Eli Feldstein, former spokesman in the Prime Minister's Office, now under indictment in an elaborate plot to use fabricated intelligence to exculpate Binyamin Netanyahu (who of course knows nothing about it) in the deaths of those six hostages. Photos via The Times of Israel.
I don't pretend to know any better than I did before the election what Joe
Biden should have done about the Gaza war beyond what he did do, but I will
say that the administration shouldn't send a ferocious letter like the one of
October 16 if they're just going to back off from their threats the way they did
on
November 12 and pretend everything's fine, the way they've generally seemed to do for the whole 13 months. You can't have it both ways.
International Criminal Court has finally issued the arrest warrants the
prosecutor requested last May for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, former
Defense Minister Gallant, and Hamas commander Mohammed Deif (whom Israel
claims to have killed in a missile attack back in July, but they've never
offered any kind of evidence). White House and State Department quickly out
condemning "moral equivalence", which I don't get. The ICC isn't claiming that
Netanyahu and Deif are "morally equivalent", merely that they have something
in common—both seem to be guilty of war crimes. And not the same crimes. Deif
is held responsible for the killing of some 1200 Israelis and others in
the massacres of October 7, Netanyahu and Gallant for the killing of at least
44,000 Palestinians, a large majority of them noncombatant women and children,
and the deliberate starving and displacement of two million more, for one
thing, and Deif committed his crime first, so he "started it", so that Israel
is entitled to argue that it has merely been exercising its "right to defend
itself" (needless to say, Gazans are not allowed to argue that they were
driven stir-crazy by their 16 years in a kind of prison camp from which their
freedom of movement was under absolute Israeli and Egyptian control,
stir-craziness isn't a legitimate defense).
BBC News Hour asked a Prime Minister's Office flunky "what evidence do you
have" of some complaint the flunky was making, I didn't quite catch what, but
I think it must have been Israel's irrelevant allegations
against prosecutor Karim Khan:
Margaret Rutherford as Miss Jane Marple, via Novel Suspects.
The details of how Matt Gaetz got the attorney general offer have been coming out like the facts in an Agatha Christie puzzle—I mean literally who was heard whispering with whom and where they were sitting on the plane—particularly in a Politico report (I first heard about it from Jay Kuo) citing their reporter Meridith McGraw, and it's stimulating the narrativium for me: I'm pretty sure I know what happened, and it's not at all what you might think, or what Tim Snyder has suggested, but something much more farcical, though perhaps equally chilling.
The background is that Republican operative Susie Wiles, co-chair of the Trump campaign and soon-to-be chief of staff, has been playing adult-in-the-room, keeping the boss on a bit of a leash and trying to keep him sensible, and had furnished him with a nice respectable shortlist of attorney general candidates, but he didn't like them. He wants his Roy Cohn, and the guys on the list seemed to have a different concept of the job; as Marc Caputo reports it, they
looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit....
The Gaetz-for-AG plan came together [Wednesday], just hours before it was announced, Meridith tells us. It was hatched aboard Trump’s airplane en route to Washington, on which Gaetz was a passenger. A Trump official revealed more details to Playbook late last night: BORIS EPSHTEYN played a central role in the development, lobbying Trump to choose Gaetz while incoming White House chief of staff SUSIE WILES was in a different, adjacent room on the plane, apparently unaware.
So the setup is the two thugs, Epshteyn and Gaetz, confabulating, and Gaetz in a state of high anxiety, with the House Ethics Committee report coming out in 48 hours, and you know it's going to be really bad, and one of them comes up with a brilliant idea for a scheme: if they can get Trump to solve his attorney general problem by naming Gaetz, Gaetz will have an excuse for resigning his House seat and stopping the release of the report. They can do it right now, while Wiles isn't looking.
So Epshteyn walks over to where Trump is sitting and starts pitching him to give Gaetz the job: Gaetz wouldn't be giving him constitutional bullshit, he'd be hounding your enemies, sir, just like you wanted. In Caputo's words, he'd "go over there and start cuttin' fuckin' heads."
