Donald Trump keeps saying that he has nothing to do with the Russians. Most recently, he made this claim in his White House press conference last week: “I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia.” He said it at a press conference in early January, too.
Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017
He also made the denial in one of the debates with Hillary Clinton.
Given that Trump is pretty consistent in how he words these denials, it could be that he’s carefully parsing. After all, if he has business interests in Azerbaijan, which he does, that’s a former Soviet Socialist Republic that is no longer part of the same nation-state as “Russia.”
Whether Trump is being too clever by half or simply lying is something that reporters, the Intelligence Community, Congress, and maybe the Treasury Department need to figure out. What’s clear for now, though, is that Trump has plenty of connections to Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
Hopefully, you’ve already seen the New York Times piece from this weekend detailing how Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen took a dossier to Michael Flynn that had been provided to him by a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician named Andrii V. Artemenko and a Russian mob-connected former employee of the Trump Organization named Felix Sater.
The dossier reportedly contained damaging information about the anti-Russian Ukrainian president, Petro O. Poroshenko, that the Trump administration could conceivably use to oust him. It also contained some kind of Russian-Ukrainian “peace plan” that would facilitate the lifting of sanctions on Russia.
What people are focusing on, quite justifiably, is the involvement of this Felix Sater character. I could write a whole, very long piece dedicated to nothing more than how obviously crazy it is for a personal lawyer to Donald Trump to meet with Sater, let alone carry his information personally to Trump’s national security adviser. Hopefully, however, you can find that argument made elsewhere.
I want to focus on two other characters. One is the man who hired Felix Sater despite his record of violence that landed him in prison and his felony conviction for a pump and dump stock scheme he ran in the 1990’s in league with Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano’s brother-in-law.
Tevfik Arif is originally from the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan. During the Soviet Era, he worked for seventeen years in Moscow for the Ministry of Commerce and Trade. He quit that job in 1991 as the USSR was dissolving and caught quite a break. Somehow he was able to parlay his experience (which focused mainly on hotel management) at the Commerce and Trade Ministry into ownership of the Speciality Chemicals Trading Company, “an export-import business trading in rare metals, chrome, and raw materials.” Shortly thereafter, once Kazakhstan gained it’s independence from Russia, he took over ACCP, a chromium plant in Aktobe.
From there, he took his riches and built a hotel in Antalya, Turkey which was completed in 1999. This was obviously more in line with his career experience than handling rare metals. Then, in 2001, he came to America and created the Bayrock Group, a real-estate development company based in Brooklyn.
It was then that he hired Felix Sater and made him a part-owner and partner, and these two then got involved with Donald Trump.
Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, had recently joined Bayrock at the behest of its founder, Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan. Bayrock, which was developing commercial properties in Brooklyn, proposed that Mr. Trump license his name to hotel projects in Florida, Arizona and New York, including Trump SoHo.
If you know anything about the Yeltsin Era of the 1990s or the rise of Vladimir Putin, you know that that the Russian state was sold off to KGB-connected or approved businessmen and intelligence officers who quickly formed into a ruling oligarchy. Mr. Arif’s rise from a hotel management functionary in the Commerce and Trade Ministry into a rare metals trader is highly, highly suspicious and ought to be looked at very carefully.
The second person I want to focus on is Tamir Sapir (nee Temur Sepiashvili), who died in 2014. An Ashkenazi Jew who was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in the former Soviet Union, he emigrated to Israel just prior to the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. From there, he quickly re-emigrated to Kentucky where he worked as a laborer.
There was a war between Arabs and Israeli in 1973, so Temur decided to leave Israel and head to a small town in Kentucky. “I was ready to accept any job, so I ended up caring for elderly women. Every day I took them to a special facility where they entertained themselves by knitting, singing and other things. They were the ones who taught me English. Right next to me lived a rich man who owned several shops. He had a business selling tools and offered me to work for him.” – remembers the billionaire. He worked as a driver, janitor and a loader, while dedicating his free time to studying English and saving up money.
Before long, he relocated to New York City, becoming a cabbie.
In 10 months, his family came to live in New York and Temur Sepiashvili became a cabbie. “I worked day and night, because I wanted to buy out the car. I slept at the airport, waiting for the first flight to arrive. In six months, the taxi became mine. I made 300-400$ per day and had time to go with my family to the park, to the movies, to the restaurant”, – says Sapir.
