Cheap Shots: Schadenfreude

This Inflation Is Enough to Drive a Man to Drink

As I wrote at Bluesky,

We wanted to understand why so many are beset by economic anxiety in spite of ample evidence that the economy is just fine. So we spoke to some professional Republican business travelers quietly stewing themselves at a barbecue joint at Newark Liberty.

I love the fact that Oates herself did this almost as much as the fact that it got done. Readers adding context confirm her estimates are about right.

***

Block That Chain

Narratology: A Real Whistleblower

 

Part I

Part II

Extraordinary new story that I thought needed a little narratological juice

Sue me, sue me, what can you do me?

Faith Prince and Nathan Lane. If you don't know the show, what makes it sublime is that he really does have to go to a prayer meeting, not because he's got religion but because he's lost a bet.

All right, explain this to me like I'm a five-year-old. I mean with a fairly big vocabulary for a five-year-old, but some innocence:

Rudy Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for former president Donald Trump, is no longer contesting as a legal matter that he made false and defamatory statements about two former Georgia election workers — but argues in a new court filing that what amounted to false claims about vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election was constitutionally protected speech and did not damage the workers.

"So I made a bunch of false and defamatory statements about you, that's some kind of reason for taking me to court?"

Yes, Rudolf, that's supposedly how it works. He was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the mother and daughter working on the Fulton County ballot count who were seen on video doing something Giuliani described as pulling fake ballots out of suitcases, like drug dealers "passing out dope", and "crooks" who "obviously" stuffed ballots, an accusation subsequently taken up by then-president Donald Trump, with the result that the two women's lives were completely upended, as they told the House January 6 committee a little over a year later: 

You Never Talk to Rudy About a Pardon

Donald and Rudes at the groundbreaking of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Columbus Circle in 1995, the year (The New York Times notes) he would declare losses of $915.7 million in his federal tax return. Photo by Francis Specker/New York Post Archives, via NYP Holdings, Inc., via Getty Images.

A note on Rudolph and the claim of his rape victim Noelle Dunphy that he told her he was selling presidential pardons at two million dollars a pop and then splitting the proceeds with the president: I remembered some talk of pardon lobbying among the scandals of Trump's last month in office—of people taking money to intercede with Trump for a pardon, with no guarantees—in the informal process, run by Jared Kushner, of doling them out to Trump allies like Manafort and Stone, somehow including Kushner's father, and was Giuliani involved in that?

In fact I did a pretty good post myself about it at the time, which repays rereading (especially the bit about Trump's former personal attorney John Dowd, who also seems to have been in charge of offering pardons to criminals from Mike Flynn to Lev Parnas in exchange for silence on the subject of their activities on Trump's behalf), and sure enough, there was Giuliani in the mix, marketing a pardon to John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who'd been busted for outing the name of a fellow officer involved in the torture of an Al-Qa'eda fighter captured in Pakistan in 2002, for which he served 30 months in 2013-15. What's especially interesting right now is Giuliani's price tag:

More Perverts

 

People, I've been reading the Complaint in the $10-million suit filed in Manhattan court yesterday against Rudolph Giuliani by Noelle Dunphy, who worked as his Director of Business Development from January 2019 to January 2021, at a salary of $1 million a year plus expenses, which he never paid her, because this was during the protracted process of his third divorce, and

he told Ms. Dunphy that her pay would have to be deferred and her employment kept “secret” until the divorce proceedings finished. He claimed that his “crazy” exwife and her lawyers were watching his cashflow, and that his ex-wife would “attack” and “retaliate” against any female employee that Giuliani hired. Giuliani promised Ms. Dunphy that his divorce would be resolved “any day now,” and therefore the deferral of her pay and the need to keep her employment secret would soon end.

And that's not all, as you've probably heard by now; he started sexually harassing her from the first day—

As he was preparing to leave, Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that since they would be working from different locations that week, he would like it if Ms. Dunphy sent him some flirtatious photos.

and in the first week, in New York on a business trip, insisted that she stay at his apartment (he has a guest suite), got her drunk, and forced her to give him oral sex, before taking her out to dinner with Lev Parnas (remember him? this is all happening as we're building up to the Ukraine scandal and the first Trump impeachment, and Lev is around a lot). Before you knew it, this had become a major part of her job:

For the Record: The Twitter Files

There's just so much news flooding in before I can absorb it, I'm thinking maybe I just have to resign myself to being a week or so behind on everything. I don't want to let go of the efforts of Mr. Musk's Kancelculture Kids to expose the woke leftist FBI's brutal censorship efforts at Twitter, where they succeeded in silencing the entire NewsCorp organization for [checks notes] a full day before Twitter changed its mind and its policy, in October 2020, nearly spoiling Rupert's special October Surprise revelations of Shirtless Hunter. 

