Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m only here for the duck photos.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Verified, but limited!

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

We need fewer warriors in public service and more gardeners.

I personally stopped the public option…

Just a few bad apples.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

No one could have predicted…

Everybody saw this coming.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Too inconsequential to be sued

This blog goes to 11…

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

False Scribes! False Scribes!

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

People are complicated. Love is not.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

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Trump-Russia

Ms. Fiona Hill Spills the Tea (Open Thread)

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I posted this clip in comments in the morning thread because it’s a great explainer of the how and why of the just-concluded Biden-Putin meeting. But it’s also notable because Ms. Hill confirms that she was so desperate to interrupt Trump’s humiliating performance at the Helsinki summit that she looked around for a fire alarm to pull and considered faking a medical emergency to derail the proceedings. That portion of the clip starts at around the 6:10 mark:

Even after all we saw that preposterous orange clown do and say over four interminable years, his behavior toward Putin and his minions, especially in Helsinki, will never not be shocking to me. I guess I’ll always be a Cold War kid. Anyhoo, open thread!

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The Black PSYOP Comes Home To Roost: The National Security Implications of Today’s DOJ Raids on Giuliani and Toensing

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So About That Third Party Spoilers Thing... The Libertarian Presidential Candidate And A Possibly Rabid Bat Edition

Now that the news has broken that the DOJ executed search warrants at Rudy Giuliani’s home and office, as well as for Victoria Toensing’s electronic devices from her office in DC, here’s what I think is going under the water line. This is connecting the known, through open source reporting national-security dots. It is not a legal analysis of what the warrants and their execution means in terms of potential criminal prosecutions. For that, I recommend Ken White, who tweets as Popehat. His excellent legal analysis is in this thread. And Ryan Goodman’s excellent analysis in this thread, which has a much more national-security approach to the news.

Back in October 2019, I laid out what Rudy Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, and her husband Joe DiGenova were doing in Ukraine, especially in terms of where the national security and political implications overlapped. And this context is important to review and keep in mind in regard to today’s news. Pay specific attention to the second and third parts of the operation:

That larger operation, which is a domestically focused Black PSYOP, has three lines of effort, each with multiple parts, and they all are now interconnected.

1) The Ukrainian deliverable.
A) The real deliverable wasn’t manufactured dirt on the Bidens. Rather, it was getting Zelensky to go on CNN to announce the opening of an investigation into the Bidens, because CNN is a mainstream news outlet and is in opposition to the President in its reporting. As soon as that happened, the President’s team would have campaign ads running 24/7 with this. They’d be pushing the reporters they often use, or who are primed for this type of cheap high like Ken Vogel, at mainstream outlets to get all over Zelensky’s announcement, thereby further laundering it and disseminating it through mainstream and legitimate outlets.
B) The fallback, when Zelensky wouldn’t play ball, was to have Hannity interview Shokin – the disgraced, corrupt prosecutor who was forced out under pressure from the US, EU, the IMF, and others. From the reporting over the past two or three days, Parnas and Fruman and Giuliani were all going to Vienna to arrange for this to happen the next night, which would be the night after Parnas and Fruman were arrested. It was also the night after Barr both returned to the US from his “fact finding trip”, met with the SDNY, and then had dinner with Rupert Murdoch.
C) The Romania and China gambits are also fallbacks. The President’s senior advisor for trade issues, Peter Navarro refused to answer CNN’s Jim Sciutto’s questions yesterday about whether the PRC had been told that in order to get a trade deal they had to manufacture dirt on Hunter Biden. I think it is reasonable to conclude that his refusal to answer should be taken as a yes. NBC/MSNBC had new reporting on Hunter Biden and Romania earlier this evening.
D) Barr’s criminal investigation is another fallback here. In this case it turns the DOJ into the propaganda laundry.