What happened next was either the work of Russian intelligence or one of the most surprising and unlikely success stories in history. According to the legend, Mr. Sapir and a fellow USSR emigrant named Sam Kislin pooled their savings and bought an electronics store on Broadway in Manhattan. They hoped to attract business from the Russian emigre community, but they had a different kind of luck.
Former President of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze played an important role in his success. “Once USSR’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eduard Shevardnadze, visited my shop. One of his bodyguards, Murad Kazishvili, turned out to be my childhood friend. Back in the day, an organization existed called “Council for American-Soviet Trade”, in which over a hundred large American companies participated, among them “Occidental Petroleum Hammer” and “Pepsi-Cola”, which also had business ties with the USSR. With Murad’s help, I also joined this organization and went to Moscow with Vice-President Bush, who headed the Council,” Tamir says. According to him, during his stay in Moscow, one of his friends advised him to start exporting carbamide to America. This substance is necessary for oil production and during Soviet times it cost 5 times less than in the US. The Carbamide trade gave Tamir his first million and as he says, whet his appetite.
He exported American clothing, footwear and tech to USSR while importing oil and oil products from there, investing profits into real estate in New York. Prices on real estate were low in 1995-1996: for example, a skyscraper that is now estimated to be worth approximately 1.5 billion dollars cost just 17 million back then. Sapir got incredibly lucky; according to his own words, it was nothing less than divine intervention. In 1997, real estate prices grew and property that Sapir bought for miniscule prices was sold for colossal amounts of money. This is how Sapir got his first billion.
So, supposedly this guy went from sleeping in his cab to being a billionaire because he quickly made enough money selling VCR’s and Walkmans to make major investments in Russian carbamide which he then used to buy a skyscraper for 17 million dollars. In the process, he was invited to join the Council for American-Soviet Trade and meet with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.
You won’t find it in his official biography, but I found the following in write-up on Sapir in a local Georgia news outfit that was profiling native Georgians who had emigrated and made a fortune (emphasis mine):
In order for Tamir Sapir’s biography to be complete, recollections of his classmate, Sergo Davlianidze, must be also mentioned. “We managed to be friends and also fight in the 60’s. My classmate from Tbilisi State School #45 was a boxing enthusiast, just like me. Who could imagine that he would become a businessman? He lived in a communal apartment near an Ashkenazi synagogue in Old Tbilisi, where all neighbors had to use the same water closet. Last time I saw Temur was in 1984 in Moscow, when he studied at Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs’ academy. He already had his own business then and offered to provide me with foreign electronics and tech if I wanted to.
The article goes on to laconically state that “It is noteworthy that the fact of [the] émigré billionaire’s study at Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs isn’t featured in any of his biographies and neither does Sapir himself talk about this in his recollections.”
Now, here is where I tie all these individuals together with Donald Trump. They all were business partners on the Trump SoHo project. The project was a collaboration between the Trump Organization, the Bayrock Group (of Arif and Sater), and the (Tamir) Sapir Organization.
The potential Russian intelligence connections of Arif and Sapir should be obvious considering their unlikely rises to great wealth. Sater is already known for his well-established connections to the Russian mafia, and he was also turned back against the Russian mob and probably Russian intelligence, too, by our FBI.
Recently unsealed federal court records show that Mr. Sater helped the government disrupt an organized crime ring on Wall Street and deal with an unexplained national security matter involving his foreign connections.
And:
[Sater] was not the only F.B.I. informant in Bayrock’s offices. Another was Salvatore Lauria, an associate of Mr. Sater, who sometimes showed up to work wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor.
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.
Things got hairy at Bayrock when one of their lawyers accidentally let it slip to a major investor that Mr. Sater was in fact a part-owner. Forbes did a deep-dive on that story and devoted a lot of money to investigating Sater. I recommend their piece to you if you want to know more. But, basically, Sater’s ownership was supposed to remain obscured because of his felony record. The Trump SoHo project ran into its own problems as they were sued for fraud and had to return over $3 million in deposits. Those records remain sealed as part of the settlement.
