that the election might be rigged. During the rally he said, “There’s a voter fraud also with the media, because they so poison the minds of the people by writing false stories.” He pointed in our direction, describing us as “criminals,” among other things: “They’re lying, they’re cheating, they’re stealing! They’re doing everything, these people right back here!”

The attacks came every few minutes, and they served as a kind of tether to the speech. The material could have drifted off into abstraction—e-mails, Benghazi, the Washington swamp. But every time Trump pointed at the media, the crowd turned, and by the end people were screaming and cursing at us. One man tried to climb over the barrier, and security guards had to drag him away.

Such behavior is out of character for residents of rural Colorado, where politeness and public decency are highly valued. Erin McIntyre, a Grand Junction native who works for the Daily Sentinel, the local paper, stood in the crowd, where the people around her screamed at the journalists: “Lock them up!” “Hang them all!” “Electric chair!” Afterward, McIntyre posted a description of the event on Facebook. “I thought I knew Mesa County,” she wrote. “That’s not what I saw yesterday. And it scared me.”

Before Trump took office, people I met in Grand Junction emphasized pragmatic reasons for supporting him. The economy was in trouble, and Trump was a businessman who knew how to make rational, profit-oriented decisions. Supporters almost always complained about some aspect of his character, but they also believed that these flaws were likely to help him succeed in Washington. “I’m not voting for him to be my pastor,” Kathy Rehberg, a local real-estate agent, said. “I’m voting for him to be President. If I have rats in my basement, I’m going to try to find the best rat killer out there. I don’t care if he’s ugly or if he’s sociable. All I care about is if he kills rats.”

“Don’t worry, we only went out once. I never saw him naked—not until now, of course.”

After the turbulent first two months of the Administration, I met again with Kathy Rehberg and her husband, Ron. They were satisfied with Trump’s performance, and their complaints about his behavior were mild. “I think some of it is funny, how he doesn’t let people push him around,” Ron Rehberg said. Over time, such remarks became more common. “I hate to say it, but I wake up in the morning looking forward to what else is coming,” Ray Scott, a Republican state senator who had campaigned for Trump, told me in June. One lawyer said bluntly, “I get a kick in the ass out of him.” The calculus seemed to have shifted: Trump’s negative qualities, which once had been described as a means to an end, now had value of their own. The point wasn’t necessarily to get things done; it was to retaliate against the media and other enemies. This had always seemed fundamental to Trump’s appeal, but people had been less likely to express it so starkly before he entered office. “For those of us who believe that the media has been corrupt for a lot of years, it’s a way of poking at the jellyfish,” Karen Kulp told me in late April. “Just to make them mad.”

In Grand Junction, people wanted Trump to accomplish certain things with the pragmatism of a businessman, but they also wanted him to make them feel a certain way. The assumption has always been that, while emotional appeal might have mattered during the campaign, the practical impact of a Trump Presidency would prove more important. Liberals claimed that Trump would fail because his policies would hurt the people who had voted for him.

But the lack of legislative accomplishment seems only to make supporters take more satisfaction in Trump’s behavior. And thus far the President’s tone, rather than his policies, has had the greatest impact on Grand Junction. This was evident even before the election, with the behavior of supporters at the candidate’s rally, the conflicts within the local Republican Party, and an increased distrust of anything having to do with government. Sheila Reiner, a Republican who serves as the county clerk, said that during the campaign she had dealt with many allegations of fraud following Trump’s claims that the election could be rigged. “People came in and said, ‘I want to see where you’re tearing up the ballots!’ ” Reiner told me. Reiner and her staff gave at least twenty impromptu tours of their office, in an attempt to convince voters that the Republican county clerk wasn’t trying to throw the election to Clinton.

The Daily Sentinel publishes editorials from both the right and the left, and it didn’t endorse a Presidential candidate. But supporters picked up on Trump’s obsession with crowd size, repeatedly accusing the Sentinel of underestimating attendance at rallies. The paper ran a story about vandalism of political signs, with examples given from both campaigns, but readers were outraged that the photograph featured only a torn Clinton banner. The Sentinel immediately ran a second article with a photograph of a vandalized Trump sign. When Erin McIntyre described the Grand Junction rally on Facebook, online attacks by Trump supporters were so vicious that she feared for her safety. After three days, she deleted the post.

In February, a bill that was intended to give journalists better access to government records was introduced in a Colorado senate committee, which was chaired by Ray Scott, a Republican. The process was delayed for unknown reasons, and the Sentinel published an editorial with a mild prompt: “We call on our own Sen. Scott to announce a new committee hearing date and move this bill forward.” Scott responded with a series of Trump-style tweets. “We have our own fake news in Grand Junction,” he wrote. “The very liberal GJ Sentinel is attempting to apply pressure for me to move a bill.”

Jay Seaton, the Sentinel’s publisher, threatened to sue Scott for defamation. In an editorial, he wrote, “When a state senator accused The Sentinel of being fake news, he was deliberately attempting to delegitimize a credible news source in order to avoid being held accountable by it.” The Huffington Post and other national outlets mentioned the spat. When I met with Scott, he seemed pleased by the attention. A burly, friendly man who works as a contractor, he told me, “I was kind of Trumpish before Trump was cool.”

