Month: January 2020

Black Americans remain “deeply pessimistic” about our national community ever reaching Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s “Promised Land.” More than 8 in 10 believe our acting president is a racist, a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll found. Nearly two-thirds believe it is “a bad time” to be a black person in the United States. Over three-quarters do not believe white Americans understand the systemic discrimination black Americans face. On this King Day holiday, over 80 percent believe Donald Trump has made it worse.

“It’s so easy to be white and oblivious in this country,” Courtney Tate told the Washington Post. Tate, 40, is the only black teacher in his elementary school outside Dallas, Texas.

As Trump brags about the stock market and black unemployment, it is a big ask for candidates to expect black Americans to trust their government. A regional campaign staffer for Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaking to a room filled with older black voters in southern Virginia found himself cut off mid-sentence. The only white person in the room, he was pitching how Warren’s plans for “big, structural change” could help black farmers (New York Times):

“No disrespect,” called out Lauren Hudson, a 62-year-old hemp farmer, “but there’s a whole different avenue when we go for funding versus when a white family goes for funding.”

Among top Democratic presidential candidates, Warren (at 9 percent) ranks third in support among black Democrats. Biden sits at 48 percent and Bernie Sanders at 20 percent. Biden enjoys greater support as a less risky bet, “because his leading rivals have yet to wrestle with how their promises of structural change must overcome historical distrust of the government in black communities,” Astead W. Herndon writes.

In a survey of 34,000 people in 28 countries, PR firm Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer found a majority “in every developed market do not believe they will be better off in five years’ time.” The survey measures trustworthiness of government, business, NGOs, and the media. None of the four were judged both ethical and competent.

Jenny Anderson reports for Quartz:

“We are living in a trust paradox,” said Richard Edelman, CEO of the eponymous firm, describing the fact that economic growth no longer appears to drive optimism in developed markets. “National income inequality is now the more important factor in institutional trust,” he said. “Fears are stifling hope, as long-held assumptions about hard work leading to upward mobility are now invalid.”

The paradox is that respondents simultaneously trust business more than government or media, yet more than half feel “capitalism in its current form is now doing more harm than good in the world.”

Wealthier, more educated, regular consumers of global media, the survey found, retain more trust for institutions than the general public. But globally, 57 percent believe the media they consume is “contaminated with untrustworthy information.”

Widespread lack of trust in government plus systemic racism make large changes a harder sell among black voters, Theodore Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, tells the Times:

Racism “contributes to black people’s lack of support for mass federal programs,” Mr. Johnson said. “There’s a sense that, if you prefer federal programs, that can be an admission that you can’t make it without white people or government.”

Proposals such as “Medicare for all,” free college, cancellation of student loan debt, etc., ask black voters to believe the government that built a system of systemic inequality can also correct it.

“No matter who is in office, the government has not been our best friend,” said Samuel Crisp, 73. He is part of the Piedmont Progressive Farmers Group, which focuses on egg production, and attended the Warren campaign event in Virginia.

“They all have programs that work against us,” he added. “And they don’t seem to understand that.”

In his Memphis speech before his assassination, King said, “I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know, tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

Half a century later, black Americans are still waiting to get there.

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These people are very good at no-hold-barred political assassination.

I thought I’d share some of the ads that Never Trumpers are making against Trump and his enablers:

If they want to help destroy Republicans I’m not going to say they shouldn’t …

Trump’s team is not the best. But Starr, Sekulow and Dershowitz are stars. And that’s all that matters.

George Conway points out in this op-ed that Trump has really had to go to the D-list for attorneys. Sekulow is a religious fanatic who has specialized in Religious Right causes. Working for Trump is consistent with millions of Conservative Christians who have revealed themselves to be total phonies without morals and principles.

His former lawyers John Dowd and Ty Cobb weren’t the best. Emmett Flood and Don McGahn bugged out and the new guy Pat Cippolone seems to be willing to destroy his career writing legal documents that are barely literate.

I don’t think I need to mention Rudy.

Conway says that the top law firms wouldn’t work with Trump because he stiffs them financially and refuses to do what they tell him. Also, I’m sure they aren’t too keen on being associated with the most corrupt president in history. Apparently, they have reason to believe they’ll have trouble attracting the top law students to join, which is unsurprising.

