Month: July 2018

I’m Afraid It’s Only A Matter of Time 

by tristero

Here on Hullabaloo, Tom Sullivan recently posted a tweet informing us that Trump supporter Michael Scheuer, an ex-CIA spook, bestselling author and world-class paranoid approvingly mentioned the growing interest on the right in assassinating those opposed to Trump:

As this week’s end, it seems likely that it is quite near time for killing those involved in the multiple and clearly delineated attempts to stage a coup d’état against the legitimately elected [sic] Trump government and thereby kill our republic. 

Finally, this week saw a significant and quickening advance toward the moment when those millions of well-armed citizens who voted for Trump, and who have been abused or wounded by Democrats, their Antifa-thugs, and their thug-civil servants for exercising their franchise to elect Trump, cannot be, in good conscience, patient for much longer.

Fortunately, they have in hand a long and very precise list of the names and photographs…

That’s right. Scheur even provided a list of people who it is “quite near time to kill.”

A day later, I came across this:

As Occupy Ice camps continue to spread across the US, some activists have warned that they have been subjected to intimidation by armed, Trump-supporting counter-protesters… 

American Action Force 3% members arrived at the Occupy Ice Louisville camp, outside the city’s Ice building, early on 14 July. Many in the group were carrying guns.

As Chekov memorably said, “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” In this case, the “stage” is ICE protests. But, to paraphrase another dramatist, in Trump’s reality-show America, any action protesting Trump is potentially a stage, and we are but targets.

It is my sincere hope that I am wrong but I’m afraid Charlottesville was a prelude.

Trump boosts manufacturing of orphans
by Tom Sullivan

The Trump administration has returned only a small fraction of separated children to their parents.

The court-imposed deadline is less than a week away for the Trump administration to reunite migrant families it forcibly separated a the border as part of its “zero tolerance” approach to refugees. The administration missed a deadline last week for reuniting children under five with their parents. Of the more than twenty-five hundred children in government detention, only 450 between the ages of 5 and 17 have reunited with their parents ahead of the July 26 deadline.

The Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security that found it easy to take children from their parents’ arms at U.S.-Mexico border stations find it much more difficult to reunite them. DHS personnel admitted weeks ago that records linking parents and their children have disappeared and in some case destroyed (a DHS spokesperson disputes this). HHS requested volunteers to help pore through case records to match children with their parents.

The Trump administration admitted Thursday while it had found 1,606 parents “potentially eligible” for reunification with their children, another 900 have been classified ineligible.

CNN reported on Thursday:

Of the parents the government claims are ineligible for reunification, two are in state or federal custody, 136 “waived” reunification rights when interviewed, 91 had a criminal record or were otherwise deemed ineligible. But, the largest group — mostly likely to cause further questions — are 679 that require “further evaluation.”

Talking Points Memo adds:

On Monday, an HHS official took the witness stand and revealed under questioning that the administration has not been able to identify the parents of 71 children. There is no reference to that group in Thursday’s filing. The filing also contained no information about parents who have already been deported without their children. The administration promised to provide that data to the court and the ACLU sometime on Friday, including the date of the deportation, the parents’ home country, and the last place they were detained in the United States.

In the same joint status report, the American Civil Liberties Union complained that the government has refused to give them the information it needs to contact parents and inform them of their legal rights. In particular, the attorneys say they are concerned about the roughly 700 parents in the class who have a final order of removal, and may be swiftly deported just after they are reunified.

Thus, Trump’s America treats destitute refugees seeking asylum by making orphans of their children.

Barbara Hines, a retired clinical law professor from the University of Texas School of Law, describes for the Austin American-Statesman the detention system for asylum seekers as the tip of the iceberg in a sprawling system of mostly for-profit private facilities housing 40,000 immigrants daily:

An utter lack of transparency and incompetence have been hallmarks of detention. The disorganized reunification process of separated children is clear evidence. The focus on abducted children has highlighted problems that immigration advocates — including myself — have complained about for years. Abhorrent conditions, sexual abuse, inadequate food, lack of medical care and deaths in detention have been repeatedly documented. Although nothing in the system changes, the administration has pushed for expanded and longer detention.

Immigrants arrested in South Texas have always been held in freezing and crowded cage-like cells. Only now has this hidden gulag sprung into public vision.

