The Southern District of New York indicted an alleged money-laundering grifting ring this morning: Audrey Strauss, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Philip R. Bartlett, Inspector-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the United States Postal Inspection Service (“USPIS”), announced the unsealing of an indictment charging BRIAN …
Trump Crime Cartel
GOP Venality Open Thread: Yep, RUSSIAGATE IS REAL
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Republican Venality, Russiagate, Trump Crime Cartel
BREAKING: In a thousand-page bipartisan report, US Senate Intel Cmte. says the Trump admin. obstructed its investigation with "novel claims" of executive privilege, and paints portrait of a Trump campaign eager to accept help from a foreign power in 2016. https://t.co/BfpgoOGJvX — NBC News (@NBCNews) August 18, 2020 I’m sure better-informed front pagers will be …
GOP Venality Open Thread: Yep, RUSSIAGATE IS REALPost + Comments (101)
Senate report on Russia blows a hole in Trump’s ‘hoax’ claims https://t.co/5u6bacGcew
— Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) August 18, 2020
The Washington Examiner is quite a conservative / right-wing outlet, but even they aren’t trying to whitewash this:
A new, bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee confirms, unambiguously, that the Justice Department had good reason to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. It also indicates that investigators were right to examine potential conspiracy with the Kremlin by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Again, this is a bipartisan report, not a partisan Democratic attack document. It is endorsed by Republican committee chairman (on leave), Richard Burr of North Carolina, by acting Chairman Marco Rubio of Florida, and by all other Republicans on the committee in addition to the committee Democrats.
The very first substantive words of the report say this: “The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”
The report “focuses on the counterintelligence threat, outlining a wide range of Russian efforts to influence the Trump Campaign and the 2016 election. In this volume the Committee lays out its findings in detail by looking at many aspects of the counterintelligence threat posed by the Russian influence operation,” with special attention on the multitudinous Russian connections of Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, who for more than a decade had conducted “influence operations” on behalf of a major Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska.
Also, “Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer.” And: “[C]ontinuing throughout his time in the Campaign, Manafort directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik, Deripaska, and the pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine. On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik.”
That’s just from the report’s initial summary. The report contains 952 pages of evidence and analysis showing that these Russian efforts were a serious intelligence threat. Moreover, several Trump officials were at least somewhat aware of, and quite open to, the Russian help, even if not criminally “conspiring” with the Russians…
"The Republican and Democratic chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis to federal prosecutors in 2019” https://t.co/MRsgRiBaaP
— Eric Rauchway (@rauchway) August 18, 2020
Statute of limitations for a violation of 18 USC 1001 is five years. https://t.co/6N6U9Fd1L6
— Mieke Eoyang (@MiekeEoyang) August 18, 2020
3 things happened that day in October:
1. The Obama admin made its first public intelligence assessment about Russian election interference
2. The Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape/story
3. Roger Stone arranged for Wikileaks to start dropping Podesta's emails https://t.co/SDKphWwsBc— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) August 18, 2020
Bipartisan Senate report shows extensive evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia https://t.co/3h9xXAXIlE
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) August 18, 2020
It is so disturbing and hard to comprehend that Bill Barr is trying to undo the Russia investigations and pretend there was nothing that merited investigation. https://t.co/i0IRd2pqDg
— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) August 18, 2020
Trump campaign Russia contacts were 'grave threat', says Senate report https://t.co/mCHfKX3HD6
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) August 19, 2020
Schiff statement on the SSCI report: https://t.co/CmAnlPqIC3 pic.twitter.com/Os0eYWRw8z
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) August 18, 2020
Bipartisan Senate report: Russia undertook an extensive campaign to sabotage the 2016 election to help Trump become president and some members of his circle of advisers were open to the help from a US adversary. ?@MarkMazzettiNYT? ?@npfandos? https://t.co/icW1xGKlmo
— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) August 18, 2020
Christ. As I've noted previously, this was also the EXACT SAME DAY that the Obama administration put out its first major warning that Russia was trying to influence the election https://t.co/mcXn3XdYMO https://t.co/NNrYZTXuSM
— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) August 18, 2020
The Senate Intelligence Committee found that Trump spoke to Stone about WikiLeaks, despite telling the special counsel in written answers he had "no recollections" that they had spoken about it via @CNN. https://t.co/8B42DTQz30
— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) August 18, 2020
NEW Trump’s 2016 campaign chair Paul Manafort was a ‘grave counterintelligence threat,’ had contact with Russian intelligence, Senate intelligence committee finds@karoun https://t.co/wMPnD9Deb5
— Spencer Hsu (@hsu_spencer) August 18, 2020
Footnote for the ages in the new Senate report (p. 256): pic.twitter.com/j5gKBr6YPu
