Month: July 2019

For the last five or six years, more often than not I have received monthly news of someone I know having to bury their kid due to an opioid overdose. Sometimes they’re not dead. Maybe they were revived or arrested or went into rehab, or walked out for the third or fourth or fifth time. The news is rarely good, although I also hear of the sobriety anniversaries and other positive stories as some people slowly turn their lives around. Those are the exceptions.

I’m approaching five years of sobriety myself, although I quit using illegal drugs in my early twenties and I never abused prescription drugs. A few years ago, I had to bury my brother who waited too long to get sober and wound up serving as a wake-up call for me. I know all these affected people because of my time in family support groups and my connections to the sober community. So, when I read something like this, I just don’t have any sympathy:

Jacqueline Sackler was fed up. HBO‘s John Oliver had just used his TV show to pillory her family, the clan that owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. In a nearly 15-minute Sunday-night segment, he joined a long line of people who blamed the Sacklers in part for the nation’s opioid crisis.

When the show was over, Ms. Sackler, who is married to a son of a company co-founder, emailed her in-laws, lawyers and advisers. “This situation is destroying our work, our friendships, our reputation and our ability to function in society,” she wrote.

“And worse, it dooms my children. How is my son supposed to apply to high school in September?”

As far as I am concerned, the Sacklers should be stripped of every last penny they own down to the change under the cushions of their expensive couches. That money should be put to use in helping the people who are struggling to deal with addiction or the trauma of losing someone to addiction. Call it reparations.

I know Jacqueline Sackler’s son isn’t responsible and he should be considered like any other applicant, but the only reason he is applying for private schools is because his parents can afford one. That should change.

I have my concerns about how Nancy Pelosi is handling her job as Speaker of the House, but the way she’s dealing with unruly freshman progressives is not one of them. I think Nancy LeTourneau ably described the different institutional roles at play, so I don’t need to need to go into that in depth. Simply stated, Pelosi is supposed to keep her caucus on track and do everything she can to protect the party’s House majority. If that means she has to crack the whip on people who are off-message or talking nonsense, then I applaud her for not shying away from her duty.

Right now, the Democratic base is clear-eyed about some things that seem to be in Pelosi’s blind spot, like how to confront Donald Trump, but their agenda is dangerously out of synch on a host of issues. Some of it how they’re handling the topics of the day and some of it is what they’re choosing to emphasize. To be honest, the presidential candidates (who are, after all, catering to the base) are just as guilty on this score.

For starters, the Democrats are managing to actually lose the debate over the border despite the fact that Trump’s positions and strategies are immoral, inept, and virtually indefensible. The American people, writ large, do not want open borders. They don’t think people who cross illegally should be allowed to stay in the country. They basically agree with Trump that people should be deported, disagreeing mainly over what exceptions might be made and how to do it humanely rather than having big qualms about the principles involved. But the Democratic base is seemingly opposed to the very idea that people should be detained at the border or deported under any circumstances other than a history of violent crime. The candidates are tripping over each other to offer subsidized health care to people who are not citizens and are not legally residing in the country. This is not politically popular. I could not walk into most Americans’ living rooms and defend these positions.

This is really irresponsible in my opinion, because it leaves voters a choice between policies they see as nonsensical and the policies of Trump, which amount to crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, this mainly works to make the crimes against humanity look like a comparable option.

What’s legitimate is the desire to offer asylum to people who need it. What’s legitimate is expecting all human beings to be treated humanely. What’s legitimate is to oppose the way Trump uses demagoguery, racial stereotyping and xenophobia as political weapons. His policies are designed to be so cruel as to act as a deterrent against not just illegal entry but legitimate petitions for asylum. This is why he wants to separate people from their children. It’s why he wants the detainment facilities to be as uncomfortable as possible and doesn’t discourage guards from mistreating people. These are winning political arguments against Trump that also happen to be correct on the merits. I can go into people’s homes and argue these points and not have people look at me like I have three heads. In fact, Trump’s actions are so egregious that I can actually use these points to change people’s minds about what kind of immigration and asylum policies we should have.

