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Month: October 2019

This is now officially a constitutional crisis

This is now officially a constitutional crisis

by digby

Trump’s lawyers say the White House won’t cooperate with the impeachment inquiry because it’s illegitimate to try to “overturn the 2016 election.”

“This is really nothing but a political strategy because Democrats want to overturn the results of the 2016 election, and they want to use impeachment and the political strategy to influence the results of the 2020 election.”A Senior administration official

Essentially, they are saying that you can’t indict a president, you can’t impeach a president and if he cheats to win an election, there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it.

If the president does it, it’s not illegal.

They can get away with it if the GOP Senate and the Supreme Court help him.

What’s the over/under?

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Pence is involved in all of it

Pence is involved in all of it

by digby

The Third Man:

Yes. That’s right. With his wife nowhere in sight, Vice President Mike Pence, probably praying for big money and no whammies, stands smiling next to the other con men. I doubt there was anything insidious in the Herald’s omission of Pence, as the article is about Trump and Giuliani, not Pence. But, as we now know—and sort of always assumed—Mike Pence might be a lapdog but he’s fully involved in every move going on in this administration.

In more recent breaking news, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, along with Harry Sargeant III have been implicated in working to position Republicans, and possibly Trump and Giuliani, to privately gain from Naftogaz, the Ukrainian state gas company. Parnas and Fruman also seem to have been peddling promises of Ukranian corruption dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Vice President Pence is a poor man’s Harry Lime, but just as unscrupulous.

I think Pence’s sycophancy has already destroyed his future — Republicans will try to erase Trump if this whole thing unravels and they’ll have to erase him too.

Still, he should be made to pay for his aiding and abetting. It’s not benign. He’s in it up to his eyeballs.

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The muddled Syria decision

The muddled Syria decision

by digby

Here’s the New Yorker’s Robin Wright on the subject:

At 3 a.m. on Monday, Middle East time, the commander of American special forces in Syria—whose name is not public for security reasons—held a video teleconference with General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, the Kurdish militia commander who led the war against isis on behalf of the U.S. coalition. The commander had bad news. President Trump had decided—after a telephone call with the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—that the United States would stand aside if Turkey, as announced, soon invades northeast Syria. U.S. troops positioned in two key posts in Syria on the border with Turkey would immediately be withdrawn. Mazloum and his Syrian Democratic Forces, who lost some eleven thousand fighters in the grinding five-year war against isis, were on their own.

Mazloum recounted the conversation to me a few hours later. “The implications are catastrophic,” he said. “We told the Americans we would prepare for war. The Kurds will defend themselves. There is no place for us to go. So that means a war between the Kurds and Turkey. The Arabs also won’t accept a Turkish invasion, either.” The S.D.F., created under U.S. tutelage, includes both Kurds and Arabs.

There is also the problem, Mazloum noted, of the twelve thousand isis fighters captured by the S.D.F. “This decision increases the hopes within isis of rebooting the caliphate,” he said. “The prisoners in detention centers have good morale now. They hope that they are able to escape.” The S.D.F., which is not a state and gets little foreign assistance, has struggled to cope with the dregs of isis since the caliphate fell, in March. Eighty thousand isis family members, held separately in the al-Hawl detention center, have become more aggressive since Turkey signalled its intent to invade northern Syria, the general claimed. Al-Hawl has become a mini-caliphate, run largely by women shrouded in black niqab robes and veils.

Trump’s bombshell policy reversal was dropped in a six-sentence e-mail, shortly before 11 p.m. on Sunday. Turkey, the White House press secretary reported, would “soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria.” In brashly undiplomatic language, the Administration chastised European allies for not taking back the isis fighters from their countries—and warned that the United States would neither hold them nor pay for their continued detention. (Not that it ever did.) Turkey will henceforth be responsible for all isis fighters in the area who have been captured over the past two years, the e-mail warned.

