Month: September 2019

Somebody doesn’t like it when a woman is in charge

by digby

Especially when she’s dark skinned with a name that doesn’t sound like “Real American” ifyouknowhatImean:

This barbaric behavior is being normalized by the president of the United States and his disgusting surrogates in the congress.It’s not surprising that his racist enablers would behave this way as well.

Here he is “explaining himself”

This is grotesque. I’m not one to say that everyone has to treat politicians with reverence. But this kind of behavior is outrageous. Jayapal was not being rude and she was going by the rules everyone adheres to. Homan, on the other hand, was performing for Donald Trump and the cult by being an asshole — “my president” is the top-off. He’s an anti-immigrant authoritarian and he should never, ever have been allowed to run ICE. (That’s on Obama, by the way, not Trump…)

As Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars observed:

[C]learly, some blowback for his outburst got to Homan, because he turned up calling into Fox & Friends for a little image rehab.

“I’m not gonna sit there and let them tell lies about my president, tell lies about the men and women of the Border Patrol and ICE. At a certain point it’s like, I’m not gonna shut up.

Just because you have a gavel, doesn’t make you queen of the day, it doesn’t allow you to lie to the American people,” said Homan.

But being president allows you to lie to the American people on average 13 times a day with impunity?

Seriously. Anyone Trumper clutching his peals about lying needs to check into rehab and get deprogrammed.

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They know he did it, they just think it’s fine

by digby

83% of the American people are not surprised that President Trump was willing to sell out the country’s national interest for his personal benefit. And why would they be? He’s been pretty clear that he’s willing to do anything to win.

36% of Americans don’t think that’s a serious problem. Presumably that forms the core of his cult which believes anything he does is terrific.

This is about the same number who approved of Clinton’s impeachment, by the way, which indicates that Republicans think lying about an extramarital affair is worse than what Trump has done. (Well, since he’s also lied about extra-marital affairs, that only applies to Democrats apparently.)

About the same number who voted for Herbert Hoover in 1932 in the height of the Great Depression. A few more broke away in the final days of Nixon’s downfall but not many. This core group of partisans always sticks together.

It’s not good news at all for Trump, however. His job approval is stable but it’s still not above 45% in any but the most partisan polls. He’s in trouble.

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What happens when a president’s brain is rotted by Fox News?

by digby

This Washington Post article by Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch should be evidence in an impeachment trial. Or, actually, the evidence for the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. The president’s not right:

Access to the highest levels of intelligence in the world can’t seem to deter the president of the United States from depending on unreliable right-wing sources to inform his decisions in high office.

According to a rough transcript released by the White House on Wednesday recounting a 30-minute phone call on July 25 between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked the foreign leader to seek evidence to substantiate a long-standing conspiracy theory originating in right-wing circles.

Random babbling? Hardly. The theory not only provides fodder for fundraising and fuel for Trump’s base, but by evoking it, Trump follows a pattern he has maintained in office: disregarding the consensus of U.S. intelligence officials, as well as reputable news reporting, in favor of hyperpartisan sophistry. By folding fringe conspiracy theories into administrative action, Trump is giving the theories new life and, with his words and actions on the national stage, has inflamed threats to national security, emboldened extreme fringe figures and exhausted government resources. His affinity for the far-flung has directly influenced his policy decisions and the alliances his administration has cultivated since taking office.

In the account of the conversation that was released by the White House, Trump name-dropped CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm the Democratic National Committee hired to conduct an investigation surrounding the hacking of its email servers in 2016. According to the memo of the conversation, Trump asked Zelensky to “do us a favor” and “find out what happened” to a fabled data server that hyperpartisan actors, including longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, have fixated on in an attempt to delegitimize CrowdStrike’s investigation. That investigation found “two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network,” and those findings were consistent with analysis by U.S. intelligence officials and independent cybersecurity firms.

“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump told Zelensky, according to the memo.

It wasn’t the first time he talked about this. Remember this?