I don’t know what else to do with this information than just throw it out there for you. It’s all highly sketchy, but I do agree with Josh Marshall that it provides the likeliest entry point for getting to the bottom of why Donald Trump acts like Vladimir Putin is holding his children hostage. In fact, it was Donald Jr. and Ivanka who were the contact people for Sater and the Bayrock Group throughout the SoHo project, and the fact that the deal went south may be directly related to every confusing thing we’re seeing from the president. After all, you don’t get in business with the mafia and have it go badly and just walk away.
A great article, Booman.
Like the old days.
Thanks.
ASG
The Octopus arises from his slumber.
Trump’s denial is irrelevant. What matters is that many Russians know Trump and the underside of his business dealings. The hacks may have captured the DNC & Clinton and maybe even the DNC dirty laundry but perhaps Trump’s stateside connections are what reside in Putin’s office now.
See my earlier diary about Louise Mensch linked to Rupert Murdoch’s empire. She is a nobody who broke the story titled
FBI ‘Granted FISA Warrant’ Covering Trump Camp’s Ties To Russia on Nov. 7th, 2016.
○ J’Accuse Rupert Murdoch On Stalinism and Sheeple – His WSJ
Of course Murdoch endorses just about anybody, from the British Conservatives, doing some hacking to let The Sun flourish, to a candidate from New York for U.S. Senate. See my further links in article.
That what she added as a post just 2 days ago …
○ SoHo Project links Trump, Russia and Israel
Mr. Sater was born in the Soviet Union, the son of Rachel and Mikhail Sater. [Aka “Satter”]
Along the way he became embroiled in a plan to buy antiaircraft missiles on the black market for the Central Intelligence Agency
in either Russia or Afghanistan, depending on which of his former associates is telling the story
Donald Trump and Bayrock Group Chairman Tevfik Arif, center, and executive Felix Sater attend
the Trump Soho launch party on Sept. 19, 2007 (Photo credit: WaPo)
with link to this revealing article:
○ Donald Trump and Bayrock Group Chairman Tevfik Arif, and executive Felix Sater attend the Trump Soho launch party on Sept. 19, 2007
In 2013, I also posted the 5 billionaires who have Bibi Netanyahu in their pockets:
○ Adelson’s Coup – The Overthrow of PM Ehud Olmert
○ Netanyahu’s ‘list of millionaires’ – Nr. 1 Sheldon Adelson nr. 2 Ronald Perelman nr. 3 Stephen Wynn nr. 4 Ronald Lauder nr. 5 Tamir Sapir | Ynet News |
Furthermore during Israel’s Likud years of governance …
○ 1967 War – Israel – Murdoch – Cheney – Syrian Spoils by Oui @BooMan on Feb. 23, 2013
Israel approves drilling for oil in Golan Heights – Syrian occupied territory
(JPost) – Israel awarded the first license to drill for oil on the Golan Heights, local media reported. A New Jersey-based company was awarded the license, covering half the area of the Golan from the latitude of Katzrin in the north to Tzemach in the south.
Sources informed ”Globes” that, a few days ago, the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources’ Petroleum Council recommended awarding the license to Genie Energy Ltd., headed by former minister Efraim ‘Effie’ Eitam.
Shareholders include chairman Howard Jonas, Lord Jacob Rothschild, and Rupert Murdoch. Former US Vice President Dick Cheney is an adviser.
On Ukraine, it’s partying time for fascists and oligarchs from East or West … a little get-together to divide the EU funds worth billions!
○ US.Gov Vetting Next President for Ukraine, Tymoshenko?
○ The strange love affair of Putin and Netanyahu
Only the Dutch by referendum have said NO to Ukraine joining NATO or getting funds as an EU member. Don’t the
Dutch have trust in the “poor” Ukrainians after the downing of passenger flight MH17 in July 2014?
Recently corrupt former McCain acolyte and president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, resigned as Governor of Odessa [after been granted Ukrainian citizenship].
The reason for throwing the towel in Ukraine? Corruption in politics. Where do all the European funds go?
It reminds me of the incestuous connections of between-the-wars European elites as described in novels. They are small enough in numbers for everyone to know everyone else.
How did I forget to mention this?
link
Meanwhile, Russian UN ambassador dies of heart attack.
Just remember that Russia had Vitaly Churkin, and the US has Nikki Haley.
