We all want to talk about the distinction between light and not light treason… Or more realistically Espionage Act versus campaign finance violations.
Open thread.
Afternoon Open Thread
Reader Interactions
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.
Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.
JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?
Battle won, war still ongoing.
In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.
Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
We won’t go back.
There is no right way to do the wrong thing.
If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!
Innocent people don’t delay justice.
Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.
People are weird.
There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.
Shut up, hissy kitty!
Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.
If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.
Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.
Tick tock motherfuckers!
People are complicated. Love is not.
Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.
This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.
Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.
Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.
Karen
This just came up on my wall on facebook
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/president-applauds-trump-jr-for-releasing-emails-my-son-is-a-high-quality-person/
r€nato
I’m truly enjoying the spectacle of the utter meltdown of the Trumpanzees, desperate to explain away or distract from Donnie Jr. providing the evidence of his collusion.
Apparently this was eleventh dimensional chess and the Great Black Satan is really at fault here.
And Hillary too, because something something something.
And then there’s “Uday was running a sting operation on the Russians!”
zhena gogolia
I still can’t get over the locution “the Crown prosecutor of Russia.” What the hell does that mean?
jl
I dunno if the T word is best to start off with when talking with Trumpsters, and those who are sitting on the fence in terms of going all out in opposition to Trump and the GOP.
The degree of T is not easy to see (even if at least some minor T is what it has to be), at this point. The degree of Lying Liars Who Lie All the time should be obvious to everyone. When I talk with some of familial Trumpsters, I’ll start with Lying Liars.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Aren’t you the Russian scholar, if anyone knows it, it should be you.
scav
Seems obvious. Light treason is the sort wandered into entirely unintentionally by white males. Not light treason, the dark nefarious type is that inevitably performed with intent by those other individuals. Light treason, like light corn syrup, is a pretty standard additive in many processed food- and consumation-products.
Montysano
@zhena gogolia:
But I lurve the way it sounds.
Barbara
@zhena gogolia: The CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) is what the UK calls its criminal prosecution agency. It’s possible that whoever used the term lives in the UK and used this term to refer to whatever the Russian equivalent is. That was my assumption. I have seen so much I am getting bug eyed, but I think some of these people might live in London (lots of Russians do in any event).
David Anderson
@zhena gogolia: The agent who was brokering the meeting was British. Crown Prosecutor = “Attorney General” or in the Russian Context “State prosecutor”
jl
@schrodingers_cat: The Crown Prosecutor of Russia is the who sends out the Inspector General, who’ll be here soon for a personal meeting. Need to get ready! Better have some gravy ready.
Edit: Occurs to me that only Gogol could do this scandal justice.
sigaba
@zhena gogolia: He does seem to have made it up. Is Goldstone from Britain or Australia?
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
How about “a) this had a -35.1 % chance of ever happening, and b) if it did he’d be impeached more or less immediately,” you fucking idiot
jl
As I said, in previous thread. I want a video mash-up of all the lies these goons have told, and now that I think about it, all the times Pence has said he didn’t know squat about nothing. With some commentary giving context and indicating the degree of outrageousness of each lie.
Anyone know who is making that and where I’ll be able to find it? Seriously, we need that mash-up, from Trump on down the line.
scav
Crown Prosecutor of Russia, sounds fancy, usually observed only after dying in a tragic car accident in Nigeria having no nearer relatives than you — send banking number immediately to preserve your wealth and election chances! You too may be descended from Royalty!
jl
@scav: Crown Prosecutor of Russia is in charge of all large remittances sadly stranded offshore requiring utmost discretion!
TenguPhule
You can have a little bit of treason just like you can be a little bit pregnant.
zhena gogolia
@Barbara:
I assume it’s an equivalent for “prokuror” but I don’t have time to research it. It just sounds weird for a country that doesn’t (officially) have a monarch.
TenguPhule
@jl:
Did the Republicans start smaller with birtherism?
Boldly seize that treason mantle and smash it over their heads. Its the only way to be sure.
zhena gogolia
@jl:
Gogol is spinning rapidly in his grave (after supposedly being buried alive in it anyway).
mdblanche
Which one of Donnie Junior’s lawyers told him to release the emails, Barry Zuckerkorn or Bob Loblaw?
trollhattan
I think Amazon chose “prime day” because “Can you believe all this crap we have laying around?” day is too wordy.
JAFD
The sky over New Jersey is lightly overcast, and may or may not portend thunderstorms. Meanwhile, the pollen or whatever has been making my eyeballs feel like they’re being sandblasted.
Was taking some generic Zyrtec* last week (cetirizine HCL, in case I’ve mxed it up with some other drug beginning with Z), Helped running nose some, eyes a bit, made me sleep thirteen hours a day and feel like I’d lost 35 points of IQ while awake.
Have been taking spent teabags out of cup, wringing out, waiting minute to cool to ‘warm’, using them to wipe eyes (be careful avoiding staples) . Good idea ? Suggestions not only welcome, but earnestly sought.
Betty Cracker
@jl: Here’s one. I’m sure folks are compiling more complete versions even as we speak:
TenguPhule
@JAFD:
Er, no. Not unless that’s herbal tea. Green tea is good for many things, your eyeballs are not one of them.
Gin & Tonic
@trollhattan: It’s also a play on the date, 7/11/17. Those are all prime numbers.
Apologies if I’m stating the obvious.
trollhattan
Japanese blogger swats down the new Amelia Earhart was captured theory by finding the supposed photo of her, Fred and the plane was published two years before the final flight.
jl
@TenguPhule: I suppose we follow the saying ‘those with ears to hear, let them hear’. For those who are ready for T, that is fine, if not, gently remind them of all the lies.
Those who see the T will get their reward, those who see the crime, they will get their reward, and those who see the lies, even those will see their reward.
TenguPhule
@Gin & Tonic:
This is BJ. We’d never stop apologizing if that were true.
jl
@Betty Cracker: Thanks! As I said in previous thread, we need the brief version, the full length feature and a special edition with outtakes, bloopers and editor’s commentary.
Pleas notify your humble commenter jl whenever you see this time of item. I am in the market until we get an honest executive branch.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: Prime and odd, two is the only even number that is prime.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Heh. Pence seems like an animatron from circa 1973 while Kellyanne simply revels in lying while smiling.
Gin & Tonic
Meanwhile Emin Agalarov, in Moscow, posts a selfie to Instagram with the caption “какие новости ???” (“What’s in the news?”)
jl
@trollhattan: If Pence become president, will be hard for Disney to replicate the Penceian robotic uncanny valley in their animatronic version.
r€nato
@mdblanche: Lionel Hutz
mdblanche
@jl: In his statement today, Pence would like to remind you that all this happened before he joined the ticket and besides he just plays the piano in this establishment, he really has no idea what the girls and their gentleman callers do upstairs.
rikyrah
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT?!??!
For.the.win
rikyrah
@scav:
LIGHT TREASON?
Like a little pregnant?
rikyrah
@TenguPhule:
Didn’t read the thread first…you got to it before I did.
Brachiator
@Gin & Tonic:
Today is also the 90th anniversary of the 7-11 stores. Free small slurpee from 11 am to 7 pm.
Hmmm. Will they throw in a free hot dog on the 100th anniversary?
Kay
The balls on these people. Screaming for a year about fake news and all the while they were busy soliciting Russian help to put Trump in.
A pack of liars, all of them. Pathological.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Treason committed by light colored people?
dr. luba
@JAFD: My brother swears by Patanol eye drops, which I used to prescribe for him. These are (or were) a prescription item; the Google informs me that antihistamine eyedrops are now available OTC. You might wish to consider these.