And of course Trump loves it—he wouldn't have thought of it himself, but he doesn't care that Gaetz is completely unqualified (he'd already named the equally unqualified Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to their important national security positions), and he doesn't care that Gaetz is a coke-snorting child fucker who told former Rep., now Senator Markwayne Mullin he would "crush Viagra and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night" (though I'm guessing Trump—and Wiles—did not realize how much trouble Gaetz was in with the ethics committee). Gaetz is his kind of guy, a guy who understands his own hopes and aspirations, and once he's made up his mind there's nothing Wiles can do about it.
In other words, the fact that Gaetz is under investigation for sex trafficking is the fundamental reason that he is slated to become attorney general. It's happening because of the investigation and wouldn't have happened otherwise, though none of the characters but him and Epshteyn realize this.
And I still have hopes the plan may fall through, because they weren't going to able to hide the crucial element, but the main thing I'm wondering about is how pervasive this kind of thing is in Trumpworld; how much it's pure thug behavior, rather than the big political issues we try to focus our minds on, that drives what happens there.
Following the Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, October 28, 2024. Photo by AFP via Times of Israel.
At a certain point Biden reached a conclusion: that the only way to stop the
Gaza war and prevent a wider war all around the Middle East was to get rid of
Netanyahu. I don't know when that happened, though an incident reported by
Franklin Foer
looks to me like a likely candidate, in late 2023, when Biden was entreating
Netanyahu to turn over to the Palestinian Authority the tax money that Israel
collects in the West Bank to finance the PA's work, such as it is (I'm not
going to claim it's a very effective government), but Netanyahu doesn't care
about the fact that it's the PA's money: on December 23
Biden called Netanyahu with a long list of concerns, urging him to release
tax revenue that Israel owed to the Palestinian Authority, the government in
the West Bank, which Netanyahu was always trying to undermine in his quest
to prevent the establishment of an autonomous, fully functioning state
there.
“You can’t let the PA collapse,” Biden told him. “We’re going to have a West
Bank catastrophe to go with the Gaza catastrophe.”
As Netanyahu began to push back, Biden couldn’t contain his pique and barked
into the phone, We’re done.
They wouldn’t speak again for almost a month.
That rhymes, in a way, with the story of Biden's worst blowup with Netanyahu,
back during his vice presidency. That was about the West Bank too, as
remembered by
Michael Hirsh in Politico Magazine:
that... shorthand might not be totally apt, if a Monday letter from the judge in the case is any measure. Indeed, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan seems to indicate that what we really have is a third election interference case.
(The paper's headline writers certainly aren't helping, if that's the case.)
My take is that "election interference case" is not a winner, particularly not for this one, The phrase "election interference" doesn't have a happy history in the Trumpery; we've been using it a long time since the discovery that Russian intelligence agencies were interfering in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf, and the only thing we've really gotten out of it, rhetorically, is that Trump now uses it against every damn investigation of his crimes:
The Fani Willis lover, Mr. Nathan Wade Esq. has just resigned in disgrace, as per his and her reading of the judge’s order today. Nathan was the ‘special,’ in more ways than one, prosecutor ‘engaged’ by Fani (pronounced Fauni) Willis, to persecute Trump for Crooked Joe Biden and his Department of Injustice for purposes of election interference and living the life of the rich and famous. This is the equivalent of Deranged Jack Smith getting ‘canned.’ Big stuff, something which should happen in the not too distant future!
And there's a kind of a point there, too; a guilty verdict in any of these criminal cases probably would have an influence on the outcome of the November election, and if the prosecutors believe he's guilty they'd probably be happier if he lost the election too, just as I would. You and I hope to exert an influence on the election too, by voting, and by persuading other people to vote the same way, including by spreading stories about Trump's criminality. Everybody's trying to interfere with the election—that's the point Trump wants to make here, in his post-truth whatabout way, that singling him out as if he were the only election interferer on the block is unfair.
