Note: Adam has already written a post on this New York Times story. I was working on this one, which comes at the issues a little differently, but there’s overlap. I decided not to change it by much.
This is an amazing story. Amazing for its substance and for how it came to be.
Bruce Ohr is a Justice Department official whom Donald Trump has been tweeting about. Trump has linked Ohr to Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, and Russia. Why is Trump so concerned about a mid-level Justice Department official?
The Times story doesn’t directly address that question. But it fills in some things about Bruce Ohr. Additionally, it shows that Congressional Republicans have been using classification to invent a story that they thought couldn’t be refuted.
Christopher Steele and Bruce Ohr began discussing turning Oleg Deripaska in November 2014, almost a full year before the Washington Examiner, a conservative newspaper, engaged Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump’s background. The dossier that Steele would later pull together for Fusion and its later client, Hillary Clinton, was nine months in the future.
The FBI knew that Russia was trying to interfere in the election, and they wanted to know more about Paul Manafort, who had worked with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with ties to Vladimir Putin. Steele had connections that could help. Deripaska was allowed to travel to New York on a diplomatic passport as part of the Russian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. Steele set up a meeting.
Mr. Ohr attended the meeting, during which the Americans pressed Mr. Deripaska on the connections between Russian organized crime and Mr. Putin’s government, as well as other issues, according to a person familiar with the events. The person said that Mr. Deripaska told the Americans that their theories were off base and did not reflect how things worked in Russia.
There were other contacts with Deripaska, but no success in getting anything like cooperation. According to the article, other oligarchs were contacted as well.
And then came the dossier. The FBI and the spy agencies had been looking at possible cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russians since late 2015; the dossier fit into that.
The Republicans on the intelligence committees had access to emails between Ohr and Steele, along with other documents. Their story focused on the dossier, and they falsely claimed that it was the basis for FISA surveillance and other law enforcement actions. They could do this, they thought, because the documents were classified, so that the full story couldn’t be told.
Indeed, an attempt by American intelligence agencies to turn Russian oligarchs is something that should be classified. Why are the sources for the Times story talking about it now?
The Times identifies its sources as “current and former officials and associates of Mr. Deripaska.” They didn’t take the officials’ word for it, they talked to Deripaska’s associates as well.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an initiative that remains classified. Most expressed deep discomfort, saying they feared that in revealing the attempts to cultivate Mr. Deripaska and other oligarchs they were undermining American national security and strengthening the grip that Mr. Putin holds over those who surround him.
But they also said they did not want Mr. Trump and his allies to use the program’s secrecy as a screen with which they could cherry-pick facts and present them, sheared of context, to undermine the special counsel’s investigation. That, too, they said they feared, would damage American security.
The American officials are obviously part of the intelligence community. If the attempt to turn the oligarchs was not already dead, it is now. Deripaska and other oligarchs may have a problem in convincing Putin that they have not been turned, although those relationships probably bear a weight of distrust in any case. Trump’s attacks on Ohr have put him in a difficult position that probably won’t be made much worse by these revelations.
What the Republicans in Congress are doing is despicable. Intelligence professionals have strong commitments both to fact and to national security. When the Republicans circulate lies to damage the Mueller investigation or the intelligence agencies themselves, they put intelligence professionals in an impossible position. Some of them decided to talk to the New York Times. They decided that breaking their silence is less damaging than the Republican attacks.
Cermet
Been there done that, says many thugs when they help bush the sock puppet of cheney try and discredit and expose Valerie Plame. Being a traitor and a thug goes hand-in-hand. Raygun certainly helped this when he arrange guns for the hostages. Tricky dick also did it when he undermined Johnson’s peace initiative with North Vietnam.
rikyrah
They need to leak more. We have TRAITORS ..and, they need to be exposed.
Saw the segment on Maddow about Mr. Ohr. He is a patriot and brilliant public servant.
rikyrah
Kansas Supreme Court wants grand jury convened on Kobach
https://lawandcrime.com/politics/grand-jury-must-be-convened-to-investigate-kris-kobach-court-rules/
Yarrow
Watched “The Death of Stalin” last night. I got the impression that trust at the highest levels of Soviet/Russian government has been an issue for a long time.