But what Conway says about Starr and Dershowitz is interesting:

Dershowitz may be a genius in some ways, but he’s not necessarily the advocate you want on your side. Judges have told me they find him condescending in manner and tone — not the approach you want before a court consisting of 100 U.S. senators. And he’s wont to make off-the-wall arguments. As his Harvard colleague Professor Laurence Tribe has put it, Dershowitz “revels in taking positions that ultimately are not just controversial but pretty close to indefensible.” Dershowitz’s recent assertion that the Supreme Court could order the Senate not to conduct an impeachment trial illustrates the point. Not only is that claim indefensible — it’s also ridiculous.

And then there’s Starr. I know and like Starr, but I can’t comprehend what he’s doing here. He’s best known as the independent counsel whose investigation led to the impeachment of Clinton. That’s hardly helpful for Trump, because Clinton was a piker compared with Trump.

Clinton’s core offense was to obstruct a private civil action about pre-presidential conduct and cover-up sexual misconduct — none of which had involved abuse of presidential power. From a constitutional standpoint, that’s a trifle compared with extorting a foreign nation by cutting off federal military funds in an effort to interfere with an upcoming U.S. presidential election.

As if that were not enough, in the Clinton case, Starr argued that Clinton had committed an impeachable offense by blocking witness testimony and documents. Oops.

You know George, it’s not hard to figure out at all. Maybe you had an epiphany of some sort (or something) but the most likely explanation is that Starr was always an unprincipled partisan just as you were then and he remains one today like most of your former buddies.

He concludes with this:

Any litigator will tell you that adding to your legal team on the eve of trial most likely will not produce better lawyering but, rather, chaos. In that sense, at least, Trump will be getting the representation he deserves.

Unfortunately, Mitch McConnell and the Accomplices (his new cover -up band) are planning to do everything they can to portray this legal chaos as perfectly normal and it’s entirely possible that much of the public will see it that way. Look at how the press is presenting Dershowitz’s inane argument that a president can’t be impeached unless he breaks the law in some way he determines is a “high crime.” (He says Clinton couldn’t be impeached because he defined it as a “low crime.”) (Dershowitz has discarded all the scholarship that says a “high crime” is a crime committed that only someone in a “high” position like a president or a judge can commit– like abuse of power or obstruction of congress, for instance. )

Anyway, he’s out there suggesting that whatever Trump did it didn’t violate an existing statute (whoever thought we’d need one?) so there’s nothing we can do. And it looks to me as if the media’s treating that minority opinion as if it’s perfectly normal.

He’s a star, dotcha know, and when you’re a star they let you do it. That’s Trump’s strategy for everything.

Junior Trump insists that he and his family are out of the international business. He is lying.

Don Jr tells Maria Bartiromo that the Trump Organization has not done "any new international deals" since his dad took office, & cites this as reason he's so involved in politics. This is a lie – they have done new deals: https://t.co/DM5hL5YH9M

No pushback, however, from Maria. pic.twitter.com/OVDofyRomZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 19, 2020

This isn’t the first time they’ve made this dishonest claim. As Rupar notes above, CNN addressed it a couple of months ago when Eric said it:

In a recent Fox News interview, Eric, discussing Hunter’s dealings, noted that “the difference between us and Hunter is when my father became commander-in-chief of this country, we got out of all international business, right?” Not quite. Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a non-profit government watchdog group, told CNN that Eric’s claim was the “worst lie I’ve heard in a while.”

Facts First: President Trump’s three oldest children have all been involved with international business in some manner since his election. Furthermore, the President has made millions of dollars from foreign assets associated with the Trump Organization in 2017 and 2018, according to his public financial disclosure reports.

The Trump Organization also continues to market, promote and expand Trump-branded properties all over the world, as recently as last month.

