Anything New? The Daily Craziness of Donald J. Trump (February 2019)

UPDATED 2/19/23.

February 1, 2019: After two grueling months, trapped in the White House by his own obstinacy, due to a partial government shutdown which he ordered, the president heads to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. 

According to The New York Times, quoting one loyal Trump supporter, the president has been suffering. 

“You would have to be insensitive not to be touched by how he has stayed there working,” said Toni Holt Kramer, the founder of Trumpettes USA, a booster group that is planning to welcome him. “I think people will have tears in their eyes because they’re so grateful that he’s come back to his home away from home.” 

(See: 2/5/19.) 

Yeah. John McCain? Imprisoned for more than five years, and tortured routinely. Not a hero. 

Trump? He binged on TV and enjoyed room service whenever he wanted in the White House for…weeks. 

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A NEW BOOK, just out, and written by former White House aide Chris Sims, bears the title Team of Vipers. 

The President of the United States hears about the book and labels Sims “a mess,” says he was nothing more than a “gofer,” and warns that his aide signed a non-disclosure agreement, typically used by businesses to keep critics silent. See for example: Sexual harassment, Fox News, Bill O’Reilly; sexual harassment, Fox News, Roger Ailes; porn star sex and payoffs, Citizen Donald J. Trump. 

No previous president has ever tried to force staffers to sign non-disclosure agreements and it’s not clear they’d be legal. 

You know. Because. History, and such. 

“As far as I know, it’s never been tried in the White House,” Russell Riley, the co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center tells Time. “I’ve never heard of it. I’ve done oral histories back to the Jimmy Carter presidency.” 

Other books that this president has tried to block include Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House and Fire and Fury: Inside the White House. Someone should explain to Trump fans why this is dangerous; but they’d probably ignore the warning and insist this is all “Fake News.” 

Logic not being their strongest suit. (See: 2/22/19.) 

As for Sims, he writes in part, 

I suspect that posterity will look back on this bizarre time in history like we were living on the pages of a Dickens novel. Lincoln famously had his Team of Rivals. Trump had his Team of Vipers. We served. We fought. We brought our egos. We brought our personal agendas and vendettas. We were ruthless. And some of us, I assume, were good people.

 

Donald J. Trump. Team of Vipers. 

It figures.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (10/29/21): When I check reviews much later, they prove interesting. Sims says near the end of his book, “I’m proud to have worked for the president of the United States. And in spite of the frustrations and misgivings laid out in this book, I’m proud that the president I served was Donald Trump.” He admits that he includes himself as one of the “vipers.” He tells a reporter for The New Yorker, “And I think a lot of what I saw in there came from a very selfish place, and one of the criticisms I have of myself is that I didn’t have a servant’s heart a lot of the time while I was there. And that’s a criticism I would apply to a lot of people there.” 

Sims agrees that the culture of any workplace comes from the top down, but also says that he doesn’t think Trump has “a racist bone in his body,” while agreeing that the president’s comments often sound “racially insensitive.” 

When the reviewer for The New Yorker presses him on what Sims thinks the meaning of “birtherism” was, he responds, “I don’t know.” 

Prodded repeatedly to answer, Sims repeatedly says he doesn’t understand the point of the questions. Finally, he admits, “So I think that’s, like, a great example of a time where he does not step up to the plate and take on these race issues in an appropriate way, a helpful way for the country. No doubt that that was terrible. I don’t know what else you want me to say about it.” 

Eventually, Sims admits that at times he was “a coward” and might have been wise to quit. And this was long before the Black Lives Matter days, when racially insensitive comments constantly spilled from President Trump’s lips. 

Birtherism? Yeah. That, too, was racism of the worst sort.

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2/2/19: Considering all the bad news for Trump, there’s a snippet of good. At least that’s the official line from the White House. This news was delivered by an aide who wished to remain anonymous, probably because he or she didn’t want to be laughed out of the nation’s capital before lunch. 

We were informed that the president’s beautiful orange glow is not really the result of makeup or tanning. It’s just “good genes.”

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2/3/19: Clearly, someone on the White House staff wants to embarrass President Twitter Thumbs. A summary of his daily schedules, November 7 through February 1, is released. 

What we learn from an insider’s view is that Mr. Trump arrives for work late, leaves early, tweets a great deal (we knew that), and has ample playtime during which he is free to amuse himself.  In this nearly three-month period, his schedule shows 297 hours and 15 minutes of “Executive Time,” where he can do whatever he likes. He spends 77 hours, 5 minutes in meetings. (At least half that time is no doubt devoted to bragging about himself.) He has 39 hours for lunch, and 38 hours, 20 minutes of scheduled events. This would include his six-minute dash to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, just down the road from the White House, to “honor” Dr. King. 

One African American critic described that visit as so meaningless, that it would have been just as well if Trump had thrown the wreath that he left out the window of his limousine as he sped past. (See: 1/21/19.)

