But it’s all over now

Nov 30th, 2018 12:12 pm | By

Uh oh.

Putin and Trump at the G20 Summit welcoming ceremony on November 30, 2018 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.



What Volodya knew and when he knew it

Nov 30th, 2018 11:30 am | By

Michelle Goldberg makes the “this is what Putin has on him” point:

We still don’t know for certain if Russia has used leverage over Trump. But there should no longer be any doubt that Russia has leverage over him.

Why? Because it’s now crystal clear that Trump was lying about his dealings with Russia all along and Putin knew it.

In a Jan. 11, 2017, news conference, Trump said that the “closest I came to Russia” was in selling a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008. While we’re just learning precisely how dishonest this was, Putin has known it all along. That means that throughout Trump’s campaign and presidency, Putin has had the power to plunge him into political crisis.

“If the Russians are aware that senior American officials are publicly stating things that are not true, it’s a counterintelligence nightmare,” Adam Schiff, the California Democrat in line to take over the House Intelligence Committee, told me.

All this time Putin has been watching Trump lie to us, and watching us helpless to do anything about it.



Anchorage

Nov 30th, 2018 10:44 am | By

There’s been a major earthquake near Anchorage, Alaska. I learned of it early because I follow Blair Braverman (Iditarod winner) on Twitter and she’s there* (without the dogs, who are far away and safe). She’s currently tweeting from a car (passenger seat) attempting to get away from a possible tsunami.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the 7 magnitude tremor struck about 10 miles north of Anchorage at 8:29 a.m. local time (12:29 p.m. EST) Friday morning. Social media images and videos showed cracked and collapsed roads, as well as cracks in the walls of buildings. It wasn’t immediately clear if there were any injuries.

“At Anchorage Daily News in Midtown, it sent cracks up walls, damaged ceiling panels and flung items off desks and walls, including a computer monitor and a fire extinguisher,” said the newspaper in its report.

*There meaning in Wasilla.



What Putin had

Nov 30th, 2018 10:27 am | By

I hadn’t quite put that together before, I don’t think – the fact that Trump’s lies about the Trump Tower project in 2016 and after were themselves kompromat. Putin didn’t need any piss-stained sheets, because he already had the kompromat.

And boy did Putin ever get what he wanted – the US turned into a corrupt malevolent reckless pile of shit.



All that and a liar too

Nov 30th, 2018 10:21 am | By

The acting AG appears to have lied to agencies investigating him. Of course he does.

New documents released by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission suggest that acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker misled the agency’s investigators as he was stepping into his role last year as Justice Department chief of staff.

After several attempts to reach Whitaker about the Miami company where he was on the advisory board, the FTC investigator emailed his colleagues to relay that he finally reached Whitaker, who was willing to cooperate and asserted that he “never emailed or wrote to consumers” in his consulting role.

Oh yes? That’s not what we’ve read.

That statement to James Evans of the FTC appears to be inaccurate. Whitaker had written a letter in 2015 to a disgruntled customer who planned to report the company, World Patent Marketing, to the Better Business Bureau. In the letter, which was included in the FTC’s disclosure and reported previously by the news media, Whitaker threatened the customer, writing: “I am assuming you understand there could be serious civil and criminal consequences for you if that is in fact what you and your ‘group’ are doing.”

The company, you may recall, is basically another “take your money and do nothing for it” scam, like Trump “University.” The customer was disgruntled because he had paid the company a lot of bucks and the company had done bupkis to earn it. Whitaker’s role was to use his lawyer cred to threaten customers who objected to this way of proceeding. That’s just the right kind of person to be Attorney General of a whole large country.

The documents, produced Friday in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, contain internal correspondence among FTC investigators, who expressed frustration at being unable to reach Whitaker at several points during 2017.

At the time, the agency was investigating complaints about World Patent Marketing, which it described as an “invention promotion scheme” that it accused of “bilking millions of dollars from consumers.”

The emails also convey FTC investigators’ shock in October 2017 when — in the latter stages of their investigation — Whitaker was suddenly named chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Evans, who works for the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, wrote on Oct. 24, 2017. “Matt Whitaker is now chief of staff to the Attorney General. Of the United States.”

It is hard to believe, but all of this is hard to believe.



Dude!

Nov 30th, 2018 9:49 am | By

Awww iddn that sweet.



Once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart!!!!

