If you’ve been reading Political Animal, it probably seems like the New York Times is pretty late to the party in finally explaining what it means that Donald Trump spent all of the 2016 campaign in pursuit of a mammoth real estate deal in Moscow. The archives here are chock full of articles on Trump’s efforts to construct Europe’s tallest skyscraper in the Russian capital. One example, from August 28, 2017, was titled Trump Has Been Lying About Russia and Felix Sater All Along. In that piece, I summarized the situation by recapping why Trump had been asked about his possible business interests in Russia in the first place, and why he had felt compelled to deny that he had any.
For now, let’s just try to remember why Trump denied having business deals in Russia. He denied it because he demonstrated an abnormal tendency to praise Vladimir Putin that was hard to understand absent some financial incentive for doing so. That he either had Russian deals that were vulnerable or wished to pursue Russian deals and didn’t want to jeopardize them was such an obvious inference that it didn’t need to be explained to anyone. He was asked if these were the explanations for his behavior and he said the whole idea was made up and ludicrous.
But people’s suspicions were 100 percent accurate. He was lying the entire time.
I wrote that a year and a half ago, but only today is the New York Times really getting to the point where they’re willing to make the same flat assertions of fact. The delay seems to be explained by some strange reticence that was only overcome when the president’s television-lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, admitted that the negotiations for a tower in Moscow only truly ended when his client was elected president.
The comments by his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani indicated that Mr. Trump’s efforts to complete a business deal in Russia waned only after Americans cast ballots in the presidential election.
The new timetable means that Mr. Trump was seeking a deal at the time he was calling for an end to economic sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama administration. He was seeking a deal when he gave interviews questioning the legitimacy of NATO, a favorite talking point of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. And he was seeking a deal when, in July 2016, he called on Russia to release hacked Democratic emails that Mr. Putin’s government was rumored at the time to have stolen.
The Trump Tower Moscow discussions were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won,” Mr. Giuliani quoted Mr. Trump as saying during an interview with The New York Times.
For me, it has never particularly mattered much when or if Trump may have given up on the Moscow Tower idea. What was significant was that he had been pursuing it at all. The significance went far beyond what it could tell us about Trump’s motivations for taking pro-Putin positions. It went beyond what it told us about his honesty. The main problem was that the Russians not only knew that Trump was lying but that they could expose his lies at any time. In the end, CNN wound up obtaining a copy of the letter of intent Donald Trump personally signed on October 28, 2015. It was an agreement with the Kremlin. Had news of the existence of that agreement come out during the primaries or the general election, it likely would have ended any chances Trump had of winning the presidency.
Here’s one reminder of how the allegations about Trump looked in 2016.
A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post.
Here’s another reminder, from the third and final presidential debate. Hillary Clinton told the moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, that “the most important question of the evening” was whether or not Donald Trump would “admit and condemn” that the Russians were interfering in the election on his behalf. She said Putin preferred Trump because he was a puppet. She told Trump that the problem was “that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do.”
Here’s most of the segment that followed:
CLINTON: …So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 — 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.
WALLACE: Secretary Clinton…
CLINTON: And I think it’s time you take a stand…
TRUMP: She has no idea whether it’s Russia, China, or anybody else.
CLINTON: I am not quoting myself.
TRUMP: She has no idea.
CLINTON: I am quoting 17…
TRUMP: Hillary, you have no idea.
CLINTON: … 17 intelligence — do you doubt 17 military and civilian…
TRUMP: And our country has no idea.
CLINTON: … agencies.
TRUMP: Yeah, I doubt it. I doubt it.
CLINTON: Well, he’d rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect us. I find that just absolutely…
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way.
That exchange makes a lot more sense in retrospect. Everything Clinton alleged was correct, and we saw the most egregious example of Trump believing Vladimir Putin over his own military and civilian intelligence professionals in Helsinki in June 2018.
In the third debate, Trump was denying Russia’s role in the hacking and praising Putin’s savvy and intelligence for two reasons. The first was that he did not expect to win the election and was more interested in getting a real estate deal in Moscow which Giuliani has now admitted he was still actively pursuing at the time. The second reason was that Putin had controlled him since at least the moment he signed a letter of intent to build the tower.
It’s the second reason that did not go away when Trump won the presidency. During the campaign, there were people behind the scenes who had read parts of the Steele Dossier and wondered if Putin might have embarrassing sex tapes that explained Trump’s behavior. But Putin didn’t need any sex tapes. He had a letter of intent.
Trump spent the entirety of 2016 subject to Russian blackmail. This vulnerability certainly increased throughout the year, especially after the now infamous Trump Tower meeting where Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner met with Kremlin emissaries offering dirt on Clinton. But Putin held Trump’s fate in his hands from no later than October 2015.
This has been known (or at least knowable) since the summer of 2017 when I began writing about it. Nothing about what I’ve been writing has changed in any meaningful way since that time.
You’ve been ahead of the curve on every part of this subject.
And the detail!
.
. . . Sun Ra quote (variant also attributed to Jesus) kinda resonate with you ever?
