Shoe Dropping

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:

Grand Collusion

Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937), via NYTimes.

There's so much going on on all Trump fronts at the moment it's almost unbearable trying to pick a subject, but this thing from Michael Isikoff at Yahoo looks to me like the smokingest gun ever, maybe not that smoking, in the Trump-Russia matter, and I don't think it's been getting enough attention—that the Seth Rich Deep State conspiracy murder theory was originally concocted by Russian intelligence:

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

and offering a conspiracy theory to account for the crime, claiming

Non-Hot Take

Quito, via National Geographic.

One thing I think everybody needs to note about the Assange story is that at this point it's not about the United States, not about Sweden, not about WikiLeaks—not driven by the preoccupations of these people we think about when we think about Julian Assange. It's really, at the moment, an Ecuador story.

That is: the previous president, hero of free speech Rafael Correa*, left his chosen successor, the less heroic Lenín Boltaire Moreno (yes, he's named after the Bolshevik leader, as well as Voltaire, only his parents spelled the latter wrong), with a problem in the country's London embassy in the form of Assange squatting there, failing to clean the bathroom or change the kitty litter, while avoiding extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted on rape charges, and from where he claimed he would be extradited to the US and buried like the Man in the Iron Mask. Moreno has been trying to get rid of this national embarrassment since he took office almost two years ago (one of the things that has enraged his former patron Correa), and he's finally succeeded, and that is the story, and it's not even all that interesting.


*Some Ecuadoreans have an alternative view on Correa's commitment to free speech:

Correa had a poor record on free speech at home. In 2011, he closed a string of radio and television stations in a bid to silence critics. According to Human Rights Watch, five journalists were jailed for “disrespecting” the government between 2008 and 2011.

Got Paranoia? Disclaimer

Ecuadorian Embassy, Knightsbridge, AP Photo/Sang Tan, August 2012. Funny to think it's really been that long.

I should have emphasized—and didn't even really mention—that Luke Harding's Assange story hasn't yet been corroborated by any other news organization, except for one compelling detail on the Ecuador angle:

CNN contributor Carl Bernstein reported Tuesday that Mueller's team has been investigating a meeting between Manafort and Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno in Quito in 2017 and has specifically asked if WikiLeaks or Assange was discussed in the meeting, according to a source with personal knowledge of the matter.

That's an important exception, because quite a bit of the story seems to have been sourced in Ecuador, in particular these—

Got paranoia? Manafort and Assange

Photo via The Mermaid's Tale.

This Guardian story, on Paul Manafort's previously unreported visits to Julian Assange's quarters in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, has colossal implications for my understanding of the whole history of Russia's engagement in the Trump campaign:

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

In March 2016, to be precise, at some point in the sequence in which