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Month: October 2019

Did the spooks make him hire Paul Manafort too??

Did the spooks make him hire Paul Manafort too?

by digby

He’s now openly pushing the conspiracy theory that the Intelligence Community set him up in 2016. This is what he’s been trying to get to from the beginning.

Here’s one of his allies (the dumbest man in the US Senate) pushing it on Meet the Press:

That’s right. They are going all-in on exonerating Russia 2016 and saying that the “real” interference” was from Ukraine on Clinton’s behalf. It’s full-blown alternate universe time.

I thought this thread from former FBI analyst Asha Rangappa explained the actual Ukraine connection pretty well:

Note the attempt to discredit investigation of Manafort in WH gaslighting. He was on the FBI’s radar for counterintelligence reasons WELL BEFORE Trump’s campaign ever started. He also has been CONVICTED of tax evasion, bank fraud, conspiracy, and witness tampering

Manafort previously worked for pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Victor Yanukovych, who had strong ties to Putin (and has since been deposed). showed up on Trump campaign’s doorstep willing to work for free — even though he was $19 m in debt to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska

While he was Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, were in contact with Konstantin Kilimnik, who is affiliated with Russian intelligence. We know from the Mueller Report that Manafort passed polling data from Trump campaign to Kilimnik

After he was arrested, Manafort *continued* to stay in contact with Kilimnik (this is where the witness tampering charges came from). He also violating court orders by continuing to ghost-write pro-Russian op-eds (propaganda) while on bail. Basically, he was still spying

Manafort was clearly a key person in Mueller’s investigation, which is why they wanted him to talk and kept piling on charges. Manafort appeared to be…but then we found out that he was lying to Mueller and that also Trump was potentially dangling pardons behind the scenes

So dude man goes to jail (for transgressions in what the judge called his “otherwise blameless life”🤔), never having spilled the beans on what he knows. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Fruity G was busy in Ukraine trying to discredit the people who helped expose him to FBI

And now we are at a place where Barr, the State Dept., and U.S. Senators are piling on, concocting a story that somehow Hillary Clinton (of course 🙄) was involved in getting Ukraine to provide info on Manafort, and this constituted “election interference.” Seriously.

To repeat, Manafort was under FBI investigation as EARLY AS 2014. Did the FBI and HRC have some crystal ball *two years before the election* that Trump was going to be the GOP candidate, and plot to take him down? Are these MAGIC GRITS???

Is the fact that Ukraine, or any other country, provide evidence to the FBI in a predicated counterintelligence or criminal investigation, which resulted in actual charges, trial by an impartial jury, and conviction, somehow unusual?? (Answer: No.)

Ask yourself whose interests are served by going down this crazycake theory. Manafort is Pooty’s friend. Manafort is super upset right now bc he kept his mouth shut thinking he’d get a pardon. Trump can’t pardon him without it having serious political liability. Do the math.

OK, apparently people aren’t good at math. Casting doubt on the basis of Manafort’s entire investigation, trying to displace blame for Russian election interference on Ukraine, and discrediting the people who helped the FBI in Ukraine gives cover for Trump to pardon Manafort.

She concludes by pointing out that this keeps Vladimir Putin happy and Manafort quiet.

You have to keep asking who benefits from this. Trump, of course. Mitch McConnell got his judges. But it’s also important to note that every single time, Russia benefits as well. Maybe it’s all a big coincidence.

I have to wonder if this isn’t something he and Vlad chatted about in their private conversations. I can certainly imagine Putin putting this in his head as the best way to cover up their collusion.

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Time to lawyer up by @BloggersRUs

Time to lawyer up
by Tom Sullivan


Photo by Jane Scanlan via Flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0

The presidential balloon is leaking hot air and losing altitude. If Axios’ reporting holds up, Energy Secretary Rick Perry is the first to get pitched over the side to keep it aloft as the impeachment inquiry accelerates.