Nov 30th, 2018 9:25 am | By

Oh, that’s how dirty the cops are in St Louis.

When a judge acquitted a white St. Louis police officer in September 2017 for fatally shooting a young black man, the city’s police braced for massive protests. But St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Officer Dustin Boone wasn’t just prepared for the unrest — he was pumped.

“It’s gonna get IGNORANT tonight!!” he texted on Sept. 15, 2017, the day of the verdict. “It’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of these s—heads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart!!!!”

Two days later, prosecutors say, that’s exactly what Boone did to one black protester. Boone, 35, and two other officers, Randy Hays, 31, and Christopher Myers, 27, threw a man to the ground and viciously kicked him and beat him with a riot baton, even though he was complying with their instructions.

But oh gee what do you know, the guy they beat up was an undercover cop.

On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted the three officers in the assault. They also indicted the men and another officer, Bailey Colletta, 25, for the attack. Prosecutors released text messages showing the officers bragging about assaulting protesters, with Hays even noting that “going rogue does feel good.”

To protest leaders, the federal charges are a welcome measure of justice — but also a sign of how far St. Louis still has to go four years after the Ferguson protests helped galvanize a national movement for police accountability.

“If it was not a police officer — and particularly a black police officer — who was the victim of this assault, would we be at this juncture?” the Rev. Darryl Gray, one of the protest organizers, said to The Washington Post. “We’ve had several incidents of protesters and activists being the victims of excessive use of force and police abusing their authority without ever seeing charges like this.”

In other words, undercover cops shouldn’t be beaten up by cops and neither should anyone else.



A small token of his esteem

Nov 29th, 2018 5:50 pm | By

BuzzFeed reports that the Trump gang was planning to bribe Putin with a $50 million dollar penthouse in the proposed Moscow tower building.

President Donald Trump’s company planned to give a $50 million penthouse at Trump Tower Moscow to Russian President Vladimir Putin as the company negotiated the luxury real estate development during the 2016 campaign, according to four people, one of them the originator of the plan.

The Trump Tower Moscow plan is at the heart of a new plea agreement by Cohen, who led the negotiations to bring a gleaming, 100-story building to the Russian capital. Cohen acknowledged in court that he had lied to Congress about the plan in order to protect Trump and his presidential campaign.

The revelation that representatives of the Trump Organization planned to forge direct financial links with the leader of a hostile nation at the height of the campaign raises fresh questions about President Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin. The plan never went anywhere because the tower deal ultimately fizzled, and it is not clear whether Trump knew of the intention to give away the penthouse. But Cohen said in court documents that he regularly briefed Trump and his family on the Moscow negotiations.

Felix Sater told BuzzFeed today that the idea was that Putin would be a lure for the oligarchs, because they’d all stampede for the chance to live in the same building as Putin. (I kind of wonder why. I’d be afraid he’d shoot me in one of the elevators, myself.)

Trump had personally signed the letter of intent to move forward on the Trump Tower Moscow plan on Oct. 28, 2015, the day of the third Republican primary debate.

On Thursday, shortly after news broke about Cohen’s guilty plea, Trump told reporters, “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won” the presidential election, “in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”

Yesterday he asked the New York Post “Why would I take a pardon for Manafort off the table?” Because it’s an abuse of power, you stupid fuck. Why you should lose lots of opportunities to make $$$ while running for president is because of the corruption. Duh.

Developing a tower in Russia had long been a dream of the Trump Organization, which pursued a deal there for three decades. After Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, Sater saw an opportunity to revive the development.

“I figured, he’s in the news, his name is generating a lot of good press,” Sater told BuzzFeed News earlier this year. “A lot of Russians weren’t willing to pay a premium licensing fee to put Donald’s name on their building. Now maybe they would be.”

Ohhh – I hadn’t grasped that part. This wasn’t about Trump’s company building the tower, it was about Trump charging millions just to put his name on the tower – the tower built by other people at their own expense. All this, for Trump’s squalid name on a building.

So he turned to his old friend, Cohen, to get it off the ground. They arranged a licensing deal, by which Trump would lend his name to the project and collect a part of the profits. Sater lined up a Russian development company to build the project and said that VTB, a Russian financial institution that faced US sanctions at the time, would finance it. VTB officials have denied taking part in any negotiations about the project.

Nice work if you can get it. They do all the work and advance all the money, and Trump just takes payments for the use of his name.