On October 10, The Trump Organization firm TIGL Ireland Enterprises received approval for a new development that the Irish Times reports will double the size of the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in Doonbeg, Ireland. Per The Trump Organization’s website, the Trump brand is associated with an estate in Scotland, residential property in India, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, the Philippines and Uruguay, and public golf courses in Scotland, Ireland, Dubai, Bali and Indonesia. The golf courses in Ireland and Scotland have accompanying Trump hotels. There’s also a Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver, British Columbia which formally opened in February 2017. As executive vice presidents of The Trump Organization, Trump’s eldest sons have continued to conduct international deals for the family company, despite the President’s initial promise to the contrary.In February 2017,

Eric went to the resort island of Cap Cana in the Dominican Republic, where The Trump Organization has had ties since 2007. After the visit, the president and vice president of Cap Cana’s Council said the relationship between the two organizations “remains incredibly strong, especially with Eric, who has led the project since its inception,” adding that “we are excited to be working with the Trump Organization in the future phases of the project.”

Eric Trump delivers a speech during a ceremony for the official opening of the Trump International Tower and Hotel on February 28, 2017 in Vancouver, Canada.While the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver was the first property to open with the Trump name after President Trump was sworn in, it was not the last. The month after their father’s inauguration, the Trump sons attended the grand opening of a Trump-branded golf course in Dubai.

While The Trump Organization did not itself develop the course, the Trump brand is associated with the property as part of a licensing agreement. The following year, Trump Jr. visited India to promote Trump-branded apartments for several development projects in Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata and around New Delhi. In June 2018, a few months after Trump Jr.’s visit, construction on the Trump Towers outside New Delhi broke ground. The website for Trump Towers Delhi features a section dedicated to Trump, where Donald Jr. is quoted as saying “we are excited to extend the Trump brand.” All the Trump Towers in India denote on their websites that the properties are not owned, developed or sold by The Trump Organization and that they’re licensing the “Trump” name. These developments represent the same kind of international business that Trump was engaging in before his election.

For years, a majority of The Trump Organization’s international business has come from licensing the Trump name. This August, Trump Jr. was in Jakarta, Indonesia, to promote Trump Residences Bali and Trump Residences Lido at a private event for potential buyers and tenants. Although The Trump Organization signed a contract for the two properties in 2015, The New York Times reported they were not yet built as of Trump Jr.’s visit. According to the President’s 2016 financial disclosure form, he received between $2-10 million for the two properties. In Indonesia, Trump Jr. told reporters The Trump Organization was making conscious efforts to avoid any conflicts of interest, saying “we have turned down a lot of deals.” The next month, the organization received approval to expand their Aberdeen golf course in Scotland.

Eric’s claim that the Trump children “got out” of international business could potentially apply to Ivanka, who shut down her namesake fashion company in 2018, motivated in part by her awareness that to continue could be seen as a violation of ethics laws and as if she was profiteering off of not only her father’s role as President but also her influence as senior adviser to the president.

However, Ivanka’s prior international dealings are the closest to what the President is alleging Hunter Biden did. In April 2017, Ivanka received approval from China for three preliminary trademarks associated with her namesake fashion company the same day she met Chinese President Xi Jinping for dinner with her father, President Trump. Although Ivanka was no longer in a managerial role with the company in 2017, she retained an ownership stake until the following year.

These are just the documented cases of the Trump spawn using the presidency to advance the company’s overseas business. It doesn’t count the obvious conflicts of interest that are presented by Trump delivering certain policies before Trump is out of office and can collect. And there is so, so much we don’t know. The blatant conflicts are everywhere and the Trumps are so corrupt that its fair to assume they have taken advantage of every one of them.

There has never been a more money-obsessed, transactional, greed-head in office than Donald Trump. His entire worldview is organized around scrounging for every last dime and screwing those with whom he does business. He’s even quoted saying in the new “Stable Genius” book that he thinks the military should be making a profit. He told his staff he wants to make it legal to bribe foreign governments, something he actually did with Kim Jong Un when he believed he was susceptible to the inducement that if he stopped building nuclear weapons Trump would arrange for some typically hideous condo developments on the beach.

He’s been pimping his properties with personal appearances and selling access via his private clubs throughout his presidency. And he’s got taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars that went directly into his company’s coffers.

Can anyone in his or her right mind not see that Trump and his spawn have been doing everything in their power to line their pockets while he is in office? It’s absurd. Of course they have.

Recall what Michael Cohen said in his testimony to the House:

I can only warn people, the more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did, blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

I wish I understood the attraction to an idiot like Trump. But I will never get it. And that’s not to say I can’t understand why people are attracted to fascism and demagogues. But it has always puzzled me as to why people get into cults of personality. And that’s what Trump is more than anything else. His “politics” such as they are, are limited to some desire to “win” whether it’s our enemies, our allies or his political rivals at home. There’s nothing of substance beyond that. The ecstatic love for him has no meaning beyond an overwhelming personal attachment and love for the group that has attached itself to him. That’s a cult.

