Who Does Putin Own More Thoroughly, Rohrabacher Or Trumpanzee-- And, No We're Not Discussing Nunes Today

Yesterday, Josh Marshall brought up the June 14, 2016 incidents again-- it can never be brought often frequently enough... the one where GOP House Majority Leader blurts out that Putin is paying off Trump and Rohrabacher... "so help me God." My favorite part of this story-- other than the pays offs themselves-- is how Ryan and McCarthy tried to cover it up and kept changing their stories as the Washington Post closed in on them and finally revealed they had a tape. Oops! Watch the two and a half minute video above. It's amazing! Marshall has an interesting spin. Take a look at this photo he put up

On June 14 2016, the day before the audio tape (which was on June 15), the House Foreign Affairs Committee hosted a hearing on Russia. This is the hearing Amb. McFaul testified at where the Russian government lawyer Natalia Vesilnitskaya attended, she’s front row.

But what’s important here is that the whole reason they held a full committee hearing on Russia (in the midst of the election) was because they needed to stop Rohrabacher from holding a pro-Kremlin subcommittee hearing, for the Europe sub-committee which he chairs.

Remember that Rohrabacher had wanted to show an anti-Magnitsky act movie (the director Andrei Nekrasov is the man with long gray hair over Vesilnitskaya’s right shoulder) and essentially use the hearing as a “show trial” of Bill Browder. According to the Daily Beast, “Ultimately, the hearing was canceled when senior Republicans intervened and agreed to allow a hearing on Russia at the full committee level with a Moscow-sympathetic witness, according to multiple congressional aides.” That’s why Jack Matlock, someone with pro-Russia views, was there as a GOP witness … House aides conceded that he did so, in part, to avoid Rohrabacher staging an event that could have embarrassed the Republican Party-- and Congress.”

We also know that Rohrabacher met with Vesilnitskaya in April 2016 and was given “the film by the Prosecutor General’s office in Moscow, which is run by Yuri Chaika.”

There’s a lot here and a lot to unpack... I wanted to flag this key point: McCarthy made this statement and Ryan pressed to keep it secret not just for some out of the blue reasons. They’d just had the description of Russian behavior from the Ukrainian PM (obviously an interested party). But they’d also spent several days trying to manage an awkward situation with a member of their own caucus who they suspected was either receiving payments from or under some influence of Russia. Indeed, key players in the unfolding conspiracy were on Capitol Hill in that hearing.

Their knowledge of what could be afoot was much deeper, just as they were deciding to make common cause with Trump and begin the process of covering up what they suspected about him.

Also yesterday Jonathan Chait, writing for New York Magazine, asks a pertinent question that half of the country could be asking: Why Does Trump Keep Lying About His Dealings With Russia? It shouldn't surprise anyone, of course-- and certainly doesn't surprise Mueller's team-- that Trump was in on the infamous Trump Tower meeting with the Russians who were offering "dirt" on Hillary. Cohen wasn't offering anything everyone didn't already know. And, going back to my quiz from yesterday, who's the biggest liar in Trumpland?

Trump, who has lied about his dealings with Russia so many times that his word has grown completely worthless, has to resort to the defense of pulling down the value of hostile witnesses to his own level. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, told CNN Thursday night, “[Cohen]’s been lying all week, he’s been lying for years.”



Years! Keep in mind that Cohen has been working for Trump until recently. The effort to impugn Cohen’s credibility naturally impeaches Trump’s own credibility. Neither man is especially trustworthy, but the preponderance of circumstantial evidence supports Cohen’s testimony.

One can see the ground already shifting in the defenses of Trump. Now his defenders deny that working cooperatively with Russians to obtain Russian dirt on Clinton amounts to collusion, or that such a thing is bad at all. “Look, I don’t think that it’s bad if campaigns are turning to foreign governments for dirt,” asserts Andrew McCarthy on Fox News, “It’s not collusion. It’s not something that’s impeachable; it’s icky, but that’s what this is.”

But if that’s the case, and Trump faces no legal liability for his secret collaboration with Russia, why didn’t he simply admit it all along? Why tell a series of lies and implicate his subordinates in those lies, exposing them to potential perjury charges? Perhaps because he has more to hide.

The Great Negotiator, Fresh From His Catastrophic North Korea Tomfoolery, Is About To Uproot 7 Decades Of U.S. Policy In Europe

Estonia is a tiny little country on the Baltic Sea. It covers 17,462 square miles, slightly larger than Massachusetts-- about the size of New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware combined. The population is 1,319,133, about the same as Maine. It's a digitally advanced country with universal healthcare, very high education levels and, for that matter, free education. It has a high income economy. And it ranks very high on the UN's Human Development index. Historically, the country has been ruled by Germany, Danmark, Sweden and, with a few brief periods of independence, from 1710 until 1990 by Russia. If it was permitted, you could stand with one foot in Estonia and one foot in Russia. Estonia's NATO membership (starting in 2004) has seen-- and still is-- as a provocation by the Russians-- and by Trump. They are also a member of the EU. They have sent troops to back the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last week, Foreign Policy reported that James Melville, a career diplomat, currently the U.S. Ambassador to Estonia, resigned in disgust after Trump's latest anti-European rant.

