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You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Russiagate / Yet More Seychelles

Yet More Seychelles

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After Betty wrote her post, the Washington Post impolitely dropped an explosive addendum to the Times story of last night. (That was last night, wasn’t it?)

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has gathered evidence that a secret meeting in the Seychelles just before the inauguration of Donald Trump was an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin — apparently contradicting statements made to lawmakers by one of its participants, according to people familiar with the matter.

This is the first big leak about what Mueller is doing. Notice that I am not saying “from Mueller’s shop,” because they have been very, very careful. I need to read the article much more carefully to try to figure out who the source(s) is(are).

That’s two times now that Trump people tried to set up secret backchannels to Russia. Now the UAE is involved too.

So Erik Prince lied to Congress. His sister visited Marjorie Stoneman Douglas School yesterday. The kids were unimpressed.

I think there’s a lot more in the Times story that I’d like to figure out. I should be less busy tomorrow than I’ve been, so maybe I can do it then.

Oh, and another thing.

 

Reader Interactions

173Comments

  1. 1.

    Adam L Silverman

    And this seems to have happened too. Apparently all the news tonight is going to break in prime time.

  2. 2.

    Baud

    Why does the president need a back channel to the Kremlin? Did they get rid of the red phone?

  4. 4.

    Corner Stone

    Sen Warren blasting this banking bill that is getting D votes. Like her or love her, she’s nailing this issue.

  5. 5.

    patrick II

    I have a question. There was a computer server in Trump tower that may have been in secret communication with a Russian bank. It was discovered and shut down. At some point Jared asked for a backdoor channel to communicate with the Russians, and now this meeting at the Seychilles where the same subject comes up. What is the timing of these meetings in relation to the loss of the Trump/bank server connection? Were they trying to replace a secret means of communication that had been lost?

  9. 9.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Baud: Jared’s and this one would not be subject to the ordinary White House rules of recordkeeping. We’ve seen far too many meetings by Trump, Tillerson, and others in which NO other Americans took part. No interpreters, no note-takers.

    There are many reasons to have an interpreter. The baseline is to be sure that you understand what is being said to you and to the other person. A note-taker takes the pressure off the principals so that they can concentrate on the meeting. And both are witnesses to what was said.

    Every president has worked with people who help to record his meetings, ultimately for the public, even though not everything is immediately available.

    This bunch doesn’t want to work like that. We can draw some nasty conclusions from that.

  11. 11.

    Adam L Silverman

    I’d also like to point out that this administration seems to have found every scumbag to come out of the Navy Special Forces community. Prince, Zinke, Higbee. There’s one more, but I can’t remember his name.

  13. 13.

    danielx

    Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has gathered evidence that a secret meeting in the Seychelles just before the inauguration of Donald Trump was an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin — apparently contradicting statements made to lawmakers by one of its participants, according to people familiar with the matter.

    I do not believe I have ever used the word ‘treason’ in regard to Le Affaire Russe. But…this particular pile of really filthy political manure is beginning to smell mightily like it. Lord knows no sane person wants a shooting war between us and the Russians, nor any other country/entity for that matter. That’s a long way from the Russians having the best interests of the US at heart. About as far as it is distant from normal for an incoming administration to try to set up a back channel with a country that does not have our best interests at heart….

    Am I being too credulous?

  14. 14.

    Adam L Silverman

    @patrick II: The server, which seems to have been in the middle between Alfa Bank’s server and a server for a company owned by Betsy DeVoss (Eric Prince’s sister), was discovered in the late summer/early fall of 2016. Or at least made public at that time. These arrangements for the backchannels, both Kushner’s with Kislyak via the Russian Embassy in DC and the one with Prince, the Russians, and this Lebanese-American fixer for the Emiratis happened during the transition.

  16. 16.

    jonas

    @Baud: So that Putin could relay instructions about what he expected from the WH in a way that wouldn’t get picked up by the press.

  19. 19.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    His sister visited Marjorie Stoneman Douglas School yesterday. The kids were unimpressed

    I never did learn how that turned out. She actually went in front of these kids?

  22. 22.

    Jay

    @Baud:

    While there is some privledge in WH Communications, it’s supposed to be “all on the record”.

    If you are going to be engaging in a little light treasoning with Vlad the Impaler, you’ld want it off the books.

  23. 23.

    ? Martin

    @Adam L Silverman: The core competency of every one of these people is criminality. If they had upstanding lives outside of this administration, they were working really damn hard at it, because the moment they got the opportunity to bend the rules, they ran hard.

  25. 25.

    different-church-lady

    The writers keep introducing new characters from all different parts of the world that honestly make it hard for casual viewers to track the plot.

    I was really confused by the part where America was about to give the rose to Hillary and then gave it to Donald instead.