Mary G
Just reading a Dallas News article from last May about GOP taking Russian money:
Something really rotten in all this.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: “Follow the money.”
JPL
@rikyrah: The democrats have a chance to win back the house, but we also need the Senate to insure that this mess is cleaned up.
The leaks need to keep coming.
The Dangerman
…and Trump announces his candidacy, basically out of the blue, June, 2015.
True, but it reflects the crisis; the SS Trump is doing the Titanic thing. They can fight like an arrowed black bear (clicking link may not be for faint of heart) or go for the lifeboats. Unfortunately, the lifeboats are guarded by crazies who are telling them to don’t even think about it. Sucks to be them right now.
I figure we have a Tuesday night massacre (as soon as polls close) and Trump fires … basically everyone involved he wants gone. Sessions, too.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I hate these fucking people. As you say, they put our intelligence people in an awful bind. Keep their mouths shut and let lies run wild? Or talk and let out classified shit? My own feeling is that the leaking is less bad. This is a democracy, at least for the time being. Democracies cannot work unless the citizens know what’s going on. When people in the government lie as a matter of course, we citizens have a much harder time doing our jobs. So these intelligence people have to leak things they shouldn’t, and otherwise never would, for the sake of the country. Nobody should ever have to choose between going down two such awful roads, and fuck Donald Tяump and his shitty little toadies for making these people choose. Fuck them forever and a half.
A Ghost To Most
Although we’ve tossed the term around for decades, it really is a vast right-wing conspiracy.
What do you do with so many traitors?
Cheryl Rofer
@Mary G: The Dallas Morning News had a couple of good articles on Russian money in the GOP. That’s one of them. I haven’t seen anything from them in a while, though. As I commented to Adam in his thread about Maria Butina, there are still a lot of loose ends as to who’s getting money from where. The Russians are good at covering their tracks, and I guess the Republicans are too.
Cheryl Rofer
@A Ghost To Most: I am concerned about what will happen if we learn that most Republican legislators have been compromised. It’s beyond what the Constitution envisioned.
Patricia Kayden
@rikyrah: Yes, the very fact that Trump and Republicans hate him is a huge indicator that Ohr is one of the good guys. This regime is sleaziness personified. I’m sure that Mueller is shocked by what he’s finding.
Patricia Kayden
@rikyrah: That is great news. What I wouldn’t give to see Kris “purge all the voters of color” Kobach actually become a felon and lose his right to vote.
A Ghost To Most
@Cheryl Rofer: I’m afraid the “if” in your statement may be a “when”. How do we deal with this many brainwashed individuals?
James E Powell
@Cheryl Rofer:
It’s way beyond what our political culture, including especially the press/media, is able to deal with. Expect a of denial and pressure to drop investigations and move forward and blah blah blah.
Snarki, child of Loki
“How do we deal with this many brainwashed individuals?”
Wood-chippers.
TS (the original)
@Yarrow:
Not too much trust at the highest levels of US government at the moment. trump & cohorts will say anything, do anything to continue in power.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
There is at least one schlub commenting at that site. He’s all in with drumpf. He doesn’t seem to have any friends.
Also very good news about kKK. Indiana didn’t want Pence and Kansas seemingly doesn’t want kKK. Would one be presumptive in believing that at least some of the “heartland” is waking up?
Shana
@Cheryl Rofer: I’ve been wondering about that too. There seem to be so many Reps and Senators who’ve received money. What do you do when 1/4 to 1/3 (just a guess) turn out to have taken dirty money?
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Yep. Always, always follow the money. That’s where the power and white collar crime is. Need I remind anyone – Al Capone.
Cheryl Rofer
What Maria Butina may have done is made difficult to figure out by articles like this. There are at least two problems: the schemes she was involved in are bizarre, and reportorial conventions make the stories hard to understand.
I rewrote the Times article about Ohr to provide a simple statement of what happened, chronologically. That is not how reporters write. There once was a convention that who, what, where, and when had to show up in the first couple of paragraphs. Now we have narrative, which goes back and forth, throws in new characters randomly, and might give you a crucial date or time somewhere toward the end.