I can’t do that if the argument is that no one should ever be deported and that the agencies in charge of immigration enforcement should simply stand down. If I go even further and start offering people expensive benefits like health care and college, they want to know what kind of drugs I am taking. They close down and stop listening with a sympathetic and compassionate ear.

The Democrats are currently taking positions on a variety of issues that either pander to a narrow slice of their base or simply have no relationship to the needs of their poorer constituents. A low-income black agricultural worker in Mississippi with no family history of higher education isn’t any more interested in the government spending every free dollar on college loan forgiveness than the average white coal miner or auto worker in the Rust Belt. They might want their kids to have a shot at a college education or they might think that’s a poor investment. But there are other things they’d like to see that money spent on, like better K-12 education, the opioid epidemic, affordable prescription drugs, basic infrastructure, or even crop subsidies.

Few of these people are going to relate to academic debates about gender identity or the patriarchy or neoliberalism or school busing policies in the 1970’s. It’s not that these things are unimportant, but these voters need to hear something else entirely if the Democrats want their enthusiastic support. Successful political campaigns are not seminars. There is a place for hashing out policies and advocating for transformational change, but people in real immediate need rarely have much interest in or patience for such things.

Pelosi may not understand how to deal with President Trump, but she understands branding.  There’s an overlap between the seats she needs to hold and the voters the Democrats need to attract to win the presidency, and anything that presents a threat to those goals is going to get her ire up. There are some things, like an impeachment inquiry, that she is reacting to with too much fear, but there are others that are plainly reasonable.

Trump has only one real chance to win reelection, and that’s if he can paint the Democrats as totally out of touch and nearly as radical as he is. If she just lets the loudest voices run roughshod over everyone else, that’s exactly what will happen.

What’s really tripping people up is that the white working class Obama/Trump voters and the less advantaged people in the black community are both arriving near the same place when it comes to Joe Biden. These groups are supposed to be about as antagonistic as any two groupings in America, but they have a meeting of the minds over what kind of nominee they’d like to see. They want a lunch-bucket type of guy who talks in plain understandable English and isn’t just advocating policies that appeal first and foremost to the professional class or the academic mindset.

Like it or not, this is a class-based consensus, and the lower classes simply have a different definition of progressivism than the college-educated do. They are practical minded because they don’t have the luxury of being anything else, and they see a Democratic Party that seems to look out for the neediest less and less and more and more caters itself to dreamers and idealists.

No, the lower classes are not the only people who matter. Everyone matters in their own way, and we need professionals and venture capitalists and inventors and scientists just as much as we need people to work retail, build our cars and tend to our crops. But what we need as a society does not always line up neatly with what we need to do to win an election.

The Democrats are supposed to be the worker’s party but their coalition has shifted on them. They are now a party based more on identity than class and more on a urban/suburban alliance and a farmer/labor one. They’ve got the intelligentsia locked up.

But they still need more of the farmer/labor vote than they got in 2016 if they want to win in 2020. They have to know how to talk to these folks and, just as important, how not to talk to them.

What Pelosi is really trying to do is keep the party in the mainstream because Trump left the middle for the taking. Much of the left has no use for the mainstream, and often for very good reason. The left wouldn’t be doing it’s job if it were satisfied with the status quo or with a return to a less than satisfying past. In some areas, Trump’s abandonment of the center offers a real chance to move things meaningfully in a more progressive direction.

But someone has to try to hold the line. That job has fallen on Pelosi, and she’s not apologetic about it. If she holds her majority and a Democrat is elected president, she’ll be ready to push a lot harder, but not before then.