Like Michael Cohen before him, another Trump henchman, Lev Parnas, has been forcibly detached from the cult by the legal system and it jolted him into awareness of what he got himself into. I have no doubt that he sought to personally profit as well, but that’s part of the Trump cult’s promise, isn’t it? The money is a big part of the deal.

The Washington Post interviewed Parnas and he talked about this aspect of it. It’s fascinating:

In an interview with The Washington Post, he compared himself to someone emerging from a “cult,” with fresh perspective on the dizzying events of the past two years.

“That arrest saved my life,” he said.

Two years ago, Parnas was fending off creditors in obscurity in Boca Raton, Fla. He shot to the tableside of the president’s closest allies and family members with a few well-placed campaign donations, a die-hard loyalty to Trump and some good old-fashioned chutzpah.

Parnas, 47, was born in Ukraine but moved with his family to the United States as a child and grew up in Brooklyn. He told The Post in an interview conducted before his arrest that he got his start in real estate, at one point selling Trump condos for Donald Trump’s father, Fred, and then worked in trading goods with the former Soviet Union before becoming a securities trader. He moved to Florida in the mid-1990s.AD

He barreled into Trump circles with a $50,000 donation to Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party less than a month before the 2016 election. “I was really passionate about the president,” he said last fall before his arrest. “I started really believing that he could really make a change and make it happen.”

“I tell you honestly, I think he’s going to go down as one of the greatest presidents ever, even with all this negativity and everything that’s going on,” he said then. Parnas told MSNBC last week that he was so passionate about Trump that he had photos of him all over his house. After his arrest, he said, his wife was embarrassed because the FBI told her that “I had a shrine to him.”

“I idolized him,” he said. “I mean, I thought he was the savior.”

In his interview with The Post, Parnas said he was able to rise quickly in Trump’s world because he discovered a “kink in the system”: the super PAC, which, unlike a candidate committee, can accept unlimited funds. In May 2018, the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action reported receiving a $325,000 donation from an energy company Parnas and Fruman had recently formed.

Prosecutors have said the money did not come from their fledgling company, which had no business or revenue, but from a private loan Fruman took out against a Miami condo. Giuliani met the two men around the same time, through a lawyer and friend who referred the duo to him, he has said.

Parnas said he sought out the former New York mayor to be a paid pitchman for a company he co-founded called Fraud Guarantee that claimed to shield investors from financial fraud. He arranged for Giuliani to be paid $500,000 by a Long Island lawyer who was an investor in Fraud Guarantee. He assumed their relationship would be a distant one, Parnas said this past week.

Instead, Parnas said, he was shocked and delighted to find himself constantly at the side of the president’s personal lawyer. Before he knew it, Giuliani was inviting him and Fruman to hang out four to five nights a week, he said. They were zipping around the country to attend Trump rallies, and then traveling around Europe to gather information about Ukraine.Giuliani says he’d testify at Trump’s Senate trial, adds that he’d ‘love to try the case’President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani reacted to Trump’s impeachment proceedings on Dec. 31.

There were long nights at exclusive cigar bars and frequent strategy sessions at Trump’s hotel in Washington; a visit to a palace outside Madrid owned by a Venezuelan energy executive; and a huddle at a luxury Parisian club. Parnas joined Giuliani in the dugout to meet the New York Yankees during a special overseas baseball game in London. He accompanied the former New York mayor to a special annual commemoration of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and to the state funeral of former president George H.W. Bush at Washington National Cathedral.

Parnas said living in Giuliani’s world was a heady experience. “I looked up to him. I grew up in New York and he was a legend. And here I was sitting with him, every night,” he said.At night, he would call his wife, Svetlana, and tell her about the powerful people he was meeting with Giuliani and the swanky fundraisers they were attending. “You won’t believe this!” he would exclaim.

Parnas acknowledged that he had ambitions to use the connections he was making through Giuliani to improve his business prospects. He said he grew up in Brighton Beach with little money and an absent father. In recent years, he said, his career had been “up and down.” “Sometimes we were buying Rolexes,” he said. “And sometimes we were selling the Rolexes to make the rent.”