2) The Firtash initiative. Firtash wants off house arrest in Vienna and out from under the extradition order to send him to the US to face the Federal crimes he’s been indicted for. The reason Firtash wants this done is because he’s Putin’s man in Ukraine’s natural gas industry. If Firtash can get back to Kyiv he can then once again try to take over Ukraine’s natural gas sector, suck it dry of profits, and fuck up its operations, which will force the Ukrainians to buy natural gas from Russia while removing Ukrainian natural gas as an alternative to Russian natural gas for the rest of the EU market. This all benefits Putin, who is Firtash’s krysha (roof/ceiling) in the Russian mob. Just as he is for every other one of these oligarchs aligned with him.
A) Firtash’s efforts weren’t going very far, so he fired his US attorneys and hired Toensing and DiGenova. They then hired Parnas to do their translation work despite it being reported that Firtash and most of his staff speak fluent and/or functional English.
B) Firtash was laundering manufactured dirt and conspiracy theories about the Bidens, about the Democrats working with Ukraine to steal the 2016 election, etc through Parnas and Fruman and Toensing and DiGenova to Giuliani. Giuliani who was being paid/worked for Parnas, but also somehow also Parnas’s boss.
C) Toensing and DiGenova are also working for free to assist Giuliani with manufacturing dirt on the Bidens.

3) The lift Russian sanctions initiative. Here’s where it all ties together, by laundering these conspiracy theories, especially that the Democrats and the Ukrainians, in conjunction with DNI, CIA, FBI, NSA, and DOJ, conspired to steal the 2016 election by running a false flag (maskirovka) operation to make it look like Russia was actually conspiring with Trump, his campaign, Republicans, and major conservative movement organizations to steal the 2016 election, it provides a fig leaf for Trump to order the lifting of US sanctions against Russia that went on after the seizure of Crimea and the invasion of Donbass and were expanded as a result of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A) Manafort, through his attorney, was feeding Giuliani this conspiracy theory from jail and then prison.
B) This provides cover to pardon Manafort and Flynn and several others.
C) It was reported today that DiGenova and Toensing are the attorneys representing the conspiracist masquerading as an investigative journalist John Solomon who was (finally) just fired from The Hill. And here is where #3 wraps back into #1. Solomon was laundering all of these conspiracy theories, from Uranium 1 to the Democrats conspired with the Ukrainians, the DNI, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the DOJ to frame the Russians for trying to steal the 2016 election in order to steal the 2016 election for the Democrats to the Biden bullshit.

A couple of final points. Giuliani and Toensing and DiGenova are now claiming that Parnas, Fruman, and now, I suppose, Solomon cannot be deposed, questioned, etc by investigators since they were either working for Giuliani and/or Toensing and DiGenova or are represented by them and therefore everything they know is either attorney-client privilege or attorney work product. So you can’t ask Giuliani about what Toensing or DiGenova are doing. Or what Parnas or Fruman are doing. You can’t ask Toensing and DiGenova about what Giuliani, Parnas, and/or Fruman are doing. You can’t ask Parnas and Fruman what Giuliani or Toensing or DiGenova are doing. You can’t ask Toensing and DiGenova what Solomon is doing. You can’t ask Soloman what DiGenova and Toensing are doing. You can’t ask Firtash what Giuliani, Toensing, DiGenova, and/or Parnas and Fruman are doing. You can’t ask Giuliani, Toensing, DiGenova, and/or Firtash is doing. And because Giuliani claims all of this is on behalf of his client, the President, you also can’t, because of executive privilege, ask Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman who are working for him and who he is working for, and/or Toensing and DiGenova who are assisting him pro bono and employing Parnas anything because they are all covered from having to divulge anything or answering any questions under executive privilege.

If this sounds familiar, it is similar to how Roy Cohn handled his legal representation of the organized crime families he represented in New York. They’d hold all their business/decision making meetings in his dining room with him present or with him on the phone in case of an emergency, so it was all covered under attorney-client privilege. Nobody, from any angle of inquiry, can say nothing about nothing and no one because everything is privileged.

It is important to note that John Solomon, who was laundering disinformation and agitprop through The Hill and Fox News is referenced in the warrant for Giuliani and Toensing’s phones/electronic devices.