Trump appears to seek evidence from Ukraine based on a theory holding that there exists a CrowdStrike or DNC server that may contain or lack contents that would prove that the 2016 DNC hack was a hoax created by the Democrats to delegitimize Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Trump was clearly referring to this abstract conception of a single server that is not, in fact, missing, and yet it is one of his frequently expressed obsessions as president and effectively opened an avenue for conservative media to rehash theories about the election. In reality, the DNC decommissioned “more than 140 servers” and had to “rebuild at least 11 servers” to secure itself after it was hacked, according to a lawsuit filed by the DNC last year.
[…]
Right-wing conspiracy theorists have for years posited that CrowdStrike fabricated its findings that Russia was behind the hack; they maintain that the fact that the FBI did not seize the DNC’s internal servers is evidence of a coverup. The theory relies on a fundamental misconception about the workings of digital crime; a physical inspection of hardware is not necessary for the conduct of digital forensics and could even damage the devices affected.

Since it was first reported that Russia was suspected of attempting to interfere with the 2016 election, right-wing conspiracy theorists and message-board users have tried to discredit the reality. A right-wing blog called Zero Hedge, rife with conspiracy theories, posted as early as January 2017 that users of the message board 4chan planted fraudulent claims about Russian interference, and that those claims made their way into the intelligence community. Gateway Pundit then repeated the conspiracy theory, New York Magazine reported.

That theory was soon exhausted, and right-wing conspiracy theorists eventually turned their sights to reports that Ukraine sought to influence the 2016 election in favor of Clinton. Conspiracy theorists latched on to false claims that CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is Ukrainian and therefore inherited Ukraine’s adversarial position toward Russia. (Alperovitch is a U.S. citizen who was born in Russia.) The false claim was leveraged to bolster accusations that it was Ukraine that had hacked the DNC, possibly to frame Russia.

Conspiracy theorists have also argued that it was an irritated DNC staffer who leaked the emails, and perhaps even murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. (A mini-verse of right-wing conspiracy theories exists specifically around Rich’s murder, to the dismay of the Rich family, and have been repeated by Fox News host Sean Hannity, a personal friend of Trump’s.)

Fringe right-wing conspiracy theories often graduate from anonymous message boards and social media to the national stage on Trump’s Twitter account and on Fox News; the two often operate symbiotically. It can often take just days for a theory to launder itself as it travels from fringe blog to a presumably reputable social media personality or conservative media outlet and then on to the Fox network.

When a theory is amplified for Trump, it instantly catches fire among his supporters; old theories are re-litigated, and emerging theories erupt. When that happens, national media outlets scramble to demystify the theory, which inadvertently spreads its claims. The debunking often has little effect on theory-believers’ interpretation of the information; after all, any press critical of the president must be “fake news.”

Trump’s request that a foreign official investigate CrowdStrike is yet another example of his proclivity for partisan conspiracy theories over truth, despite the resources at his disposal. Also in the memo recounting the July 25 conversation between Trump and Zelensky, Trump suggests that former vice president Joe Biden “went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution” of his son Hunter Biden, echoing nearly verbatim claims made by Hannity earlier this year. Around the time of Hannity’s claims, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani — who is a bit of a conspiracy theorist himself and is friendly toward Hannity — was reportedly planning to pressure Ukraine to investigate the genesis of the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and also Hunter Biden’s employment by a Ukrainian gas company. Baseless claims about the 2016 election and Joe Biden’s past dealings have been resuscitated in the run-up to the 2020 election as Biden emerged as a Democratic primary front-runner in polls.

Information from the fringes has often served two uses for Trump: inspiring his actions as president and justifying his administrative agenda.
[…]
The president has also repeated false claims that illegal voting caused him to lose California by millions of votes, despite the fact that no evidence exists to support that claim. The source of such claims relied almost entirely on Internet rumors, PolitiFact determined in 2016, which were initially spread on conspiracy theory websites, including Infowars, and by hyperpartisan actors, including the alt-right-friendly gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos, then employed by Breitbart. Trump leveraged such claims to launch a now-defunct commission on “election integrity” in 2017.

During a Republican fundraising event earlier this year, Trump mentioned a conspiracy theory about windmills causing cancer. That appeared to have originated from some of the most extreme conspiracy theorists online. Derivatives of the theory have appeared on the conspiracy site Natural News. Claims that windmills — or wind turbines that generate green energy — cause cancer aren’t even popular among most conspiracy theorists, the Daily Beast reported at the time, yet the president cited them to advance his administration’s agenda on U.S. fossil fuel production.