In a conference call Friday with House Republicans, Donald Trump claimed he did not want to make the now-infamous “perfect” call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He only did so at the urging of Perry, three sources on the call told Axios. Trump said (approximately): “Not a lot of people know this but, I didn’t even want to make the call. The only reason I made the call was because Rick asked me to. Something about an LNG [liquified natural gas] plant,” one source told Axios. The other two sources supported the first’s recollection.

Trump added, “More of this will be coming out in the next few days,” meaning about Perry who reportedly has plans to resign by the end of November.

Perry told the Christian Broadcasting Network on Friday his dealings with Ukraine had only to do with cleaning up corruption.

“I’ve talked to Kurt Volker, Gordan Sondland, the EU ambassador, every name that you’ve seen out in the media, and not once, not once as God is my witness, not once was a Biden name — not the former vice president, not his son — ever mentioned,” Perry said.

Trump blaming Perry for the Ukraine call signals other members of this administration it might be time to lawyer up. Trump has one loyalty and it is not to them. Nor to his oath of office. Others will go over the side as their usefulness to the acting president fades.

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross could find themselves in free fall. Should Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao go, the end will be near. (Chao is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.) Attorney General William Barr will go down with the acting president.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is especially vulnerable given his enthusiastic participation in chasing conspiracy theories around the globe at his master’s request. On Saturday in Athens, Greece, Pompeo called the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry a “silly gotcha game.”

But Pompeo “got” himself already, writes Frank Bruni of Pompeo’s moral transformation. First in his class at West Point and an evangelical, Pompeo saw a chance at real power and, like others in Trump’s orbit, cast principles over the side — principles and his own warnings about “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution.” As Kansas congressman, Pompeo said of Trump at a 2016 rally for Marco Rubio, “It’s time to turn down the lights on the circus.” Instead, Bruni chides, Pompeo “put on a clown suit, put away his ethics and finagled a big role under the Big Top.”

Pompeo will want to lawyer up too. Once his usefulness runs out, Trump suddenly will recall what Pompeo said about him in 2016.

Politico’s conversations with seven current and former members of the National Security Council reveal the impeachment drama has them worrying about their careers and asking whether they might need to retain lawyers.

John Gans (“White House Warriors”) tells Politico things could get dark quickly:

Depending on how far Democrats want to take their inquiry, it could drag in other pieces of the NSC, not to mention the State Department and other agencies making national security policy. Based on what happened under Iran-Contra, Gans recommended that NSC staffers who have any ties to the Ukraine controversy, at least, get lawyers.

“On Iran-Contra it became every man for themselves,” Gans said, predicting that under Trump: “It will be very dark. And I think anarchic. Your career prospects might be dimmed. This was supposed to be the highlight of your career and now it’s going to be a lowlight.”

It is only a matter of time for the rest of Trump’s coterie. How many attorneys in Beltway area have experience defending this sort of thing?

Pretty as you feel: “Chained For Life” (***½) By Dennis Hartley @denofcinema5

Saturday Night at the Movies


Pretty as you feel: Chained For Life (***½)

By Dennis Hartley

Now the questions that come to mind: “Where is this place and when is it?” “What kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm?” You want an answer? The answer is it doesn’t make any difference, because the old saying happens to be true. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence. On this planet or wherever there is human life – perhaps out amongst the stars – beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lesson to be learned in the Twilight Zone.
— Epilogue from “Eye of the Beholder”, a Twilight Zone episode written by Rod Serling.

Depending on how far back your pop culture references go, a certain classic episode from the original Twilight Zone TV series may (or may not) keep popping into your head as you watch writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s “movie within a movie” Chained For Life.

Picture if you will: a postmodernist mashup of The Elephant Man with The French Lieutenant’s Woman (I’ll give you a moment). Schimberg’s film intercuts two parallel romantic affairs; one involving two fictional lead characters in an arthouse horror flick, and the other one that is developing off-set between the two actors who portray the leads.

