What Did Putin Get For His Investment In The 2016 Election? How Much Did He Spend? And Is Trump A Full-Fledged Traitor?

 

How much did Putin spend to help get Trump elected? And what did he get for it? It was probably the greatest Russian foreign policy coup in history and didn't cost a great deal. Unfortunately, I doubt we're going to see Trump tried, let alone imprisoned or stood up before a wall and shot. But, it will certainly be interesting to see how history deals with the most peculiar-- and horrific-- episode in U.S. presidential history.

Reporting for the Washington Post over the weekend, Shane Harris took a look at what Putin got out of his interference in U.S. domestic politics. Short version: under Señor T, "the United States has abandoned international climate and nuclear arms agreements. It has announced its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, questioned the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and antagonized stalwart allies like Germany. America’s past presidents have long promoted democracy, human rights and the rule of law abroad, yet Trump instead has waged an assault on those values at home, where he has weakened institutions, shredded norms and declared without evidence that the upcoming election will be 'rigged.' America’s moral authority also has been undercut by the devastatingly high death toll and wrenching economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, coupled with the racial reckoning that has convulsed the country. These highlights from Trump’s nearly four years in office read like Vladimir Putin’s wish list. Few countries have benefited more geopolitically from Trump’s time in office than Russia.

Trump continues to argue he's been tougher on Russia than anyone but whatever aggressive measures his regime did take, he has opposed and has had to be cajoled and prodded into allowing.

In his two decades as Russia’s autocratic leader, Putin has systematically sought to grow his nation’s influence at America’s expense by breaking up its long-standing alliance structure and discrediting its democratic institutions and values.

Over the past four years, Putin has succeeded to a remarkable degree, aided by the credibility and support on the world stage that Trump has given him, according to national security and foreign policy experts, some of them Trump’s most strident critics.

“The more dysfunctional, polarized and erratic the United States seems at home, the more beset by domestic problems, the more ineffective in demonstrating leadership and dealing with them, especially during the pandemic, the better that is for Russia, because they benefit from a world in which the United States is seen as unreliable and unpredictable,” said William J. Burns, a former deputy secretary of state and U.S. ambassador to Russia under George W. Bush who now leads the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

...More than 130 Republican former military, intelligence, diplomatic and other national security officials signed a joint statement in August endorsing Biden because they said Trump had “failed our country,” in part because of his handling of Russian interference and alignment with Putin and other strongmen.

Russia’s longtime aim has been to undermine trust in democratic systems of government around the world, and the United States with Trump at the helm has proved an ideal model to advance that goal.

“This president has been the most extraordinary gift to the Kremlin,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Across every field, in terms of America’s standing in the world, in terms of America’s cohesion at home, no president has done more to damage the United States or to advantage the Kremlin than Donald Trump. That will be his lasting legacy.”

Through his rhetorical attacks and norm-busting actions, Trump has eroded public faith in the Justice Department, the State Department and the intelligence community; demeaned the military leadership; threatened the freedom of the press; and challenged the courts.

Most recently, he has challenged elements of America’s democracy itself by questioning the legitimacy of the upcoming election and refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

“One of Putin’s primary objectives is to utterly discredit democracy as a model, and on that he’s getting an A-plus, because in Donald Trump you have a would-be authoritarian who is deliberately and overtly taking a wrecking ball to the underpinnings of our democracy,” said Susan E. Rice, a former ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser in the Obama administration.

Though Trump appears to have governed in this manner largely to protect and perpetuate his own political power, his objective dovetails neatly with Putin’s, according to longtime students of Russia.

“If you turn on state-controlled Russian language television in Russia, what they love talking about day in and day out is how much of a mess the United States is,” said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Russia has been a central player throughout Trump’s presidency-- from that country’s election interference in 2016 and again this year to Trump’s appeasement of Putin on matters both geopolitical and personal.

For the first half of his term, Trump was haunted by the wide-ranging criminal investigation into Russian election interference-- so much so that, for the president, simply repeating the country’s name (“Russia, Russia, Russia”) is shorthand for scandal.

A report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” in hopes of helping Trump. Mueller also laid out evidence of 10 episodes of potential obstruction of justice by Trump but concluded it was not his role to determine whether Trump broke the law.

...Trump has not only played down the Russian threat, he has sought to exploit it. Last December, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani met with a Ukrainian lawmaker offering derogatory information about Biden, the former vice president, and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

The lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services,” the Treasury Department declared in September, sanctioning Derkach for his efforts to “undermine” the 2020 elections.

The previous month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence singled out Derkach for his role in helping Russia “denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment’ ” in the United States. Current and former officials said that the false information he peddled to Giuliani, which Trump has spread, also has been picked up by U.S. lawmakers, who are effectively laundering Russian propaganda.

“Trump has embraced Russian assistance to destroy his own political enemies,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a career CIA officer who oversaw the agency’s operations in Russia and Eastern Europe.

At times, it’s difficult to tell whether Trump is parroting Russian propaganda or if the Kremlin is echoing Trump.

“We used to think that our elected officials and those up for elected office would be held to a higher standard about the information they consume and amplify. Instead, we’re seeing a degradation,” said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center and author of the book How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict.

In September, the Homeland Security Department issued an intelligence bulletin to state and local law enforcement agencies that Russia seeks “to undermine public trust in the electoral process” by spreading false claims that mail-in ballots are riddled with fraud and susceptible to manipulation. The department said Russia spreads such claims through a network of state-controlled media, proxy websites and social media trolls.