In most facilities, immigrants in the so-called civil system are clothed in prison jump suits. They are transferred at will across the country from one detention center to another, even when they have legal representation. For example, separated parents were moved from Laredo, Texas, to Tacoma, Washington. Indigenous-language speakers cannot convey their legal claims or find their children. There are insufficient interpreters for this population, and phone interpretation lines are frequently broken. Attorneys must communicate with clients by leaving messages that may never be delivered. Waiting times to see clients can be up to three hours, and attorneys must share the few available visitation rooms. At the Hutto Detention Center in Taylor, where many separated mothers were incarcerated, the visitation rooms consist of see-through plastic cubicles that are not soundproof.

Despite the similarities with the prison model, immigrants are not entitled to court-appointed lawyers. This makes navigating the immigration court system nearly impossible for most immigrants.

Emma Platoff of the Texas Tribune on Thursday posted a Twitter thread of court documents in which detainees confirm what Hines’s experience: detainees signing documents they cannot read; no legal assistance; denial of requests for asylum processing, etc.

National Public Radio last night ran a story of a woman Lourdes (last name withheld) who had a “credible fear” hearing with an asylum officer in El Paso:

Back in 2012, Lourdes says, she owned a small clothing store in Honduras. A local gang tried to extort money from her — money she didn’t have.

“Four people came into my store, with their faces covered,” Lourdes said. They beat her, and burned her arm with acid, she said, and damaged her left hand so severely that four fingers had to be amputated.

She went into hiding for five years. When she emerged, she says, the gang found her and threatened to kill her. The asylum officer in El Paso denied her claim. She is scheduled for deportation.

“The Trump administration is trying to send a message to asylum seekers,” said Carlos Moctezuma Garcia, an immigration lawyer in McAllen, Texas. “Perhaps we will reunify you. But we’ll reunify you on the plane back to your home country, without allowing you to present your full case before an immigration judge,” Garcia said.

Garcia says he recently visited the ICE facility in Port Isabel, Texas, where some of his clients are detained. Out of 76 women in the cell block, Garcia says, his clients told him that only 8 had passed the credible fear screening.

L. Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, testified before Congress in May that he wants to curtail “frivolous filings.” Many smugglers, traffickers, and criminals, he said, are exploiting the system, creating “lingering backlogs can be exploited and used to undermine national security and the integrity of the asylum system.” His testimony provided no data to establish the scope of the problem.

Is is a “get tough” argument similar to that used to erect barriers to voting in the name of election integrity. God forbid any who cheat get through the net – we cannot say how few. Better to make the barriers higher for everyone. “Zero tolerance” is not simply a policy, but an authoritarian mindset.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

I think we all need a little cute this week:

Have a soothing week-end everyone. It looks like the next week is going to be just as wild as the last one.

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Republicans are not enablers. They are accomplices.


by digby

I’m just going to post this Michelle Goldberg column and add a big +1000:

Of all the interlocking mysteries of the Trump-Russia scandal, one that I’ve found particularly perplexing is the utter servility of congressional Republicans before a president many of them hate and believe to be compromised by a foreign power.

Yes, I know they’re thrilled about tax cuts and judges. Given how Russia has become a patron of the right globally over the last decade, some Republicans might welcome its intervention into our politics, believing that the Democrats are greater enemies of the Republic. And some are just cowards, afraid of mean tweets or base blowback.

But that doesn’t explain why, for example, Speaker Paul Ryan, a Russia hawk who is retiring in January, allowed his party to torpedo the House Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian interference in the election. Ryan, after all, knows full well who and what Donald Trump is. In a secretly recorded June 2016 conversation about Ukraine, obtained by The Washington Post, the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, said, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Far from disagreeing, Ryan said, “What’s said in the family stays in the family.” If he were patriotic — or even if he just wanted to set himself up for a comeback should Trump implode — he would have stood up for the rule of law in the Russia inquiry. It’s hard to see what he got in return for choosing not to.

This week, however, a new possibility came into focus. Perhaps, rather than covering for Trump, some Republicans are covering for themselves.

Last Friday, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, indicted 12 members of Russian military intelligence for their interference in the 2016 election. The indictment claims that in August 2016, Guccifer 2.0, a fictitious online persona adopted by the Russian hackers, “received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress.” The Russian conspirators obliged, sending “the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.” Congress has, so far, done nothing discernible to find out who this candidate might be.