Kay
So what happened in that meeting with Putin that inspired someone to blow the whistle on the Trumpsters?
How fucking bad was it? What did the big dope bungle?
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: You never swore this much IIRC, before November.
scav
@rikyrah: Well, more along the lines of the distinction between the inevitable Lone Wolves shooting multiple people and the necessarily vicious culture-representative thugs that are justifiably shot before arrest for walking with Skittles. That kind of light.
dmsilev
@zhena gogolia:
Czarist revanchism.
Karen
isn’t it great that by releasing those emails daddy is proud of his son as a “high quality person”; I guess in Dolt45 terms high quality person means total idiot to the rest of world
Waldo
@Brachiator:
A hot dog left on the warmer since the 90th, yes.
schrodingers_cat
@JAFD: Cucumber slices are good for giving eyes some relief. Tea is an astringent, what it does is reduce puffy eyes.
Mike J
@Brachiator:
Also the Hamilton duel. Shocked we’ve seen no songs posted.
dmsilev
Who among us has not enjoyed Mozart’s classic piece Eine Kleine Nachtreason?
dmsilev
@Karen: To be fair, compared to Eric Trump, Don Jr. _is_ “the smart one”.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Couple of years ago, I had a raging asshole dickbag cocksucker client who refused to listen to me, fucked up his case by playing cowboy and then refusing to do little things like show up to hearings. When I flipped my shit at him for stupidly running me over earth and fucking up his own case, he snidely said “that’s what I pay you to do – fix things that I fuck up”.
Of course, after the initial modest retainer, he paid me nothing, then started blowing off invoices for the remaining $4,000.00, telling me “the check is in the mail”, “I lost your invoice”, my Secretary quit” and all kinds of stuff. When I finally went with my secretary to hand-deliver an invoice to his home, he rushed me in his driveway and stuck a 9mm in my face.
I hate cocksuckers like that.
TenguPhule
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
How long did he get sentenced?
PPCLI
@zhena gogolia: Goldstone is British, I believe, and evidently not all that bright. That’s what the equivalent of a District Attorney is called in Canada, and I would assume in Britain and many other Commonwealth countries.
So it would be as if an American spoke confusedly about having spoken to “The Russian District Attorney”.
ETA: Ah, I see I’m about the 10th to make this point. Never mind….
TenguPhule
@rikyrah: Great minds.
jl
@Kay:
” all the while they were busy soliciting Russian help to put Trump in. ”
Looks like Russia solicited them.
Which makes it all so unfair. I mean, isn’t government entrapment a good defense, even it its another government that entrapped you? I think yes.
I routinely trash emails with headers like “Don’t miss latest Russian government offer to throw your local election”. So hard to tell the real things from phishing attempts.
Iowa Old Lady
@Karen: It’s a little hard to claim “transparency” when you lied for months, and changed your story every day for four or five days now.
Betty Cracker
Roger Stone, who is an insane person but also a long-time adviser to the narcissistic nutjob in the White House, says Trump could turn all of this around by arresting and “perp-walking” President Obama and assorted other wingnut hate objects. I’m a mild-mannered, middle-aged white lady in Florida, but if those scumbags fuck with President Obama, I will personally drive to DC with a pitchfork and torch and join my fellow citizens in reenacting the storming of the motherfucking Bastille!
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Worse case scenario, Trump just gave Putin the names of lots of IC assets in Russia.
Those people are now probably wishing they were dead. And soon will be.
SatanicPanic
@Betty Cracker: I don’t want to get all Tengu on this, but things would get real if that happened.
TenguPhule
@Betty Cracker:
Tell me again why we shouldn’t be expecting a Civil War with these people?
jl
@TenguPhule: Maybe it was the joint US/Russia ‘internet vote club’ idea?
Everyone saw what happened with Putin was the last guy in the room talking in Triump’s ear.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Folks speculating that’s why they had to try and send Melania in several times.
TenguPhule
@Betty Cracker:
They still have torches in America?
jl
@TenguPhule: Because they are toxic loons and better to let they themselves whittle down their own support into single digit levels, scattered and disorganized through these 50 Great United States.
Many won’t give up the bigot authoritarian cause, but they will take offense at the stupidity and start looking for another.
Peale
@TenguPhule: We will carry sconces that have been ripped from the walls of classy hotels.
Timurid
@Betty Cracker: That’s the one fundamental element lacking so far in this attempt at authoritarian rule. If Trump and Sessions say “we’re going to arrest and run show trials for Obama, the Clintons, Comey, etc.” they won’t find many people willing to do it for them. Federal agents and prosecutors will be lining up around the block to submit their resignations.
SatanicPanic
@TenguPhule: yes, but we call them flashlights here
ruemara
@Betty Cracker: Shit would get serious and real if that happened. They’d learn we’re armed and sick of their shit. Look sideways at an Obama, you motherfucking racist nazis. Just, squint.
@Timurid: I don’t need their goddamned resignations to allow these traitors the chance to fill seats with fellow nazis. I need these timid fuckwads to do their jobs and call out treason.
Gin & Tonic
@Kay: I’m quite certain German intelligence has recordings and transcripts.
TenguPhule
@ruemara:
I can’t improve on your words.
? Martin
@Kay:
I think it became clear at that meeting that Trump, even in private, is inclined to believe and align with Putin over his intelligence agencies. IMO, it’s now McMasters obligation to blow the whistle on everything going on in the WH.
jl
@Timurid: I think they are attempting to install authoritarian rule, but we are lucky so far in that they are too incompetent to make much progress. They started with arbitrary and senseless rule wrt to immigration and undocumented residents, where they have more latitude than with citizens. They have explicitly threatened CNN with politically motivated rulings on corporate mergers. Whether the proposed merger is a good idea or should be allowed is separate question, but saying ‘we might make trouble unless you give us better coverage’ is not part of that legitimate poicy argument.
efgoldman
@Brachiator:
Not if they want the customers to live long enough to come back, they won’t.
randy khan
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Not to mention that Clinton utterly crushed him in the debates and that all of the bad stuff that came out about him would have mattered much more to Democratic primary voters than it did to Republican primary voters. I mean, come on.
? Martin
@Timurid:
I think you seriously underestimate the number of authoritarian followers out there. Yes, there would be resignations, but not enough to stop it. 1930s Germans were not fundamentally different people from 2010s Americans. The only difference was the offer being put on the table. The whole point of the exercise is to make sure that offer is never put on the table, because we know that people will succumb to it. That’s why the deliberate ignorance of norm violations and lower-level law breaking is so potentially damaging – those were our safeguards.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker:
Blanche Yurka FTW!
Chris
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
@randy khan:
I’ve idly wondered a couple times, while watching my NeverTrumpist acquaintances “struggle” (it was a foregone conclusion) with Trump, what would’ve happened if something like the Trump phenomenon happened on the Democratic side.
And every time I quickly conclude that it is, of course, a nonsensical question, for basically the two reasons you pointed out: 1) the Democratic base would be highly unlikely to rally around a left-wing version of Donald Trump – the two parties are really not the same, MSM to the contrary, and 2) if someone it had happened, the “establishment” would’ve opened up on him with both barrels – not covered for him, relentlessly smeared his opponent, and generally done everything they could to even the odds into a horse race. A Democratic Trump candidacy doesn’t happen, and if by some miracle it does, Dem!Trump loses by a Goldwateresque margin.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@dmsilev: Who’s smarter between Eric and Uday?
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@? Martin: 1930s Germany never had a long tradition of democracy either like the US does
Bobby Thomson
@Mike J: I think it was more than 90 years ago.
jl
@? Martin: Obama, along with someone who is not mentioned on this blog, is about the only politician, ex or current, with a high public approval rating. Just over 61% as of May 16 2017, which is last batch of polls on that topic at Huffington Post pollster.