The Butina article is particularly bad. I’ve read it a couple of times, and, without writing stuff down, I can’t tell you who offered her a million dollars for jet fuel or what they intended to do with it. There is a cast of thousands, extending to Pakistan, who may or may not have had jet fuel to sell or wanted to buy it.
It’s likely that this is a bunch of con people conning each other. But the reporters are content to say that something happened that involved a promise of lots of money if Butina could get a supply of Russian jet fuel and then throw in a bunch of atmospheric stuff.
Cheryl Rofer
@Shana: We start by electing Democrats this fall. If there are fewer Republicans in Congress, the problem is smaller.
Ruckus
@Patricia Kayden:
I’d bet he’s over being shocked. He’s been around the law for a long time. And I’d bet his time in the Marine Corp and in Vietnam most likely didn’t leave him with the ability to be shocked by a lot of things that would shock most of us. He seems very much to me as a let’s do this thing right and for however long it takes kind of guy. You don’t shock them easily. Surprise occasionally but not a lot of shock.
Ruckus
@Shana:
Start over?
Shana
@Ruckus: And expand the prisons?
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
The con is simple. As are the main proponents. But it goes deep and probably most of one of our political parties are involved, even if some of them don’t know or realize it. Which is the mark of a simple but strong con, the marks help the con along, all without knowing that it’s a con. In this case I’d bet that drumpf was just a simpleton in the right place at the right time, who really, really needed to find a way out of what I’d also bet is his crushing debt. It’s been known that he wanted to run for president before and considering him and what just mentioning President Obama’s name does to him, he’d do anything to win. ANYTHING. Cheat, not a problem, he’s been doing that his entire life. Be a racist, check, easy peasy. I believe that Putin bought him, lock stock and the barrel he has him over. All of the pieces point in that direction and what can we do about it? Arrest Putin? Yeah sure, that can and will happen but not in this lifetime. Putin is running out of time. He’s stolen most of the money he can, he’s strong armed for all the power and he’s still a third rate or worse country. What’s a boy to do?
Yarrow
@Patricia Kayden: Mueller rolled up the mob. He’s not going to be shocked by any of what he’s finding. The Trump crime family is another mob family, just on a bigger scale and involving the Russian mob this time. Corrupt politicians in the pocket of the mob are hardly new. It’s just this time the mob boss is the head of state of our biggest enemy state.
patrick II
I have always felt they did the same sort of thing with Hillary — knowing she couldn’t defend herself with classified information which they cherry picked in their hearings. Later, at least some of what was in her emails and the fact that there was what was supposed to be a secret CIA mission came out. But the damage had been done.
Yarrow
@Shana: We have plenty of prison space; they’re just filled with low level offenders, many of whom don’t really need to be there. Release low level drug offenders and the problem is solved.
mattH
@Cermet: Right? It’s been party over country for more than 4 decades now. This is why there have to be investigations after every Republican administration.
Mainmata
@Cermet: This is the key point: Republicans for the last 50 years at least are totally comfortble with committing treason if it will help them win or maintain power and/or achieve their ideological goals. They’ve become a party of total degenerates that needs to be destroyed or they will destroy this country.
Ruckus
@Shana:
Well we could let out some of the people who don’t need to be in there, we could build a couple more Supermaxes. And who cares if it’s over crowed and dropping the soap in the shower is an every day affair?
But what I really meant was the country could start over. Build a better mouse trap, the one we have worked OK for a while, as long as you didn’t mind the racism and the cronyism of the owners. But it really no longer represents the interests of the majority, which it sort of did for a long time. And there are a lot more of us than when we were 13 colonies and a lot of wilderness.
How many of us feel that most of our representatives aren’t actually representing us? It’s a fair number and I think they are correct, those reps are representing their pay masters. See it’s always follow the money. Sure there are and always would be a few who do represent their constituents and if we are successful this Nov probably quite a few more. But the senate and the current executive branch and the probable USSC? Yeah the people are just those of us who aren’t their paymasters, even if that isn’t direct.