Mabel (Jess Weixler) is the leading lady, a beautiful movie star hoping to score some art cred by working with a critic’s darling German director (Charlie Korsmo) who is making his English-language debut. Cast opposite Mabel is Rosenthal (Adam Pearson), a sweet-natured young man with a pronounced facial deformity. “Herr Director” is using a semi-abandoned hospital for his set, casting dwarves, “real” Siamese twins, a “bearded lady”, and other folks with unusual physical attributes alongside professional actors like Mabel.

Rosenthal has never acted in a film before; he picks Mabel’s brain between takes for tips. He’s particularly nervous about memorizing his dialog. Mabel assures him that every actor, no matter the degree of experience, worries about that in the early days of a shoot.

“Name an emotion,” Mabel says to Rosenthal in an impromptu acting lesson. On the spot, he can’t think of one. “Sadness,” she offers, as she changes expression to match the emotion. “See?” she says, “Acting.” “I see,” says Rosenthal, “Now I’ve got one. Happiness.” Mabel obliges. “Let’s try fear,” he says. She promptly shows fear. “How about…empathy?” Rosenthal requests. Mabel begins to hedge. “So…empathy in 3-2-1, action!” he repeats. Cleverly, Schimberg keeps his camera on Rosenthal as Mabel gives it a go. “And…it’s a lot like ‘pity’. But all the same, I’m touched,” Rosenthal deadpans.

That funny/sad scene in the first act is essentially the crux of the film: “Empathy” truly is “an advanced emotion” to convey, as Mabel says to Rosenthal with a nervous laugh. Rosenthal’s resigned response to Mabel’s good intentions reveals much about what it’s like to be inside the head of someone who has no control over others’ first impressions of them (he’s thinking “different day, same old shit”). Our first reactions give us away, and honest conversations about how society treats such “outsiders” are far and few between.

Schimberg’s film, while decidedly unconventional, is eminently accessible (once you adjust to its peculiar rhythms). He is clearly a student of the Robert Altman school; highly populated shots with slow zooms from multiple cameras, overlapping dialog, and an improvised feel (although I don’t know for a fact that he gave his actors that leeway).

For me, the best scene is the denouement. Mabel is taking a taxi to the airport after the film production wraps. The camera remains solely on her while she has a conversation with the driver (who we hear, but never see). Initially, Mabel appears uncomfortable, particularly when the driver tells her she is very beautiful and then says he’s a movie fan.

“We have something in common,” the taxi driver says. “We are both artists.” He hands her a book that he has written about his escape from Nigeria. He thinks it would make a great movie. Maybe Denzel Washington can play him. “I know 9 languages,” he tells her. “I am also a math wizard.” He asks her to give him a random math problem, which he solves in seconds, Rain Man style. He tells her about his plans to produce a YouTube series that teaches children math. He dreams it will become so popular that he will be able to use his celebrity status to “ask President Trump to bring my family from Nigeria.”

“You’re an extraordinary man,” Mabel says in wonderment.

And this is an extraordinarily timely film.

Previous posts with related themes:

Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Zoology
The Lure
Fright Night at the Art House: A Top 10 list

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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— Dennis Hartley

Devious Tucker Carlson, having it both ways

Devious Tucker Carlson, having it both ways

by digby

Crooks and Liars caught Tucker Carlson playing both sides.

On the Tucker Carlson Tonight show Thursday night, Carlson debated Democrat Richard Goodstein about the Ukraine scandal, which prompted Democrats to launch a formal impeachment inquiry.

Carlson agreed with Goodstein that Republicans who led the impeachment against Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal would now call it a mistake. “All of them would express regret,” Carlson dubiously asserted. (If you’ve heard any of them express regret, let me know.)

But Carlson moved on to suggest that Trump’s Ukraine is even more of a nothingburger than Clinton’s Lewinsky:

CARLSON: That’s absolutely right. If you were to ask Republicans in Washington now, including the Republican in Washington who led the impeachment charge, of course the then-Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who we just talked to about this – all of them would tell you it was a mistake, all of them would express regret. 