...At the same time, Trump has assiduously sought to cultivate a friendship with Putin, through regular phone calls and private in-person huddles. He has publicly excused Putin’s transgressions and has steadfastly avoided denouncing or even lightly criticizing the Russian president.

Time after time, Trump has taken Putin at his word, to the consternation of Trump’s top national security advisers.

Putin appears to have fueled Trump’s long-standing conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, and not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election-- and that it did so to try to stop him from reaching the White House.

Putin seemed to relish the diversion. “Thank God no one is accusing us of interfering in the U.S. elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine,” the Russian president said at a news conference last November. “Well, let them sort this out among themselves.”

In 2018, Trump traveled to Helsinki for a summit with Putin, where he said he took Putin at his word that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, effectively rejecting the unanimous conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had done so.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the summit “fabulous” and “better than super,” according to Russian news agencies.

Retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former U.S. permanent representative to NATO, said, “The last four years have been open-field running for Vladimir Putin because he hasn’t received a hard pushback.”

...[E]xperts questioned whether Trump’s pursuit of Putin’s affections has made Americans any safer or better positioned the United States in the world.

“I’m not against that in principle, but the objective always has to be, you’re doing this as a means to advance an American national interest,” said Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration.

“He’s done all these things to try to befriend Putin over four years,” McFaul said. “What has that accomplished for the United States of America? . . . What tangible, concrete agreement, policy, change in Putin’s behavior has all of this appeasement achieved? I would say it’s empty. It’s literally empty.”

National security experts believe Putin’s greatest triumph in the Trump years has been on the foreign policy front, and specifically the U.S. president’s methodical denigration of NATO.

NATO, which the United States helped establish after World War II as a bulwark against the then-Soviet Union, has been widely considered America’s most productive security alliance and the foundation of the Western-led liberal order.

“Trump is doing to NATO what Russia has long wanted to do, which is to separate the U.S. from our European allies and to decrease NATO’s ability to pose a coherent counterweight to Russia,” Lute said. “This lack of cohesion and absence of U.S. leadership are gifts to Russia.”

Rice said Putin’s ambition has been to undermine U.S. alliance relationships, which she argued have been America’s greatest global asset and source of power.

“In Trump, he’s found somebody who wants to degrade our alliance structure and has called into question the very concept of NATO,” Rice said. “What better red carpet for Vladimir Putin?”

Trump has publicly toyed with the idea of withdrawing from NATO, has questioned the value to the United States of the alliance, and has repeatedly assailed NATO allies. In one particularly vituperative outburst at a 2018 NATO summit, he said Germany was “a captive of Russia,” because Germany imports large amounts of natural gas from Russia.

Trump also has withdrawn the United States from a number of trade agreements, as well as the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal.

Meanwhile, Trump has praised far-right, pro-Russian leaders in Europe-- a U.S. embrace that is seen as a threat to some in the NATO alliance. In May 2019, he welcomed to the White House Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, whom Western leaders have criticized for his hard-line immigration policies and authoritarian maneuvers. In their Oval Office meeting, Trump remarked, “I know he’s a tough man but he’s a respected man. Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s okay.”

In a further break with Western allies, Trump has repeatedly called for Russia to be added back to the Group of Seven, after it was expelled in 2014 in response to invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea.

“He doesn’t think of a promotion of freedom, human rights and rule of law as a foreign policy objective,” McFaul said. “That, I think, has let the creepy crawlers of the world advance their interests all over the place, and Russia’s at the top of the list.”

McFaul recalled a recent interview he had with a Moscow radio station. “They were like, ‘Man, what’s happened to you guys? It feels like you completely forgot about who you once were.

You Think The Pandemic Is Bad Here? Russia Is Really Getting Clobbered

Russia's coronavirus statistics look as phony as the election results this week that made Putin dictator-for-life. In a single vote, Russians had to choose whether to support a package of constitutional amendments that included pension and minimum wage boosts, a modest reorganisation of government, a constitutional mention of "faith in god," a ban on gay marriage, exhortations to preserve Russian history, and a ban on top officials holding dual citizenship-- an slipped in there was a reset on presidential term limits that will allow Putin (age 67) to rule until 2036, when he's 83.

Russia's pandemic started late but went strong fast. For a while they were reporting 8,000 + new cases a day and then a couple weeks ago it went down to 6,000 + new cases a day. No one believes them. The official count of cases is 667,883 and 9,859 deaths. Wednesday they reported 6,566 new cases; Thursday it was 6,760; Friday they reported 6,718 new cases; and yesterday it was 6,632. Only the U.S. and Brazil have more reported cases, though India will soon--probably Monday or Tuesday of next week-- surpass Russia for third place in total cases. (Today it was 6,736 new cases.)

Robyn Dixon reports for the Washington Post from Moscow. Yesterday she tried explain how Russia's economic crisis is impacting typical families in the hard-hit country, hard-hit not just with infections, but with a catastrophic pounding of the economy. People and businesses have gone bankrupt. Families have been evicted from their homes. Dixon paints a break picture of desperation, hopelessness and abandonment. "Across the globe," she wrote, "the pandemic has tanked economies as the world faces its worst collective downturn since the Great Depression. Russia has been particularly hard hit by the twin blows of the coronavirus and the collapse in oil prices. Russia relies on taxes from the oil and gas sector for 40 percent of its budget. Since March, Russian charities and nonprofit organizations experienced a surge in the kind of clients they have not had before: families that had never been in financial crisis, but are now desperate. Some of them were unable to buy even food. Some were left homeless."

