The Russia story is moving so fast that I can’t keep up long enough to try to capture it in writing. It’s too big to get my arms around.
But I’ll do my best.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Well…what’s with Trump’s accusations against Obama and now a call for an investigation of Obama? Attempts to distract from the Russia issue? And is Trump himself canny enough to come up with this nonsense, or is Bannon behind it?
Please let us have an independent special prosecutor.
And please let him/her subpoena Trump’s tax returns.
Oh! Oh! And then let Trump try to fire the special prosecutor!!!!!
That investment in popcorn futures is looking better all the time.
Look back at Obama’s record on things like FISA renewal and the conclusion that Trump was wiretapped for the purposes of bailing out Clinton’s inept campaign, is not only plausible, it’s inescapable.
Now with a president committed to civil liberties, and to reining in the excesses of the intelligence community, the truth will finally get a chance to emerge.
[I think that’s how the official progressive position should run, but I’m open to edits.]
You might as well wait. This Russia thing is like Ohio weather: if you don’t like it, wait a day and it will be different.
I’m up to my eyeballs in outrage and I’m learning to dial it down. Since this Ship of Fools administration is so poorly organized, mismanaged, and leaked from, I just wait a day and see what blows away and what sticks. Shit happens every day, we need to not get overhyped.
I think the parties investigating this morass of illegal activity need to keep their heads down, focus, and document everything they find. We deserve a solid, legal and in-depth investigation, and that’s going to be a huge challenge.
Keep us updated, Booman. You have a great Spidey-sense about what’s real and what’s crap.
Past the bluster and satire of its title, this is a very helpful aggregation website which is helping chronicle and analyze the daily outrages:
https:/whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com
Bookmarked. Thanks!
Got it pinned. Good site to keep an eye on.
Bookmarked it. thanks
Blogrolled. Thanks here too.
I read something today in Times ” How Trump Wins By Losing”. The whole idea is to keep it going. Reminds me of a carnival barker.
That’s how he works financially, I’ve heard, constantly starting ever larger new projects as the old ones fail.
Like a Ponzi scheme — but those always, sooner or later, come crashing down. And there’s no Bankruptcy Court salvation for where he is now.
Could someone with knowledge of details please explain how special prosecutors are named in the first place? Is it solely a Congressional action? Because Trump sure as hell isn’t going to sign his own political death warrant.
Wikipedia to the rescue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_prosecutor
Here you go — Summary of US Special Prosecutor Rules. The legislation put in place after Nixon and Watergate expired in 1999. Mostly because it was abused. While now codified, essentially its back to where it was when Nixon was in office. Up to the AG (or Deputy AG is the AG recuses her/himself or the Assistant AG if both the AG and Deputy AG recuse). The current Deputy AG nominee is Rod J Rosenstein (The current acting Deputy AG is Dana Boente and the current Acting Asst. AG is William Baer)
The SNL takedown of Sessions was nicely done.
Story going too fast with too many players.
Trump’s inopportune tweet opens the door for Republicans to get behind investigations (“to get Obama”) which would lead to revelations about Trump associate’s ties to Russia. Then, in mock sorrow, they will go after Trump. The Party Organs will begin to slam Trump to prepare the Proletariat for his departure and investiture of Spence. This could accelerate once polls start coming in in regard to 2018 elections and they look bad.
The only issue is, has the roll over for Trump by the mainstream GOP stained any and all proposals; once his ties to Russia are revealed? Can the Democrats claim all the cuts are a “Moscow” plot to weaken the US; put forth by Putin Pawns- including the GOP?
If (and A BIG IF) Trump is shown in hock to Moscow, and GOP ignored all the evidence in order to get some policies through…then could the Democrats run on the fact that GOP enabled an enemy of the US and not worthy of wielding power? That the party should no longer have the respect nor be given legitimacy by the Democratic Party and all patriotic Americans? Interesting possibility.
R
Didn’t you mean to type “Trump is shown making bold gestures to reach out to and conciliate an important potential American partner in the ME, and a key pillar of peace and stability in Eastern Europe?”
It’s a common-enough typo.
I mean Trump’s son’s admission in 2007 that the Trump organization was getting a lot of funding from Russia. As Trump’s bankruptcies had made him a toxic credit risk in NY, he had to seek funding elsewhere.
All his associate’s ties to Russia money, his son’s speech, Trump’s slavish praise of Putin…
All questions could be solved through his tax returns. Which could be why he won’t release them.