But really, "election interference" isn't a crime in and of itself. If somebody murders his rich uncle for a share of the estate, he doesn't get charged with inheritance interference but with murder; inheritance interference is the motive, not the crime. If a political candidate commits crimes in order to influence the election result, whether it's collaboration or conspiracy with a foreign intelligence agency or the illegal coverup of hush money payments, those are the crimes charged; election interference is the motive. And this seems to be exactly the view taken in New York State: it is a crime only if it's "committed unlawfully".
When Trump's attorney-fixer Michael Cohen arranged for the National Enquirer publisher David Pecker to pay $150,000 kill fee to Playboy model Karen McDougal for her article describing her affair with Trump, that was an unlawful campaign contribution under federal law; it was way over the limit in size, and it was illegal to donate it in secret. When Cohen himself got $130,000 laundered through a shell company to Stephanie Clifford/Stormy Daniels to kill her article on a night with Trump, mushroom imagery and all, that was apparently another unlawful campaign contribution, but when it turned out Trump had ended up reimbursing Cohen for the money with another $130,000 to cover taxes, that made it an unlawful campaign loan, and Trump's own money the illegally unreported contribution, and his attempts to pass it off as legal fees is a case in New York State of falsifying business records in the first degree:
Falsifying business records in the first degree is a felony under New York state law that requires that the "intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof". This is in contrast to falsifying business records in the second degree, which is a misdemeanor that does not have that requirement.[8][92][93] In later filings, Bragg listed three such crimes that that Trump allegedly intended to commit: violation of federal campaign finance limits, violation of state election laws by unlawfully influencing the 2016 election, and violation of state tax laws regarding the reimbursement.
Those three crimes that make the falsification a felony instead of a misdemeanor aren't themselves charged in the Trump indictment, which is a little weird. The first of them, though, is a federal crime, for which Cohen was charged, and convicted in his plea with the Southern District, and he indeed did prison time—Trump himself (Individual-1 in Cohen's case) wasn't charged with it because he was president at the time, I guess, so it's implicit that the crime took place and he was certainly involved in it; we all heard the recording of his call with Cohen in re the Pecker payment.
The second one is the definition of what constitutes "election interference" in New York State (thanks, Just Security!):
N.Y. Elec. Law § 17-152: Conspiracyto promote or prevent election. Under that statute, “Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”
(I'll ignore the tax issue.)
So this is clearly the kind of thing that happened, as summarized at ABC News:
"From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant [Trump] orchestrated a scheme with others [including Cohen, who did prison time for his part, and Pecker, who was given federal immunity in return for his testimony]to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant's electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York," prosecutors said in a statement of facts accompanying the charges.
Which may seem a tiny bit circular—it's unlawful influencing because of the election law violations and the falsification of records, and the falsification of records is a felony rather than a misdemeanor because the influencing is unlawful—but that makes sense to me: it's a real conspiracy, in which the distinct parts aggravate the criminality of the whole.
Anyway, it occurs to me that this is a case where the coverup is not worse than the crime, it is the crime. Or rather I should say the metacoverup is the crime, because if you think about it it's a coverup of a coverup, in which the first-order federal campaign law violation of concealing Donald's nasty sexual behavior (which itself was not a crime but a bad look for the evangelical champion, especially at the moment of the Access Hollywood tape) by paying off the two women is itself concealed by the second-order New York crime of falsifying the records.