Then, on Monday, we learned of the arrest of Maria Butina, who is accused of being a Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association, the most important outside organization in the Republican firmament. Legal filings in the case outline a plan to use the N.R.A. to push the Republican Party in a more pro-Russian direction.

Butina, 29, appears to have worked for Alexander Torshin, a Russian politician linked to organized crime who is the target of U.S. sanctions. She developed a romantic relationship with Paul Erickson, a conservative operative close to the N.R.A. (Court filings cite evidence it was insincere on her part.) Erickson, in turn, wrote to a Trump adviser in May 2016 about using the N.R.A. to set up a back channel to the Kremlin.

The young Russian woman clearly understood the political significance of the N.R.A. In one email, court papers say, she described the central “place and influence” of the N.R.A. in the Republican Party. Through her pro-gun activism, she became a fixture of the conservative movement and was photographed with influential Republican politicians. A Justice Department filing quotes Torshin as comparing her to another young, famous Russian agent: “You have upstaged Anna Chapman. She poses with toy pistols, while you are being published with real ones.”

If the N.R.A. as an organization turns out to be compromised, it would shake conservative politics to its foundation. And this is no longer a far-fetched possibility. “I serve on both the Intelligence Committee and the Finance Committee,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, told me. “So I have a chance to really look at this through the periscope of both committees. And what I have wondered about for some time is this whole issue of whether the N.R.A. is getting subverted as a Russian asset.”

This is not a question that Republicans are eager to answer. Before Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee abruptly closed their investigation into Russian election interference, committee Democrats wanted to interview both Butina and Erickson. Their Republican colleagues refused. “If there were efforts towards a back channel towards the N.R.A., they didn’t want to know,” Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who is the ranking member on the committee, told me. “It was too hot to handle.”

It is not surprising that Republicans would want to protect the N.R.A. According to an audit obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics, the N.R.A.’s overall spending increased by more than $100 million in 2016. “The explosion in spending came as the N.R.A. poured unprecedented amounts of money into efforts to deliver Donald Trump the White House and help Republicans hold both houses of Congress,” the center wrote.

McClatchy has reported that the F.B.I. is investigating whether Torshin illegally funneled money to the N.R.A. to help Trump. Wyden has also been trying to trace foreign money flowing into the N.R.A., but has found little cooperation from the organization, his Republican colleagues or the Treasury Department.

“The fact is, the N.R.A. has flipped their position more times than a kid does on a summer diving board,” Wyden said of the organization’s conflicting responses to his inquiries. At this point, the N.R.A. has acknowledged receiving just over $2,500 from Russians or people living in Russia, mostly for dues payments and magazine subscriptions. But that doesn’t tell us anything about money that might have been routed through shell companies, like, for example, Bridges, the limited liability corporation that Butina and Erickson set up in South Dakota in February 2016. 

Wyden said Republicans on the Intelligence Committee have thwarted his attempts to look deeply into the Russian money trail. “The Intelligence Committee has completely ducked for cover on follow-the-money issues,” he said. (As it happens, Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, is one of Congress’s leading recipients of N.R.A. support.)

On Monday, a few hours after news broke of Butina’s arrest, the Treasury Department announced a new rule sparing some tax-exempt groups, including the N.R.A., from having to report their large donors to the I.R.S. Wyden called the move “truly grotesque,” saying it would “make it easier for Russian dark money” to flow into American politics. You might ask who benefits. The answer is: not just Trump.

Yep.

And for a lot of reasons. 

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Nothing and Everything

by digby

A new poll asked what people would say is the worst thing about the Trump administration and this is the word cloud that came of it:

They also asked what was the best thing:

Aaaand, there’s this:

Nearly half of the respondents (49 percent) said they agreed with assessments that Trump’s performance at the summit could be described as “treasonous.” That included 21 percent of Republican respondents. By contrast, a mere quarter (27 percent) of respondents disagreed with the assessment of treasonous behavior.

The findings are the latest in a round of highly critical reviews of the president’s performance, during which he criticized U.S. law enforcement, lashed out at special counsel Robert Mueller, and dismissed the American intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia undermined the 2016 U.S. presidential election. According to the pool, 49 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that Trump is “too deferential” towards Putin, including 69 percent of Democrats and one third of Republicans.