The case would be absurd, and appear absurd and unjust and ridiculous to a large majority of the public and piss off voters at landslide levels. It would make the impeachment of Bill Clinton look like political genius. Stone is a fool.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@jl: This also. The administration and the GOP have no credibility anymore
japa21
Since this is an open thread, I’ll bring up something about the health care fiasco. Went over to the Gallup site (for some unknown reason Trump is up to 40%) and the main headline was
Can anybody detect the basic fallacy involved in that headline? Actually, there may be two.
MCA1
@jl: Fuck that. No time for semantics and the nuance of the differences between the constitutional and legal definitions of “treason” and the colloquial. The latter being “disloyal to the United States.” We and Democratic elected officials should be shouting it from the rooftops and reclaiming the mantle of protectors of the realm and true patriots daily. Here’s a quick list of talking points:
– Trump Jr. is Benedict Arnold
– Trump’s foreign policy was written by Vladimir Putin
– The Trump Administration hates America
– [____________] is a disloyal American
– [____________] has betrayed every American citizen
– every Republican who buries their head in the sand on this is (fill in the blank: feckless, spineless, a turncoat, complicit in espionage, a traitor to America)
– John McCain/Lindsey Graham is Neville Chamberlain
TenguPhule
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Unfortunately, this has contributed to the weakness of the current system.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@japa21: Does not mention specifically that the GOP is the one in power and is trying to “reform” the ACA.
TenguPhule
@jl:
Which means they would possibly do it anyway. We’re long past “this is not normal”.
And as other have said, simply making the arrest would mean all bets are off.
trollhattan
@? Martin:
Yeah, good opportunity to show what his oath means to him.
Tillerson will continue to do whatever is best for Exxon’s stock price.
japa21
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: That is the second one I thought of. Actually, by putting reform in quotes, you hit both. The GOP has no intention of reforming the ACA, and the only part of Congress allowed to participate is the GOP.
p.a.
Well, tRump admin is finally getting around to some job creation. Maybe LGM can stop the critique of law school ripoffs. Criminal law doesn’t pay what corporate pays (well, depends on the client ?), but it’s a living…
germy
The story so far…
1980: Roger Stone, future Trump confidante and dirty trickster, founds a lobbying practice with future Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort. Trump is one of the firm’s first clients.
October 1998: Demolition of a vacant building to make way for Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City begins. Trump begins selling units in the skyscraper, which becomes a depository for Russian money.
2000: Stone serves as chairman of Trump’s presidential exploratory advisory committee.
2002: Russian-born Felix H. Stater, a future fixer for Trump who will help him scout business deals in Russia, and his Bayrock Group begin working with Trump on a series of real estate development deals, one of which becomes Trump SoHo.
2004: One third of all Trump Tower units on upper floors are sold to people or limited liability companies connected to Russia or neighboring states.
2005: Trump begins an aggressive 10-year effort to penetrate the former Soviet empire with a one-year deal with developer Bayrock Group, run by Felix Sater, a Russian émigré, felon and Trump associate.
2005: Manafort proposes that he undertake a consulting assignment for a billionaire oligarch friend of Putin to influence politics, business deals and news coverage in the U.S. and Europe to benefit Putin’s government.
February 2006: Two of Trump’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, travel to Moscow where they are shown around by Sater.
October 15, 2007: Trump, speaking publicly of Putin for the first of many times, tells Larry King on CNN that Putin “is doing a great job . . . he’s doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period.”
November 2007: Manafort’s consulting firm receives a $455,000 wire transfer to billionaire industrialist and Ukraine Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych’s political party for a campaign to improve Putin-backed Yanukovych’s image in the West.
2008: Donald Trump Jr. tells a real estate conference in New York, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. . . . We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” although his father will insist when the first inklings of a scandal appear in 2016 that he has no Russian investments, a claim he will repeatedly make despite substantial evidence to the contrary.
July 2008: Trump sells a Florida residence to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, believed to be the biggest single-family home sale in U.S. history. The oligarch never lives in the house, which is later demolished.
October 14, 2009: Manafort’s firm receives a $750,000 wire transfer from Yanukovych’s political party for the image-enhancement campaign.
January 2010: Sater becomes Trump’s “senior adviser.”
February 2010: Yanukovych is elected Ukraine president.
June 19, 2012: As President Obama meets with Putin, Trump tweets, “Putin has no respect for our president — really bad body language.”
April 8, 2013: Three Russians whom the FBI later accuses of spying on the U.S. discuss recruiting businessman and future Trump campaign aide Carter Page, who has many Russian contacts, to spy for Moscow.
July 8, 2013: Trump terminates a BBC interview when asked about Sater’s mob ties.
October 13, 2013: On The Late Show, David Letterman asks Trump if he had any dealings with Russians. Trump answers, “Well, I’ve done a lot of business with Russians.”
November 2013: Trump hosts the Miss Universe pageant, then part of the Trump Organization, in Moscow. in return for a $20 million licensing fee from the Crocus Group. It’s president is Aras Agalarov, an Azerbaijani-Russian billionaire and close ally of Putin, whose meeting with Trump had to be cancelled because of scheduling conflicts. The Crocus vice president is Agaralov’s pop singer son, Emin.
Late November 2013: Emin Agaralov releases a music video starring Trump reprising his Apprentice television role.
December 2013: Putin sends Agaralov’s daughter, Sheyla, to deliver a personal note and gift Trump later describes as “a present, a beautiful present” to him at Trump Tower as a token of apology for their missed meeting.
February 22, 2014: Yanukovych flees Ukraine amidst a popular uprising. A handwritten ledger left behind purports to show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort’s firm from the deposed president’s political party.
April 17, 2014: Trump tweets that Obama is a weakling compared to Putin. “America is at a great disadvantage. Putin is ex-KGB. Obama is a community organizer. Unfair.”
March 2015: Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state is made public. She states she has turned over work-related emails to the government but that 30,000 or so personal emails on the server were deleted.
Summer of 2015: Future Trump campaign adviser Michael Flynn makes several trips to the Middle East as an adviser on a project to pursue a joint U.S.-Russia-Saudi business venture to develop nuclear facilities in Saudi Arabia.
June 16, 2015: Trump announces that he is running for the Republican presidential nomination.
September 2015: In a cryptic first sign of the Russian scheme to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, an FBI agent calls the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to warn that its computer network had been hacked by “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government. A DNC tech-support contractor does not take the call seriously.
September 2015: A secretive anti-Trump Republican hires Fusion GPS, a Washington, D.C. strategic intelligence firm, to compile an opposition research dossier on Trump as the Republican presidential primary campaign heats up.
October 11, 2015: Speaking on Face the Nation, Trump brags about sharing air time with Putin on 60 Minutes although they were on separate continents. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Trump says there isn’t enough proof to blame Russian separatists for shooting down a Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine the previous year.
Late 2015: Britain’s GCHQ, which is equivalent to the U.S.’s NSA, first becomes aware of suspicious interactions between individuals connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents. This intelligence is passed on to the U.S. as part of a routine exchange of information.
December 10-12, 2015: Flynn is paid $45,000 by RT, Vladimir Putin’s state propaganda network, for a three-day Moscow trip in which he gives a speech criticizing Obama’s Russia policy and sits at Putin’s table at a banquet.
December 17, 2015: Putin praises Trump and Trump quickly returns the favor, saying “It’s always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected in his own country and beyond.”