While subjecting witnesses to a variety of abuse

Nov 29th, 2018 5:00 pm | By

Comey is seeking to quash the subpoena, on account of how he doesn’t want to talk to Congress behind closed doors because the Republicans cheat.

Former FBI Director James Comey has filed a motion in federal court in Washington to quash a congressional subpoena issued just before Thanksgiving soliciting his testimony on the FBI’s actions leading up to the 2016 election.

Comey has said previously that he would be willing to testify publicly, but did not want to do it behind closed doors.

In Thursday’s filing, his lawyers argue that the House Judiciary and Oversight committees “have conducted an investigation in a manner that exceeds a proper legislative purpose insofar as members of the committees have established a practice of selectively leaking witnesses’ testimony in order to support a false political narrative, while subjecting witnesses to a variety of abuse.”

Yep. Remember how they shouted at Rosenstein? Remember how they shouted at Peter Strzok?

“Mr. Comey asks this Court’s intervention not to avoid giving testimony but to prevent the Joint Committee from using the pretext of a closed interview to peddle a distorted, partisan political narrative about the Clinton and Russian investigations through selective leaks,” his lawyers added in court papers.

In their filing on Thursday, Comey’s lawyers claimed Republicans would leak parts of his testimony “to mislead the public and to undermine public confidence in the FBI and the DOJ during a time when President Trump and members of his administration and campaign team are reported to be under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and other law enforcement authorities.”

“The public record shows members of the Joint Committees leaking what suits them and maintaining the secrecy only of what does not. Witnesses who appear before the joint committees are powerless to counter or contextualize the distortions of their testimony that are leaked to the press,” Comey’s lawyers added.

Not completely powerless, I would think, but certainly at a huge disadvantage given that the leakers are The Government. So what the Republicans are doing here is, like so much of what Trump does, an abuse of power.

Comey’s lawyers cited a Supreme Court ruling born from the Joseph McCarthy Red Scare hearings in the 1950s and argued that the “abusive conduct” of the House investigation is in violation of Congress’ own rules and done to “harass and intimidate witnesses.”

The filing ticks through news reports that detail closed-door testimony by former FBI officials who appeared before the committees, such as Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, calling them “leaks and related comments by Committee members” that have “unfairly prejudiced these witnesses and hardly served the supposed truth-seeking purpose” of the investigation.

What I said.

Lawfare has the motion.



Swastikas on the wall

Nov 29th, 2018 12:37 pm | By

Meanwhile, uptown, a psychology professor at Columbia Teachers College and some students head to her office.

As they entered her workspace, they passed a mezuza, a small box containing Hebrew religious texts, affixed to her doorpost.

But the sight that met them next made the professor and her students stop in their tracks.

Anti-Semitic graffiti had been spray-painted on the office walls of Elizabeth Midlarsky, a clinical psychologist and Holocaust scholar at Columbia’s Teachers College on the Upper West Side of New York. The vandalism included swastikas and an anti-Semitic slur, “Yid,” painted in bright red on the white walls of her office foyer. The outer door had been closed but not locked, one student said.

“I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it,” Midlarsky said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I’m usually not a fearful person, but they got me. I’m afraid.”

Rya Inman/Columbia Daily Spectator

Last month was the slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Of course she’s afraid.

Dark times.



A high likelihood of rampant criminality

Nov 29th, 2018 11:51 am | By

Paul Waldman at the Post says Mueller is closing in on Trump.

When he spoke to reporters about this Thursday, Trump stressed over and over that it would have been perfectly fine for him to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, as he had long sought to do. Legally speaking, that’s true. But given the controversy around Trump’s solicitousness toward Vladimir Putin and the growing realization that Russia was intervening in the campaign on his behalf, through 2016 it was important for him to distance himself publicly from Russia, which he did many times by stressing that he had no investments there.

But also there’s a thing Neal Katyal said:

It wasn’t just normal market negotiating, it was negotiating with officials of the Russian government.

And then there’s the whole Trump Organization problem.

Just about everyone who has followed this story closely understands that whatever might or might not have happened with Trump and Russia during the campaign, the real threat to the president lies in the Trump Organization. As Adam Davidson of the New Yorker put it, “I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality.”

Cohen was intimately involved for years in that business, making deals and putting out fires. If he’s telling Mueller everything he knows, Trump could be in serious trouble.

I hope his aides packed plenty of changes of underwear for his trip to Argentina.