All of them, you know, they don’t like Clinton, but that was not a good idea. So I just wonder, like, if — since you brought that up, two years from now, are Democrats really going to say it was a wise idea to make up this ludicrous, unbelievably dumb story about Ukraine? 

No one even has their heart in it. No one really believes anything bad — the impeachable happened. Do you really think in two years, Democrats would say that was really smart to do that?

Three hours later, a column co-authored by Carlson was published in which he characterized the Ukraine scandal essentially as an abuse of power that just didn’t rise to the level of meriting impeachment.

Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea. Like a lot of things Trump does, it was pretty over-the-top. Our leaders’ official actions should not be about politics. Those two things need to remain separate. Once those in control of our government use it to advance their political goals, we become just another of the world’s many corrupt countries. America is better than that.

So, either Carlson had a sudden change of heart after his show ended at 8 PM, then hastily co-wrote the column that was published at 11:19 PM, or he has brought new meaning to the term two-faced.

Very interesting. I wonder if he thinks that most people who watch his show won’t read the op-ed? He might be right. I suspect that most prime time Fox viewers get all their information there and don’t really read much at all.

Carlson was on MSNBC during the Bush administration and he almost certainly observed Chris Matthews who pulled a similar sleight of hand when he was a cheerleader for Bush and the war on the air while being critical in his newspaper column. When the war went south he was able to show that he’d been “against it all along” although any of us who watched his show certainly knew better.

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A parade of sniveling sycophants

A parade of sniveling sycophants

by digby

I have had disagreements with some of my fellow progressives over whether or not to show the so-called “Never Trumpers” any respect considering all they did to bring us to this place. I fall into the category of “welcome to our nightmare” while others believe they should all be shunned forever. It is a friendly disagreement. I give the vociferous Never Trumpers some credit because I think it takes courage to go up against your own tribe in these polarized times and even though most of them have been welcomed into the Village salons as apostates, they have had to leave behind a lot of relationships. In any case, I think we can settle old scores once the Trump threat has been dispatched.

And regardless of where we stand on that particular group I think everyone can agree that these cowardly bootlickers are the worst of all.

In 2016, Erick Erickson could not have been clearer. Donald Trump was “a racist” and “a fascist.” It was no wonder, Mr. Erickson wrote, that “so many people with swastikas in their Twitter profile pics” supported him. “I will not vote for Donald Trump. Ever,” he insisted, adding his voice to the chorus of Never Trump Republicans.

Last week, Mr. Erickson, a well-known conservative blogger, titled one of his pieces “I Support the President.” In three years, he had come completely around, a transformation that is a testament to President Trump’s remarkable consolidation of support inside the Republican Party. The effort to impeach the president, Mr. Erickson wrote, was a desperate move by people “who have never come to terms with him.”

“Never Trump” no more, conservatives have largely resigned themselves to a more accommodating state of mind: “Never mind Trump.” And their change in attitude helps to mute the much smaller group of conservative voices who remain highly critical of the president and have questioned his conduct.

Glenn Beck, the radio host who once called Mr. Trump “an immoral man who is absent decency or dignity,” now says that his defeat in 2020 would mark “the end of the country as we know it.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who so bitterly feuded with the president during the 2016 primaries that Mr. Trump gave out Mr. Graham’s cellphone number on national television, declared last week that impeachment was nothing but “a political set up.”

It can be difficult to remember that indignation and contempt for Mr. Trump once simmered in every corner of the conservative world. In August 2016, dozens of the most senior Republican national security officials signed a letter warning he would “put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Women leaders of the anti-abortion movement joined together before the Iowa caucuses in 2016 and issued a joint statement declaring themselves “disgusted” at his behavior, saying he had “impugned the dignity of women.” National Review published an “Against Trump” issue that featured essays from 22 prominent conservatives who all made a case for why he should be not be the Republican nominee.

At least half of those writers are now on the record making supportive comments about the president. Some, including Mr. Erickson and Mr. Beck, now fiercely defend Mr. Trump, joining many former foes who are speaking out loudly against the impeachment inquiry. Others who contributed to the issue like Ed Meese, the attorney general under Ronald Reagan, has helped Mr. Trump plan his transition and build his administration.

