Government of Carelessness

 

So we may be on the brink of fighting our second war with Iran in eight months. Or maybe not, who can say? "We'll see what happens," as the commander-in-chief always says. I think he generally means he'll see it on TV and he won't be sure until then, and find out what his decision was at the same time as the rest of us do.

I mean this more or less literally: that his more gnomic utterances, especially the social media posts when he writes them himself, should be understood as oracular, like the words of a Sibyl, possibly drug-induced, but in need of interpretation. They represent Trump's hopes, the thing he wants done, but in a way that can't be understood directly, and that indeed he can't understand himself. His lieutenants have to divine it for him, and put it into action, and then he'll know.

In a way that's not even particularly weird. It's really nothing more than the familiar figure of the psychopath CEO, like Dilbert's boss in the old comic strip when it was good (may its memory be a blessing!). It's not so hard to interpret what he's saying if you just remember that (a) it has a context, and (b) he's a psychopath. 

There was a delicious example in yesterday's news, with the melodramatic AI image of the US hospital ship being sent posthaste to rescue all the suffering Greenlanders from their ailments (Greenland runs its extremely good single-payer healthcare on Danish lines with Danish assistance, of course). WTH was that about?

Lede, Buried

Protesters thanking the United States, via Sky News.

Speaking of gratitude, Hong Kong activists and some of their admirers have been tweeting out a lot of it to Donald Trump for signing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act authorizing sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials involved in the repression of the demonstrations and requiring the State Department to do an annual review of Hong Kong's special trade status, passed unanimously by the Senate and 417 to 1 by the House.

Those thanks may be a little misplaced. That the president signed the bill was inevitable given the majorities, though as a matter of fact he'd threatened to veto it before the votes; that isn't news. But the buried lede is that he issued it with a signing statement that the newspapers aren't running in full: I ran into it on Twitter.

Trump has signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law — reluctantly. This signing statement isn't a shining endorsement, more like a "they made me do it" since a veto would've been overturned. pic.twitter.com/Ky8XyhU4QQ

— Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) November 27, 2019

That is to say, he reserves the right to not obey it if he finds it "interferes" with his "constitutional authority, just as he did with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) authorizing sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, passed by similar majorities at the end of July 2017 (including some of those Republican senators now saying "Ukraine might have done it"), which he also threatened emptily to veto before signing it into law in 2 August. And successfully avoided implementing it for almost two and a half years at present writing, as I explained last June.

In short, there aren't going to be any sanctions on China in behalf of democracy in Hong Kong as long as Trump is president, because emperors don't submit to Congress if their grand viziers can figure out ways of avoiding it and their fellow emperors don't want them to.

Sanctions. II

Photo by Alexei Klimentiev, AFP/Getty Images, via Time.

Continued from a previous installment—

After Trump had finally surrendered to 14 months of demands by Congress that he should punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 US presidential election, by putting sanctions on 19 individuals and 5 entities mostly among the ones named in Mueller's 16 February indictments around the Internet Research Agency and its social media contributions to the Trump campaign, widely regarded as an inadequate gesture—

Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin, one of those indicted by Mueller and hit with sanctions on Thursday, said in comments cited by RIA news agency that he already had been hit with U.S. sanctions “maybe three or four times - I’m tired of counting.”

“I’m not worried by this,” Prigozhin was quoted as saying. “Except that now I will stop going to McDonald’s.”

—his first big thought seems to have been devoted to getting together with Vladimir Putin, as soon as possible, perhaps with an invitation for a White House summit; he arranged for a phone call, five days later, on 20 March, two days after Putin's victory in the Russian presidential election, to his second consecutive and fourth total term in office (more than 16 years, since the length of the term had been changed to six years in 2012). Briefing materials from Trump's aides warned him in all caps, "DO NOT CONGRATULATE", we're told, but Trump congratulated Putin anyway.

Sanctions. I

Note: This piece is overwhelmingly indebted to the timeline published by justsecurity.org in July 2018; in places it's little more than an abridgment of that, fosusing on the single issue of sanctions.

The first time Donald Trump had a conversation with Vladimir Putin, as far as we know, was on 14 November 2016, following up on Putin's congratulatory telegram immediately after the election, and I don't mean to say I have any sinister suspicions there was an earlier talk, I only mean to say we probably wouldn't know if there was, and we really only know about this one because the Kremlin issued a statement on it, on which The New York Times wrote a report:

The two agreed “on the absolutely unsatisfactory state of bilateral relations,” said the statement, and they both endorsed the idea of undertaking joint efforts “to normalize relations and pursue constructive cooperation on the broadest possible range of issues”

and Putin

hoped that Moscow could build a “collaborative dialogue” with Washington on the bases of “equality, mutual respect and noninterference in the other’s internal affairs,” the release said.