R
Davis is an expert at wry sarcasm.
Only Nixon could go to China.
“Only Nixon could go to China.”
But he didn’t go as a debtor, hat in hand.
“Please Mr. Putin, don’t foreclose on my golf courses. Don’t kneecap me, or kidnap my daughters, my son…you can have my wife, plenty more in Eastern Europe.”
R
Jon Favreau
@jonfavs
Barack Obama’s master plan:
8:44 PM – 4 Mar 2017
Not even Dr. Evil could hatch such a nefarious scheme.
Just to pick one log off of this bonfire:
What strikes me as most important about the “investigate Obama” tweet is the same specific element that tends to get lost in the shuffle — or, inversely, taken for granted — because it’s so constant and obvious: Trump’s incredible lack of understanding.
(I was going to add more words to the end of that last sentence — “of procedure”; “of law”; “of the separation of powers”, etc. — and then I imagined one of those DailyKos style comment threads where somebody would quote such a sentence and strikethrough all the qualifiers, adding “Fixed that for you.”)
Yastreblyansky actually covered all of this, last night, in great detail: when Trump saw that “Obama’s” FBI was looking at communications in Trump Tower through a FISA procedure, Trump did not (as any reasonable person would) think, “This is bad, because a FISA warrant means there was something there to investigate that warranted a court order” — like, finding out that the IRS is doing an audit or something like that, where the fact of the investigation signals, automatically, the presence of some appearance of malfeasance that the right people found legitimate enough to use as a basis for that investigation. It’s a bad sign.
But, notwithstanding the fact that (as Yas pointed out) none of this is news and none of this is stuff that Trump’s recounting correctly…the deeper issue is that Trump has literally no idea what’s going on; what to make of this. His knee-jerk reaction is, at the end of the Obama administration, the FBI was looking at my emails…so, I am very angry and I want to sue/punish them for having the temerity to wiretap me!
He doesn’t seem to understand that the FBI is supposed to look for crimes, and use wiretaps (with judicial oversight) to effect that search for crimes. He doesn’t understand, either on a citizen’s level (there must have been some potentially treasonous or at least criminal thing happening) or on a self-protection level (I’d better hope this goes nowhere because what it turns up will be very bad for me). He’s literally too unsophisticated and stupid to see this. All he sees is, Obama wiretapped me and now I’m President and I won’t stand for it…Obama’s the bad guy and I’m going to hit back!
As Yastreblyansky wrote (about Trump’s “This is Watergate/Nixon” tweet), “He really hasn’t learned […] that if this is Nixon/Watergate, it’s where documents were stolen from the DNC, only by Russian agents instead of plumbers, and he’s Nixon.”
that’s essentially what I wrote, too.
Yes, you’re quite right. Apologies for not noting this properly.
TL;DR:
Shorter Trump: “I will attack!”
What strikes me as most important about the “investigate Obama” tweet is the same specific element that tends to get lost in the shuffle — or, inversely, taken for granted — because it’s so constant and obvious: Trump’s incredible lack of understanding.
Trump’s Razor, from Josh Marshall:
I’ve been praised in recent months for having some handle on the Trump phenomenon. The truth is a little different. Early on I realized that when it came to Trump if I figured out the stupidest possible scenario that could be reconciled with the available facts and went with it, that almost always turned out to be right. The stupider, the righter.
http://crooksandliars.com/2017/03/eighth-russian-connected-trump-found-dead
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A Russian operative with ties to Donald Trump dies.
It’s not an unusual story. In fact, it’s happened seven times in the last year.
It’s hard out there for a potentially compromising conduit between Trump and Vladmir Putin.
This one strikes particularly close to home. Alex Oronov was found dead, according to a Facebook post by Andrii Artemenko, an Ukrainian MP. Oronov was apparently quite successful in agribusiness. He had an interest in an ethanol business set up by Michael and Bryan Cohen in the Ukraine. Michael Cohen is Donald Trump’s attorney. Bryan, in addition to being Michael’s brother, is Oronov’s son-in-law. With Artemenko and others, Oronov had organized a “peace plan,” which was described by The New York Times as a back-channel opportunity for the Trump administratio
yes, I was up to four scouring Ukrainian websites on these characters. That’s one stream from the firehose.
The Russian story is frightening and fascinating. It certainly is turning the screws on the administration.
From CNN: “Nobody has seen him that upset,” one source said…”
“When the President returned to the White House Thursday evening from a day trip to Virginia, there were “a lot of expletives.”