Court filings show he has been dogged by debts. When he met Giuliani, he was being pursued for more than $500,000 in Florida courts by investing in a movie deal gone bad.In his new environs, Parnas said, suddenly anything appeared possible: “I figured, once this is over, we’ll be kings.”

Still, he said, he understood from the start that he and Fruman, who often wore T-shirts paired with gold chains, did not fit in Giuliani’s circle.“No one understood it,” Parnas said of their constant presence by his side. “I didn’t understand it.” But at the time, he said, he believed Giuliani enjoyed their company — and that Giuliani appreciated that the duo were a solicitous entourage, willing to drop anything to join him at his favorite haunts, stay out late while he drank scotch and pick up the tab.

Now Parnas believes that the president’s lawyer drew the two Soviet-born men close after he realized they had connections in Ukraine, a Giuliani obsession. The former New York mayor was convinced Ukrainians had worked against Trump in the 2016 election and were in possession of evidence of Biden’s corruption.

“I think we were recruited,” Parnas said. “It was the perfect storm.”

There’s more at the link.

Maybe Parnas is a very stable genius himself who is playing a very deep game on behalf of some nefarious Deep State players. But I doubt it. That recitation rings true. I can see how someone like him would think he had an in with big players and stood to make a ton of money. And while I will never understand why anyone would idolize Donald Trump it sounds perfectly believable to me that this guy did.

Lev should have listened to Michael Cohen

Bill and Rudy had separate jobs in the Ukraine plot, but they were working toward the same goal.

You’ll recall that Bill Barr has said that he was out of the loop on Trump’s Ukraine adventure. It’s always been suspicious that the DOJ just dismissed the whistleblower complaint of course. And when Barr appeared in Trump’s Zelensky call transcript in the same breath as Rudy Giuliani, people wondered why. (He denied knowing anything about it.) Trump wanted him to hold a press conference and tell the public he did nothing wrong but he didn’t do it.

Lev Parnas said Barr was “on the team” and we already knew that he was. After all, he’s been pushing to discredit the Mueller Report with his “investigation of the investigation” and leaving open Trump’s daft idea that the Ukrainians may have “framed” Trump and the Russian government in the 2016 election interference. Parnas says he believed he was in on the Biden smear as well.

And now we have this:

Attorney General William Barr briefly attended a meeting at the Justice Department last fall between top criminal prosecutors and President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, a department official said Friday.The meeting reveals a previously undisclosed interaction between two men the President depends on to defend him.

I’m just putting his here.

Newly released: AG Barr dropped in on Giuliani meeting with Assis. AG for the Criminal Division. @JulieZebrak's analysis is dead on the money here. This new detail deserves a lot of scrutiny. https://t.co/jbJFCuVRJR

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) January 18, 2020

Barr is said to be leery of Giuliani and reportedly told Trump to dump him. (Trump can’t do that, of course, since Rudy has “insurance.”) But they have been working toward the same goals.

Barr took the task of discrediting the Mueller investigation with his Durham probe. Rudy went after Biden. Whether or not they actively plotted together they are most definitely on the same team.

Arshad Hasan, I think, then with Democracy for America, told a group of us trainees to remember we were not normal people. Normal people don’t spent their weekends in campaign schools. They don’t eat, breathe, and sleep politics.

I coach canvassers never even to think voters are stupid. They aren’t stupid. They’re busy – with work, kids, school, church, soccer practice, etc. Most are not evaluating a policy checklist as much as reading signals that tell them a candidate or party has their back. They’re normal.

So it was this tweet from Iowa came across my feed via an L.A. Times correspondent:

Hard to overstate how unpredictable talking to voters can be: Melissa from Algona, Iowa, caucused for Bernie in 2016, then voted for a Trump; she supports Medicare for All but supports Buttigieg, but will likely vote for Trump again if Buttigieg doesn’t win the Dem nomination. pic.twitter.com/ZgvQQ7NoW2

— Matt Pearce 🦅🇺🇸 (@mattdpearce) January 16, 2020

Ridicule such voters if you like losing, but their motivations aren’t easily distilled into neat red & blue categories. Mark Meadows’ NC-11 is the only district in the state that voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, narrowly. The district went heavily for Donald Trump in the general election. Some Sanders voters flipped to Trump. Many Democratic regulars did too. Many of the latter are holdovers who simply never switched parties after the 1960s.