So I'd like to propose an improved nomenclature for the criminal cases in which they are clearly differentiated and both the crime involved and its subject matter are referenced:
the Hush-Money Coverup for Bragg's case (I'm not saying it's not an election interference case, but I think the expression tends to make all these cases sound less criminal than they really are, which is why Trump is deploying it so much in his zone-flooding commentary, and it's merely "influence" in any case: I don't think Bragg should put himself in the position of having to argue that knowing about McDougal and Stormy would have made a crucial difference in the election results, not something we can really know);
the Election Racket for Willis's case in Atlanta, in which Trump after the 2020 election is just one (important) member of a criminal gang trying to impose its will in its territory through threats and intimidation, messing with voting machines and tormenting election workers, with more attention to thugs like Giuliani and Meadows; and
the Election Fraud for Smith's Washington case, where Trump is (mysteriously) the only defendant, which overlaps a good deal in content with the Atlanta case but which seems to me to focus less on the activity of making trouble and and unrest (it's remarkable how little attention Smith gives to January 6 itself), and more on Trump's broader personal objective, the "conspiracy to disenfranchise voters" promulgation of the Big Lie, Trump's effort to sustain the idea that he really had won the 2020 election, alongside his knowledge that he was lying; and
the Documents Theft (I've been using this all along) for Jack Smith's Florida case generally known as "Mar-a-Lago", in which the important element isn't that they were in his house (as is also the case for Biden and Pence) but that he deliberately took them from the White House and resisted giving them back in so many ways, with such a variety of lies and subterfuge, and such a total refusal to obey the law.
Narratologically speaking, I think this is a pretty good schema for seeing the four very different proceedings as constituents of a single story, which I hope is a story of Trump's failure. Don't count on that though.
Got fixated on a peculiar detail of the government case against Alexander Smirnov, the main witness in the Republican complaint according to which Hunter Biden and Joe Biden took $5 million each in bribes from Hunter's Ukrainian employer, Mykola Zlochevsky, and nobody else seems to be paying attention to it.
Smirnov, a double agent working for Russian intelligence services and the FBI, gave the latter the story of the bribery, with advice as to how they could go about gathering evidence to back it up, and the Bureau gave it to Rep. James Comer and Senator Charles Grassley, who hoped to use it as a gigantic and appalling climax to their attempt to impeach the president, except, as we now know, when the special prosecutor found a moment to check the story out (34 months after receiving it), it turned out to be completely bogus, Smirnov's invention or that of his Russian handlers, and the Republicans' impeachment case, such as it was, is smashed to pieces, Smirnov is now under indictment for his deceit, and the prosecutor is trying to have him detained before trial, as a flight risk.
It's in that document, special counsel David Weiss's request to deny bail to Smirnov, that the story of his collaboration with Russians emerged publicly for the first time, in the context of Weiss's long-delayed investigation of Smirnov's allegation—a story of Russian intelligence services promulgating disinformation to help elect Donald Trump to the presidency, which is, as you know, one of my favorite kinds of stories to tell, and the first big one of the 2024 campaign—so of course I was looking at it, and noticed this narrativium-packed paragraph (where Public Official 1 is the president and Businessperson 1 is his son):
Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks
up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to
The Independent
and the great Murray Waas:
Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of
classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.
A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr
Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took
“thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many
bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in
attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between
his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.
I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side. We've known something about these documents for a long time—Trump started
claiming he had already declassified a stash of documents on the subject as
early as a
Tweet
of October 2020—
“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all
documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American
History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No
redactions!”
—which, like so many Trump statements, was more aspiration than fact; it
wasn't, in fact, until January 19 2021, the day before the Biden inauguration,
that, with some documents in hand, in a "binder" he'd received from the
Justice Department on December 30, he finally issued a
memorandum
to the attorney general, DNI, and DCI directing them to declassify it, with
the redactions demanded by the FBI. I don't think it's been reported whether
they obeyed this order, but it also seems certain that at least one copy of
those materials, probably without redactions and with intact classification
markings, was among the stuff stolen and sent to Trump's Palm Beach club that
day, along with at least one copy of the classified stuff stolen from the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by Chairman Nunes and Chief
of Staff Meadows that the staff had made so many photocopies of
on the same day.