The “Never Trump” taint still lingers three and a half years later. National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, said that, regrettably, that week’s magazine was remembered as the “Never Trump” issue. “I wish they’d never come up with that phrase,” he said. Mr. Lowry, who spent three weeks recruiting and assigning writers for the issue, still does not shy away from publishing or writing pieces that are harsh toward the president. But he acknowledges that Mr. Trump has helped conservatives like him “stress test your assumptions,” and has forced him to rethink issues like the need to take a tougher approach with China.

“Had I known this was going to be perceived as the bible of the anti-Trump movement, I never would have written it,” said L. Brent Bozell III, who in his National Review essay wrote, “Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all.” He now counts himself as a Trump convert.

There is significant exposure in airing even the most mild criticism of the president, as Mr. Bozell was reminded the other day when he pointed out on Twitter that China, whom Mr. Trump had just congratulated on its 70th anniversary as a communist republic, was a repressive regime.

“The fury is absolutely there for anyone who criticizes this president,” he said. Still, he offered nothing but scorn for the few remaining Never Trump Republicans, whom he accused of being self-righteous and politically shortsighted. “For a lot of the purists, they would rather go down in flames than look at any political equation,” he said. “These are the people who supported George W. Bush when he did nothing for conservatives, and they don’t have any leg to stand on when it comes to passing judgment on Trump.”

This is the grift, right here. Conservatism can never fail it can only be failed. Look for Bozell to turn on a dime if Trump is defeated.

In the meantime, no need to forego all that easy money, amirite?

Mr. Bozell has also discovered that there is a significant market for defending Mr. Trump against impeachment. Through the organization he founded, the Media Research Center, he has helped provide the Trump-friendly news media with a steady stream of videos and articles alleging bias in the mainstream news media’s coverage of impeachment. He has also co-authored a book this year on a similar theme: “Unmasked: Big Media’s War Against Trump.”

In the Republican national security community, many still openly criticize Mr. Trump. But some of the most prominent signatories of the 2016 letter have taken a more charitable view of the president today, like Tom Ridge, the former Homeland Security secretary, and John Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, who said earlier this year: “I certainly don’t think his presidency has been catastrophic.”

Of course Negroponte has slithered into the Trump camp. Bloodthirsty tyrants, domestic and foreign, all find Trump to be quite useful.

The motivations for getting on board are considerable: a job, a bigger audience, a white knight-like belief that you can change things from the inside. “Some of this is pure opportunism and careerism,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a State Department official in the second Bush administration who signed the letter and also helped recruit like-minded Republicans to join an earlier anti-Trump letter that called the then-candidate “fundamentally dishonest.”

“Some people have an inflated notion of the good they can do from the inside,” Mr. Cohen added. “One of my pet hobbies is the study of the technocrats of Vichy, and there were a lot of people like that — some of them indeed making things less bad. And sometimes they were getting seduced by power.”

I don’t believe the white knight theory explains it anymore. Everyone has been able to see for a couple of years now that Trump is impervious to all information that doesn’t fit his twisted and cramped narcissistic worldview. Nobody has influence on him except servile lunatics who tell him what he wants to hear.

And these people take the cake:

Few changes of heart have been as head-spinning as the social conservatives and evangelical Christians who now consider Mr. Trump a hero. Many of the conservative women who once saw him as a boor have come to believe that for too long they were focused on the wrong qualities in presidential candidates. They wanted someone pious when they should have been looking for someone who could throw punches.

“I endorsed Rick Santorum in 2012. And Mike Huckabee,” said Penny Young Nance, who signed the statement in 2016 of anti-abortion activists opposing Mr. Trump. “But at the end of the day, I’m not sure those guys I love and admire would have had the guts to do what Trump has done,” she added.