— Charles Homans (@chashomans) August 18, 2020
Amazing Read: “Inside the Chaotic, Desperate, Last-minute Trump 2020 Reboot”
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Trump Crime Cartel
It’s hard not to be paranoid about the open criminality of the Republican party during this election season. And yet, there is this consolation: The Trump people don’t know what they’re doing, and the Permanent GOP (McConnell, Meadows, the various deep-pocket donors) are handicapped by their inability to control the various petty tyrants and third-rate …
Amazing Read: “Inside the Chaotic, Desperate, Last-minute Trump 2020 Reboot”Post + Comments (241)
… Parscale, and those who liked him, believed it was Kellyanne Conway who wanted him gone the most. During the 2016 campaign, Conway made no secret that she was annoyed by Parscale’s folksy habit of announcing, to outsiders, that he didn’t know much about politics — and annoyed, too, that he didn’t know much about politics. “It’s charming that Donald Trump has never been in politics before,” she told him once. “It’s not charming that the people who work for him have never worked in politics before.” Parscale thought Conway wanted to take control of the 2020 campaign and that to do so, she needed to prove to the president that Kushner was fucking everything up, and that to do that, she needed to sabotage him. Trump was aware that Parscale saw Conway this way, but Trump also seemed terrified of Conway and never at risk of doing anything to intervene. For reasons Parscale could only speculate about, Conway’s job was always safe. (Conway thought the allegation was ridiculous and that if Brad had focused as much on Michigan and messaging as he did on nonexistent infighting, things might be a little bit different. As she saw it, Parscale’s demotion came after he tried to deny what the president saw with his own eyes — crowd size in Tulsa, the profligate spending, and the polls showing Biden ahead.)…
[Note: Conway’s a monster, but she’s a professional monster. She’s done very well off the Trump campaign, but she fully intends to have a career after the word ‘Trump’ has been memory-holed by the entire Republican party. The grifters & amateurs surrounding Trump will *never* understand how Conway, or her husband, see the world.]
By the third or fourth interview of the day in which a Trump campaign official argues, with what sounds like sincerity, that not only are the polls all wrong, they are wrong owing to intentional malpractice on the part of major polling institutions and their partnered major media outlets, and not only are they wrong but, actually, polls don’t even matter, because there is a silent majority of American voters who fear telling surveyors what they really believe and because the polls were wrong in 2016 (although they weren’t — national polling correlates to the national vote, not to the Electoral College, and Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million, about what the polls indicated she’d win by, whatever the prediction models created by data journalists suggested), you begin to suspect you are the victim of something that’s not quite a conspiracy but more like a practical joke…
People on the campaign say they believe — have to believe — there’s a way forward. If they just win North Carolina (where Trump leads by an average of one or two percentage points), Florida (where Biden leads by five), and Arizona (Biden by two), states Trump won in 2016, then they need only one state in the so-called blue wall of Pennsylvania (Biden by six or seven), Wisconsin (Biden by seven), and Michigan (Biden by seven or eight). These three states had gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1992 before Hillary Clinton lost them by 77,000 votes combined in 2016. Staffers assume that Ohio is already a Trump lock, although Biden is ahead there, too, by an average of more than two points…
But while Stepien has focused August ad spending in battleground states with early voting, effectively trying to stall the race long enough for the national picture to change, few on the campaign he’s running seem to be thinking in strategic terms at all, never mind enough to generate the kind of miracle the president needs. Instead, they seem to think that if they got lucky the last time, and proved the conventional wisdom wrong, maybe they’ll just happen to get lucky again…
this is far and away the biggest non-kremlinology takeaway from the nymag piece – these dipshits legitimately think they’re running a ground campaign and in actuality nothing is happening. good luck fixing that in august https://t.co/N6TCElbr24
— kilgore trout, new tone haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) August 16, 2020
Election Year Open Thread: Young Prince Jared Tries His Hand At Rodent Fornication
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Open Threads, Trump Crime Cartel
… And fails by every possible metric, because that’s his real skill-set: This is the most transparent scheme ever. https://t.co/Son3lxkgl6 — Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) August 13, 2020 We call this "coordination" in the business, and it's a federal crime. https://t.co/VEALNfe6CO — Reed Galen (@reedgalen) August 13, 2020
Every so often, you get to pick the headline to go with your story. And let me tell you, it feels *great* https://t.co/jSNv6yAzfH
— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) August 12, 2020
… “We have no knowledge of what Kanye West is doing or who is doing it for him,” the Trump campaign’s spokesman said at the time. But last weekend, indefatigable Trump cheerleader and former aide Sam Nunberg had no qualms about bragging to The Washington Post that he’d introduced Trump in 2014 to the GOP pol who got West on the ballot in Arkansas last month. To Nunberg, running West was a coup for Republicans. “Does the Biden campaign want Kanye West campaigning in Cleveland, in Cincinnati, in Milwaukee?” he asked. “I don’t think they do.”