(Do read Goodman’s entire thread)

Now that we’ve refreshed ourselves on the context, here’s what I think is going on:

  1. Parnas, recognizing that his only way out is to give up people more important, more powerful, and more well connected than him, which is basically everyone, agreed to cooperate early on and has given the Feds what they need to work their way up the network.
  2. All of this is going to wind up connected back to Firtash, who, again, is Putin’s guy in Ukraine’s natural gas sector, and, likely, several other pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarchs.
  3. A Federal magistrate seems to have decided that the Roy Cohn gambit – that every one of these people’s communications regarding Ukraine was covered under attorney-client privilege because they were working for Giuliani who is Trump’s lawyer or for Toensing who is a lawyer and was assisting Giuliani for free as he was assisting her for free while working for Trump for free – is not in play here. Hence, the specific reference to communications regarding John Solomon and others.
  4. Trump world has just an astounding level of connections to pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarchs. The Philadelphia lawyer they brought into the campaign to advise on Pennsylvania’s recount rules is the attorney for Igor Kolomoiski. So is Bruce Kasowitz, who is one of Trump’s other personal attorneys. Just off the top of my head, Giuliani is tied to Kolomoiski, Derkach, Firtash, and several others. Toensing is tied to Firtash. And there’s plenty more that would take too long to list.
  5. I expect that the Feds will play the bigger fish off of each other as the investigation moves forward. If part of that is playing Toensing off against Giuliani, she’s going to eat him alive to save her, her husband’s, and her son’s tuchases as she’s still very sharp, despite being way through the map, whereas Rudy is Rudy.

If you want in on the “will Rudy Giuliani be able to stay off of Sean Hannity’s show tonight” action, please see Ann Laurie on the mezzanine level between the concession stands and the merchandise shop. While you’re waiting to get in on the action, I recommend the nachos and the Balloon Juicers hockey jersey. Pro tip: spring for the authentic one with the tie down strap, it comes in handy in a fight…

Open thread!

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Breaking News: Nora Dannehy, Senior Deputy to US Attorney John Durham, Has Resigned In Protest Over Politicization of Durham’s Investigation Into the DOJ’s, FBI’s, and US Intel Communities 2016 Russia Investigation

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This is what professionals do!

From The Hartford Courant (emphasis mine):

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned – at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.

Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by email Thursday evening. The short email was a brief farewell message and said nothing about political pressure, her work for Durham or what the Durham team has produced, according to people who received it.

Durham, who has never even acknowledged that Dannehy was in Washington working for him, had no immediate comment on the resignation.

Durham recruited Dannehy to join his team after he was appointed by Attorney General William Barr more than a year and a half ago to examine the the FBI’s legal justification for a disputed counterintelligence investigation that looked for ties between President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian efforts to meddle in the election.

Dannehy is a career prosecutor who worked closely with Durham before leaving the U.S. Attorney’s office about a decade ago for a corporate position in the defense industry. Durham persuaded her to return to the justice department and, within weeks, join his team in Washington in the spring of 2019.

Colleagues said Dannehy is not a supporter of President Donald J. Trump and has been concerned in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr – who appointed Durham – to produce results before the election. They said she has been considering resignation for weeks, conflicted by loyalty to Durham and concern about politics.

Durham is notoriously circumspect and neither he nor members of his team have revealed anything about the direction of their work. But Durham associates, none of whom have specific knowledge of the investigation, have said recently that it is their belief he is under pressure to produce something – perhaps some sort of report – before the presidential election in November.

The thinking of the associates, all Durham allies, is that the Russia investigation group will be disbanded and its work lost if Trump loses.

More at the link.

We already know, from the findings in the fifth and final volume of the Republican majority Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which shares oversight of the US Intelligence Community (IC) with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), has concluded that the US Intelligence Community, the DOJ, and the FBI acted reasonably and responsibly and that there was sufficient predicate to open the investigations into what Russia was doing and whether the President, his campaign, his campaign manager Paul Manafort, his business, members of his family involved in both the campaign and the business, and several outside senior advisors to the President during the campaign were somehow compromised by Russia during the 2016 campaign.

The SSCI’s conclusions tells us, if anyone had a question about it, that AG Barr is on a snipe hunt to try to produce an October Surprise to help the President get reelected. We also know that the conspiracy theory that AG Barr’s basis, his predicate for creating Durham’s investigation, is partially rooted in the debunked conspiracy theory that Secretary Clinton and her campaign, in conjunction with the Obama administration and senior Obama administration officials – VP Biden, APNSA Rice, AG Lynch, FBI Director Comey, DNI Clapper, DCI Brennan, and others – were conspiring with the Ukrainian government to interfere in the election to harm the President and his campaign and to blame it on Russia by creating a hoax that Putin was interfering on behalf of the President’s campaign. The fifth volume of the SSCI’s investigation report into Russian active measures and the 2016 election states unequivocally that this conspiracy was created by the Russian Intelligence Services and provided to Paul Manafort by his GRU handler, Konstantin Kilimnik, and that Manafort than provided it to the President and many of his senior appointees, aides, and surrogates. Moreover, we now know that the person responsible for pushing this conspiracy theory right now has been designated as a Russian intelligence officer who has been running the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, as usefully idiotic asset!