You can bet Donald Trump not finishing his term and a few other Trump items here: https:/sports.ladbrokes.com/en-gb/betting/politics/american/specials/donald-trump-specials/22288103
6
After the news of how angry mad he is about recent events, my bet is on – heart attack (not yet listed). Given his ego I can’t see him leaving voluntarily. Whoever made the comparison to Captain Queeg was spot on.
Thanks for covering this Booman.
But Captain Queeg was so much smarter and more coherent.
Not being snarky; I’m trying to make a legitimate point (similar to the garbled stuff I wrote above): Tump is like a guy with a burlap sack dropped over his head, staggering around trying to land a punch. He doesn’t know whom to hit at. He doesn’t know what’s going on.
When he sees that the FBI is using a FISA warrant to look at the Trump Tower emails/phones/whatever, he doesn’t see “Branch of the United States government legitimately investigating possible treasonous crime” (“which, if they find anything, will get me in big trouble so I’ll downplay all this”). He sees “Obama attacked me, with wiretaps! That’s illegal!” (Even though it’s not remotely illegal, as any 21st Century Republican should know full well because they made it that way.
Yeah that’s still my bet. He’s 70 and in lazy-poor health. He won’t resign, but I don’t think he’ll survive the stress.
70 years old and in this kind of shape:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4zvO5mUYAA4pLZ.jpg
Not only the dead, but Moscow’s cyber warriors have been arrested as well.
Sergei Mikhailov, a division head of the Russian intelligence service FSB was arrested during a FSB meeting; troops bursting in and putting a bag over his head.
“Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of Kaspersky Lab’s investigations unit, was arrested in December..”
You could look at this as either getting rid of any trails leading back to Putin or getting (along with the dead Russians)those who leaked to Chris Steele for his memo.
The Kapersky link is very interesting. Kapersky is a major enterprise anti-malware software used to protect things like email servers, etc… Was Stoyanov involved in or know about bypassing Kapersky to hack servers?
R
——excerpt——-
“In the past 15 months, Stoyanov wrote three posts for Kaspersky Lab’s Securelist blog. All three involved financially motivated crime conducted inside of Russia. It’s not clear what the maximum penalty is for treason in Russia. The country has reportedly suspended executions, and the last one was in 1996.
Word of the arrest almost immediately ignited a flurry of speculation and concerns of a possibly chilling effect the action might have among security researchers. The charges were filed under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code, an extraordinarily broad statute that opens individuals to treason charges for providing financial, technical, advisory, or other assistance to a foreign state or international organization that’s considered hostile to the Russian government. As coverage from Forbes reported, such assistance could potentially be as simple as furnishing the FBI with information on a botnet.
A much more chilling scenario, offered in this post from Lawfare Blog, is that Stoyanov was a source for US intelligence officers who ultimately concluded Russian-sponsored hacking attempted to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election. That speculation is likely off base because it doesn’t fit with Kaspersky’s assertion Stoyanov is being investigated for activities that predated his employment or with this claim from a fellow Kaspersky Lab researcher that Stoyanov’s research never involved advanced persistent threats, the term for hacking techniques used by government-sponsored spies. People advancing the theory seem to be basing it on the timing of the arrest, which roughly coincided with the classified release of specific details said to support the US intelligence community’s claims the hacking was ordered by President Vladimir Putin.
https:/arstechnica.com/security/2017/01/kaspersky-labs-top-investigator-reportedly-arrested-in-trea
son-probe
to clarify-
“Sergei Mikhailov was deputy head of the FSB security agency’s Centre for Information Security. His arrest was reported in a series of leaks over the past week, along with that of his deputy and several civilians, but Tuesday’s news went much further.
“Sergei Mikhailov and his deputy, Dmitry Dokuchayev, are accused of betraying their oath and working with the CIA,” Interfax said, quoting a source familiar with the investigation. …”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/31/russian-cybersecurity-experts-face-treason-charges-cia
Antonio Prohias (the creator of the immortal Spy vs. Spy series for Mad Magazine) was in actuality a Cuban intelligence officer who lived far in the future. When Cuban scientists cracked the time code and enabled back travel in time (although not forward travel because the present defines the future), he volunteered to be sent back to provide early commentary on what the U.S. and Russian intelligence fools were up to as they bumbled along towards the eventual nuclear disaster that set the world back hundreds of years.
He gave it everything he had.
We are still not sure if he succeeded.
Stay tuned.
AG
P.S.