Melville, who has served as a diplomat for 33 years and as ambassador to Estonia since 2015, was due to retire soon but said in a private Facebook post announcing his retirement that Trump’s behavior and comments accelerated his decision.

“A Foreign Service Officer’s DNA is programmed to support policy and we’re schooled right from the start, that if there ever comes a point where one can no longer do so, particularly if one is in a position of leadership, the honorable course is to resign. Having served under six presidents and 11 secretaries of state, I never really thought it would reach that point for me,” he wrote in the post, which was obtained by Foreign Policy.

“For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go,” he wrote, citing Trump’s reported comments in recent weeks that have unnerved U.S. allies.

The post surprised several State Department officials who worked with Melville, describing him as a consummate professional who never let domestic politics impact his job.

The resignation comes ahead of a pivotal NATO summit, where the United States’ closest historic allies fear that Trump will lambast them and further isolate Washington from its allies after heated disputes over trade, defense spending issues, and the U.S. exit from the Iran nuclear deal. Allies fear that the optics of Trump trashing allies in Brussels, followed by a meeting in Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin, will undercut an already anemic trans-Atlantic partnership.

Melville said he believed in the U.S. support for the European Union and NATO to his “marrow.”

Trump has been undermining both-- to the point where observers are wondering whether Trump is "an ignorant and destructive fool or operates as some sort of agent" for the Kremlin. Josh Marshall posted that "the upshot appears to be the same."

One of Putin's top priorities-- certainly what he insisted Trump do in return for Russian help in handing him the White House-- was to withdraw U.S. troops from Germany, something Trump is working on now. The Washington Post gave the excuse conceited by Putin and repeated by Trump's regime: "Trump was said to have been taken aback by the size of the U.S. presence, which includes about 35,000 active-duty troops, and complained that other countries were not contributing fairly to joint security or paying enough to NATO."

This is in advance of the NATO summit next month which will be followed shortly after by a summit with Vladimir Putin. The German troop presence news comes after we learned that in April Trump tried to persuade President Macron of France to leave the European Union. Days ago Trump told a crowd in North Dakota that “the European Union, of course, was set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank.” Trump apparently ‘joked’ about pulling the US out of NATO with the Prime Minister of Sweden. More strikingly, he told G-7 members in Canada earlier this month that “NATO is as bad as NAFTA.”

What theTimes of London calls a “senior EU diplomat” says of these comments and gambits, “we are more and more concerned they are not just incidents. It starts to look like a very worrying pattern” and refers to “an American doctrine in which there are no friends, only enemies” with no “rules-based order.” “It is very dangerous,” the source told the paper.

...[T]he role of Russia, the efforts to liquidate NATO and the continuing and aggressive courtship of Putin show it is part of some broader agenda. Someone, eventually, will have to place some check on Trump’s power. For the moment, the entire cadre of political appointees in the administration and the leadership of Congress appears entirely inert and passive, if not outright supportive. It is important to remember that the President has zero constitutional authority over trade policy. That is 100% on loan from Congress. It’s remarkable that this is all happening before our eyes and no one.

We’re in a lot of danger.

It's expected that at their meeting on July 16, Trump and Putin will discuss the U.S. recognizing Russia's dismemberment of Ukraine and Trump may well start a process of ending U.S. sanctions involved with the annexation of the Crimea. One of Trump's excuses is that the Russians have "spent a lot of money on rebuilding it" adding, like an imbecile, gratuitously, that "President Obama allowed that to happen which is very unfortunate... It was during President Obama’s term in office." I bet that scares the bejesus out of Estonia, and every other NATO member anywhere near Russia.

News Flash! Spicer! Conway! The Trump White House Is Now Officially An Insane Asylum

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is on the job.

by Noah

That the Trump White House has become a home for crazy people shouldn't come as a surprise to any sane observer of the events of recent years. Face it: We've seen the Republican Party cross over the edge of sanity since the dawn of the Tea Party. That was the point where it became apparent that the Republican Party had fully become the Crackpot Party. I don't need to recount the Bizarro World antics of the likes of Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Louie "The Bestiality Guy" Gohmert, Paul LePage, et al. Their numbers are legion, and they have been parading across our TV screens for years like the sideshow freaks they are.

Nixon's "last press conference" (oops!)

