Chuck C. Johnson making what looks like a white nationalist hand sign and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, Ecuadorian Embassy, London, August 2017, via DCCC.
Don't know if you'll remember the story from about 80 years ago, wait no I
mean in
February, about how then-congressman Dana Rohrabacher (representing Orange County CA
for the United Russia Republican party) had traveled to
London to meet in the Ecuadorian embassy with Mr. Assange with a proposal:
Assange’s lawyers alleged that during a visit to London in August 2017,
congressman Dana Rohrabacher told the WikiLeaks founder that “on instructions from the president, he was offering a
pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange … said Russia had nothing to
do with the DNC [Democratic National Committee] leaks.”...
Rohrabacher denied it, of course, but in a curious way:
The Senate Intelligence Committee has sent a bipartisan letter to the
Justice Department asking federal prosecutors to investigate Stephen K.
Bannon, a former Trump confidante, for potentially lying to lawmakers
during its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016
presidential election.
The letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The [Los Angeles] Times, was
signed by the panel’s then-chairman, Republican Sen. Richard M. Burr,
and its ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner.
It also raised concerns about testimony provided by family members and
confidants of President Trump that appeared to contradict information
provided by a former deputy campaign chairman to Special Counsel Robert
S. Mueller III. Those it identified as providing such conflicting
testimony were the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law
Jared Kushner, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former
White House Communications Director Hope Hicks.
"Has sent" actually about 13 months ago, to prosecutor Deborah Curtis in the
DC US attorney's office (who transferred to Commerce Department in September 2019). DOJ didn't tell the paper what action they had or hadn't taken up to now.
The "former deputy campaign chairman" is Paul Manafort's right-hand man Rick
Gates, who cooperated with Mueller and took a plea. Among other things,
Drawing by Barry Blitt from The New Yorker, September 2018.
A little applied narratology:
Just to make it entirely clear, that is not quite what the Times story https://t.co/8JkKbda0uo does. That is, it does name Stephen Somma as the figure known as Case Agent 1 in the Horowitz report on Crossfire Hurricane, but it does not say anyone was assigned to "fabricate dirt".
🚨🚨🚨 We should impeach them all. That's how this works, right? Given their rules its a no brainer since there's an actual ask, unlike anything they're coming up with.
Actually there's a bit more here going on here than just laughing at Junior for thinking it's a thing that you can impeach senators; something that sheds a good bit of light on the current case (of which I was reminded a day or two ago by our friend Boswood).
Not that the allegation he's retweeting is true. The letter of 4 May 2018 from Senators Menendez, Durbin, and Leahy to the Ukrainian prosecutor general Yurii Lutsenko did not ask him to "investigate Trump"; it asked him not to stop its cooperation with the Mueller investigation in its investigation of the criminal Paul Manafort, as they appeared to have done "to avoid the ire of President Trump":
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP: By the way, not only wasn’t he [Donald Junior] charged, if you read it, with all of the horrible fake news- I mean, I was reading that my son was going to go to jail — this is a good young man — that he was going to go to jail. And then the report comes out, and they didn’t even say, they hardly even talked about him.
OK, so I read it. He's cited on 44 pages of the Report (the same, as it happens, as "Russian sanctions"). Mueller doesn't call him a good young man. Mueller explains that he committed a crime in accepting the offer of help in the form of "dirt" on Clinton from a foreign government, but he felt it would be too hard to convince a jury that he knew what he was doing, or that the thing on offer was a "thing of value", given that as far as anybody knows it turned out to be not valuable (as you know, I think there's more to be said on that and new evidence in the Mueller Report bearing me out), so he decided not to prosecute:
taking into account the high burden to establish a culpable mental state in a campaign-finance prosecution and the difficulty in establishing the required valuation, the Office decided not to pursue criminal campaign-finance charges against Trump Jr.
Or as Marcy's explained, he'd have a hard time showing Junior was smart enough to understand that he was risking jail. It was nevertheless a crime, and it still is one. Hold that thought.
Update 5/24/19: Correction—It wasn't in fact Rob I was talking to, I am informed via Twitter by Oui2Entertainment, but the company's co-founder David Wilson; I'm confident at the same time that it doesn't contradict anything Rob would wish to say.
I had no idea I was talking to Rob Goldstone, who used to be the music publicist for the Russian pop singer Emin Agalarov and served as the email intermediary between Emin's father Aras Agalarov and Donald Trump, Jr., arranging the famous Trump Tower meeting of 9 June 2016, until after it was over, and I looked for the first time at the book page screenshots he sent, and it turned out that they were all from Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents: How an Email Trumped My Life by Rob Goldstone, 2018, from a publisher called Oui2Entertainment.
