Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

This blog will pay for itself.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

This really is a full service blog.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

So many bastards, so little time.

The willow is too close to the house.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Innocent people do not delay justice.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

We still have time to mess this up!

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

You are here: Home / Politics / America / The Maskirovka Slips XIII: A Few Thoughts

The Maskirovka Slips XIII: A Few Thoughts

by | 168 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , , ,

In the comments to the Maskirovka Slips XI post, PJ wrote:

Even a Putin critic like Masha Gessen has claimed that Russophobia is behind the allegations connecting Trump with the Russians, and that there’s nothing to see here, folks.

This is a good point to raise and something to keep in mind as everything continues to play out. My guess is that PJ was referencing this article by Gessen at The NY Review of Books. Gessen’s essential thesis is that:

Russia has become the universal rhetorical weapon of American politics. Calls for the release of Trump’s tax returns—which the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hopes to have subpoenaed as a result of its lawsuit alleging the violation of the Emoluments Clause—are now framed in terms of the need to reveal Trump’s financial ties to Russia. And the president himself is recapturing the campaign debate’s “No, you are the puppet” moment on Twitter, trying to smear Democratic politicians Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi with Russia.

The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him. If that happens, it will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community—setting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome.

And that this almost unrelenting focus is obscuring equally, if not more important matters:

Imagine if the same kind of attention could be trained and sustained on other issues—like it has been on the Muslim travel ban. It would not get rid of Trump, but it might mitigate the damage he is causing. Trump is doing nothing less than destroying American democratic institutions and principles by turning the presidency into a profit-making machine for his family, by poisoning political culture with hateful, mendacious, and subliterate rhetoric, by undermining the public sphere with attacks on the press and protesters, and by beginning the real work of dismantling every part of the federal government that exists for any purpose other than waging war. Russiagate is helping him—both by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.

Gessen has likely forgotten more about Putin and how he operates than most people will ever know, and I doubt she’s forgotten much if anything. And her concerns and caveats are important to keep in mind going forward. However, I think her concerns, as rooted in her excellent column on autocracy from November 2016, are also missing something: the overwhelming, open source reporting and documentation about the connection between the President, his business the Trump Organization, his children, and both senior and peripheral members of his campaign, his transition, and now his Administration with Russian government officials, Russians connected to Russian Intelligence – formally and informally, Russian oligarchs tied to Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian Oligarchs tied to Vladimir Putin, and people – Russian and non-Russian tied to Russian organized crime.

As I’ve been stating here, and Malcolm Nance has been tweeting and stating on a variety of news platforms:

And, to quote Ian Fleming, as many have:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.

As Evan McMullin tweeted:

While I think it is important to keep Gessen’s concerns in mind, we have significant amounts of circumstantial evidence as a result of open source reporting and documentation. What we don’t have, what we don’t really know, is what the material that the Interagency Counterintelligence (CI) Task Force investigating all of this has. And here, I think, is where some of Gessen’s concerns begin to break down: a lot of the leaking hasn’t been anything that wasn’t either already known in the open source reporting and documentation for those that knew where to look or were looking and/or were intended as warning shots across various people’s bows. For instance, the leaks about Attorney General Sessions were the latter. They were intended to put him on notice that if he tried to muck about with the CI investigation the next shot wouldn’t be for range, it would be for effect. And to his credit, AG Sessions was smart enough to recognize this and recused himself.

As I’ve written here before, several times:

As a national security professional, what I would like to see is the President-elect address the now long standing and ongoing allegations regarding his connection to Russia. If the allegations are spurious, as he and his team have claimed every time they’ve come up, or if there is a straightforward and simple explanation that can be made, he needs to make it. I think a lot of the foreign, defense, and national security policy concerns that many across the political spectrum have with the President-elect’s longstanding policy preferences dating back to 1987 arise from all of the smoke around the claims of Russian connections and interference for Russia’s, not the US’s, not the President-elect’s, interests.

The sooner the President-elect and his team can either provide evidence for why the allegations and rumors are spurious or provide a simple and straightforward explanation for the seeming preference for Russia and the abandonment of the post WW II and post Cold War international order the better.

Unfortunately we’ve reached a point where I’m not sure a straightforward and simple explanation can be made. The circumstantial evidence we’re all able to review from the open source reporting and documentation seems to have obliterated that possibility. Yesterday several of the surviving members of the investigative reporting team that included the late Wayne Barrett provided even greater details and granularity into the Trump Organizations connections to Russian organized crime via Felix Sater and Sater’s ties to the Department of Justice and the FBI, specifically the New York Field Office. Today WNYC reported on some of Paul Manafort’s real estate transactions that appear to follow the same patterns as those done to launder money. These stories broke almost at the same time as Richard Engel’s reporting on Manafort’s financial dealings in Cyprus, USA Today‘s reporting on the Trump Organizations alleged ties to Russian and other state’s organized crime,* The New Yorker‘s multiple reports, and Michael Issikoff’s reporting on the ongoing mess that Congressman Nunes’ actions and statements have made of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. This includes functionally shutting the committee down so that the House of Representatives no longer conducts oversight of the US Intelligence Community given that all future business of the committee has now been postponed indefinitely.

For those of us that have been following these things for a while, a lot of this wasn’t new, surprising, or both. And that’s really why I think Gessen’s caveats and concerns are important to keep in mind, but that she is also missing the forest for the trees. There is just too much coincidence here. The US Intelligence Community does not form Interagency Counterintelligence investigations willy nilly. Nor do judges approve FISA warrants for spurious or frivolous reasons. I honestly have no idea where all this will lead. And I do agree with Gessen and others that even if these investigations ultimately demonstrate actual connections and collusions between the President’s campaign and the Russians which given how things have been intertwined under Putin basically includes the Russian government, Russian intelligence, Russian oligarchs, and Russian organized crime, we may not see the resolution that many are hoping for. These connections are all linked together, which also makes unravelling this ball of yarn difficult. Part of the problem going forward is exactly why we have been in a Constitutional crisis for months. It is unclear which, if any, of the institutional protections and remedies that the Constitution delineates actually could be used to resolve what we have been watching slowly unfold since last Summer when the leaks of hacked DNC, DSCC, DCC, and John Podesta emails began to trickle out. If there is nothing to see here, as Gessen attests, then there certainly is a whole lot of a very specific type of nothing** all around the President, his family, his business, his campaign, his transition, and his Administration.

* The Who, What, Why?, USA Today, and WYNC reporting are not actually breaking news. They do provide substantially more details about things that have been previously reported, documented, and/or known.

** And this nothing doesn’t even get into financial ties between the President and PRC state owned banks, which are facially violations of the emoluments clause as a result of the President’s failure to properly and fully divest from his business.

Reader Interactions

168Comments

  1. 1.

    cain

    You need to give a proper tl;dir. Do we get outraged or not, Adam! Not everyone can appreciate all the details. But from what I can glean, there isn’t enough information to determine Russia’s role in all of this.