PJ
@Yarrow: I don’t know, or care, whether Mueller is shocked by what he is investigating, but the extent of the corruption of major Republican lawmakers seems to be much larger than anything we have ever experienced in this country. (Though the corruption in the Buchanan Administration, notably the shipment of federal arms to the Confederacy, ranks up there. And there are similarities between the Confederates and modern day Republicans, who would abrogate democracy if it would guarantee them permanent political power.) That doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t be exposed, but it does mean that teaching the American people about it will be a big job, and rectifying the damage will be even bigger.
p.a.
Does Putin really consider Trump an asset whom he would regret to see fall, or is it win/win to him no matter what the outcome: infantile incompetent remains in office, vs gets thrown out resulting in howls and chaos from the racist entourage? Chaos either way, but B is basically US only, not Post WW2 world order.
(My thought: Putin prefers Trump survive as this throws not only the US but NATO/Atlantic alliance/US-Japan-SK axis, WTO etc etc into the shit. But he can live w/result B)
J R in WV
I think many criminal enterprises are confusing from the beginning, by design partly, and also because criminals don’t organize well. These guys don’t seem qualified to organize a good picnic, really, and in trying to create both a real world public and legal organization while at the same time trying to manage a black ops underground illegal effort, well, a cluster fuq of grand proportions is to be expected.
Many reporters have trouble explaining a moderately complex public bond issue, so expecting them to be able to organize a really complicated exercise in illegality buried within an equally complicated legal organization, that may be expecting too much. Someone trained in organization of complex operations can to a much better job of unveiling the illegal machinations of Manafort and his puppet handlers, someone like Ms Rofer!
Thanks Cheryl!
Suzanne
@Mainmata: Yes. My biggest fear is that Mueller and journalists and the IC and the FBI can do all this work, reveal all this truth…..and then nothing happens, because the Trump fanbase people really do not care. They care about having their trash avatar in power so they can humiliate the intellectual coastal elitist liberals, who make them feel BAD!
I have yet to read a compelling plan for how to move forward from that point.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@p.a.: Either way, there’s Kaos in the US, Putin doesn’t care as long as that’s the result.
Ruckus
@p.a.:
I’d bet tomorrow’s lunch money that Putin doesn’t really give a shit about the shitgibbon, his success or failure. And he’s smart enough to know there is no success there. Putin is playing the long game. And as I said above he really doesn’t have anything else left if he wants to be a world leader. And he really, really does. Right now he controls everything in Russia, he is a modern tzar. And it’s at best just above 3rd world country. His economy is listed as 10th on some charts. He can’t steal any more, he can’t control any more, he’s 65 so he’s got a few years left but he’s pissed off a lot of people, do you think he is loved by many?
His goal, IMO, is to disrupt the US to the point that we do stupid shit on tariffs, trade, world relations so that he can gain world position, which he otherwise couldn’t at all. How’s it look so far?
He doesn’t give a fuck about drumpf, why should he, drumpf is just a pawn in his game. And he knows that drumpf is such a fuck up that he will screw up the US. How’s it look so far? And massive splitting of a country, based upon racism? Have you studied Russian history? They know from racism but are mostly not a country of immigrants like we are. They know what buttons to push. I doubt this entire mess is far off of what Putin envisioned.
Ken
@J R in WV:
Or Easter Egg roll.
Zelma
@p.a.
What does Putin want? Exactly what Putin is getting! A weakened, isolated United States which is unwilling (or unable) to sustain the promises it made to its allies. Sure, Putin would like to get the sanctions removed but that’s far from his first priority. His stooges who have moved billions to the US and other western nations are finding the sanctions annoying and Putin does have to try to keep the thieves happy. But what Putin wants is exactly what he’s getting. Did he know when he backed Trump that this would be the result? Probably not. What’s going on is probably beyond his wildest dreams. What he wants is to destroy the United States and his puppet is succeeding.