Chris Whipple, who wrote the book The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, once said that “the most important asset in any presidency is the president’s time.” 

Now we know. 

Trump diddles away most of his days.

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2/4/19: No one has seen Rudy Giuliani in public for days. This leads to wild rumors. Trump has fired him after a series of “misquotations” that make it sound like Trump is a liar. (Because he is.) Rudy has quit, having told friends that working for Trump is impossible because the president is a pathological liar. (True.) Old Horndog has run off with another mistress, having tired of his current mistress. That would be the mistress for whom he left his third wife. And his third wife just so happened to be his mistress when he was cheating on his second. (True, save the first sentence.)

 

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Federal prosecutors subpoena documents from Trump Inaugural Committee.

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Anyway, no one has seen Rudy, just when the president is going to need every lawyer he can find. 

We learn today that federal prosecutors have subpoenaed documents from Trump’s inaugural committee. 

The reason given in court is an interest in possible money-laundering and illegal gifts from foreign powers. Only one individual is named specifically in the subpoena: Imaad Zuberi. He’s described by The New York Times as “a former fund-raiser for President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.” 

You know if Fox News covers the story, they’re going to highlight that phrase and milk it for fifty shows. 

The Times adds that Zuberi “was seeking inroads with Trump” and his company donated $900,000 to the inaugural committee.

 

Another entity that the subpoena seeks documents on is Stripe, which created technology to help process credit card transactions. According to published reports, the company counts Josh Kushner, the brother of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, among its investors. Josh Kushner is not named in the subpoena, and a spokesman for him declined to comment.

 

 

Follow the money. Again. 

We know Josh and Jared’s dad has spent time in prison for financial misdeeds. We know Jared has had shady backdoor meetings with Russian bankers. We know leaked records show that Jared managed to avoid paying federal income taxes in at least five years during a stretch of eight, from 2009 to 2017, despite being worth an estimated $324 million. So, you can see why a liberal blogger might smell a number of rotting fish in Team Trump’s wastebasket. 

Once again, in the story of the Trump presidency, we need to follow the money and see where we end. (For the fate of Mr. Zuberi, see: 1/7/20.)

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Among other questions authorities are trying to answer: Was the list of donors the committee submitted to the Federal Election Committee accurate and complete? Thomas Barrack, who chaired the committee, is a longtime pal of President Trump. And if you follow the legal threads obsessively, you know Barrack is “famous” for having been named in an investigation by Italian authorities. It was thought Barrack might have been involved in a criminal conspiracy, after he was accused of orchestrating a scheme to evade $190 million in taxes. 

This evasion involved Barrack’s real estate company – selling a seaside resort in Sardinia – to interests in Qatar – for $670 million. According to The Guardian, the investigation included “wiretaps,” never a good sign for those suspected of wrongdoing. Investigators were trying to follow a money trail which wended its way north, through Luxembourg, a notorious tax haven. Then the money traveled east, to the State of Delaware, where you can charter any shell company you like, and no one will look too carefully into what your company actually does. Finally, the money turned around and headed back to Europe. Having arrived at its destination at last: Deutsche Bank, favorite bank of money-launderers, it was ready to be deposited and spent. 

Among other interesting aspects of the story, we learn that Paul Manafort is “a longtime friend” of Mr. Barrack. The two enjoyed yachting in the Mediterranean after Manafort was booted from the Trump campaign. 

Barrack was also the first major business figure to endorse Trump in his run for president. He called the candidate “intrinsically and academically first class.” He described his friend as “kind, compassionate” and “empathetic.” “Donald’s natural alliance is with the little guy,” Barrack added – accurately, if we assume the “little guy” has the clout to purchase a seaside resort in Sardinia. Barrack has also worked closely with the Saudi royal family and has argued that the only way to solve the crisis in Syria is to work “with Russia and not against them.” 

We know Rick Gates, who has already admitted to a number of felonies, is cooperating with investigators. We know he worked for the inaugural committee. We know he worked after that for Barrack, up until the day he was indicted. We can assume that Mr. Barrack is sweating a bit. (See: 7/28/19.)

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/26/21): Barrack will be indicted, after Trump leaves office. He’s charged with serving as an agent of foreign governments, without registering as such, or, in a nutshell, selling U.S. foreign policy when he can.

 

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The warmest century in the Artic in the last 115,000 years. 

IN OTHER BUSINESS PERSONS-turned-government-leaders news, Trump nominates David Bernhardt to be next Secretary of Interior. Bernhardt’s main qualification is that he has strong ties to the oil and gas industry and never saw a spot of land he didn’t think would look much better with an oil rig pumping crude to the surface and maybe spilling a few barrels now and again. 

As for the Endangered Species Act, f**ck those stupid animals! Bernhardt considers the act an “unnecessary regulatory burden.” 