Given what Churkin has done in his diplomatic life, Haley’s going to have to step it up to be nearly as useful to the US.
Bullshit. He was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald using one of those canes with a poison dart in the tip.
Tell me again why Putin is more important than a very large gang boss in the US. Yes, I do recognize that the Russian state has parity with the US in nuclear weapons. What is the scenario that people see Trump playing out over against that? Is it Trump saying, “Oh, here, Vlad, go take my nuclear triad out for a spin. You’ll think it’s the yuuugest and bestest military there is.” The US is awash with 330 million small arms, a lot of which might have some loyalty to Trump. But…do you really think these flag-waving pay-try-otic Americans will not oppose a Putin occupation of the US?
I think the fears of a Trump-Putin alliance are more subtle and less directly expressed that what they have been so far. And you make your point that the shadow world between head-of-state and Mob boss is where the concern is. And that’s not like current special operations how?
This is a longstanding question. Where exactly is the income from all that Afghanistan opium going?
I don’t know what reality you’re living in.
I really don’t.
It’s just bizarre the things you sometime say.
I’m living in a reality that has had nuclear weapons in it from almost the day I was conceived.
I’m living in a reality in which policies of peace and prosperity have given way to what? Is anyone in the US government even trying anymore?
I’m living in a reality in which it is never the wrong time to hate on Russia and in which the perceived grace with which we apparently treated the reconstruction of Germany and Japan turned in historical fact to be a cynical manipulation of propaganda of the US homeland. The former Soviet Union did not get the same generous treatment because the US did not have an enemy forcing it to be generous with former enemies. You would have to had been a kid in the 1950s and 1960s to understand how much harder that betrayal is to ones engrained values. The eruption of 1960s outrage over Vietnam did not come close to completely draining that outrage.
We are rapidly moving from punctuated war without end to continuous war without end.
This is a conscious policy decision that the US has made in spite of its citizens–better yet by manipulating the consent of its citizens.
What seems to me to be reality about the policy with respect to Russia is that with Trump, the Republicans went from treating talking to Putin as traitorous when President Obama and Secretary Kerry did it and just a business deal when Trump does it. Neither addresses actual policy with respect to the issues that matter most to US security with respect to Russia or China.
Yes, I did suggest a bizarre strawman because no one is really saying out loud what they most fear from a Trump-Putin alignment. It is either something that is the result of partisan hyping and distracts from real resistance to Trump’s policies and the people that he likely will be hurting or it is so dangerous that we better get clarity and not innuendo on it as a danger.
Unfortunately, our intelligence community is too self-centered to tell the American people with clarity and without evasion what they know. Or they are saluting the new administration and marching forward.
If you are alleging that the SoHo project was what integrated Trump into Putin’s nest of special political operations, what does that imply for what US citizens need to do. If you are alleging that those came with Russian and international organized crime connections, remember that one prominent supporter of Trump was Sheldon Adelson, who has bunch of business before the Chinese goverment.
If anyone should be shitting themselves, it should be the Republican caucus in Congress, but they are too corrupt and to clueless to care. I’m seeing Reagan’s third term.
At least you admit that you’re carrying Cold War luggage of greater burden than you can bear.
Why don’t you focus for a moment on the real pearl of our postwar achievement, which is Western Europe?
Because that’s what is under attack at the moment.
We can look at our own problems that we’d have with any Republican government, or we can look at what’s uniquely threatened right now, by a variety of factors, but definitely most directly by anti-Western forces led by Putin.
If we don’t tame Trump or remove him quickly, we’re in deep trouble and all our postwar dreams of ecumenicalism and post-nationalism and reduced militarism and democratic socialism are going to get consumed in the flames of a revived international fascist movement.
So, yes, it goddamn well matters if Trump is captured because he made a deal with the devil fifteen years ago and now he’s terrified of crossing his masters.