  4. 4.

    Omnes Omnibus

    she is also missing the forest for the trees. There is just to [sic] much coincidence here.

    Aye, there’s the rub.

  8. 8.

    Lyrebird

    Not trying to be picky, genuinely want to know what you intended to follow this “even if”, bc I think some of the sentence you composed is missing:

    And I do agree with Gessen and others that even if these investigations ultimately demonstrate actual connections… which…

  9. 9.

    BBA

    I don’t think we ever find out the truth, or if we do it’s after everyone involved is dead and buried.

    If the President does it, it’s not illegal.

  10. 10.

    piratedan

    it will be interesting to see how the GOP acts in request to Nunes ouster. If they still think that he’s a viable chairperson to lead this organization, is it a sign that the leadership is complicit or a case of IOKIYAR and they have a free pass to do as they wish and there are no lines as far as conduct or ethical conflict is concerned?

  11. 11.

    Davis X. Machina

    …there isn’t enough information to determine Russia’s role in all of this.

    There are an awful lot of footprints going into the cave.
    And there aren’t any footprints coming out.

    Not that this means there’s a bear in the cave, mind you
    Could just be a kegger they’re having in there.

  12. 12.

    BruceFromOhio

    Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.

    Three makes a pattern you can repeat to see if it occurs more than thrice. It’s a great paradigm for solving software problems – if you can make it happen three times or more, then you’ve got something tangible that can be tracked.

    For example, the lack of balls on Republican Congressman has been proven repeatedly.

  14. 14.

    Lyrebird

    Probably dumb-sounding question, but probably easy for Adam or other legal experts here to answer:

    If an ordinary US citizen writes a letter to an embassy official of another country, would that be breaking the same kind of law that the new administration folks may have broken by being in contact w/Russian gov’t officials?

    For instance, what if I write a letter of apology and send it to the German embassy, expressing my regret and embarrassment regarding that NATO “bill” that was handed to Ch. Merkel? Would that be against the rules?

  15. 15.

    Adam L Silverman

    @amk: I don’t know. The reason is that Director Comey’s testimony indicates the CI investigation began around July 2016. But the criminal investigations revolving around Felix Sater as an informant have been going on for years. So there is some murkiness in timelines depending on what side of this mess you’re looking at. And, because we do routine collection on Russian diplomats and other Russian governmental assets, you don’t have to do specific collection. You have to go back and ask for formal FISA permission to unmask completed collection, to search phone call intercepts/transcripts and emails, that may have the information that is being sought.

  18. 18.

    PhoenixRising

    But Gessen’s point is that the Russian conspiracy theories are irrelevant. There’s plenty to see here, and it’s all right out in the open. The ball of yarn doesn’t really need to be untangled to identify the crisis in our system, and in some ways the details of HOW we ended up where we are are less important than WHAT we can do about it.

    There’s something about the sunk cost fallacy here that if I were cold sober I’d probably be able to unbraid, but bottom line, where are the pressure points on a unified GOP to get compliance with both laws and norms from a rogue executive? is a more important question than Where did Manafort get the bags of Benjamins he laundered with ca$h real estate transactions?*

    *Answer is ‘Russian mob’, but honestly who cares, it’s the money laundering…

  22. 22.

    Davis X. Machina

    My personal fascination is with the non-trivial slice of people on the left who insist that this is simply a whole lot of fraternal-greetings-and-peaceful-cooperation-between-peoples-ing, that’s all being willfully misconstrued by the Scoop Jackson[1] wing of the party, who just hate peace and friendship.

    [1] You young people, find an old, and ask them who this “Scoop Jackson” guy was.

  27. 27.

    cmorenc

    One of the most curious of the “too much coincidence” elements is the meeting Jarad Kushner had with Sergey Gorkov, chairman of VneshEconomBank (VEB), a Russian state bank controlled by Putin, which has been under US sanctions for three years – VEB said the meeting was in reference to Kushner’s role as head of Kushner Companies about real estate, and not as Kushner/Trump Admin claim as transition point man to meet with foreign leaders. There’s never been an incoming Administration with even a fraction of the close Russian connections as various members of Trump’s Administration seem to have.

  28. 28.

    Mike J

    @Davis X. Machina: Jill Stein, leader of the Greens, tweeted about how mean people are being to Putey-poot, and not a word about Trump gutting enviro regs, which one would think might interest Greens.

  29. 29.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Lyrebird: You’ll get, at most, a polite reply, by the embassy’s public affairs office.

    One of my favorites was a middle schooler, back in, I think the mid 80s, who was working on a term paper on Lenin. He wrote to the Russian Embassy in DC asking for information. The embassy’s public affairs officer wrote a polite letter back informing the student that he could not be of help because the Russian government had no information on John Lennon. The student had misspelled Lenin’s name. Who says apparatchik’s don’t have a sense of humor.

  30. 30.

    Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho

    @Adam L Silverman: Full marks for range and effect. And I understand how people who haven’t been obsessed with these reports following this since the fall may wonder what all the fuss is about, and whether anything will happen. The twitter beefs are heating up (Louise Mensch called Nance an uninformed dude who uses a ghostwriter tonight), so things could be happening quicker behind the scenes. Personally, I listen to Nance, Schindler (that asshole) and the Jester for what I believe is information from reliable sources, but Mensch did report the FISA stuff first. Probably because the pros chose not to do so. So she does hear things, and she is a dot connector.

    Patience is required as CI investigations take as long as they take. The pros are suggesting “soon.”

    But I *still* don’t have the fucking risotto recipe. Sad! #menu crisis

  31. 31.

    Major Major Major Major

    My take on Gessen’s warnings is that she’s writing as a creature of the media and responding to its excesses, not to the often real and sometimes even well-sourced kinds of allegations that we like to talk about around here. There is a great deal of stupid out there on every topic and she’s responding to the part of it that’s related to the Russia scandal. I see the stuff in question on Facebook and other places and the problem she describes is real, but you might think she’s overreacting if you didn’t spend your days mired in the Trump-Russia-media world.

  32. 32.

    Lyrebird

    @Adam L Silverman: Ah, yes – thanks! FWIW when I tell my students to visit their school’s writing center, it’s not because the advice they get will necessarily be useful, but finding those “oops did not get that from brain to keyboard yet” gaps is very useful indeed.

    Thanks again for sharing these insights.

  33. 33.

    Chet Murthy

    Ehhh, I’m unconvinced by Masha Gessen’s argument. We all knows he’s
    (a) a fraud
    (b) a rapist
    (c) a grifter
    (d) a white supremacist
    (e) an authoritarian
    AND (f) a Russian agent

    But we ALSO know that (a)-(e) are going to convince PRECISELY NOBODY amongst his supporters. PRECISELY NOBODY. We’re simply -hoping- that some of his supporters have a scintilla of patriotism in their pustulent souls, and can be convinced to exercise that patriotism in defense of our country.