Respondents also said that the summit failed to serve America’s larger geopolitical interests. Only five percent of Americans think the United States benefited from the summit more than Russia, while a third of the public (34%) said the summit was more beneficial to Russia than to the United States. Sixteen percent think that the summit was not beneficial to either country.

Although Trump has repeatedly questioned that Putin meddled in the 2016 campaign, the majority of Americans believe that the Kremlin has not made its last foray into election espionage.

More than half, 51 percent, believe that Russia will interfere in the U.S. midterm elections, with 70 percent of Democrats convinced that the Kremlin will engage in a repeat attack and 37 percent of Republicans agreeing. Just a quarter of those polled believe that the Trump administration is able to prevent those threats.

That sounds like a problem to me.

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Kompromat and sistema, oh my

by digby

Adam Davidson has a theory about Trump and his bff Putin:

The former C.I.A. operative Jack Devine watched Donald Trump’s performance standing next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, and his first thought was, “There is no way Trump is a Russian agent.” The proof, he told me, was right in front of us. If Trump were truly serving as a Russian intelligence asset, there would have been an obvious move for him to make during his joint press conference with Putin. He would have publicly lambasted the Russian leader, unleashing as theatrical a denunciation as possible. He would have told Putin that he may have been able to get away with a lot of nonsense under Barack Obama, but all that would end now: America has a strong President and there will be no more meddling. Instead, Trump gave up his single best chance to permanently put to rest any suspicion that he is working to promote Russian interests.

During a three-decade career in intelligence, Devine ran the C.I.A.’s effort to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, and then served as the No. 2 (and, briefly, acting head) of its clandestine service. Along the way, he tangled with, and carefully studied, Russian intelligence officers. He was involved in two major hunts for American intelligence operatives who were secretly working for the K.G.B.: Devine was the supervisor of Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who pleaded guilty to spying for Moscow in 1994, and he oversaw the investigation of Robert Hanssen, the F.B.I. counterintelligence officer who confessed to being a double agent in 2001. Hanssen, for instance, was like Trump, narcissistic, with a broad set of grievances about the many ways that his special qualities were not being recognized. But, unlike Trump, he harbored those grievances quietly and found satisfaction in secretly upending the system in which he operated. Trump shows no signs that he can be gratified by secret triumphs. He seems to need everyone, everywhere, to see whatever it is that he thinks deserves praise. His need for public attention is a trait that would likely cause most spies to avoid working with Trump.

There is no need to assume that Trump was a formal agent of Russian intelligence to make sense of Trump’s solicitousness toward Putin. Keith Darden, an international-relations professor at American University, has studied the Russian use of kompromat—compromising material—and told me that he thinks it is likely that the President believes the Russians have something on him. “He’s never said a bad word about Putin,” Darden said. “He’s exercised a degree of self-control with respect to Russia that he doesn’t with anything else.” Darden said that this is evidence that Trump isn’t uniformly reckless in his words: “He is capable of being strategic. He knows there are limits, there are bounds on what he can say and do with respect to Russia.”

Because the word kompromat is new to most Americans, and has been introduced in the context of a President whose behavior confuses many of us, it is natural to assume that it must be a big, rare, scary thing, used in extraordinary circumstances to force compliance and achieve grand aims. But, Darden explained to me, kompromat is routinely used throughout the former Soviet Union to curry favor, improve negotiated outcomes, and sway opinion. Intelligence services, businesspeople, and political figures everywhere exploit gossip and damaging information. However, Darden argues, kompromat has a uniquely powerful role in the former Soviet Union, where the practice is so pervasive, he coined the term “Blackmail State” to describe their way of governance.

Kompromat can be a single, glaring example of wrongdoing, recorded by someone close to the Kremlin and then used to control the bad actor. It can be proof of an embarrassing sex act. Darden believes it is unlikely that sexual kompromat would be effective on Trump. Allegations of sexual harassment, extramarital affairs, and the payment of hush money to hide indiscretions have failed to significantly diminish the enthusiasm of Trump’s core supporters. But another common form of kompromat—proof of financial crimes—could be more politically and personally damaging.