Now we wait to see what the effect of Deputy US Attorney Dannehy’s resignation has. This is definitely a brush back pitch. Whether it actually changes AG Barr’s behavior is something we’ll have to wait to see. AG Barr has made it clear that he doesn’t feel that the DOJ’s rules regarding releasing information that could affect an election within 60 days of an election. Dannehy’s resignation is a warning shot. Now we have to wait and see if Barr receives the message.

Open thread!

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Traitor-in-Chief Open Thread: Another NYTimes Reporter Has A Book to Sell

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And the NYTimes is only too happy to cross-promote the ‘savvy’ of both their reporter and his employer:

… Schmidt, a New York Times correspondent in Washington who was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018, including one for coverage of Trump’s Russian-inflected scandals, portrays an administration in which all aides may as well always have a resignation letter ready as a safeguard against an angry, flailing president detached from commonly accepted reality. This is a meticulously reported volume that clearly benefits from the author’s extraordinary access to many of the relevant characters, but also from his subjects’ tendency to record, in detail, their time around Trump…

The narrative is sometimes cinematic. It opens with Schmidt chasing down McGahn outside the White House’s front gates and eventually getting him to concede, “I damaged the office of the president; I damaged the office.” It’s a breathtakingly revealing admission from the White House’s chief lawyer and the architect of Trump’s effort to appoint as many conservative judges as possible. (Schmidt says, “I thought he was still understating the gravity of what he had done.”)

McGahn, a staunch libertarian, was frequently in over his head with the lawless president he nicknamed “King Kong,” and he struggled with his highly unusual extended contact with Mueller’s team. Still, despite getting close to resigning, McGahn stuck around far longer than his apparent misery and frequent attempts at principled stands would suggest, largely because of his judicial project’s success. It was only after Trump granted a woman clemency at Kim Kardashian’s request that McGahn knew he truly had to leave the White House. He could no longer abide the accumulation of Trump’s actions…

Lawlessness, meh. But Kim Kardashian?!? — ewwww!

… Comey was always deeply interested in maintaining his and his agency’s public credibility — especially after his wildly controversial intrusions into the 2016 campaign over Hillary Clinton’s emails. After he was fired by Trump, he text-messaged a friend: “I’m with my peeps (former peeps). They are broken up and I’m sitting with them like a wake. Trying to figure out how to get back home. May hitchhike.” It’s just one example of the clearly extensive access Schmidt had to Comey and his wife.

“Donald Trump v. the United States” is full of gritty details about what it’s like for a plugged-in journalist to report on Trump’s intrigue, ranging from the time Schmidt shepherded a valued source to and from the airport, to his learning, secondhand, about a Justice Department official soliciting dirt on Comey at a Cinco de Mayo party. At one point, Schmidt writes, he shattered his cellphone and didn’t fix it for a week because there was too much news; he ended up with pieces of glass in his hands.

More interesting, however, is the constant flow of shocking anecdotes: Schmidt writes that Mitch McConnell fell asleep during a classified briefing on Russia, for example…

But the journalistic stigmata! Such a cinematic detail!

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Donald Trump’s Nonproliferation Ambitions

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Today we have a report that Donald Trump would like to meet with Vladimir Putin before the election to present a new arms control agreement to the world.

The easiest thing for Trump to do would be to extend the New START Treaty, which lapses in early February next year. The treaty is written to allow five-year extensions with a minimum of negotiation, and Putin has said he is willing to extend it.

Trump has been surrounded by treaty-haters, though, particularly but not only John Bolton, who would be happy for New START to lapse. Their strategy is to insist that China be a part of arms control negotiations and spin their wheels doing stunts like adding small Chinese flags to places around the table during US-Russian interactions and then whining that China didn’t show up. As China had said it wouldn’t.

Russia and the United States each have 1500 deployed nuclear warheads, whereas China has about 300. China has stated that it sees no reason to join arms control talks until Russia and the United States have brought their numbers closer to its own.