Cuz tha’d be pretty understandable.
Matthew 13:54-57; Mark 6:1-6; Luke 4:26-30; John 4:44.
Since it’s “attributed to” Jesus but Sun Ra definitely said it, I guess Jesus may have gotten it from Sun Ra.
Jesus could have gotten it directly from Sun Ra by way of a sort of “Back to the Future” scenario, not that he would have needed that.
But more likely it was the other way around, i.e. Sun Ra got it from Jesus (a) directly, by way of The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (otherwise known as the King James Bible); and (b) indirectly, perhaps by way of some extragalactic source.
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/full-lecture-and-reading-list-from-sun-ras-1971-uc-berkeley-cours
e.html
The NYT, even though we call it the newspaper of record in the US, has such a bizarre quirk when it comes to their failures.
I’m remembering specifically their love affair with ‘Clinton Cash’ and how they seemed to take it’s revelations as the real take vs any semblance of fact checking. Article after article on Uranium One with titillating headlines.
Too many crickets during the campaign and it seems notable that many of the talent pool moved over to the WaPo after the election.
The realization that Trump ran for the Presidency not for any ideological reasons, not because he had faith he was the best for the job or even his ego. No, he ran because he wanted the business deal of a lifetime, the tallest building in Europe. Plain and simple.
. . . that’s a pretty much seamless continuation of their role as chief Fools for Scandal flogging The Hunting of the President throughout the 90s.
Name “Jeff Gerth” ring a bell? A name (and NYT “reporter”, natch) that deserves to live in infamy in the “journalistic” Hall of Shame (along with Judy Miller, also NYT, natch, and . . . oh wait, that list gets unmanageably long almost instantaneously). But of course their journalistic malpractice never makes it into print atop p. A1 without the enabling by unindicted co-conspirators otherwise known as “editors”.
. . . noticed (or at least under-remarked) how virtually unprecedented it was that the Obama admin remained squeaky-clean throughout — one aspect for which he/they deserve far more credit than is routinely granted. Cuz if you consider what NYT did before and since (and obviously, they’re not alone in this), is there any reason whatsoever to doubt they’d have been all over spinning any even marginally plausible rumors, gossip, innuendoes, or accusations into “scandals” as they did with “Whitewater”?
None of these names were unknown to us in 2016: William Barr, Jerome Corsi, David Bossie, Christopher Ruddy, Peter W. Smith, Larry Klayman.
All part of the Republican smear and libel machine, all proud ratfuckers.
Three hundred million dollars! And you know he is stil chasing after it. Man has no morals or patriotism. It’s all about the money.
the donald probably owes more than half of that for all the Russian loans and his own bad debts. Putin knew and used the donald’s greed/ignorance to his advantage.
If those were the only problems, he would not be such a catastrophe. Greedy unscrupulous people can be dealt with if they are rational.
The man has severe personality disorders and quirks. Just a few off the top of my head –
-The man is a bully who enjoys hurting people. (e.g., people hurt by his shutdown)
– The man thinks not just that any negotiation is I win, you lose, but he prefers to win by cheating and breaking his word. (I put something over on you, yay for me!)
How do you deal with such a person? There is no way.
I have no answer how you deal with him other than remove him from office. He has a severe personality disorder we get to witness every day and especially now during the shut down. He has about zero compassion for anyone else and he seems to think people support his actions, all his actions no matter how nutty it is. Some do I suppose which is another crazy matter. Where do we go from here?
With a decent media, Americans would understand how Trump is betraying us by helping the economy of Russia (reducing sanctions). He’s helping Russia create the money to build the weapon systems that Russia is aiming at us and Europe.
What I want to know is when will all this matter to the Republican party? I’m beginning to think that there is a very real possibility that it might be never.
You would think that voting to stop Trump’s effort to remove sanctions on a Russian oligarch who’s in the middle of this mess would be a no-brainier for any Senator, yet only 11 Republicans joined the Democrats and the bill failed cloture by a couple votes and sanctions on Oleg Deripaska’s companies apparently will get lifted to Trump’s (aka Putin’s) delight. That is one reason I have become very skeptical that all of this is going to end up with an impeachment and then a conviction in the Senate. Well, impeachment I think is pretty likely at this point, but in the Senate I really wonder if the votes will be there to convict him- there are too many Republicans that are in too deep to get out now. Certainly, if the time comes to save their skin, they might grudgingly remove Trump from office, but a lot will have to happen before they get to that point.
In October, 2015 (if not long before), Putin took Trump hostage with sanctions relief and busting NATO as his ransom.
On January 20, 2017, Trump took the American government hostage. His ransom being endless grifts of taxpayer money and breaking the institutions of democracy and government. The current seizure of 800,000 government workers is only the latest manifestation of this.
And he will keep doing this until he is forcibly removed from office.
Multiple community members here mocked Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she and her campaign pointed out the things BooMan mentions here. They derided her and her campaign for pointing out the major security risks Trump’s actions presented.