What I'm saying is that Jack Smith seems to have come to the same conclusion
as I did on a motive for at least some of the Mar-a-Lago document
theft—his long quest to avenge himself on the FBI and everyone who exposed his
collusion with Russian intelligence in the 2016 election, and (taking it, as I
always do, just a notch farther than the reported story) that will be the
basis on which Trump is indicted in this case. As, I think, I've been telling
you.
Not only that, but also this week is the
wonderful reporting
in The New York Times by Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner that
shows former attorney general Billy Barr pushing special counsel John Durham
on the same quest to incriminate the FBI and others over the Crossfire
Hurricane and Robert Mueller investigations in the face of the fact that there
was no evidence of any wrongdoing to begin with, and of course practically
none squeezed out after millions of dollars and years of effort (one minor
deception in the filing of the third renewal request on the surveillance order
against Carter Page, discovered not by the special counsel but the FBI
inspector general. Corroborating what I've been telling you since October 2019 at least, including anticipations of this week's stories in
that snipe hunt for evidence in Italy where Barr and Durham came up dry, in
October 2019, and the switch to a criminal investigation, of which I wrote at the time
"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. "
the pressure on inspector general Horowitz to come up with the stuff in April 2020, with a nod to John Solomon's participation in the effort going back to August 2019
"My [i.e., Solomon's] reporting, including interviews with four dozen U.S. officials over the last several months, actually identifies a much larger collection of documents — about a dozen all together — that, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by Democrats"
the use of Russian intelligence disinformation to hint at a bogus case against
Hillary Clinton "to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming
interference by the Russian security service" in
October 2020 (with a guest appearance by the big binder mentioned above, delivered
by DNI John Ratcliffe to Barr's DOJ)
It's always seemed me that this was one big story, starring mad Trump as Captain Ahab after the white whale of the FBI, and all Trump's henchmen from Solomon and Patel back to Bully Barr as the Pequod's doomed crew (Cassie Hutchinson is Ishmael, alone escaped to tell thee?), only it's not a ship but a criminal outfit. And now the news narrative is finally coalescing to my point, under Jack Smith's guidance. I think there could be a lot of indictments, though sadly not of Barr and Durham, who are in some ways the most reprehensible of all (committing some of the exact same crimes of which they falsely allowed Hillary Clinton, together with Comey, McCabe, Mueller, and others, to be accused), and it's looking as if I've had pretty good instincts on this up to now.
This story apparently emanating from Rupert World (Tucker Carlson via NYPost)
McCarthy gives firm 'yes' to creating new Church Committee to investigate
FBI/spy agency politicization after night of talks@RepThomasMassie, who participated in GOP speaker race talks tonight, told me he would
'love' to chair it, an idea floated last night by
@TuckerCarlsonpic.twitter.com/Sq8mX3KOAn
Named after the Senate committee in the mid-1970s examining the abuses of the
Cold War intelligence community after a series of revelations in the press
ranging from J. Edgar Hoover's efforts to get Dr. King to commit suicide
through a series of CIA assassination attempts at various international
political figures to Nixon's multi-agency war on the hippies as exposed by
Seymour Hersh
at the end of December 1973; chaired by Frank Church (D-ID), and the direct
answer of today's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Hutchinson testified on May 17 that “boxes of documents on dollies” were delivered from the Intel Committee to Meadows, and that he copied them and gave some to people in the private sector. This was when she was describing how Meadows also burned documents in the fireplace.
I really wasn't planning to take on any new cases from the January 6 Committee releases, at least not right away. There's so much to read! And the interview transcripts aren't even searchable, at least this one isn't. But Mark Meadows doing something funky—trafficking?—with classified documents in the White House was too much to resist, and I had to look. What kind of classified documents? What kind of folks in the private sector? What the hell?
Obviously I had to take a look, and I did find something that may be pretty significant, in regard to an issue we're already officially interested in, and literally nobody knows about it other than probably Liz Cheney and her colleagues on the Committee, who, if I'm getting this right, want us, or Jack Smith, to figure it out without their having to say it out loud. Serious, it looks an answer to some pretty big questions.