Whether China signs on to arms control has nothing to do with New START. If we want to draw China into arms control talks, we should extend New START and work from there.

That may be what Trump has in mind for a meeting with Putin.

His interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios, however, had a tantalizing hint of something else. (transcript of interview)

Swan asked Trump about a phonecall with Putin on July 23 in preparation for asking him about the story of Russian offers of payments to Taleban in Afghanistan for targeting Americans.

Trump says that the call was about “nuclear proliferation.” After discussion of the alleged payments, Trump says

It’s interesting. Nobody ever brings up China. They always bring Russia, Russia, Russia. If we can do something with Russia in terms of nuclear proliferation, which is a very big problem.

Bigger problem than global warming.

A much bigger problem than global warming in terms of the real world, that would be a great thing.

Trump is not good with complicated concepts, so it’s entirely possible that when he says “nuclear proliferation” he means “arms control.” He says “We discussed numbers things,” which could refer to arms control, although numbers would not be necessary in a discussion of extending New START. Others have interpreted these remarks that way.

In an interview with Ron Rosenburg in 1987, Trump said something similar, in more detail.

It’s a deal with the Soviets. We approach them on this basis: We both recognize the nonproliferation treaty’s not working, that half a dozen countries are on the brink of getting a bomb. Which can only cause trouble for the two of us. The deterrence of mutual assured destruction that prevents the United States and the USSR from nuking each other won’t work on the level of an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange. Or a madman dictator with a briefcase-bomb team. The only answer is for the Big Two to make a deal now to step in and prevent the next generation of nations about to go nuclear from doing so. By whatever means necessary.

“Most of those [pre-nuclear] countries are in one form or another dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union,” Trump says. “Between those two nations you have the power to dominate any of those countries. So we should use our power of economic retaliation and they use their powers of retaliation and between the two of us we will prevent the problem from happening. It would have been better having done something five years ago,” he says. “But I believe even a country such as Pakistan would have to do something now. Five years from now they’ll laugh.”

This has Trump earmarks that are now familiar to us. The two strongmen get together to squeeze the little guys not to make nuclear weapons. It seems to have been his dream for a long time.

If I can find that material, so can Putin’s intelligence services. It would be a great lever on Trump, his way to a Nobel prize, in his mind anyway. If Putin is to be his partner in dealing with “a much bigger problem than global warming,” Trump would not want to alienate him.

The evidence is that Trump has other Russian connections that could be corrupting. But when I listened to the Swan interview, I couldn’t help thinking of that 1987 interview.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Foreign Interference Open Thread: The *Other* Friday Doc Dump

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We report, you decide!

… In an unusual public statement, William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said the three countries were using online disinformation and other means to try to influence voters, stir up disorder and undermine American voters’ confidence in the democratic process…

Foreign adversaries also may try to interfere with U.S. election systems by trying to sabotage the voting process, stealing election data, or calling into question the validity of election results.

“It would be difficult for our adversaries to interfere with or manipulate voting results at scale,” Evanina said…

Evanina said “Kremlin-linked actors” also are trying to “boost President Trump’s candidacy via social media and Russian television.”

He said his agency assessed that China would prefer that Trump not win re-election, because Beijing regards him as too unpredictable.

He said China has been expanding efforts to influence U.S. politics ahead of the election to try to shape U.S. policy, exert pressure on U.S. politicians it regards as anti-China, and deflect criticism of China.

Evanina said Iran is likely to use online tactics such as spreading disinformation to discredit U.S. institutions and President Trump and to stir up U.S. voters’ discontent…

Many officials who oversee U.S. election technology and outside security experts now worry less about hacking in the elections than about misinformation and logistics such as a shortage of poll workers and slowdowns at the U.S. postal service.

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Robert Mueller Speaks

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Robert Mueller has an op-ed in the Washington Post. He is getting tired of Trumpian misrepresentation.

I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office. 

It’s short and clear, something that his earlier report could have benefitted from.

We now have a detailed picture of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. The special counsel’s office identified two principal operations directed at our election: hacking and dumping Clinton campaign emails, and an online social media campaign to disparage the Democratic candidate. We also identified numerous links between the Russian government and Trump campaign personnel — Stone among them. We did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its activities. The investigation did, however, establish that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome. It also established that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.

Anyhow, read the whole thing.

Open thread!

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