Under Trump, the White House reportedly drafted an executive order to address unfounded claims from right-wing social media personalities who say they have been censored by social media companies on the basis of their political beliefs, ignoring reports showing that conservative content often outperforms progressive content on those platforms.

And last year, Trump tweeted that he had ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” land appropriation measures and a string of farm murders in South Africa after watching a segment on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that presented as fact decades-old white-nationalist propaganda about “white genocide” in the country.

It is difficult to imagine a building in which more reliable information is available than the White House, which is why it’s especially hard to credit that the president of the United States routinely acts on information that comes from right-wing media swamps.

He really is that guy at the end of the bar. Only he doesn’t drink. This is his personality totally sober. And that’s sobering.

It’s not benign. He’s the most powerful man in the world. And as we’ve can see, he’s so psychologically unfit that he sees everything in terms of his own ego and is obsessed with wacko conspiracy theories. That’s nuts.

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The right wing *keyboard kerning experts are back on the case

by digby

Carpet bomb the memes comrades!

The looming battle over President Trump’s potential impeachment has sparked an online hunt in the far-right corners of the Web as self-styled Internet sleuths race to identify the anonymous person Trump has likened to a treasonous spy.

Their guesses have been scattershot, conspiratorial and often untethered from reality, spanning a wide range of such unlikely contenders as presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Pence.

Some of the online commentators and anonymous posters said they have been spurred to action by Trump’s fury, foreshadowing the online clashes that are likely to engulf any upcoming impeachment hearings and the 2020 campaign.

“Carpet bomb the memes. Everywhere,” one anonymous poster on the message board 4chan wrote in response to one of Trump’s angry tweets about the whistleblower. “Time to rise up. Your president has asked for your help.”

The quest to identify the person who crafted the politically explosive complaint against Trump has become a fixation across the most extreme corners of such platforms as Twitter, Reddit and Gab — and has spread onto conservative news sites, radio shows and TV broadcasts.

The Washington Post obtained video of President Trump giving a private speech to U.S. diplomats on Sept. 26. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

The president’s scornful portrayal of the whistleblower shaped and stoked the online conversation throughout the week, as it descended into a case study of the Internet at its worst — frenetic, fueled by rumor and frequently racist, misogynistic and crude.

“the whistleblower is not white,” one 4chan commenter asserted Thursday, probably misreading a part of the complaint in which the whistleblower calls himself or herself a “non-White House official.” “see second set of bullet points on page 3. trump only has a handful of non white staff. I wonder who it might be.”

Bless their hearts.

This is funny but Trump’s threats aren’t. He’s already inspired some followers to several mass shootings. And one of his nuts sent pipe bombs to a whole bunch of people on his enemies lists which luckily didn’t go off. When they say “time to rise up” some people might be thinking of something other than amateur internet sleuthing.

*For those who haven’t been around blogs since the dark ages, “kerning” refers to this.

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But his extortion!
by Tom Sullivan

Knowledgeable sources (Jon Voight) indicate that for his foot soldiers Democrat’s impeachment of Donald J. Trump means war

While they mobilize, however, the White House is in “total panic.” The acting president’s tweeted declarations of innocence sound more than usual as if written by Bart Simpson. Trump, the president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and Paul Manafort have tried since the early days of the administration to exonerate Vladimir Putin and Russia for interfering in the 2016 elections. The “Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials” are the real meddlers, they claim. Oh, and former Vice President Joe Biden.

Since that narrative is not finding traction, it was inevitable all the president’s henchmen would attempt diverting the attention of the Trump-vilified “Fake News” onto someone else.

They have found someone: Hillary Clinton. The Washington Post reports:

As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials. Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post.