It's from the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony, as noted, and it seems to be a conversation about Meadows doing stuff with papers incuding throwing them into the fireplace, specifically things having to do with "the vice president's role on January 6th" and a conversation with Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania congressman at the center of the conspiracy to make Jeffrey Clark the attorney general and IMO the most likely candidate in the House for an indictment, and then it takes a kind of startling turn:
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.
The Republican noise machine, including this putz, a former reporter
who got fired from BuzzFeed in 2014 after 41 of his stories were busted for
plagiarism, now reinvented aa a podcaster for "God, Family, America", with gigs
on NewsMax, Parler, and Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA (coincidentally I just
removed him from my Twitter yesterday in my
#ProjectMute
program, which is why I know all this at the moment), is shocked! shocked! to
learn that Twitter's Trust and Safety officers were meeting regularly with the
FBI during the 2020 election campaign.
This from the #TwitterFiles "investigation" being carried out by famous
independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss ("investigation" in scare
quotes because the investigating seems to consist basically of reading the
stuff Mr. Musk gives them and trying to squeeze it into some kind of narrative
arc).
Pretty sinister, huh? And Twitter's deputy general counsel at the time, Jim
Baker, used to be
Catherine Herridge interviews Donald Trump July 14, 2020 for CBS—the one where she asked him why Black people are killed by police and he replied, "So are white people."
A couple of weeks or so ago, CBS News ran a story about the Hunter Biden
laptop that didn't get a lot of attention outside the rightwing outlets, by
Catherine Herridge, who joined CBS in April 2021 after two decades as a
correspondent for Fox News, because she wanted to be on "a team where facts
and storytelling will always matter," she said
at the time, but it quickly began to look as if it was because a better place to launder
the "exclusive"
propaganda material from dubious rightwing sources that has long been her stock in trade.
It's very appropriate that Catherine Herridge landed this interview after
misrepresenting so much of what Barr and Grenell were feeding her in recent
weeks.
This is kind of weird (and gets much weirder below the fold)—a letter to President Biden issued yesterday from 30 members of the House Progressive Caucus urging him, very respectfully, and without any cheap bothsidesing of the respective positions of Ukraine and Russia, to work toward a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war, mainly reacting to the scarily increased risk of nuclear conflict:
Given the destruction created by this war for Ukraine and the world, as well as the risk of
catastrophic escalation, we also believe it is in the interests of Ukraine, the United States, and the
world to avoid a prolonged conflict. For this reason, we urge you to pair the military and
economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push,
redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire. This is consistent with your
recognition that “there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here,” and
your concern that Vladimir Putin “doesn't have a way out right now, and I'm trying to figure out
what we do about that.”
We are under no illusions regarding the difficulties involved in engaging Russia given its
outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine and its decision to make additional illegal annexations
of Ukrainian territory. However, if there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and
independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support
such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.
I wouldn't sign it myself—looks like a signal of doubt and disagreement among Democrats that I don't think it's helpful for Russians to see, and then I'm pretty confident that whatever negotiation with Russia is possible right now is being done anyway, not just by US but NATO as a whole, maybe with Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey) in the lead—but it's really hard to object to the substance of the thing, such as it is ("Mr. President, please do what I think you're doing"). But why, and why now?
Jordan writes in comments, in response to some material I won't repost here that I was saving for a sequel to the "Minions" post:
Apologies for being thick-headed but I just want to make sure I get this.