Among the other considerations of “late adopters,” as Ms. Nance called herself, is how Mr. Trump relentlessly and savagely attacks the left and its leaders. “American women want a street fighter,” she said, “and this is the guy who puts the knife in his teeth and swims the moat.” She called Mr. Trump, “a gutsy New Yorker,” resisting the urge to use a less polite term that Mr. Trump might have used himself. “I could use a different word, but I won’t.”

Oh, go ahead Peggy, say it. Ballsy. You know you want to. We all know now that conservative evangelicals are amoral, violent, vengeful, hypocritical monsters. No need to hide it anymore. Let your freak-flag fly.

For the few remaining holdouts, the willingness of so many conservatives to support Mr. Trump’s behavior is troubling. “I’ve heard from countless people who argue and believe that this is an existential moral moment and if a Democrat wins, darkness will descend on the land,” Peter Wehner, a speechwriter in the second Bush White House, said. “If that’s your mind-set, then of course you’ll engage in a lot of unholy alliances to defeat Satan.”

“I’m trying to determine what’s the limiting principle for a person when it comes to casting a vote for Donald Trump,” Mr. Wehner added. “And I’m not sure there is one.”

Watching these people on TV making excuses for Trump and preening before his cult followers is more than I can take these days.

They know what they are doing. They are not rubes being brainwashed by Sean Hannity. And they know very well that Democrats are not an existential threat. With the exception of some of the evangelicals who have been lying their entire lives about who they are and what they care about, this is a calculated career decision based on cowardice.

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We are lucky to have survived so far, Part XXIV

We are lucky to have survived so far, Part XXIV

by digby

I think this may be one of the scariest things I’ve read about the Trump administration:

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.

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.”

Trump says he is ‘very proud’ of Ukraine call

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.

[WHO DOES THIS ??? –]

“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.”

[He obviously got this in one of his little private chats with Vlad…]

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.

[Trump IS the US and he does share Saudi Arabian values.]

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.”

[He is an imbecile]

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.”

God only knows what else was said but since it was an open secret that he was an imbecile who commonly said things revealed in this article, I shudder to even imagine what they thought was so bad they had to hide it in the NICE server.

I’m going to guess much of it was outright graft and corruption and the rest was overt political blackmail to benefit himself and wreak revenge on his political rivals.

Clearly, his overwhelming stupidity was impossible to keep under wraps.

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Dance for me citizen, if you know what’s good for you

Dance for me citizen, if you know what’s good for you

by digby

If the Democrats win the White House and have one or more houses of congress, it’s vitally important that they do a comprehensive housecleaning at DHS. There’s something very, very bad happening at all the agencies under its auspices. DHS didn’t exist until after 9/11. We should re-think the whole thing and reform and reorganize whatever necessary functions are within it.

These petty tyrants in uniform are out of control:

It took a moment for Ben Watson to realize the officer was not joking.

Watson had just told the Customs and Border Protection staffer reviewing his passport that he works in journalism. Then the seemingly routine Thursday encounter at the Washington Dulles International Airport got tense.

“So you write propaganda, right?” Watson, the news editor at the national security site Defense One, recalled the CBP officer asking.

“No,” Watson says he replied. He affirmed again that he was a journalist.

The officer repeated his propaganda question, said Watson, who was returning from a reporting trip in Denmark.

“With his tone, and he’s looking me in the eye — I very much realized this is not a joke,” Watson told The Washington Post on Friday. Watson said he got his passport back only after agreeing with the “propaganda” charge.

The incident comes amid rising hostility faced by journalists as the Trump administration continues to attack the media as “fake news.”

Watson said he had heard a couple stories of similar encounters in the past, but said he did not realize until sharing his experience at the Dulles Airport on social media just how many people in his field were reporting the same brand of harassment. U.S. airport border agents were at the center of several incidents that have raised reporters’ concerns this year.

“I’ve honestly never had a human attempt to provoke me like this before in my life,” Watson said he told his colleagues. “This behavior is totally normal now, I guess?”

Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that it is investigating the “alleged inappropriate conduct.”