The statement didn't mention the economic and diplomatic sanctions the US had been imposing on Russia since 18 individual Russians were sanctioned in 2013 under the provisions of the Magnitsky Act, and in conjunction with the European Union, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea and the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, "so-called sectoral sanctions were imposed against major Russian energy firms, financial institutions, parastatal organizations, and state-owned corporations [including] restricted access to global capital markets, which had served as a major funding source until that point." But it would hardly have been a surprise if Putin had wanted to talk about them, as a part of what made the situation "absolutely unsatisfactory", and I don't think it would have aroused a lot of critical comment, even. The Times mentioned sanctions in its story, in a quirky little paragraph of early Trumpology:

One Loopy Piehole; and Prolegomena to a Discussion of Russia Sanctions

To the tune of a song by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser:


One Loopy Piehole

here we are
out of Adderall
are there drugstores open?
can't somebody call?
one loopy piehole
that whines on and on
and waits for the copter
on the lawn

here we are
wasted all the time
if he won't shut up he'll be
confessing to a crime
one loopy piehole
with nothing to say
how long before he
goes away?

do you remember the way we fought
throughout the whole campaign?
Russia didn't help me at all
do you remember the way I won
thanks to my big big brain?
there isn't time to stall
we have to build that wall

and here we are
hectoring the press
free associating
what a freaking mess
one loopy piehole
that whines on and on
waiting for the copter
on the lawn

Photo by Evan Vucci, via IowaPoliticsNow.

Got Paranoia? Puppet Puppet

Via Truiceman.

We're hearing a lot about Andrew McCabe's story, as retailed on CBS Sixty Minutes, of Trump telling his intelligence briefers, "I believe Putin", which doesn't seem like news to me at all—he's been telling us all himself for at least a couple of years. But NPR's interview with McCabe helpfully laid out the context, from which I think we can learn something new, and possibly a whole lot: I think we can tell exactly when and where Putin could have told him this, on an extremely significant day, and in that way corroborate that the story is true and fill in some important details of the conspiracy hypothesis, if you'll follow along:

Exhibit A: an FBI briefing with Trump that had "gone completely off the rails from the very beginning."

McCabe said the topic was supposed to be how Russian intelligence officers were using diplomatic compounds inside the U.S. to gather intelligence on American spy agencies. Those compounds were closed as part of the long diplomatic chill between the two countries.

"Instead the president kind of went off on a diatribe," McCabe told NPR, explaining that Trump changed the subject to his belief that North Korea had not actually launched any missiles because Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that the U.S. intelligence assessment was wrong and that "it was all a hoax."

The diplomatic compounds, officially home-away-from-home dachas for Russian diplomats missing their own dachas, were closed on a very specific occasion, on 28 December 2016, as part of the new sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration as retribution for Russia's interference in the presidential election, along with the expulsion of 35 personnel.

Out Like Flynn

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty via Paste.

A couple of things about old General Flynn that may perhaps not be getting said because a responsible journalist can't say them (late addition: Erin Branco/Daily Beast is going there, in fact):

I.

We irresponsibles can say pretty much precisely what he was doing on 29 December 2016—after the Obama administration announced a set of diplomatic measures to punish Russia for its interference in the presidential election (expulsion of Russian personnel, and sanctions on individuals and agencies suspected of involvement in hacking) and foreign minister Lavrov announced that Russia would retaliate—

#Peskov: There is no doubt that Russia's adequate and mirror response will make Washington officials feel very uncomfortable as well

— Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) December 29, 2016

—when he engaged in a series of phone calls from his vacation spot in the Dominican Republic with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that were intercepted by the FBI in its normal surveillance of Kislyak's phone and with an official from the presidential transition team (PTT).

Namely, when he advised Kislyak that the Russian government should not retaliate against these new sanctions and spoke about the possibility of lifting US sanctions after Trump's inauguration, he was working to tamp down a conflict that would interfere with the lifting of sanctions, which was an essential element of the Trump campaign's arrangement with the Russians.

For the Record: Sanctions Rise Again

So the White House has announced a new order sanctioning any country that interferes in US elections, or more precisely "enabling" sanctions, as if they weren't already enabled by legislation Congress passed over a year ago. BooMan explains that it's a fraud, the purpose of which is actually to stop Congress from putting more pressure on the administration, but I wanted to tack on a few words on the background:

You-all told us last March he was implementing the sanctions against election interference that Congress asked for the previous AUGUST six weeks after the deadline https://t.co/YXEwA0lI2Z

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) September 13, 2018

The Crime. IV

Lego Abraham and Isaac, via This Is Dan Scott.