Chris Hayes responded to Matt Pearce’s tweet with observations he’d made in Wisconsin in 2004:

Undecided voters aren’t as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We’re giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man’s house, she still couldn’t make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn’t have much luck.

But disparaging such voters’ lack of “a basic rationality” assumes voters make their voting decisions rationally, or should, is like saying you made a rational decision to fall in love. It misses a great deal of subtext. More subliminal factors are at play, other signals. Pheromones and whatnot. That’s how it is with some voters, especially those for whom social issues matter most, wrapped up in concerns about jobs and maintaining the existing pecking order.

Americans of means sometimes don’t choose candidates, they invest in them looking for a return in financial terms, social status, or both. For your consideration: Gordon Sondland and Lev Parnas. That’s rational, if not calculating. For others, it’s more unconscious. They take the “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like” approach. It’s not wrong, just different, the way people having different learning styles.

As smart as progressives like to think they are, we often miss this. Rationality is overvalued. Emotional intelligence matters in these personal interactions:

A candidate’s attitudes toward “people like me” thus become a powerful heuristic. If a candidate generally likes people like me, then it seems plausible that he will look out for my interests in a wide range of scenarios. 

Hayes went on to say his 2004 post that while undecided voters care about politics, “they just didn’t enjoy politics.” Many undecideds he met in Wisconsin could not name a single issue of importance to them. They simply did not identify complaints in their lives as having any connection to politics or that they might have political remedies.

In this context, Bush’s victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed “values” as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn’t the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like “character” and “morals.” Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values–we all know what’s right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don’t even grasp what issues are?

That’s why expanding our suite of tools beyond facts and issues is key to reaching many voters. Rationality is overvalued. Emotional intelligence is lacking in our politics. If it seems as if we’re speaking different languages sometimes, it is because we are. Peers planning trips abroad will bone up on the local culture, learn some basic phrases, etc., to enhance their visits. They just won’t show voters in the next county the same courtesy. A new friend observed Friday how the culture in the South is very different from back North, both in good ways and in bad.

Perhaps that is why trainers tell canvassers their job is not to engage in a debate with voters. The job is to smile, listen, drop the literature, and most of all leave a good impression. It’s not to impress anyone with your smarts and superior command of the issues. That’s the candidate’s job, but only a part of it. Tone and body language speak volumes.

This shadowy Kremlin-connected Ukrainian energy oligarch seems to be at the center of everything.

Franklin Foer takes a look at his story and the various strands connecting him to both the Mueller probe and this Ukraine scandal. He would seem to be a likely source of much of the money that’s been floating around.

Somewhere near the heart of the Ukraine scandal is the oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Evidence has long suggested this fact. But over the past week, in a televised interview and in documents he supplied to Congress, Rudy Giuliani’s former business partner Lev Parnas pointed his finger at the Ukrainian oligarch. According to Parnas, Giuliani’s team had a deal with Firtash. Giulani would get the Justice Department to drop its attempt to extradite the oligarch on bribery charges. In return, according to Parnas, the oligarch promised to pass along evidence that would supposedly discredit both Joe Biden and Robert Mueller. […]

The rapid ascent of Firtash, a fireman from western Ukraine, remains mysterious—although he once disgorged details from his past in a long chat with the U.S. ambassador to Kyiv, Bill Taylor, a description of which eventually emerged in a WikiLeaks document dump. But it’s been widely reported that Firtash attached himself to the gangster Semion Mogilevich, one of the region’s most important Mafia bosses, a man the FBI placed on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. (His lawyers vociferously deny any connections to gangsters.)

When Putin ascended to power in 2000, he gained control of his country’s natural-gas business. He placed his allies at the helm of the country’s gas monopoly, Gazprom, and he has routinely wielded that company as an instrument of Russian foreign policy. In 2002, Firtash became Gazprom’s most important middleman: He was responsible for selling Russian gas to Ukraine. Thanks to an extraordinary Reuters investigation, which burrowed into Customs documents, contracts, and Cyprus bank accounts, the details of this arrangement are now well known. Gazprom sold Firtash gas at four times below the market price. When Firtash resold the gas to the Ukrainian state, he pocketed a profit of $3 billion. Even as he amassed this fortune, bankers close to Putin extended Firtash an $11 billion line of credit.