    Yeah, I’d prefer to get him on all the rest. But it ain’t happenin’. It ain’t happenin. Or at least, not until after he’s destroyed so much, that his gibbering hordes actually fall out of love with him. That’s a long, long time to wait, and lotta damage.

    The only way this ends soon, is if he’s exposed as a Putin stooge. And as Adam has noted, “soon” in CI terms is a long time. If it ain’t that, we’re talkin’ 2020, minimum.

  34. 34.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mike J: I hadn’t. The whole thing is ridiculous. Yes, technically, the Secretary of State sits on the board that approves these decisions. But ultimately State didn’t have the final say and doesn’t control the board. And, as far as anyone has been able to tell, Secretary Clinton wasn’t even in attendance when this was discussed. The standard operating procedure is for a deputy to be sent.

  38. 38.

    Lyrebird

    @Omnes Omnibus: Hey good. I’m guessing that writing as a random citizen w/o promising anything ought to be different than calling up offering political concessions.

    @Adam L Silverman: Oh the Lenin/Lennon retort is excellent. Not every day you can decline to do someone’s homework for them in quite such style.

  40. 40.

    Timurid

    They seriously think that they can brazen this out for as long as it takes.
    We’re not all that far from people in positions of power asking, unironically. about how many divisions the Washington Post, DNC, CIA, or any other inconvenient organization has…

  41. 41.

    piratedan

    @Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho: isn’t Louise one of those that travels in Griftwald’s circle? If so, I would be incredibly leery of what she writes simply because GG has been a very convenient tool for the Russians in the past, i.e. the whole Snowden deal. if anything, she may be placing herself to discredit those that are attempting to unravel the threads.

  42. 42.

    Adam L Silverman

    @cmorenc: There is absolutely no legitimate reason for Kushner to be doing financial/corporate business with VEB. VEB is well known as a front for Russian Intelligence (RIS) and is tied to the Bratva. The only reason you do business with them is if you can’t get funding from more legitimate banks.

  43. 43.

    Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho

    @Omnes Omnibus: It’s much easier than people will have you believe, just slightly labor intensive and requires short grain (Arborio is the easiest to find). But I still don’t have Podesta’s recipe, and everyone else seems to. #menu crisis

  49. 49.

    Chet Murthy

    @Timurid: Here’s a possible guess: I don’t think she quite understands the virulence of the prion disease infecting the Rs and esp. their RWNJ sub-population. I don’t think she *gets* how difficult it is to convince them of basic facts that are well-understood and proven everywhere else in the world.

    And perhaps, b/c she’s of Russian extraction, she sees the Russian story in the news stream as dominating the other stories. Whereas, those of us who grew up in the US (and aren’t prion-infected) can see all the other stories too, can see that they’re being pushed (and can see that they’re falling on deaf ears over in the R camp).

  50. 50.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    @BBA:

    I might go along with this, only this crew is so cataclysmically, abysmally, spectacularly incompetent that I don’t think there’s any way they can keep this shit buried for too long. I mean, Jesus Christ. Donald trump as a criminal mastermind? Bannon? Priebus? Kushner? Nunes? These clowns are pathetic. None of these zeroes are remotely smart enough to keep from stepping on their own dicks here.

  52. 52.

    Adam L Silverman

    @piratedan: No, she’s not. She seems to have good sources. The issue with her writing is likely not her sources, or even the way she is connecting the information. Rather it is the conclusions she draws. But here too, as with so much else, we will have to wait and see. She does seem to close on ideas very, very quickly and she does seem to like to pick fights with those who are in general agreement with her, and have far greater expertise, over drawing different conclusions.

  53. 53.

    Trabb's Boy

    Ultimately and cynically, I think this is all about the story. Trump is violating the emoluments clause right and left. He has openly committed numerous acts of corruption that would warrant impeachment in a world where politicians put country over party. None of that matters a whit to republicans in or out of office. The advantage of Russia is that it is a puzzle, a mystery, a 14-episode miniseries with cliffhangers, ominous portents and the promise of a big, appalling reveal. It is captivating to anyone paying attention, so it makes news, which gets more people intrigued, then outraged. It doesn’t matter if there is a big reveal at the end. What matters is getting people to pay attention to what a crook he is, and nurturing that attention with well-spaced reveals. It is the only thing that could possibly create a groundswell of anger among the public that could pry the grifter nazi out of power.

  54. 54.

    Davis X. Machina

    Anyone else remember Koreagate?

    Similar in shape, if not in scale or signficance.

    Though it was a political scandal at the time, and raised serious questions concerning the loyalty of Members of Congress who would accept bribes from a foreign government, Koreagate had surprisingly few and small long-term consequences, especially when compared to the Watergate scandal.

    (Wikipedia)

  56. 56.

    Millard Filmore

    @Timurid:

    We’re not all that far from people in positions of power asking, unironically. about how many divisions the Washington Post, DNC, CIA, or any other inconvenient organization has…

    That makes an assumption that the world outside of our borders takes no action in response to an overthrow of the Constitution. There will not be an invasion by the EU, for instance, but every multinational company will instantly go to “cash and carry”. Our credit will be no good for many years. We are one of those Too Big To Fail monsters. When we go down, everyone goes down.

  58. 58.

    Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho

    @Adam L Silverman: Oh hell’s bells. I saw that email and that’s a known thing. Kind of basic, like the whole point of the labor. I thought he had some kick ass combination of roasted red peppers and artichokes with blanched slivered garlic and toasted mushrooms, with some precision combination of grated cheese at the finish or something.

    I appreciate your effort in clearing up my confusion. Thanks!

    @Omnes Omnibus: Good plan, and understood.

    @Adam L Silverman: Well now I know. Thank you.

  60. 60.

    different-church-lady

    @Mike J:

    Jill Stein, leader of the Greens Jill Stein’s Ego…

    And the Greens still can’t figure out why they’re not getting any traction anywhere.

  61. 61.

    Chet Murthy

    @BBA:

    The right loves Putin, he’s a manly leader who gets what he wants, unlike those liberal cucks.

    Yes, a lotta people on the Right love Putin. But it doesn’t take very many to literally put country over party, for this chapter of the nightmare to end. And I claim (perhaps in error) that none of the other accusations (a)-(e) have this character. None of them have the character of literally putting the country and our position in the world at risk.

    Look: I’m not saying that (f) is a great bet. But it’s a dam’ sight better than all the others put together. We *know* this already. So it’s either (f), or ready ourselves for civil war. B/c in 2020, the Dems may not be able to fight back — gerrymandering and voter suppression may have done for us.

  62. 62.

    lollipopguild

    @BBA: Trump is president because HE lied his ass off to the voters. He made all kinds of promises that he will not be able to deliver on. He also had no problem being a 100% public Racist and promising to get rid of all of “those people” that white racists want to run out of the country.