You’re on your own

According to Russian federal statistics agency Rosstat, an estimated 4.5 million people were out of work at the end of May-- a number that has soared 85 percent since March. Before the double crises hit, Russia had 1.3 million people listed as unemployed, according to official figures. The jobless rate now stands at 6.1 percent, compared with 5.8 percent in April. The U.S. unemployment rate in June was 11.1 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, down from a peak of 14.7 percent in April.

In May, Russia’s industrial output slumped by 9.6 percent compared with May 2019 as restrictions on oil production under a deal with OPEC hit home. The auto-manufacturing industry was particularly hard hit, down by 42.2 percent in May compared with the same period last year. The International Monetary Fund expects the Russian economy to contract by 5.5 percent this year. The Russian Central Bank said it could shrink by up to 6 percent. The U.S. economy shrank at a 5-percent rate in the first quarter of this year, the Commerce Department reported in late June.

Thousands of small businesses in Russia have gone bankrupt. The government was slow to respond, and belated, patchy measures left millions of people adrift.

“You’re on your own,” said Ivan Molchanov, a welder who spent 20 nights on the streets after his employer suspended operations and stopped paying both his 75,000-ruble monthly salary (about $1,070) and his accommodation in a cheap workers’ hostel.

“I slept in public toilets,” he said. “I slept in building entrances. You follow people in who live there or you watch when they enter the code and memorize it.”

Dom Druzei (House of Friends), an aid organization that normally offers medical assistance only to homeless people, set up six hostels in Moscow since April 22 and started general food-parcel distributions.

“The number of people asking for help doubled or tripled overnight,” said Dmitry Aleshkovsky, founder of Nuzhna Pomosh, a foundation that raises money and supports charities and nongovernment organizations throughout Russia. “Millions, literally millions, of people lost their jobs in one second."

“I met a guy getting 200,000 rubles a month,” he said, a sum equivalent to $2,857. “In one second, he fell to zero. He didn’t have money to pay the rent, so he became homeless in one second.”

A family evicted

Lana Zhurkina, founder of Dom Druzei, was struck by the case of a young Moscow beautician with an 18-month-old toddler, whose salary was “higher than average.” She had a mortgage on an apartment, under renovation, and rent for a different apartment during the work. Then the pandemic temporarily closed the salon.

“She came to us and asked for help for food because the time came when she just had no food in the house,” Zhurkina said. “We brought her food and she burst into tears because she could not understand how she could ever have found herself in this situation.”

“There are many such stories,” said Olga Lim, founder of the Chuzykh Detei Ne Byvayet (They Are Not Someone Else’s Children) foundation for orphans and families in crisis in Khabarovsk in the far east, citing the story of a young chef with two young children whose cafe temporarily closed.

“There was a young mother with two little children. She was in a terrible situation when I arrived with food parcels. All she had was one packet of cereal, nothing else."

As Russia has eased its isolation period, some people have returned to work, including the beautician and the chef. But many small businesses have closed and many jobs have been lost.

Alexander Gorbunov, 42, husband of Yekaterina, also 42, with the four children ages 10 to 16, has worked for years as a client manager at a trucking company. It closed in March. Now he leases a car and drives for a ride-share company, leaving early in the morning and returning around 2 a.m.

The family had been living in two small rooms of a communal apartment and had been on a waiting list for Moscow City housing since 2011. They moved out last year and rented a larger space. In March, they barely cobbled together the rent.

“It was very tough. But we couldn’t find the money for April and May,” Gorbunova said. “We hoped the landlady would let us stay. She said, ‘I don’t care about your problems.’ The landlady said, ‘If you’re incapable of paying, I don’t want you.’ ”

She added, “We couldn’t pay because we had no money. I was panicking. I was so confused and lost. When the crisis happened, the state didn’t help us.”

The couple had to borrow 300,000 rubles ($4,285) from two banks to cover their expenses. The Mercy Foundation of the Russian Orthodox Church paid the rent for April and May, enabling the children to finish the school year.

The couple’s daughter, 16, is taking extra classes in medicine. Their 14-year-old son is taking extra classes in advanced mathematics. Their 12-year-old son’s ambition is to become a military general and their 10-year-old son is a good athlete. Now they are living temporarily at a Gorbunova’s mother-in-law’s summer cottage outside Moscow, with no idea where they will go when the school year starts in September.

A fortress is broken

Putin has often promised to support families with many children, but many feel abandoned. During the crisis, families have received payments of 10,000 rubles ($142) per month for each child younger than 16, but Gorbunova said the payment doesn’t cover a week’s worth of expenses, even without rent.

“All families with many children feel that way,” she said. “President Putin is a nice person. But as very often happens, a fortress is broken on the inside. There are worms burrowing inside the fortress.”

The number of Russians filing for bankruptcy protection in the first quarter increased 68 percent over the same period last year, according to RBC news, with at least 1 million Russians predicted to declare bankruptcy in coming months. (In the United States, commercial Chapter 11 bankruptcies increased by 18 percent in March compared to March 2019, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute, but many more U.S. bankruptcies were filed in the months that followed.)

But even as many middle-class families and small businesses struggle, it is tougher for vulnerable families, homeless people and low-income people, many of whom do informal work in the “gray economy,” a category excluded from government help.