“We used to just take it on the chin if somebody said something about us,” he said. “The fake-news thing became the popular thing to say, because of Trump.” He believed that Trump has performed a service by popularizing the term. “I’ve seen journalists like yourself doing a better job,” Scott told me. He’s considering a run for governor, in part because of Trump’s example. “People are looking for something different,” he said. “They’re looking for somebody who means what they say.”

He is their safe space who allows them to believe whatever they want to believe because anything that doesn’t comport can be dismissed as “fake.” It must be so comforting.

The whole article is quite disturbing. I personally blame social media which is delivering what used to only be delivered by Fox and talk radio — alternate reality (Trump means what he says? In fact, he says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear. But you knew that) but in the hands of people you know and trust.  It’s also making it easy to organize your own fanatical group. The left is doing it too, of course. That’s the Resistance.This is the Counter-Resistance.

This is all very depressing. According to the article, these folks are still mourning the loss of Exxon jobs that left in 1982 — 35 years ago — and don’t want to work in the new industries like health care and education, probably because they don’t pay as well or have the same cachet as the macho oil field jobs. The loss of oil jobs has become a become an inter-generational identity.

This is not about issues, though, not really. I’m not even sure it’s about status. I think it might be just about alienation and loneliness. It seems to me that what these people were yearning for was a shared purpose, something they could do together. Trump activated that by naming and pointing at their common enemies. Us.

Trump let the raging right wing id out of the bottle, let it wail, made it fun, made it social, opened up a world in which they could all meet each other and share a communal space, free to let their freak flags fly unlike the greater world which circumscribes their true feelings.

Anyway, that’s about all the time I have this week for pondering that vast neediness of the Trump voter. It’s interesting, even necessary to look at it. But in the end, they are no more important than the Latino cook in New Mexico or the young female retail clerk in suburban Maryland or the African American insurance company manager in Illinois. This is a very big country and we all have our issues, we all have our needs. This focus on this one group is creating a sense that only they represent the true character of our country and everyone else is going to have to adjust to it.

No. The have the same rights and responsibilities as all Americans but they only represent themselves. There are hundreds of millions of us who don’t agree with them.

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Comic relief

by digby

Here are a couple of good ones from Daily Kos Comics on the Russia Scandal:

Seriously people…

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The president’s numbers are not bad? Sorry. They’re bad.

by digby

See no bots, hear no bots, speak no bots

by digby

This should be interesting. It possible that this guy knew absolutely nothing about the cyber-shannanigans during the presidential campaign that are attributed to Russian actors. But it’s a little bit hard to believe that he wouldn’t have had some suspicions.

On Friday, Trump’s bearded digital data guru Brad Parscale accepted an invitation to testify before the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation.

The committee is probing whether the Trump camp colluded with Russia in unleashing fake news and propaganda to undermine the candidacy of Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton. Parscale says he is unaware of any Russian involvement in Trump’s digital and data campaign.

Parscale is credited with persuading Trump to take digital seriously, and increase spending on the online campaign when it lagged far behind that of the Clinton effort. Unlike other key Trump officials, he has so far stayed out of the spotlight.

A Kansas native, Parscale coordinated Trump’s digital strategy from the San Antonio headquarters of his web marketing firm, Giles-Parscale.

According to a 2016 Wired profile, he started out with a $500 investment after graduating from Trinity University, cold calling potential clients before graduating to building websites for organizations including the Trump Winery and Eric Trump Foundation.

He told the magazine Trump gave “a farm boy from Kansas” a chance. “When I was successful, he continued to reward me over and over again, because I worked hard and produced success,” he said.

During the presidential campaign, the Trump camp paid a whopping $91 million to the firm, which prior to 2016 had no experience in political campaigning.

According to CNN, the campaign’s data operation helped it to figure out where Trump’s message was resonating in states such Michigan and Wisconsin, which were traditionally pro-Democrat but switched to the Republicans and handed Trump victory.

The campaign was sophisticated and carried on in a vast scale, running as many as 50,000 Facebook ads a day to establish which ones resonated best with voters, reported Wired, and paying for “dark posts” that are publically invisible and show up in a voter’s news feed.

He now works with the pro-Trump America First Policies non-profit group, which was created by Trump supporters to promote the administration’s policies.

Parscale rejects claims that Trump’s digital campaign, which was overseen by the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, colluded with Russia, providing them with voter data to target U.S. citizens with fake news and propaganda.

“The only collaboration I am aware of in the Trump digital campaign was with staff provided to the campaign by Facebook, Google and Twitter,” he said in Friday’s statement. “Those experts in digital marketing worked side-by-side with our teams from Giles-Parscale, the Republican National Committee, and Cambridge Analytica to run a professional and winning campaign.”

Kushner is himself a subject of interest to the FBI, which is probing meetings he held in December with a Russian banking CEO and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. in which he allegedly sought to establish a secret back channel to the Kremlin.