Early 2016: Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and his felon father, Charles, give up on a two-ear effort to obtain a half-billion dollar business bailout from Qatar to refinance a white elephant property on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
February 11, 2016: Flynn meets with investigators in a routine meeting to discuss his application to renew his security clearance. When asked about his Moscow trip, he reportedly says, “I didn’t take any money from Russia, if that’s what you’re asking me.”
March 2016: The first wave of fake news stories originating in Eastern Europe targeting Hillary Clinton voters in swing states is detected.
March 19, 2016: John Podesta, chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign, is emailed a link asking that he change his password, which is believed to be the way that hackers later gained access to his email account.
March 29, 2016: On the recommendation of Stone, Manafort is hired by the Trump campaign to line up convention delegates.
Spring of 2016: Page, a businessman with extensive Russian ties and previous contacts with Russian intelligence agents, is hired by the Trump campaign as a quick fix for its lack of foreign policy expertise.
April 2016: Hackers believed to be linked to Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) gain access to the DNC computer network.
April 2016: Kushner, accompanied by Flynn, meets with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who is widely considered to be a spy, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., the first of several meetings by Trump associates with Russian officials that are monitored by U.S. intelligence.
April 2016: About the same time as the Mayflower meeting, U.S. intelligence intercepts the first communications among Russians who discuss aggressively trying to influence the presidential election by sabotaging Clinton.
April 20, 2016: Manafort is named Trump’s campaign manager.
Late April 2016: The DNC’s IT department notices suspicious computer activity and hires private security firm CrowdStrike to investigate.
Early May 2016: Manafort meets in New York with Konstantine Kilimnik, a Ukrainian business associate who served in the Russian army and may be working for Russian intelligence.
May 2016: CrowdStrike determines that highly sophisticated Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries named Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear are responsible for the DNC hack.
May 2016: An unidentified Democratic client takes over the Fusion GPS contract. Fusion hires Orbis Business Intelligence, a British intelligence firm co-founded by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, to assist it in investigating Russia-Trump connections.
June 2016: Although little noticed and not commented on at the time, Russian-Macedonian hackers begin a fake news campaign to energize Bernie Sanders supporters against Clinton by planting stories that, among other things, she murdered former Bill Clinton aide Vince Foster.
Early June 2016: The CIA concludes in an internal report that Russia is actively engaged in interfering in the presidential election, including the goal of getting Trump elected, not merely disrupting the U.S. political system.
June 3, 2016: Publicist Rob Goldstone, representing Emin Agaralov, emails Donald Trump Jr. that he had met with “his father Aras this morning and . . . [he] offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary . . . and would be very useful to your father.” Trump Jr. replies “if it’s what you say I love it.”
June 9, 2016: As a result of the email exchange, Donald Trump Jr. arranges a meeting of the campaign brain trust at Trump Tower with Goldstone and Natalia Veselnitskata, a Russian lawyer who through Goldstone has promised damaging material about Clinton. Kushner and Manafort also attend.
June 15, 2016: A hacker with the online persona Guccifer 2.0 claims credit for the DNC hack and begins posting DNC documents on the Guccifer 2.0 website.
June 15, 2016: House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy tells fellow Republican leaders that “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Dana Rohrabacher is a California Republican. House Speaker Paul Ryan immediately interjects and swears those present to secrecy.
June 17, 2015: The Washington Post publishes a story headlined “Inside Trump’s Financial Ties to Russia and His Unusual Flattery of Vladimir Putin.”
June 20, 2016: Steele delivers the first of a series of reports to Fusion GPS based on several confidential sources. He identifies “Source A” as “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” “Source B” as “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin,” and “Source E” as “an ethnic Russian” and “close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump.”
Summer of 2016: U.S. intelligence agencies collect information revealing that senior Russian intelligence and political operatives are discussing how to influence Trump through Flynn and Manafort.
July 2016: Russia escalates a campaign of harassment of American diplomats and intelligence operatives in Russia.
July 5, 2016: FBI Director James Comey rebukes Clinton for being “extremely careless” but recommends no criminal charges in connection with her handling of classified information, including emails on a private server, as secretary of state, ostensibly lifting a cloud from her presidential campaign.
July 6, 2016: Another batch of hacked DNC documents appears on the Guccifer 2.0 website.
July 14, 2016: Another batch of hacked DNC documents appear on the Guccifer 2.0 website.
Mid-July 2016: Working behind the scenes, the Trump campaign rewrites the Republican National Convention platform on Ukraine, removing a pledge to provide lethal weapons in its fight with Russia over Crimea and a call for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia.
July 19, 2016: Trump is nominated for president at the convention after he, Flynn and other surrogates declare, in what becomes an oft-repeated campaign theme in the coming weeks, that Clinton should be “in jail” for her use of the private email server.
July 19, 2016: Trump’s debt load has almost doubled from $350 million to $630 million over the past year, reports Bloomberg News.
July 22, 2016: WikiLeaks, which is friendly with Putin, begins releasing 44,000 hacked DNC emails.
July 25, 2016: Trump suggests that the Russians were behind the DNC hack because Putin “likes” him.
July 27, 2016: Trump calls on Russia to hack 30,000 so-called “missing” Clinton emails.
Late July 2016: The FBI opens an investigation to examine possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but its existence is kept secret even from high ranking members of Congress colloquially known as the Gang of Eight, who by law are to be briefed on important intelligence matters.
Late July 2016: The FBI obtains and then renews a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court warrant allowing it to monitor Page, whom it believes is in touch with Russian agents and had been used in previous years by Moscow spies to obtain information.
August 2016: The CIA concludes that unnamed Trump campaign advisers might be working with Russia to interfere in the election by sabotaging the Clinton campaign through a multi-pronged attack personally approved by Putin that includes email hacking, disinformation and false news stories.
August 2016: The CIA informs the White House of Putin’s campaign to interfere in the election. For the next five months, the administration secretly debates dozens of options on how to retaliate, including whether to use CIA-gathered material that would be embarrassing to Putin.
August 2016: CIA Director John Brennan convenes a secret task force with analysts and officers from the CIA, FBI and NSA to keep the White House and senior government officials informed.
August 2016: Manafort meets again with Kilimnik.
Early August: Steele begins sharing his memos to Fusion GPS with an FBI agent assigned to the bureau’s Eurasian Joint Organized Crime Squad.
August 4, 2016: Brennan calls Alexander Bortnikov, director of the FSB, the post-Soviet successor to the KGB, to warn him that election interference will not be tolerated.
August 12, 2016: A batch of hacked Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) documents appear on the Guccifer 2.0 website.
August 14, 2016: Stone engages in direct messages with Guccifer 2.0, according to media reports.
August 15, 2015: Guccifer 2.0 releases hacked DCCC documents on Florida primary elections.
August 15, 2016: Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson arranges a conference call with dozens of state election officials to enlist their support to shore up voting systems in light of the Russian effort. He gets no support.
August 19, 2016: Manafort is forced out as Trump’s campaign manager, ostensibly over concerns about his ties with Russian officials.
August 21, 2016: Guccifer 2.0 releases hacked DCCC documents on Pennsylvania congressional primaries.
Late August 2016: Brennan is so concerned about Trump-Russia links that he initiates urgent, one-on-one briefings with the Gang of Eight.
Late August 2016: Stone boasts that he has communicated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who he says has materials including “deleted” Clinton emails that would be embarrassing to her.
August 25, 2016: Brennan briefs Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, then the highest ranking Democrat. With Congress in recess, Brennan explains to Reid over a secure phone link that the FBI and not the CIA would have to take the lead in what is a domestic intelligence matter.
Late August 2016: Reid writes to Comey without mentioning the CIA briefing. He expresses great concern over what he calls mounting evidence “of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.”