Mainmata
@Ruckus: Ironically, the proof of Putin’s weakness was those China-Russia military games. China is a rising military force but not a superpower; Russia is a petrostate with a declining population and a miserable economy outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Putin fully understands and empathizes with the GOP and vice-versa because they align with his socio-economic ideology.
zhena gogolia
@Cheryl Rofer:
Thank you for saying this. Every time I click on one of these Russia stories, I get disheartened three sentences in, because I have no idea what’s going on. And I speak Russian and have been there many times — so how would the average reader be able to get all this?
SenyorDave
@Suzanne: My biggest fear is that Mueller and journalists and the IC and the FBI can do all this work, reveal all this truth…..and then nothing happens, because the Trump fanbase people really do not care. They care about having their trash avatar in power so they can humiliate the intellectual coastal elitist liberals, who make them feel BAD!
I worry about that too. The only thing I come up with is some type of march like the women’s march only bigger. Have a million people in DC, 2 million in Manhattan, etc. And shut down these places. Make it about anger at the party in power failing to do their jobs.
BTW, I am assuming that if the Dems take the House this will not be necessary because they will have subpoena power., but I’m not banking on this happenning.
zhena gogolia
@Zelma:
He’s also one of the thieves, don’t forget.
Cheryl Rofer
@p.a.: Oh man, what Putin wants, that’s the question! He wants to stay in power. He wants Russia to be seen as the US’s equal. Beyond that, I’m not guessing!
Putin has quite a set of issues in Russia. People there are getting tired of the foreign adventures and recently got quite angry about his proposal to cut pensions. He’s backtracked somewhat on that. But he does have his troll and hacker factories, and they can keep going pretty much independently of any political trouble.
Miss Bianca
@Cheryl Rofer:
Funny you should say that, because I’m writing for an online news magazine now, and those are the first conventions my editor reminded me of! Basically, the first few times I wrote a story she re-worked the opening paragraphs so that we’d get the skinny right in the beginning, and then work our way forward from there.
Cheryl Rofer
@zhena gogolia: Thanks. A sanity check is good for all involved. I feel crazy reading some of this stuff, too.
I’ve been trying to follow the Trump-Russia connections since the summer of 2016. I thought I’d do a master timeline, and I’ve got quite a bit of work put into a breakdown of the Steele dossier and comparison to what’s been happening, which I really should bring up to date.
But the standard media articles are so badly written from the viewpoint of extracting that kind of information, I found myself having to devote MUCH too much time to every article that might contain new information. It’s a hard story to report on, hard to know how much background to put in, hard to note all the possible connections. But the way the articles are written makes all that much harder.
Ruckus
@Mainmata:
Exactly.
Putin wants to be #1. He can’t do this by building up his country, at least not with the only tools he knows and the amount of corruption in place and the time he has left.
So his only possible game is to tear down those who are at the top. That’s us and the EU. He is big enough and economically strong enough to hurt the EU, that petrostate thing. But the EU has been going all out on sustainable power generation and good public transportation and are doing pretty damn good at it. Yes they will for the foreseeable future need petroleum, as will we. But they are far ahead of us on electric generation with wind and solar and tax the crap out of gas eating vehicles. There are enough people who don’t need a car at all there and here we are fighting the war of personal transportation as the be all end all of civilization, with our F250s and Silverados and Rams that never carry anything more than groceries.
Cheryl Rofer
@Miss Bianca: Your editor is to be commended. Some organizations do still work that way, but not the New York Times or the Washington Post. And they have many of the most important articles.
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
Getting the info doesn’t mean much if you don’t/can’t/aren’t allowed to write the story in an understandable and informative way.
Zelma
@zhena gogolia:
Oh, undoubtedly he’s a thief too. Some say he is the richest man in the world. But I’m not sure that wealth was ever what solely motivated Putin. Power and revenge and, in his wildest dreams, the reestablishment of the Russian empire. Was it not he who declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy in modern history?
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: @Cheryl Rofer: These are the same things. Follow the money.
Suzanne
@SenyorDave:
So I have been listening to a podcast about Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School this week. Apparently, Marcuse essentially believed that for workers to tear down monopoly capitalism, the master’s tools would have to tear down the master’s house, aka we will have to use the power structures and artistic expressions we currently have in order to achieve collective liberation. This seems difficult.