In related news, which you absolutely know President Trump and his new pick for Interior missed, scientist studying ancient plant samples on Baffin Island issue stark warning. Melting ice in the Arctic has revealed plants frozen and continuously hidden from view for the last 40,000 years. 

Simon Pendleton, lead author of a study of the melting and the recently revealed plants, estimates that the past century in the Arctic has been the warmest of the last 1,150 centuries, or the warmest period in 115,000 years. 

For extra fun, scientists warn that melting ice could revive ancient diseases. In one study, from 2015, experts found that a 30,000 year old virus Mollivirus sibericum could infect modern amoeba. You might not care about infected amoeba; but that’s not where the danger stops. “If we are not careful,” says Jean-Michel Claverie, one of the study’s authors, “we run the risk of one day waking up viruses such as smallpox that we thought were eradicated.”

What this place really needs is an oil well!

2/5/19: Trump is scheduled to give his third State of the Union address. Possible topics to cover: 

o   Trump will declare a national emergency so he can send the U.S. military down to the Mexican border and start building his pet wall. 

o   Trump will declare Nancy Pelosi a witch and ask Evangelicals to support him in bringing her to justice, up to and including burning at the stake. 

o   Trump will announce that the U.S. capital is being moved to Mar-a-Lago. 

o   The Department of the Interior will blast the face of George Washington off Mt. Rushmore, and spend $500 million to replace it with the granite visage, complete with granite jowls, of Mr. Trump.

 

* 

Are the beaches nice? 

Time magazine releases a scathing report on President Trump and his “willful ignorance” when it comes to intelligence matters. Breaking two years of silence, 

“The officials, who include analysts who prepare Trump’s briefs and the briefers themselves, describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.”

 

What is most troubling, say these officials and others in government and on Capitol Hill who have been briefed on the episodes, are Trump’s angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds. Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public.

 

As for the president’s focus, and grasp of details, sources reveal two sad examples to put a point to the story. During one briefing, discussion turned to a key U.S. military base on the island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. Trump asked two questions: Are the people nice, and are the beaches good?” As for a growing threat from the Chinese in the region…well, no matter. During another briefing, when the president was shown a map of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that area, he told briefers he knew Nepal was part of India. They had to tell him gently he was wrong. Well, at least Bhutan was part of India, Trump tried next. And he was wrong again. 

More to the point of the dangers of the man’s ignorance, when North Korea blew up facilities on one of its giant nuclear arms production sites, Trump insisted that Kim Jong-un was really destroying his nuclear facilities. Intelligence experts built a large model of the facility to show the president how much of the site remained untouched, even adding a model “Statue of Liberty” to give Trump a sense of scale. 

Still, he insists on going out in public and bragging about how great it is that he and Kim are “friends.”

 

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“Kremlin connection.” 

ONCE AGAIN, WE FIND MONEY at the heart of the story of Trump, his grifter crew, and the Russians who love them. 

Federal investigators have questions they hope to put to heads of three D.C. lobbying firms. All three powerhouse firms, including two that are run by individuals with strong ties to Democrats, were originally recruited by Paul Manafort for the job in question. This lucrative work – of questionable morality – involved burnishing the dark image of the Ukrainian government, which was pro-Russian and essentially anti-Ukrainian people at the time. 

Since thousands of Ukrainians were dying in the fighting with Russia, and since this public relations work was sketchy, and since the three firms didn’t want their efforts to be known, court records indicate they lied about how much money they were paid. They back-dated payments to try to obscure their significance, and hide the fact a mysterious $150,000 check from a Ukrainian oligarch ended up in the hands of the Trump charitable foundation. 

There have been hints, so far unsubstantiated, that this money was used to pay off Karen McDougal, the Playboy Bunny, who eventually got a check for…$150,000. 

(That may well be internet bullsh*t; but I include it here because the possibilities are amusing.) 

In other, “I’ll do anything for cash” news, we learn that Republican fund-raiser Paul Erickson was indicted on charges of wire fraud and money laundering. I’m going to assume you don’t recognize his name, since one recent poll found 12% of adults don’t know who Mike Pence is.

The indictment charges Erickson with bilking investors, beginning in 1998, and continuing through 2016. Erickson claimed he was building assisted living facilities across the U.S.A. Actually, it appears he was pocketing investors’ money and building a first-class Ponzi “facility.” 

Now, let’s bring Russians into the story! Evidence suggests that $30,000 in laundered cash, courtesy of Mr. Erickson, was used to pay Ms. Maria Butina’s college tuition. Butina is a hot little Russian redhead who pled guilty recently to acting as an agent of the Russian Federation during the 2016 campaign. And Butina was shacking up with Erickson at the time. 

(Erickson is not exactly your idea of a stud; so, there’s that.) 

We know that in May 2016, Erickson sent an email with the subject line, “Kremlin connection,” to Trump campaign adviser Rick Dearborn. According to an article in The New York Times, based on email evidence, Erickson wrote that Russia was “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.” An attempt would be made to use the N.R.A.’s annual convention to make “‘first contact.’” 