The crisis has long been brewing. For years, Turkey has wanted to create a buffer zone inside Syria, both for its security and to resettle the more than two million refugees who crossed the border to flee Syria’s eight-year civil war. Even more, Erdoğan has wanted to wipe out the Kurdish militia in Syria which he views as a threat because of its ties to a Kurdish movement in Turkey. Kurds are the largest minority in Turkey and a large voting bloc; a militant faction has sought autonomy or an independent Kurdistan that would unite Kurds across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The United States held off Erdoğan as long as it needed Syria’s feisty Kurds to fight isis on the ground, with backup from American air power. All the other U.S.-backed rebel groups failed, disintegrated, or turned into warlords.

Trump referred to this as a “tribal” war that has nothing to do with the US and he just wants to wash his hands of the whole thing.
Good luck with that.

Many in the press think he has the right argument for Real Americans who have all abruptly morphed from flag-waving warmongers who scream “cowardly cut ‘n run!!!!” at the slightest hint of a withdrawal of American troops anywhere, to peace loving isolationists who just want everyone to get along.

Remember this?

Jean Schmidt, an Ohio Republican who is the most junior member of the House, told of a phone call she had just received from a Marine colonel back home.

“He asked me to send Congress a message: stay the course,” Ms. Schmidt said. “He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do.”

They have not changed. It’s just that they now worship Donald Trump over and above everything else. But I’m not sure why the media thinks that this actually means anything. They are still the same bloodthirsty warmongers they always were — they are just turning their twisted form of “patriotism” on Latinos at the border for the moment and pretending that they really truly just want everyone to get along in the Middle East.

On the other hand, they almost certainly don’t give damn about the Kurds. They figure they’re all shithole countries so whatever. But let’s not confuse that with a belief that America shouldn’t be involved militarily overseas and should “bring the troops home.” It wasn’t long ago that any suggestion of such a thing was met with “why do you hate the troops so much?”

That is who they really are. This newfound “isolationism” is a function of their Trump worship, nothing more.

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Roger Stone rallies his troops

Roger Stone rallies his troops

by digby

So, this is fine:

Stone is angling for a pardon, of course. And he’ll probably get it.

Recall that his “personal bodyguards” were the alt-right strom troopers, The Proud Boys.

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Five hour gap?

Five hour gap?

by digby

So it turns out that Trump’s toady, EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, spoke directly with Trump as he was text messaging back and forth about the quid pro quo with the acting ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor. This explains the “five-hour gap” in the texts when Sondland came back and gave a Manchurian Candidate “Donald Trump is the kindest, warmest etc …” type response “reminding” Taylor that the president has said there is no quid-pro-quo. Not that it wasn’t obvious he’d called the White House for instructions, but this reporting shows he got them directly from the president.

Sondland was scheduled to testify in the House today but apparently, late last night, the White House got a preview of his testimony and ordered him not to testify. At least that’s what it looks like.

Sondland is quite a character. He should be held in contempt if he defies a subpoena. We’ll see if he wants to be a martyr for Trump.

This article in VICE
about Sondland shows that he wasn’t always one of Trump’s accomplices. So who knows?

Sondland is the son of German Jews who escaped the Holocaust and eventually settled in the Pacific Northwest. He’s a diehard conservative who once gifted his wife a signed copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

He made a fortune in the hotel industry and has been a major GOP donor for decades. But the extent of his actual governmental experience had been limited to work on an Oregon state board that sought to bring television and movie production to the state, plus a spot on the ceremonial Commission on White House Fellows during George W. Bush’s presidency.

He backed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the 2016 GOP primary, donating more than $20,000 to a pro-Bush superPAC. He came around once Trump was the de facto nominee, with plans to chair a fundraiser. But then he pulled out when Trump attacked the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim-American soldier who’d died in the line of duty.

A Sondland spokeswoman said at the time that Sondland and his business partner, Bashar Wali, were done with Trump.

“Mr. Sondland is a first-generation American whose parents were forced to flee Germany during the years leading up to World War II because they were persecuted for their faith, and Mr. Wali is a Muslim-American who emigrated to this country from Syria,” Provenance Hotels spokeswoman Kate Buska told Willamette Week. “In light of Mr. Trump’s treatment of the Khan family and the fact his constantly evolving positions diverge from their personal beliefs and values on so many levels, neither Mr. Sondland or Mr. Wali can support his candidacy.”

