Narratogy: Cigar Bar

 

Oh, by the way, one of the things that happened in 2022 was how we learned that Paul Manafort really did make a deal with the Russian government where he would help them try to take over Ukraine and they would help him try to elect Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016. Not that there were any new details, exactly, in this excellent piece by Jim Rutenberg, The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine November 18, and has been sitting in my open tabs ever since, but that it's among the first attempts to tell that part of the story with what you might call a healthy helping of narrativium, helping a reader understand the plot the plot of the plot, and I've been wanting to take it just a little bit further.

Another Steele Dossier?

Updated 5 May

This is kind of interesting, reported in England by The Telegraph (paywall) and picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald: It seems Christopher Steele compiled a second dossier on Donald Trump, this one directly for the FBI, after Trump took office:

The second dossier contains raw intelligence that makes further claims of Russian meddling in the US election and also references claims regarding the existence of further sex tapes. The second dossier is reliant on separate sources to those who supplied information for the first reports.

The fact the FBI continued to receive intelligence from Steele, who ran MI6’s Russia desk from 2006 to 2009 before setting up Orbis, is potentially significant because it shows his work was apparently still being taken seriously after Trump took hold of the reins of power.

It was, was it? We'd been given to believe FBI broke off relations with Steele in November 2016, after David Corn revealed the existence of the original dossier in a Halloween article in Mother Jones—not that at that point that they didn't trust his research, but that they couldn't trust him to stay away from the press, which is understandable (I can also understand Steele's point of view, that the FBI didn't seem to be doing anything with the material he'd showed them, even as they publicly reopened an obviously bogus investigation into Hillary Clinton, and someone who appeared to be a tool of the Russian government was dangerously close to getting elected president of the United States, and he and Glenn Simpson felt morally obliged to do something).

But it's not exactly true that the FBI broke off with Steele. DOJ's Bruce Ohr kept talking to Steele, and the FBI was aware, and opinions on it in the Bureau differed:

Narratology: What Polling Data?

The Grand Havana Room, New York City.

Remember how we've learned that Paul Manafort passed a lot of confidential Trump polling information ("'topline' data, which included the results of internal polling including state, dates, generic, decided GOP, and other such numbers") to his Ukrainian confederate Konstantin Kilimnik, culminating on 2 August 2016, when Kilimnik flew in to New York in the early evening and met with Gates and Manafort (fresh from a 5:00 meeting with Trump and Giuliani at Trump Tower) at the Grand Havana Room at 666 Fifth Avenue (yes, Jared's white elephant building), where Manafort explained, at considerable length, his plan for achieving a Trump victory?

Kilimnik told Patten that at the New York cigar bar meeting, Manafort stated that they have a plan to beat Hillary Clinton which included Manafort bringing discipline and an organized strategy to the campaign. Moreover, because Clinton's negatives were so low [sic]-if they could focus on her negatives they could win the election. Manafort discussed the Fabrizio internal Trump polling data with Kilimnik, and explained that Fabrizio 's polling numbers showed that the Clinton negatives, referred to as a 'therm poll, ' were high. Thus, based on this polling there was a chance Trump could win. (Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Election Interference, vol. 5)

And how Kilimnik relayed the stuff to various persons including their Russian patron Oleg Deripaska and some Ukrainian oligarchs, to the displeasure of Rick Gates, who didn't trust Kilimnik and didn't see the point?

I've struggled with wondering what exactly Russian intelligence might have been able to do with this information and what they wanted it for and found myself too ill-informed to think of anything that made any sense—it was all mixed up in my mind with the Facebook operation. So a few days ago I ran into something that's simple enough to be true, in a kind of summary by Rob Waldeck of material from his October book The Black Ledger: How Trump Brought Putin's Disinformation War to America—that it was simply a presentation of polling data

Useful Idiot in the Strict Sense of the Term

 

And the reason they held the meeting was so they could run a photo of the meeting. Duh. From Trump's Twitter account via USA Today.

Live-blogging volume 5—

Of what some have decided to call the Rubio Report, after Senator Marco, who has pulled a Billy Barr in this connection:

Hope you get a chance to read it. You should read everything you sign, you know. You've got some big surprises coming.

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2020

Marco taking a leaf from Barr's book. If you don't like what the report says, just announce that it says something different, and maybe enough people will believe you. https://t.co/t4b4NQwoAc

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2020

There is, as you can imagine, evidence of "collusion" in the report, some of it new, as in SSCI's certainty that Manafort's assistant Konstantin Kilimnik was a Russian intelligence officer, something previously only described as a possibility:

Rashomon Salad

 

Rashomon Salad is my indie band name, of course, but... Drawing by Reuben Bolling (thanks, Jesse!) via TVTropes.