Early mornings, homeless people sleeping on the benches in Moscow’s gardens rouse themselves after the first dog walkers arrive. They know the network: the Burger King where they can rely on workers to hand out unused food, the church charities giving out food and clothing, the soup kitchens at hostels and railway stations.

“The situation got a lot worse,” said Nikolai Rubanovskii of Nochlezhka, which hands out food to needy people and offers legal help to the homeless. “In our St. Petersburg project, we have a bus that distributes food. Before the pandemic, 60 to 80 people lined up. Now it’s 140 standing in line.”

In late April, police raided a soup kitchen in a park near Moscow’s Kursky Railway Station. Police told the Tass news agency that the establishment violated rules against mass gatherings.

Earlier that month, other volunteers handing out food at the station were detained. Aleshkovsky thinks it is pointless to wait for the Russian state to rescue people in need. “It’s a big wealthy country,” he said, “and we don’t understand why we are living so badly.”

Trump Has Covered Up Russians Paying Bounties For Dead American Soldiers

Trump has failed to protect Americans from the pandemic and yesterday it came out that he also failed to protect American soldiers stationed overseas from his Russian "allies." One would be crazy not to wonder if Trump was getting a percentage of the bounty Russia was paying the Taliban for each dead American soldier. Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwitz's story in the NY Times today, Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says would be a blockbuster were it not for all the other Trump insanity clogging the news cycles.

I want you to keep in mind that at the very end of May, when he had already been briefed and when others in his Regime were proposing sanctions against Putin's government for paying for the assassinations of American soldiers, Trump was whining about wanting to invite the Russians to rejoin the G-7 (May 30).

The Times trio reported that months ago, U.S. intelligence has concluded that Russia has been offering bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan-- including targeting American troops-- amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there. The Russian GRU unit carrying out the policy-- which had to be approved by Putin personally-- " has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats."

Money has changed hands for at least of some of 20 dead Americans killed "in combat" in 2019.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options-- starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

An operation to incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time the Russian spy unit was known to have orchestrated attacks on Western troops.

...While some of his closest advisers, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have counseled more hawkish policies toward Russia, Mr. Trump has adopted an accommodating stance toward Moscow.

At a summit in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump strongly suggested that he believed Mr. Putin’s denial that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election, despite broad agreement within the American intelligence establishment that it did. Mr. Trump criticized a bill imposing sanctions on Russia when he signed it into law after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has repeatedly made statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.

...[T]he intelligence had been treated as a closely held secret, but the administration expanded briefings about it this week-- including sharing information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to have been targeted.

The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.

The revelations came into focus inside the Trump administration at a delicate and distracted time. Although officials collected the intelligence earlier in the year, the interagency meeting at the White House took place as the coronavirus pandemic was becoming a crisis and parts of the country were shutting down.

...Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.

The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the G.R.U. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.

Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.

American intelligence officials say the G.R.U. was at the center of Moscow’s covert efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that election, American officials say, two G.R.U. cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers and then used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing internal communications.

In part because those efforts were aimed at helping tilt the election in Mr. Trump’s favor, his handling of issues related to Russia and Mr. Putin has come under particular scrutiny. The special counsel investigation found that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s intervention and expected to benefit from it, but found insufficient evidence to establish that his associates had engaged in any criminal conspiracy with Moscow.

Operations involving Unit 29155 tend to be much more violent than those involving the cyberunits. Its officers are often decorated military veterans with years of service, in some cases dating to the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Never before has the unit been accused of orchestrating attacks on Western soldiers, but officials briefed on its operations say it has been active in Afghanistan for many years.

Though Russia declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, relations between them have been warming in recent years. Taliban officials have traveled to Moscow for peace talks with other prominent Afghans, including the former president, Hamid Karzai. The talks have excluded representatives from the current Afghan government as well as anyone from the United States, and at times they have seemed to work at crosscurrents with American efforts to bring an end to the conflict.

The disclosure comes at a time when Mr. Trump has said he would invite Mr. Putin to an expanded meeting of the Group of 7 nations, but tensions between American and Russian militaries are running high.

Nebraska/Russia-- Ricketts/Putin

Different politicians are handling the pandemic in different ways. Denialism has been pretty rampant though. And it doesn't work. Nebraska's crackpot governor, Pete Ricketts, is unquestionably one of the worst governors confronting the coronavirus-- and his state is starting to suffer in a really major way now. Because Ricketts, always the sociopathic ideologue, refused to issue a stay-at-home order or take the pandemic seriously, Nebraska is on the top of every list of the states heading into a horrific Wave II. Monday, the Omaha World-Herald reported that Ricketts "rejected a call from AARP Nebraska Director Todd Stubbendieck to name long-term care facilities that have had coronavirus cases. Stubbendieck said the disclosures are needed to protect public health and to protect people who live and work at nursing homes and assisted living facilities. As of Wednesday, 455 residents or staff of long-term care facilities had tested positive for the potentially deadly virus, while long-term care residents accounted for two of every three deaths from the virus. Nebraska is one of 13 states in which half of or more deaths are nursing home residents, Stubbendieck said." Instead, Ricketts announced that he would allow dine-in restaurants, hair salons, massage therapy and other close-contact services to reopen Monday. Next Tuesday is primary day in Nebraska-- with in person voting, of course.