  63. 63.

    JerryN

    It’s possible that some of the threads are unconnected. For instance, the Trumps and Kushners have been dependent on questionable Russian and Ukranian sources for financing. So it could well be the case that some of the post-election contacts have been about sweetening the terms of those deals in exchange for political favors. These may be unrelated to contacts involving Manafort, Flynn, etc. during the campaign. I’m not saying that there’s nothing there, rather that there could be several somethings – each of which is a cause for concern.

  68. 68.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    @BBA: Because he’s good at some things. he’s good at getting small people to believe he cares about them. It’s no small skill, it’s true, and he rode it to the presidency, but let’s not forget what kind of help he had. He didn’t do this by himself. He got the nomination by bullying a lot of smaller bullies who could have banded together to beat the shit out of him, but each one was waiting for some other dumb fuck to take the first swing before piling on in with them. Once he got nominated, he had an awful lot of help from the party, from the press, from Russia, from Comey and even from Clinton herself at times. He isn’t some mental powerhouse.

  70. 70.

    jl

    @JerryN: Possible, plausible, maybe even probable. But so what? Suppose Trump has not personally on some kind of Russian payroll. But he has been floated by Russian gangster and oligarch money for years, and therefore has been surrounded by people who are even more deeply invested in Russian cash flows of dubious provenance, and very likely on the payroll. Who exactly is paying, in the sense or writing the checks, is a mystery, could be Putin himself through Russian government controlled banks, or could be oligarchs or sleazy gangsters. That is still foreign influence on government policy.

    My only concern is that some think the scandal is helped by hyping Russia the country and people into a mortal enemy of the US, as if we were at war, or have irreconcilable difference of interests. That is not true, witness the brave protests in Russia over last day or two. The problem is the direction Putin has taken the Russian government and society through antidemocratic and autocratic policies.

    But I disagree with Gessen completely that concern is overblown or this is some kid of US IC coups. It just isn’t. Too many news reports on Trump’s Russian connections going back for years, and certainly fairly early in the 2016 election campaign.

  71. 71.

    Ruckus

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    None of these zeroes are remotely smart enough to keep from stepping on their own dicks here.

    What makes that bad is that they also play golf. Ever see what golf shoes can do to flesh? From an old line – “He’s so (insert incompetent, stupid, clumsy, etc) that he’d step on his own dick with golf shoes on.”

  73. 73.

    Ruckus

    @BBA:

    If he’s so dumb, how come he’s President?

    1. It ain’t because he’s smart.
    2. The fucking morons who voted for him know less than he does.
    3. Racism

  75. 75.

    MikeBoyScout

    @Adam L Silverman: she’s Russian with a particularly Russian cultural perspective on “news”. It’s a narrower perspective. One that , not only doesn’t take leaps, but argues against taking them. Totally usual for intelligentsia of her generation.

    Disclosure: we’re aquatinted, albeit not close

  76. 76.

    Adam L Silverman

    Didn’t one of you all claim you went to college with Pence? And that he had to publicly pray for guidance as to whether it was okay to date his now wife because she’d been divorced and might be a corrupted woman or something? Or am I just remembering wrong?

  77. 77.

    jl

    @Mike J: Trouble in dither city. Which rhymes with G. Especially on TV.

    Trump was watching golf on TV. What more do we need to know. Ban it.

  78. 78.

    danielx

    Observations…

    1. Felix Sater knows way too much for his own good; there seem to be a lot of people who would be better off if the information in his head was separated from his body.
    2. What Devin Nunes has been promised by Trump, or whatever hold Trump has on him…isn’t going to be enough. Nunes doesn’t have enough fingers for the leaks.

  79. 79.

    Anonymous patient

    Adam,

    Great piece… but I saw a typo, where you say “those that new” where you should say “those that knew…”.

    JR

  80. 80.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Adam L Silverman:

    The only reason you do business with them is if you can’t get funding from more legitimate banks.

    And this right here is key. Donald is a known shithead to every bank in the Tri-State area, and across the country. He can’t get loans, because he’s got a record of not repaying and then declaring bankruptcy and leaving the banks holding the bag. He carefully insulates his actual assets from seizure. He is a pariah in NYC. So he goes overseas, looking for new marks.

    He may have made his final mistakes with the Russians and the Chinese.

  81. 81.

    Ruckus

    @jl:
    It ain’t close to dangerous. If it was it would be less boring. I worked in professional sports for 11 yrs, an extreme professional sport. Dangerous as fuck, even as we tried to make if far less dangerous. Not boring, not in the least. Golf isn’t close to dangerous. Maybe it’s a bit risky to play in a thunder storm. Or to stand in front of the tee. (If I’m playing, anything within 180 deg of in front or less than 100 yards is risky. Had a friend who only had one arm, he was less risky to be near playing golf than me. And better, damn him, may he RIP.)

  83. 83.

    Yarrow

    For instance, the leaks about Attorney General Sessions were the latter. They were intended to put him on notice that if he tried to muck about with the CI investigation the next shot wouldn’t be for range, it would be for effect. And to his credit, AG Sessions was smart enough to recognize this and recused himself.

    What exactly did he recuse himself from? The investigations into the campaign connections to Russia only? All Trump/Russia connections? Something else?

    And how is this enforced? He’s the top guy. How is he kept in the dark? Sessions is in deep with the Russians and lied about it. What’s to keep him from lying about not checking out what’s happening with the investigations?

  84. 84.

    patrick II

    Gessen:

    Imagine if the same kind of attention could be trained and sustained on other issues—like it has been on the Muslim travel ban.

    I have, and spreading fascism in Europe and here, and the breakup of NATO, and the heightened attacks on Ukraine, and probably others down the road is NATO is weakened, rank pretty high on my list as important matters.

  85. 85.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    Masha Gessen is suffering from her own experience as a Russian refugee.

    She simultaneously overestimates Trump’s ability to turn America into a kleptocratic autocracy (like Putin’s Russia) and underestimates the nefariousness of the ties between Trump Camp and her home country.

    This is probably because everything in Russia is one conspiracy theory or another meant to distract attention away from Putin’s agenda, and the press there has no chance of ever convincing the public that any one of them is accurate (especially since most of them are not).

    I heard her give a talk about how Trump would be like Putin, only holding one press conference, jailing reporters, cracking down on protesters, etc…..so far hasn’t panned out. What *has* panned out is that Trump & Co. are neck deep in Russian business dealings and collusion to leak stolen emails to win an election. That’s the story that will bring him down, and she fundamentally misunderstands the American electorate and political system or else she’d see it.

  86. 86.

    Adam L Silverman

    @MikeBoyScout: Tracking. She has deep knowledge and expertise that is very important. I just think it is important, hence the post, to draw some wider, though still careful parameters and to explain why as other people are using what she’s writing, or taking what she’s writing, as a justification to say there’s no here here.