In fact, if you're a glutton for punishment, you can trace the origins of this thing of total lunacy the Trumpies call a movement back through the Reagan years all the way to President Nixon. Nixon was a raving maniac who we learned literally ran through the corridors of the White House screaming his head off. Even before he was elected president, America had evidence that Nixon was severely paranoid and given to delusion. Think: "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" (Nov. 7, 1962, at what he said was his "last press conference," after his California gubernatorial loss). Eventually, his White House taping system proved once and for all that he was a racist and, even more, an anti-semite.

So, really, the precedent for a President Trump or someone like him was set long ago. Most of America, with the help of the mainstream media myth machine, just chose not to see it.


1968-69: THE NIXON PODS DESCEND ON DC

I lived in Washington, DC, in all but the last of the Nixon years. The Nixon government aside, I saw the change in the population of Washington as it moved from the LBJ years to the Nixon years. To say the least, no one I chose to associate with had much if any regard for either man. We could look at LBJ and give him his due for ramming civil-rights and voting-rights legislation through Congress, but there was also his role in escalating the Vietnam War. Nixon, on the other hand, had no redeeming qualities other than the creation of the EPA. Please note that all three of the positives I just mentioned are things that today's republicans hate with all their being.

What I found most disturbing about Washington in those days was that when Nixon took over, you could see a marked difference in the kind of people that were coming to town to replace the LBJ people. I'm not talking just about cabinet people; I'm talking about the massive numbers of department staff and support staff that come along with the tide when a new president comes in. With Nixon it was an influx of crewcut, wound-tight, pole-up-the-ass types, people who were stuck in a world view of 1953, 15 years out of date; people who really did still believe that Commies lurked in every shadow and that the Earth is only 6000 years old.

These people feared a world where males had sprouted long hair. Which made them easy to terrify in the streets of Georgetown, especially after the horrific crimes of the Manson Family, and I admit that I personally had some fun with this. You could just stare at them and they'd start walking on eggshells. Dumb fucks that they were, they thought that any guy with hair over his ears was carrying a machete.

The Nixon types also hated those who hated war. War was big business for them, plus it was waged against Commies. Understand: The word Commies didn't necessarily mean Communists in the literal geopolitical sense. To them a "Communist" was anyone who didn't agree with their myopic, narrow-minded view of things. To the vast majority of them, both bread and people should only come in one color: white.

Today's republicans aren't that much different. Sure, it's harder to tell them from normal people just by fashion differences. I mean, can you tell those Duck Dynasty freaks from a death-metal band or the Manson gang? But if you notice that wound-tight thing, substitute "Muslim" for "Commie," and listen to the various bigotries they express, it's really the same. The difference now is that there seems to be a larger concentration of them in the general population. Either that or they just feel bolder and more entitled to act out in civilized society. Then again, it could be because social media and more TV and stations have given them a platform where they can reach each other easily and egg each other on.


SO HERE WE ARE NOW IN 2017

Russia is still an enemy of the United States. Only now that's OK with republicans 'cause the Russians helped put their guy in the White House. The Republican Party went over the cliff and dropped down so low that, to them, there's not a thing wrong with that. They got so insane that they put party over country like no party has ever done before. They got so insane that they embraced a man who is obviously severely mentally ill and now he is our president. If Nixon ever wanted a president in the White House that made him look sane by comparison, he's got him. Somewhere in Hell, a great burden has been lifted from his shoulders.

It has now gotten so bad that on Saturday afternoon, when I was in our kitchen and heard an angry, shrieking madman on the TV in our living room, I had to stop what I was doing and see what the commotion was about. At first I thought maybe the authorities had arrested some bonkers terrorist at some airport somewhere. Maybe my wife was watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Vincent Price's House on Haunted Hill.


"Don't try to escape! You can't!"

But no, it wasn't a movie. It was Comrade Trumpinsky's press secretary, Sean Spicer, channeling the Orange Fascist himself. He was clearly off his meds, and was a thing to behold -- emphasize thing.

He wasn't wearing a straitjacket, but you could be forgiven if you remembered it that way. That's how intense the crazy shooting out of his mouth, eyes, and entire body language was as he berated and tried to intimidate the assembled press. Mere words cannot do this bizarre incident justice. And this was just his first day! He made a lasting and credibility-destroying impression. It was a tantrum for the ages. I have never seen Facebook explode over an ongoing event like it did with this one.

What set Spicer off was the press coverage of the Trump inauguration, particularly the reporting of the simple fact, verifiable by aerial photographs that we have all seen by now, and verifiable by photographs of the empty seats along the parade route, that President Obama's crowd was bigger than President Trump's crowd. Freud would have a field day with this. Obviously Trump had sent Spicer out to combat this reality that Trump cannot deal with and is not mentally equipped to deal with. His megalomania and massive insecurities get in the way.