You're saying
1) Trump has his narcissistic injury of believing that the "deep state" (or
whatever Nixonian fantasy he has of the forces aligned against him) wanted
to prevent his election by inventing "Russia, Russia, Russia";
2) The main goal of his first term therefore was to vanquish and punish his
enemies; to "win" (beyond merely getting elected anyway; to really show
everyone);
3) To this end he directed investigations into the FBI and Congress;
4) Upon leaving office he took the documents — the evidence of his
investigation into his enemies' investigation — because (and here's where I
get confused):
4a) Trump believed the documents did exonerate him (they proved that "Russia, Russia, Russia" was a hoax and
a vendetta);
4b) Trump believed the documents did not exonerate him;
4c) Trump started with #4a and switched to #4b (or the other way around) so
that, like Lindell, the material that he first believed he was empowered by —
that would let him "win" — was revealed as material that would sink him;
4d) Some alternative combination of elements that is less rational;
5) So now, he has no choice but to keep stonewalling while helplessly watching
the walls close in, retreating into the feral stance he gets into when he's
really cornered (the stance from which he orders his followers to get
violent).
Is this basically it? If so, there's still the deeper mystery of why Trump
believes that "Russia, Russia, Russia" is a hoax — if he does in fact
"believe" this — or if it's more that he knows he did it all, committed all
the crimes, but so does everyone on the international stage, so his being
singled out (merely because he was running for President) was nevertheless a
vendetta...meaning, like a mafioso, he knows he's guilty but still believes
that those investigating him are being unfair. Right?
Close. I think you're making it a lot more complicated than necessary. Let me
take it starting from where you finish:
Sorry to keep harping on this, but I can't seem to focus on anything else, and
there are some dumb stories circulating because people aren't paying attention
to the timeline (my favorite version of which is the one posted by
CNN). And some interesting new stuff is just coming out.
First, the original issue was internal to the National Archives and Records
Administration, starting not long after Biden's inauguration, and what tipped
them off is kind of endearing: as they were sorting through the Trump
administration presidential records doing librarian things, cataloguing and
indexing, they were eagerly awaiting just what you or I would: the famous
stuff, like the love letters from Kim Jong Un or the weather map Trump had
tried to doctor with his Sharpie in the hope of convincing people that he had
been right to warn Alabamans to prepare for a storm that was not coming to
Alabama.
I have this feeling yesterday's post was too hypertextual to read comfortably and that nobody in fact really read it in the way I meant them to do, so I'm trying again in more conventional prose.
Bassin's Café, Pennsylvania Ave., before and after torching,1978. Via
WETA's Washington history website. Boundary Stones.
Eric Says – “we’re the first honest family who’s actually ever gone into Washington, DC.” https://t.co/CLDNzJ117b
Or, more accurately, the only family that's gone into Washington, DC since Salvatore Cottone finally got sent to prison in 1990. Because, really, what kind of family "goes into" a city and there are so few of them that you might be tempted to say yours is the only honest one? That's what you'd say about a Mafia family, of which most cities most of the time have just one, like Chicago or New Orleans (you'd be lying about the honesty, I guess, or maybe meaning that yours are buona gente, unlike those filthy pervert Russians), or fewer, like Washington up until the mid-1970s, when Salvatore Cottone opened a couple of pizzerias there and put his brother Giuseppe in charge of the cocaine and heroin dealership.
Bassin's Café, Pennsylvania Ave., before and after torching,1978. Via WETA's Washington history website. Boundary Stones.
More accurately the first family that's tried to take over Washington
since Salvatore Cottone went to prison in 1990https://t.co/WCpZxNJDW1
— Woke Mob Just Want to Have Fun (@Yastreblyansky)
August 14, 2022
Cottone's downfall came when his desire for revenge against the
informant who got his brother's cocaine ring busted led him into an FBI
trap. Will Trump finally succumb because his desire for revenge against
Comey, McCabe, and Strzok started him on his career of document theft?