The pearl of our postwar achievement in Western Europe was taken for granted by both parties of the American system. (1) They did not see it as a strategy for integrating the states of the former Soviet Union, including Russia into a common Europe. They saw it as a lab for extreme free market capitalism and set loose the forces that propelled Putin as a more acceptable alternative to Zhirinovsky. US policy created the ground on which Putin and the oligarchs arose. (2) The countries in the European Union are as in train with their bankers as the US government is. The idea of imposing austerity during the worst recession since the Great Depression was and is insanity. The larger nations of Europe busted Greeces, Italy, Spain, and Portugal and then nicknamed them PIGS. That is self-destruction. (3) It is NATO and US weapons that are going right up to Russia’s borders; it is the US who abridged the anti-ballistic missile treaty unilaterally; nonetheless, the US and Russia have negotiated a second round of strategic arms reduction talks; it is the US Congressional hawks who opposed that and a deal in which Iran eliminated its nuclear weapons program. Putin is open to another round of arms reduction talks; the US in both parties is opposed.
It is clear that US policy returned in 2014 to being anti-Russian; it is clear that the Congress forced the President into that position and caused Kerry to be conducting double-tracked diplomacy–one track to deal with Russia and the other to deal with US warhawks.
The fact is that Russia did not invade Ukraine; it was already in Sevastapol under a long-standing agreement with Ukraine signed after Ukraine split from the Soviet Union and reaffirmed afterward. Sevastapol is Russia’s Okinawa.
I’m seeing a lot of US and Western self-inflicted economic and strategic damage being blamed on Putin’s strategy. I’m also seeing that Putin has his own issues governing and integrating Russia in the midst of on-again, off-again, but never ever gone away US and Western sanctions over whatever is domestically popular at the moment.
That said. as sketchy as Trump and Bannon are with regard to Russia, they are much more of a danger to supporting a virulent form of white nationalism with a servere strain of bigotry, and lust for genocide. But the Trump administration now in place shows none of those signs; instead, they show an aggressiveness and preference for military action against especially Iran, China, and Russia and an alliance with Israel, the Anglophone countries (Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand) and few others. NATO is problematic because it is a dilution of US military strength and technological superiority and because they see NATO as a profit center, not a cost center.
Even in Putin were not around, the Trump administration would be a danger to US domestic tranquility and civil liberties, the US economy and prosperity, and US safety in the world. We have yet another President seeking a war, any war, in order to increase the institutional power of the Presidency and his own personal power to rule (and that is the verb that is operative) the US and a significant part of the rest of the world. It will not happen and it will be another and possibly larger catastrophe than we have seen for the past 16 years.
In fact, Trump’s relationship with Putin matters not at all until the Republican Congressional caucus stop protecting Trump and themselves from honesty.
Nor is intense US natioalism from the opposition necessarily the best antidote for Trump’s and Bannon’s brand of European-style nationalism that is less jingo9sm and more outright ethnophobic Nazism.
IF the US wants to support Europe, the best thing it can do is right its economy by creating higher wages. At least one large economy needs to get off the austerity addiction before there is a collapse of order globally. Unfortunately, collapsing order is the current US style of international relations, complete with the chest-beating.
You want to go after Trump. Do it. Go get the times, dates, events, and find the lever in the US government that still does accountability. You are going to need a unified and loud opposition party to do that. See that anywhere? And some media with a wide audience into Republican districts. See that anywhere.
I’m a geezer. At least I’m beginning to understand the luggage that I’m carrying. I used to pretend I didn’t have any. But I’ve seen enough black-and-white movie footage of the explosion of nuclear weapons and have read Herman Kahn’s “Thinking about the Unthinkable” to know that we are still looking for saner heads to walk back the montrosity that the US unleashed in 1945. And familiarity and a long time without danger makes the likelihood of a miscalculation that much higher.
Thx TD! As always … food for thought.
I would hope you would find time to put your experience and analysis in a diary. My thoughts …
○ It’s Not Russia …
Per your comment about the Crimea (Sevastopol): Right, the Soviet fleet was in Sevastopol, and the part of the fleet inherited by post-Soviet Russia stayed there via some sort of agreement between Russia and Ukraine. What in the world does that have to do with Russia meddling in Ukraine 20-some years after the Soviet breakup?
Russia, like most countries, does not consider its policies to be meddling. No doubt, it perceived imposing martial law in Crimea as the US military would in Okinawa if the Japan were to go through the sort of political change that the Euromaidan brought in 2014.