Of all the Wave II disaster-zones, Nebraska is looking the worst-- with 4,431 cases per million, far more than other phase-two hot spots like South Dakota (3,976), Iowa (3,922), Indiana (3,658), Colorado (3,452), Mississippi (3,251), Georgia (3,202), Tennessee (2,276), North Dakota (1,992), Utah (1,984), Florida (1,908) and Texas (1,409). These are states that can look forward to unnecessary suffering because they elected bad leaders.

Another right wing authoritarian with zero empathy for his people, Vladimir Putin, has also denied, denied, denied until it was too late. Actually he's still in denial mode and on Monday announced that Russia was ending whatever little there was of an economic shutdown across the country. Russia now has the third most total confirmed cases in the world-- following the U.S. and Spain. Russia, which has been reporting about 11,000 new cases per day for the past week, spent the first half of the pandemic gloating and sneering at the U.S. and western Europe. Yesterday, anti-empathy heads of states had catastrophic increases in cases in their countries. These were the contemptible national leaders who brought on the most new cases yesterday:

• Señor Trumpanzee- 18,196
• Vladimir Putin- 11,656
• Jair Bolsonaro- 6,444
• Boris Johnson- 3,877
• Narendra Modi- 3,607

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that Putins spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has been hospitalized with COVID-19. He's a key Putin crony who's been working for him for two decades. Another close Putin crony, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, is also in hospital being treated for COVID.

Reporters from the Kremlin pool said on Twitter that Peskov was last seen in public on April 30 “at a meeting with Vladimir Putin.” It was not clear whether it means the two were in the same room, as Putin has been conducting all his meetings via teleconference in recent weeks.

Since early in the outbreak, the Russian president minimized meetings and switched to holding daily video calls with Cabinet members and aides.

Peskov’s announcement comes just a day after Putin said Russia was successful in slowing down infections and announced easing some of the nationwide lockdown restrictions.

Russia has reported more than 232,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 2,100 virus-related deaths, as of Tuesday. Hours before Putin made televised remarks Monday about ending the country’s partial economic lockdown, health officials reported a daily record of over 11,600 new cases.

Russia's statistics are not considered to be accurate and it is widely assumed that Russia's deaths are being drastically under-reported.

Foreign Policy reported Tuesday morning that "Like many of his counterparts at the outset of the pandemic, Russian President Vladimir Putin may have underestimated how bad his country’s outbreak could get. 'The situation is on the whole under control,” Putin said on March 18. “Russia looks much better compared with other countries.' Since then, coronavirus cases have steadily increased. Russia now has approximately 220,000 cases. Only the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom have more. If trends continue, Russia will have overtaken the United Kingdom by the end of today.

Russia’s handling of the coronavirus has not helped Putin, who was planning for his next few terms in power just before the pandemic struck. While still high by Western standards, his support has declined to its lowest levels since he was first elected president. A recent poll by the Levada Center showed a 59 percent approval rating among the Russian public. The Kremlin said it was “not inclined to fully trust” the poll results.

It’s perhaps with these ratings in mind that Putin has ordered an easing of the country’s lockdown restrictions, starting today.

On May 7, Foreign Policy asked 11 Russia experts for an assessment of Putin’s 20 years in charge and what the future holds. Susan Glasser sums up how quickly things have changed for the Russian leader. “May 2020 was meant to be a 20th anniversary party for Putinism, but the party has been canceled,” she writes.

Putin Is Probably Worse Than Kushner-in-Law

Yesterday, the Washington Post published another piece on the deadly dysfunction the Trump Regime has brought to the pandemic response. "By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president-- and the coronavirus the enemy-- the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined." Every step of the way, Trump has dragged his feet 'til his two-little-too-late policies meant next to nothing in the battle, where a courageous and dedicated leader was desperately needed. Because of Trump's timid cowardice "the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation."

Trump's latest solution? Putting his unaccomplished and farcical son-in-law in charge. NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez explained that Kushner is an executive in his father's crooked real estate firm "with no public health expertise. [He] generally works behind scenes at the White House. So, critics have been curious about his role in the administration's efforts to confront the coronavirus pandemic. He has emerged with a central role working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to oversee the distribution of vital medical supplies to hospital and health care providers. On Thursday, he explained that Trump and Vice President Pence came to him looking for new ideas and 'outside of the box' thinking. But his lack of experience has drawn scrutiny, especially when he referred to the national stockpile of medical supplies as 'our stockpile. The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile,' he said. 'It's not supposed to be states' stockpiles that they then use.' The backlash was quick and harsh."

Trump is desperate to get get Anthony Fauci-- the most trusted pandemic-related leader by the American public-- off center stage. Even though Kushner is a failed clown with no qualifications whatsoever except for his proximity to the Oval Office, Trump is hoping he will draw attention away from Fauci and his politically-difficult recommendations. Eventually Trump will fire him. The firestorm won't be less hot with the cloddish son-in-law in charge.

Morons by Chip Proser

It could have been worse. Trump's role model Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that again. Russia has been hiding it's COVID-19 numbers from the public. Anastasia Vasilieva the leader of the Alliance of Doctors, an independent doctors’ union, was arrested and tossed into jail when she talked about the fake numbers the Putin Regime is handing out. Andrew Higgins, reporting for the NY Times wrote that she was arrested while "traveling from Moscow to an impoverished rural town to deliver masks, gloves and other supplies to a local hospital." I bet Trump would love to arrested Fauci.