Probably because it's a completely trivial matter of interest only to people trying to distract attention from their actual crimes, like you when you cheerfully accepted an offer of "official documents" as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." "I love it!"
Smurfing, or structuring, being the crime of making a financial transaction in a one-bit-at-a-time way sequenced and parceled so as to evade reporting requirements, like the $35,000 checks cut by the Trump Organization to Michael Cohen all through 2017 paying him back for his payoff of one of Trump's one-night stands (illegal under campaign finance law whether Trump repays it or not), of which we saw two on TV yesterday, one with Junior's signature on it.
He wasn't lying when he showed us your signature on that Stormy Daniels check, Junior. And that's another one of your little crimes, too, structuring payments, isn't it? You might want to keep your head down for a while.
Michael Cohen was one of many lawyers who represented me (unfortunately). He had other clients also. He was just disbarred by the State Supreme Court for lying & fraud. He did bad things unrelated to Trump. He is lying in order to reduce his prison time. Using Crooked’s lawyer!
It's remarkable that these people keep working to discredit Cohen's testimony by reminding us of the crimes Cohen pleaded guilty to—"He's a convicted liar so why should we believe him now?"—as if nobody had any way of finding out what he was lying about when he told the lies for which he's going to jail, or on whose behalf:
—is getting things wrong in its own right, in the sense that when we're asked to distinguish between two distinct Trump Tower Moscow deals, one involving the high-class Junior and the Agalarov family, which died in 2014 of "deal fatigue", and the other involving the roughnecks Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, which was ongoing in 2016 when Trump was lying about it in every conceivable venue, that's a really false picture.
Meanwhile, Emily Jane Fox of Vanity Fair (h/t Raw Story) has been reporting on Emperor Trump's intense anxiety over the fate of his eldest son, Junior, expecting to be indicted over his involvement in the Russia business, and now she's looking into its motives. What's he anxious about?
I think I posted this video by Emin Agalarov before—it's not thrilling musically but OK, and the imagery just keeps getting more extraordinarily interesting.
A few days back I started building up this case that it was possible to know pretty much precisely what crime Donald J.Trump has been covering up with his evasions, lies, and pressure on investigators and witnesses since, at least, those first interviews with personnel like James Comey during the transition in December 2016 (in addition to all the money-laundering and self-dealing he's been doing all along with his Russian mobster pals). It was a pretty restricted thing, I was about to say, a single phone call of three or four minutes with his son Donald Junior on 6 June 2016, sandwiched between two calls between Junior and the Russian pop singer–oligarch Emin Agalarov (what's officially known isn't quite that—what's known is that Junior spoke to somebody with a blocked number between the Russian calls and the president's number happens to be blocked, and Junior says he can't remember whose blocked number he might have been calling, probably not ordering pizza, but he remembers vividly that it wasn't his father).
But I never got around to writing this, and then last night something happened to advance the story beyond what I was expecting: it was announced by persons unknown, apparently not by the president's former lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen, that Cohen was prepared to say something in court about what I'm pretty sure is this very phone call:
So here's the news. Cohen says Trump knew in advance about Trump Tower meeting, was informed by Don Jr., signed off and looked forward to getting the dirt. pic.twitter.com/XI6gcd02Er
A little backstory on this. Cohen has been suggesting that he knows this and is willing to testify to that effect. CNN is apparently the first to get this solid enough to report. I would say it has always pretty clear this was the case. But it being obvious and there being a witness are very different things. This has very big implications.
I'll get to the crime (the crime Donald Trump is most anxious to conceal) presently, in an update on what I've been maintaining, since last October or so, but I'm going to take my time. Don't @ me, as the Twitter kids say.
So there's this thing floating around tweeted by Aleksandr Torshin, Russian gun enthusiast and oligarch and mentor to our newly indicted lady spy and graduate student Mariya (her preferred spelling, "Mariia", looks like a typo and I refuse to use it) Butina, from February 2016, looking almost like an announcement on Twitter that the secret cabal of Russian gun enthusiasts have finished recruiting their US presidential candidate:
Which I have to say does not seem exactly right to me. I mean, that is, if you are running this incredibly audacious conspiracy from within Russian criminal-governmental circles to take over the US elections and install your own candidate, don't you have some more secure method of communication? Twitter FFS?
What's not being noted adequately among the tweeps is what kind of tweet this is, a link to a Russian newspaper article, from the very popular Putinist Lenta.ru, reporting on the Republican debate of 13 February, where JEB! sternly proclaimed that the United States and Russia could never be allies and Trump said they could:
Reporter from the Future, by Flickr/The People Speak. Via Sputnik International, I'm sorry to say, which may have meant for the picture to be taken as news.