  26. 26.

    Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)

    @Adam L Silverman: There’s still Katie Hopkins and Alex Jones to explain.

    Hell, rappers aren’t known for their attention to healthy practices, yet the only ones I’m aware of who’ve aged that horribly are Ras Kass (44), Lil Wayne (35) and Flavor Flav (58) [and quite a few others wear their age, but they generally don’t look a decade older].

  27. 27.

    jc

    Mr. Trump must be so impressed with his BFF Vlad, watching how he deals with those who threaten his interests. Trump only wishes he could poison his enemies. Those damned legal and ethical constraints keep getting in the way.

  28. 28.

    different-church-lady

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Kellyanne Conway was born in 1572 and occasionally bathes in the blood of young, virginal women…//

    If she actually did that she wouldn’t look like she was sixty.

  29. 29.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @danielx:

    Am I being too credulous?

    I have a problem with this too. Accusing someone in a high post of coordinating with a hostile power is a very heavy thing and should not be done without proper evidence. Alternatively, it sounds like a conspiracy theory.

    That’s why I have been very careful in how I write about this. But the evidence that comes in seems to be going in one direction only. And friends who I respect are struggling with the same thing.

  30. 30.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Cheryl Rofer: I’m not going to reconstruct the whole thing from memory after a couple of cocktails, but I looked at the Alfa Bank thing at the time it became public, and there seemed to be much less there than it looked to people who don’t understand DNS very well. IOW, there was, based on the data available at the time, an easy and relatively benign explanation. I haven’t followed the story after that, though.

  31. 31.

    ? Martin

    @Corner Stone: Yep. Her protege is running for a House seat here in CA and has the voter backing and the CA Dem Party didn’t endorse her. I don’t get it.

  34. 34.

    different-church-lady

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    Accusing someone in a high post of coordinating with a hostile power is a very heavy thing and should not be done without proper evidence.

    Trump was not yet in that post.

  35. 35.

    B.B.A.

    @different-church-lady: They weren’t expecting to get renewed for another season and had to through a wrench into the storyline because the planned conclusion left them with nowhere to go.

    No, sorry, that was Code Geass.

  38. 38.

    ? Martin

    @Cheryl Rofer: Trump is not unknown. He’s done this shit his entire life – break any rule, any law to get ahead. This is completely in character for him.

  39. 39.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Gin & Tonic: I don’t know enough about computers to make a judgment, but my sense is that your view was up for a while, and then people found something else or reinterpreted the data, and decided that the link looked maybe not harmless.

  42. 42.

    JPL

    Is it possible that since Kelly was in the room when Trump spoke to Preibus and then McGahn, he informed the special council?
    Kelly is a liar and a creep, but it could still be possible.

  44. 44.

    efgoldman

    If you sent this script to any fifty random agents in Hollywood, each and every one would send it back postage due.

  46. 46.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cheryl Rofer: It is a strange place we find ourselves. As I’ve written here several times: I should not be able to link all of these people – from the President, to members of his family, to his closest business and political aides and appointees – to Russians who are all within one or two links of Putin.

  50. 50.

    Adam L Silverman

    @efgoldman: She hasn’t produced the birth certificate. So it could be 1472. I understand the President has a team in New Jersey looking for it and you won’t believe what they’re finding!

  53. 53.

    efgoldman

    @WereBear:

    Finding scumbags seems to be a real strength in this administration.

    Clearly not strength enough. There are still hundreds of empty desks in various departments, especially state and DOD

  54. 54.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Why would Putin kill witnesses when there was no collusion.

  56. 56.

    Corner Stone

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Has anyone heard him speak.

    Yes, one time in Prague. He stopped next to me at the bar and asked if I had the time. “The time for what?” I responded. The next three weeks were a blur but I’ll never forget his milky soft hands and the desperate gleam in his eyes when I grabbed him by the back of his head.

  61. 61.

    different-church-lady

    @Corner Stone:

    …the desperate gleam in his eyes when I grabbed him by the back of his head.

    …and forced his face down into the toilet?

  62. 62.

    efgoldman

    @Corner Stone:

    I’ll never forget his milky soft hands and the desperate gleam in his eyes when I grabbed him by the back of his head.

    You are one sick puppy. Funny, but sick.

  71. 71.

    eric U.

    what’s amazing is that even with only the publicly known information, any Democratic presidency would be sunk by now. And it seems clear that we don’t know some really bad stuff that they have done.

  72. 72.

    Amir Khalid

    @Baud:
    The red phone (which to me always seemed to have the ring* of a fictional invention) is an official channel. I’d bet the conversations on it are secret,but still recorded/transcribed. Jared might have been thinking of that when he asked for a private channel — he would have wanted something not subject to official monitoring. Everything Jared thinks up has to have its dose of stupid, and I think asking the US Government to provide you such a channel (which of course they would monitor without telling you) is a big helping of stupid.