 

Trump’s answer could be worth tens of billions. 

By some freak of chance (or plotting) Butina had appeared at the N.R.A. convention the previous year. There she managed to be picked to ask Trump, who was speaking at the gathering, a question. If elected, would he continue with the economic sanctions aimed at Russia by President Obama, following the invasion and annexation of Crimea? His answer could be worth tens of billions to Russian oligarchs whose funds had been frozen overseas as a result. 

“I wouldn’t think you’d need the sanctions,” Trump replied, not when he was in charge and the United States was “respected” again. 

In Moscow, they had to love that answer.

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BLOGGER’S NOTE: Ms. Butina eventually pleads guilty to conspiring, from 2015 to 2017, “to establish unofficial lines of communication” between top Republicans, and advance the interests of the Russian government. One main avenue was through her connections with the National Rifle Association. Having posed as a gun-rights critic of Vladimir Putin during her time in the U.S., she returned to Russia in 2019, having served fifteen months in a federal prison. 

You figure, as a Putin critic, she’s going to get tossed off the high balcony of the apartment where she lives. Or someone will smear a fatal poison on her front doorknob. 

Or she gets arrested, at least. 

In fact, she later runs for a seat in the Russian parliament and wins. She’s also famous for “ambushing” Aleksei A. Navalny, a leading critic of Vladimir Putin, during a visit to the Siberian penal colony where he’s serving nine years. She compares the fine conditions, under which she claims Navalny is being held, with the horrors she faced in U.S. prisons. 

Her interview with Navalny then runs on state-owned television. Nobody mentions the fact that Navalny almost died, after someone managed to get his luggage taken off a plane, and then smeared the seems of his underwear with a deadly nerve agent. 

Her boyfriend, Erickson, is eventually sentenced to seven years in prison, but on January 19, 2021, he snags a pardon from President Trump, on Donald’s last full day in the White House. Not only does Erickson avoid jail time, the pardon means he can avoid repayment of $3 million he owed in restitution to victims of his fraudulent business schemes. 

At the time of his pardon, NPR explains,

The Trump administration issued a statement…and said it was supported by former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway. The statement described Erickson as a victim of broader allegations that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia.

“Mr. Erickson’s conviction was based off the Russian collusion hoax,” the statement said. “After finding no grounds to charge him with any crimes with respect to connections with Russia, he was charged with a minor financial crime.

As in $3 million. Victims of Erickson’s schemes were out anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000. 

As for Butina’s first Russian patron, Aleksander P. Torshin, in April 2018, along with a list of other oligarchs, he was placed under sanction by the U.S. Treasury Department.

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2/6/19: Freedom House, which has been rating nations around the world on a number of factors, from ease of access to voting, to freedom of the press, to corruption within the government, recently released its annual report. A total of 88 nations, including the United States are rated as “free.” That designation covers 2.9 billion people, 39 percent of the global population.

 

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Only four in ten people today live in free countries.

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Almost as many people today, 2.7 billion, live in nations rated “not free.” Scored on a 100 point scale (with Australia, for example, scoring 98 to rate as “free”) some of the big names on the “not free” list include China (14), Cuba (14), Iran (18) North Korea (3), Russia (20), Saudi Arabia (7) and Venezuela (26). 

The bottom five include Syria (-1), Tibet (1), South Sudan (2), and Eritrea, tied with North Korea (3). 

By comparison, Canada (99), Belgium (95), Chile (94), Czech Republic (93), Denmark (97), Estonia (94), Finland (100), France (90), Germany (94), Greece (85), Iceland (96), India (77), Japan (96), Kiribati (93), Mongolia (85), Netherlands (99), Norway (100), South Korea (84), Sweden (100), Taiwan (93), Tunisia (70), the United Kingdom (94) and Uruguay (98) are rated “free.” 

This list holds special interest for this blogger. He began using it in his American history classes when he first started teaching in the 70s. If memory serves, China in those days, scored 0. Chile and the Czech Republic (then part of Czechoslovakia) were “not free.” Chile suffered under a brutal military dictatorship. Czechoslovakia was under the Soviet thumb. Germany was carved in two. West Germany scored high. East Germany, under communist control, scored, if I remember correctly, in single digits. 

I do remember that students found stories about the ways people escaped from East Berlin and East Germany of great interest. In the early days of the Berlin Wall, for example, one man pole-vaulted to freedom. Later, a family floated out of East Germany in a homemade hot-air balloon. The famous picture of the East German guard leaping across barbed wire in a dash for freedom always made a critical point. 

People around the world crave freedom.

East German guard escaping.

 

I never had a problem highlighting the flaws in the U.S. system of government. But the fact we scored 100 in those days, was an indication that clean government and a commitment to protecting individual rights mattered. 

