Got Paranoia? More Stone

 

Brooks Brothers Riot of November 22, 2000. Photo by Colin Braley/Reuters, via Wikipedia.

A gold nugget of fact I had no idea of in a segment on my favorite radio show that was mainly about the Dominion Election Systems settlement with Fox News, but it goes back to a big New York Times report of 2019 on the whole history of the Rupert Murdoch enterprise, by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, that puts an awful lot of things together on Rupert's early days in the US, after he'd bought the New York Post:

In 1980, he met Roy Cohn — the former adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy and a Trump mentor — who introduced him to Gov. Ronald Reagan’s inner circle. It was a group that included Roger Stone Jr., another Trump confidant and the head of Reagan’s New York operations, who said in a later interview that he helped Murdoch weaponize his latest tabloid purchase, The New York Post, on Reagan’s behalf in the 1980 election. Reagan’s team credited Murdoch with delivering him the state that year — Murdoch gave Stone an Election Day printing plate from The Post over a celebratory meal at the 21 Club — and his administration subsequently facilitated Murdoch’s entry into the American television market, quickly approving his application for American citizenship so he could buy TV stations too.

Seditious Conspiracy

 

Virginian Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell, 67, has denied he was in the building, but the FBI seems to know better.

Whaddaya know Merrick Garland did sumthin. Kind of thought he might one of these days. https://t.co/x6c9oc40Tq

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) January 13, 2022

This is really great news for those who have been worried about the Justice Department approach to 6 January investigations and the apparent focus over the whole past year in its 725 arrests on the misbehavior inside the Capitol on the day itself, and seeming failure to see the conspiratorial context, stretching back to the 2020 election and the existence of a leadership, going very high up, in the neighborhood of Donald J. Trump himself. I mostly felt pretty confident Attorney General Garland was conducting it on the classic model of a mob investigation, doing an exhaustive job on the soldiers and pressing as many of them as possible into cooperation agreements before moving upwards to the leadership and the plan. With the long-awaited arrest of Stewart Rhodes and the charge of seditious conspiracy

Narratology: Folie à Trois

 

Salvador Dalí, Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937), via Wikipedia.

Well, well, well, gossip genius Michael Wolff seems to be releasing a third volume on the Trump administration, under the title Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, to arrive July 27, and New York magazine has a promo excerpt dealing with the events of 6 January, with which I am totally fascinated.

Not that it tells you the story of an unfolding coup attempt: it doesn't. One of the inherent defects of the genre, whether the author is a patrician-reporter like Bob Woodward or a literary slumdweller like Wolff, is that it's forced to take its sources' self-serving stories at more or less face value. If a coup attempt was really taking place, none of Wolff's sources said so, whether because they didn't know or because they were pretending not to know, understandably, so he effectively couldn't tell the story by the means at his command. 

And it really seems from the excerpts as if none of his sources might have known such a thing; the characters divide neatly into two groups, one consisting just of the truly delusional Trump and Giuliani, in a remarkable kind of folie à deux, who were genuinely hoping that Pence would decertify the election with his imaginary vice presidential powers, and everybody else in and around the White House, who knew this would not happen, but didn't know how to tell the boss. And they nearly all sound as if whoever is talking to Wolff is more or less telling the truth.

Florida man: "How quickly can I blow it all on pussy?"

The Third Man. If you know what I mean.

Headline from the former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, not his former friend Matt Gaetz, who probably might not express himself so coarsely

I have this idea Gaetz will get away with it—been looking at the plea agreement for Joel Greenberg and seeing plenty of opportunities for Gaetz to call himself Greenberg's victim instead of a partner in crime, and don't doubt he's dishonest and disloyal enough to take full advantage of them.