Live-blogging Volume 5—

Of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on Russian active measures in the 2016 election, focusing (this final volume) on counterintelligence aspects, that is, on the

threat posed by the Russian influence operation. For example, the Committee examined Paul Manafort' s connections to Russian influence actors and the FBI' s treatment of reporting produced by Christopher Steele. 

And a good deal more. It was released this morning, as I learned from a couple of eager tweets from Emptywheel, and I guess it's going to take over my life for a while.

It really is almost 1000 pages long (the last piece, "Additional Views of Senator Wyden", comes on pages 949-66), and that doesn't mean with a lot of filler, as far as I can tell, though there's pretty heavy redaction in some spots. The report on the 9 June Trump Tower meeting (pp.322-95), which I couldn't help peeking at, reads like a kind of Rashomon salad, with all the participants' conflicting accounts chopped and tossed together on the page. Incidentally, 

Michael Cohen told the Committee that, in his opinion: "The reason why Jared and Manafort were in that meeting is because Mr. Trump would never have allowed Junior to be in that meeting by himself. Mr. Trump was very quick to tell everybody that he thinks Don Jr. has the worst judgement of anyone he's ever met in the world. And I can assure you that when that meeting, conversation, took place, that Mr. Trump turned around and said: Make sure that Jared and Paul are part of the meeting. Because he would never let Don Jr. handle that meeting by himself." Cohen Tr. II, p. 376; Cohen's statement is notable only because of the access-he had to the individuals involved, including Trump, at the time of meeting. The Committee did not find information that corroborate's Cohen's statement, and did find information that contradicts it. (360, fn. 2321) 

Pretty sure the contradictory information concerns how Kushner and Manafort got involved in the meeting (their information makes it clear that Junior invited them himself, and even kind of pestered them, in what looks to me like recruiting them as witnesses to what he expected to be a glorious intelligence coup), not Trump's opinion of Junior's judgment. 

Literary Corner: I Got Rhythm

Donald Trump's latest performance piece, Commuting Roger, a multimedia blizzard of tweets, video clips, official statements, and court papers, came out to rave reviews, as the president himself said ("I'm getting rave reviews"). Critics adored the extraordinarily swift pacing of the dénouement, in which the attorney general said Stone's prosecution was justified, Stone confessed that he'd committed his crimes (lying and intimidating witnesses) to cover up the president's high crimes, and Trump announced he'd paid the price of keeping Stone silent on the details in a Friday night news dump, all in an Aristotelian span of less than 24 hours:

July 9, 2020: Attorney General William Barr declares that Roger Stone’s prosecution was “righteous.”

July 10, 2020: After learning that his appeals to remain out of prison have been denied and that he must surrender to the Bureau of Prisons on July 14, Roger Stone tells reporter Howard Fineman, “I had 29 or 30 conversations with Trump during the campaign period. He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t. They wanted me to play Judas. I refused.”

Also on July 10, 2020: Shortly after Fineman’s interview with Stone becomes public, Trump commutes Stone’s sentence and he becomes a free man. (Steven Harper/BillMoyers.com)

But there were many remarkable effects along the way, not least the moment in the next day's epilogue, "Remarks to Stakeholders Positively Impacted by Law Enforcement" when he slipped, unexpectedly, out of his usual choppy free verse into 15 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, the line of Shakespeare and Milton:

302s

Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed has begun posting a bunch of documents from the Mueller investigation that he obtained through a FOIA request, starting with some pretty heavily redacted 302s (FBI informal records of agent interviews) of sessions with Paul Manafort's second-in-command, Rick Gates, now in prison for his part in some of Manafort's Ukraine misdeeds (there's also material on Michael Cohen and Stephen Bannon that I haven't worked through yet). But these interviews are about the Trump campaign, and particularly the months around 9 June 2016 and the meeting at Trump Tower, which Gates didn't attend or necessarily even know about—he carefully told the FBI that Trump Jr. never spoke to him about the Veselnitskaya meeting, didn't say he never heard of it (weird detail: when that story broke in June 2017, Manafort asked Gates if he'd been at the meeting—I wonder what he would have asked next).

They don't naturally tell us anything directly about the meeting itself, but they're pretty enlightening, in my view, about its context, in such a way as to add some new clarity to my own reconstruction, and I wanted to blog my way through it right away, before I find out what everybody else is doing with it.

The interviews are structured more or less chronologically, and they start off (interview of 10 April 2018) with the lead-up to the Veselnitskaya meeting, in April and May 2016, when the atmosphere in the Trump campaign was all about emails: "interest in the emails was ratcheting up in the April-May 2016 timeframe because it was likely the emails could help campaign":

Barr's Zombie Investigation

From the CDC's Zombie Preparedness site.

I think I know what this story—

Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury and to file criminal charges.