  88. 88.

    JerryN

    @jl: My point was that this could be several scandals and that trying to tie them all together into one overarching narrative can lead people into making claims that not only don’t pan out, but can be turned around and used as cover for dismissing the legitimate claims. Each of these scandals is enough on its own to merit independent investigations and potentially impeachment and criminal proceedings if enough evidence is uncovered.

  89. 89.

    Villago Delenda Est

    (From the Twitter machine)
    @AndrewBerkshire

    When DC Comics made Lex Luthor president, he sold LexCorp. Trump is literally less ethical than a comic book villain.
    8:07 PM – 26 Mar 2017

  91. 91.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Villago Delenda Est: What’s more confounding is that the Russians are claiming that this was about Kushner’s real estate business, not the President’s. I get the NY/NJ real estate and development business often means the questions asked are: 1) is the money green? 2) Is it counterfeit? No and no. Alright then, we’re good to go! But this type of thing, coming so closely on the heels of the reports of Chinese state banks not just bailing out his borderline investment in Manhattan, but so overdoing the bail out as to raise both of everyone’s eyebrows, just makes me shake my head.

  92. 92.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Yarrow: Compartmenting the information and the investigation. Why do you think Director Comey and VADM Rogers cancelled their appearance before the HPSCI? Because they don’t believe that what they brief the committee members in closed session won’t be leaked by Congressman Nunes.

  94. 94.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Yarrow: Also, given that then Senator Session is tied to Richard Burt and the two of them are responsible for bringing Carter Page into the campaign, the warning shot was high and inside. It was a way of telling him: do anything to mess with this and the next leak will do far, far, far more damage.

  95. 95.

    efgoldman

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Zee money, follow zee money!

    I wonder if Schneiderman (the NY AG) is running his own, quiet investigation into the financial mishegas. He doesn’t need congress, the DOJ, or the FBI; he (his office) can do it on his own

  96. 96.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman: I guess I missed they’d canceled their appearance. Not the public one they had last week, but another one.

    Nunes appears to be a mole. I wonder if there’s more than one on the committee.

  97. 97.

    Bupalos

    Adam I think you are significantly misreading Ms. geffen’s point here. While she has slipped into “conspiracy theory” language at points, I don’t think she is at all saying that it is unlikely that Trump and his cadre are indictable, or that they are free of what should be politically disqualifying ties to a foreign adversary. I think she’s continuing to make a completely different point. Which is that none of the things that are hidden (supposing there is a there there) are likely as bad as the things that are there in the open. That by running down this alley, needing to find the secret bad thing, we may be inadvertently bolstering the validity of the obvious and open bad things. Ultimately this may be an impulse to deny that these things are American. Its a subtle point, but one that is dawning on me as critical, brilliant, and potentially much needed.

    None of it means that Trump’s corruption shouldn’t be investigated or that it can’t yield political value. But stop a minute. This guy just installed the CEO of Exxon as our secretary of state. He’s empowering family members within the executive. He’s railing on religions and ethnicities as the subversive enemies in our midst. What is it we’re turning over rocks looking for to show he’s not innocent again?

  99. 99.

    efgoldman

    @Timurid:

    They seriously think that they can brazen this out for as long as it takes.

    That’s what Trickie Dicksie Nixie and the Gang That couldn’t Shoot Straight (h/t Breslin) thought, too.
    Yes, these things take time. I need to keep reminding you Grasshoppers that Watergate break-in to Tricksie on the helicopter was more than two years. At this stage (roughly August of ’72) nobody had publicly connected anybody in the WH or CREEP to the burglars.
    And now, there are all kinds of digital bread crumbs for people to follow that didn’t even exist then.

  100. 100.

    Adam L Silverman

    @MikeBoyScout: Also, please pass on my compliments on her book on Putin. I have had time to get too far into it yet, and I’m still working through Darwisha’s as well, but it is very interesting and well done.

  102. 102.

    danielx

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Zee money, follow zee money!

    Particularly when dealing with Trump, because in the end it’s always about money with Trump.

    And ego, mustn’t forget ego.

    Been reading that article in whowhatwhy.org, and I think my brain is going to explode. So far it’s just been Russians who have been defenestrated, poisoned, shot, etc., but if I were any of the reporters involved in that article I’d be running a mirror under my care before I got in it, and not walking under any ladders. Of course, that could go for a great many of the actors involved, from reporters to Sater to Sally Yates.

  103. 103.

    RandomMonster

    Did I misread DougJ in an earlier thread saying Mensch’s “fever dreams” are “likely wrong”? The suspicions were obvious to me the moment that Trump’s goons pushed to change the Republican platform to include a neutral stance on Russian aggression in Ukraine.

  104. 104.

    Bupalos

    @Adam L Silverman: its all open source perhaps, but as yet there is no smoking gun. I think geffen’s point is simply that we are ignoring a Forrest of smoking guns looking for a smoking gun that is plausibly less American, and hence less troubling.

    Putin did it.

    No. We did it. Putin may have helped.

  105. 105.

    patroclus

    Back in 1946, the U.S. (mostly via Congress) spent a LOT of time investigating the attack on Pearl Harbor – it dominated the news cycle for months and eventually produced a report that kind of sorta blamed it on Kimmel and Short, kinda sorta blamed it on FDR and various elements within his administration and mostly just accepted that Japan was responsible (which was pretty much what everyone believed as of 12/7/41). Yes, like Gessen suggests, perhaps the media should have spent all that time focusing on present or future problems, but the Pearl Harbor investigation was actually very important because it informed the citizenry about a major attack perpetrated on the U.S. and provided a lot of detail about so that we could understand it historically. Churchill opposed the very idea (especially the part about breaking Japan’s codes), Truman and the then-administration didn’t like it, but Sam Rayburn (a Democrat) allowed it and even facilitated it. He didn’t go around trying to cover it up or defend his friend FDR – he let the facts fall where they may.

    The Russian investigation is similarly important because it represents an attack on our democracy. It HAS to be looked into – regardless of whether Trump and his associates like it. And even if it doesn’t result in any indictments or charges or impeachment – which it probably won’t – doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done or that the media shouldn’t spend time obsessing on it. That it serves as the current means by which criticism of Trump can revolve around is incidental but the way Trump and his minions are reacting to it is ridiculous and makes them look guilty of something regardless of whether they actually are. They should stop trying to obscure it; they should adopt a cooperative attitude and Nunes and some of the Republicans should stop acting like Trump’s defense lawyers and fluffers.

  106. 106.

    Yarrow

    @danielx:

    So far it’s just been Russians who have been defenestrated, poisoned, shot, etc., but if I were any of the reporters involved in that article I’d be running a mirror under my care before I got in it, and not walking under any ladders. Of course, that could go for a great many of the actors involved, from reporters to Sater to Sally Yates.