Retroactive classification. Trump should have thought of that as soon as allegations arose that White House allies misused the National Security Council’s codeword-level, classified computer system for burying records of the acting president’s most embarrassing phone calls with foreign leaders. Now, the White House is using retroactive classification to resurrect “but her emails” from the fever swamps. It may represent “a new front on which the Trump administration could be accused of employing the powers of the executive branch against perceived political adversaries,” the Post adds. State Department investigators began contacting former officials about 18 months ago, then dropped the investigation until August this year:

Several of those who have been questioned said that the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security investigators made it clear that they were pursuing the matter reluctantly, and under external pressure.

One official said the investigators were apologetic: “They realize how absurd it is.”

Not for this White House. Not for a White House that grants security clearances to Trump family members over the objections of career security specialists, uses unsecured phones, and conducts “U.S. business outside government channels.” All while fawning over foreign autocrats.

This is the latest flailing attempt by the administration to regain control of the national narrative. There will be more nonsense like this from the White House and Trump’s thralls, some of it criminal. Defenders of democracy and the rule of law need to keep them knocked back on their heels.

House Democrats claim they are focusing their impeachment inquiry narrowly on the Ukraine affair. But there is much more Trump means to keep hidden, including (but not limited to) other conversations locked in that NSC server and business records held by Deutsche Bank. Once investigators begin digging in earnest, Ukraine could become the lesser of the malfeasance they uncover. Democrats on Capitol Hill need to remain nimble. The rest of us should help keep the press from taking the bait Trump’s defenders dangle to get them to look elsewhere. #buthisextortion .

Trump is desperate for a distraction, you “savages.” Don’t allow him one. Hillary Clinton can take care of herself. She’s proven that.

Happy New Year.

One sweet dream: On Abbey Road at 50 and an anniversary reissue

By Dennis Hartley

“A pleasant but unadventurous collection of basically low-voltage numbers.”
-from the original 1969 Newsweek review of Abbey Road

By 1969, the Beatles had probably done enough “living” to suit several normal lifetimes, and did so with the whole world looking in. It’s almost unfathomable how they could have achieved as much as they did, and at the end of all, still be only in their twenties.

Are there any other recording artists who have ever matched the creative growth that transpired over the scant six years that it took to evolve from the simplicity of Meet the Beatles to the sophistication of Abbey Road?

Hindsight being 20/20, should we really be so shocked to see the four haggard and sullen “old guys” who mope through the (yet to be reissued) 1970 documentary, Let it Be? Filmed in 1969, the movie was intended to document the “making of” the eponymous album (there is also footage of the band working on several songs that ended up on Abbey Road).

Sadly, the film has a rep as hard evidence of the band’s disintegration. Granted, there is some on-camera bickering (most famously, in a scene where an uncharacteristically riled-up George reaches the end of his tether with Paul’s fussiness).

Still, signs of a deeply rooted musical camaraderie remain in that outdoor mini concert filmed on a London rooftop. If you look closely, the boys are exchanging glances that telegraph they’re having a grand time jamming out; an affirmation that this is what this band of brothers were put on this earth to do, and what the hell …it’s only rock ’n’ roll.

The Let it Be movie doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how tumultuous 1969 was for the band. As Ian MacDonald notes in his excellent 1994 assessment of the Beatles’ catalog, Revolution in the Head:

The day after the rooftop concert, the band recorded three songs unsuited to recital in a moderate gale [“Two of Us”, “Let it Be”, and “The Long and Winding Road”] before winding the [recording sessions for the Let it Be album] up in some relief. An ignominious failure which shook their faith in their collective judgement, it had pushed them to the verge of collapse. […]

[soon after the Let it Be sessions wrapped] a fatal rift in the group’s relationships opened when Lennon, Harrison, and Starr asked the Rolling Stones’ American manager Allen Klein to take over the Beatles’ affairs. McCartney, who favoured Linda Eastman’s family firm of management consultants, immediately opened a court battle which long outlasted the remainder of the Beatles’ career.

The dream was over. Or so it seemed. The boys were not about to go out on a sour note (at least in a creative sense). As Bob Spitz writes in his exhaustive band bio, The Beatles:

The tapes from earlier in the year that would eventually become “Let it Be” languished in the can, abandoned, a victim of haste and sloppy execution. “[They] were so lousy and so bad,” according to John – “twenty-nine hours of tape …twenty takes of everything – that “none of us would go near them …None of us could face remixing them; it was [a] terrifying [prospect].” “It was laying [sic] dormant and so we decided ‘Let’s make a good album again,’” George recalled.