Individual 1 explains all

Nov 29th, 2018 9:39 am | By

“I was allowed to do whatever I wanted during the campaign,” he assures us.

“There was a letter,” he says, and helpfully draws a rectangle in the air, in case we don’t know what a letter is.

ANYway, point is, Michael Cohen is a weak person, and not a very smart person.



Why Individual 1 was such a friend to Putin

Nov 29th, 2018 8:54 am | By

Oops.

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, who pleaded guilty in August to breaking campaign finance laws, made a surprise appearance in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday morning and pleaded guilty to a new criminal charge, the latest turn in the special counsel’s investigation of Mr. Trump and his inner circle.

At the court hearing, Mr. Cohen admitted to making false statements to Congress about his efforts to build a Trump Tower deal in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign. That real estate deal has been a focus of the special counsel investigation into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russian operatives.

Oooops. That sounds big. Lawfare has posted the docs for us, and from what I’ve read so far it looks big. Cohen admits to telling a bunch of lies to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and not trivial lies but big lies, about that Trump Tower deal in Moscow. He said it was all over and finished in January 2016, before the Iowa caucus and months before the first primary.

It wasn’t.

The new guilty plea in Federal District Court marks the first time the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has charged Mr. Cohen. In exchange for pleading guilty and continuing to cooperate with Mr. Mueller, he may hope to receive a lighter sentence than he otherwise would.

But even more than that, from what he has said before, he wants not to take the hit all by himself. He committed all these crimes at the behest of the corrupt pile of shit who squats in the Oval Office, and he wants that corrupt pile of shit to fall with him.

The Criminal Information doesn’t name Trump but calls him Individual 1 – the Individual 1 who was Cohen’s employer and a candidate for president.

He should be removed from office right now. Today.



Artemis and Athena are not impressed

Nov 28th, 2018 5:14 pm | By

This crap again. A conference called PantheaCon, meaning I assume AllthegoddessesCon, explains why after inviting the well-known scholar Max Dashu to speak it then told her to stay away. It explains, of course, by pouring abuse on Max and licking the bums of people it claims would be terrified by her presence.

To the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming members of the PantheaCon community:

It was a mistake to include Max Dashu in the program and I want to personally apologize to each of you. I have communicated with many of you directly and have read every letter sent personally. I want to apologize for my part in causing the fear, pain, and sense of exclusion that many of you felt. Providing a safe and inclusive space is of primary importance to me and the convention staff. In order to provide that safe space, all trans-exclusionary advocates and those in close association with them will not be presenting at PantheaCon for the foreseeable future. I hope we can have healthy debates about our many societal issues at this and future Cons.

That basically amounts to saying Max is a bad bad scary dangerous bad person, and that they did a bad bad thing inviting her to speak in the first place. And yet – you’ll not be surprised to learn – Max is not a bad bad scary dangerous bad person, and it’s disgusting to behold these people who invited her to speak now flinging shit at her in public.

To all our PantheaCon community:

I also apologize to the whole PantheaCon community for the chaos and confusion caused by our dis-inviting both Max Dashu and Witchdoctor Utu after they had been accepted in our program. Please be assured that this will not happen again. In the future, we will make every effort to more carefully verify presenter credentials and check a variety of sources in our background research. We will also consider the social and political impact of each presenter and presentation in making decisions going forward. If a presenter seems too controversial or divisive to community members, we hope to determine that before the program is published.

Look at that. There’s not even any substance to it. “Too controversial or divisive to community members” – what on earth does that mean? Controversial on what subject or subjects?

The only hint is the recipient list – “the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming members of the PantheaCon community.” So trans people have an automatic and sweeping veto over all speakers who seem too controversial or divisive? But given how touchy the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming community is, that would be almost everyone – except fellow members of the the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming community.

These people, I swear. They’ll kill off intellectual life if we let them.



Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers

Nov 28th, 2018 3:51 pm | By

Via Screechy Monkey in the Miscellany Room, the Miami Herald on the plea agreement that spared Jeffrey Epstein a long prison sentence:

On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz.

[Lefkowitz’s] client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.

He was also suspected of trafficking young girls for “parties” with his friends.

Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.

But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.

Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.

Acosta even agreed that the deal would be kept secret from the victims – which violates federal law.

Now President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta, 49, oversees a massive federal agency that provides oversight of the country’s labor laws, including human trafficking. He also has been on a list of possible replacements for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure earlier this month.