— Woke Mob Just Want to Have Fun (@Yastreblyansky)
August 14, 2022
Emptywheel's got a convenient list of documents the FBI might have been seeking in Palm
Beach:
The transcript of the “perfect phone call” with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and
other documents pertaining to his first impeachment
Notes on his meetings with other foreign leaders, especially Vladimir Putin
and Saudi royals, including Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in
Helsinki
Information surrounding the Jamal Khashoggi execution (and other materials
that make Jared Kushner’s current ties to Mohammed bin Salman suspect)
Policy discussions surrounding Qatar, which tie to other influence peddling
investigations (for which Barrack asked specifically)
Intelligence reports on Russian influence operations
Details pertaining to security efforts in the lead-up to and during January
6
Intelligence reports adjacent to Trump’s false claims of election fraud (for
example, pertaining to Venezuelan spying)
Highly sensitive NSA documents pertaining to a specific foreign
country that Mike Ellis was trying to hoard as boxes were being packed in January 2021
I wouldn't have been able to do such a good job, but I'm embarrassed I didn't try
to do it at all. It brings into excellent focus an idea that has been trying
to worm itself through my brain since
last May
or so—that the "highly classified" material concealed in the basement storage
room at Mar-a-Lago includes direct evidence of Trump committing crimes, like
above all the records—memcons—of those Trump-Putin phone calls, of which
Politico wrote, back in February 2021,
Memcons, including Trump’s calls with Putin, are considered presidential
records, and were not expunged before the 45th president left office, one
former Trump White House official said. They were transferred to the National
Archives and Records Administration at the end of Trump’s term, as is
customary.
“Of course we didn’t delete anything and they would be in NARA and accessible,” the official said.
Except, as we know now, stuff that the archivists were expecting to find turned out not to be in NARA and accessible at all, which is how it was discovered that Trump had stolen it and was keeping it in Florida.
The Washington Post decries the flawed investigation of a crime without suggesting that a crime necessarily took place. Photo via bendydiaries.
This may turn out to be kind of unimportant and boring, but I've put too much
into it to stop—about an old January 6 story that came up in a dust-up between
esteemed commenters on
Wednesday's post—and it touches on some general matters that have been preoccupying me for a
long time, on how we're to go about looking at reality.
The story, which appeared in competing versions in
Mother Jones
and
The Guardian
on Halloween Day 2021, was extracted from a massive investigative piece (16
reporters are listed in the byline) that had come out earlier that day in the
Washington Post, laying out everything they could learn about the insurrection considered as
a security failure, as far as their sources understood it at that point, and
it focused, as The Guardian wrote it up, on one particular dereliction
attributed to the FBI:
Among information that came officials’ way in the weeks before what turned
into a riot as lawmakers met to certify the results of the presidential
election was a 20 December tip to the FBI that supporters of Donald Trump
were discussing online how to sneak guns into Washington to “overrun” police
and arrest members of Congress, according to internal bureau
documents obtained by the Post.
The tip included details showing those planning violence believed they had
orders from the president, used code words such as “pickaxe” to describe
guns, and posted the times and locations of four spots around the country
for caravans to meet the day before the joint session.
On one site, a poster specifically mentioned Mitt Romney, a Republican
senator from Utah, as a target, the Post said....
My narratological take is that it started on
Friday, when ABC reporters spotted Marc Short, Mike Pence's vice presidential chief
of staff, coming out of a federal courthouse in Washington with his lawyer.
They asked him if he'd been testifying to the January 6 grand jury meeting
there, and of course he had indeed, though he wasn't allowed to say about
what. Then over the weekend The New York Times learned that another Pence
aide, Greg Jacob, had been testifying as well, making it clear to anybody
who's been thinking about it that the Justice Department has indeed been
looking at Donald Trump's activities as part of its criminal investigation,
because what else would they be talking about with Short (who'd testified to
the Select Committee on Pence's January 4 meeting with Trump and Eastman
where Trump screamed at Pence, calling him a wimp and a pussy) or Jacob (who'd
testified to telling Pence that Eastman's scheme for refusing to certify the
election results was illegal)?
And after that the dam seems to have broken, and by last night we were all
learning
that that was in fact the case, not just recently in the wake of the House
Select Committee's TV appearances but quite a bit earlier:
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