The detention of Dr. Vasilieva, an eye specialist who has been highly critical of Russia’s response to the pandemic, added fuel to already widespread skepticism, particularly among Kremlin critics, about the accuracy of official figures showing relatively few cases of the virus in Russia. Her detention also increased skepticism about the readiness of Russia’s health care system to cope with the pandemic.

A group of doctors at a hospital in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second biggest city, released a video on Friday appealing to the public for help in obtaining the protective equipment they said they needed to treat coronavirus patients.

Maria Bakhldina, the head doctor at the hospital, speaking to Fontanka, a news site in the city, dismissed the doctors complaints as “untrue.”

Views on how far the virus has really spread in Russia and how prepared the country is have been largely determined by political leanings. The general public, which mostly supports President Vladimir V. Putin, has voiced little concern while many of the Kremlin’s opponents suspect a cover-up.

Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, recently accused the authorities of lying about the number of tests carried out and suggested that, as a result, the number of cases could be much higher than reported.

Russia has sharply stepped up testing and now says it has conducted more than 575,000 tests, but this includes cases of multiple tests on the same person, lowering the head count.

In an address to the nation on Thursday, President Putin, holed up for most of the past week in his country residence outside Moscow, praised health workers for “holding the line of defense against the advancing epidemic” but acknowledged the worst is yet to come.

Russia has been far more open in confronting the pandemic than many other former Soviet countries, some of which insist they have no cases now and can keep the virus at bay with quack remedies.

A sudden large surge in cases would likely break Russia’s rickety medical system and undermine Mr. Putin’s already declining but still robust approval ratings, especially as state-controlled media has bombarded the public for months with gushing reports about how the president is improving health care across the country.

The virus has also slowed Russia’s already sluggish economy, posing another problem for the Kremlin less than a month after it pushed through constitutional changes to allow Mr. Putin to dispense with term limits and stay in power until 2036.

Dr. Vasilieva, the detained physician, set up the Alliance of Doctors last year in part to counter the Kremlin’s claims of dramatic improvements in funding and other support for hospitals. She has treated Mr. Navalny as a patient and affiliated her group with his. The authorities arrested her last year for rallying opposition to the closure of a tuberculosis clinic in a poor region of southern Russia.

Mr. Putin’s approval rating, according to a recent survey by the Levada Center, a respected Russian polling organization, fell from 69 percent in February to 63 percent in March, near to what it was in 2014 before a surge in the president’s popularity after Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.

In his last public outing early last week, Mr. Putin visited a new state-of-the-art infectious diseases center, Hospital No. 40 in Moscow, escorted by its head doctor, who this week tested positive for the virus. The Kremlin said that Mr. Putin has been tested regularly and that “everything is O.K.”

Russia on Friday reported 601 new infections, down from 771 new cases reported on Thursday, bringing the total number to 4,419. This is a fourfold increase over the past week but still far fewer than the more than 245,000 cases reported in the United States and nearly 118,000 in Spain and 115,000 in Italy.

Critics of the Kremlin, however, have questioned the official figures. Dr. Vasilieva, the detained doctors’ union head, said in a video late last month that authorities were lying about the true number of infections, accusing them of deliberately misclassifying people who had developed the disease as victims of ordinary pneumonia.

A few days later, she said she had been called in for questioning over her comments, declaring defiantly in another video that “You can send whomever you want to get me-- the Federal Security Service, the fire service-- but the truth will not change.” The real number of coronavirus cases, she said, “is much higher than the authorities say.” She provided no evidence of any cover-up.

Her medical workers’ union, warning that Russian hospitals were desperately short of masks and other protective equipment, recently started a fund-raising drive online to raise money from the public to buy supplies for hospitals and clinics.

The government, too, seems worried that it may need to do more to control the virus. On Friday, it suspended the last remaining flights into the country, halting even special flights bringing Russians home from abroad, the Interfax news agency reported. All land borders have already been closed.

Moscow, St. Petersburg and many Russian regions this week ordered residents not to leave their homes except to buy food and medicine or walk their dogs close to their residence.

Dr. Vasilieva was stopped by police officers on Thursday while attempting to deliver supplies by car to a hospital in Okulovka, northwest of Moscow, according to Natalia Kolosova, a colleague who was traveling with her. “They were clearly waiting for us,” Ms. Kolosova said, noting that police officers had set up a check point at the entry to Okulovka but stopped no other vehicles.

Dr. Vasilieva appeared in court on Friday charged with disobeying police orders and violating quarantine restrictions. She was released on Friday evening after being ordered to pay a small fine.

Natalia Zviagina, director for Amnesty International in Russia, condemned the detention, saying in a statement that: “It is staggering that the Russian authorities appear to fear criticism more than the deadly Covid-19 pandemic” caused by coronavirus. By detaining Dr. Vasilieva, she added, the authorities show “they are willing to punish health professionals who dare contradict the official Russian narrative and expose flaws in the public health system.”

Dmitri Sokolov, a paramedic at the Okulovka hospital and the head of the regional branch of Dr. Vasilieva’s Alliance of Doctors, said that the hospital had not yet admitted any patients confirmed as suffering from Covid-19 but that staff members were deeply worried because of severe shortages of masks and other equipment.

Okulovka hospital’s head surgeon, Yuri I. Korvin, also a critic of the authorities, had been ordered to stay away from the hospital and self-isolate for two weeks because he had had contact with Dr. Vasilieva, Mr. Sokolov said. Police officers involved in her detention, however, were allowed to keep working, he added.