So, in the sampling for 2018, I include Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Venezuela for a reason. All are socialist nations. Those first three are the freest countries in the world. The last is a failing state, beset by hyper-inflation, and ruled by a despot. I think we should avoid the simplistic arguments about socialism and the fearmongering on Fox News and in the right-wing media sphere. 

 

Trump administration abdicates democratic leadership. 

More than that, I was saddened to see that Freedom House rated the United States at 86 for a second year in a row, somewhere around fiftieth place. 

In a section titled “Democracy in Crisis,” we learn that 2018 marked the thirteenth year in a row during which freedom round the globe has been in retreat. One contributing factor is the decision of the Trump administration to abdicate democratic leadership, and in several cases to lead in reverse. 

Freedom House explains: 

The gravity of the threat to global freedom requires the United States to shore up and expand its alliances with fellow democracies and deepen its own commitment to the values they share. Only a united front among the world’s democratic nations—and a defense of democracy as a universal right rather than the historical inheritance of a few Western societies—can roll back the world’s current authoritarian and antiliberal trends. By contrast, a withdrawal of the United States from global engagement on behalf of democracy, and a shift to transactional or mercenary relations with allies and rivals alike [emphasis added], will only accelerate the decline of democratic norms.

 

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LATELY, DON JR. has been busy trying to prove that when it comes to tweeting, he’s just as big an ass as his father, but without the excuse of early-onset Alzheimer’s. It really got his undies in a wad when he noticed Democratic congresswomen dressed in white for the State of the Union address last night, and realized they weren’t sporting American flag pins! 

Boy, oh boy, how unpatriotic. 

Sadly, brother Eric soon posted a family picture from the same evening, and no one pictured, not Tiffany, not Ivanka, not Eric, not Don Jr. and not Donner or Blitzen, was sporting…a flag pin. 

At any rate, while we’re on the topic, can we remember again what Washington Irving said two centuries ago? His comment tells us something about true patriotism and the Trump clan today.

 

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“Teach us to distrust and despise those clamorous patriots whose courage dwells but in the tongue.” 

Washington Irving (1819)

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There’s still hope for Barron because he’s young.   

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2/7/19: Do we have any good news for President Trump? Yes and no. Polls show his State of the Union address was well-received, with 76% of viewers in a CNN survey approving of what he said. 

Unfortunately, you can’t have a Trump speech without a few gigantic falsehoods. At one point, the president claimed that building a section of border wall in the El Paso, Texas region in 2008, turned that city from the most dangerous in America to the safest. For that reason, he explained, we had no choice but to build the Great Wall of Trump from sea to shining sea. 

The mayor of El Paso decided to fact check Mr. Trump. He reported that his police chief said in 2008, that the city was the second safest city in the country, with 500,000 people or more. After the section of wall was built in 2009, El Paso moved up to…well… the city remained second. 

In the last decade, however, El Paso has seen a reduction in crime and is now the #1 safest city of its size. 

A careful check of the records shows that crime was falling steadily in El Paso before the wall was built; and crime has continued to decline at roughly the same rate since. On a positive note, arson and car theft are way down since the El Paso section of the wall went up. 

Unfortunately, rapes have increased dramatically. 

For some odd reason, if we broaden our view, we notice that the crime rate in New York City has declined dramatically during the same timespan without the help of a wall to keep killers out. 

In fact, crime has been falling steadily across the United States, starting in the early 90s. This decline occurred despite the fact the number of illegal immigrants living in our midst increased. 

The wall would seem to be irrelevant.

 

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SPEAKING OF POLLS, the right-wing choir continues to howl a song of horror every time Democrats suggest raising taxes on America’s richest men and women. Elizabeth Warren, for one, has made it clear she favors a “wealth tax” on individuals earning more than $50 million annually. 

On Fox News, the horror knows no bounds, when their own polling shows 70% of viewers favor increasing taxes on those making more than $10 million per year. And 65% would raise taxes on Americans earning more than $1 million. 

In response to that shocking poll, Charles Payne, host of Fox Business Network’s Making Money with Charles Payne, blames America’s teachers for spreading socialism throughout the land. “The idea of ‘fairness,’” he grumbles, “has been promoted in our schools for a long time.” 

Fairness! 

Stupid teachers. 

Apropos of “fairness,” we should note that a record for the most expensive home ever sold in America was set in January. Ken Griffin, a hedge fund manager, paid $238 million for a New York City penthouse overlooking Central Park. 

If you’re like me, you don’t know what a hedge fund manager does to earn his or her swag. So, here’s what I discovered. Hedge funds can invest in all kinds of assets, not just stocks. They can gobble up real estate, fine art, rare stamps, precious metals, and even sports memorabilia. They often have several levels of corporate responsibility, including offshore bank accounts. Hedge funds may buy up companies, cut costs (i.e. lay off workers), and watch stock prices soar. Hedge funds are typically closed to individuals making less than $200,000 per year. 