Spicer managed to set some sort of record for speed lying as he spat out an incredible five lies in just five minutes. You can click here for the specifics. It was engrossing. It was both hard to look and hard to look away. I was watching a man disintegrate on national TV.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo had this to say:

On the one hand it is chilling, bizarre, un-American to see the President's spokesman begin the term excoriating and threatening the press, telling demonstrable lies, speaking with a palpable rage in his voice. On the other, the President and his toadies are on the second day almost vanishingly small. They are embarrassing themselves. They look silly. They look ridiculous. It is hard to be intimidated by ridiculousness. I suspect this will be the abiding duality of the Trump presidency.

Yes, they look ridiculous, and yes, they are embarrassing themselves. But sadly for them and everyone in the world, they have no idea that this is how they come off, just as those who voted for Trump have no idea how this seems to the moral and the sane. Even former press secretaries from both major parties took issue with Spicer's behavior.

The thing is, of course, that Trump and his toadies are taking millions of naïve, wounded, and gullible Americans right over the cliff with them, and the rest of us are at risk of being collateral damage. While this bit of Saturday-afternoon horror theater was going on, I checked the FOX "News" twitter feed, where Trump's army of brainwashed souls, in an orgasmic state, were cheering Spicer on in his ranting insanity. There were a lot of "About time!" and "Hell yeah!" shout-outs to Spicer. To them, a star was born.


Is Sean Spicer counting hockey crowds now too? Maybe it was the very same "million and a half people" President Trump saw at his inauguration who packed Dallas's American Airlines Center for Saturday's Stars loss to (ahem) the Washington Capitals. [Click to enlarge.]

Reading the FOX Twitter feed offered a glimpse at the total Opposite World these brainwashed crazies live in. The danger is that they want to make the rest of us live in their world. It's like they've already gone through the looking glass and blown right past, into a state of ultimate denial. This is way beyond "O.J. didn't kill Nicole" stuff. This is alternate-reality creation that allows them to rationalize and justify, consciously or unconsciously, the criminality of what they have just done to their own country and the world.

Trump's lost souls are trying to reverse the polarity of reality itself. It may be that the only way to deal with these people is to constantly throw their vile bullcrap right back in their faces until their heads explode from brain-hemorrhaging apoplexy. Disdain, derision, and zero tolerance should be the order of the day.


"ALTERNATIVE" REALITY INVADES SUNDAY-MORNING TV

The Sunday morning news-talk shows like Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and "This Week With George Stephanopoulos brought out Trump's mistress of spin, Kellyanne Konartist. On This Week she made the point that (crowd) size doesn't matter while saying that it was "completely unacceptable" for the media to call Sean Spicer a liar. Well, Kellyanne, I'll go ya one further: If Spicer keeps it up, soon the word spicer will be synonymous with liar.

But it was on Meet the Press that Kellyanne reached the heights of crazy that republicans adore her for, claiming that Spicer wasn't lying, he was just presenting "alternative facts"!



It's really something when you are a republican so disingenuous that even a republican water carrier like Chuck Todd puts you on the hot seat. Still, I have to give Ms. Konartist credit. She is very good at her job and proved it in the campaign. She can also go on TV and erect a stonewall like nobody's business. Maybe Trump can send Kellyanne to the Mexican border and she can just talk any would-be "illegals" away.

I took some amusement from the moment where Kellyanne appeared to flip off Chock Todd UK-style with a two-finger F-U salute. Was it intentional, or am I making up some of that famous "fake news" that is all the rage?



To be fair -- and, like I say, I'm always fair -- I do want to address the bit of unfortunate real fake news that Ms. Konartist brought up on Meet the Press. There was lots of chatter from republikook circles over the weekend about a "fake news" report on the bust of Martin Luther King being removed from the Oval Office (now declared by me to be the Offal Office for the duration of Trump's hopefully short term).

In fact, the bust was not removed. It turns out that it was obscured by someone standing in front of it. The reporter who wrote the story should have at least taken a better look. The righties are focusing on this incident as an example of what they term "fake news." Fair enough, but there is a much more serious underlying issue at play here. The issue is: Why would we assume that President Trump would remove the MLK bust. It's only natural to assume that he would because of his previously demonstrated feelings towards African-Americans, which include his having them removed from the floors of his casinos, the rabid support he received from KKK and other white supremacy groups worldwide, and many of his own words.

[Click to enlarge.]

The silver lining in this is that, if Trump was going to remove the MLK bust, a likely scenario, he will now have to think twice about it. I take pleasure in knowing that, when he is in his new office, he will have to look at something he'd rather not see. Oh well, funny how things can work out! Maybe he can just paint it gold or cover it with a handy white hood.


ANDY BOROWITZ OFFERS A TAKE ON THE SPICER STORY

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -- A man who was described as “visibly deranged” eluded the Secret Service on Saturday and gave a five-minute press conference at the White House.

The man, who somehow obtained White House credentials in order to bypass security, unloaded a delusional and paranoid rant that left a room full of experienced reporters shaken.

“We were all very, very scared,” Tracy Klugian, a reporter who witnessed the incident, said. “The things he was shouting made absolutely no sense, and he seemed to just get angrier and angrier.”