This makes sense. It would be the reason Putin smirked when asked if he had kompromat and said Trump was to much of a small fry to have attracted his notice. Bada-bing. Trump couldn’t have been happy about that …

The article goes on to lay out an interesting case that Trump’s financial ties to Russia were tertiary to the big money oligarchs and therefore be kompromat collected by the sistema a shadowy loos-knit, gangster-style organization that has long defined Russia’s financial and political hierarchy and which Putin has simply re-tooled for his own use:

Because the word kompromat is new to most Americans, and has been introduced in the context of a President whose behavior confuses many of us, it is natural to assume that it must be a big, rare, scary thing, used in extraordinary circumstances to force compliance and achieve grand aims. But, Darden explained to me, kompromat is routinely used throughout the former Soviet Union to curry favor, improve negotiated outcomes, and sway opinion. Intelligence services, businesspeople, and political figures everywhere exploit gossip and damaging information. However, Darden argues, kompromat has a uniquely powerful role in the former Soviet Union, where the practice is so pervasive, he coined the term “Blackmail State” to describe their way of governance.

Alena Ledeneva, a professor of politics at University College London and an expert on Russia’s political and business practices, describes kompromat as being more than a single powerful figure weaponizing damning evidence to blackmail a target. She explained that to make sense of kompromat it is essential to understand the weakness of formal legal institutions in Russia and other former Soviet states. Ledeneva argued that wealth and power are distributed through networks of political figures and businesspeople who follow unspoken rules, in an informal hierarchy that she calls the sistema, or system in English. Sistema has a few clear rules—do not defy Putin being the most obvious one—and a toolkit for controlling potentially errant members. It is primarily a system of ambiguity. Each person in the sistema wonders where he stands and monitors the relative positions of friends and rivals.

It is clear that something is weird with Trump and Russia. That’s been true since the day he announced his run for office. This adds a new layer of understanding to what might have happened. Well worth reading the whole thing.

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No wonder Trump was so upset about the Cohen raid

by digby

Now that we have firm evidence Cohen was taping Trump, let’s look at this again:

He did seem a little over the top didn’t he?

In case you missed it, here’s the New York Times article reporting the story that Cohen taped Trump ordering him to pay off Karen McDougal.

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Fear is the only item on the menu

by digby

This is how Republicans are running in House district that stretches from the booming suburbs of Columbus to the foothills of the Appalachians. No tax cuts, no economy. https://t.co/ynUQPKU6wn

— (((JonathanWeisman))) (@jonathanweisman) July 19, 2018

What a week

by digby

My Salon column today:

It’s been four days since President Trump stood on the stage in Helsinki and pledged fealty to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Well, he didn’t actually pledge fealty, he just strongly implied it with his eagerness to please his counterpart. Perhaps this wouldn’t have seemed so obvious if he hadn’t insulted America’s closest allies in the run-up to the meeting and then maligned his own intelligence agencies as being no more reliable than Putin himself.

The immediate firestorm was fierce but it’s obvious that Republicans desperately want the president to find a way to settle this controversy and move on to the next one. Unfortunately, Trump can’t seem to help making things worse so the fire is still burning out of control.

On Wednesday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had set everyone on edge by failing to tamp down the suspicion that Trump really meant it when he’d said in the press conference that he thought Putin’s “incredible offer” to allow Mueller to come to Russia to interview the military officers he’d indicted in exchange for allowing Russian prosecutors to interview Americans, including former Ambassador Michael McFaul. Needless to say, the reason people believed Trump might actually do it is because after the first meeting between the two presidents in 2017, Trump had been as delighted as a young fanboy when Putin suggested that the two countries should create a “cybersecurity task force” together to share all their top secret information.

Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017

That idea was thankfully shot down by all the experts but Trump still loves the idea because the two men brought it up again at the press conference. It’s that kind of eager beaver gullibility that shows Trump is still obtuse enough not to realize that he’s being played. Since nobody knows anything about what happened in that meeting, it’s fair to be extremely suspicious even if it seems completely outlandish.

Sanders clarified the statement on Thursday saying, “it is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it.” Trump apparently saw into Putin’s soul, as George W. Bush once did and knew he was sincere. And it sure didn’t sound like he disagreed with it at the time although, to be fair, he probably didn’t have a clue what Putin was really suggesting.

Tellingly, after the White House issued that statement the Senate still voted 98-0 for a non-binding resolution that the United States should refuse to make American diplomats available to Russian prosecution. Yes, they actually felt the need to put that glaringly obvious concept to a vote.