Into this maelstrom of racial animus and nihilism strides Kushner, a bloodless man possessed of a singular genius for locating new petards with which he can hoist himself. Last Thursday, Kanye got on Colorado’s ballot; within 48 hours, he’d gotten a private audience in the state with the permanently wincing White House senior adviser, who started his political career by trying to establish backchannel Trump communications with Russia and who most recently was excoriated for completely fucking up the U.S. coronavirus response—possibly, it was reported by Vanity Fair, because he reasoned the virus “was going to be relegated to Democratic states” and Trump “could blame those governors” for the resulting mass deaths.
If one could bracket out the immediately obvious evils of manipulating a man in a mental health crisis for maximum political gain, using Kanye to halfheartedly rig an election would be the perfect Kushner tasking. He has grand ideas about his abilities, as we’ve seen. But this is probably closest to his sweet spot: chumming with celebrities and concocting the stupidest scheme imaginable to keep his extended family’s grift going just a bit longer…
What gets to me is that the point of exercises like this is that they are supposed to be secret… https://t.co/WESaNNrxHC
— Alex Hazanov (@alexhazanov) August 12, 2020
look, if you *have* any kind of connection to Kushner, it is your patriotic duty to call him up and explain that you have a way that, with just a few tens of millions spent, the Trump campaign can be competitive in Hawaii
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) August 12, 2020
I’ll believe that Jared Kushner is growing into his role as a White House staffer when his friend stop trying to retract embarrassing things he says in conversations with reporters. https://t.co/btfr2WKiVL pic.twitter.com/k6DDDMoZic
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 13, 2020
Sure, some voters — even in swing states! — might write in Kanye West. Others will write in Ron Paul, Lydon LaRouche, or their own favorite celebrity. Doesn’t make Kushner’s attempts to ‘encourage’ his ‘friend’ any less despicable, or futile.
‘We had a general discussion, more about policy,’ Jared Kushner said, confirming that he met Kanye West recently https://t.co/qJlo8eHHov pic.twitter.com/JqeL3UHTrk
— Reuters (@Reuters) August 14, 2020
Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner boasts of having a black friend. pic.twitter.com/5pBIc71gbs
— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) August 13, 2020
Black political reporter, for some reason, not finding this funny:
It ONLY took 3 complaints in Illinois for the State Board of Elections to review the petition by #KanyeWest to be on #POTUS ballot. They determined nearly 75% of his signatures were fraudulent. If Kanye is on your state’s ballot, contact your Board is Elections for a review! ??
— AprilDRyan (@AprilDRyan) August 13, 2020
Excellent Read: “How to Counter Trump’s Attempt to Manipulate the Election and the Census”
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Excellent Links, Readership Capture, Trump Crime Cartel, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It
New Interview: I talked to Vanita Gupta, the head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, about how to ensure a fair election, what the Trump administration is doing with the census, and the legal challenges we may see after November 3rd. https://t.co/1q3SHZHGSj — Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) August 9, 2020 Yes, I always …
What have you made of the Trump Administration’s attacks on the Post Office? Is there something that people in Congress or elsewhere should be thinking of doing if the Administration tries to seriously mess with the Post Office?
Yeah. I’m deeply alarmed by this. I think there is no question that the Trump Administration is attacking core democratic institutions and they are threatening the infrastructure that is required to hold a safe, secure, accessible, and fair election in November. So you have this attack on the United States Postal Service, in which the President puts in a donor to run the agency, who makes cuts, and the result is delays in the mail. You look at the President’s tweet, from Monday, where Nevada passed a slew of measures seeking to expand [mail-in] voting. He knows that the Postal Service is a crucial part of our democratic infrastructure, especially in this election amid a pandemic.
