Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Russia’s defense ministry says it’s ready to act on the agreements

    Oh but that’s not what he meant, he meant the opposite, he didn’t hear the question, he was answering a different question, he had a pain in his bum right at that second, he didn’t mean “no” the way you’re interpreting it, he said yes but you just didn’t listen, he left out some of the letters, he meant to say wouldn’t, he forgot his homework, the dog ate his shoes, the sun will come out tomorrow, is that a zebra?

    President Trump appeared to say on Wednesday that Russia was no longer targeting the United States, contradicting his own intelligence chief just a day after promising that his administration was working to prevent Kremlin interference in the upcoming midterm elections.

    Hours later, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that Mr. Trump was answering a different question, and that “we believe the threat still exists.”

    Certainly; he was answering a different question, that no one asked, that he made up in his head, that presumed the answer “no.” The question was…would you like the ceiling to collapse on your head right now? That’s the question he was answering. I don’t know why you’re all so suspicious.

    What Coats has said:

    “These actions are persistent, they are pervasive and they are meant to undermine America’s democracy,” Mr. Coats said in a speech on Friday.

    And again on Monday: “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy,” Mr. Coats said.

    But on Wednesday, when the president was asked whether Russia was “still targeting” the United States, Mr. Trump said: “No.”

    But he thought the question was: “Do you have a dog?”

    The president’s changing statements about Russia’s intentions toward the United States underscore his pattern of questioning his own intelligence agencies.

    The word you’re looking for is undermining…or perhaps better, sabotaging. He has a pattern of sabotaging his own intelligence agencies.

    Which, in a president, looks kind of treason-like.

    Mr. Trump’s latest vacillation on Wednesday drew more outrage, including from his own party.

    “I’m dumbfounded by the statement he does not believe that the Russians are still up to it,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Wednesday. “We need to reconcile the difference between him and the intelligence community. I agree with the intelligence community. Tell me why I’m wrong, Mr. President.”

    That and a nickel will get you a ride on the subway. Talk is cheap, Senator.

    Mr. Graham said ignoring the threat posed by the Russians was “political malpractice” if the threat was real. “I believe it’s real,” he said.

    Mr. Graham added, “If he is wrong, and the intelligence community is right and we get attacked because we didn’t prepare ourselves, that is a terrible legacy for him.”

    It’s not great for us, either!

    Though the details of the president’s meeting with Mr. Putin are not publicly known, Russia’s defense ministry announced that it was ready to put in motion the unspecified agreements Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin reached.

    Oh, brilliant – we don’t know what they are and apparently have no way of forcing Trump to tell us what they are.

  • Look at ambassadors not there

    More lies.

    “There’s been no president ever as tough as I have been on Russhah.”

  • DARVO

    Trump has been burning the place up since yesterday. He called John Brennan “a very bad person,” he called Montenegro “aggressive” and speculated it could get us into World War III being so aggressive, he ranted about Trump Derangement Syndrome and its responsibility for our failure to be awed by his success at kissing Putin’s bum.

    Vanity Fair:

    “Membership in NATO obligates the members to defend any other member that’s attacked,” Carlson said to Trump. “So let’s say Montenegro, which joined last year, is attacked. Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?” In response, Trump told Carlson that he sympathized with his view. “I’ve asked the same question. Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people,” the president said. “They’re very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations you’re in World War III.”

    …

    By casting doubt on the founding principle of NATO, Trump again seemed to side with America’s adversaries over its allies. As Nicholas Burns, who served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush, explained to me last week, the NATO alliance is only effective as a deterrent against Russian aggression if President Vladimir Putin believes that the U.S. and the alliance’s 28 other members will respect Article 5. “The big danger here is that Putin needs to believe that Trump is the leader of NATO, is willing to defend NATO countries that could be threatened by Russia,” he told me. “That is what deterrence is all about, that is how deterrence works, right? The other guy, in this case the adversarial power Putin, has to believe in his heart of hearts that he cannot take aggressive measures toward NATO countries because Trump and the other leaders would stand up to him.”

    Well that ship has sailed.

    CBS News:

    President Donald Trump lashed out at former CIA Director John Brennan after Brennan criticized Mr. Trump for remarks he made during a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    “I think Brennan is a very bad guy, and if you look at it, a lot of things happened under his watch,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in Helsinki on Monday. “I think he’s a very bad person.”

    The traitor tweets:

    The slope gets steeper every day.

  • Unlocking all the doors

    They’re smoothing the way for Putin.

    The White House eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council on Tuesday [last week], doing away with a post central to developing policy to defend against increasingly sophisticated digital attacks and the use of offensive cyber weapons.