Beatles musicologist Tim Riley picks it up from there – from his 1988 book Tell Me Why:

Still, venturing out into solo careers was a daunting notion, especially when the itch to make more Beatles music wouldn’t go away – perhaps the rooftop set had been so promising that they felt the need to reconcile the musical loose ends on the unreleased “Get Back” [album] sessions [from early 1969]. If the Beatles were still a band, they owed their audience a follow-up to “The White Album”. George Martin remembers a phone call from Paul in July asking him to help make a record “the way we used to do it.

In case you hadn’t heard, that record turned out pretty good.

In fact, I’m listening to it at this very moment, as I write this review. Specifically, it is the 3-CD + Blu-ray disc Abbey Road Anniversary Box Set (also available in a truncated 2 CD edition). The reissues commemorate the 50th anniversary of the album (originally released in the U.K. September 26, 1969 and in the U.S. on October 1, 1969).

CD 1 is the album itself, remixed in stereo from the original 8-track masters (supervised by George Martin’s son Giles). I don’t have a state-of-the-art sound system, but even so I was able to discern the difference upon first listen. The tracks have a warm, analog resonance that sound closer to the original vinyl (we’ve come full circle, I suppose). Upon initial listen, “Something”, “Here Comes the Sun”, “Sun King”, “Because”, “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “Golden Slumbers” benefit the most from the upgrade.

CDs 2 and 3 contain alternate takes of the Abbey Road cuts (it’s fun to hear the studio chatter, especially Lennon’s playful and frequently hilarious lyric improvisations) as well as early takes of their 1969 45 “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and its B-side “Old Brown Shoe”. Other highlights include Paul’s demos for “Come and Get It” and “Goodbye” (hits he wrote for Apple Records artists Badfinger and Mary Hopkins, respectively) and takes of George Martin’s isolated orchestral parts for “Something” and “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight”…which remind you of his genius for song arrangement.

I haven’t had time to explore the Blu-ray yet; it contains 3 different enhanced versions of the new mix: in Dolby ATMOS, in 96kHz/24-bit DTS-DD Master Audio 5.1, and in 96kHz/24-bit High Res Stereo. Obviously, these mixes require a high-end setup for full appreciation; I’ll hang on to it in case I ever get a spare $25,000 for a home theater room.

The Super deluxe Edition also includes a 100-page book with rare photos (many taken by Linda Eastman), essays and track-by-track annotation with the complete rundown on personnel involved in each session.

This is a lovely package, a treat for Beatle fans. It’s pricey, but you have an option to pick up the 2 CD version(although it’s missing the Blu-ray, quite a few of the outtakes and demos, and the book…come on, you know you want the box set!).

I remember buying the LP when it came out. I was 13 and living in Columbus Ohio. October of 1969 was a stressful time for my family. My dad had just left for a tour in Vietnam, and my mom was at the end of her tether. It was the first time they had been apart for an extended period of time since their wedding in 1955; my brothers were typical 2 and 4 year-old terrors and I was adding to her aggravation being a typical 13 year-old male with a smart mouth and no father figure to give it a well-deserved smack.

I think that was when music became important to me; in a spiritual way. I couldn’t articulate at the time why Abbey Road was so important to me, but it was. I was like Richard Dreyfuss playing with the mashed potatoes… “This MEANS something!” Abbey Road provided the salve I needed at that moment. And at this moment. And in the end…

Previous posts with related themes:

On Revolver at 50
Confessions of a Beatles fan, pt. 1
Confessions of a Beatles fan, pt. 2
George Martin tribute
Thoughts on a Beatles anniversary
The Beatles 1+
Magical Mystery Tour and Produced by George Martin
Good ‘Ol Freda

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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–Dennis Hartley

Trump’s Roy Cohn having second thoughts?

by digby

Oh my. It looks like Bill Barr might be having second thoughts about being Trump’s Roy Cohn:

Attorney General Bill Barr was “surprised and angry” to find that President Trump had grouped him together with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani during a controversial July 25 phone call with the president of Ukraine, a source “familiar with Barr’s thinking” tells the AP.