… only, not really

But for Sondland, those values were apparently malleable. After Trump’s victory, Sondland gave a combined $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee through four limited liability corporations, as first reported by the Center for Responsive Politics.

That put him back in the president’s good graces. Early last year, Trump nominated him to be EU ambassador.

Sondland has talked up how close he is to the president. During that Ukrainian TV interview, he said he’d talked to Trump before sitting down with Ukraine’s president. But he may end up regretting his newfound role in Trump’s inner circle.

Sondland would certainly have been asked about that interview, which came the day after Trump’s now-famous call with Ukraine’s president. “We want to make sure that all of the reforms are on track,” he said, an apparent reference to Trump’s push to get Ukraine to investigate debunked theories that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election — and perhaps Biden.

Investigators surely also have questions about Sondland’s text messages, which reveal his efforts to help Trump secure the Ukraine government’s cooperation. The president has publicly called for Ukraine to investigate Biden after doing so during his call with Zelensky in late July.

“I think POTUS really wants the deliverable,” Sondland texted Volker on Aug. 9. In the same conversation, he suggested asking to see a draft statement on what Ukraine’s president would say to ensure it matched what Trump was pushing for — an investigation into who was behind 2016.

Will he go down with the ship?

Oh, by the way, he is withholding texts he sent from his private phone. There was a time when Republicans had a cow over State Dept officials using private communications for official business.

That’s called “consciousness of guilt”

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“The fiery trial through which we pass” by @BloggersRUs

“The fiery trial through which we pass”
by Tom Sullivan


Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index scores, 2018.

Accusing others of what they themselves are doing is a staple of right-wing politics. Call it projection or inoculation, it is a variant of that fine schoolyard tradition of shouting, “I know you are, but what am I?”

So it is with shouting “corruption.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow gave an extended monologue Monday night [timestamp 15:20] on how corruption is the new “fake news,” a phrase originally used to describe social media propaganda efforts by Russia and others. By adopting the phrase and twisting it to their own purposes, Donald Trump and the right rendered analysis of the actual false stories impossible. Any story they don’t like is now dismissed as fake news. Facts be damned.

Trump is attempting the same bad Jedi mind trick now with corruption, Maddow observes, deploying the term relentlessly against anyone and everyone so that it loses all meaning and turns investigation of his actual corrupt acts as president into he said, she said stories. “I know you are, but what am I?”

Fighting corruption in Ukraine is Trump’s latest explanation for holding back military aid as leverage to get Ukraine to open an investigation into his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. The Associated Press reports that at the same time Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a band of associates were attempting to “install new management at the top of Ukraine’s massive state gas company” (Naftogaz) to help direct lucrative contracts to firms owned by Trump allies:

But the affair shows how those with ties to Trump and his administration were pursuing business deals in Ukraine that went far beyond advancing the president’s personal political interests. It also raises questions about whether Trump allies were mixing business and politics just as Republicans were calling for a probe of Biden and his son Hunter, who served five years on the board of another Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

On Friday, Trump blamed Energy Secretary Perry for instigating the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that triggered a formal impeachment investigation. Perry admitted encouraging Trump to call Zelensky, explaining it as part of U.S. efforts to open Ukraine’s energy sector to Western companies.

Politico reported on Saturday:

Two clients of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Ukrainian-American Trump donors Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, had met with Naftogaz earlier this year to pitch themselves as suppliers of U.S. natural gas, according to media reports.

“I may or may not know anything about it,” Giuliani told POLITICO when asked whether he knew about Perry’s efforts to install new people on the board.

AP’s sources revealed the Naftogaz plan involved several of Trump’s large donors, “two Soviet-born Florida real estate entrepreneurs,” Parnas and Fruman, and “an oil magnate from Boca Raton, Florida, named Harry Sargeant III” who hoped “to
replace Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev with another senior executive at the company, Andrew Favorov.”

AP continues:

The three approached Favorov with the idea while the Ukrainian executive was attending an energy industry conference in Texas. Parnas and Fruman told him they had flown in from Florida on a private jet to recruit him to be their partner in a new venture to export up to 100 tanker shipments a year of U.S. liquefied gas into Ukraine, where Naftogaz is the largest distributor, according to two people briefed on the details.