    *Geddit? Geddit?

  74. 74.

    Brachiator

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I’d also like to point out that this administration seems to have found every scumbag to come out of the Navy Special Forces community.

    I had a younger cousin who briefly worked for a state agency that had developed a reputation for being corrupt. He didn’t know how bad it was before working there and got out as fast as he could. He noted that the agency was fairly diverse, but the common link, no matter where the key staff came from, were that they were all crooked, unpleasant and untrustworthy.

    This seems to be the case with the Trump administration, with the GOP leadership as co-conspirators.

  75. 75.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    When they found Sepe in the meat
    truck, he was frozen so stiff it
    took them two days to thaw him out
    for the autopsy.

  79. 79.

    lgerard

    Is it wrong to hope that the participant also made that same misleading statement to the FBI?

    I think not

  80. 80.

    Major Major Major Major

    OT FYI

    A researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says he’s revising a study he co-authored after admitting that “criticism is valid” of initial findings that Uber and Lyft drivers are making a median pretax profit of $3.37 an hour and a vast majority are making less than minimum wage.

    Uber said the working paper had “a major error in the authors’ methodology.”

    Using one new method of calculating the median profit that incorporates Uber’s criticism, the figure “rises to $8.55/hour from the $3.37 initially reported,” the lead author Stephen Zoepf wrote in a statement posted to Twitter on Monday. And using another alternate method, the median profit goes up to $10 an hour.

  81. 81.

    RandomMonster

    That’s why I have been very careful in how I write about this.

    Thank god I’m not in some position where I have to exercise skepticism. When the Republican party changed only a single plank of their platform after the primaries— and it had to do with easing sanctions on the Russians — I could just freely assume a conspiracy on the part of the likes of Manafort.

  83. 83.

    mad citizen

    I have a random question. One day I looked at the treason statute and the language was something like “enemies of the United States”. What defines Russia, or any other nation, as an enemy of the U.S.? I can get if we’ve declared war against a nation, but are their other criteria?

  84. 84.

    Brachiator

    So, we’re finding out that Trump likes it from the back channels…. But enough about the Stormy Daniels revelations.

  88. 88.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @mad citizen: IANAL, but that seems to be one of the reasons not to call the administration’s actions treason. What is said is that treason can only be committed with an enemy of the United States.

    I don’t feel like I’m missing much in not using the word. Describing the acts and the evidence for them is bad enough, although only Mueller is preparing his work for a court of law.

  90. 90.

    Amir Khalid

    @? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
    They do say a young man wants a girl like the one that married dear old Dad. I reckon young women do something similar: they learn, from watching their fathers, what to look for in a man. And in Ivanka’s case, Dad is a high-rolling but crooked and inept real estate man. I’d throw in the sleazy personal morals if I could, but I haven’t seen any sign of that in Jared.

  94. 94.

    efgoldman

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Well, that’s all she wrote on the power front.

    We’re still OK (but most of our wires are on poles and the snow is getting heavy).

  97. 97.

    Amir Khalid

    @mad citizen:
    An enemy state in a declared war. Russia is a geopolitical adversary, yes; but the US is not formally at war with it, so Russia is not an enemy for the purposes of the statute.

  100. 100.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Amir Khalid: If I recall correctly, the Cold War-era “red phone” (aka the hotline) was never actually a phone on the President’s desk; it was a teletype.

    These days Trump probably just calls up Putin on his unsecured cell phone.

  102. 102.

    Corner Stone

    @Amir Khalid:

    And in Ivanka’s case, Dad is a high-rolling but crooked and inept real estate man. I’d throw in the sleazy personal morals if I could, but I haven’t seen any sign of that morals in Jared.

  104. 104.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @Amir Khalid:
    Ivanka has an Elektra complex and her father most likely has the hots for his daughter. Family values!

  107. 107.

    Anne Laurie

    @? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:

    What Ivanka sees in him I’ll never know.

    They both grew up with overbearing, narcissistic, criminally-inclined daddies. It’s a weird form of bonding — gives them a shared emotional ‘vocabulary’ that they couldn’t find dating people from less fvcked-up families. Kinda like the way children of alcoholics have a way of ‘finding each other’ even when they don’t know each others’ backgrounds; as one such person said “It saves so much time when you don’t have to explain all these things… “

  109. 109.

    Amir Khalid

    @Matt McIrvin:

    the Cold War-era “red phone” (aka the hotline) was never actually a phone on the President’s desk; it was a teletype.

    You mean, Hollywood’s been lying to me all these years?!

  110. 110.