To me, her main mistake, and it’s a big one, is not allowing an impeachment inquiry to formally begin. She should use the same standard that was used during Watergate, the investigation of which, you may remember, began almost immediately after Nixon was reelected in an historic landslide. If those Democrats were not afraid of a public backlash, I really don’t understand why she is today.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

I’ve added more color, darkening things a bit to see if the image will have the illusion of great distance. Note the brown lit buttes and dark shadows below. I’ve left the far distance lighter for an attempt at aerial perspective.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

If you have a job making political advertising for Democrats, you may want to save the video clip of this one for later use.

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta resigned Friday amid intense scrutiny of his role as a U.S. attorney a decade ago in a deal with Jeffrey Epstein that allowed the financier to plead guilty to lesser offenses in a sex-crimes case involving underage girls.

President Trump told reporters Friday morning that Acosta had decided to step aside. He called Acosta a “great labor secretary, not a good one” and a “tremendous talent.”

“This was him, not me,” Trump said of the resignation decision, as Acosta stood by his side. “I said to Alex, you don’t have to do this.”

It’s customary whenever possible for a president to say kind things about a cabinet member who is stepping down. Even if everyone knows that the president is actually furious with the person, you can expect them to say that they did a good job and they’re grateful for their service. It’s also completely normal for the president to claim that the decision wasn’t theirs and they accepted the resignation with some reluctance, even though this is only rarely true.

But this isn’t an ordinary case. This isn’t about taking unauthorized flights or buying fancy office furniture or even run of the mill cronyism and corruption. This is about an extensive international underage sex slavery ring. Secretary Acosta, who announced his resignation will become official next week, has been rebuked by a federal judge for wrongly keeping the victims in the dark about a non-prosecution agreement he struck with Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers. This is a grotesque and unprecedented scandal involving a former close personal friend of the president.

Trump did not have to say that Acosta was “a tremendous talent” or that he’s been “great labor secretary, not a good one.” He didn’t even have to show Acosta the usual courtesies given that he’s been exposed as an unconscionable public official.

Acosta is leaving Trump’s cabinet because the public outcry has been too much to withstand, and Trump decided to create as little distance from his as possible. That’s political malpractice, but hardly unprecedented. He should have showed anger and a sense of betrayal toward Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, but instead praises and dangles pardons in front of them. Even when he has a decent case to make that he’s been ill-served and did not know what his underlings were doing or had done, he chooses to embrace and protect them.

At some point in the general election, Trump will be asked about why he has the habit of employing people who get arrested, resign in disgrace, or both. No doubt, he’ll be dishonest about his record in these cases, which is why you want the video footage of him praising these people.

If you can’t separate yourself from a guy like Acosta, you have to pay a hefty political price for it. I’m sure the Democratic ad-makers understand this.

I’m currently a Tennessee resident, which should tell you something about the quality of my representation in Congress. The vast majority of the state’s Republicans might as well go to work wearing sheets and hoods—the statehouse still has a bust of Klan founder Bedford Forrest prominently displayed, and the new governor is not only perfectly fine with leaving it up, he he just issued a proclamation honoring the racist, sending yet another signal to Tennessee’s African American community not to get too uppity about their rights.

But while Memphis has a ballsy Democratic congressman in Steve Cohen, my city of Nashville is represented by out-of-touch Blue Dog Jim Cooper, who describes himself as “the House’s conscience, a lonely voice for civility in this ugly era.” I guess that means “fibbing to constituents and bowing to Donald Trump” since, if his letters to me are any indicator, that’s what Cooper does.

In a recent letter to me in response to a phone call about impeachment, Cooper wrote me the following:

Mr. Cooper’s letter was, in a word, disappointing. It also merited a response, because when you order steak and the waiter brings you a a bowl of diarrhea, you complain to the management. So I dropped him a line.