I’ve alays thought there was something very, very weird about them hiring this neophyte and Cambridge Analytica etc. Maybe we’ll get a clearer picture of what they were doing now.

More than just harsh language
by Tom Sullivan

Still from Aliens (1986). “What the hell are we supposed to use, man, harsh language?”

Something about how the audio-visual content of movies stores in my long-term memory makes it jump out in response to fresh stimuli. Like this scene with the space Marines from Aliens:

Hold that thought.

So a recent comment on social media got under my skin. Likely, the topic was defeating the Republican repeal of Obamacare. Someone was urging friends to write or call their senators to fight repeal. A respondent said it was pointless and/or unnecessary to call Democratic senators. From the tone of the reply, I gathered this was a more-progressive-than-thou progressive.

If they are Democrats, this person wrote, they should already know how I want them to vote. And if they don’t, they should lose their seat.

head : desk

Now, the last Democratic congressman who represented me was a Blue Dog. I know. But still a Democrat (80 percent of the time). Ahead of one important vote, I called his local office, told them what I thought, and asked the office manager how her calls were running.

Right wingers were lighting up the phones. Ten to one conservative-to-liberal, she said with an exasperated sigh, asking, “Where are the Democrats?!”

It is a small thing, but it matters. You can’t expect your Democratic representatives to fight for you without ammunition. They need those calls, those faxes and emails as tangible evidence of popular support for our positions and to change their minds when they need changing. (Plus, as members of the minority, they need the moral support.) The other team won’t be shy about making its presence felt. Congressmen and senators need active support to stiffen their spines and to help them hold their ground when challenged. Hullabaloo readers know this, but not everyone on my social media feed does: If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit.

Still from Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).

Really reaching back now. Sands of Iwo Jima, the old John Wayne film. Marines again. Three of them in a foxhole somewhere inland in a firefight with the Japanese. But they are running low on ammunition. Someone needs to fetch more. The layabout of the bunch bails out of the foxhole and runs back to the beach. But after grabbing the ammunition bandoliers, he passes a mortar team in the rear brewing fresh coffee. He asks for a cup, sits down, tips back his helmet, and relaxes to enjoy it. While he is living “the life of Riley,” his buddies run out of ammunition. They get overrun and bayoneted.

As we fight passage of Trumpcare, expecting electeds to read your mind and vote as you would want them to won’t cut it. Remind friends “sending good energy” won’t either. Don’t assume your Democratic representatives don’t need you actively to supply them with ammunition in the form of calls and massive stacks of letters and faxes.

Because what the hell are they supposed to use, man, harsh language?

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Speaking of stacks of faxes. Should you live in AK, NV, OH or WV, your fence-sitting GOP senators in particular might need to hear what you think about Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s “Better” plan to roll back Medicaid and leave millions of Americans uninsured. Over at Howie’s place there is some free advice on how to turn individual letters or calls from volunteers on your email list into a lasting impression.

I’m sure this is fine

by digby

If it didn’t affect the outcome of an election in which the winner won the electoral college by some very small voter margins in certain states while the loser had three million more votes, then it never will. So never mind:

To understand the scale of the hacking attempts against election systems in the 2016 presidential election, consider South Carolina.

On Election Day alone, there were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the state’s voter-registration system, according to a postelection report by the South Carolina State Election Commission.

And South Carolina wasn’t even a competitive state. If hackers were that persistent against a state that President Donald Trump won comfortably, with 54.9% of the vote, it suggests they may have targeted political swing states even more.

In harder-fought Illinois, for instance, hackers were hitting the State Board of Elections “5 times per second, 24 hours per day” from late June until Aug. 12, 2016, when the attacks ceased for unknown reasons, according to an Aug. 26, 2016, report by the state’s computer staff. Hackers ultimately accessed approximately 90,000 voter records, the State Board of Elections said.

Unlike in Illinois, South Carolina didn’t see evidence that any attempted penetration succeeded, said Chris Whitmire, the State Election Commission’s director of public information and training, last week. Most of the attempted intrusions in that state likely came from automated computer bots, not thousands of individual hackers.

“Security has been a top priority for the [State Election Commission] since implementing the statewide voting system in 2004,” Mr. Whitmire said about South Carolina.

“However, events leading up to the 2016 General Election, including the breaches of other states’ voter-registration systems, created an election-security environment that was very different,” he added.

South Carolina’s and Illinois’s cases aren’t unique, as many states faced virtual threats.

There is evidence that 21 states were potentially targeted by hackers, said Jeanette Manfra, acting deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity and communications at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last month.

Read the whole article. It goes into great detail about the attempts to hack the state and local election systems.

We have been assured that they didn’t succeed in any way so I guess that’s that. President Trump says there was no interference in the electoral process in any way and he plans to do nothing to curb it in the future. Republicans are blocking all efforts to find out what happened and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Indeed, their mission is to make it even harder for people to vote which would work very well as an adjunct to this program that screws with the voter rolls.

I’m sure that’s a coincidence.  They would never take advantage of such a program instituted by a foreign government. And if they did, there would be nothing wrong with it. That’s what they say anyway.

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