Mr. Sokolov said “nobody knows the real number of infections” and added that residents in Okulovka were alarmed by a recent flood of people arriving from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Fleeing quarantine restriction and high infection rates in their home cities, urban residents have been fleeing to rural towns like Okulovka to take shelter at country homes.

“None of us know where these people have been or whether they have been tested,” he said.

Do Not Imagine You Can Avoid Coronavirus By Going To Moscow

The Moscow Times reported yesterday that Russia-- like other socially backward countries, Trump-America included-- hasn't been testing and thereby reports low numbers of people with COVID-19. No one trusts Russia's reports which show that "With 116,000 tests for the coronavirus carried out and 114 returning positive, Russia’s ratio of tests to positive cases is 0.09%, the lowest among all of the countries infected by the coronavirus. The second lowest ratio is Taiwan’s 0.3%-- three times higher than Russia’s... 'The figures are likely a lot higher,' Alexei Kurinny, a deputy on the State Duma’s health protection committee, told the Moscow Times. 'Unfortunately we were slow to get around to doing comprehensive testing.'"

Putin and Trump-- two self-obsessed, incompetent assholes. And speaking of self-obsessed assholes, Richard Burr (R-NC), chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, found out what was going to befall this country early. So what did he do? He warned his biggest campaign donors-- though not his constituents-- and withdrew about a million dollars from the stock market before it crashed.

On Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin judged the situation in Russia “under control.” But the country has nonetheless revved into gear over the past few days, announcing that it will ban the entry of foreign nationals and stateless people until May 1 in an effort to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, Moscow has banned all public events larger than 50 people until April 10.

But despite these measures, medical experts are now questioning whether Russia’s official coronavirus statistics reflect reality in the country-- which ranked 116th last year in the Global Health Security Index for “detecting” pandemics.

If the numbers are significantly higher, officials may have missed their opportunity to stem the tide-- leaving the weight on the shoulders of doctors already stretched thin by a teetering healthcare system.

Jeremy Rossman, reporting for Newsweek yesterday, wrote that the countries not reporting big and increasing numbers of coronavirus cases are the countries, like Russia, not testing. The spread of the pandemic has depended movement of people. Countries with extensive dealings with China and the ones where the disease exploded first and with the most virulence. The dozen countries with the most interaction with China all show tremendous outbreaks-- except the ones that haven't been testing. These are the dozen countries in order of inbound travel with China and the number of cases reported:

• South Korea- 8,162
• Japan- 814
• Russia- 63
• U.S- 3,083
• Mongolia- 1
• Laos- 0
• Philippines- 140
• Singapore- 226
• India- 108
• Canada- 255
• Thailand- 114
• Vietnam- 56

Just 63 cases in Russia which has very strong travel, emigration, immigration and trade relationships with China? Rossman reported that "Some countries with very good travel, migration and trade links with China still have comparable low case numbers (both Japan and Singapore have fewer than 1,000 cases). For these countries, there has been early and extensive border screening, control and surveillance, which has probably held the localised transmission in check. If these measures hold, these countries will probably see only slow increases in case numbers over the coming weeks. It is interesting to see that most of the global cases are found north of the tropic of cancer. At present, there are only 2,025 cases south of the tropic of cancer. Case numbers in countries residing in the tropics or current southern hemisphere winter make up just 1.29% of the global cases. This could reflect global travel and trade relationships with China or could reflect impacts of climate on COVID-19 transmission. It is also possible that the broad range of tropical infectious diseases has masked the identification of COVID-19 cases that often present with mild, non-specific symptoms... [T]he low levels of reported cases in many countries may be due to a lack of testing or a lack of reporting. Many countries are actively pursuing policies in which only those with serious illness and a travel history to an area with strong local transmission will be tested, including the UK. This will lead to a dramatic under-reporting of case numbers and can jeopardise the ability to contain the pandemic, as the WHO has stated: 'You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is. Find, isolate, test and treat every case, to break the chains of transmission.'"

It is of particular concern that with the close relationships to China and extensive national resources, Russia has only reported 63 cases. While it is possible that this low number reflects their active border control and screening there is a concern that this reflects either a lack of screening or a lack of reporting. Combined with the recent evidence that Russia has been behind several recent COVID-19 disinformation campaigns, this raises the concern that Russia may be playing a dangerous game with global health. Hopefully this is simply a case of good border control or low rates of testing, but time will tell.

This is a dynamically unfolding pandemic that will require the concerted efforts of counties around the world to control. As the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says: “we’re all in this together.”

Nero Lives: Part II by Nancy Ohanian

Meanwhile, in hard-hit Italy "a silent surge in fatalities in nursing homes, where dozens of patients a day are dying untested for the virus... 'There are significant numbers of people who have died but whose death hasn’t been attributed to the coronavirus because they died at home or in a nursing home and so they weren’t swabbed,' said Giorgio Gori, mayor of the town of Bergamo." [So far 19 long-term care facilities in Florida have either confirmed or suspected cases of the coronavirus. It won't be long before you will be able to add a zero to the number. Oh, and by the way, no one will divulge the names of the facilities, which seems criminal, no?]

Immediately after the virus emerged in northern Italy on Feb. 21, care homes cut off access to visitors to limit the contagion risk to elderly patients most vulnerable to the disease.