Sargeant told Favorov that he regularly meets with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and that the gas-sales plan had the president’s full support, according to the two people who said Favorov recounted the discussion to them.

These conversations were recounted to AP by Dale W. Perry, an American who is a former business partner of Favorov. He told AP in an interview that Favorov described the meeting to him soon after it happened and that Favorov perceived it to be a shakedown. Perry, who is no relation to the energy secretary, is the managing partner of Energy Resources of Ukraine, which currently has business agreements to import natural gas and electricity to Ukraine.

Favorov told the group Trump planned to replace U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch with another official friendlier to their economic interests.

Dale Perry was so concerned about the effort to replace Kobolyev that he reported what he had heard to State Department officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and wrote a detailed April 12 memo. Sargeant’s lawyer tells AP, “Attending a single, informal dinner in Houston does not place Mr. Sargeant at the center of any Naftogaz or Ukrainian business plan.” Sargeant was only there to provide “broad industry guidance and his expert view on the challenges presented by operating in foreign markets.”

Among those challenges is knowing the good guys from the bad guys, the honest from the corrupt. That is an increasing challenge in this market, foreign to everyone not from here. Julia Ioffe writes at GQ that our view of Ukraine is ridiculously two-dimensional:

Like the inhabitants of all borderlands throughout history, many Ukrainians have learned to play one side against the other in securing money and power for themselves. Lavishing money on an American consultant with deep ties to the Republican establishment (like Manafort) or to the Democratic one (like Hunter Biden or Devine) can go a long way in securing influence in Washington and, hopefully, still more money in the form of American aid. The same can be done to secure the flow of Russian funds.

[…]

Ukraine pops up in our domestic political scandals because it is in the middle of a tug-of-war between Russia and the West, and because Westerners go there to enrich themselves doing questionable work. But in our minds, it is a small country somewhere over the horizon, full of people with funny Slavic names. Ukraine is much easier to think about if we cram it into our own political dichotomies, even if that distorts what’s really happening on the ground. The problem in doing so, however, is that we become unwitting participants in someone else’s games.

Ukraine scored 32/100 on Transparency International‘s 2018 corruption index, improving. The U.S. scored 71/100 on Transparency International’s 2018 corruption index, worsening. The transparency of the acting president’s efforts to smear his political opponents with his own dung would be laughable if not for the peril he and his allies’ corruption pose to the future of the republic Lincoln described during “the fiery trial through which we pass” as “the last best hope of earth.”

Trump on the phone

Trump on the phone

by digby

Trump screwed the pooch on the Turkey-Syria call with Erdogan last night. Surprise:

In a scheduled phone call on Sunday afternoon between President Trump and President Erdogan, Trump said he would withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria. The phone call was scheduled after Turkey announced it was planning to invade Syria, and hours after Erdogan reinforced his army units at the Syrian-Turkish border and issued his strongest threat to launch a military incursion, according to the National Security Council official to whom Newsweek spoke on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. withdrawal plays into the hands of the Islamic State group, Damascus and Moscow, and the announcement left Trump’s own Defense Department “completely stunned,” said Pentagon officials. Turkey, like the United States, wants regime change in Syria. Russia and Iran support the Assad regime.

“President Trump was definitely out-negotiated and only endorsed the troop withdraw to make it look like we are getting something—but we are not getting something,” the National Security Council source told Newsweek. “The U.S. national security has entered a state of increased danger for decades to come because the president has no spine and that’s the bottom line.”

This kind of cock-up has been anticipated by people in the White House. Maybe they should have spoken up before he got a whole bunch more people killed:

In one of his first calls with a head of state, President Trump fawned over Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling the man who ordered interference in America’s 2016 election that he was a great leader and apologizing profusely for not calling him sooner.

Donald Trump wearing a suit and tie sitting at a table: President Trump speaks with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto by phone in 2018 as he announces the United States has reached an agreement with Mexico to enter a new trade deal.