Between the lines: The anonymous leak to the AP suggests a possible effort by Barr to distance himself from the Ukraine scandal that ignited a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump last week. The whistleblower complaint at the heart of the scandal alleges that Trump solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election by asking Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, and that both Giuliani and Barr appeared to be involved.

“I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it,” Trump told Zelensky, according to a summary of the call released by the White House.

Justice Department officials say Barr was not aware of the phone call until mid-August. The acting director of national intelligence referred the whistleblower complaint as a possible violation of campaign finance law, but the Justice Department declined to open an investigation

What to watch: Democrats have called on Barr to recuse himself from all matters related to the Ukraine investigation, since he is named in the whistleblower complaint and may have been involved in the administration’s efforts to stop it from being turned over to Congress.

Giuliani and Barr are likely to face scrutiny from the House Intelligence Committee, which has already subpoenaed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and scheduled a series of depositions and hearings next week as part of its impeachment investigation.

Perhaps it’s belatedly occurring to Barr that his vaunted “unitary executive” theory might just have a little flaw: what happens if a malevolent, psychologically damaged imbecile somehow becomes president? Indeed, the checks and balances Barr so abhors were put in place for exactly that possibility.

That Barr has used Trump to advance his theory without any care for the fact that Trump is the last person who should have such powers shows either that Barr’s brain has been rotted by Fox News or he is as malevolent as Trump. Either way I’m guessing he didn’t think Trump could take him down. He may very well be wrong about that.

He is the John Mitchell of our time.

Update: As emptywheel points out, none of this is relevant as to why Barr should have recused himself.

It does not matter at all whether Bill Barr was surprised to hear the President roping him into framing his opponent’s son (though we should not believe he was surprised until the Attorney General says that publicly himself, preferably under oath). It does not matter when Demers learned of the substance of the complaint, it matters when Barr did, and whether it preceded other actions he took.

What matters is whether Barr learned he was named in the transcript before the DOJ made the decision there was no crime there. What matters is whether Barr knew he was implicated before making the decision not to recuse in advance of a prosecutorial decision made while lacking all the facts. What matters is whether Barr knew he was named in the transcript before getting an OLC opinion justifying withholding the complaint. (h/t F for the last point)

The AP story doesn’t tell us that. Instead, it tells us everything we don’t need to know.

Bill Barr will never recuse himself from anything to do with Trump. Trump has made that a condition of being the Attorney General and everyone in the world knows it. Bill Barr certainly does.

If, for some reason, he does end up doing that we’ll know that he and Trump have split the sheets.

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How mad is John Bolton?

by digby

… or maybe I should ask whether or not Bolton, regardless of his noxious ideology, has a shred of integrity. I honestly don’t know.

But he knows things:

White House efforts to limit access to President Donald Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders extended to phone calls with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, according to people familiar with the matter.

Those calls — both with leaders who maintain controversial relationships with Trump — were among the presidential conversations that aides took remarkable steps to keep from becoming public.

In the case of Trump’s call with bin Salman, officials who ordinarily would have been given access to a rough transcript of the conversation never saw one, according to one of the sources. Instead, a transcript was never circulated at all, which the source said was highly unusual, particularly after a high-profile conversation.

The call — which the person said contained no especially sensitive national security secrets — came as the White House was confronting the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence assessments said came at the hand of the Saudi government.

With Putin, access to the transcript of at least one of Trump’s conversations was also tightly restricted, according to a former Trump administration official.

It’s not clear if aides took the additional step of placing the Russian phone calls in the same highly secured electronic system that held a now-infamous phone call with Ukraine’s president and which helped spark a whistleblower complaint made public this week, though officials confirmed calls aside from the Ukraine conversation were placed there.

The conversations between Trump and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud and the crown prince, widely known as MBS, were kept very secret, several sources with knowledge of the calls told CNN.

There were no transcripts made of the phone conversations between Trump and the Saudi king or crown prince to prevent leaks, both a former White House official and a source familiar with the calls told CNN. This is considered very unusual in how previous administrations have dealt with keeping record phone calls with world leaders.