I don’t know if protest will be sufficient. Especially in urban areas, by educated people like most of us here. I hope it doesn’t require more suffering.
But I do think that we have drastically underestimated how shitty white people (we don’t even have a name for this subculture) were in thrall to their own identity politics.
Zelma
William Saletan had a very interesting article about Trump/Putin on whichever website he writes for. He argued that Putin won over Trump not because of any “dirt” that Putin has on him, but because Trump chose the Putin’s view of the events over that of the US intelligence community. Birds of a feather and all that.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cheryl Rofer: I’m convinced this is a deliberate effort to alter traditional journalism to make it more amenable to being a form of propaganda as opposed to a means to inform. It’s not what the Founders imagined a free press to be, for sure. They wanted an informed electorate, which is the last thing the parasite 1% wants. Furthermore, they encourage the paranoids like Alex Jones to further muddy the waters, because they know that most of the population has rudimentary critical thinking skills at best.
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman: The circumstantial evidence is strong, but I’d like to see more before I launch into a full-blown accusation.
zhena gogolia
@Zelma:
Chicken or egg. I don’t think he really cares about Russia’s greatness. It’s a scam for the rubes.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ken: ISWYDT
Villago Delenda Est
@James E Powell: This is because the Village is not only craven, they are lazy. “The Narrative” is a crunch that assists them with not going to places that discomfit them. Half their effort is devoted to tamping down their own self awareness.
Villago Delenda Est
@Villago Delenda Est: er, a crutch. I want my edit button back!
Miss Bianca
@Cheryl Rofer: I’ll tell her you said so. ; ) Interestingly, this editor is the same person who, in her role as the chairperson of a foreign adoption advocacy group for former Soviet countries, got called as cover by the Russians before that infamous meeting at Trump Tower to “discuss Russian adoptions” – another Russian connection that’s got me smh.
Cheryl Rofer
@Miss Bianca: A sidelight I wasn’t aware of. And a very clear statement of exactly what happened.
The Russians really wanted people to believe that meeting was about adoptions. But, as she said, the Magnitsky Act has nothing to do with adoptions. That was what the Russians chose to retaliate on.
oatler.
The main problem as I see it is that none of these motherfuckers ever dies. Is Kissinger selling some of his serum?
FuzzyDude
Am I over-anxious to fear that Mueller might be in physical danger? I assume he has very strong physical protection day to day?
Procopius
I can’t make sense of this.
Why are they using Russian sources to validate the story of Russians acting against the interests of U.S. intelligence agencies? Why would they think current and former officials and associates of Mr. Deripaska are more trustworthy than he is? I read the story twice, but can’t make it coherent. I still don’t know what’s supposed to be important about Bruce Ohr. What does the FISA warrant and Manafort have to do with anything?
Gin & Tonic
@Procopius: Manafort worked for Deripaska and reportedly owed (owes?) him a shitload of money.
PJ
@Gin & Tonic: @Procopius: Which is why Deripaska says he’s willing to testify about his relationship with Manafort, but not about Trump’s relationship with the Russians.
peter ramus
Should be “Washington Beacon, a conservative website,” what?
Jeffro
@Cheryl Rofer:
I may have to up my usual phrasing to “thousands of charges against hundreds of people”
By the time this all drops, we will be through the upcoming election cycle and possibly up against the next. It is indeed beyond what the constitution envisioned but…well…we’ll see if the republic can take care of it at the ballot box
Cheryl Rofer
@Procopius: Did you read my post and the Times article?
The sources are “current and former officials” of the United States government. They are referenced in more or less this way in other places in the article. It’s prudent to confirm with associates of Deripaska if they can. The US officials have different motivations than the Deripaska associates. If their stories match, there’s a good chance they are both telling the truth.
Bruce Ohr, as it says in the Times article, was a part of an operation that was trying to turn Russian oligarchs to cooperate with the US government. Deripaska, in particular, had a great many business dealings with Paul Manafort, who was Donald Trump’s campaign manager and took no salary from Trump. This was all part of the government’s investigation of Russian influence on the election and with the Trump campaign.