Fortunately, most of those community members are no longer participating here. A couple have stuck around, though. They no longer defend their previous bad judgments on the Trump/Russia issue. But they haven’t conceded they were wrong in 2016 and 2017. One of those community members continues to present belligerent and factually evasive takes on the community, its members and the Democratic Party in general.
His track record is bad. He advocates for many regressive policies. He’s certainly not one whose judgement and factual representations anyone here should trust.
Did she have him nailed or what?
https://twitter.com/hillaryclinton/status/793254986641764356?lang=en
That clip is from October 2016…
It remains ridiculous to me that media outlets and pundits are waiting for a “smoking gun” pee tape as the only type of thing that Putin could blackmail Trump with or be compromising enough to make Trump bend over backward to tow the Russian line.
There are any number of nefarious business deals and relationship that Trump is likely to be engaged in or seeking (like a Moscow tower with financing from Russian banks under sanctions) which are even more dangerous legally and more likely to be embarrassing to Trump the person than even a pee tape. After all, he likes being known for sexual prowess and even picadillos, but being financially beholden to anyone sends him into fits!
The concept of the corrupt business deals is much too complicated for virtually all of the mainstream media, particularly on the broadcast side. There is simply no way for them to put that story into 10 minute snippets that are digestible enough for the vast majority of lazy Americans to consume and to understand. So they wait for the pee tape, or the hooker video, or some other simple and seedy tag that they can lead with, and attract the eyes of the consciously ignorant public consumer of news. Short of having a tangible and unfalsifiable recording of some sort, they are simply incapable of doing the intellectual legwork to collect, process, and formulate the information at the necessary junior high level of understanding that is needed to make all the civically ignorant people understand. And if it is is written form, no matter how concise and persuasive, will just elicit a “TLDR” shrug.
My hope is just that the sheer volume and cumulative weight of things continually coming out will at least get people’s attention enough to make them at least consider the smoke-fire connection when it comes to Trump-Russia.
Yet they somehow managed with Whitewater, Benghazi, and Hillary’s emails.
I don’t think one in a thousand Americans could even begin to explain what either of those were all about — let alone produce a detailed description — but that never stopped the same newsmedia from relentlessly “covering” them both.
The trick is, with Whitewater, Benghazi, emails, Travelgate, all of them, republicans generate soundbites, the dumber the better, filled with outrage and accusations that are perfect for the media. They lead with these or make them prominent, and this is the hook for the public to reel them in, on the same principle as clickbait. This stuff sticks in shallow minds, that’s why in 2016 you had so many people distrusting Hillary for reasons unknown, or calling for her to be “locked up” for crimes they couldn’t specify. It would be like, it just is.
. . . snippets” to anything anymore? Seems that would be an exceptionally, astonishingly long segment on cable/broadcast “news” shows these days. Which, if true, of course just strengthens your point.
But I don’t really know, since I watch virtually none of it live, only the occasional link, for years (decades?) now.
Ten minutes is extraordinary; usually reserved for stuff like hurricanes and blizzards.
People read things which develop their ideology and policy views all the time. The trick is that they must be motivated to read and trust those things.
Trump not only can’t afford to lose 1% of his base, he simultaneously can’t afford to have independents breaking hard against him and Democrats supremely motivated to turn out and vote. Given the likely news and event flows, it’s easy to imagine the electoral climate being worse for Trump and his fellow Republicans in 2020 than it was in 2018.
The evidence of Trump’s corruption doesn’t have to persuade the Trump cultists. Getting enough of those outside the cult will suffice.
“This has been known (or at least knowable) since the summer of 2017 when I began writing about it. Nothing about what I’ve been writing has changed in any meaningful way since that time.”
It is depressing how true this is. It makes me far less optimistic about the prospects for cleaning up the mess. We can only hope it will finally sink in.
Ha-ha, maybe there ARE some downsides to having a preening con/biznessman as your prez candidate and then prez! MAGA indeed, incompetent white electorate. Perhaps Repubs can run Rexxon T in 2020….the billionaire deal-makin’ CEO model has worked great so far!
Putin clearly was never going to let the fools Trumper & Sons build the Tower thing if Trumper lost, as the letter of intent/stringing along was purely for persuasion/influencing (i.e. blackmail) purposes, and obviously the thing wasn’t going to be built if the puppet actually won, the goal which Team Putin certainly was working towards. So our Very Stable Genius(tm) got royally played, as did the idiot American electorate and useless complicit corporate media.
Whether the stenographers and talking heads wake up now is essentially irrelevant, and in any event they can’t take too much time away from their blaming of recalcitrant Dems for the historic shutdown, while letting Repub senators helplessly wail that the Congress simply has “NO POWER!” to act when a prez says NO on a spending bill! Or even ask if Repub senators themselves believe Trumperian’s Wall makes the slightest sense to build—Your Lib’rul Media at work!
If senate Repubs have forgotten their constitutional override power and won’t confront Der Trumper (and his all-white Latino-hating base) on his criminal and tyrannical country-wrecking shutdown, then I think it clear they will have REALLY forgotten their supposed role in an impeachment. A thoroughly corrupt and criminal party, McConnell & Co. have destroyed the country, however many “revelations” keep coming.