    A memorandum circulated by an aide to the new national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the post was no longer considered necessary because lower-level officials had already made cybersecurity issues a “core function” of the president’s national security team.

    Cybersecurity experts and members of Congress said they were mystified by the move, though some suggested Mr. Bolton did not want any competitive power centers emerging inside the national security apparatus.

    Yes sure that’s all it is, a power play by Bolton. Nothing to see here, don’t worry.

    It is unclear how those issues will now be managed in the White House. Mr. Bolton has virtually no cyber-related experience. When he was last in government, as ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, cybersecurity was not formally considered a national threat. It is now listed as the No. 1 threat in the annual assessment that the director of national intelligence sends to Congress.

    Mr. Bolton has talked about “streamlining” the N.S.C., and so far that appears to have involved reducing many of the new positions created over the past decade.

    Let’s have less security now.

    The elimination of the cybersecurity role is likely to increase concern that the Trump administration is short-handed and unprepared to deal with increasing cybersecurity threats. The White House still has not presented a coherent plan to protect election systems in advance of the fall midterm elections.

    Russian hackers are believed to have penetrated election computers in a number of states, though there is no evidence that vote counts were changed. And authorities say hackers with Kremlin ties engaged in a wide-ranging campaign to attack the computer systems of Democratic officials and spread misinformation on social media before and after the 2016 presidential election.

    Security experts are also worried that hackers operating out of Iran or Russia could renew their efforts to penetrate computer systems in the United States, including machines that operate critical infrastructure like the electric power grid.

    But other than that it’s no big deal.

  • Wrong target

    Oh honestly.

    Talk about tribalism, or groupthink, or living in a bubble, or whatever you want to call it. It takes some heavy duty ignorance of Obama not to realize that he has been saying this pretty much his whole life. It’s his theme. He annoyed colleagues at the Harvard Law Review when he was editor because he kept seeking out conservative contributions. It’s actually quite likely we’d be better off now if he’d been more of a street fighter for team slightly-left, but whether that’s true or not it’s absurd to claim he hasn’t urged listening to a wide range of opinion until just now.

  • A response to the fallout

    There was a huddle. They had a huddle to try to fix it. Even John Bolton was in the huddle.

    Top national security officials had huddled in the White House Situation Room on Tuesday to develop a response to the fallout. The meeting resulted in a determination that Trump would need to clarify his remarks. Top officials, including national security adviser John Bolton, were involved in crafting the statement that Trump delivered from the Cabinet Room.

    The President made some of his own additions to what his aides prepared; he scrawled in black marker that “THERE WAS NO COLLUSION” on one page.

    And “GUY IN BASEMUNT” on another.

    Earlier Tuesday, the President had offered a defiant rebuke of his critics, writing on Twitter:

    “While I had a great meeting with NATO, raising vast amounts of money, I had an even better meeting with Vladimir Putin of Russia.”

    “Sadly, it is not being reported that way – the Fake News is going Crazy!” he proclaimed.

    Thus undercutting his own attempt at a walk-back later in the day. Whatevs.

  • “I miththpoke”

    Oh come on.

    Reuters:

    U.S. President Donald Trump tried on Tuesday to calm a storm over his failure to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, saying he misspoke in a joint news conference in Helsinki.

    …

    “I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t,’” Trump told reporters at the White House, more than 24 hours after his appearance with Putin. “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’”

    Well of course it should have been, but it wasn’t.

    Although he faced pressure from critics, allied countries and even his own staff to take a tough line, Trump said not a single disparaging word in public about Moscow on any of the issues that have brought relations between the two nuclear powers to the lowest ebb since the Cold War.

    Republicans and Democrats accused him of siding with an adversary rather than his own country.

    Mainly reading from a prepared statement, Trump said on Tuesday he had complete faith in U.S. intelligence agencies and accepted their conclusions. But he appeared to veer from his script to also hedge on who was responsible for the election interference.

    “It could be other people also – there’s a lot of people out there,” he said.

    Like that guy in a basement. Remember him? He could have done it.

    Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump’s comments on Tuesday were another sign of weakness, particularly his statement that it “could be other people” responsible for the election meddling.

    “He made a horrible statement, tried to back off, but couldn’t even bring himself to back off,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “It shows the weakness of President Trump that he is afraid to confront Mr. Putin directly.”

    The weakest thing about him is his head.

  • Very very inspiring

    Trump gives a report on his trip.