Mr. Cooper,

In your last letter to me, dated July 10, 2019, you claimed that Democrats need to “find a ‘smoking gun’ that persuades most Americans” before you work to impeach Mr. Trump. This is factually false, as you surely know, and I am angered that you think you can play semantic games with a constituent. Perhaps you are used to disrespecting Tennesseans, who after all rank 36th in the nation for educational attainment [Numbers from Google; this 2017 article says 39th, so I guess things have slightly improved, ED] and “dead last” in voter turnout in 2018, according to Knox News. I am not one of those Tennesseans, and I do not appreciate being lied to like some country bumpkin.

Impeachment is a political process, not a crime investigation or a court case. There is no requirement that a “smoking gun” be identified (for that matter, many court convictions are won without a smoking gun, as an attorney like you surely knows).

Furthermore, every impeachment is different. Nixon resigned before being convicted. Clinton survived because of one Republican vote. Furthermore, Clinton was ALREADY highly popular when impeachment, a fact you fail to mention in your silly and puerile response to me – did you have a 19 year old intern who flunked US history draft that thing?

Unlike President Clinton, Donald Trump is not popular at all, and Mitch McConnell even less so. In fact McConnell’s announcement that he wouldn’t convict is a signal to the public that his Senate is corrupt. Stop being scared of your own shadow and, more importantly, stop lying to your constituents about what impeachment is and muddying the waters. If you won’t impeach until “most Americans, not just Democrats” believe the president needs to be removed, why are you telling falsehoods that point Americans in the wrong direction?

In short, your letter to me was factually inaccurate, ridiculous, and utterly offensive. As the kids say, do not pee on my head and tell me it’s raining. Do your job: open an impeachment inquiry and remove Donald Trump from office. Otherwise, Tennesseans like me will find someone who will.

Cooper’s deeply disingenuous letter is actually an improvement over previous correspondence on the topic. He now claims to be “eager” to impeach Mr. Trump, instead of his previous squirrely evasions on the issue. But as you can see it’s nonsense: a man who is “eager” to take action does not raise the specter of failure again and again. He does not set unrealistic and preposterous benchmarks before moving forward.

Cooper, who’s held his seat for eight terms, was re-elected in 2018 with about 63% of the vote after running unopposed in the primary. His opponent was a relatively unknown Republican with scant political experience, and who likely held views that were anathema to voters. But the fact is that Nashville is one of the most liberal communities in the entire state. We deserve better representation than an elderly man whose time has passed and who is so out of step with his constituents that he feels he has to pull the wool over their eyes to defend his weakness.

Earlier in the month, Cooper lied to me about his policy of accommodating President Trump on immigration. I’ll have my response to that later today or sometime tomorrow.

President Trump is holding some kind of internet troll conference at the White House today, but that’s obviously not it’s being branded. It’s called the “White House Social Media Summit” but you won’t see any executives from Facebook or Twitter or Google in attendance. The straight news coverage of the event is described this way by reporter Katie Rogers of the New York Times:

…Mr. Trump kick[ed] off an event that will gather a group of supporters who have grown from fringe lurkers in the internet’s backwaters to significant disrupters — largely thanks to Mr. Trump’s attentions — and who think they are being discriminated against for their conservative views. The guest list has alarmed critics who fear it is bringing together people who disseminate threats, hate speech and actual fake news, and who sometimes have their messages elevated with the velocity of a presidential tweet.

At first glance, the guest list sounds like a 4Chan message board come to life.

If you don’t know what 4Chan is, you can begin to educate yourself by perusing their Wikipedia page. It has subtopics on Gamergate, Arrests for child pornography and cyberbullying, Threats of Violence, Internet attacks, and Celebrity photo leaks. If you’re familiar with Pepe the Frog, his popularity as a meme has its origins with the 4Chan community.

Probably the most famous troll at the White House today is James O’Keefe, who made his reputation by using misleading and doctored video footage to destroy my old employer, ACORN.  His tactics are so suspect that he’s been taken off the Mercer family payroll and condemned by people like Brent Bozell who accused O’Keefe of “grandstanding and hurting the conservative movement.”