Walter Montini, president of ARSAC, the association grouping 30 old people’s homes in Cremona province, said that at one small care home with 36 beds, there were 7 deaths in a day.

“There has obviously been an increase in deaths. You just have to look at the local daily (newspaper) in Cremona. Normally there’s a page of death notices. Today there were five.”

He launched an appeal for more masks for staff on March 2 but, given the shortages, hospitals were judged to have a greater need. He said staff needed to be tested but that was not happening.

Local health authorities say they have received government directions on testing and treatment which say that hospitalization is only indicated for patients with “significant respiratory symptoms.”

...With the health system pushed to its limits and funeral services overwhelmed by the hundreds of dead every day, there is no capacity to conduct autopsies or test bodies for coronavirus.

The bodies are wrapped in special protective plastic bags and buried or cremated with no more than a quick blessing from a priest. Any family commemoration will have to wait until a ban on public gatherings is lifted.

In case you missed it yesterday, it's worth mentioning a Reuters report by Gene Emery that asserts that the virus "can remain viable and infectious in droplets in the air for hours and on surfaces up to days, according to a new study... The tests show that when the virus is carried by the droplets released when someone coughs or sneezes, it remains viable, or able to still infect people, in aerosols for at least three hours. On plastic and stainless steel, viable virus could be detected after three days. On cardboard, the virus was not viable after 24 hours. On copper, it took 4 hours for the virus to become inactivated."

New York Times Clears National Security Stories with the Government Before Publication. Source: New York Times

New York Times response to Donald Trump's attack on the Times story revealing recent U.S. cyber-attacks against Russia

by Thomas Neuburger

The New York Times has just admitted that it clears national security stories with the government before it publishes them. We've already known this occurred some of the time — see "How the NY Times & U.S. Government Worked Together to Suppress James Risen’s Post-9/11 Reporting." It now looks like it occurs most of the time, if not all of the time.

The source for the revelation, at least in the current instance, is the New York Times.

This find is courtesy of Ben Norton, writing at Grayzone:

The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.

This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.

On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia’s power grid. According to the article, “the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,” as part of a larger “digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”

In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article “a virtual act of Treason.”

The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.

“Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,” the Times communications team said. “We described the article to the government before publication.”

“As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns,” the Times added.

The reason always given for the government suppressing a national security story is, of course, that lives will be put in danger, even when they won't. The following is Risen, as reported by Norton, talking about this arrangement between Times editors and the government, an arrangement he once went along with, but then grew to distrust:

Risen detailed how his editors had been “quite willing to cooperate with the government.” ... There is an “informal arrangement” between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”

“At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,” the former New York Times reported [sic] said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.

“He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,” Risen said. “I agreed.”

Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. “If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,” he wrote. “That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously.”

This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. “And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times,” he said.

This practice applied not only after 9/11 and the Iraq War, but long afterward as well:

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently “clashed” with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government’s lies. But his stories “stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration’s claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.”

The Times’ executive editor Howell Raines “was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war,” Risen said.

In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.

Risen said Rice told him “to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone.”

“The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories,” Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the “war on the press.”

I've written before that the U.S. is one of the most heavily propagandized nations in the world, most recently here ("ICE is Paying Millions to Spy on People’s Communications"). This propaganda takes many forms, from the soft propaganda of military intervention into movie content (see this criticism of the film Pitch Perfect 3, "I Paid To See A Movie About Singing. I Got Ninety Minutes Of Pentagon Propaganda.") to the hard propaganda of former generals, admirals and security officials masquerading as "independent analysts" on news programs where they usually advocate for unpopular government policies, like war (see Lee Fang's "Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?" and "Pentagon military analyst program" at SourceWatch).

We now know, if there was any doubt, that those heroes of the #Resistance at the New York Times, by their own admission, have been fully folded into the government's media "information" project. Good to know.

Ignoring the Elected President

Side note: It's understandable, in a way, that in the current panicky environment, administration employees are treating the president, their boss, as someone to withhold information from, as they did in the case of the U.S. military's cyber-intrusion into the Russian power grid. Again, according to the New York Times (emphasis added):

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials[.]

Is this a precedent, though, we want to cheer or set? The act of cementing in place an American Praetorian Guard with a publicly sanctioned veto over decisions of an elected head of state, once done, won't be undone easily.

Is this what we want our next constitution to become, a state in which it's OK for elected officials to be publicly frustrated by their unelected subordinates? One must consider the future before radically altering the present.

I've said this before, but consider: If a President Bernie Sanders wanted better relations with Russia and North Korea, and went about it in a smart, safe way; wanted to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. by smartly but radically renegotiating our billionaire- and corporate-friendly trade deals; wanted to radically reduce spending on the national security apparatus, on our endless wars, and spend instead on government-provided services like Medicare for All (which, by the way, would devastate several powerful, well-funded industries and bipartisan donor constituencies) ... and for good measure, started jailing bankers again...

...if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend?

How much would be kept from him by "his" administration? How many who work for him would openly block his agenda, using the security state's propaganda resources (such as the New York Times) to defend their actions?

How much of the future are we willing to sacrifice in order to fix the present? After all, if Establishment leaders really want to be rid of President Trump, there's a fully constitutional method for doing it — impeachment. Instead they seem to be choosing these anti-constitutional methods.

This is a plan that will backfire. Once a nation opens the door to rule by its security elite, as the U.S. has increasingly done, the guardians and beneficiaries of that door almost never let it be closed.

Word to the wise.