    Fortunately his people wrote down the words for him, so that he could say them without having to think, but he had a hard time anyway, because he did have to read the words. He did it haltingly and clumsily, as if he were 6 years old and just starting out.

    He didn’t say about Russia in this clip. Maybe his people are waiting to release that part until…erm…the seas rise a little higher? Something explodes and we’re looking the other way? I don’t know; I’d quite like to see that part.

  • Getting along

    Trump’s presidential PR team has put out its official spin on the lovefest in Helsinki:

    Bold American diplomacy in Finland

    When President Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday, he continued a proud American tradition on the world stage. “From the earliest days of our republic, American leaders have understood that diplomacy and engagement is preferable to conflict and hostility,” the President said.

    America has no illusions when it comes to Russia. President Trump directly addressed the issue of Russian interference in U.S. elections with President Putin, and the Trump Administration has implemented a range of tough sanctions on Russian individuals and entities. “The disagreements between our two countries are well known,” President Trump said. “But if we’re going to solve many of the problems facing our world, then we’re going to have to find ways to cooperate.”

    The bottom line: Americans want peace, not conflict. “Nothing would be easier politically than to refuse to meet, to refuse to engage, but that would not accomplish anything. As president, I cannot make decisions on foreign policy in a futile effort to appease partisan critics,” President Trump said.

    “As the world’s two largest nuclear powers, we must get along!” President Trump tweeted.

    And by “get along” he means abject submission by the US president and smirking dominance by the Russian dictator.

  • Guest post: Anger depletion

    Guest post by Robert Ahrens.

    I wish I had some pithy, cool, smartass remarks to make about this week’s news.

    From the indictment of Russia’s intelligence operatives and the astonishing details of their actions coupled with those of the Trump campaign, including Trump himself, to the events of today, where the President of the United States stood up before the world, on live TV and told us he trusts the leader of our most powerful enemy more than he does our own Intelligence services, I am numb.

    I should be angry.

    I should be virtually speechless with anger, with enraged disgust, and with outraged fury at both the actions and words of the traitor who inhabits the White House AND the Republican Party who have and continue to refuse to hold this disgusting little man to account.

    But, somehow, I’m just numb.

    Perhaps its because I don’t see Congress, under the GOP, doing anything. Perhaps its because the checks and balances built into this system have failed and continue to fail due to the corruption and traitorous greed being shown by the leadership of the GOP, who have been enabled by the actions of the NRA, as enticed by the Russian money offered by that Russian redhead the DOJ indicted as a foreign agent today.

    Perhaps its because of the 40 some-odd percent of Americans who suck at the tit of the Republican Party and are so stupid they cannot see treason when it hits them upside the head with a baseball bat.

    Whichever reason, today, I’m just numb. I cannot feel anything but sadness and a kind of listless pain I cannot fully describe.

    This country has endured war, both civil and foreign, disease, famine, natural disaster, economic disaster, political disaster, and all sorts of other calamities for two hundred and forty-two years.

    When I started my Federal career, this country was two hundred years old. I spent 42 years and four months serving our government and you, the American taxpayer, in both military and civilian capacities. Today, I cry.

    There are people in prison today because they betrayed our country in various ways. In the past, our country has EXECUTED people for that crime. Today, I cry.

    Today, a wealthy man sits in the White House, guarded by our loyal and dedicated Secret Service agents tasked with the protection of the person who occupies the office of President of the United States. To see that, I cry more.

    He was elected through the actions of a foreign power with whom he and those under him colluded and plotted with to fraudulently ensure his success in gaining that office. Today, I cry.

    He has turned this country upside down through refusing to abide by both law and tradition in making this government work, refused to properly enforce the law, accepted emoluments from foreign governments as of the moment he took the oath of office, and today, has taken the side of a foreign dictator over the interests of the United States, in violation of both the Constitution and his Oath of Office.

    As of this evening, Pacific time, the GOP has done nothing.

    Oh, yeah, a few Republicans have displayed some form of complaint to the press.

    A few.

    If, by this time tomorrow, Congress has not seen the filing of at least one bill of Articles of Impeachment and actually advanced that legislation in serious intent, you can be certain that the GOP is most assuredly in cahoots with Trump and the Russians.

    …and this country is most assuredly screwed.

    I, for one, have no idea where this goes from here, but tonight, I’m just numb.

    If I didn’t have some form of cirrhosis from my overweight days, I’d go get drunk.

    Somebody cheer me up.

  • In plain sight

    Greg Sargent at the Post points out that Republicans are avoiding the core issue.

    They don’t acknowledge the intelligence services’ consensus view that the Russian sabotage effort was designed to elect Trump.