“We hold our employees accountable to our core values of vigilance, integrity and service to country, and do not tolerate inappropriate comments or behavior by our employees,” the agency said.

Standards of conduct for the Department of Homeland Security, CBP’s parent agency, direct staff to “act impartially.”

An article from Defense One describes Watson’s full recollection of Thursday’s conversation. After the second alleged query by the CBP officer, Watson explained that he covers national security “with many of the same skills” he used as a public affairs officer in the Army — and added: “Some would argue that’s propaganda.”

When the officer repeated his question a third time, Watson said, he paused.

His wife had already circled the airport for 20 minutes. He figured he could get stuck for hours if he tried to call in the officer’s supervisor. So he gave in.

“For the purposes of expediting this conversation, yes,” he recalled telling the CBP officer.

The officer made Watson agree one more time before letting him through, Watson said. He says he’s filed a civil rights complaint with DHS.

“We are disappointed and concerned that any U.S. official would question a journalist, or any citizen, in this way,” Kevin Baron, Defense One’s executive editor, wrote to The Post.

Others in journalism circles and beyond were quick to point out chilling implications in the story.

Walter Shaub, an attorney who served as director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics until 2017, tweeted that the incident should go to the DHS inspector general for review.

“A customs agent withholding the passport of a journalist until he agrees to say he writes ‘propaganda’ is actionable misconduct, even in Trump’s America,” he said.

A growing list of journalists say they have been startled by government officials’ harassment in a country that prizes freedom of the press. The encounters are raising fears that hostile rhetoric led by President Trump and his allies are damaging reporters’ ability to do their job unhindered.
[…]
Several other journalists have described difficulties getting through airports in 2019.

In February, CBP apologized to a BuzzFeed journalist questioned at a New York airport about his news organization’s coverage of Trump and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. A few months later, a freelancer said he was detained by CBP officials for hours at an airport in Texas.

Then, in August, British journalist James Dyer described an “unsettling experience” as he flew into California to cover a Disney event. The film and TV writer said a CBP officer at Los Angeles International Airport called him a member of the “fake news media” and asked if he had worked for CNN or MSNBC, two frequent targets of Trump’s criticism.

“He aggressively told me that journalists are liars and are attacking their democracy,” Dyer wrote in a viral tweet thread.

He said he was allowed to move on after explaining that he was just trying to write about Star Wars.

CBP’s response at the time was much like its statement on Thursday’s incident.

“Inappropriate comments or behavior are not tolerated, and do not reflect our values of vigilance, integrity and professionalism,” the agency said.

No, these behaviors are most certainly tolerated. Clearly. And far worse is tolerated against immigrants and foreigners.

This is a rogue agency that employes tens of thousands of uniformed law enforcement with tremendous power over the lives of individuals. There must be top to bottom reform of this entire sector of the government.

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Trump the corruption crusader

Trump the corruption crusader

by digby

It’s just too absurd:

From CNN’s Marshall Cohen — Trump’s latest defense — that he’s just an apolitical anti-corruption crusader — doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. New documents unearthed from the impeachment inquiry, and many of Trump’s past comments, undermine his claims that this isn’t about Biden or 2020 politics.
Here are just a few reasons:’

Trump hasn’t publicly raised these issues before with Ukraine.
So far, the supposed anti-corruption campaign is only focused on Biden.
Trump defended his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who made millions from Ukraine’s corrupt former president.
Trump has praised other world leaders mired by more well-founded corruption scandals, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Also the Trump crime family is making money hand over fist influence peddling and the president is filling his pockets with money from foreigners and others currying favor by patronizing the businesses he refused to divest. I would not be surprised if he’s been setting up branding deals with foreign leaders from the oval office. He’s said publicly that they told him he has a perfect right to do it.

The idea of this man being a crusader against corruption is hysterical. Watching the Republicans solemnly declare that their Dear Leader is just “draining the swamp” by using the government to smear his political rivals would be funny if I didn’t think their followers actually believe it. You know these elected officials don’t. They are as corrupt as he is.

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