I may be starting to repeat myself a bit, but Donald Jr. kind of got me going:
Pretty sure the actual constitutional crisis is the prior administration weaponizing the DOJ and FBI to undermine a duly elected president with information paid for by his opponent with no basis in fact. But run with the Dem talkers. You do you. 🙄 https://t.co/SgEMTRiBBa
Plus senior members of Congress, Nunes and Ryan, Grassley and Graham, openly working with him to obstruct the investigation of his misdeeds, in totally unprecedented violation of the separation of powers, Nunes taking orders straight from White House.
Really shouldn't have missed failing to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, from the endless sabotaging of the Affordable Care Act to blatant refusal to implement the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, signed into law by Donald Trump on August 2, though he called it "seriously flawed" in his signing statement, after votes of 98-2 in the Senate and 419-3 in the House.
That's for the constitutional crisis, but that "take down a duly elected president" bullshit struck me as illustrating a deep retroactionary confusion that is a big part of this Nunes idiocy.
For those not getting it. To avoid the shutdown you need 60 votes in the Aenate. Republicans only have 51 seats so you need 9 dems. So Schumer either wanted a shutdown putting illegals ahead of Americans or is bad at his job and can’t wrangle 9 votes... or both. #SchumerShutdown
Your father and McConnell can't be trusted. They make promises and don't keep them and then insult the people who were deceived. Where's the health care assistance they promised Collins in return for her vote on crappy tax bill?
— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018
As Republican Lindsey Graham said, Congress has no negotiating partner in the White House, just your father watching TV all day and white nationalist Stephen Miller ordering him what to do. Can't make a deal that way. #TrumpShutdown
— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018
Republicans turned down McCaskill's bill to fund the military. You had four months to renew CHIP and did nothing until you decided to use it to extort money for the fantasy wall. #TrumpShutdown
— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018
Donald Trump Jr. asked a Russian lawyer at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting whether she had evidence of illegal donations to the Clinton Foundation, the lawyer told the Senate Judiciary Committee in answers to written questions obtained exclusively by NBC News.
The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told the committee that she didn't have any such evidence, and that she believes Trump misunderstood the nature of the meeting after receiving emails from a music promoter promising incriminating information on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump's Democratic opponent.
It's not exactly what she herself told NBC in July 2017. In fact it's totally different—in that story Junior wasn't interested in the Clinton Foundation but the Democratic National Committee:
I'm pretty creeped out at the moment by the startling news that's been coming out about Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. (yes, his papa was Jimmy Carter's patrician secretary of state while Mika Brzezinski's papa was doing all the foreign policy work, in an illustration of how our country seems to have developed a full-blown aristocracy since I was a kid), as summarized by David Freedlander at New York Magazine:
Vance, first elected in 2009, is running for a third term in November without an opponent from any party on the ballot after winning the Democratic primary without opposition in September. In the last couple of weeks Vance has come under withering criticism, first from a ProPublica/WNYC investigation into a decision not to prosecute Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump for misleading prospective buyers about their Trump Soho property, and then after The New Yorker revealed that Vance declined to prosecute Harvey Weinstein for allegedly sexually assaulting 22-year-old model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez even though Gutierrez came forward with a recording of Weinstein discussing the assault.
In both cases, lawyers for the accused made sizable donations to Vance’s campaign, with Trump personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz giving Vance a $32,000 check on the heels of a private meeting with the district attorney, and Weinstein lawyer David Boies donating $10,000 after Vance dropped the investigation into his client. Vance has since returned the Trump money, and denied that the fundraising had anything to do with the decision to not prosecute, saying that neither case had enough evidence to prove criminality.
To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, bumbling into the appearance of having been bribed to not indict an extremely socially powerful criminal may be regarded as a misfortune; but doing it twice looks like carelessness.
And then there's learning the news at this particular moment, less than a month before the election, when there's seemingly nothing that can be done to stop him from getting a third term if we're not satisfied with his explanations, which we really aren't so far—independent nominations closed off, New York laws making it impossible to think about getting an alternative name anywhere on the ballot, not even a Republican to vote for.
But a write-in candidate has bubbled up today, a civil rights lawyer named Marc Fliedner who ran in the summer primary for Brooklyn DA and says he's willing to move across the river, and a background that's both intersectional (he's gay) and Bernieish (Berners backed him in the Brooklyn race, in which he got 10% of the vote):
“I’m not doing any fundraising, I don’t have any staff, but it is accurate to say that I am a candidate via this grassroots write-in effort,” Fliedner said in a phone interview this morning. “It’s important we give voters an ethical choice in a landscape totally devoid of women’s rights and equal justice.”
No, I don't think he's going to win, and I can hardly even believe Vance could be as bad as he looks at the moment (I wish I could hear some acknowledgment that he knows how bad he looks). It's just a thought that not absolutely everything is necessarily going to hell.