Trump was one of his partying friends back in the day, as was Bill Clinton.

“This was not a ‘he said, she said’ situation. This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ — and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story,’’ said retired Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, who supervised the police probe.

Now there are two unrelated civil law suits that could turn up what was buried ten years ago.

Federal prosecutors, including Acosta, not only broke the law, the women contend in court documents, but they conspired with Epstein and his lawyers to circumvent public scrutiny and deceive his victims in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The law assigns victims a series of rights, including the right of notice of any court proceedings and the opportunity to appear at sentencing.

“As soon as that deal was signed, they silenced my voice and the voices of all of Jeffrey Epstein’s other victims,’’ said Wild, now 31. “This case is about justice, not just for us, but for other victims who aren’t Olympic stars or Hollywood stars.’’

As most of us aren’t.

Despite substantial physical evidence and multiple witnesses backing up the girls’ stories, the secret deal allowed Epstein to enter guilty pleas to two felony prostitution charges. Epstein admitted to committing only one offense against one underage girl, who was labeled a prostitute, even though she was 14, which is well under the age of consent — 18 in Florida.

“It’s just outrageous how they minimized his crimes and devalued his victims by calling them prostitutes,’’ said Yasmin Vafa, a human rights attorney and executive director of Rights4Girls, which is working to end the sexual exploitation of girls and young women.

“There is no such thing as a child prostitute. Under federal law, it’s called child sex trafficking — whether Epstein pimped them out to others or not. It’s still a commercial sex act — and he could have been jailed for the rest of his life under federal law,” she said.

A close look at the trove of letters and emails contained in court records provides a window into the plea negotiations, revealing an unusual level of collaboration between federal prosecutors and Epstein’s legal team that even government lawyers, in recent court documents, admitted was unorthodox.

Acosta, in 2011, would explain that he was unduly pressured by Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers — Lefkowitz, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis, Gerald Lefcourt, and Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky.

Did you catch those? Dershowitz, who is now prostituting himself for Donald Trump? Starr, the scourge of Bill Clinton? Yet Clinton himself was reportedly one of Epstein’s buddies.

But Epstein did get some chastisement, yes?

Not really.

Unlike other convicted sex offenders, Epstein didn’t face the kind of rough justice that child sex offenders do in Florida state prisons. Instead of being sent to state prison, Epstein was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein work release privileges, which enabled him to leave the jail six days a week, for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in West Palm Beach. This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.

12 hours in a nice office, 8 sleeping…so that leaves four hours awake in a cell.

In 2011, Epstein petitioned to have his sex offender status reduced in New York, where he has a home and is required to register every 90 days. In New York, he is classified as a level 3 offender — the highest safety risk because of his likelihood to re-offend.

A prosecutor under New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance argued on Epstein’s behalf, telling New York Supreme Court Judge Ruth Pickholtz that the Florida case never led to an indictment and that his underage victims failed to cooperate in the case. Pickholtz, however, denied the petition, expressing astonishment that a New York prosecutor would make such a request on behalf of a serial sex offender accused of molesting so many girls.

“I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this. I have done so many [sex offender registration hearings] much less troubling than this one where the [prosecutor] would never make a downward argument like this,’’ she said.

Epstein has a book full of names.

The story is book-length. Much dirt to shovel.



[Trump speaks off the record.]

Nov 28th, 2018 12:19 pm | By

In their talk with Trump yesterday Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker asked him about the Mueller-Manafort breakup.

DAWSEY: People around you have told me you’re upset about the way he’s been treated. Are you planning to do anything to help him?

TRUMP: Let me go off the record because I don’t want to get in the middle of the whole thing.

[Trump speaks off the record.]

DAWSEY: Is there any version of that you’re willing to give us on the record in answer to that question?

TRUMP: I’d rather not. At some point, I’ll talk on the record about it. But I’d rather not.

[Trump speaks off the record.]

So it’s not likely that was an uncomplicated “no,” then. He’s said “no” many times on the record, so if he felt the need to say it off the record, it probably wan’t just another “no.” So what was it?

DAWSEY: Mr. President, your national security team is going to the Hill tomorrow to brief senators on Saudi Arabia and Jamal Khashoggi. I’ve heard from Senator [Lindsey O.] Graham, who I know you were with yesterday, and others, that they want stronger punishment on Saudi Arabia, tougher sanctions. Do you want them to impose that, or do you think that would be deleterious to our — ?