Unfortunately, the Senate Republican majority couldn’t bring themselves to bring to a vote proposed resolutions urging the president to take tougher stand against Russia and protect the Mueller probe although Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) did say that the Senate Banking and Foreign Relations committees would look at the possibility of further sanctions is Russia interferes again. As tepid and impotent as that is, it’s more than we’ve seen up until now.

As I mentioned yesterday, Republicans have eliminated election security spending in this year’s budget and they voted down Democratic efforts to restore it. Freedom Caucus member Jim Jordan, currently under a cloud for failing to report sexual abuse when he was a wrestling coach, offered this pithy observation:

Rep Jim Jordan on why House R’s shot down Dem push for more election security $$: “I know what we need for safe and secure elections, and that’s voter ID.”

— Erica Werner (@ericawerner) July 19, 2018

The House GOP also refused to subpoena Trump’s state department interpreter at the Helsinki meeting for a closed session to determine what was said since Trump refuses to tell anyone. That includes the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats who revealed in a live interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell at the Aspen Security Summit that he had not been read in on the contents of the meeting, which is truly stunning even for the Trump administration.

Trump mentioned Coats by name in Helsinki and seemed peeved that Coats had given a speech the previous Friday in which he reiterated that Russia had interfered in the election and said they were doing it again. According to the Washington Post, he was even more peeved at Coats’ statement after the meeting standing by the Intelligence Community, which Trump had just slighted on the world stage. Nonetheless he was persuaded that Coats resigning would be a problem so he praised him in an interview on Wednesday.

Then this happened:

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats informed on stage at Aspen Security Forum that the Trump administration has invited Vladimir Putin to the White House.

“Say that again,” he responds. https://t.co/RBdhdILVas pic.twitter.com/TZal1Xb4Yi

— ABC News (@ABC) July 19, 2018

There has been some speculation that the White House made the announcement at that moment in order to rattle Coats, whose comments were being carried live on all three cable news networks. But with this White House, it may just as easily have been the usual incompetence that made the insane news of a Putin invitation into an even more surreal moment than it already was.

The Post reports that administration insiders are furious with Coats for “going rogue,” so his days are likely numbered one way or the other. It’s possible that FBI Director Christopher Wray, who has run the bureau for less than a year, could be next. In his own Aspen interview, Wray didn’t deny that he had contemplated resigning in the wake of the Helsinki meeting. But we’ve seen this sort of thing before. Trump’s appointees get wobbly but always come back to the fold, at least until Trump finally orders one of his minions to fire them.

The president has apparently still told no one what was discussed in that meeting. Putin and his ministers seem to be talking freely about it, however. A Russian defense official said the two nations have come to an agreement on Syria, although the U.S. Army general in charge of the region says he has heard nothing about it.

Putin himself reportedly told Russian diplomats that he made a proposal for a referendum in eastern Ukraine, but agreed not to mention it until Trump had a chance to “mull it over.” So of course the Russian leader mentioned it, likely in order to force Trump’s hand in this overheated environment and make him take Putin’s side.

If we didn’t know better we might think that Trump was waiting for Putin to make the details from their meeting public. Whether it’s because Trump didn’t understand what was happening and can’t ask anyone for fear of accidentally crossing the Russian president or because that was their agreement is impossible to say.

Instead of calming things down, Trump has now invited the foreign leader who ordered his military intelligence to interfere in the 2016 presidential election to visit Washington shortly before the next election. This firestorm has just had a tanker full of gasoline poured all over it. It’s going to be harder and harder for Donald Trump and his loyalists to put it out.

Has Putin compromised the GOP too?
by Tom Sullivan

California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher was among a group of Republicans that appeared to endorse a fictional program to arm toddlers on Showtime’s ‘Who Is America?’ — Hollywood Reporter.

Former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman summarizes Vladimir Putin’s KGB tradecraft with a Russian expression, “What makes a person breathe?” Seeing how Donald Trump breathes, Putin knows Trump lacks the self-restraint to be a “controlled agent” of the Kremlin. Putin instead uses the U.S. president a “confidential contact,” a more technical term, writes David Ignatius, than “useful idiot.” Thus, has he turned Trump into “a human wrecking ball against America’s traditional allies and trading partners.”

European allies are “gobsmacked” by Trump’s failure to stand up to Putin in Helsinki. That compounded his undermining of the NATO alliance last week in Brussels.