Hedge funds don’t produce any products. They don’t make toilets or toilet paper. They don’t raise soybeans or beets. A hedge fund manager won’t paint your house, pick up your trash, or teach your middle school child to play the flute. They don’t remodel bathrooms. The don’t roofs homes. They don’t get your car going if it dies by the roadside. They won’t rush you to the hospital if you have a heart attack, draw blood once you arrive, or unclog your arteries if that’s what you need. 

They invest. 

This work, of course, is incredibly hard! And because hedge fund managers work way harder than people like you, they deserve way better pay. 

For that reason, the top 25 hedge fund managers made a combined $16.8 billion in 2017. It was either that, pay them a decent wage, or hire illegal immigrants to do the work instead. Mr. Griffin, for example, must have put in some grueling overtime, because he came home with $1.4 billion, earned by the sweat of his brow. That left him in fourth place among hedge fund managers, behind Michael Platt ($2 billion), James Simons ($1.8 billion) and David Tepper ($1.5 billion). 

Of course, these poor fellows needed a tax cut and President Trump made sure they got one in 2018.

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 2/8/19: IT TURNS OUT American intelligence intercepted a call in 2017. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman can be heard telling underlings he would finish off the journalist Jamal Khashoggi “with a bullet” if he refused to return to Saudi Arabia and end his criticism of the royal family. 

President Trump has said he thinks the Crown Prince is a noble fellow and he’d like him to visit the new U.S. capital at Mar-a-Lago. He can even bring his favorite doctor with the bone saw. 

You never know when you might catch a journalist and need the right kind of saw while traveling. (See: 10/16/18.)

 

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“Trump is hated by everyone inside the White House.” 

PRETTY MUCH everyone agrees there has never been a White House that leaks like this one, with Trump at the helm. 

Experts theorize that this has something to do with the fact so many people working in the White House can’t abide the way the president acts. Reporters for Vanity Fair explain it this way: 

Morale inside the White House, never high to begin with, has turned particularly bleak, according to interviews with 10 former West Wing officials and Republicans close to the president. The issue is that many see Trump himself as the problem. “Trump is hated by everyone inside the White House,” a former West Wing official told me. His shambolic management style, paranoia, and pattern of blaming staff for problems of his own making have left senior White House officials burned out and resentful, sources said. “It’s total misery. People feel trapped,” a former official said. “Trump always needs someone to blame,” a second former official said. Sources said the leak of Trump’s private schedules to Axios – which revealed how little work Trump does – was a signal of how disaffected his staff has become [emphasis added throughout]. (See: 2/3/19.)

 

Even Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney is said to be anxious to leave; and he’s only been on the job for eight weeks. 

Well, there’s always Rudy…. 

Or not! 

With arrival of the weekend, Rudy Giuliani remains conspicuous by his absence. He has not been seen in public since January 20, when he told The New York Times that the president informed him negotiations on a Trump Tower Moscow deal were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won.”  

As the Times explained after that bombshell dropped: 

The new timetable means that Mr. Trump was seeking a deal at the time he was calling for an end to economic sanctions against Russia….He was seeking a deal when he gave interviews questioning the legitimacy of NATO, a favorite talking point of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. And he was seeking a deal when, in July 2016, he called on Russia to release hacked Democratic emails that Mr. Putin’s government was rumored at the time to have stolen.

 

Rudy quickly woke up to his mistake (or the president started screaming at him again) and tried to walk back his comments. 

No one has seen him since, kind of like Jamal Khashoggi walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

 

* 

THE COURT NEWS keeps coming. On Friday, U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III denied media requests for release of all court records in the case of Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer. 

Pauley ruled that documents related to Cohen’s financial crimes could be released. But documents related to two other felonies had to remain sealed or could be released only in redacted form. 

An observer in court explained: 

The judge said prosecutors had opposed the media requests, saying disclosure “would jeopardize an ongoing investigation and prejudice the privacy rights of uncharged third parties.”

 

…He said the search warrant applications and affidavits supporting them “catalogue an assortment of uncharged individuals and detail their involvement in communications and transactions connected to the campaign finance charges to which Cohen pled guilty.”

 

…The judge added: “At this stage, wholesale disclosure of the materials would reveal the scope and direction of the Government’s ongoing investigation. It would also unveil subjects of the investigation and the potential conduct under scrutiny, the full volume and nature of the evidence gathered thus far, and the sources of information provided to the Government.”

 

In a separate story, Politico added: 

“And if the past is any prologue, unmasking those who are cooperating with the Government’s investigation or who have otherwise provided information to the Government could deter further cooperation with the investigation by ‘subject[ing] those individuals to witness tampering, harassment, or retaliation,’” the judge added.

 

It didn’t take a genius to figure out who might be doing the harassing. And who was doing the witness tampering. And what corpulent orange guy might be subject of the continuing investigation. 

