What Mueller hires reveal:team members are specialists in money laundering, financial fraud &Russian organised crimehttps://t.co/Q15vuzvhwj
— Michiko Kakutani (@michikokakutani) June 18, 2017
In other words, all of Trump's hobbies. https://t.co/XqwU4SRE0w
— Schooley (@Rschooley) June 18, 2017
They were careless people, Mike and Donny…
.@SenWhitehouse tells @wolfblitzer there is a ton of evidence Mike Flynn is a cooperating witness with the FBI. Wow.
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) June 19, 2017
Retired 3-star General Michael Flynn. Gig Economy Mercenary. https://t.co/8lhJf3meY2 pic.twitter.com/N7COaIVssr
— Salacious Materiel (@ZeddRebel) June 18, 2017
Wow, so @RT_com paid Flynn $45,000 for his Moscow visit. https://t.co/jt7N5AOtZm
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) June 18, 2017
Omnes Omnibus
Wow indeed.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Am I right in thinking that there was speculation about this a month or so ago?
efgoldman
He really doesn’t have much choice. It’s his best chance to make a deal.
Dmbeaster
No wonder Trump liked Flynn – a fellow traveler who viewed government activity as one big profit opportunity.
This is gonna be about Trump and crew making deals with Russians to launder their dirty cash into the West, and Trump and crew getting financing for their crappy real estate deals as part of the deal.
Gin & Tonic
Is this guy Drezner related to Rip Van Winkle? The amount Flynn got from RT was known ages ago.
debbie
Kakutani’s left the Book Review?
WaterGirl
I keep noticing Tunch with wings in the twitter area in the sidebar. Am I right in thinking we are close to the anniversary of losing Tunch? I know it was shortly after the tree fell on my house, and that was May 31. RIP Tunch, we still love you.
Mike J
Not just money laundering. Mueller hired a flipper today.
efgoldman
@Dmbeaster:
Yeah, by the time this is all done, obstruction will be an afterthought.
Major Major Major Major
On NPR today they had an interview with Obama’s ethicist who recalled, with exasperation, how they wouldn’t let Obama refinance his mortgage because of the appearance of conflict that even small amounts of debt can cause.
WaterGirl
@Mike J:
Flipper. I like that. Is that actually a legal term, or a Mike J original?
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: Un-fucking-believable. Except that it’s not.
They have no respect, not for people, for traditions, for rules, for the rule of law. Greed and hate, that’s all they’ve got.
Major Major Major Major
@Mike J: Glen(n?) “run ’em down” Reynolds had a piece that somebody printed today about how Mueller needs to recuse himself from the obstruction investigation because he’s friends with Comey.
Libertarians, you can always count on them to take a principled stand when it will help a republican.
jl
@Mike J: Good. No torture, that is immoral and ineffective. But hand ’em some cigs and beer and just talk about life, you know, how things sometimes just don’t turn out the way you thought they would, we all wind up in places we didn’t want to be, and gosh darn it, its just better to do everything we can to make amends and put any mistakes we may have made behind us asap, right?
I hope Flynn listens. Trumpsters talk about ‘no evidence’. Flynn took foreign money, didn’t report it, and the first damn thing he did, as soon as he was in a position to have any influence at all, was to block a proposed campaign against ISIS that his paymasters (in Russia and Turkey) found unpleasant.
So… no evidence, huh? Sure, whatever they want to say about it. They can go shout at the moon, but it won’t go away, will it?
debbie
I just checked Trump’s feed, and his most recent tweet is getting retweeted a couple times every second. Could this possibly be true?
Brachiator
Interesting that some of Flynn’s clients came through a “tight knit circle of Iranian Americans.” Kleptocracy loves diversity.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: @WaterGirl: Yes. There’s been speculation for several month’s now.
What I really want to know is just how much Jill Stein got paid for her RT banquet appearance.
Steeplejack
@debbie:
The link in her tweet is to a Guardian story by Julian Borger. She’s still at the Times.
RandomMonster
@Dmbeaster: I keep telling my friends the same — it’s arranging for investments of dirty money in Trump properties, in exchange for letting dirtbags like Manafort and Page drive pro-Russia policy positions.
Quinerly
@WaterGirl:
Someone who specializes in flipping witnesses. It’s a real thing.
Quinerly
@Adam L Silverman:
Me too.