His name isn't mentioned anywhere in the document, but it's clear he's involved in just two of the six crimes to which Greenberg has pleaded guilty (out of I think 33 total charges in the original indictments: the sex trafficking involving a minor, in which he bonked some of the young women Greenberg was in the habit of sourcing through the Sugar Babies app in return for money he paid Greenberg with Venmo and Greenberg in turn paid them, sometimes asking them to take MDMA with him (and paying them extra when they did); and the use of fake IDs Greenberg manufactured in his tax collector's office, which in Gaetz's case seems to have been sort of legitimate, in that he wanted ID for his real self rather than the stolen identities Greenberg created out of abandoned driver's licenses for his own use and that of the girls:

The Gaetz of Hell shall not prevail

 

So, per this Daily Beast story. sometime in late 2020 and early 2021 the former tax collector of Seminole County, Florida, Mr. Joel Greenberg, in a series of text messages exchanged on the Signal app with presidential ratfucker Roger Stone detailing some of the crimes he'd committed, including crimes committed in concert with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), for he would like to purchase a presidential pardon, for $250,000, if Mr. Stone was agreeable, in unmarked bills (well, in Bitcoin):

Karmic Relief

Sadly, armies of YouTube fans have been unable to locate the channel, which seems likely to have been deleted.

"Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" is gonna be lit on Saturday with stories of hubris brought low.

For one thing, 53-year-old Italian Marc Feren Claude Biart, a made member of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, wanted in Italy for cocaine smuggling to the Netherlands, was living his best life in retirement with a fake identity in the Dominican Republic, but done in, they say, by his "love for Italian cuisine", or really by the temptations of the Internet, where he and his wife started a YouTube channel for cooking videos. He didn't show his face in the videos, but failed to hide his tattoos, which cooking-video fan Interpol agents recognized, and they busted him, along with 354 other defendants in an enormous 'Ndrangheta sweep. (NPR, but I'd like the record to show I got the story from Frankfurter Allgemeine Twitter.)

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:

For the Record: Obstruction by Obfuscation

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".

— Brand New Preexisting (@Yastreblyansky) February 24, 2020

You Know Me Al

YouTube screen capture, from the Sessions confirmation hearings.

I only wrote one brief post on Al Franken's resignation from the Senate, not saying much more than, "I really hate everything. I certainly hate Al Franken, though I obviously hate Roger Stone a lot more," with reference to the clear indications that ratfucking was involved, and archratfucker Roger Stone was somehow involved in it:

I'm guessing same way he knew "Podesta's time in the barrel" was coming in August 2016? https://t.co/2OOdM1kj5k i.e. ratfucking he was personally engaged in, with or without Assange and the Putinist mob.

— O'er the Airports We Watched (@Yastreblyansky) November 17, 2017

And with the understanding that Franken had set himself up for this, which quickly began to look more and more unfair as the character of the ratfucking exposed itself in more depth, and I found myself hating him a lot less. As I put it last spring, with reference to attacks on Joe Biden for his disturbing-uncle behavior:

I also thought and continue to think Al Franken was essentially innocent, in similar ways and indeed still more so (in the sense that his dopey comedian behaviors are less creepy than the Biden massages and hair sniffings), but nevertheless right to resign from the Senate, because what loyalty to the party demanded at the moment of accusation was to not allow that to become an issue for diluting the party message on sexual assault...

So that I was fully prepared, as many of us must have been, for Jane Mayer's excellent New Yorker report, though maybe not for how angry I'd start to feel as I began to appreciate how obvious Franken's innocence should have been from the start, whenever we learned who the accuser LeeAnn Tweeden was (conservative radio "host", Fox figure and Hannity friend, and an inveterate liar about a large number of subjects, including that USO tour); what Tom Arnold of all people was able to report accurately in early December 2017 must have been possible for the press to check out, and I don't know why they didn't.