The history and foreign relations of the Russian Black Sea Fleet are very complicated with many backs and forths. Black Sea Fleet
The fundamental reality of the situation is that Russia will not give up Sevastapol as long as it has the military power to keep it. A 25-year-old lease was up for negotiation and there were perceived diplomatic maneuvers going on to strip that lease from Russia through Ukraine regime changes. It would be encouraging if no US strategic expert hadn’t expressed the desire to strip both Kaliningrad and Sevastapol from Russia, depriving it of its warm-water port and its major Baltic port. But we do have idiots like that getting paid good money and running around talking about toughness. It still is wish-dreaming and, if not, sheer folly.
You certainly know the history of why Kaliningrad is Russian territory to begin with: Ah yes, Soviet ethnic cleansing at the end of WW2. So there’s post-Soviet Fortress Kaliningrad bordering on Poland and the Baltic states, now members of NATO…members because their history of being under Russian domination (and colonized/Russified in the case of the Baltics) quite sensibly led them to look for protection, anticipating that once post-Soviet Russia got back on its feet, it would start fomenting discord while claiming to be protecting those poor unfortunate Russian colonists now stranded in the Baltic states and (how awful) expected to learn the native languages.
I don’t have any insight into who drew the borders of the Soviet republics and why regions with large ethnic Russian populations became part of the Ukrainian SSR. Nobody expected the USSR to vaporize and turn those administrative boundaries into international ones. But I do believe there’s a general agreement nowadays that forcible “rectification” of international borders along ethnic lines is to be frowned upon. (This point was perhaps reinforced by the disintegration of Yugoslavia.) Lexical sleight of hand, such as calling those eastern parts of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state “Donbass”, shouldn’t fool or persuade anyone, nor should the ridiculous attempt to paint all ethnic Ukrainians as fascists out for Russian blood. Explain to me why Trumpian ethno-nationalism in the US is awful, but Russian ethno-nationalism and irredentist territorial claims are justifiable.
It is the Banderists and Right Sector, who were the major movement that used the Euromaidan demonstrations to conduct a coup d’etat that are the fascists. Subsequent election since 2014 have moderated the composition of the Parliament and change the oligarchs in power.
The Ukrainian militias in eastern Ukraine are for the eviction of the ethnic Russian population. The ethnic Russians are for restoration of administration from Moscow. Those reflect tensions that were there in the Soviet period.
Ethno-nationalism in all cases is awful, or more precisely sets a society against itself. That is a totally different argument from the US using the ethno-nationalist tensions and stoking them to create the notion that Russia has returned to being an military enemy instead of an strategic competitor.
My argument is that what the US is doing in fixating on Russia as an enemy and baiting the Russia military in the Baltic Sea and Black Sea is dangerous for US interests no matter how satisfying the chest-beating is. And that in the current state of US military strength, being bombastic is exactly the wrong way to regain power and authority in the world. The most important interest we have vis-a-vis Russia is further reduction of nuclear weapons and reduction of tensions between Europe and Eurasia, tensions that the US has hyped for 15 years. Tensions that Obama first relaxed and then renewed after successfully working with Russia to disarm Syria of its chemical weapons. My reading of that at the time was that Obama was driven by intense pressure from Republican warhawks in Congress — remember those guys?
The argument is not a moral one; the US is rapidly losing its moral authority through “going to the dark side” and “taking the gloves off” in stupid ways. The argument is a geopolitical one. Because of US willingness to respond to 9/11 with two wars instead of proportional response to essentially an international insurgent group unaffiliated with any government, the US has hollowed out its military capability and lost the perception of power that it had on September 12, 2001. The Republican caucus would not allow Obama to change that direction and the Democratic caucus did not allow an alternative.
To avoid further destruction of our civilian economy through over-investment in weapons, the US needs to pursue some diplomatic inititatives that restore commercial activity to large parts of the world. One of those is Eurasia, where the US is a buyer but not a seller, is working to destroy the local economies instead of bringing propsperity that could revive our own prosperity and vice versa.
Detente is possible with Russia so long as the US has open eyes about what Russia’s interests are and do not overstate Russia’s threat. I am puzzled why so many liberals and Democrats suddenly have flipped on prospects for reducing tensions just because Trump supposedly suggested them. If Obama and Kerry had had the latitude that the GOP caucus now wants to give Trump, we would be in a much better geopolitical position with respect to the great-power relationships in the world. But baiting Trump with the stench of Putin to too fun a game to give up it seems. And now the GOP caucus is flanking Democrats on the warhawk side while still supporting Trump’s foreign policy.