Trump doesn’t care. He’s invited several people best known for creating doctored images or footage. Supposedly, these people are being persecuted and suppressed by the social media giants as they struggle to contain the surge of hate speech in the Trump Era.

Mr. Trump is seeking proof that he and his supporters have been marginalized on social media. The president has crusaded for months against what he and his closest advisers believe is a concerted effort to muffle conservative voices. Last August, after the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was largely barred from Facebook, Apple and Google, he ramped up his critiques.

“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent.”

If this the best the right has to offer in online activism, the left is displaying their talent at the Netroots Nation conference that begins on Thursday in Philadelphia and runs through the weekend.  There will be a few out of the mainstream elements to this conference too, but nothing on the scale of what’s happening at the White House.  I’m headed down the conference after I submit this piece, and I’ll let you know what’s going on with online left as they prepare for the presidential primaries and general election. There will be things that inspire and amaze me, and also things that make me want to bang my head against a desk, but there will be nothing as hateful or dishonest as the group Trump has assembled for his White House Social Media Summit.

Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Never-Trump Republican Rick Wilson provide two good chuckles today.

A reminder for House Democrats → America’s national security is NOT A GAME. pic.twitter.com/s7yXn5i6Ep

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) July 11, 2019

Frankly, I agree with Mr. McCarthy’s reminder. Our national security is not a game, and House Democrats would do well to listen to the congressman… and keep his party out of power and away from our national security forever.

After all, McCarthy’s party: let 911 happen; let Osama bin Laden get away; told lie after admitted lie about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to start a war which got thousands of people killed; and then lost the war.

Do we really need to go into how the Republican Party is refusing, to this day, to protect our elections against foreign intervention, while their “president” kisses the ass of dictators and may well be a Russian asset?

In other words, Kevin McCarthy is a bigger boob than a prop in a Woody Allen movie, and his lectures should be met with disdain and mockery.

Meanwhile Rick Wilson continues to demonstrate that he’s in deep need of an intervention.

Honestly, did you miss your coffee this morning? Because you don't look that stupid. https://t.co/RgKafUweZ0

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) July 11, 2019

As they say at the rehab center, “denial’s not just a river in Egypt.”

Wilson likes to claim that Republicans tell him “privately” how much they hate Donald Trump and how the “president” is ruining their already-ruined party. He also likes to portray himself as some kind of “truth teller” who can lead the party out of the darkness. This would be easier to swallow if Wilson hadn’t admitted to losing control “of those tools, the party, and the movement.”

Wilson, a veteran Republican campaign strategist, cops to “a stirring bit of guilt” for his role in creating the “Frankenstein monster” that became the Republican base in the Obama years. “We fed the monster and trained it,” he acknowledges in his book’s introduction. “Then Trump came along. We lost control of those tools, the party, and the movement. The monster is out of its cage.” A true first-person, insider account of the creation and unleashing of the base could have made for a stirring read. But beyond noting that he should have seen it coming — “let’s get this mea culpa out of the way,” Wilson writes — he spends nearly all 300-plus pages of his book blaming everyone else for the outcome of his experiment.

The writer goes on to describe Wilson and his output as “revolting,” which is putting it mildly. So it’s kind of funny to see Rick –a man who made his bones running attack ads tying a Vietnam veteran who lost three limbs in that war to Osama bin Laden– is calling other people stupid for acknowledging a basic fact: the GOP is the party of Trump. Wilson apparently thinks there’s some pathway back, when not a single Republican will stand up to their president because they can’t win without Trump’s base.

Yes, let’s all take listen to the political genius who was so influential he couldn’t stop his party from electing Trump, and can’t convince all those Republicans who “tell him in private” how much they object to his presidency. Wilson’s such a brilliant strategist that now he’s politically homeless! Hope the memories of tearing down Max Cleland keep you warm at night in your cardboard box down by the railroad track, politically homeless guy!

This has been another semi-regular episode of “whistling past the graveyard.”