He pledged to Saudi officials in another call that he would help the monarchy enter the elite Group of Seven, an alliance of the world’s leading democratic economies.

He promised the president of Peru that he would deliver to his country a C-130 military cargo plane overnight, a logistical nightmare that set off a herculean scramble in the West Wing and Pentagon.

And in a later call with Putin, Trump asked the former KGB officer for his guidance in forging a friendship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — a fellow authoritarian hostile to the United States.

Starting long before revelations about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president rocked Washington, Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders were an anxiety-ridden set of events for his aides and members of the administration, according to former and current officials. They worried that Trump would make promises he shouldn’t keep, endorse policies the United States long opposed, commit a diplomatic blunder that jeopardized a critical alliance, or simply pressure a counterpart for a personal favor.

“There was a constant undercurrent in the Trump administration of [senior staff] who were genuinely horrified by the things they saw that were happening on these calls,” said one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations. “Phone calls that were embarrassing, huge mistakes he made, months and months of work that were upended by one impulsive tweet.”

But Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went beyond whether the leader of the free world had committed a faux pas, and into grave concerns he had engaged in a possible crime or impeachable offense. The release last week of a whistleblower complaint alleging Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals as well as the release of a rough transcript of the July call led to House Democrats launching an impeachment inquiry against Trump.

The Ukraine controversy has put a renewed focus on Trump’s un­or­tho­dox way of interacting with fellow world leaders in diplomatic calls.

Critics, including some former administration officials, contend that Trump’s behavior on calls with foreign leaders has at times created unneeded tensions with allies and sent troubling signals to adversaries or authoritarians that the United States supports or at least does not care about human rights or their aggressive behavior elsewhere in the world.

Joel Willett, a former intelligence officer who worked at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, said he was concerned both by the descriptions of a president winging it, and the realization that the president’s behavior disturbs and frightens career civil servants.

“What a burden it must be to be stuck between your position of trust in the White House and another obligation you may feel to the American people to say something,” he said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment Thursday or Friday.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said the president speaks his mind and diverges from other presidents who follow protocol. Graham said he saw nothing distressing in the president’s July 25 call with Zelensky and said he expected it to be worse, partially given his own experience with Trump on the phone.

“If you take half of my phone calls with him, it wouldn’t read as cleanly and nicely,” he said, adding that the president sounded like a “normal person.”

This story is based on interviews with 12 former or current officials with knowledge of the president’s foreign calls. These officials had direct involvement in the calls, were briefed on them or read the transcripts afterward. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s private conversations with world leaders.

The first call Trump made that set off alarm bells came less than two weeks after his inauguration. On Jan. 28, Trump called Putin for what should have been a routine formality: accepting a foreign leader’s congratulations. Former White House officials described Trump as “obsequious” and “fawning,” but said he also rambled off into different topics without any clear point, while Putin appeared to stick to formal talking points for a first official exchange.

“He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my people didn’t tell me you wanted to talk to me,’ ” said one person with direct knowledge of the call.

Trump has been consistently cozy with authoritarian leaders, sparking anxiety among aides about the solicitous tones he struck with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President ­Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin.

“We couldn’t figure out early on why he was being so nice to Russia,” one former senior administration official said. H.R. McMaster, the president’s then-national security adviser, launched an internal campaign to get Trump to be more skeptical of the Russians.
Officials expressed surprise in both of his early Putin calls at why he was so friendly.

In another call, in April 2017, Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who had overseen a brutal campaign that has resulted in the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers, that he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

Trump’s personal goals seeped into calls. He pestered Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for help in recommending him for a Nobel Prize, according to an official familiar with the call.

“People who could do things for him — he was nice to,” said one former security official. “Leaders with trade deficits, strong female leaders, members of NATO — those tended to go badly.”

Aides bristled at the dismissive way he sometimes addressed longtime U.S. allies, especially women.

In a summer 2018 call with Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump harangued the British leader about her country’s contribution to NATO. He then disputed her intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s government had orchestrated the attempted murder and poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil.

“Trump was totally bought into the idea there was credible doubt about the poisoning,” said one person briefed on the call. “A solid 10 minutes of the conversation is spent with May saying it’s highly likely and him saying he’s not sure.”