After a stream-of-consciousness tirade in which he accused the reporters of being part of a far-reaching conspiracy to distort reality, the man abruptly walked off “before he could do any real harm,” a Secret Service spokesman said.

Reporters who left the White House called the incident the scariest five minutes of their lives and said that they were grateful it did not escalate further.

“We were all terrified that, at some point, he was going to ask us if we had any questions,” Harland Dorrinson, a reporter, said. “None of us wanted to say anything that would set him off.”

MEMES OF THE ORANGE WHITE HOUSE INSANE ASYLUM

"News Flash! Spicer! Conway! The Trump White House Is Now Officially An Insane Asylum" (1/23)
"Trump Press Secretary Spicer Spawns A Cottage Industry Overnight!" (1/24)
"Kellyanne Conway Memes: Crazy Lady Now Roams The Halls Of The White House, America’s Newest Insane Asylum" (1/26)

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I Just Got Back From Moscow... Where I Didn't Get A Chance To Discuss Trump With Putin

Saturday I did a brief post at the travel blog about the fantastic Museum of Russian Political History in St. Petersburg which I visited a few weeks ago. I was really impressed that a still somewhat paranoid country barely emerging-- slowly-- from unbroken centuries of routine authoritarianism would permit such an unbiased and objective presentation of history right up to the present day. That said, no one crosses Putin in Russia and gets away with it. That painting up top of him and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in lingerie by Konstantin Altunin was seized by security personnel in 2013 and the artist was forced to flee and seek political asylum in France. The city of Moscow appeared to me to be particularly uptight about anything that could be interpreted as disparaging to President Putin and people there do not joke around about him. People in St. Petersburg are considerably more open and expressive and the Political History museum included an exhibit-- neutral enough, but not fawning or complicit in his cult of personality-- on him. I very spontaneously cracked a joke in front of it tying Putin to Trump. The whole room-- primarily filled with Russians, the museum being off the beaten tourist track-- cracked up. Everyone got the joke. And, even if Putin isn't, Trump is very much a joke... at least among people in St. Petersburg who are conversant in English.

Look, I'm going to get to the Putin-Trump connections in a minute but let me take a little detour from my tangent for a moment. I won't get into how this happened but I wound up spending an afternoon at Russia's most famous cemetery, Novodevichy, part of a 16th century convent. Virtually all of the top Soviet political and heroic leaders are buried in the Kremlin wall behind Lenin's ghastly tomb in Red Square-- Stalin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Leonid Brezhnev, Marshall Zhukov, Yuri Gagarin, John Reed, Mikhail Suslov, Sergei Kamenev, Mikhail Frunze, Mikhail Kalinin, Dmitriy Ustinov, Konstantin Chernenko-- but not all.

Me & Nikita 

Novodevichy Cemetery, aside from national luminaries like Chekhov, Gogol, Stanislavski, Rostropovich and Prokofiev, holds the bodies of Andrei Gromyko and of out-of-favor former ruling elites like Nikita Khrushchev and Boris Yeltsin-- and has a plot ready for Mikhail Gorbachev (next to his deceased wife). There was always a feeling among some of Russia's political elites that Gorby was somehow owned by the CIA and his deconstruction of the Soviet Union was something they (we) had put him up to. Some think Putin's revenge is none other than Donald J. Trump. Perhaps Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook, not a scholar but a worshipper of unnamed "experts," is of that mindset. "Experts are telling us," he told CNN's Jake Tapper yesterday, "that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these e-mails... Other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump. I don't think it's a coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention. And that's disturbing... We need to be concerned that we also saw last week at the Republican convention that Trump and his allies made changes to the Republican platform to make it more pro-Russian... This isn't my assertion. There are a number of experts that are asserting this. I think we get to the bottom of these facts. But that is what experts are telling us. Experts have said that it is the Russians that in fact went in and took these emails and if they are the ones who took them then we have to infer that they are the ones who have been releasing them."

Mook may be a nut or an ignoramus-- or both-- but there is a seemingly credible case being built that ties Trump and Putin. I don't know how much of it is true but I do know the Clinton team has signaled they will be using it to denigrate Trump for the next 3 and a half months. Let's remember that Trump has been making statements that would seem to be in line with what Putin would like him to say-- like refusing to defend NATO partners in a way that undermines the core of the alliance the West has built to contain Russia. And yesterday Trump was babbling about pulling the U.S. out of the WTO, the trade system which helps western elites control the world's economy.


The U.S. and NATO have given the Russians plenty of legitimate reasons to be uncomfortable and Putin's vision of the U.S. as an adversary is not unwarranted by any stretch of the imagination. And that's far more in line with Clinton's thinking than with Trump's, who's basically just in it for a quick buck rather than anything to do with the complex global strategies that are well beyond his grasp or interest.