As detailed in the 1991 book The Jeffrey Dahmer Story: An American Nightmare by Don Davis, the crime scene in Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment was a horror show:

A more detailed search of the apartment, conducted by the Criminal Investigation Bureau, revealed a total of four severed heads in Dahmer’s kitchen. A total of seven skulls—some painted, some bleached—were found in Dahmer’s bedroom and inside a closet. In addition, investigators discovered collected blood drippings upon a tray at the bottom of Dahmer’s refrigerator, plus two human hearts and a portion of arm muscle, each wrapped inside plastic bags upon the shelves. In Dahmer’s freezer, investigators discovered an entire torso, plus a bag of human organs and flesh stuck to the ice at the bottom. Elsewhere in Apartment 213, investigators discovered two entire skeletons, a pair of severed hands, two severed and preserved penises, a mummified scalp and, in the 57-gallon drum, three further dismembered torsos dissolving in the acid solution. A total of 74 Polaroid pictures detailing the dismemberment of Dahmer’s victims were found. In reference to the recovery of body parts and artifacts at 924 North 25th Street, the chief medical examiner later stated: “It was more like dismantling someone’s museum than an actual crime scene.”

Many of Dahmer’s victims were minors who he had lured off the streets with one enticement or another. The evidence against him obviously could not have been more overwhelming and he also helpfully confessed and pleaded guilty which meant that the only disputes at trial were over his mental competence and the sentence he should receive. Fortunately, no powerful people worked behind the scenes on Dahmer’s behalf. Not so, apparently, in the case of Jeffrey Epstein:

Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.

“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta.

Jeffrey Dahmer was prosecuted by the state of Wisconsin and Jeffrey Epstein was ultimately prosecuted by the state of Florida, but that was only because of a secret non-prosecution agreement he made with our current Labor Secretary Alex Acosta who was then the U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida. Acosta claims he backed off prosecuting Epstein after he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” presumably meaning that he was a contract agent of the Central Intelligence Agency or perhaps another outfit like Naval Intelligence.

This was apparently all Acosta needed to hear. Epstein had been running a multi-state, in fact an international, underage sex slavery ring involving an entire army of recruiters, schedulers, drivers, pilots, and paymasters that preyed on young girls and rented them out to rich and connected clients. But that was all non-prosecutable because someone alleged that Epstein had some ill-defined relationship with the Intelligence Community.

As a result, this is what happened:

Florida [federal] prosecutors had prepared a 53-page indictment accusing Mr. Epstein of being a sexual predator. But those charges were shelved in 2008 after an 11th-hour deal was reached between the United States attorney’s office in Miami and Mr. Epstein’s lawyers.

The agreement granted Mr. Epstein immunity from federal prosecution and let him plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Federal prosecutors arranged for the plea deal to be kept secret from Mr. Epstein’s accusers until it was finalized in court.

The deal let Mr. Epstein avoid a possible life sentence in federal prison. Instead, he spent 13 months at a Palm Beach jail and was permitted to leave the facility six days a week for work. He was also required to register as a sex offender.

While Dahmer’s crimes were more gruesome and involved murder, he had a much smaller list of victims. I bring him up to serve as a more extreme example of Epstein, but no one should minimize the horror or pain that Epstein has caused. That he had friends in high places doesn’t make him any less dangerous than Dahmer. In fact, this arguably has made him more dangerous.

If Dahmer’s case had been investigated by the Feds and passed off to Wisconsin with a non-prosecution agreement that was kept hidden from the families of the victims, I don’t think people would be debating whether the person responsible should still be serving in Trump’s cabinet. I don’t think any possible “intelligence” connections would have made a difference.

Is the Epstein case really so different?

In January 2016, before Donald Trump was inaugurated, I wrote a piece (“Mnuchin Needs to Explain the 19.5% Sale of Rosneft”) for the Washington Monthly that argued that Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, “will need to be grilled on these topics during his confirmation hearings.”