TRUMP: I’m going to listen to what they say. They’re all friends of mine, and I get along with them great. I’m going to certainly listen to what they have to say, Josh. In the end, though, they’re spending massive amounts of billions of dollars. If you look at Iran and what they do, and you look at many other countries — I don’t have to embarrass other countries by saying it — if you look at what they do, it’s a rough part of the world. It’s a dangerous, rough part of the world. But they’ve been a great ally. Without them, Israel would be in a lot more trouble. We need to have a counterbalance to Iran. I know him. I know him well, the crown prince. And, by the way, never did business with them, never intend to do business with them. I couldn’t care less. This is a very important job that I’m doing right now. The last thing I care about is doing business with people. I only do business for us. Somebody said, well, maybe they’re an investor in one of his jobs. The answer is no.

Like hell it is.

But I just feel that it’s very, very important to maintain that relationship. It’s very important to have Saudi Arabia as an ally, if we’re going to stay in that part of the world. Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world? One reason to is Israel. Oil is becoming less and less of a reason because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don’t have to stay there.

RUCKER: And why have you taken his denials for ordering the killing of our colleague, Jamal Khashoggi —

TRUMP: I haven’t taken anything.

RUCKER: — over the evidence that the intelligence community has gathered?

TRUMP: Phil, I haven’t done that. If you look at my statement, it’s maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. But he denies it. And people around him deny it.

Sometimes people deny things for reasons other than truth-telling. Sometimes.

RUCKER: Sir, you just said, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but are you getting the best advice and the best information from the intelligence community and on the climate issue from your experts in the government, because you’re doubting what they’re saying?

TRUMP: Phil, I’m getting advice. I’m the president of this country. I have to do what’s the best for our country. We have a very important ally in Saudi Arabia. We have an ally that has tremendous oil reserves, which are — frankly, they can make prices go up and down, and I want to keep them down. We have an ally that’s investing billions and billions of dollars in our country. They could very easily invest $110 billion, $450 billion overall over a period of time, fairly short period of time. $110 billion in military. Russia and China would love to have those orders, and they’ll get them if we don’t. They’ll have no choice, but they’ll get them if we don’t.

He seems to have completely missed what Rucker was asking, which was about the relationship between his constant dismissal of what experts in his own government tell him and his ability to get good information. If he refuses to pay attention to his own experts, how can he get the best advice and the best information? He doesn’t address that question at all.

So I take everything into consideration, and again, he totally denies it, and he denied it to me on three different occasions, on three different calls, and a lot of other people deny it, too. Did he do it? As I said, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but in the meantime Saudi Arabia’s spending billions and billions of dollars in the United States, and I want them to spend it here. I don’t want them to spend it in China and Russia.

One, he denies it so it’s not true, and two, never mind whether it’s true because money.

Also, about that it’s not true – he seems to think he gets to add up all the denials and get a higher not-true number. “He denied it to me on three different occasions, on three different calls, and a lot of other people deny it, too,” so it’s not true times 3 plus a lot. That makes it very very big number not true. You can’t argue with that.

But if you insist on arguing with it anyway, then money. End of argument.



Inflamed tensions

Nov 27th, 2018 9:05 pm | By

Grotesque.

A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

Boom.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Whatever it was a bid for, it’s dirty dirty dirty.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed.

WELL NO SHIT, SHERLOCK, THAT’S THE POINT. That’s what makes it dirty dirty dirty.

Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Mr. Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations campaign against Mr. Mueller’s office.

But a public relations campaign should be wholly beside the point. It’s not a vote whether or not Trump is a crook, it’s a factual question.

While Mr. Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors, who accused Mr. Manafort of holding out on them despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant, according to the people. That conflict spilled into public view on Monday when the prosecutors took the rare step of declaring that Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about a variety of subjects.

Awwww; I hope they can be friends again some time down the road.

In his own recent Twitter attacks on the special counsel, the president seemed to imply that he had inside information about the prosecutors’ lines of inquiry and frustrations. “Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, he tweeted: “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want.”

I wish a prosecutor twenty feet tall would just tear the roof off the White House right now and pluck Trump out and smash his head on Pennsylvania Avenue.



Trump reports he has a very high level of intelligence

Nov 27th, 2018 5:17 pm | By

The Post had a conversation with Trump today; it went as well as you’d expect.