Josh Marshall laid a lot of the popular groundwork for this weekend's paranoia about Putin's hold on Trump when he pointed out that the untrustworthy and heavily leveraged Trump has been blackballed by all major U.S. banks and that his tottering empire is only able to stay afloat because of Putin-connected (and directed) money. Remember, we still don't have a clear picture of Trump's business ties with Putin and his wide network of allies because Trump is still refusing to release his taxes. "At a minimum," wrote Marshall, "Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men." Marshall asks his readers to consider 7 facts that seem to tie Trump and Putin together:

1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. [T]here's a good overview from the Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration ...

Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that's not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,

"Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt."

Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."

Sounds completely legit.

Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

5. Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom's role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which have most soured his reputation around the world.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue-- in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform-- speaks volumes.

This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin's orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence. Again, in the context of near total indifference to the platform and willingness to let party activists write it in any way they want, his team zeroed in on one fairly obscure plank to exert maximum force and it just happens to be the one most important to Putin in terms of US policy.

Add to this that his most conspicuous foreign policy statements track not only with Putin's positions but those in which Putin is most intensely interested. Aside from Ukraine, Trump's suggestion that the US and thus NATO might not come to the defense of NATO member states in the Baltics in the case of a Russian invasion is a case in point.

There are many other things people are alleging about hacking and all manner of other mysteries. But those points are highly speculative, some verging on conspiratorial in their thinking. I ignore them here because I've wanted to focus on unimpeachable, undisputed and publicly known facts. These alone paint a stark and highly troubling picture.

To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.

Thursday, John Harwood interviewed extreme rightist Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), simultaneously a violent and aggressive hawk and a Trumpist. Cotton may be the youngest member of the Senate but he's an unreconstructed Cold War psychopath, always ready for for war. "Putin," he glady reminded Harwood, "was a KGB spy and he never got over that. He does not have America's best interests at heart and he does not have any American interests at heart. I suspect, after this week, when Donald Trump is the nominee and he begins to receive classified briefings, similar briefings to what I receive as a member of the Intelligence Committee, he may have a different perspective on Vladimir Putin and what Russia is doing to America's interests and allies in Europe and the Middle East and Asia." It doesn't seem to have occurred to Senator Cotton-- nor even to McConnell or Ryan, to whom it should be occurring-- that the very idea of giving Trump classified information on Putin and Russia, information which will most assuredly get right back to Putin, is an extremely dangerous proposition.

The Humiliation Of Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, The Republican Party-- While The Demented Donald Laughs At America

The superficially crafted messaging of the Republican convention has been stepped on and obliterated every day. But Hillary better not feel powerful for having had anything to do with it. It's all Trump and his incompetent, deranged micro-campaign that's causing all the seemingly self-destructive chaos. Trump lifted those plagiarized passages from Michelle Obama's speech and put them into Melania's address and ate up two-and-a-half days of headlines that might have gone to republican messaging. Trump lured Ted Cruz into an untenable position last night, overshadowing, Mike Pence's introduction to the nation as the two squared off in some kind of an alternative universe 2020 preview.

I'm not Ted Cruz fan, but you almost feel sorry for the guy. Trump had originally said that unless his former rivals endorsed him in advance, they wouldn't get convention speaking slots. It kind of worked on sweaty, wormy Rubio but Ted Cruz-- who was not going to humiliate himself by publicly fellating the man who denigrated him and his family so violently-- well that turned into the kind of chaos Trump loves to spark and then take advantage of. Cruz decided to address the convention-- packed with really dumb Trump supporters-- without endorsing the legitimate party nominee. Trump was waiting for him, with a well-coordinated whip plan for strategic booing and camera-chaos. This is what America woke up to this morning:

David Frum referred to what Cruz did last night as "his brave and noble act" and I tend to see it similarly-- with reservations. Many others put Cruz in a far less heroic light-- even as a backstabber. Patricia Murphy at Roll Call: Having already identified Trump "a narcissist and a pathological liar," Cruz "exacted his revenge and refused to endorse Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention meant to unify GOP support behind his nomination." Politico noted that "Boos rained down on Cruz, and his wife had to be escorted from the hall amid verbal taunts in an unreal scene that marked an end to a surreal primary season."

“We deserve leaders who stand for principle, who unite us all behind shared values, who cast aside anger for love,” Cruz said. “That is the standard we should expect from everybody.”

It was a standard that Cruz determined Trump did not meet.

“Don’t stay home in November,” Cruz told the audience. “Stand and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

But he wouldn’t say Trump’s name.

In doing so, Cruz handed Hillary Clinton and the Democrats a potentially devastating cudgel of a slogan-- “vote your conscience”-- with which to hammer Trump all the way through November. Clinton grabbed it immediately, tweeting the phrase and a link to a voter registration page.