“These topics” were divulged in the Steele Dossier–published just a few days prior.

As I noted at the time, the privatization of 19.5% of Rosneft actually took place on December 10th, 2015.

I was just beginning to look into the Rosneft story when I wrote my first piece on it, but in March 2018 I came back to it (“Revisiting Carter Page and the Rosneft Deal”).

It is evident that Steele’s sources knew what they were talking about even if they unsurprisingly were not omniscient about the details. Vladimir Putin was looking for investors to buy up 19 percent of Rosneft but it was difficult because of Western sanctions. One solution was to convince America to lift the sanctions, and offering the Trump team the brokerage fee on the sale was their enticement. The day after the sale was announced, Carter Page flew back to Moscow, but this time he was subject to a FISA warrant and under constant surveillance. The timing of his second visit is unlikely to be a coincidence.

That process would have been highly illegal and complicated, as the Americans would have had to enter into an agreement banned by sanctions only to retroactively make it legal by lifting them. This would require quite a bit of concealment in how and when the money changed hands.

Now, it’s obvious that Robert Mueller’s investigators never found slam-dunk prosecutable evidence that could link the Trump team to the Rosneft sale or we would have read about it in his report. But for those who are skeptical that the Russians were at least attempting to make this transaction, you should really look at the newest scandal in Italy.

What we have here is an audio recording of a meeting that took place on October 18, 2018 in the lobby of Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. The attendees included three Italians and three Russians. One was Gianluca Savoini, a close aide of Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. He wanted the Russians to help finance his Lega Nord party’s campaign for the May 2019 European Union parliamentary elections. The Russians, who have not been identified by name, were reporting back to “Russian deputy prime minister, Dmitry Kozak, and a powerful member of Putin’s United Russia party named Vladimir Pligin.”

Now, look at how the proposed deal was set up to conceal its true purpose:

The negotiation — which lasted for an hour and 15 minutes, interspersed with cigarette breaks and fueled by espressos — would involve a major Russian oil company selling at least 3 million metric tons of fuel over the course of a year to Italian oil company Eni for a value of around $1.5 billion. The buying and selling would be done through intermediaries, with the sellers applying a discounted rate to these transactions.

The discount would be worth around $65 million, based on fuel prices at the time, according to calculations provided to BuzzFeed News by industry analysts, and it is this money that would be secretly funneled to the Italian party via the intermediaries.

The participants were clear that the purpose of the deal and the discount mechanism at its heart was to support Lega, in particular its European election campaign.

“It’s very simple,” one of the two other Italian men said some 25 minutes into the meeting. “The planning made by our political guys was that given a 4% discount, 250,000 [metric tons] plus 250,000 per month per one year, they can sustain a campaign.”

Do you think that Donald Trump would concede that these negotiations constituted “collusion”? How about a criminal conspiracy? Does he really wonder why the FBI pursued a FISA warrant on Carter Page after he went to Moscow in the summer of 2016 and talked to high-level Rosneft executives and members of Putin’s cabinet? Is it not suspicious that Page reappeared in Moscow after Trump was elected and one day after the Rosneft sale went through?

There are few more things you should know about the players involved in this conspiracy between the Russian and Italian governments. For a start, they are looking to undermine the European Union and turn Europe into a bunch of bunch of pro-Russian fiefdoms.

Opening the discussion in faltering English, Savoini, who has been described in the Italian media as Salvini’s “sherpa to Russia” and who uses a picture of himself shaking hands with Putin as his WhatsApp avatar, was explicit about the grand political ambition behind the proposed deal.

“Salvini is the first man that want[s] to change all of Europe,” he declared. Victory at the European elections taking place the following May would be just the start.

Listing nationalist “allies” across the continent like France’s Le Pen and Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, the 55-year-old Italian, who can be heard later on the tape describing himself as the “connection” between the Italian and Russian political sides, concluded: “We really want to begin to have a great alliance with these parties that are pro-Russia.”