Hint: his or her initials are DJT.

 

* 

BUT WAIT!!!! There’s more. In separate court proceedings in Washington D.C., federal prosecutors tell a judge that Paul Manafort may have lied to them, despite a plea agreement that was in place, about “an extremely sensitive issue,” in hopes of goosing his chances for a pardon. 

The person with power to pardon Manafort has the same initials as the individual hinted at two paragraphs above. 

DJT.

 

Prosecutors also tell Judge Amy Berman Jackson that they believe Manafort lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, a business buddy, and a man with deep connections to Russian intelligence. Those interactions, prosecutors assure Judge Jackson, go “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” 

Jackson chastises Manafort at one point, making it clear she believes he tried to cover up the truth that he used $125,000 from a pro-Trump political action committee to pay legal bills. 

Andrew Weissman, speaking for the prosecutor’s office, describes that cozy arrangement as, “to put it charitably, a scheme.”

___ 

 

2/9/19: If you missed it, in a recent Oval Office meeting, Trump announced, with tortured syntax, “I accomplished the military.”

 

____________________ 

Scrimping and saving on $2,061,068,493.15 per day.

____________________ 

 

As per usual, Trump wanted to show there was always an “I” in “team” in any sentence he spoke granting credit. You had to wonder. Did he mean he created the U.S. Navy back in 1775? Or was it his idea to spin off the Army Air Force into a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947? 

It turns out, he was bragging about boosting the military budget, which you would have thought must have been zero dollars before he took over. In 2011, for example, with fighting having ramped up in Afghanistan, the U.S. defense budget was a measly $752.29 billion, forcing our admirals and generals to scrimp and save on $2,061,068,493.15 per day. Defense spending fell to $639.86 by 2016, as our role in Afghanistan and Iraq was reduced. The federal deficit also declined. 

The burden of stretching that $639 billion plus, for one extra day, in a Leap Year, in 2016, must have driven the military mad, what with only $1,748,251,366.12 to throw at problems every twenty-four hours. 

Still! Trump “accomplished” the military, including getting the Navy ten more ships than had already been planned. 

Rumor has it, Trump expects the new vessels to be named the U.S.S. Donald J. Trump, the U.S.S. I Accomplished This Ship, the U.S.S. Donald is a Stud Muffin, and other fitting names in his honor. 

I, for one, am thinking the U.S.S. Stormy Daniels would be fun. 

Now we know. The 2019 defense budget will be $731.75 billion, and Donald J. Trump did it all by himself, except for paying any taxes, and the federal deficit, which Trump claimed he would wipe out with ease, will not be wiped out.

 

* 

A cream sold to active duty troops and veterans with scarring. 

SPEAKING OF the U.S. defense budget, in today’s episode of “Government is always the Problem,” and putting business folks (like Trump) in charge of everything is the solution, we focus on a quality manufacturer of skin care products. This company produces a cream to treat pain and scarring. Their cream is sold to active duty troops still recovering from serious injuries and veterans now out of the service. 

The only problem is that the company charges $14,000 for each tube of this most excellent cream. 

This price is clearly steep. That meant, in an effort to increase sales, distributors and doctors had to come up with a scam. Among other tricks, they paid active duty troops and veterans to say they needed the cream. Then they provided kickbacks, even if the soldiers, sailors, and Marines threw the expensive tubes in the trash. Who cared if they needed pain relief! 

Sales boomed! 

The company also provided bounties to doctors who prescribed more tubes of their excellent product, and everyone involved headed for their favorite banking institutions in good moods. 

Sadly, all good scams must come to an end and the federal authorities broke up the skin-care-crime-ring this week. 

Assorted individuals were arrested and charged with stealing $65 million from the federal government.

 

* 

OTHERWISE, Trump has kept busy arguing with heads of U.S. intelligence about the wisdom of several recent foreign policy stands. Experts do not agree, for example, that ISIS has been defeated. 

 

Someone forgot to inform the general. 

As reported by DefenseNews, this week Gen. Joseph Votel, who leads U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), spoke before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He tells the senators he was caught by surprise when President Twitter Thumbs declared he would be ordering withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and cutting forces in Afghanistan in half. 

“I was not aware of the specific announcement,” he told the Senate panel. “Certainly, we were aware that he had expressed a desire and intent” to leave. 

“I was not consulted [emphasis added],” he said. 

“The fight against ISIS and violent extremists is not over and our mission has not changed,” he continued. “The coalition’s hard-won battlefield gains can only be secured by maintaining a vigilant offensive against a now largely dispersed and disaggregated ISIS that retains leaders, fighters, facilitators and a profane ideology that fuels their efforts.” 

This failure to notify Votel would be an obvious problem. This CENTCOM map shows the region for which he had responsibility.