So... yes, Cruz kicked off his 2020 election campaign-- probably against Hillary, in the GOP's alternative universe, against President Gas. Byron York pointed out Cruz is taking a big gamble with his political future. "No one," he correctly asserted, "will know whether he won or lost until a few years from now... The upside of Cruz's gamble is that in one brief appearance, he won the intensified support of those Republicans who cannot reconcile themselves to Trump. And, if Trump goes down to defeat in November-- and it's safe to say everyone in that group believes he will-- Cruz will have serious I-told-you-so cred. Then, the theory goes, he will be in a strong position to put the party back together and run in 2020.

The scene irritated the still-raw feelings of some veterans of the 2016 GOP race. Veteran Republican strategist Curt Anderson, who ran Bobby Jindal's campaign, saw in Cruz's action far more calculation than principle, recalling the days when Cruz expressed admiration and affection for Trump.

"No one did more to create Donald Trump than Ted Cruz did," Anderson wrote in an email shortly after Cruz's speech. "While others were attempting to stop Trump, Cruz was complimenting him and sucking up to him. It was a political calculation that failed. Everything he does is a political calculation. Tonight he calculated that not endorsing the Republican nominee will be good for him. That will be another failed calculation, no matter whether Trump wins or loses in the fall."

Anderson was by no means alone in that feeling. Talking to attendees leaving the hall Wednesday night, most were unhappy with Cruz's performance. They didn't like the fact that Cruz would not fall in line behind his party's choice, and they could not understand his decision in light of their strong belief that the country has gone downhill fast under President Obama and will continue unless Hillary Clinton is stopped.

On the other hand, Sarah Palin, one of Trump's most blood-thirsty lady enforcers, has declared Cruz, henceforth, a persona-non-grata in the Republican Party:

Cruz’s broken pledge to support the will of the people tonight was one of those career-ending “read my lips” moments. I guarantee American voters took notice and felt more unsettling confirmation as to why we don’t much like typical politicians because they campaign one way, but act out another way. That kind of political status quo has got to go because it got us into the mess we’re in with America’s bankrupt budgets and ramped up security threats.

It’s commonplace for politicians to disbelieve their word is their bond, as evidenced by Cruz breaking his promise to endorse his party’s nominee, evidently thinking whilst on the convention stage, “At this point, what difference does it make?” We’ve been burned so horribly by that attitude that voters won’t reward politicians pulling that “what difference does it make” stunt again. Politicians will see — it makes all the difference in the world to us.

Who knew Palin was such a Talking Heads fan!



Josh Marshall tried to make sense out of what happened last night for normal observers-- but found it almost impossible. "Trump's convention is everything you could have predicted: a mix of bracing disorganization, provocation, aggression and lies. It is simply impossible to pick apart the incompetence from the transgressive behavior and pettiness... Years from today we will still wrestle with the meaning of Cruz for once leveraging the awesome power of his assholery in a righteous cause. Perhaps there is a salutary bravery or solidity there I hadn't noticed, or at least a quality vouchsafed for this moment. This is Trump. His convention would be his presidency-- entertaining and hilarious if he weren't also a live wire against the fumy gasoline can set against our national home. It is quite literally a terrifying prospect. He's quite likely to lose his quest for the presidency. But he might not. He's that close to the unimaginable. And he's brought almost an entire political party along with him. We will be blessed if we can escape this with no more harm."

click on the image to enlarge

Is Netanyahu in Trouble?

Yesterday Howie pondered, "Did Boehner Lose Netanyahu His Reelection By Bringing Him To Washington?," and looked at the surprising reports coming out of Israel regarding prospects for the March 17 election. Meanwhile, the reports that Bibi may be in trouble already had our colleague GP pondering too. -- Ed.



Snapshot of polls by party just prior to Israel's 2015 election (source). Click to enlarge.

by Gaius Publius

It seems that the smooth-sailing-to-reelection predicted for Benjamin Netanyahu by Uri Avnery and others may have been premature. To recap, the Israeli election was neck-and-neck prior to Netanyahu's speech before the U.S. Congress. Many thought the image of Netanyahu putting the public wood to Iran's presumed U.S. supporters would swing voters into his camp and secure his return to office.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo says, maybe not:

Yes. Netanyahu is Suddenly in Real Trouble

... As we noted last week, the initial polls after the Prime Minister's speech to Congress painted an equivocal picture: perhaps a very small bump of support but one that seemed to subside quickly and still leave the Zionist Camp/Labor Party with the slenderest of leads. But over the weekend something changed.

Over the last three days a new raft of polls has been published which show ZC/Labor with a lead of between two and four seats over Likud. That is at the very outer range of the leads ZC/Labor [the "Zionist Camp"/Labor opposition] has had. But the trend has not been this pronounced in the past or with a group of polls all seeming to agree on the same movement. What's more, Likud's numbers clearly seem to be dropping in absolute terms. There have also been press reports — supported by my own reporting — that internal polls from the two major parties show a bigger gap than the public polls.