    Yeah, no kidding. I wonder if the line will get crossed at some point and it won’t just be Russians who end up injured or dead under suspicious circumstances. That would certainly change things.

  107. 107.

    PJ

    @Bupalos: Trump’s corruption has been out in the open since the primaries. His supporters still voted for him, and Republicans still supported him. He could sell the Statue of Liberty to the Chinese and the Republicans would say it was a smart move to lower the debt. They do not care, and, frankly, a sizable chunk of journalists think of that stuff as business as usual.

    As Adam discusses in this post, there is a substantial amount of public information linking Trump’s close advisers to the Russians and Russian money, and there is more that will come out. Many (most?) Republican politicians may be errant villains, but there may be some that still have a genuine concern for the independence of the Republic. That’s why the investigation into Trump’s Russian ties is crucial. Publicizing all of the very public things Trump has said he would do and is doing will, in the short run, change nothing politically, because the Republicans control Congress and the White House and there is a split in the Supreme Court. Publicizing Trump’s, and the Republican’s, possible collusion with the Russians is necessary both to stop it from continuing (which is vital) and because it is the best lever to remove Trump and win elections in 2018 and 2020.

  108. 108.

    Anonymous patient

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Yes, some of the most important things I ever wrote were grant applications to get EPA funding. After I thought I was done I got everyone who was standing still to proof it. With a hard deadline, too!

    We were coders, precise users of language, with graduate degrees. And the Monday after I sent one into EPA in Philadelphia, the items Region 3 office, I would page through my last copy and see the most obvious error that I missed, that the senior systems analyst missed, that my predecessor with the MBA missed, that my ex-military boss missed,

    Agony. But they knew we were human, most of them had trivial typos or other errors, so we usually got a grant from them. I made way more than my own personal costs back for my agency.

    But typos are the writer’s bane !! And no helping it.

    My first job was summer relief for proofreading staff going on vacation. Some type was set and proofed by two of us, one reader of the copy and one following the set type to mark up for errors. So I ought to be good at it.

  110. 110.

    J R in WV

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Yes, some of the most important things I ever wrote were grant applications to get EPA funding. After I thought I was done I got everyone who was standing still to proof it. With a hard deadline, too!

    We were coders, precise users of language, with graduate degrees. And the Monday after I sent one into EPA in Philadelphia, the Region 3 office, I would page through my last copy and see the most obvious error that I missed, that the senior systems analyst missed, that my predecessor with the MBA missed, that my ex-military boss missed,

    Agony. But they knew we were human, most of them had trivial typos or other errors, so we usually got a grant from them. I made way more than my own personal costs back for my agency.

    But typos are the writer’s bane !! And no helping it.

    My first job was summer relief for proofreading staff going on vacation. Some type was set and proofed by two of us, one reader of the copy and one following the set type to mark up for errors. So I ought to be good at it.

  111. 111.

    cmorenc

    @Adam L Silverman:

    @cmorenc: There is absolutely no legitimate reason for Kushner to be doing financial/corporate business with VEB. VEB is well known as a front for Russian Intelligence (RIS) and is tied to the Bratva. The only reason you do business with them is if you can’t get funding from more legitimate banks.

    bingo!

  112. 112.

    patroclus

    @PJ: For me, it was reading Red Notice by Bill Browder about the facts and circumstances about the Magnitsky Act.

  113. 113.

    Adam L Silverman

    @RandomMonster: The question regarding Mensch, as I’ve said repeatedly, is not so much her sources, or even the information she’s delineating in her reporting. Rather it may be the conclusions she’s drawing. But only time will tell.

  114. 114.

    Bupalos

    @patroclus:

    “makes them look guilty of something regardless of whether they actually are.”

    Just to sum up my reading and defense of Geffen, this is the kind of language that the Russia tie stuff threatens to lure us to. Maybe its a point only a linguist would accept, but read your sentence there. There is no chance that Trump is not guilty of things that, in betrayal of American values, go well beyond taking money from a foreigner to promote a particular foreign policy. Zero.

  116. 116.

    Chet Murthy

    @Bupalos: Don’t wanna belabor the point, but: what he’s guilty of is irrelevant. What matters is what he can he can be convicted of, in court, in Congress, and in the court of public opinion. And the last means: “what will convince Rs to throw him over, and soonest?”

  117. 117.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Bupalos: Its Gessen. Geffen makes movies. Unless you’re referring to his wife, in which case she’s married to a guy named Geffen who makes movies.

  118. 118.

    Marjowil

    To me there is no question how important this is. I started following Twitter because there is so much info and breaking news there on this subject. There would seem to be clear evidence that the Trump campaign including Trump himself colluded with a foreign enemy to distribute damaging info at key points in the election in exchange for changing our policies re financial sanctions, security in Europe etc, that our federal govt has been sold to our enemy, that our president is making policy decisions not in our interests but in Russia’s. How is that not a terribly big hairy dangerous deal?

  122. 122.

    Redshift

    @Bupalos: I don’t think those things are being ignored. We, and our representatives, are actually capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. But as long as we have Republican majorities, we’re not going to get rid of Trump&co until there are misdeeds that are either too major for them to cover for, which means collusion with a foreign power, or are actually criminal.

    So we fight the rest as best we can, and keep looking for the smoking gun.

  123. 123.

    Bupalos

    @PJ: I don’t necessarily disagree. I just think we need to be clear eyed about it essentially being a matter of political tactics, and there is a potential cost here that shouldn’t be ignored. Part of me is starting to resonate on Geffen’s vibe. I think she knows what the reaction might have been if earlier on Putin had been even more decisively proven to have been tied to corruption. I think she may be right in putting more emphasis on how the need to find more normalizes what is already enough, and I don’t think her rejoinder about the potential fallout of paranoia and political schism is too far off either.

    There won’t be any easy wins here.

  124. 124.

    Adam L Silverman

    @RandomMonster: Since I have no idea who he actually is outside of his posts here, I have no way of knowing what experience and/or expertise he’s basing that statement on.

  126. 126.

    dogwood

    @MikeBoyScout:
    I tend to agree. I trust Adam’s assessment of this woman’s knowledge and credentials. However, reading the piece left me with impression that she letting her personal feelings about fear of a potential rising Russophobia lead her to some unsourced speculation about the IC. I read comments here and have conversations in my real life with people who are concerned about this, and nowhere do I sense Russophobia. . I realize my own bias could be effecting my interpretation because I am bone tired of conspiracy theories and those who pose them.

  127. 127.

    Redshift

    @Bupalos:

    There is no chance that Trump is not guilty of things that, in betrayal of American values, go well beyond taking money from a foreigner to promote a particular foreign policy. Zero.

    Ones that the people who could remove him from office aren’t also guilty of, or willing to excuse to hold onto power?

    If betraying American values was enough to bring him down, he wouldn’t be in office in the first place.