…“We want to change Europe,” said longtime Salvini aide Gianluca Savoini — who dined alongside Vladimir Putin at a government banquet to celebrate the Russian president’s visit to Rome last week. “A new Europe has to be close to Russia as before because we want to have our sovereignty,” he continued over the clinking of coffee cups and buzz of conversation around the lobby.

They also want to free Russia of sanctions and destroy NATO’s effectiveness:

Vladimir Putin has been able to count on Matteo Salvini’s unswerving and vocal support for years.

The Lega leader has repeatedly called for European Union sanctions against Russia to be dropped; he has described the annexation of Crimea as legitimate, even visiting the illegally occupied region in 2016.

He has also criticized NATO and the coordinated EU response to the Salisbury nerve agent attack by Russian military intelligence operatives in March 2018.

And it is working:

But it’s over the last 18 months that Salvini’s value as an ally to Putin has increased exponentially. His reinvention of Lega from a small regional force in the north of Italy to a nationwide, far-right, anti-immigrant party saw it win over 17% of the vote in the Italian general election in March 2018. Three months later, he became deputy prime minister and interior minister when Lega entered into a coalition government with the populist Five Star Movement.

Since then the party has grown to become the country’s dominant political force, doubling its vote to 34.5% in May’s EU parliamentary elections to become the most popular party in the world’s eighth largest economy. The result secured Salvini’s status in the vanguard of Europe’s nationalist far-right movements.

Lastly, they consider Trump a part of their alliance. A Russian on the tape refers to Matteo Salvini as “the European Trump” and they see Salvini as their point man for a fascist takeover of Europe.

The Russian response was positive. They can be heard describing Salvini, who is also Italy’s interior minister, as the “head” of Europe’s resurgent ultra-right nationalist movements, stretching from Italy in the south to Sweden and Finland in the north.

Given Russia’s experiences with the Nazis, anti-fascism has long been a core part of their national identity, but that is clearly over now. Russia has been pushing this movement everywhere:

If the Democrats played as dirty as the Republicans, they could make a lot of hay out of this:

• Trump’s newest proposed tariffs on Chinese imports — on hold for now — include the paper used to print Bibles.
• Publishers recently told the administration that up to 75% of what it costs them to make a Bible, with complex illustrations and ultra-thin pages, is now spent in China after specialized printing moved there decades ago from the U.S.
• Middle- and low-income readers could be priced out by the proposed 25% tariffs, religious leaders and publishers said.

Forget birtherism, do you remember when the Republicans went nuts about Fast & Furious and Solyndra? Or when they lost their minds about the phase-out of the traditional light bulb? Or they forced Obama to have a beer summit during the Henry Louis Gates controversy? Remember when they freaked out when Obama said if he had a son he’d look like Trayvon Martin? How about the unending Benghazi controversy? This is just a sample of the Republicans ability to invent controversies and make mountains out of molehills.

I can imagine the Democrats accusing Trump of secretly despising Christians and pursuing a tariff policy designed to interfere with missionary work and deny working folks access to the Gospel.  They could just start saying this despite the fact that it’s ludicrous. They could have a handful of their politicians make reference to it and say, “some people are making that accusation.” They could make it known to all the bloggers and left-leaning think tanks and magazines and columnists that they want to spread this rumor. Talking heads could go on the radio and television and make the charge. Mailers could be sent out to Christian congregations.  Party leaders could play stupid and pretend that they’ve never heard of the theory while refusing to debunk it.

This isn’t going to happen because this isn’t how the center-left operates in this country. That’s mostly a good thing, but there’s a cost to it when one side will say anything and the other has scruples.

I know for certain that if Barack Obama’s tariff policies were going to have this effect on the production and cost of Bibles, we’d never hear the end of it.  The Republicans put winning above all other considerations. The fact that the idea of the Democrats exploiting this story is laughable tells you have far they are from putting winning first. There’s no way they’ll start asking why the president hates the Holy Bible.