    …

    The Republican evasion on this is not just a political dodge to avoid offending Trump voters. It’s also substantively important. The big unknown right now is why Trump refuses to take Russian sabotage of our democracy seriously, at a time when our own intelligence officials say it will happen again. The easy answer that has been pushed by Republicans and some Trump loyalists is that the president doesn’t want to diminish the appearance of his victory’s legitimacy. It’s just a matter of ego and temperament. It’s just crazy Trump being crazy Trump.

    But as this Brian Beutler thread demonstrates, that explanation cracks up against the known facts. We all had good reason to suspect in real time that Russia was interfering, and Trump relished it, and even encouraged it, as it happened. Now that Mueller’s indictments have started fleshing out the fuller dimensions of this sabotage and its now-confirmed goal of electing Trump, this can no longer be about guarding appearances of legitimacy, because his current conduct makes that more suspect. The only conceivable explanation is that he was both perfectly happy to benefit from Russian interference and wants to obstruct/or and delegitimize the ferreting out of the truth.

    Ok so a mystery remains: if Trump badly wants to conceal the fact that Russia helped him get elected (despite having publicly encouraged them to do just that during the campaign) then why did he insist on that meeting with no one else present except the translators? Surely it can’t really be so that they could Discuss Their Cunning Plans…because surely they would have preferred a rather less visible way of doing that, and therefore would have come up with something.

    Unless it’s just that Trump is so stupid that that never occurred to him. Putin of course doesn’t need to care, because our intelligence services can’t do anything to him. Putin murders people right out in the open.

  • His mood soured

    Trump is surprised.

    I guess even though all his advisers told him he mustn’t do what he did, he thought everyone would be overjoyed anyway? Because…[????]

    President Donald Trump was upbeat immediately after his news conference with Vladimir Putin in Finland, but by the time he returned stateside on Monday evening, his mood had soured considerably amid sustained fury at his extraordinary embrace of the Russian leader.

    Well, to be fair, I don’t give a flying fuck what his mood is, I want to know when he’s going to resign in disgrace.

    He offered a defiant rebuke of his critics mid-Tuesday morning, writing on Twitter: “While I had a great meeting with NATO, raising vast amounts of money, I had an even better meeting with Vladimir Putin of Russia.”

    “Sadly, it is not being reported that way – the Fake News is going Crazy!” he proclaimed.

    Resignation. At once, please.

    Trump’s self-defense, however, was unlikely to quell the uproar caused by Monday’s news conference.

    The conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal declared the news conference “a personal and national embarrassment” for the President, asserting he’d “projected weakness.” Newt Gingrich, ordinarily a reliable voice of support, wrote on Twitter the remarks were “the most serious mistake of his presidency.”

    Immediately after his news conference, Trump’s mood was buoyant, people familiar with the matter said. He walked off stage in Helsinki with little inkling his remarks would cause the firestorm they did, and was instead enthusiastic about what he felt was a successful summit.

    How is that possible? How? It’s not as if he’s not aware of the Mueller investigation, to name just one clue that there would not be universal joy if he staged a lovefest with Vladimir Putin.

    He watched the telebision news on the plane ride home and he was upset, poor babby.

    He vented to Bill Shine and Stephen Miller, because that’s going to help a lot.

    He’s going to vent to the rest of us at 2 p.m. DC time so about 40 minutes from now. We can predict what he’ll say – good to have good relations with Russia, he did everything all by himself with his heroic mightyness, fake news, but her emails, where oh where oh where is that server.

  • Bang

    The Daily News:

    Image may contain: one or more people and text

  • Meanwhile

    The DOJ press release on the arrest of Maria Butina:

    A criminal complaint was unsealed today in the District of Columbia charging a Russian national with conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General.

    The announcement was made by Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie K. Liu, and Nancy McNamara, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

    Maria Butina, 29, a Russian citizen residing in Washington D.C., was arrested on July 15, 2018, in Washington, D.C., and made her initial appearance this afternoon before Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She was ordered held pending a hearing set for July 18, 2018.

    According to the affidavit in support of the complaint, from as early as 2015 and continuing through at least February 2017, Butina worked at the direction of a high-level official in the Russian government who was previously a member of the legislature of the Russian Federation and later became a top official at the Russian Central Bank.  This Russian official was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control in April 2018.

    The court filings detail the Russian official’s and Butina’s efforts for Butina to act as an agent of Russia inside the United States by developing relationships with U.S. persons and infiltrating organizations having influence in American politics, for the purpose of advancing the interests of the Russian Federation. The filings also describe certain actions taken by Butina to further this effort during multiple visits from Russia and, later, when she entered and resided in the United States on a student visa. The filings allege that she undertook her activities without officially disclosing the fact that she was acting as an agent of Russian government, as required by law.