—is about. It's about Trump, and the idée fixe of Trump's increasing paranoia: that he must get to his enemies by using their weapons, of saying "bad things" and getting "dirt". Investigate them all! Lock them up! And its failure so far, which has been accelerating in recent weeks, as Barr's meta-investigation falls apart.

That is: Barr's task, as you'll remember, is to find that there was something wrong with the FBI's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which eventually became, after Trump fired the FBI director, an investigation of Trump himself under the direction of Special Counsel Mueller. Trump has been complaining about this since long before it was understood that he had anything to do with it, whether because it was suggesting "bad things" about V.V. Putin, or because it was depriving him of Manafort's services, or after the election because it was suggesting his victory wasn't legitimate, or because it was forcing him to let Flynn go, or because "they were spying on me!" And trying in secret to put a stop to it, as chronicled in Mueller's volume II.

Timelines: A Buried Lede

Image via Irish Examiner.

Here's a peculiar one, brilliantly reported by Christina Willkie at CNBC (but not so well edited, the story is extremely hard to follow), about one of the more purposeless-sounding lies Paul Manafort told prosecutors when he was pretending to cooperate after the first trial, about the origins of a payment of $125,000 that went to one of his lawyers in June 2017.

The money was obtained, it seems, from an old comrade called Laurance Gay who Manafort had put in charge of the Tom Barrack–created superPAC Rebuilding American Now (where he seems to have done exceptionally well, raising $24 million, the best performance of any Trump superPAC, though three quarters of the money came from just four donors—wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon for $6 million; Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus for $5 million; Hollywood real estate tycoon Geoffrey Palmer, not previously a well-known donor, though his experience in campaign money laundering goes back to 1991, for another $5 million; and the Arkansas poultry magnate Ronald Cameron, whose experience with campaign money laundering through his "Jesus Fund" is very extensive, for $2 million).

Gay got it from a company, Multi Media Services Corporation, or MMSC, which earned $19 million as the chief ad buyer for the Trump campaign, and whose silent owner turned out to be Tony Fabrizio, another old Manafort associate and the Trump campaign's main pollster, with whose company Gay had a slightly dodgy-sounding relationship:

Otherwise Blameless Life: Postscript

Andrew "Chef" Glick, ex-president of the Cape May branch of the Pagan Outlaws Motorcycle Club, knew enough about the 2012 hired killing of April Kauffman, a local radio host and doctor's wife who had threatened to expose the illegal opioid prescription racket her husband was running with the Pagan Outlaws, that he could have been arrested as an accessory. Cops instead charged him with crimes unrelated to the murder plot, illegal possession of methamphetamines, cocaine, and weapons, for which he could have gotten up to 40 years, according to the Philly Voice, and he testified against the murderers and did no time in his own case. That's what Manafort was supposed to do. It's not that complicated.

Also on the Manafort subject, I hope this isn't too obvious, but the fact that none of the crimes with which Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have been charged with  feature direct collaboration in a Russian conspiracy doesn't mean they never committed any crimes on those lines.

Indeed, we know at least two cases in which Manafort and Flynn absolutely did collaborate in a Russian conspiracy: Manafort in that cigar bar meeting with Kilimnik of August 2016 when he passed him the 75 pages of polling data, Flynn in those phone calls with the Russian ambassador in December 2016 when they spoke about sanctions. That seems like a clear violation of the 1799 Logan Act

Otherwise Blameless Life

Obligatory: Manafort, Stone, and Atwater, 1985. Photo by Harry Naltchayan/Washington Post.

I have to laugh at Judge Ellis remarking that Paul Manafort had led an "otherwise blameless life" except for the period between 2004 and 2018 when he committed all the crimes he's charged with in the Virginia and DC cases. Does he believe Manafort went to Ukraine and suddenly became a professional criminal at the age of 55?

I have my doubts, above all over his work for Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, reported by Ken Vogel in Politico Magazine back in June 2016, not long before Manafort's promotion from convention manager to campaign manager (the article was published literally the day after the meeting in Trump Tower with the anti-sanctions campaigner Natalia Veselnitskaya where he was reported to have fallen asleep, seemed later to have been taking desultory notes on his phone, and possibly, as Emptywheel pointed out, recorded the whole thing, which would now be in the hands of the Special Counsel, with Manafort's other electronic devices):

Keep your eyes on the timeline

Tom Barrack, in blue tie, applauding the president at the inauguration, photo by Joe Gromelski/Stars and Stripes. Barrack has denied the report in Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury that he ever said Trump is "not only crazy—he's stupid."