According to close watchers of Gazprom, a chunk of this cash cycled back to Moscow in the form of kickbacks. Another chunk of this money was spent bankrolling Russian political influence in Ukraine. Firtash was one of the two primary patrons of the deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and his political party. (He also bought a television network for the sake of promoting the cause.) This meant that Firtash was also writing the checks that covered the cost of Paul Manafort’s services to Yanukovych. It’s worth pausing to marvel at the narrative symmetry of this scandal: Both Manafort and Parnas shared the same Russian-alligned paymaster.

In 2014, just after a revolution chased Yanukovych from power, the FBI issued an arrest warrant for Firtash. Austrian authorities detained Firtash near his Vienna mansion. The indictment alleged that he had bribed Indian officials on behalf of Boeing, which desperately wanted to acquire rare materials for the construction of its 787 Dreamliner. (McKinsey & Company, the now-vilified consulting firm, apparently vetted Boeing’s decision to work with Firtash and didn’t recommend against it, according to a New York Times investigation.)

When Firtash needed someone to pay his bail—which the Austrians set at $155 million, the highest in the nation’s history—the oligarch Vasily Anisimov, a member of Putin’s inner circle, supplied the cash. Over the past five years, Firtash has successfully battled the Justice Department’s attempts to extradite him. He’s hired an army of American lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants, including the notorious Jack Abramoff and the longtime Clinton friend Lanny Davis, as well as the Donald Trump–supporting lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing. His spokesman is Mark Carollo, who worked for Trump’s legal team during the Mueller investigation.

Foer suggests that Firtash’s involvement raises some important questions about the Ukraine scandal;

Is it possible that the plot against biden began with firtash? 

According to the Daily Beast, Firtash has long seethed at Joe Biden. As vice president, Biden vigorously promoted an anti-corruption agenda that included liberating Ukraine’s energy sector from Firtash’s dominance. In fact, when Biden visited Kyiv in 2015 and spoke before Parliament, he seemed to praise the Ukrainian government for “closing the space for corrupt middlemen who rip off the Ukrainian people.” Firtash raged against this speech. He described Biden as an “overlord.” He said, “I was ashamed to look at this. I was repulsed.” If Firtash promised Parnas material that could be used against Biden, he was fulfilling a long-held grudge.

Foer points out that everyone seems to believe that the Biden plot originated with the corrupt Prosecutor Viktor Shokin because he was fired at the insistence of the United States, represented by Biden. It turns out that Shokin and Firtash are allies, with Shokin even filing an affidavit in Austria testifying to Firtash’s innocence. Foer wonders if they might have been working together on this from the beginning.

He also wonders if Parnas and Fruman’s attempt to get a natural gas contract to export American gas to Ukraine (!) and install new leadership in Naftogaz, the company Firtash believes owes him money and is blocking him from selling stores of gas he thinks he owns., might have been on Firtash’s behalf?

And, of course, the big question is what in the world was Rudy Giuliani doing for Firtash? He has tried to distance himself from the oligarch but he’s had to admit that he has met with Firtash’s lawyers and others, here and in Europe. Giuliani met with the Justice Department to discuss the case of a foreigner who was accused of bribery and he won’t name the client.

Finally, Foer asks:

What did the russians know? Given Firtash’s past involvement with the Kremlin—given that the Russian state supplied him with his fortune, given that he did its political bidding in the past, given that a Putin insider loaned him the money for his bail—it seems fair to ask: Did he keep the Russians in the loop about his involvement with Parnas and Giuliani? Did he ever seek to enlist their help? These are admittedly speculative questions, but the oligarch’s background demands their consideration.

Dmytro Firtash’s work in Ukraine undermined that nation’s democracy. He spent hundreds of millions entrenching the forces of kleptocracy. His machinations kept the country locked in Russia’s orbit. That he may have been involved in spreading disinformation about Biden for the sake of avoiding extradition is the most important allegation from Lev Parnas’s trail of cable-news interviews. It suggests that he may have attempted to reprise his past work on American soil, and maybe even succeeded.