The Republicans in Congress, particularly those on the intelligence committees, have had the information in the Times article and more. They have cherry-picked that information to set up a false story that the Steele dossier was the basis for the FISA warrant allowing surveillance of Carter Page’s communications and that Bruce Ohr and others are plotting against Trump.
Cheryl Rofer
@Jeffro: And impeachment. And the courts. But we need to be thinking about how to mend civil society.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cheryl Rofer: We can’t mend civil society without a thorough cleansing of the wound.
Cheryl Rofer
@Villago Delenda Est: I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Not gonna make a list tonight, but we have a number of things to face up to. I’ve said before that we will need a truth and reconciliation commission, maybe more than one.
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
VDE is right, no society has rebuilt itself without figuring out what it wants, various ways to get there and to clean house.
Over the last 50-60 yrs we have kept people like Rodger Stone in play. Or a better way to say it was that he wasn’t removed from play. That has led to the acceptance of their story and propaganda agency, faux news. So we are where we are, deep in it, with the truth difficult for non political junkies to wade through. And so wade we must, at some point soon. Questions need to be asked and answered and we will need to change some of the effects that time has worn on our government, because it is barely working in good times and even less so now. We don’t have enough protections for the people, we get to vote, and little more. And many don’t get that protection.
We need to find out exactly what did happen so that we can act appropriately. And I’ve heard some good possibilities here the last two days, things that could make this a lot harder to happen again.
Aleta
The way I understand it so far. (Pretty obvious …)
Trump and Republicans need to disprove any suggestion that the Russians influenced his win and he’s illegitimate. And that his campaign conspired with foreigners. Since they can’t ignore or disprove the actual IC leaks, all the press investigations and the guilty pleas, they have to create their own story to negate it. (“We create our own reality” said some Bush person.)
So Republican have come up the story that the intelligence leaks and the whole of Deripaska –Ohr- -Steele–Fusion GPS– Clinton–the dossier is a political plot to harm Trump, done by intelligence people and media who work for some kind of secret rogue operation.
In other words, the DOJ-FBI-CIA are the subversive elements, not Trump. So they are the actors in the deep state Trump and his ilk refer to, the ones who are trying to overthrow the democratically elected Greatest Most Loved Leader.
Yikes, Trump doesn’t believe his own DOJ is legitimate. And got Graham and Falwell Jr. to say that Sessions has revealed his disloyalty by recusing, refusing to prosecute HRC, and not ending the investigation, so he too is secretly working for the subversives.
The storytelling about Trump’s legitimacy began right after the inauguration (as he kept repeating lies about how historically big his win, how large the crowd, and lying about the popular vote and the EC). Right after the inauguration is also when news stories about Kislyak talking secretly to Flynn and Kushner and Sessions began to appear, because someone in the DOJ or CIA or other security agencies had leaked that information to reporters. The leaks happened so soon that to me it seems the reason was someone was worried and already convinced.
If I remember right, it also came out that those conversations were picked up because of US surveillance of the Russian embassy. (IIrc, at first Republicans countered by saying that it happened before Trump was in the WH office– therefore private citizens talking to the Russians was not illegal. Then they said that the surveillance itself was out of bounds. (In fact it was done properly through the court.) They gave harmless sounding reasons for the conversations (just as they did later, for the T Tower meeting). They added to the story (as the T tower meeting came out) that Obama was illegally tapping Trump’s phones and who knows what. And eventually Congress held a hearing to claim the FBI emails between those two people having an affair were evidence of a plot.
All in all, they’ve been making the case straight along that there is deep corruption inside the IC in cahoots with HRC and President Obama. Republicans have placed every firing and action that looks like obstruction of justice into their narrative of rogue elements that had to be stopped. Meanwhile young George P’s lawyers say he’s a bumbling innocent just trying to help out who got tangled up in the big complicated world.
After all the effort put into distrusting conventions for proving facts, while defunding education, I don’t expect there will be public consensus about Republican lies and conspiring. (Later on historians etc. will work it over of course.)