August 31, 2016: Guccifer 2.0 releases documents hacked from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s personal computer.
September 2016: Intelligence shows that although Republican sites are also being hacked by Russians, only DNC emails are being publicized by WikiLeaks.
September 2016: Aaron Nevins, a Republican political operative with ties to Stone, receives valuable Democratic turnout analyses hacked by Guccifer 2.0 and publishes them online under a pseudonym.
September 5, 2016: Obama, meeting with Putin at a conference of world leaders in Hangzhou, China, tells him that the U.S. knew about the election interference and “[he] better stop or else.” Putin responds by demanding proof and accuses the U.S. of meddling in Russia’s internal affairs.
September 8, 2016: Trump campaign adviser Jeff Sessions meets with ambassador Kislyak in his Senate office.
September 15, 2016: Guccifer 2.0 releases hacked DCCC documents from New Hampshire, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio.
September 16, 2016: Stone declares on Boston Herald Radio that “I expect Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks people to drop a payload of new documents on Hillary on a weekly basis fairly soon.” He says he is in touch with Assange “through an intermediary.”
September 22, 2016: Two other Gang of Eight members — Dianne Feinstein and Representative Adam B. Schiff, the ranking Senate and House intel committee Democrats — release a statement stating that Russian intelligence agencies are “making a serious and concerted effort” to influence the election.
September 23, 2016: Guccifer 2.0 releases hacked documents from DCCC chairman Ben Ray Lujan.
Late September 2016: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, at the behind-the-scenes urging of the Obama administration, is asked to warn state election officials of possible attempts to penetrate their computer systems by Russian hackers. McConnell resists, questioning the veracity of the intelligence.
September 25, 2016: McConnell writes to state election officials. He does not mention the Russian connection, but warns of unnamed “malefactors” who might seek to disrupt elections through online intrusions.
October 4, 2016: Guccifer 2.0 releases documents hacked from the Clinton Foundation.
October 7, 2016: The Obama administration publicly accuses the Russia government of hacking into emails from the DNC and other institutions and individuals.
October 7, 2016: National security adviser Susan Rice summons Kislyak to the White House and gives him a message to relay to Putin about U.S. plans to retaliate for the election inferference.
Late October 2016: The Russians launch a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and send spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials.
October 28, 2016: Comey tells Congress that the FBI is reopening its Clinton investigation because of emails found on a computer belonging to former Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose estranged wife is a top Clinton aide. The Clinton campaign is thrown into crisis only 11 days before the election.
October 30, 2016: Reid writes a letter to Comey angrily accusing him of a “double standard” in renewing the Clinton investigation so close to the election while sitting on “explosive information” on ties between Trump and Russia. Comey’s response, if any, is not known.
October 31, 2016: The Obama administration, using a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear war, warns that the election meddling is unacceptable interference. Russia does not reply until after the election and denies the accusation
October 31, 2016: Mother Jones magazine reports without identifying former British spy Steele by name that he had produced a dossier that concluded Moscow had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Trump for years and had compromising information on him that could be used as blackmail. The story is little noticed in the flurry of election news.
November 6, 2016: Comey announces that after a intensive review of the “new” emails, they were found to be either personal or duplicates of those previously examined, and that the FBI had not changed the conclusions it reached in July in exonerating Clinton.
November 8, 2016: Sergei Krivov suffers fatal blunt force injuries after calling from the roof of the Russian consulate in New York. Krivov was widely believed to be a counter spy who coordinated efforts to prevent U.S. eavesdropping. Russian officials claim he died of a heart attack.
November 8, 2016: Trump defeats Clinton decisively in the Election College but loses the popular vote in a close race that pundits widely agree was decided by voters who were influenced by Trump’s repeated characterization of Clinton as being a criminal and Comey’s October 28 announcement.
November 9, 2016: Russia’s Parliament erupts in applause when Putin announces Trump’s election victory.
November 10, 2016: Obama, meeting with Trump at the White House, expresses profound concerns about Flynn becoming a top national security aide because of his previous management of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the 2015 trip to Moscow and other Russia ties.
November 10, 2016: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov acknowledges the Trump campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.
Mid-November 2016: Marshall Billingslea, a former Bush administration national security official, is named to head Trump’s national security transition team. Unlike Trump, he has deep skepticism about Russian intentions and concerns about contacts between Trump aides and Russian officials.
Late November 2016: Obama administration officials provide Billingslea with a CIA file on Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak because of Billingslea’s belief that Flynn is not taking seriously the implications of his contacts with Kislyak.
Late November 2016: Senator John McCain, attending the annual Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, is made aware of the Steele dossier by Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia and former Steele protégé.
December 1or 2, 2016: Trump son-in-law Kushner and Flynn meet with Kislyak at Trump Towers. They discuss easing sanctions while Kushner proposes that a secret communications channel be set up between the Trump transition team and Kremlin using Russian diplomatic facilities in the U.S. to shield their discussions from monitoring.
Early December: David J. Kramer, a former State Department official with Russia expertise and staffer at the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Washington, D.C., meets Steele in London at McCain’s behest and obtains a full copy of the dossier. It includes information that there had been discussions between the Trump campaign and Russians about how to pay hackers who penetrated the DNC computer system and how to cover up the operation. Manafort, Page and Stone are mentioned by name.
December 8, 2016: Page visits Moscow to meeting with “business leaders and thought leaders.”
December 9, 2016: Obama orders a comprehensive review of Russian interference in U.S. elections going back to 2008 with the intention of making some of the findings public. They are not.
December 9: McCain meets privately with Comey in his FBI office and gives him a copy of the Steele dossier .
December 13, 2016: A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman terms emerging stories about election-related hacking a power struggle between American security agencies.
December 16, 2016: Obama, in one of his last news briefings, expresses anger that the election “came to be dominated by a bunch of these leaks.”
Mid-December 2016: Kushner meets with Sergey Gorkov, a close associate of Putin and chief executive of Vnesheconombank, a development bank with close ties to Russian intelligence services that had been sanctioned by the Obama administration and one of its executives convicted of espionage.
December 26, 2016: Oleg Erovinkin, believed to be instrumental in helping Steele to compile his dossier, is found dead in the back seat of his car in Moscow in another suspicious death of an individual linked to the scandal.
December 29, 2016: After five months of internal debates, Obama announces modest new sanctions against Russia because of its election interfering, including expelling 35 diplomats and closing two Russian compounds.
December 29, 2017: Flynn talks with Kislyak about easing sanctions.
Early January 2017: The CIA and FBI are said to have “high confidence” that Russia was trying to help Trump through a hacking campaign, while the NSA has only “moderate confidence.” The agencies also believe that Russia gained election board computer access in a number of states.
January 3~5, 2017: In a series of tweets, Trump attacks the integrity of the U.S. intelligence community’s findings that Russia interfered in the election.
January 4, 2017: Flynn tells Trump’s transition team that he is under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign.
January 5, 2017: Obama’s national security director releases a report stating that the CIA, FBI and NSA believe that Russia hacked Democratic email accounts and then passed the emails on to WikiLeaks to try to tip the election to Trump because he would be friendlier to their interests.
January 6, 2017: Comey briefs the president-elect on the contents of the Steele dossier in a meeting at Trump Tower and begins keeping notes on his meetings with Trump.
January 10, 2017: BuzzFeed News publishes a story stating that the Steele dossier has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents and journalists.
January 10, 2017: Attorney General nominee Sessions states at a Senate confirmation hearing that he never had communications with the Russians.