We may never know why Donald Trump seems to constantly be surrounded by people who are determined to sabotage our elections. Many of them seem to be centered in Russia and Ukraine but it’s clear he’s happy to rig the election by any means necessary. He doesn’t see anything wrong with it. He’s made that clear.

At this point, I don’t even care why. He’s betrayed his country for his own personal benefit over and over again. And his accomplices in the Republican Party are as faithless and disloyal as he is. His reasons no longer matter.

Image via Herbert Neubauer via AFP/Getty

It may not be possible to know in advance if a candidate is smart enough to be president. But we can sure as hell tell when he or she isn’t.

Charlie Pierce discusses “A Very Stable Genius” in his newsletter and makes all the tart observations one would expect from him. But he adds something that I think is important. He notes that Trump has gone a long way to demystifying the presidency and that should make all of us more conscious of the demands of the job.

I think that’s true. Many people assumed that Trump would “learn on the job” or that he would hire great people who would really run things or that that least here is some unnamed group of grey emminences who would ensure that he didn’t make any truly rash decisions. ( “Deep state” anyone?) None of that is correct.

Pierce writes:

God knows, there was no office in any democracy anywhere that needs demystifying more than the American presidency, and that this is a project that should be ongoing forever. For example, believe it or not, unless you’re in the military, the president is not your “commander-in-chief.” In fact, if you are not in the military—or, if you are, and you’re acting in your capacity as a citizen—the president is merely your temporary employee. We need more of this attitude in our politics, and not less.

One of the drawbacks of a demystified presidency, however, is the notion that the job can be done by almost anyone. This can work out well or, as we are seeing today, it can work out very poorly. And, because to job of demystification is never really done, the presidency is still very well-armed for the task of making sure the foibles and shortcomings, dangerous and otherwise, are shielded from the president’s employers. So if, as it seems we have done, the country elects a dangerous incompetent to be president*, there always will be a desire in certain quarters to believe that this person can “grow into the job.” Call this the Harry Truman Fantasy. And, as Old Lodge Skins says in Little Big Man, sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

He goes on to describe the little flap-let in 1999 when George W. Bush was quizzed about some world leaders and made a fool of himself. His spokesperson, Karen Hughes, said it didn’t matter if he knew the names of world leaders because he had a grand strategic vision for the world. (As opposed to his dad’s admitted problem with “the vision thing” presumably.)

The DC press corps jumped into action and defended what they called Bush’s “incurious” intellect and as Charlie notes went back immediately to bashing Al Gore for being a pathological liar. (Seriously, they did that. And he wasn’t a liar.)

Pierce also notes that they defended Reagan to the hilt for his obvious intellectual shortcomings even before he was beset by Alzheimers. And we can go back to Eisenhower and Truman for earlier examples (although Truman was derided in his own time and only later was seen as some kind of master strategist.)

He writes:

[T]he notion that a president doesn’t need to know a lot stayed in our politics like a chain of time-bombs. It went off disastrously in 2000. And now, it has detonated again, this time with nearly limitless megatonnage

He concludes with this:

Here, in one dangerous man, the demystification of the presidency and the ever-present chorus for an amateur in that office combine to increase the peril presented by both phenomena. You can’t hire just anybody for any job, and you can’t make a quasi-mystical political figure out of just anyone, either.  Sooner or later, the blind commissioner falls off the tightrope.

Personally, I think an awful lot of Americans daftly think they themselves could be president. That’s the old “I want a president I could have a beer with” nonsense. On the other hand, many of them looked at Trump and saw that he was rich and famous and that was all they needed to see. Sure he sounds like a damned idiot but you can’t get all that fame and fortune without being super-smart, right? The fact that he inherited his money and is a cheap fame whore with four bankruptcies behind him didn’t register.

Anyway, Pierce is right. I don’t think we can necessarily know if a president has the requisite combination of skills to be president or even if he’s smart enough in the right way. But we sure as hell can see when a candidate is not. It wasn’t hard to see that Bush Jr was an idiot with a lot of daddy issues who would be easily manipulated by the Razputin cabal around him. And Donald Trump’s blazing ignorance and personality disorder was on display for all to see. It’s not that hard to weed out the truly dumb ones.