Major Major Major Major
@debbie: how else is it going to get tens of thousands of retweets? Lots of tweets by extremely famous people are like that.
geg6
@debbie:
Bots. More Russians lending a helping hand.
Adam L Silverman
@efgoldman: The first person to cooperate gets the best deal. Especially if that person was high enough up the food chain to be able to deliver significant value to the investigation.
jl
@Adam L Silverman: Seems like pretty reliable and undisputed reports of facts that have Flynn nailed as a foreign agent who committed several serious crimes.
Is his intervention to block the campaign against ISIS that was proposed by the outgoing Obama team also criminal, or just very corrupt?
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: New Botnet Army.
SiubhanDuinne
@debbie:
Might be all those bots we heard about a week or so ago.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: Depends on whether they can tie the decision to his being paid by Turkish interests close to both Erdogan and Putin.
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: I say Jill got the same amount Flynn did. And in 2017 America, if enough people say it often enough, it becomes the truth.
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: that actually still only works for republicans.
debbie
@geg6:
First time I’ve seen that happen. I always thought the numbers were static.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@Mike J: Bernie Woulda Flipped Them
debbie
@Steeplejack:
Thanks.
tobie
@RandomMonster:
That’s the only theory that really makes sense to me. Trump doesn’t care about anything but his own personal enrichment and self-aggrandizement. He’s too narcissistic to have ideological commitments besides himself. I’m sure he was fine with whatever pro-Russian position Manafort/Page/Flynn/Kushner bargained for as long as he got funds for his buildings. I just hope Mueller finds some substantial evidence of collusion.
Major Major Major Major
@debbie: I stopped caring about Twitter long ago but maybe it’s a new feature.
Anne Laurie
@Dmbeaster:
Pure speculation on my part, but: Lots of ‘successful’ men with ADD who grew up before it was widely accepted as a medical diagnosis did so by ‘disrupting’ situations where they couldn’t win by the usual metrics. If you physically can’t succeed in situations that reward focused attention / deferred compensation / close attention to other peoples’ body language, then going around those boundaries and ‘cheating’ may be a better choice, at least temporarily. And in large, sometimes overly-rule-bound institutions, it can actually be a short-term success strategy — like Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard and then “innovating” IBM’s business out from under the suits. But in the long run, the habit of disregarding rules can become an addiction to breaking stuff for the sake of hearing the noise, and that’s when the Inertia of Large Institutions lands solidly on the maverick…
Both Trump and Flynn, from reports, seem to have this ADD itch; it’s a habit of mind that drew them together, but such men never work in harmony for long. And the partnership seldom ends on mutual terms; “turning” Flynn probably wouldn’t be hard, because (a) he almost certainly sees Trump as having cheated / betrayed / abused their partnership; and (b) Trump is gonna do his best to encourage that view going forward, by publicly disparaging Flynn as a loser hireling who stabbed him in the back.
Gin & Tonic
@Major Major Major Major: Doesn’t have to.
So I heard today from a reliable source that RT.com paid Jill Stein $45,000 to attend that dinner with Putin that Mike Flynn was also at.
debbie
@Major Major Major Major:
It must be. None of his other Tweets have done that.
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: I actually assumed they had. Was the source me, months ago?
@debbie: maybe you could stop looking at them, it would be for the best ?
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: Works for me. Get your Botnet Army right on that info ops campaign please.
Anne Laurie
@Gin & Tonic:
Maybe, but plenty of twitter readers who hadn’t seen that number now know about it from Drezner’s tweet. That’s one of the ‘arts’ about doing social media, like twitter or blogging, well: Repeating useful data for a mixed audience, without confusing the newbies or boring the old hands.
Gin & Tonic
@Major Major Major Major: You know I can’t reveal my source.
jl
Off Topic, but maybe important for those calling their GOP Senators:
House GOP nut caucus sent McConnell a list of demands for the Senate bill. Some of them directly clash with changes the Senate made to give some of the spineless moderate GOP Senators cover. Particularly glaring is demand to cut Medicaid asap, and the expansion is to be all gone and bye-bey before 2020. And the tax cuts for filthy rich to come online apace.
So, will mindless reactionaries be so mindless as to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? I wouldn’t count on it. But maybe constituents should bring up this dimension of the humiliation and disgrace pile of poop that their moderate GOP Senators will have to gobble down, chew and swallow, and say they like it in front of the whole country. You can follow the link in the tweet to read the article that explains how this lunacy from the House bomb throwers jams the Senate plans. Found the tweet via Josh Marshall’s twitter stream.