January 10, 2017: Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, informs Trump of a military plan to retake the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria with the help of Syrian-Turkish forces. National security adviser designate Flynn, who has been secretly lobbying for the anti-Kurd Turkish government, tells Rice to hold off approving the mission.
January 11, 2017: Former Blackwater boss Erik Prince, working as an emissary for Trump, meets secretly with a man close to Putin in the Seychelles islands in an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the president-elect.
January 15, 2017: Vice President Pence states on Face the Nation that Flynn, whom Trump has named national security adviser, did not discuss sanctions with Kislyak nor did any Trump associates have contacts with Russians.
Mid-January 2017: Former Trump campaign manager Manfort tells Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus that the Steele dossier is “garbage” and suggests it was motivated by Democratic activists and donors working with Ukrainian government officials who supported Clinton.
January 20, 2017: Trump becomes president. He insists that the Russia scandal is “fake news” while naming Flynn an other people to key positions in his administration who had secret contacts with Russians involved in the interfering effort.
January 22, 2017: Flynn is sworn in as national security adviser, a position that does not require Senate confirmation.
January 22, 2017: Trump singles out Comey at a White House event, hugs him and declares, “Oh, and there’s Jim. He’s become more famous than me.”
January 24, 2017: Flynn is interviewed by the FBI at the White House, possibly about his contacts with Kislyak.
January 26, 2017: Acting Attorney General Sally Yates tells White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II that misstatements made by Flynn to the Trump administration regarding his meetings with Russians make him vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.
January 27, 2017: Yates, responding to a query from McGahn, says that Flynn could be criminally prosecuted.
January 27, 2017: Trump tells Comey “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty” during a private dinner in the Green Room at the White House. Comey, according to a memo he made of the meeting, replies that he can pledge “honesty” but not pledge “loyalty.”
Late January: Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, Sater and Andrii Artemenko, a wealthy oligarch and Ukrainian lawmaker, meet at the Loews Regency Hotel in Manhattan where a “peace plan” for control of Russian-held Crimea is hatched.
Late January: Cohen delivers the “peace plan” to Flynn at the White House, reports The New York Times.
January 30, 2017: McGahn asks Yates if the Trump administration can see the underlying intelligence data about Flynn. She agrees to provide it.
January 30, 2017: Trump fires Yates, allegedly over a matter not related to the scandal — her conclusion that Trump’s Muslim ban is unconstitutional, which is later upheld by the courts.
February 7: Alarmed at reports that Trump plans to ease Russia sanctions, two senators introduce bipartisan legislation to bar the administration from granting sanctions relief without congressional review.
February 13, 2017: Flynn is forced to resign as national security director when it is revealed he misled Vice President Pence about his communications with Kislyak concerning easing Obama administration Russia sanctions.
February 14, 2017: Trump tells Comey in a rivate Oval Office meeting that he wants him to drop the FBI’s investigation of Flynn.
February 15, 2017: White House Chief of Priebus asks Comey and his top deputy, Andrew McCabe, to refute news reports about Trump campaign ties with Russian government officials. They demur.
February 15, 2017: Comey confronts AG Sessions and tells him he doesn’t want to be left alone again with the president.
February 24, 2017: Comey rejects requests from the Trump administration to publicly rebut reports about Trump associates’ contacts with Russians. Trump counters by tweeting that FBI sources are leaking information to the press and demands that stop.
February 26, 2017: Chuck Todd of NBC News notes a pattern in which Trump attacks the press immediately after a new Trump-Russia story breaks.
March 2017: Over the course of five sessions, the FBI questions Page about allegations that he served as a middleman between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the election.
March 2, 2017: Alex Oronov, a naturalized U.S. citizen, dies under unexplained circumstances in his native Ukraine. He reportedly helped set up the late January meeting between Cohen, Sater and Artemenko.
March 2, 2017: AG Sessions recuses himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russia-Trump connections after acknowledging that he failed to disclose his own meetings with Kislyak while he was advising the Trump campaign.
March 4, 2017: Trump, reportedly furious that Session recused himself, tweets that Obama ordered the phones at Trump Tower to be wiretapped.
March 5, 2017: Comey asks the Justice Department to deny Trump’s wiretapping claim. Justice refuses and Comey’s request is leaked to the news media.
March 11, 2017: Trump fires New York U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was conducting several investigations involving Trump associates, including Tom Price, health and human services secretary.
March 17, 2017: Wealthy Russians have invested nearly $100 million in Trump luxury high rises in Florida, according to Reuters.
March 20, 2017: Comey in effect calls Trump a liar in publicly acknowledging for the first time in testimony before Congress that the FBI’s investigation into Russian election interfering includes Trump associates’ contacts with Russians who were working to sabotage Clinton.
March 2017: In the wake of Comey’s testimony, Trump makes separate appeals to Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, and Admiral Michael S. Rogers, director of the NSA to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. They refuse.
Late March 2017: Flynn offers to be interviewed by investigators for Senate and House committees examining Trump campaign ties to Russia in exchange for immunity from prosecution. The offer is later withdrawn.
March 30, 2017: Trump asks Comey in a phone call what could be done to “lift the cloud” over him because the FBI investigation was hurting his ability to govern. Comey replies that the FBI and Justice were reluctant to make statements about the president’s status “because it would create a duty to correct, should that change.”
April 2017: The Senate and House intel committees secure access to top-level intelligence from the FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies on Trump-Russia ties that in theory will enable them to dig deeper.
April 7, 2017: Spanish authorities arrest Pyotr Levashov at the request of U.S. authorities, who believe he is one of the Russia election meddlers who distributed “fake news” to try to influence voters through sendings billions of spambot messages by infecting tens of thousands of computers.
April 8, 2017: House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes recuses himself from the panel’s investigation after it is revealed that White House security staffers fed him information in an effort to bolster Trump’s false claim that Obama had personally ordered that his Trump Tower phones be tapped.
April 11, 2017: Trump asks Comey in a phone call when he planned to put out a statement that he was not under investigation. Comey responds that he had passed the request on to his bosses at Justice but had not heard back.
April 25, 2017: House Oversight Committee members assert that Flynn may have violated federal law by not fully disclosing his business dealings with Russians.
April 28, 2017: The Senate Intelligence Committee asks four Trump campaign associates — Flynn, Page, Manafort and Stone — to hand over emails and other records of their dealings with Russians and says it is prepared to subpoena those who refuse to cooperate.
Early May 2017: Comey meets with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to request a substantial increase in funding and personnel to expand the FBI’s investigation in light of information showing possible evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.
Early May 2017: Stone, who is being investigated for his Russia ties, reportedly lobbies the president to fire Comey.
Early May 2017: White House lawyers warn Trump that it would be inappropriate for him to reach out to Flynn, which he tells them he wants to do, because Flynn is under investigation.
May 2, 2017: Trump agrees in a phone conversation with Putin to meet with his foreign minister, who will be meeting with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in coming days. Putin neglects to tell Trump that the Lavrov-Tillerson meeting with be 4,100 miles away in Alaska, while the White House keeps secret the forthcoming visit.
May 2, 2017: Clinton says Comey’s decision to tell Congress of the “new” Clinton emails and WikiLeaks email disclosures helped alter the outcome of the election because people inclined to vote for her “got scared off” while Trump again tweets that the scandal is”phony.”
May 2, 2017: Trump criticizes Comey in a tweet, saying “[He] was the best thing to ever happen to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds.”
May 3, 2017: Comey tells Congress, “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election” because of his Clinton case disclosure. He says the Russia investigation is continuing.
May 5, 2017: Kushner reportedly urges Trump to take a hard line when he announces support for an Arab boycott of Qatar, which had turned down Kushner and his father for a half-billion dollar bailout in early 2016.