At some point yesterday morning I became aware of a story that had showed up overnight in the New York Times that made me want to give up writing about Trump and Russia altogether, because it suggested that everything I thought I understood about the thing was not just wrong but incoherent; the story, elaborating yesterday's story about Paul Manafort transmitting some Trump-campaign polling data to his confederate Konstantin Kilimnik, that the data was destined for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

What the hell was that? This information transfer supposedly took place in spring 2016, as Manafort was just settling into his job with the Trump campaign, and two months later Manafort was writing to Kilimnik, essentially, "Hey Kostya does Oleg know about my new gig?" and offering to supply Deripaska with a bunch of private information from the campaign, in the hopes of getting some slack over the $10 million or whatever it was (I've seen quotes from $8.5M to $16M) he owed Deripaska. How could he be doing that if he'd been sending Deripaska information since May?

Well, I can't link that story, because it doesn't exist any more. The Times story was wrong:

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

No Evidence [Narrator: There is some evidence]

Pablo Picasso, Nous Autres Musiciens, 1921, via Wikipedia.

I love the galloping rhythm of these jaunty couplets composed in a moment of adversity:

Song of the Illegal Witch Hunt

By Donald J. Trump

The illegal Mueller Witch Hunt
continues in search of a crime.

There was never Collusion with Russia,
except by the Clinton campaign,

so the 17 Angry Democrats are looking
at anything they can find.

Very unfair and BAD for the country. ALSO,
not allowed under the LAW!

I'm sorry, Donald? There was a dog not barking, and it was so loud I couldn't hear what you were saying!

The dog I mean being, of course, Paul Manafort's guilty plea on Friday and agreement to cooperate

fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly with the Government and other law enforcement authorities identified by the Government in any and all matters to which the Government deems the cooperation relevant.

Rodolfo Giuliani came out posthaste with a covfefe denial that there was anything serious here, so instantly and easily falsified that none of the commentators even bothered to make fun of his drunk-typing:

The Crime. II

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

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 27, 2018

Josh adds,

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.

The Crime. I

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:

And Something, You Know

The Trumpster Bunny.

What Easter Means to Me

by Donald J. Trump

Well, it really means something very special.
I'm going to church in an hour from now
and it's going to be—it's a beautiful church.
I'm in Florida. And it's just a very special—
time for me. And it really represents family
and get-together and—and something, you know,
if you're a—a Christian, it's just a very important day.

Schiff Memo update: Two conspiracies?

Doom Patrol 96 (June 1965). Via.

Following up on yesterday's post:

1. Marcy has spoken, and she doesn't think there's much new stuff for us to learn from the Schiff memo, except for the one thing, or set of things, about international man of mystery George Papadapoulos, the mook whose boasting with High Commissioner Downer in the Kensington Wine Rooms in May 2016, reported by Downer to his government that July, launched the FBI's investigation of Trump campaign collusion with the (already known) Russian efforts to mess up the 2016 presidential election.

The question of what emails Joseph Mifsud and the Russians he introduced Papadopoulos to in April 2016 were talking about, the "thousands of emails" that were going to damage the Clinton campaign; Marcy is now convinced that, as I speculated in December, Papadopoulos wasn't told at all what they were, only that they could be helpful to Trump. He could have imagined it had some connection with the emails deleted from Hillary Clinton's private server in 2012 when she was leaving the State Department, which in the fantasies of rightwingers would have concealed all sorts of evidence of corruption, but we have no evidence that he did.

This allows me to go on assuming that the Russians were talking at that point about about the emails stolen from the Clinton campaign from John Podesta's computer, which the Fancy Bear team had just concluded with that March (as opposed to the theft of the Democratic National Committee emails, which which was mostly from April and May), and which were ultimately published by WikiLeaks (more or less simultaneously with the revelation of the Trump Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing monologue) and weaponized into use as evidence (with material from the transcripts of Clinton's paid speechmaking of 2013-14) of Clinton's supposedly corrupt ties to the banking industry and generally evil neoliberal intentions, as a way to discourage people on the left from voting for her or voting at all.

Aha

Image via Oprah!

Very glad to hear Paul Manafort and his confederate Rick Gates have been busted for some of their many crimes against the people of the United States, and I'm not going to lie, it was bigger than I was expecting, but it's this morning's other Trumprussia story that really makes my heart beat faster, because it's really Trumprussia, and it looks like my story, the one I've been constructing, developing in an extremely major way, in the guilty plea of George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who kept trying to set up meetings between Russian officials and the campaign: pleaded guilty on October 5, we learn today, to lying in an interview with the FBI in January, and what he lied about was a meeting with a "Russian professor":

A “statement of the offense” document released by the special counsel’s office states that “on or about March 31, 2016,” Papadopoulos attended a national security meeting with Trump and other advisers, at which Papadopoulos stated that he “could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin”.

Papadopoulos told investigators as part of the plea that he befriended a London-based professor with “substantial connections” to Russian government officials after he became an adviser to the campaign.

Papadopoulos initially told investigators that he met the professor before joining the campaign.

The professor was not named in court documents but is described as a person with close connections to the Kremlin who told Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails”.