Haley Bird
@birdinator
These are the four demands the RSC will make on health care in a letter to McConnell later this week:
https://twitter.com/byrdinator/status/876827666489503745
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie:
That kind of behavior doesn’t move one from O-1 to O-6. I am pretty sure that it doesn’t do a lot of good once one has stars on one’s shoulders either.
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: with an attitude like that you’ll never work at The Intercept.
kd bart
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Would stand there and lecture them. After awhile, they’d just want it to stop.
Gin & Tonic
@Anne Laurie:
must be living in caves with no electricity. It was in every newspaper back in Feb/Mar. It took me a whole 10 seconds of Googling to find multiple pages of links.
burnspbesq
@jl:
He’ll get indicted for that if he can’t make a deal. He failed to register as an agent for Turkey, and the Turks wanted that initiative killed in the worst way, because it involved arming Kurds. Flynn got $530K for that stunt.
Gin & Tonic
@Major Major Major Major: That’s a loss I’m willing to accept.
Mike J
@Adam L Silverman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es7BgsWq1_g
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic:
Well, that’s probably why nobody knew it then.
randy khan
As if it wasn’t evident from Obama’s decision to fire him, Flynn’s always been . . . unreliable.
I hope this turns out to be one more obvious example of Obama knowing better than Trump.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Anne Laurie:
Trump is a bit like Tom Buchanan: a wealthy, self-satisfied, violent lout.
Adam L Silverman
@Mike J: Well played.
Omnes Omnibus
@West of the Rockies (been a while): Kind of an insult to Tom. He and Daisy were careless people. Trump is vicious.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman:
My personal guess? Not very much; she’d have shown up in return for her expenses and the promise of a seat at the head table, plus maybe a nice plaque or award to put up in her den.
I don’t think Dr. Stein needs the money, and she’s not politically aware enough to see that she was being used. She just wants what sf fans used to call “egoboo” — ego boosts — the warm feeling that she’s up in front of the cameras being recognized as a Woke Individual who has The Highest Goals for Humanity. All of us do our various jobs for some combination of tangible (money/power) and intangible (egoboo) rewards; Flynn seems to be high in the More Money / Less Glory quadrant, while Stein is in the opposite More Glory / Less Money corner.
Radiumgirl
@efgoldman: He did want immunity from a Congressional committee, right?
RandomMonster
@tobie:
Totally agree. In fiction writing you’d have to choose between constructing a villain who is motivated by ideology and one who is motivated by greed or self-aggrandizement. Trump, as we all know, is perfectly comfortable subordinating his “position” on a topic to whatever adds value to his “brand” — which he measures in wealth. He has no ideology. His numerous bankruptcies made him desperate, even to the point of treason.
Adam L Silverman
Hmmm…
Keith P.
Trump vs. FBI reminds me of an old Onion headline about George W. Bush. It was something like “President Bush to Terrorists – ‘Please stop bringing it.'” Trump has been sticking his chin out in front of both the media *and* f’n FBI, and he’s going to be eating a steady diet of haymakers as a result.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sounds like the O-4 who was the flotilla commander for a ship I was on in the Atlantic and then moved sideways to be a ships captain, a career killing move, on a ship I was transferred to in the Pacific. A real sweetheart that one was.
catclub
@Radiumgirl:
The trick is to get immunity from a Congressional committee, then spill lot of stuff to them that prosecutors will not be able to use against you.
Vhh
@catclub: He didn’t get immunity. I suspect his lawyers are now trying hard to keep him out of prison for perjury, espionage, and a whole shit-ton of other crimes.
TenguPhule
@Vhh:
Mueller may be dangling the very real possibility of the military simply courtmartialing and shooting him for treason if he doesn’t spill his guts. Or letting Putin think he’s a loose end that needs tidying.
Its all fun and games until there’s polonium in the tea.
Applejinx
It’s late stage capitalism: nobody doesn’t need money. If Jill Stein was doing the bidding of Russia it’s because she was paid to do it and saw it as being no worse than what America gets up to, and as we know the business of America is money and throwing little countries up against the wall to take their lunch money.
It’s the latter bit which makes me hopeful for Tengu’s scenario: I think we all agree that getting shot for treason is another thing that can happen. I don’t know if getting whacked by Putin is a thing unless you’re one of his soldiers, but Flynn was one of OUR soldiers, so…