Meanwhile, military writers are pointing out how hollowed US nuclear command-and-control has become for calling back a nuclear attack once launched (the Dr. Strangelove scenario). Consider this series of three articles in War is Boring about the state of the 60-year-old nuclear command-and-control system (as periodically modernized).
Elaine Grossman, How Putin Might Yank Away Trump’s Control Over America’s Nuclear Weapons.
Escalating military relations with the Russian military by getting right in Putin’s face in Kaliningrad and Sevastapol could easily go awry in a really bad incident in which a failure of diplomatic contacts between the US and Russian military could rapidly escalated into a nuke/no nuke decision for President Trump. Does Trump then make the decision with his outside-the-bubble information or from the emotions surrounding the situation. After a snap decision, how does he undo it?
That’s why I think the Putin and Trump/traitor memes are so dangerous to use as political fodder. Especially since the US public thinks the military is just this shiny assortment of perfectly working machinery that can just be ordered into battle at the President’s whim. The danger is that Trump has this same understanding.
Sevastapol is Putin fans’ talking point of the month, somehow replacing “All Ukrainians are Nazis” in the playbook since more plausible Nazis took over the White House, Brexit, and the realization that the far right is marching under Pootie-Pie’s banner.
You look at the West and see nothing but self-imposed disaster, which is not without some merit. I look at the West and still see the best example for the rest of humanity that’s on offer right now, and the best place to live if you don’t belong to some favored group with an ethnoreligious privilege.
I don’t look at the West; I am enmeshed in and part of that culture and politics just like I am by fate enmeshed in and part of Southern culture and politics and you are enmeshed in and part of New Jersey and Pennsylvania culture and politics.
Yes, I see a trail of disaster over the past 50 years primarily because of what William Fulbright was calling then “the arrogance of power”. Moreover, I see an uninterrupted streak of denial of and evasion of responsibility for America’s own problems as leading to further folly. It is folks like the GOP caucus, cowardly Democrats, and politicized preacher who have made the US hostile to folks without ethnoreligious privilege. The cowardice of Democrats the moment that the racist attacks began on President Obama is by far a greater reason for ethnoreligious bigotry of the moment than anything else. The behavior of Joe Lieberman, Zell Miller, and a bunch of dearly departed “blue dog” Democrats was exactly the opposite of the McConnell GOP’s tack with Trump. But “I’m not an Obama Democrat” was the tune of 2009 and 2010. That set up the notion that political bigotry in messaging would go unpunished.
The West’s relevance as the best example for the hope of humanity declines as the local and national politicians become less open to sanctuary for refugees, less interested in prosperity for all of their population, more the tools of their banks–that is, as long as the politicians snuff out the hopes that so many non-westerners have depended on for safety and new lives. The fact that so very few are now defending those rights, freedoms, and opportunities.
Since the Bush administration (and possibly since Francis Fukayama’s declaration of the “end of history”) the West has been going distinctly retrograde in its commitments in reality (as opposed to lofty rhetoric) about being hope for anyone. Rhetoric has its place in keeping hope alive, but rhetoric alone or rhetoric betrayed eventually creates the sort of despair that gave the US enough political weakness for Trump to squeak through.
The idea of the West is today suffering the doubts signaled by Spengler and Toynbee 70-80 years ago. Those were the basis of many a fearful sermon in the 1950s and 1960s about the decline of Rome and the rise of communism. It was right-wing malarkey then. It is right-wing malarkey now, no matter how many lefties have signed on. What has not happened is an honest grappling with the pessimists and the realities of the past 50 years and a restatement of the promise of Western philosophical approaches to politics and society without the arrogance and self-serving of Western societies. No one burnishing the Western bona fides can avoid serious consideration of all that the West has done since World War II.
And it is only in some areas of life that the West might be the best example. There is much that we in the West can learn from other cultures that might be of benefit to us were we not on our 500-year-long sense of total conquest. For one, I’m not sure that organizing and economy totally out of the legal fiction of corporations with limited liability has worked to our political health.
If you were not so interested in purging perceived Putin fans, you might start grappling with the complex efforts that it is going to take to rescue US democratic governance. The professional political class are having too much of a good time right now to join that slim majority of the public in doing it.