Trump would sometimes make commitments to foreign leaders that flew in the face of U.S. policy and international agreements, as when he told a Saudi royal that he would support their country’s entry into the G-7.

“The G-7 is supposed to be the allies with whom we share the most common values and the deepest commitment to upholding the rules-based order,” the former official said.

Russia was kicked out of the group in 2014 for violating international law when it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Trump has publicly advocated for Russia to be allowed back in. Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women and has a record of human rights abuses, wasn’t a fit candidate for membership, the former official said.

Saudi Arabia was not admitted to the group.

Calls with foreign leaders have often been highly orchestrated events in past administrations.

“When I was at the White House, there was a very deliberative process of the president absorbing information from people who had deep substantive knowledge of the countries and relationships with these leaders. Preparation for these calls was taken very seriously,” Willett said. “It appears to be freestyle and ad-libbed now.”

Trump has rejected much of the protocol and preparation associated with foreign calls, even as his national security team tried to establish goals for each conversation.

Instead, Trump often sought to use calls as a way to befriend whoever he was talking to, one current senior administration official said, defending the president. “So he might say something that sounds terrible to the outside, but in his mind, he’s trying to build a relationship with that person and sees flattery as the way to do it.”

The president resisted long briefings before calls or reading in preparation, several former officials said. McMaster, who preferred providing the president with information he could use to make decisions, resigned himself to giving Trump small notecards with bulleted highlights and talking points.

“You had two to three minutes max,” said one former senior administration official. “And then he was still usually going to say whatever he wanted to say.”

As a result, staff fretted that Trump came across ill-informed in some calls, and even oafish. In a conversation with China’s Xi, Trump repeated numerous times how much he liked a kind of chocolate cake, one former official said. The president publicly described the dessert the two had in April 2017 when Trump and Xi met at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you have ever seen.”

Trump preferred to make calls from the residence, which frustrated some NSC staff and West Wing aides who wanted to be on hand to give the president real-time advice. If he held the call in the Oval Office, aides would gather around the desk and pass him notes to try to keep the calls on point. On a few occasions, then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly muted the call to try to get the president back on track, two officials said.

Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and critic, said the calls fit Trump’s style as a business leader.

“When he had to get on calls with investors on a publicly traded company, they had to worry that he would break securities laws and lie about the company’s profits,” O’Brien said. “When he would go and meet with regulators with the casino control commission, his lawyers were always worried under oath, in a public setting, that he would say something that would be legally damaging.”

Though calls with foreign leaders are routinely planned in advance, Trump a few times called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron unannounced, as if they were friends, a former administration official said.

After some early summaries of Trump calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia leaked to the press in 2017, the White House tightened restrictions on who could access the transcripts and kept better track of who had custody of copies. For example, Vice President Pence still received a courtesy copy of any foreign-leader call, but his staff now had to sign off when they transported it to his office and also sign off when they returned or destroyed the document.

Some former officials said that over time staff became used to the oddity of some calls even if they still found them troubling.

“People had gotten really numb to him blurting out something he shouldn’t have,” one former national security staffer remarked.

But officials who had served in the White House through the end of 2018 were still shocked by the whistleblower complaint about the effort to “lock down” records of Trump’s July 25 call. The complaint said White House officials ordered the transcript moved into a highly secure computer system, known as NICE, which is normally reserved only for information about the most sensitive code-word-level intelligence programs.

“Unheard of,” said one former official who handled foreign calls. “That just blew me away.”

If you want to see what kind of coward he really is, just look at how he deals with his own employees:

“Spineless” is a nice way of putting it, notwithstanding his great and unmatched wisdom and his clever insulting nicknames.

None of this is to say that keeping troops in the Middle East forever is a great thing. But this particular deployment was very small, serving as support for the tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds who have been doing the fighting against ISIS. Abandoning them to the Turks who will treat them mercilessly is just …. horrifying.

Trump just shrugged and said “fine” because he doesn’t understand any of it and neither does he care.

He has a hotel in Istanbul though …

When he has to choose he always backs the people who benefit him personally.

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