In a wide-ranging and sometimes discordant 20-minute interview with The Washington Post, Trump complained at length about Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. “Jay” Powell, whom he nominated earlier this year. When asked about declines on Wall Street and GM’s announcement that it was laying off 15 percent of its workforce, Trump responded by criticizing higher interest rates and other Fed policies, though he insisted that he is not worried about a recession.

“I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump said. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

Classic. One, he thinks he has great instincts (wrong), and two, he thinks he knows more than anyone else (so very wrong).

He added: “So far, I’m not even a little bit happy with my selection of Jay. Not even a little bit. And I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off-base with what they’re doing.”

Classic. He tells us how bad Jay is, then he says he’s not blaming anybody.

Trump also dismissed the federal government’s landmark report released last week finding that damages from global warming are intensifying around the country. The president said that “I don’t see” climate change as man-made and that he does not believe the scientific consensus.

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump said. “You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean.”

Image result for head desk

The president added of climate change, “As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it.”

Says the imbecile who knows nothing at all about it except that he doesn’t like it. “Very high levels of intelligence” in a pig’s eye.

Trump again questioned the CIA’s assessment that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a contributor to The Post, and said he has considered Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s repeated denials in his decision to maintain a close alliance with the oil-rich desert kingdom.

“Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” Trump said. “But he denies it. And people around him deny it. And the CIA did not say affirmatively he did it, either, by the way. I’m not saying that they’re saying he didn’t do it, but they didn’t say it affirmatively.”

He’s just repeating the same twenty stupid words he said about it last week. With all his high levels of intelligence, he doesn’t have enough nous to avoid constantly repeating the same stale formulas over and over and OVER again. That is not a sign of someone with an adept mind. Plus he’s so fucking thick that he thinks the normal explanation of what we can know and what we can’t equals “but they didn’t say it affirmatively.”

The CIA has assessed that Mohammed ordered Khashoggi’s killing and has shared its findings with lawmakers and the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. Intelligence assessments are rarely, if ever, ironclad…

What I’m saying! They’re not going to send him a note saying “We know for positive he did it, Sir!” That’s not what they do. Trump thinks every opinion he has is the certain truth, and people with functioning brains know they never know the certain truth.



The view across Elysium Planitia

Nov 27th, 2018 4:42 pm | By

InSight is sending photos home.

The InSight lander's first picture from Mars

Looks a bit like Texas.

This is the view across Elysium Planitia, the vast lava plain near the equator of Mars, where Nasa’s InSight lander touched down after a hair-raising descent on Monday. The probe snapped the image of the desolate landscape as the dust thrown up by its arrival was still settling around it.

Over the coming days, InSight will take more photos of the landing site and send them back to Earth, where scientists will use them to decide where the probe should place its instruments.

Isn’t it strange that as a species we’re clever enough to do this, yet we still elect a Donald Trump president? Or we go on a hajj and get trampled to death or we stone girls to death for rejecting an arranged marriage or we let priests molest children for decade after decade.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan



Developments

Nov 27th, 2018 12:16 pm | By

DTrump is having a tough day. Not as tough as those teargassed asylum-seekers had, but tough. Not one but two shoes hit the floor with a crash.

The first development came when special counsel Robert S. Mueller III asked a federal court to begin sentencing proceedings for Manafort, sentencing that was on hold while Manafort cooperated with Mueller’s team. According to the filing: “After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement.”

That could be bad for Trump as well as for Manafort.

First, it’s unlikely that Mueller would be withdrawing Manafort’s plea agreement unless he had specific evidence demonstrating that Manafort lied. He’s going to lay that evidence out for the court as the judge considers what sentence to give Manafort, in what amounts to another indictment.

Second, Trump’s lawyers and Manafort’s lawyers have a joint defense agreement that allows them to share information. And third, Trump recently completed a set of written answers to Mueller’s questions.

Marcy Wheeler explains what all that might mean:

Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them. That means they didn’t really need his testimony, at all. It also means they had no need to keep secrets — they could keep giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors, all while reporting misleading information to Trump that he could use to fill out his open book test. Which increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers to those questions full of lies.

Interesting. The two are very close together in time. Innnteresting.

That’s a lot of ifs, which is why we’re going to have to wait until Mueller lays all his cards on the table to see the true magnitude of this development. Which brings us to the second of the day’s potentially enormous stories, from the Guardian:

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

It may all just be coincidence.

Or not.