    Lawfare has the criminal complaint and the affidavit in support of the criminal complaint.

    But don’t worry, Trump trusts his buddy Putin.

  • Prosecutors see what he did

    More reactions.

  • Where is the server?

    This. This part is just absolutely staggering. CNN:

    Russian President Vladimir Putin denied Russian interference in the 2016 US election. (Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies insist Russians did interfere.)

    Trump declined to endorse the US intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election, saying Putin was “extremely strong and powerful” in his denial.

    Instead, the US president repeatedly asked about the Democratic National Committee’s email server and Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

    Here’s the moment:

    So let me just say that we have two thoughts: You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months, and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying? …I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have — I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone, just gone.

    Ah but they cut it off too soon. There wasn’t a period after that “just gone,” only a very brisk comma, after which he went straight on to add “I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily.”

  • Unbelievable

    Oh christ. This one is so damning.  SO DAMNING.

  • What you are seeing right now in real time is treason

    More reactions:

  • The timing was exceptionally awkward

    The Times was live updating.

    Mr. Trump refused to say that he believed American intelligence agencies’ findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 United States election, as a news conference where international affairs were expected to dominate turned again and again to the president’s domestic political troubles. The timing was exceptionally awkward, just days after the Justice Department indicted 12 Russian intelligence agents on charges of hacking the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in an attempt to aid Mr. Trump.

    For “exceptionally awkward” read “treasonous.”

    Asked whether he believes his own intelligence agencies, which say that Russia interfered in the 2016 United States election, or Mr. Putin, who denies it, Mr. Trump refused to say, but he expressed doubt about whether Russia was to blame.

    It’s rather as if Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940.

    Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, and other American intelligence officials “said they think it’s Russia,” Mr. Trump said. “I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

    Emphasis added.

    But when asked directly whom he believes, Mr. Trump changed the subject to misconduct by Democrats during the campaign.

    The president’s ambivalence, after the indictments of Russian intelligence agents for the election hacking, and after the findings of congressional committees, represents a remarkable divergence between Mr. Trump and the American national security apparatus.

    For “remarkable divergence between Mr. Trump and the American national security apparatus” read “treason.”

    “I addressed directly with President Putin the issue of Russian interference in our elections,” Mr. Trump said. “I felt this was a matter best discussed in person. President Putin may very well want to address it, and very strongly, because he feels very strongly about it, and he has an interesting idea.”

    Ah yes, best discussed in person, between a ruthless murderous former KGB operative and an ignorant reckless toddler.

    Mr. Trump began the day of the meeting by blaming the United States for its poor relationship with Russia, casting aspersions on the federal investigation into Moscow’s cyberattack on the 2016 presidential election, even as he said he felt “just fine” about meeting with Mr. Putin.

    In a pair of tweets sent on Monday before he headed for breakfast at Mantyniemi Palace, a residence of the Finnish president, Mr. Trump twice branded the special counsel investigation into Russia’s election interference the “Rigged Witch Hunt.”

    That investigation, and “many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity,” he wrote, are why the United States’ relationship with Russia “has NEVER been worse” — a bold claim, given that the history includes periods like the Cuban missile crisis, and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

    For “bold” read “treasonous.”

    Mr. Trump reiterated the point in his prepared remarks at the news conference with Mr. Putin, saying: “Our relationship has never been worse than it is now. However, that changed as of about four hours ago. I really believe that.”

    Image result for chamberlain peace in our time

    Asked at the news conference if he held Russia at all responsible for conflict with the United States, Mr. Trump said: “Yes, I do, I hold both countries responsible. I think the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish.”

    But he did not cite a single specific thing Russia had done to contribute to tensions. And as he often does, Mr. Trump pivoted from the question that was asked to declaring his innocence of collusion with Russian election meddling, and boasting about his electoral victory.

    “That was a clean campaign,” he said. “I beat Hillary Clinton easily and frankly we beat her. We won that race and it’s a shame that there can even be a little bit of a cloud over it. The main thing and we discussed this also: zero collusion.”

    “There was no collusion,” he added. “I didn’t know the president. There was nobody to collude with.”

    For “no collusion” read “treason.”

  • Everyone is numb and in shock

    Reactions to the Trump-Putin press conference:

    https://twitter.com/RogueSNRadvisor/status/1018895593958019073

    https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1018891344520142848

    In plain sight.