May 8, 2017: Yates testifies before a Senate subcommittee about the repeated warnings given Trump and his White House legal counsel about Flynn being a security risk and possibly liable for criminal prosecution because of his Russia ties.
May 9, 2017: Trump hires a Washington law firm to send a letter to Senator Lindsey Graham, who says he intends to look into Trump’s extensive business dealings with Russians. Trump claims yet again that he has no connections to Russia.
May 9, 2017: The Senate Intelligence Committee issues a subpoena to Flynn demanding that he turn over records of his interactions with Russians after he refuses to do so. A federal grand in Alexandria, Virginia issues subpoenas to a number of Flynn’s business associates.
May 9, 2017: Trump, who had effusively praised FBI Director Comey’s handling of the Clinton email investigations, summarily fires him. He asserts that Comey mishandled the investigations, but it is widely believed that he is trying to quash the bureau’s Russia investigation.
May 9, 2017: Deputy AG Rosenstein, who drafted the Justice Department memo justifying the dismissal of Comey, threatens to resign after the White House portrays him as the mastermind behind the firing.
May 10, 2017: Trump, meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and ambassador Kislyak at the White House, boasts about highly classified information from an ally about ISIS he was not permitted to disclose, let alone to an adversary.
May 11, 2017: Testifying before Congress, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe rejects White House assertions that Comey had lost the backing of rank-and-file agents, and says the bureau’s Russia investigation will continue.
May 12, 2017: Trump issues a veiled threat to Comey to not leak any information that he may have and indicates he may have tapes of their conversations.
May 12, 2017: A “close associate” of Comey’s states that the fired FBI director is willing to testify before Congress, but only in an open hearing.
May 15, 2017: The Washington Post publishes a story on Trump’s boast to Lavrov and Kislyak. The White House denies that the president revealed sensitive intelligence.
May 16, 2017: Trump, in early morning tweets, contradicts his aides and appears to acknowledge that The Post story is accurate, while the White House refuses to release a transcript of the Lavrov and Kislyak meeting.
May 17, 2017: In a remarkable offer, Putin says he is willing to provide Congress with a transcript of the meeting. Democrats and Republicans reject the offer.
May 17, 2017: Deputy AG Rosenstein names Robert Mueller, who preceded Comey as FBI director, as special counsel to oversee its Russia investigation. Trump calls the appointment the “greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
May 18, 2017: FBI and congressional investigators say Flynn and other Trump campaign advisers were in contact with Russians in at least 18 calls and emails during the last seven months of the presidential race, according to Reuters.
May 18, 2017: Trump yet again calls the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” but for the first time equivocates, saying that “I cannot speak for others.”
May 19, 2017: Deputy AG Rosenstein tells members of Congress that Mueller has been given the authority to investigate the possibility of a cover-up.
May 19, 2017: The Washington Post reports that a senior White House adviser close to the president is a “significant person of interest” to investigators.
May 19, 2017: A transcript of the May 10 Lavrov-Kislyak meeting shows that Trump told them that firing “real nut job” Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
May 19, 2017: Russian officials bragged in conversations during the presidential campaign that they could use Flynn to influence Trump and his team, according to CNN.
May 20, 2017: The House Intelligence Committee asks Michael Caputo to submit to a voluntary interview, reports The New York Times. Caputo, who worked for the Trump campaign for six months, had extensive dealings with Kremlin officials in the 1990s.
May 22, 2017: Flynn’s lawyers tell the Senate Intelligence Committee that he is invoking the Fifth Amendment rather than comply with a subpoena to produce documents regarding his contacts with Russians.
May 23, 2017: Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, tells the House Intelligence Committee that the Trump campaign may have been successfully recruited by Russia and said there is evidence of “troubling” contacts between the campaign and Russian officials.
May 23, 2017: Trump retains the services of lawyer Marc E. Kasowitz in connection with the Russia scandal. He previously represented Trump in fraud, divorce and numerous other cases, and has clients with extensive Kremlin ties.
May 30, 2017: Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, says he will refuse to cooperate with the Senate and House intel committee investigations.
May 31, 2017: Clinton, in an interview at Recode’s Code Conference, says she is “leaning” toward believing that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.
June 1, 2017: Shifting from previous blanket denials of Russian involvement, Putin says “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks to help the Trump campaign.
Early June 2017: Mueller is said to be expanding his investigation beyond Trump-Russia ties to include the roles of AG Sessions and Deputy AG Rosenstein in firing Comey.
June 5, 2017: Trump, in a series of tweets, chastises the Justice Department for the troubles plaguing the White House. Sources say the president also is angry at AG Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, which eventually led to Mueller’s appointment.
June 6, 2017: Kushner reportedly urges Trump to take a hard line as he announces support for an Arab boycott of Qatar, which had turned down Kushner and his father for a half-billion dollar bailout loan in early 2016.
June 7, 2017: Coats and Rogers, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, refuse to discuss Trump’s efforts to get them to deny the existence of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.
June 8, 2017: Comey, in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee carried lived on national television, calls Trump a liar and untrustworthy, implies the president has obstructed justice and says he leaked notes of his February 14 meeting with Trump to The New York Times with the intention of getting a special counsel named.
June 9, 2017: Trump says Comey’s testimony vindicates him, accuses the former FBI director of lying and offers to give sworn testimony.
June 11, 2017: Trump calls Comey “cowardly” and vows to find out if he leaked any more sensitive information.
June 12, 2017: A longtime Trump friend says the president is considering whether to fire Mueller as some of Trump’s conservative allies attack the special counsel’s credibility.
June 13, 2017: Trump personal lawyer Kasowitz bragged to friends that he got New York U.S. Attorney Bharara fired after telling Trump “this guy is going to get you,” according to Talking Points Memo.
June 13, 2017: Deputy AG Rosenstein says Mueller will have “full independence” and only he can fire him for cause, while Adam Schiff, the ranking House intel committee Democrat, says Congress would immediately reappoint Mueller.
June 13, 2017: AG Sessions testifies before the Senate intel committee, indignantly denying any collusion with Russia and declining to answer key questions about his conduct and interactions with Trump.
June 14, 2017: In a sharp rebuke to Trump, the Senate votes overwhelmingly to block the president from easing Russia sanctions and to step up sanctions for its election interference.
June 14, 2017: Mueller is investigating whether Trump obstructed justice, reports The Washington Post.
June 15, 2017: VP Pence hires a criminal defense lawyer to assist him in the various investigations.
June 15, 2017: Trump’s transition team general counsel orders team members to preserve documents and other materials related to the Russia investigations because of the possibility some of them are under investigation.
June 15, 2017: Trump tweets that Mueller is “a very bad and conflicted” person.
June 16, 2017: Trump attacks Deputy AG Rosenstein in a tweet for leading a “witch hunt” in acknowledging publicly for the first time that he is under investigation.
Mid-June 2017: Coats and Rogers tell Mueller’s team and Senate investigators that Trump suggested they say publicly there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russians.
June 20, 2017: AG Sessions hires a criminal defense lawyer to help him in the various investigations.
June 21, 2017: Jae Johnson, Obama’s secretary of homeland security, tells the House Intelligence Committee the administration feared acknowledging Russian election interference would reveal too much about intelligence gathering and be interpreted as “taking sides” in the race.
June 22, 2017: Trump says in a tweet that he did not tape his meetings with Comey.
June 23, 2017: Trump says in a “Fox & Friends” interview that his tweet hinting at taped meetings with Comey was intended to influence his testimony before Congress.
June 25, 2017: Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” blames the Obama administration for failing to deal with Russian interference in the election.