There are also signs of erosion, though still limited, for the entire center-right bloc — not just Likud, but the allied parties from which it would build a natural coalition.

Marshall looks at possible causes and comes up with this (my emphasis):

It may simply be the heightened and not uncommon volatility that comes in the last days of an election when the mass of voters begin to really focus on the decision. Or it may be a rapid string of events coming at once undermining Netanyahu's credibility on his signature issue: security. J.J. Goldberg runs through three of them here. In short, a smashing critique of his rule by a former chief of the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad; a botched commercial which some core Likud supporters believed was comparing them to Hamas; and then a leaked document about negotiations with the Palestinians.

The last is the most interesting. A document surfaced purporting to show that Netanyahu had discussed a far-reaching settlement with the Palestinians which would approach the kind of deal real two-staters endorse — something far more than he has ever suggested a willingness to consider publicly. First his campaign denied its authenticity, then it denied its implications. Then his campaign took back his original endorsement (albeit an extremely hedged one) of the two-state principle. Then it un-took it back. Kind of.

That's quite an apparent betrayal of principle. Read that last again — Netanyahu supports a something-like-two-state solution? The Greater Israel people must be freaking out.

Marshall acknowledges the problems faced by Yitzhak Herzog, the leader of the "Zionist Camp" opposition:

[T]here is still the very real problem of how Herzog would assemble a coalition. First, there is the problem which I discussed earlier of the likely non-inclusion of a dozen or more seats from the Joint Arab List. But on top of that, Herzog would likely need to find a way to bring a secular party (which is hostile to the special accommodations of the ultra-Orthodox) together with one of the ultra-Orthodox parties, and/or a viciously nationalistic party like Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beytenu with the left-wing Meretz or even an Arab party, both of which would be very challenging.

Coalition-building is always a special problem in a parliamentary system. Herzog faces a formidable challenge, but it's not insurmountable.

Avnery thinks the fate of the Middle East hangs on this election. He could be right. I'll bet Sheldon Adelson's control of Israeli politics hangs in the balance as well. And though that election could still go either way, in Marshall's estimation:

Netanyahu still has the upper hand in eventually forming the next governing coalition. But as the piece also notes, all the remaining unknowns seem to favor Herzog and his Zionist Camp/Labor Party.

The election is March 17, just days away. Something to pay attention to, in my estimation.

How Elections Work in Israel

For those of you who can't get enough bracketology from our national March Madness, here's some background to help you watch what's about to happen in Israel.

As noted, Israel uses a parliamentary system, which means multiple political parties, seats allocated by proportion of votes gotten per party, and coalitions among non-majority parties in order to select officers who will "form a government." Israel also has something called an "electoral threshold," which allocates seats in the Knesset (their parliament) only to parties whose vote total exceeds the threshold. In Israel the threshold was recently raised from 2% to 3¼%, which some analysts took as an attempt to freeze out the small Arabist parties. In fact, it caused them to combine.

Here are the details, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Israel uses the closed list method of party-list proportional representation; thus, citizens vote for their preferred party and not for any individual candidates. The 120 seats in the Knesset are then assigned (using the D'Hondt method) proportionally to each party that received votes, provided that the party gained votes which met or exceeded the electoral threshold. Parties are permitted to form electoral alliances so as to gain enough collective votes to meet the threshold (the alliance as a whole must meet the threshold, not the individual parties) and thus be allocated seats. The low threshold makes the Israeli electoral system more favourable to minor parties than systems used in most other countries. Two parties can make an agreement so that both parties' sum of surplus votes are combined, and if the combined surplus votes amounts to an extra seat, then the extra seat goes to the party with the larger amount of surplus votes.

Keep that number, 120 seats, in mind. Then look at the chart at the top of this piece. Since no party will reach 61 seats, the President (of the country) will select a party leader most likely to form a successful coalition, "successful" defined as "approved by a majority of the Knesset":

After an election, the President, following consultations with the elected party leaders, chooses the Knesset member most likely to form a viable coalition government. While this typically is the leader of the party receiving the most seats, it is not required to be so. In the event a party wins 61 or more seats in an election, it can form a viable government without having to form a coalition. However, no party has ever won more than 56 seats in an election; thus, a coalition has always been required. That member has up to 42 days to negotiate with the different parties, and then present his or her government to the Knesset for a vote of confidence. Once the government is approved (by a vote of at least 61 members), he or she becomes Prime Minister.

Presenting "his or her government" means naming his or her proposed cabinet officers and putting that list to a vote of the full Knesset. It's a fascinating process. What you should watch for (if you're watching closely):

• The March 17 vote totals by party
• What happens in the next 42 days, especially if Zionist/Labor wins
• Which parties get seats in the proposed coalition cabinet

If there weren't so much at stake, this could be popcorn time. For party-by-party information, use the poll chart above and this link. And good luck to us all.

GP

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