Mother of God.
Ho. Lee. Shit.
On a professional note (I proofread for shorthand reporters): That court reporter must have had his/her sangfroid sorely taxed.
Oui reported this in comments to the previous post.
LOL. From the court transcript:
MR. KIM: Could we get a copy of what you are reading?
MR. MEISTER: I don’t want to give you a copy of what I’m reading.
That comes off as true. Not sure about the rest.
Martin, how does this news change what might be going on with the Trump/Russia relationship? Or is it just another astonishing part of this astonishing story?
For crying out loud. If the guy is really aphasic it could be easily proved or disproved by CT scan, MRI, etc.
Aphasia is a symptom of brain damage. There are many kinds of aphasia and each one is connected with specific lesions.
Plus, aphasia comes about through trauma to the brain either from a stroke, tumors, traumatic brain injury, or progressive neurological disorders. Of which there would certainly be a medical record.
If you didn’t notice, I’m quoting here in an article that was written in the same year that he died, which is 2014. His lawyer was either conned or lying.
Yes, but there still would have been a medical record. If Sapir really had aphasia and was trying to keep it a secret, legally speaking, that would have been aided by the confidentiality of medical records. But once he is deceased I don’t see why such records could not be subpoenaed.
As I said, aphasia is a dramatic symptom of brain trauma, usually a stroke or brain tumor. It could not have gone without medical attention.
The lawyer seems to be repeating what he was told by the son. Maybe he “elicited” it from the son. It doesn’t matter. He refers to “medical reports” but that is obvious BS because aphasia is not a disease, it is a symptom. He’s only describing the alleged symptom, but the disease (lesion) would have to have been diagnosed, and that normally involves CT scans and/or MRI. MRI was available by 1998.
It’s just an excuse to avoid having to submit an affidavit.
And that’s why the lawyer didn’t want to show the paper from which he was reading.
Sater was also with Donald Jr. and Ivanka on the 2006 trip to Moscow when the Trump Tower Moscow deal failed for the first time,
By the way, great research, Booman.
The plot thickens.
Why / how has Trump managed to stay out of jail his entire adult life? I know the answer to the question, but really, why didn’t Justice under Obama go after the criminal and get him convicted, or at any rate long ago destroy his reputation and attempt to bury him?
And another question, if Justice in America is so inept and weak at indicting and prosecuting the criminals reviewed in this post alone, what difference does it make that Trump sits on the throne for the next few years? So many villains in the world with so much money and power it’s hopeless to try to fight them.
(Good story though.)
While there may be an Congressional and/or independent investigation of the Russian influence in the election, Trump is not going to be brought down by it.
Everything done in the past few weeks was aimed at purging Flynn, and also proving to Trump that the IC had his balls in a vise, and could squeeze anytime they wanted. However, I doubt the IC is sad about a generic Republican administration. Also, pushing the Russian story to its logical conclusion (Russia helped Republicans win an election in return for sanctions being lifted) would destabilize the US, pleasing Putin.
So a middle of the road approach was taken to thwart Putin. Once noises were made about McMaster being NSA, the Russian-Trump headlines stopped. My conclusion: The IC was happy to get someone they could trust on the inside. The MSM, without the IC’s assistance, cannot push the story further because it’s too byzantine and polarizing to sustain itself on its own.
So it’s up to us to remind everyone about the Republicans and Russia, and make it a voting issue for the squishy middle. But the IC has stopped what it saw as the greatest threat: the actual lifting of sanctions on Russia via Flynn. Putin has been thwarted for the moment, and McMaster now has eyes on Trump.
Fascinating stuff. Great work, BM.
That said, it’s still not clear to me why I’m supposed to be terrified of Russia… gasp!… trying to have sanctions lifted.
Or, for that matter, how its influence over the current administration is any more powerful, or less pernicious to world peace, than that of Israel’s over every previous administration for the last 50 years.
I don’t doubt that Trump has had many dodgy business dealings, but perhaps his coziness with Putin is more easily explained by the adage “birds of a feather flock together.” Putin came to power and quickly moved to suppress a nascent free press and opposition political parties. His authoritarian bona fides are well known. Trump has all the same instincts and is obviously keen to demonize and suppress political opposition. I expect he admires Putin’s achievements.