But as appalled as Trump’s GOP colleagues are at his fawning over the Russian dictator, they have made no serious efforts at reeling him back in. But damage control? Congressional Republicans are getting a crash course in damage control. Perhaps because they have become useful idiots as well.

Sacha Baron Cohen found it too easy to co-opt prominent conservatives into supporting (and advocating on film) a phony Israeli program for arming schoolchildren, Matt Lewis writes at Daily Beast:

In one interview, Cohen, posing as an Israeli colonel and terrorism expert, gets former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh to advocate arming little kids.

“The intensive three-week Kinderguardian course introduces specially selected children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semiautomatics, and a rudimentary knowledge of mortars. In less than a month—less than a month—a first-grader can become a first grenader,” Walsh says on camera. On purpose. Amazing.

Russophile California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s duping in Cohen’s Kinderguardian prank has already become a campaign issue.

And @SachaBaronCohen has officially become a campaign issue pic.twitter.com/e3ivf2I30y— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) July 17, 2018

Do you think Vladimir Putin hasn’t noticed credulity trips over itself on the right?

This week federal agents arrested Maria Butina, a 29-year-old Russian national and graduate student who had become a minor celebrity for the National Rifle Association. Butina is allegedly a Russian agent the FBI has been monitoring since she arrived as a student in the U.S. in 2016. She worked at gaining access to NRA and Conservative Political Action Conference circles by “touting her interest in U.S. affairs and efforts to promote gun rights in Vladi­mir Putin’s restrictive Russia.” Only unlike Cohen, she wasn’t fishing for laughs. A grand jury indicted her for conspiracy and failing to register as a foreign agent.

Wayne LaPierre.
Rick Santorum.
David Clarke.
Scott Walker.

All with Maria Butina. Lookie here. 👀 pic.twitter.com/KYB6Ut32jN— Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) July 18, 2018

Buzzfeed adds:

What is clear is that in Butina, the Russian government either found or created an irresistible persona for US conservatives. The story she repeated over years of speeches and interviews — of a scrappy girl from Siberia fighting for gun rights in Russia — was carefully calibrated to show a passion for self-defense, a yearning for America’s easy access to guns, and a hint of criticism of Russia’s own laws.

“Anyone can be duped,” Lewis writes. “However, some people were more vulnerable at certain times in our history than others.” In the past, Russians co-opted members of the left. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin is running the same play on the right. That they fell so easily for both Borat and Butina, he believes, is no coincidence.

Russian intelligence knows what makes the right breathe. It knows their instincts. Republicans don’t want to govern. They want to rule. To that end they have enacted a large set of anti-democratic measures in legislatures across the country for empowering themselves at the expense of representative democracy. To that end they have spent years promoting the spurious rumor that millions of unseen, illegal voters (black and brown ones) are corrupting election integrity. Russia has reinforced their efforts to erode confidence in U.S. elections through criminal interference in the 2016 elections. Donald Trump proclaimed the election rigged in campaign stops across the country.

The American Idea is built around majority rule, that “whichever cluster of interests and preferences are held by the greatest number of individuals should receive the lion’s share of the political power at any given time,” warns Damon Linker at The Week:

What we have seen in recent years is something else entirely. George W. Bush lost the 2000 presidential election by roughly half a million votes and yet won the presidency with the help of two counter-majoritarian institutions — the Electoral College and the Supreme Court. President Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and yet won the presidency, this time because of the Electoral College alone. In 2012, Democrats in House races received nearly 1.5 million more votes than Republicans, yet due in large part to gerrymandered congressional districts, the Republicans won a majority of the seats by a margin of 234-201. Some models predict that in the upcoming midterm elections this November, Democrats could outpoll Republicans by 4, 5, 6, or even 7 percent while still failing to win a majority in the House.

Add it all up and we’re left with something perilously close to minority rule. This is pure civic poison.

The prospect of permanent minority rule compounds the growing threat that those now primed to believe elections are rigged will reject the American norm of peaceful transitions between elected U.S. governments. Thanks to the NRA and it’s Russian handlers, they’ll have plenty of armament for the task.

Michael Scheuer, the former senior CIA official and NYT bestselling author of Imperial Hubris, is calling for Trump supporters to kill Trump opponents https://t.co/lH81xBoKqX pic.twitter.com/Hh0IM2HHtN— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) July 16, 2018

Putin will have just what he’s always wanted. He’s already enlisted useful idiots in the cause.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.