  128. 128.

    Oldgold

    The damnable Rooskies know what they did. The IC knows what it knows. So, the secrecy must be to keep the American public ignorant. Why?
    Oh, yeah, “sources and methods.” Well, given the stakes here, ef the supposed super sanctity of “sources and methods.” If we have traitors in the WH, lets get the info into the light of day. “Sources and methods” are not going to do a damn thing for us if we
    have traitors at the helm.

  129. 129.

    efgoldman

    @Redshift:

    But as long as we have Republican majorities, we’re not going to get rid of Trump&co until there are misdeeds that are either too major for them to cover for, which means collusion with a foreign power, or are actually criminal.

    Even up to the last moment, most of the Republiklowns on the Rodino committee voted against impeachment.

  130. 130.

    Bupalos

    @Redshift: I dont disagree with this either, and this is why I say there will be no easy wins here. There is no magic bullet that is going to erase the American reality of Trump, not even the fairly unlikely scenario of quick and successful impeachment.

  132. 132.

    different-church-lady

    @Bupalos:

    There is no magic bullet that is going to erase the American reality of Trump

    Like I’ve said before: some day Trump will be gone. But the 62 million people who voted for him will still be here.

  134. 134.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @dogwood: I don’t think that fear of “Russophobia” is valid. Putin is an authoritarian, greedy, ruthless dictator. He happens to be Russian. I didn’t feel about Yeltsin (or Gorbachev, for that matter) the way I feel about Putin.

  135. 135.

    PJ

    @different-church-lady: Maybe we’ll be able to peel away a few million who get their faces eaten by leopards in the next two to four years. And the Grim Reaper will lower the numbers of Trump voters some, too. So things are looking up!

  136. 136.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @efgoldman: Once the “Smoking Gun” tape came out, though, they all announced (even Charles Sandman, Nixon’s most ardent defender on the HJC) they’d vote for Impeachment when it came to a vote in the House floor.

  137. 137.

    dogwood

    @efgoldman:
    Yep. My biggest concern about this Russian investigation stuff is that while it is imperative that it continue, it is raising some overblown expectation about impeachment. I do think it could be reasonable to speculate that it might clear out some WH goons, (Trump kids included) and make life difficult for guys like Sessions.

  139. 139.

    jeannedalbret

    @piratedan: If she was, she is no longer. She dismisses Greenwald’s Intercept as The Ivancept and is convinced Assange is a Putin stooge.

    Yes, she supports Brexit, but nobody’s perfect according to Joe E. Brown.

  140. 140.

    Bupalos

    @dogwood: I guess at this point I’ll take trump out as quickly as possible in any way possible. But if nuclear weapons didn’t exist, I think I’d argue its worth some risk at this point to have trump and the circular firing squad of republicans serve out a full term without excuses. I think that might actually move American politics leftward in a huge tectonic shift. I don’t have a great sense of what things will look like with “Russia” as a dominant or decisive element in Trumps demise. I kind of fear this could be an “out” for the Republicans.

  142. 142.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    Damn… sorry I missed this… I’ve been busy tonight…

    Interesting phenom: without a serious Congressional Russia/Trump investigation, it’s been organically crowdsourced to the media and public.

    Yes, I had thought that very same thing… that the investigation had been crowdsourced to folks just like us! And all of us all over the place have been doing a terrific job!

    The amount of information about Trump and the Russians coming out and coming together has hit something akin to a combinatorial explosion… it’s just off the charts in the moment…

    And Adam, I’m in complete agreement w/ you…

    We ARE under attack by a foreign country, abetted by our own GOP and…

    We ARE in a wicked bad Constitutional crisis…

    Absolutely…

  144. 144.

    piratedan

    @Thru the Looking Glass…: and if msn.com is to be believed, Ryan is now stating that he doesn’t see why Nunes shouldn’t remain chairman for the panel. I’m thinking that’s a pretty serious fucking tell that our ZEGS may be just as dirty as the rest of them, certainly complicit.

  145. 145.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    @piratedan: Yeah… I saw that earlier… it looks like a lot of Republicans are lining up in the Fuck You formation…

    Not gonna be pretty… if we do win this, and when it’s all over… i want to see some people serving SERIOUS TIME… none of that’ I’ve pardoned them and it’s time to move on’ bullshit…

    SERIOUS TIME…

  146. 146.

    Redshift

    @Bupalos:

    But if nuclear weapons didn’t exist, I think I’d argue its worth some risk at this point to have trump and the circular firing squad of republicans serve out a full term without excuses. I think that might actually move American politics leftward in a huge tectonic shift.

    I may be more optimistic about their crimes taking them down, but I’m nowhere near that optimistic about anything good politically coming of their being in power. The idea that people will change their views once they see how bad Republicans are had come up repeatedly, and it just never happens.

    Not to mention that in addition to nuclear weapons, I’d add climate change, the destruction of our scientific/research base, further concentration of wealth…

  147. 147.

    EBT

    @piratedan: ZEGS can’t play 2 dimensional chess, let alone 11th. The idea that he is in any way actually GOOD at being majority leader is as laughable as the idea that deadbeat donnie has a full head of natural hair.

  148. 148.

    dogwood

    @piratedan:
    I doubt Ryan is involved with the Russian stuff. He is a party hack and Nunes is his lieutenant. Hold a phony investigation, wrap it up as soon as possible and move on to Ryan’s passion, gutting the safety net. Not saying he’s competent when it comes to this stuff, but he’s gonna stick with it until another bad idea comes up.

  149. 149.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    Whoa… just came across this…

    The Democratic National Committee just asked all its staffers to resign

    The newly-elected Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez has asked all of the organization’s staffers to issue their letters of resignation as part of a move to completely overhaul the makeup of the committee, NBC News reported on Tuesday.

    All staff are now subject to interviews by a committee advising Perez on his transition, who will determine which staffers are allowed to stay, which will be terminated, and how Perez will seek to remake the committee.

    It is normal for staffing turnovers to take place when a new chairperson is elected, though according to NBC, current staff levels are at an unusual low.

    I get that it’s the norm to clean house and bring in new people AND I’ve also read that the Russians had a mole, or moles, inside the DNC helping them do what they did during the campaign and election…

    I wonder if that is partially why Perez did this… trying to flush out the spies in the house?

  150. 150.

    EBT

    I would imagine that he also wants to get rid of anyone who can’t shut up and be a team player.

  151. 151.

    Millard Filmore

    @piratedan:

    Ryan is now stating that he doesn’t see why Nunes shouldn’t remain chairman for the panel.

    For the best chance of jail time for the perps, what is the best forum for the investigation? I read on BJ recently that testimony in front of Congress gives one immunity. Should we cheer that Nunes is holding things up? Should the FBI (prodded by IC leaks) take the lead?