June 27, 2017: Manafort reveals that he failed to disclose, as required by law, that his consulting firm received more than $17 million over two years from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s political party before Yanukovych fled to Russia in 2014.
June 29-30, 2017: Right-wing Republican opposition researcher Peter Smith implied before his death in May that he worked for Flynn, who he says was colluding with Russian hackers trying to obtain the “missing” Clinton emails, according to Wall Street Journal stories that also state investigators are looking into Flynn’s role as a possible intermediary.
July 6, 2017: Trump, at a news conference in Warsaw, Poland, again questions U.S. intelligence agency claims Russia interfered in the election and said Obama deliberately didn’t address Russian hacking for political reasons.
July 7, 2017: Trump and Putin meet for the first time at a G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany. Trump raises the issue of election interference, which Putin denies. Putin later claims Trump had “agreed” with his statements of denial.
July 9, 2017: Trump, returning from Europe, declares it is “time to move forward” in a constructive relationship with Russia and says he is prepared to team with Moscow on forming an “impenetrable Cyber Security” unit to prevent future hacking breaches.
July 9~11, 2017: The New York Times publishes stories on consecutive days on Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Veselnitsakya in June 2016.
July 10, 2017: Trump Jr. hires a criminal defense lawyer to assist him in the various investigations.
germy
http://kikoshouse.blogspot.com
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@germy: Its so goddamn long. And it will only get longer
?BillinGlendaleCA
@TenguPhule:
Check Amazon, it’s Prime Day, don’t ya know.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@TenguPhule:
Somebody in my office had been a career prosecutor on some interesting task forces, advised discretion as this guy’s name had popped up on some OC lists involved some unsolved murders in the entrepreneur side of things.
As he put it, the wristslap the asshole would get for the pled down misdemeanor offense wouldn’t be worth the installation of 24 hour home security or the daily cost of pet boarding away from my home.
It stung, but made sense.
Lapassionara
@Betty Cracker: I’m with you. Just say the word.
germy
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
It’ll get so long it’ll see its own tail on the horizon.
efgoldman
@germy: Jesus H, Use up all the pixels, why don’t you.
You writing the 2017 version of All the President’s Men or something?
Karen
@dmsilev: don jr the “smart one” this is more scary than reading Stephen King just before going to bed after having eaten too much. Sadly, not horror story nightmare, but “real life”
Kay
So. Raise your hand if you predicted Donald Trump’s son would leave an email map of “collusion” :)
God. Rich people are absolute morons.
germy
@efgoldman: My copy/paste muscle twitched. Pardon.
germy
Repubs are oddly silent on the subject of don jr
chris
@germy: Thank you. Bookmarked.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@germy:
My favorite part from the most recent post:
Raven Onthill
I very much fear that this is the point where the radical right Christian and nationalist factions install Mike Pence as President, and attempt to create the Kingdom of Gilead. We have two enemies here: Russia and our own home-grown fascists, and it does not do to disregard either.
Kay
And what a huge let-down Wikileaks is- we were all reading the dead-boring Clinton emails while the Trump campaign was conducting international espionage.
Wkiileaks screwed the public. They gave us rice recipes when they coulda got the good stuff.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Kay: That’s because Wikileaks is a tool of the state of Russia
Chris
@MCA1:
This.
Reposted from a couple threads ago:
As much as I generally don’t mind the “remember that this isn’t actually treason, treason is a very narrowly defined term in the constitution” reminders, at this point, fuck it. If colluding with the KGB in order to take over your own government doesn’t constitute treason, then the term has no meaning. It may or may not fly in a court of law, but by the standards required to post in plain English on a political blog, the term is just fine.
japa21
@germy: Not all. Hatch has already said this is being blown up out of proportion and Donny Jr. is a nice young man.
@Kay: IMHO, you just won the intertubes.
germy
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kay:
No worries, it’s only collusion(which I’m told by Faux Noise is ‘A OK’) or just a little light treason.
efgoldman
@Kay:
Hey, I love a good risotto!
Tazj
@Betty Cracker: These people are shameless. I give you Marsha Blackburn she’d like to know more about the Clinton Foundation’s links to Russia and former president Barack Obama’s conversations with Russia.
I especially love the part where she complains that the press is covering a shiny object while ignoring the work of Congress to create jobs and provide healthcare.
Chris
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Reposting myself again, from years ago, but something that’s been unpleasantly resonant since 2016:
[in the context of whether the Republican base would ever wake the fuck up and realize they were being screwed by their elites]: “Personally, I’m at least as worried about what would happen if they actually did wake up. If they finally realized that they’re being screwed, that they’re never going to see the money trickling down, that life not only isn’t going to get better but is going to keep getting worse… none of that’s going to do anything to change the prejudices they base their politics on. Isn’t a crazy right wing base slipping off the leash and no longer taking orders from conservative elites exactly how… all that unpleasantness in Europe in the thirties and forties happened?”
germy
Chris
@Kay:
Sadly, what Goku said: seems pretty clear at this point that Wikileaks is for all intents and purposes and arm of Russian intelligence. You know those radical groups from the seventies and eighties that indignantly claimed that they were the real revolutionaries and were in no way connected to those gray dour state-capitalist bureaucrats in Moscow? And then when Eastern Europe fell and all the archives of the STASI and its buddies were raided, it turned out that, yeah, no, they were in Moscow’s pocket all along? Wikileaks is that, upgraded for one generation later.
Chris
@germy:
You can’t be fucking serious.
trollhattan
@germy: Dear lord, Wilmer, what the hell game are you playing (or is he subtly gathering Republican support for wifey?)
rikyrah
@germy:
Damn.Thanks for this.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@germy: Now knock that off, he’s the the most popular Democrat out there(except he’s not a Democrat and there’s that Obama guy).
germy
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
bemused
@Kay:
This family is especially stupid amped up by being rich and arrogant. I’d love to see them to get some lengthy jail time anyway but their “can’t touch me” attitudes make me want that even more.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@JAFD: In case no one has mentioned it yet, there are eyedrops available for allergy-related irritation, and some are available OTC. If you wear contact lenses, remove them before applying drops.
I double up Zyrtec and Clairitin, but luckily neither makes me sleepy. Clearly, YMMV. Some people get good results from the nasal sprays that aim to apply the drugs right at the site–a friend swears by her Flonase.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@germy: Sounds like the old coot picked up some of the wrong kind of mushrooms by the lake house.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Chris: Since I’m too lazy to look it up myself, the anti-nuclear movement of the 80s wasn’t embedded with KGB agents, was it?
E
I miss Orly Taitz. What’s she up to these days? Surely she has a comment from her real estate/dental office/constitutional law practice.
Chris
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Sorry. By “radical” I meant actually terrorist – Baader-Meinhoff, Red Brigades, Japanese Red Army, Action Directe. Those guys basically existed on life support from places like Libya, Syria, and various East European republics, and when the Soviet Bloc collapsed, went away.
But yes, unfortunately, I think the anti-nuclear movement and a non-trivial amount of the New Left movements of 1968 and after were embedded with KGB agents. That doesn’t mean they founded them or controlled them, even to the extent that they controlled the terrorist types, but I’m pretty sure they did try to support and influence them as much as possible.
elm
@germy: Lets not rush to judgment on what this signed confession means!
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Chris: Yeah, they probably did. It was just that I really connected with the movies and music that came out of that era. It kind of colored my politics and view of the world
r€nato
@elm: We’ve sure come a long way from Trump firing Comey and admitting on national television that he did it to stop the Russia investigation… just think where we’ll be a few weeks from now. I hope it’s Trump resigning in disgrace or impeached and convicted.