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer investigated the sexual misconduct allegations against former Sen. Al Franken. "Almost NOTHING His Main Accuser Said checks out," she tweeted. https://t.co/IMYBdz2kPU

— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) July 22, 2019

I still think Franken was right to resign (agreeing with the conclusion, if not many of the premises, of Matt Yglesias)—even though he seems to be second-guessing himself at this point—and I'm not going to scream at the Democratic Senators who did what they felt they had to do, including Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer in the leadership roles they took, though I'm glad Gillibrand's never going to be president after reading about this slightly Frank Underwood moment:

at a previously scheduled press conference, Gillibrand added insult to injury: she reiterated her call for Franken to resign while also trumpeting her sponsorship of a new bill that banned mandatory arbitration of sexual-harassment claims. She didn’t mention that Franken had originated the legislation—and had given it to Gillibrand to sponsor, out of concern that it might be imperilled by his scandal. 

Still, politics is ugly, and nobody's indispensable. But I miss him, shooting barbs in the Senate Judiciary Committee and representing exactly the kind of progressivism the whole party has begun to move toward. I hope we get him back in public life.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

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

Underpants Gnomes in the Russia Investigation

Via IresPuestas.com.

Just to refresh everybody's memory, when Trump howls "They SPIED on me!!!" what he means is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved an order of federal surveillance on a former foreign policy adviser to candidate Donald Trump called Carter Page, in October 2016, on evidence that included some raw intelligence gathered by a former MI6 Russia expert called Christopher Steele for a firm called GPS Fusion which had a contract with the Democratic-connected Perkins Coie law firm to do opposition research on Trump, which is incontrovertible proof, according to certain Republicans, that the Democratic Party and the entire leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a plan (an "insurance policy") to remove Trump from office in the unlikely event he got elected, which they would accomplish by recording Carter Page's phone calls.

Let's just lay that out as an Underpants Gnomes scenario:

1. FBI does electronic surveillance on Carter Page
2. Trump wins the presidential election
3. ???
4. IMPEACH!

This schema is what Attorney General Barr was referring to, not without a little healthy skepticism, when he was talking to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. A very little skepticism, so little a lot of people didn't even notice it, which may be what he intended, as we heard Thursday on NPR:

Stone Crazy

Via District of Calamity.

I hope you're not confused with the Roger Stone indictments by people claiming them as proof that "there was no collusion" because Stone is not accused, in point of fact, of interacting with any Russians in any of these instances, only with "Organization no.1", which is the thing called WikiLeaks. The main thing is it might as well have been Russians, since WikiLeaks had become, by this point in summer 2016 if not a good deal earlier, basically a Russian asset, curating and publishing materials stolen by Russian intelligence in the furtherance of Russian intelligence aims to weaken future president Hillary Clinton or even prevent her from getting elected.

In a relationship that went back to at least 2010, as Nancy LeTourneau just reminded us, and including at least at one point getting WikiLeaks some funding at a financially difficult moment for the organization (Nancy citing The New York Times, 1 September 2016):

I hate everything

Alicublog on Friday afternoon, before the women show up.  Actually Pompeii around 60 C.E. Via Early Church History.

I really hate everything. I certainly hate Al Franken, though I obviously hate Roger Stone a lot more.

CHECK IT OUT: Roger Stone knew about the Franken scandal LAST NIGHT before midnight. Somethin' smells mighty fishy, don't it? pic.twitter.com/k5N7YuVvLi

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 16, 2017

"Stone Cold Truth" is Roger Stone's Twitter account that he uses because his other Twitter account was "permanently suspended" after he called CNN's Don Lemon a "dumb piece of shit", "dull witted ignorant partyboi", and "ignorant, lying covksucker" (that last word must have been short for "covfefesucker"). Because being permanently suspended from Twitter doesn't mean exactly what you'd think.

I'm guessing same way he knew "Podesta's time in the barrel" was coming in August 2016? https://t.co/2OOdM1kj5k i.e. ratfucking he was personally engaged in, with or without Assange and the Putinist mob.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 17, 2017

Nevertheless, Franken has made it possible. Roy has made me feel a little better, and it looks like a great party could be getting started over it his place, follow the link.