Installment #7 of "The Twitter Files", by noted plastic straw advocate Michael Shellenberger, showed up on Tuesday to defend the story he, Weiss, and Taibbi have been developing: 

It's not at all clear that it's "wholly accurate" https://t.co/6uLpGTzSMv https://t.co/qEEXqxJzrM

— Yas is at post.news/yastreblyansky but still here (@Yastreblyansky) December 20, 2022

I mean, for one thing, the story of the blind computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac turning the laptop over to the FBI was dodgy enough, the way Mac Isaac told it:

Narratology: State of the Theory

 

Fall of the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, October 1917

The most surprising news to me in the Tuesday hearing was the story that Trump really meant it on January 6 at the Ellipse:

And after this,
we're going to walk down,
and I'll be there with you,
we're going to walk down,
we're going to walk down.

I mean of course he was indeed lying about the walking part. It's two miles from the Ellipse to the Capitol, he hasn't walked anywhere near that far in 60 years and clearly can't, any more than he could walk the 700 yards with the G7 leaders in Taormina in 2017, when he had to chug behind them in a golf cart, and as Kayleigh McEnany recounted it, he seems to have pulled back from that notion pretty quickly:

Bad News From the New York Office

Rogue Agents.

Some discouraging news for those who are waiting to learn the truth about how rogue agents from the FBI's New York field office manipulated Director Comey into publicly revealing the bogus "reopening" of the Hillary Clinton email investigation in October 2016, which has looked statistically like the news story that finally tipped the presidential election to Donald Trump; it looks like it's not going to happen.

Namely, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General has issued a report on its investigation of the matter—

allegations that FBI employees improperly disclosed non-public information regarding the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. FBI policies strictly limit the employees who are authorized to speak to the media, and require all other employees to coordinate with or obtain approval from the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA)... 

—and it looks like they pretty much couldn't find out what happened, or decided they couldn't, because in the first place, um, unfortunately, some phones disappeared. OIG was collecting texts and electronic messages from agents fingered as suspicious by "senior FBI witnesses" and found that there was a gap in the record that the bureau couldn't account for. OIG then proceeded to impound the phones of the agents in question but couldn't get them all:

After the FBI informed the OIG of the missing text messages for the four employees, the OIG requested to take physical custody of the FBI-issued cellular phones for these employees. The OIG received Samsung Galaxy S7 devices that had been assigned to the four employees, and recovered text messages from these phones for the early 2017 time period.7 However, the FBI could not locate the employees’ previously assigned Samsung Galaxy S5 devices, which would have had text messages for the relevant time periods in 2016. Accordingly, the OIG was unable to review the 2016 text messages for four of the employees identified by senior FBI witnesses as being potential sources of disclosures of non-public information in 2016. 

And none of the messages that they were able to review had any evidence of those agents transmitting non-public information to the press. So it looks like either

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.

Refresher Course

So Rudolph Giuliani's Upper East Side office and apartment have been raided, and cellphones and computers seized, and a grand jury subpoena served on Giuliani's executive assistant, in an FBI investigation of whether he may have violated laws against trying to influence or lobby the US government on behalf of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department. Among other things, I trust. Also a phone taken from lawyer Victoria Toensing, who has been variously involved with Giuliani's Ukraine contacts Yuriy Lutsenko and Dmytro Firtash and has employed Lev Parnas and Ihor Fruman as "translators", I believe, and is the attorney of writer John Solomon, who is in turn one of the correspondents in the communications the feds are searching for on the devices they seized.

I'm re-upping the following, from January 2020, the day after Trump's impeachment lawyers presented his "case",  as a helpful guide to who all these people were and what they were likely to have been doing, and who they were doing it for (one Donald J. Trump, in his aspiration for a second presidential term)

By Jen Sorensen.

It Was All True

 

Photos via Radio Free Europe,  February 2019; one of the US government–run news organizations Trump started attacking around October 2019 and taking measures to destroy after his first impeachment.