    Corner Stone

    @RandomMonster: I guess it’s not easy for someone with a serious research and data driven background to reach too far without nailing it all down first. But I’m with you. I’ve never been smacked in the face with a fish but I’m sure it stinks. Same with this whole WH crowd. they stink to high heaven.

  116. 116.

    Corner Stone

    @Anne Laurie:

    They both grew up with overbearing, narcissistic, criminally-inclined daddies. It’s a weird form of bonding — gives them a shared emotional ‘vocabulary’ that they couldn’t find dating people from less fvcked-up families.

    Ivanka is a graspy, greedy, striver for acceptance. She saw a man with a B in front of his bank account and figured it was a way to secure the next phase of her ambition, given that Daddy had went bankrupt four or so times already.

  119. 119.

    Yutsano

    @Omnes Omnibus: My soft spot for Teufelhunden is well known. :P However this is supposed to be the post of a lifetime…and it’s for the Dolt45 crew. They’re consummate professionals but eww.

  127. 127.

    mad citizen

    @Cheryl Rofer: Thanks Cheryl and Amir for the answers! I agree with the comment that a Democratic administration would have been toast by now. I was on the CNN website thinking if Obama has a past affair come to light when he was President, people would be hounding him out of office.

  133. 133.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @rikyrah: There is something very wrong going on in the administration. It may or may not be treason according to the legal definition. Mueller has indicted people for conspiracy to defraud the United States. That may wind up being the charge against all of them.

  136. 136.

    Corner Stone

    I had the absolute pleasure of explaining who Stormy Daniels was to my son earlier today. Since both his mom and I are up front about the birds and bees this did not shock him. But it was still a lot of fun.

  145. 145.

    mad citizen

    @Corner Stone: That sounds great. Were you able to get into why people use aliases, like Stephanie Clifford = Stormy Daniels, or Donald Trump = David Dennison, or John Barron or John Miller?

  147. 147.

    Sm*t Cl*de

    @Calouste:

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yeah. I mean, people go to sleep there and wake up as a giant cockroach.

    The giant cockroach later teamed up with the Golem, Dr Faustus and Doctor Dee, as Prague’s own crime-fighting team of superheroes.

  151. 151.

    Corner Stone

    @mad citizen: No. He has a news feed on his phone and we discuss anything that strikes his fancy. This blurb just lead to, “Who is Stormy Daniels?”
    “I am glad you asked that!”

  152. 152.

    The Lodger

    @Adam L Silverman: Sorry, I forgot you’re not a Game of Thrones fan. He’s a eunuch. Unlike the fate of a couple of other characters, his captors did the job when he was young.

  155. 155.

    T S

    @Corner Stone: I don’t have to “love” anyone to vote for them. They just need to be pushing the debate and the policies leftward. But then again, I’m not a liberal snowflake, just a liberal.

  160. 160.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    @Cheryl Rofer:
    Me too. Whenever I think I’m fully immune to being shocked by anything coming out of this maladministration, they remind me all over again of just how much arrogance and contempt they bring to … well, to everything. Norms, institutions, simple manners, all tossed aside like a used Kleenex.

  164. 164.

    Procopius

    @danielx: “Am I being too credulous?” Probably not, but you don’t seem to understand what “treason” is under the American Constitution. In the absence of war, there can be no treason. In the context of the constitution, there is no way to understand the word “enemies” except as adversaries in war. We are not at war with Russia, and there is no objective reason for us to even be adversaries except that’s what the neoconservatives and imperialists want.

  165. 165.

    Procopius

    @Jay: Anything transmitted over “the red phone” would be so highly classified probably nobody except Trump and Jared could read it (it’s actually an old-fashioned teletype machine).

  167. 167.

    Shalimar

    @Adam L Silverman: So you’re saying Kellyanne Conway hasn’t been able to kidnap and kill virgins since she got increased scrutiny from working in the White House? Theoretically, 450 year olds should show no signs of aging over a trivial period of a year or two.

  171. 171.

    beef

    @Procopius:

    I’ve heard about enough pedantic internet-lawyer explanations of the peculiar US legal meaning of ‘treason’. The word has a plain English meaning as well, and that’s what everyone means when they talk about Trump’s treason. We weren’t at war with Russia during the Cold War, but I don’t think you’ll find too many people who think the Rosenbergs weren’t guilty of treason.

  172. 172.

    arielibra

    @Sm*t Cl*de:

    The giant cockroach later teamed up with the Golem, Dr Faustus and Doctor Dee, as Prague’s own crime-fighting team of superheroes.

    FIVE STARS WOULD READ.

  173. 173.

    Barney

    Skripal is not, however, “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin” (he was jailed and swapped years ago), so Stedman has got that one wrong.

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