Typically, there would be several senior officials listening in to a call with an important foreign leader and then a transcript of the call would be circulated to those officials.

Only Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton would be in the room for them, the former White House official said.

I think we probably know what Trump said to Mohammed bin Salman. He said, “good for you, Khashoggi was a disloyal prick and he deserved what he got. I’m sorry you’re having to deal with this unfair witch hunt by the fake news media.”

They are both bloodthirsty assholes.

Putin? Who knows? He’s had a bunch of private chats. He could be making promises, telling him he thinks his authoritarian ways are awesome, setting up a big business deal for when he gets out of office or, very likely, spilling secrets to impress him. It could be anything. His relationship with Putin is bizarre in the extreme and nobody really understands it. It could be a simply as childish defiance in the face of everyone knowing that Putin helped him get elected or it could be some kind of kompromat. It doesn’t matter. His behavior is unhinged and dangerous.

It may just be ego that makes Bolton come forward, but if he wants to rescue his reputation (a very long shot, I realize) he might want to think about getting on the right side of history for once.

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“Americans are no wiser than Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism”

by digby

This segment last night reminded me of how stunned and yet energized we all were in the wake of Trump’s shocking upset in November of 2016. We KNEW what he was, we understood the threat. Seeing it also brought home the sad fact that he really has been normalized to a great degree, largely as a result of the Republicans circling of the wagons and the failure of the Mueller investigation to clearly spell out the scope of his crimes (which we should not have counted on in the first place.)

Anyway, I bought Timothy Snyder’s little book and consulted it frequently in the early days. Maybe I absorbed enough of it or just got tired, I don’t know, but somewhere along the line I stopped seeing this in those terms. We shouldn’t. It’s really this stark as this past week has shown us. He is a criminal demagogue who betrays his country and subverts democracy without a second thought. The fact that he is an imbecile doesn’t change the fact that he is profoundly dangerous to us all.

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Ukraine policy is getting messier by the day

by digby

Trump is such a clod that he just says whatever he comes into his head without regard to how it will be taken.You can only imagine what he has said to other foreign leaders. >:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that President Donald Trump pledged to help him take back the peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014 in the aftermath of the Ukrainian revolution.

This week has already been dominated by revelations from conversations between the two presidents, with a July phone call between the two men prompting an impeachment investigation into the president.

A Trump commitment on Crimea would complicate the issue further, given the allegations that Trump offered Zelensky a quid pro quo of U.S. support and military aid in exchange for a Ukrainian investigation into 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Such a pledge would also inflame opinion in Russia, which now considers Crimea part of the nation and those living there Russian citizens, despite objections from the international community.

Following their meeting at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Zelensky told reporters that he and Trump discussed the contested Crimean peninsula, Unian reported. Zelensky said he told his counterpart that “Crimea is a beautiful place” and “it is a large beautiful part of our country.”

“It seems to me, and I heard that he agrees that this is our native land and we will get it back,” Zelensky told journalists. The president claimed that Trump told him, “Yes, you need to work, and we will help you.”

Trump has previously angered Ukrainians by reportedly suggesting that Crimea is Russian territory because the majority language there is Russian. Zelensky appears to have addressed the error when meeting the commander in chief this week.

“You know there were statements that if people there speak Russian, it is no longer Ukraine, Zelensky told reporters. “I explained to him that this is our land; we have no issues about communication or language. We have a state language, and it’s Ukrainian.”

In the official White House transcript of the meeting, Trump stressed that Crimea was annexed while President Barack Obama was in office. “I think it was handled poorly,” Trump said. “But it’s just one of those things.”

Blaming your predecessor for everything only gets you so far when you are more than halfway into your term.

Trump probably just meant that he would provide military aid, but the way he said it made it possible to take it as a promise of something more substantial. That’s why diplomats and normal presidents are careful about choosing their words. Unfortunately, Trump only has a vocabulary of about 100 of them so there’s not much to choose from.

Zelensky surely knows that you can’t trust anything Trump says. Putin certainly does. But at some point he’s going to say something like this that an adversary will use as an excuse to do things they wanted to do anyway.

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