I think it’s better not to expect agreement, even about his crimes or badness. As he usually does, Trump’s changed the story to an alternative focus.
But I absolutely believe he will be exposed and that a number of his people will be in court for a long time, with jail for some. I just don’t expect that the numbers in support of it will be like Watergate. I think the conspiracy theory that they’ve created will go on, because that’s where we are right now.
This is incredibly to the point. Thanks Cheryl and thanks for reordering the NYT story.
dimmsdale
@Shana: Well, and what do we do if/when it’s revealed that Russians salted Democrats’, as well as Republicans’, campaigns with dirty money? I don’t know how possible it actually is for campaign fundraisers to be vigilant against Russian campaign contributions, but if I were a Putin lackey trying to sap Americans’ faith in our election process, and to sow chaos, I’d be sure to contribute tainted money to Democrats as well as Republicans, and then not reveal it until the hammer started coming down on Russian/Republican election interference. Just a guess on my part, but I think we should be prepared for it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ruckus: Two words: Citizens United.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
CU is certainly one of the things but really it goes a lot deeper than that. How did we get to where that could go that way? It wasn’t a shot in the dark, it was started in motion a long time prior. A lot of the rat fucking that’s been going on has been so for my entire life. And I don’t think it started then. Too much of our history has been the powers that be bought or stole what the original document seems to be saying. Till now it really doesn’t say that at all according to many and they want their pound of flesh to prove it. We have always had wealthy segment of the population, every society does and societies most often fail when that segment wants it all. And gets most of it. We were supposed to be different. But we are almost all of us human and we have all the foibles that humans have had since time started. Some have a bit more foibles than normal.
I think we either have to find a way out this mess and how to fix the issues that plague us or we will continue to find ourselves down the road we are now on. And in my mind that is an unsustainable path.
prostratedragon
@Cheryl Rofer: My concern ever since it became clear how Russianized Trump was, soon after the nomination. I think it is why Obama was so cautious; he had a real “logistical” problem on his hands similar to trying to eradicate Pharaoh ants.
Of course much more terrifying is the cultural problem of 60+ million in desperate need of basic education (“a” is for apple, this is a conman, official racism has already been shown to cripple societies, four legs may be good but we have two, etc.) that we have to live with.
Cheryl Rofer
@Aleta: This is pretty much correct. I am a bit more agnostic about Trump’s motives, but not so much as to make a difference in the overall story. And I’d add that other countries’ intelligence services have contributed to what we know.
Cheryl Rofer
@dimmsdale: I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some of that, but so far we have no evidence that Democrats welcomed Russian operatives into their organizations as the NRA did Maria Butina, or that they eagerly accepted Russian information operations, as Don Jr. did the meeting with Veselnitskaya and others.
Tokyokie
@Cheryl Rofer: The 5 w’s and an h (who, what, where, when, why and how) were still being taught when I was an undergrad j-student at Mizzou, but that was a long, long time ago. Mizzou was always a rather traditionalist program, so maybe they still do. But as new bits of information are uncovered, WaPo and NYT will cram those into the lede, no matter how badly it messes up the timeline regarding the other known facts. I’ll read what’s new, but I won’t dive more than a few graphs into a story, just far enough to get an idea of how things fit together. But I’m happy you show up on occasion to make sense out of all of it.
melusine
@Suzanne:
According to Trae Crowder, the proper name is indeed “shitty white people”. Which really sums up the nasty, racist, think-they’re-superior element quite well.
DonL140
Re: Journalism
Reports are short and get the W’s in the lede. They give a great deal of information quickly, but not completely. A longer report includes “both sides.” News reports are designed to give information and let the reader choose sides.
Longer reports with more information and often a single conclusion, put “theme” in the lede and build. These are “stories” and are not specifically news reports. This is the gray area between the editorial page and the front page.
Cheryl Rofer
@DonL140: I don’t believe I’ve seen a single report on the Trump-Russia scandal. Just “stories.” And longer reports could stick to the standard format if informing the public is truly what the print media wants to do.
Aardvark Cheeselog
Fixed that post title for you