See??

Even Trump knows Junior is going to prison bc of the June 9 meeting and not some lies he told Congress. Don't be stupider than Trump.

Also note: Don is lying abt it going nowhere. https://t.co/miHY9NsGo4

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 5, 2018

So right. Today's the day Big Donald has decided to throw his dim son under the bus.

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.

Deep

Deep state: Vanuatu's underwater post office ("All you need is a deep breath and a waterproof postcard"), via Smithsonian.

The New York Times editorial page sighs with relief:

Finally, Trump Has Something Bad to Say About Russia

But that's not what it says in the fine print, I mean the editorial itself:

The West’s response to Russian aggression has usually been too little, too late, and devoid of the one voice that really matters — President Trump’s.

But at last, his administration is taking action, and Mr. Trump has spoken out, tentatively. On Thursday the Treasury Department announced it was imposing sanctions for the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election. Officials have denounced the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain and Russia’s devastating bombing missions in Syria.

"Tentatively" is putting it mildly: in his St. Patrick's press availability yesterday with the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, later in the morning after the Treasury department issued its announcement, he answered one question:

Lindsey Graham can't figure it out

Late 2013 was a particularly good time for peculiar and damaging interactions with women one doesn't know in the Ritz Carlton Moscow. If you've never heard this story from December 2013, you should.

Not only did Putin add me to the Interpol list, but the US simultaneously revoked my visa. @jaynordlinger explains https://t.co/d8KskJ5CTK

— Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) October 22, 2017

Sadly, no, Nordlinger's piece doesn't explain it at all, it's mostly National Review harrumphing, though I wouldn't disagree with that part of the message.

Browder is, as you remember, the old-Russia-hand investor (the grandson of Earl Browder, who was secretary general of the Communist Party USA during the Great Depression and World War II) who made an enormous fortune out of the privatization of the former Soviet economy in the 1990s, fell out with Putin and the oligarchs, and was subjected to various indignities, banned from entering Russia (he lives in London, having given up his US citizenship in 1998, I'm sorry to say, to avoid US taxes), his business offices raided and employees harassed and arrested, companies he owned outright stolen, and $230 million in tax payments from his companies to the Russian state robbed, upon which his Russian lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, was arrested, imprisoned, tortured—authorities were trying to make him confess that he'd stolen the $230 million himself, on Browder's orders—and beaten to death.

What Times is it?

Rick Gladstone, New York Times, October 31:

Israel’s defense minister said Tuesday that the country had interpreted Iran’s conversion of some enriched uranium to fuel rods for civilian use as evidence that Iran had delayed ambitions to build a nuclear weapon. 

The assertion, by Defense Minister Ehud Barak in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, amounted to the first explanation from him as to why he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu softened their position in September over the possibility of a military strike to thwart what they called Iran’s drive toward imminent nuclear weapons capability.

Funny, because some people knew about it three weeks ago. Of course Amos Harel got the story not from Barak but from "senior Israeli defense officials"—that's where that pesky Red Line went. Of double course Harel got the story from Barak on "background" and has only now chosen to out himself, to the UK, who knows why. There are even suspicions, you'll be shocked to hear, that it has something to do with politics and the oncoming Israeli elections.

While Barak was dancing in London, Netanyahu was prancing in France, of course, getting François Hollande (who I fear is somewhat out of his depth on this subject) to sign on to the ever escalating demands for a more severe sanctions regime. For some reason the Times has nothing to say about this trip. (No, I don't think it's a conspiracy of any sort, we New Yorkers have a lot of different stuff on our minds at the moment. But they are really not covering that whole scene very well.)

Meanwhile, as the story of Iran's nuclear weapons is every day more clearly a frivolous story about Israeli politics and not about Iran at all, the sanctions grow more and more painful for ordinary Iranians—not for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to say nothing of those who actually run the country—and are clearly harming US interests. Can we please have this discussion some time?

From Haaretz.

Hurts me more than it does who?

Say what you will about those ayatollahs, you can't deny they have a sense of humor. To punish the European Union for imposing an embargo on Iranian oil, effective July 1, Iran's oil ministry has announced that it has stopped selling oil to Britain and France right away, with hints that Spain, Italy, and Greece could follow. Crude oil prices went up to $103 a barrel in US markets yesterday, "up 12 percent in the last 6 weeks and up 21 percent from a year ago" according to the Fairfax News (they had the most vivid numbers). That way the Europeans will get an early chance to find out if they really like the sanctions or not so much.

Peak Oil. From Howe Street.