  152. 152.

    dogwood

    @Thru the Looking Glass…:
    I imagine it’s more than “partially.” And by the way, who’s running the RNC? They were hacked and should be setting up some new standards as well. Maybe Trump’s waiting for school to get out so he can appoint Barron chairman of the RNC. I hear he’s “very good with the cyber.”

  153. 153.

    Mike in DC

    Any quid pro quo between the Trump campaign/administration and Russia, which directly involves Trump, is and should be an extinction level event for status quo politics. Not only will/would it annihilate the administration, we are seeing already some evidence of how it would spread to the rest of the elected GOP establishment. The disinformation campaign was only effective due to the right wing information bubble, and the only inoculation against future disinformation campaigns is the bursting of that sealed system. Etc.
    Now, if somehow we arrive at a point that falls short of the worst case scenario, then perhaps we reach a kind of fractured status quo. That, in itself, would benefit the enemies of the United States.

  154. 154.

    akryan

    Am I totally wrong for not wanting Trump gone until the mid-terms? I want this to drag out for a few years to make every Republican have to keep supporting him. Then 3 months before the election I want the entire house of cards to fall. If he was to leave tomorrow, then we’d get Pence who may actually be worse. Every policy would be at least as bad, but he’d be competent enough to get more done. It’d also give Republicans time to rehab their image, something they’re very good at. I’d like Trump to keep flailing and batting back controversies, with the Republicans in tow, for two years until we can get the legislature back.

  155. 155.

    SC54HI

    @NotMax: Don’t know about timber in Cyprus but Russia appears to have a significant interest in Cypriot real estate.

    The spouse & I attended a conference in Nicosia last year which included a half-day excursion to some of the World Heritage sites on the south coast of Cyprus, specifically Paphos. There are TONS of Russian-built condos & hotels in that area and it looked more were in the works.

  156. 156.

    GregB

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    I have been pretty easy in Russia my entire life. Always felt they deserved greater credit for their terrible WWII sacrifices and felt they were uneccesarily boxed in further post Cold War.

    I don’t think for a moment that my cyrrent disdain fir the track they are currently on is due to a later in life burst of Russophobia.

  157. 157.

    CM

    @akryan:

    “Am I totally wrong for not wanting Trump gone until the mid-terms? I want this to drag out for a few years to make every Republican have to keep supporting him.”

    And so the more evidence of collusion and criminality, the better.

  158. 158.

    Gvg

    @akryan: yes you are wrong to want this to drag out. Too many awful things are being normalized. We need for it to remain normal for candidates to release tax returns and divest businesses and NOT have ties to many foreign countries. For family not to get high paying jobs etc.
    Pence should have to meet certain standards or go too.
    Has Ryan released his tax returns?

  159. 159.

    Sam

    Occam’s razor: it is all about money. Trump never met a policy or a person other than himself that mattered. I think law enforcement has an embarrassment of riches, they have probably been tracking the flow of dirty money into real estate and “consultants” for some time. So I am betting that, as things develop, a simple explanation will be available: these folks sold out their country for money. Full stop. All the spy business is just our surveillance capabilities picking up conversations about dirty money and the quid pro quo.

    There may be a sophisticated FSB plot, but I am convinced that the basic scandal is going to prove to be extremely simple. The ramifications are not so simple, because we have a portion of a fundamentally corrupt political class aiding and abetting the corruption for their own purposes.

  161. 161.

    zhena gogolia

    They booed Hillary all through her own convention. That was triggered by the very well-timed Wikileaks release of e-mails hacked by the Russians. Trump is financed by the Russians and follows techniques developed by Putin (as Gessen should well know). This isn’t xenophobia. I adore Russia. I hate Putin.

  162. 162.

    zhena gogolia

    And I’d remind everyone that on the day after the election or thereabouts, Masha Gessen wrote a piece advising us to abandon all faith in our democratic institutions. I don’t think that has turned out to be very good advice. So I’m reluctant to take her as a terribly reliable authority on this matter.

  163. 163.

    Ryan

    “open source reporting”

    I am curious as to what open source adds to reporting. Is there a meaningful distinction?

  164. 164.

    Seth Owen

    @Ryan: It’s a term used by people with security clearances, such as Adam, to make clear that none of his statements rely upon classified material he has seen, but is based solely on information that is available to the general public. It’s to protect him, it’s no reflection on the reporting.

  165. 165.

    polyorchnid octopunch

    I know I’m late to the party, but there is something to wonder on here.

    ISTR reading that the Democrats weren’t the only people to be hacked; that in fact, elements of the Republican information infrastructure were very likely to have been hacked too. I wondered at the time that perhaps the reason why all the leaks were about the Dems was because all their sins are venial, while the Repubs’ sins are mortal. This means the approach to take to destablize is to publicize the venial so as to discredit in the eyes of the public while keeping the mortal on tap to use against the chosen beneficiaries.

    This makes me wonder… was the intelligence that Nunes was shown not about surveillance but about Nunes himself? Maybe Nunes has been moved from being a useful fool to being made to become a made man.

  166. 166.

    sherparick

    I think what Martha Gessen misunderstands is nature of the Village, the New York-DC media club. Just like Benghazi and “Hillary’s Emails” were catnip for them during 2014-16, to the exclusion of policy, the Russian caper, with all the Congressional hearings and leaks and counter leaks is the kind of lazy, gift wrapped, gossipy story that they love, as opposed to policy stories where they do actual work to try to explain and interest people on stuff that causes their eyes to glaze over (such as the ACA and the ICE raids in the Hispanic community, etc.) It is the nature of Village Media and their attraction to “scandal” stories that is the reason the story is dominating Cable News, broadcast news, and front pages of the New York and DC papers. It is not liberals, the “resistance,” or remainder of the left’s Netroots (Daily Kos, Balloon Juice, Driftglass, LGM, etc.) who are driving this story. These blogs and alternate news stories are the ones documenting the atrocities of the Muslim Ban, the War for Coal and the Rampage on the Environment, and ICE as an agency trying to become the Gestapo. In fact, but for the alternate media these stories would not be getting out. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/3/28/1648030/-Legal-Chicago-Resident-in-critical-condition-after-ICE-agents-raid-his-home-shoot-him-family

  167. 167.

    sherparick

    @Seth Owen: However, folks with clearances still have to be careful even with reporting that appears in media, particularly if it is based on a leak from a classified source. Folks were reprimanded for putting classified information on a unclassified network when they linked to articles in the NY Times and Guardian reporting the leak documents revealed by Chelsea Manning through Wikileaks.

  168. 168.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Ryan: @Seth Owen: Even more specifically Open Source refers to Open Source analysis, which we produces what we call OSINT – Open Source Intelligence. This is distinct from intelligence developed through other means. OSINT can still produce classified results, depending on how the information is bundled and it is bundled with from other collection methods and approaches. One of the things that I am considered to be an expert at is designing, directing, and conducting OSINT.

Comments are closed.