So the things that need to happen are that Congress needs to provide adequate funding to push back on any notion of the need to make these cuts. In the absence of that, there is no reason why states should not be changing the rules, if they haven’t already, to accept ballots that have been postmarked on Election Day. You can provide a reasonable window of fifteen days, twenty days after the election, because there could be these delays to the U.S. Postal Service. So many of these states still have not done that, and that is a really important fix…
If a person can wear a mask and is able to vote safely in person, given all the things we’ve talked about, would you suggest that they do that?
My suggestion is that, for voters who can, they should apply as soon as possible for a mail-in ballot or an absentee ballot, fill it out carefully, and then send it back or drop it off as early as possible so as to relieve pressure on polling places on the day of, when people for whom it is essential—like Native American voters who may not have U.S. postal addresses, or voters with disabilities who need assistance, or voters of color who, because of cultural reasons and historical reasons, may not trust the Postal Service—can vote. Keep in-person voting for those who consider it essential for whatever reason. If others engage in this process as early as possible, it will also, frankly, help secretaries of state to be able to count their votes earlier. There will be less of a surge, and it’ll reduce the delay in actually being able to announce the results after November 3rd…
I, for one, plan to send in my ballot as soon as it arrives (Massachusetts is sending mail-in ballots to every voter who requests one, this year). It’s not as though I’m going to change my mind about voting for Joe Biden!
Essentials.https://t.co/4oAyNxDOYF pic.twitter.com/yMsZngSnOy
— Tom Toles (@TomTolesToons) August 9, 2020
Cash for Votes
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Politics, Trump Crime Cartel
House Democrats have made the decision to ride out the Trump crime spree until November. It’s an understandable decision. They control only one half of one chamber. The GOP majority on the SCOTUS, GOP-controlled Senate, Trump-controlled DOJ, etc., have signaled they’ll accept and/or abet any crimes Trump and his pack of rapacious grift-mavens commit. Under …
Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: Young Prince Jared Hoped to Make Millions Off Dead Americans
This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Excellent Links, GOP Death Cult, Trump Crime Cartel
So the White House made the explicit decision that it was a better political call to let people die in the blue states and blame the governors then try to fix the testing situation. https://t.co/1fKA5vhfWa — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 30, 2020 pic.twitter.com/lK8d0iWpiF — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 30, 2020 This excellent read has been …
Countries that have successfully contained their outbreaks have empowered scientists to lead the response. But when Jared Kushner set out in March to solve the diagnostic-testing crisis, his efforts began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires. They saw themselves as the “A-team of people who get shit done,” as one participant proclaimed in a March Politico article…
The group’s collective lack of relevant experience was far from the only challenge it faced. The obstacles arrayed against any effective national testing effort included: limited laboratory capacity, supply shortages, huge discrepancies in employers’ abilities to cover testing costs for their employees, an enormous number of uninsured Americans, and a fragmented diagnostic-testing marketplace…
By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.
But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.
Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said…
The gamble that son-in-law real estate developers, or Morgan Stanley bankers liaising with billionaires, could effectively stand in for a well-coordinated federal response has proven to be dead wrong. Even the smallest of Jared Kushner’s solutions to the pandemic have entangled government agencies in confusion and raised concerns about illegality…
Ms. Spiers was the editor of the NY Observer when Prince Jared decided to buy, and destroy, it:
Can confirm that Jared is both malicious and stupid. https://t.co/ePjGQrXnsq
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 31, 2020
If you're surprised by Jared Kushner's callousness re: people in blue states dying of covid-19, you should know it's not an aberration. Here's what I wrote in early May: https://t.co/Djmd6qF0SX pic.twitter.com/SBad1kaIts
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 31, 2020
I think people underestimate the extent to which both Jared and Trump are angry at blue state elites for never really accepting them. They both have massive inferiority complexes, even with all of their wealth and privilege. So of course they're happy to let, say, NYC die. https://t.co/U19DkzxPqR
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 31, 2020
They want validation from competent, smart people too, and the only way to get that is to be competent and smart themselves. Which would take work, and humility, neither of which they're up for. So not getting approval from those quarters makes them angry, too.
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 31, 2020
maggie, who works at the new york times, did not consider it newsworthy that her friend (the authoritarian president) was intentionally murdering her state https://t.co/08oL1nG85J
— etaoin shrdlu (@Theophite) August 1, 2020
she uncritically covered trumps claims of wealth when she was at the ny post and politico and i think she still essentially sees him as a clownish, harmless, self-aggrandizing NYC real estate guy instead of 'what if a cable news channel had nuclear codes'
— le loup garou (@turdducken) August 1, 2020
they’re job shopping for the next era
— kilgore trout, new tone haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) July 30, 2020
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