Well, well, well. I do believe the National Intelligence Council's unclassified report on Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections just confirmed it for me:

Rudolph Giuliani and the rest of the rightwing Hunter Biden industry last year were working under the direction of the Kremlin.

In an extension of the same long-term project as the one that contributed to electing Donald Trump in 2016, with the same elfin figure at the center, Kostya Kilimnik, Paul Manafort's Ukraine amanuensis who was actually his Russian handler. The document doesn't actually tell us what Kilimnik personally did in 2020, but it does name him:

Pardons Я Us

 

Brother Johann Tetzel on the ass, right, dispensing indulgences to the wealthy in a German broadside poster, $32.83 from Amazon (the poster, not the indulgence). 

In the couple of months after the 2000 election, some scandal emerged over the flurry of last-minute pardons issued by outgoing president Bill Clinton, starting with the news that Democratic superdonor and Friend of Bill Ron Burkle had been agitating for a pardon for the junk-bond fraudster Mike Milken, and climaxing with the one given to the tax cheat and sanctions-violating commodities trader Marc Rich, who'd been evading justice living in Switzerland for the previous 17 years, in which the deputy attorney general—a guy you may have heard of called Eric Holder—and the president himself had shown extremely poor judgment at best (Rich's ex-wife Denise was a big-time donor to the Clinton Presidential Library, for one thing, and there's a 200-year-old rule that it's improper to pardon fugitives), allowing themselves to be manipulated by the lobbying of Rich's lawyers including Jack Quinn, who, having been White House counsel from 1995 to 1997, wasn't allowed to lobby for anybody at all until 2002. Also, Clinton issued some 31 pardons and commutations that hadn't gone through the normal processing, because the applications had arrived so late, and First Brothers Hugh Rodham and Roger Clinton had been taking some serious money to lobby the president themselves. Nevertheless Milken didn't get his pardon, and the applications the First Brothers had worked on weren't successful either, and Clinton went on to a very successful post-presidency, Holder eventually became attorney general, and even Quinn (whose Wikipedia bio doesn't even mention Rich) is now a legal analyst at CNN.

All of which seems extremely different from today's news reported by Michael Schmidt and Kenneth Vogel in The Times that there's a regular pardons market in the outgoing Trump administration:

Call Me Sherlock Holmes. II

Photo via The Mary Sue.

Carrying on a bit from last night:

https://t.co/fHtFgWCU74

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 2, 2020

I know I'm an idiot but he actually was in BOP custody for a couple of weeks after his arrest in October 2019. He later said Dowd visited him there and "told him to cooperate and sacrifice himself for the president".

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 2, 2020

Literary Corner: Rudolfo's Solliloquy

Via Jacobean Tragedies.

Just when America needed a new poetic voice, a sound out of Jacobean tragedy, violent and baroque—

I Can't Give You All These Affidavits

by Rudolph Giuliani

Now, I don’t know. You’re going to tell me

that sixty people are lying? They didn’t just

tell me this. They swore under penalty of perjury,

which is something no Democrat has ever done.

You don’t even ask Biden about this. You don’t

put them under penalty of perjury. He doesn’t

even get asked questions about it. He doesn’t

get asked questions about all the evidence

of the crimes that he committed. These people

are under penalty of perjury, the names that are

on our affidavit. They swear that they weren’t

allowed to carry out their function as inspectors.

Those rats won't fck themselves

 

Via.

Me, on 28 October 2016:

There is no chance, as far as I'm concerned, and based on what actual journalists are reporting, that the FBI has any new information that is of any relevance to the question whether or not Hillary Clinton ought to be president, regardless of your feelings about that question, since the emails that "may have been related to" Clinton's private server, which Huma Abedin seems to have chosen to print from a home laptop that was also used by Anthony Weiner to transmit pictures of his penis, or not, as the case may be, are neither from Clinton nor to Clinton, and are absolutely not documents that have been withheld from the investigation; the FBI is already perfectly familiar with their content, at least so far (there are thousands, naturally, and it will take many weeks, until long after the election is over, to finish looking at them). They could conceivably be relevant to the question whether Huma Abedin mishandled classified data, but nobody's saying that there's any likelihood of that either; they're just checking them out from an "abundance of caution".

Comey's conduct in making this non-information public 11 days before the presidential election is said to be from an "abundance of caution" too, or, as we say in English, covering his ass against accusations that he ended the Clinton investigation too early, just in case the Bureau does somehow learn something of interest to somebody. Yes, it's really improbable, but Comey's going to be ready. Not only does he wear a belt and suspenders but he also has his trousers surgically attached to his waist and ankles:

“In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season,” he noted, “there is significant risk of being misunderstood.”

(Via Jane Mayer's piece in the New Yorker, which you need to read.) Comey seems to think the worst thing that could ever happen to our republic would be if somebody criticized him. With the result, naturally, that he comes in for a lot of criticism, much of it very richly deserved. 

OK so I was wrong about how long it would take for FBI to go through the material (it took exactly just long enough to poison the electorate and ended just in time for Comey to pretend it hadn't done that), and I was obviously wrong about whether this nonsense could affect the vote outcome (Steve was more doubtful). But I was right about the utter nullity of the scandal.

Me, almost exactly four years later:

For the Record: Why the Affordable Care Act Will Survive

Photo by CQ Roll Call via Forbes.

 

 A heavy Twitter day, sorry. Some more arguments with friends:

There's too much Grassley in it. We need to get it rewritten by a committee with fewer Republicans.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 24, 2020

That I have never believed. Huge financialized corporations--hospitals, insurers--have a very big stake in preserving it, and finding for Texas would cause serious chaos https://t.co/kdHUAkVLFi. The Court cares more about them than it does about Trump.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 24, 2020

Malarkey Factory

 

It’s not complicated—Vote for Joe if you want to save America and democracy.

And watch this. It’s wonderful. 💖 https://t.co/VIBTkix0v9

— Pam Resists (@ResisterForever) October 19, 2020

I may be finding this Matt Viser/Washington Post story a little more reassuring than I should, but I'm glad to learn the Biden campaign has a multimillion-dollar "Malarkey Factory" combating disinformation, and very glad to get an explanation of what kinds of disinformation they decide to combat:

Hi It's Stupid: Rudy

Painting by Burhan Dogancay,1998, via WikiArt.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Rodolfo Giuliani really had no idea Andrij Derkach was a Russian agent. No, hear me out!

Giuliani had been hanging out last December with Derkach, a Ukrainian MP formerly from the Russia-backed Party of Regions and supporter of the corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych, now in exile in Russia, and Ph.D. graduate of the KGB's Higher School in Moscow (his dissertation was on the "Organization and Conduct of Meetings With Secret Agents"), and Derkach had supplied him with edited audio of phone conversations between Ukraine's former president Petro Poroshenko and then–Vice President Joe Biden, which Giuliani believes, or claims to believe, are evidence of some kind of corruption on Biden's part, though The Washington Post was not convinced in May:

The recordings played at the news conference Tuesday [19May] shed relatively little new light on Biden’s actions in Ukraine, which were at the center of President Trump’s impeachment last year. They show that Biden, as he has previously said publicly, linked loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general in 2015. But Derkach used the new clips to make an array of accusations not proven by the tapes...

The tapes released in Kyiv offered no evidence to back Giuliani’s long-standing accusation that Biden pushed for the prosecutor general’s ouster to help his son. At the time, Hunter Biden was earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a month on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, whose owner, a former government minister, was under investigation in Ukraine. Still, the tapes gave Trump’s allies a chance to recycle that allegation closer to the 2020 election.

Derkach did not say he had gotten the tapes from the FSB, but rather than he got them from unnamed "investigative journalists" who had in turned obtained them from recordings made by President Poroshenko himself, which is not quite easy to believe .

But in a startling twist yesterday, it turned out that Derkach is a Russian agent! According to the US Treasury Department, which has slapped him with sanctions: 

And the grift goes on...

Drawing by Tom Toles.

This peculiar but sober-sounding lede (story from Washington Post flagged by Jane Mayer)

Federal prosecutors are examining the communications of a New York family doctor who appears frequently on Fox News and has been in touch with the White House to tout an anti-malarial as a treatment for the novel coronavirus, according to people contacted as part of the inquiry.

conceals a snapshot, I think, that epitomizes the soul and the style of Trump World so tightly and so hilariously that I feel a need to try telling it, as WaPo doesn't seem to want to do, involving a mistake made by wingnut villain Jerome Corsi when he sent an email meant for Dr. Vladimir "Zev" Zelenko to federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky instead.

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