 

We might also point out that the U.S. government might have a little extra cash to spend on bullets, if President Trump wasn’t always jetting off to Mar-a-Lago every time he gets bored pretending to be the Leader of the Free World. According to data gathered by the Government Accountability Office, Trump’s trips first four trips to Florida cost $3.4 million per. That includes a direct payment of $60,000 to the Mar-a-Lago club, for use of space. 

That would bring the total cost of 19 trips to Florida to roughly $64 million, so far. Or: far more than the cost of the Russia investigation.

 

* 

NOW UNDER DEMOCRATIC CONTROL, the House Intelligence Committee has sent the transcripts of some fifty witnesses who testified previously before Congress in the Russia probe, to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. We already know two Trump buddies, Roger Stone, and ex-buddy Michael Cohen, have been indicted for lying to Congress. Look for there to be others. 

Among those whose transcripts are being delivered and who should probably be sweating profusely: Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Brad Parscale and Alexander Nix. Nix ran digital operations during the 2016 campaign. Hope Hicks, who helped put together a misleading letter about a key meeting with agents of the Russian government – with Don Jr. and Jared – is also in danger. 

All five are hot candidates to have committed perjury. 

The president reacts to the news by labeling Rep. Schiff “a political hack” in a tweet. He calls efforts to investigate potential violations of the law nothing more than “presidential harassment.” 

Still, there is one politician Trump still ♥♥♥’s and he makes that clear moments later, in a follow-up tweet: 

North Korea, under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, will become a great Economic Powerhouse. He may surprise some but he won’t surprise me, because I have gotten to know him & fully understand how capable he is. North Korea will become a different kind of Rocket - an Economic one!

 

The two chunky heads of state are scheduled to meet again at the end of the month in Hanoi. For obvious reasons, this will be Trump’s first trip to Vietnam.

___ 

2/10/19: It looks like we’re going to have to deploy the entire U.S. military to defend the border with Mexico. That includes sending the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan steaming up the Rio Grande. 

Drastic measures are required. So send that aircraft carrier plowing up the river mud at all costs. 

President Trump is convinced, based on a hypothetical example in an opinion piece written for the Gallup organization, that we’re about to be overrun by a caravan. A really big caravan! The biggest caravan of rapists and murders and Middle Eastern terrorists with fake Spanish accents, ever! 

REALLY F’N BIG!!!! 

Sunday morning, the president actually tweeted: “Gallup Poll: ‘Open Borders will potentially attract 42 million Latin Americans.’ This would be a disaster for the U.S. We need the Wall now!”  

This is the second time in two weeks that the president flipped out after seeing scary numbers in the news, numbers that turned out, on second glance, to be way less scary. (See his panic in regard to illegal immigrants voting in Texas: 1/29/19. See the much-reduced reason for panic: 1/31/19.) 

Looking at this latest tweet, I did what any sensible person would do, assuming a sensible person was seated in the Oval Office and not tweeting stupid crap. I checked the source. Jim Clifton, the CEO of the Gallup organization, wrote an opinion piece based on recent Gallup polling. Researchers, he explained, posed the following question to a sampling of people living in Central America: “Would you like to move to another country permanently if you could?” 

Anyway, here’s the terrifying math – assuming you’re too dumb to think for yourself. Mr. Clifton notes that there are 450 million people in Central America. And 27% say they would like to move permanently to a new country. That means, as the president would have us believe, that 121,500,000 already have their bags packed. Of that number who already have their socks and underwear picked out for the trip, 35% said they’d head for the United States. 

 

Forty-three million Latinos heading our way! 

When we do the Trump Math, we learn that this means 42,525,000 could be heading our way this afternoon. If not sooner. We should round up and make it even scarier! There are 43 million on the way!!! 

This would make sense if we took answers to hypothetical questions literally. For example: Would you like to be able to fly like a bird? Yes, most people would probably say. That does not mean those respondents are going to start throwing themselves off ten-story buildings anytime soon. 

Or you might ask unmarried men: Would you like to date a super model? I think 97% would answer, “Yes.” That doesn’t mean millions of bachelors are going to be making Saturday night dinner reservations for two. 

In terms of scary immigration figures, in the past eight years, three million individuals, total, have been apprehended trying to illegally cross the southern border. That’s less than 400,000 per year, not quite the hordes Trump warns us will soon be hammering at our gates.

___ 

2/11/19: Every day, I vow: You are not going to tumble down the rabbit hole. You will not try to cover all the insanity there is to see in Trumpistan. 

So, let’s stick to one example today. Once again, we have proof of the predatory nature of many business and corporate types. 

 

A drug once available free will cost $375,000. 

Three thousand unlucky Americans suffer from Lambert-Eaton Myasthenic Syndrome (LEMS), a rare and crippling neuromuscular disease. Until recently, under an FDA program that guaranteed “compassionate use,” a drug called 3,4-DAP was available to them free for treatment. 

NBC explains what happened next: 

Since 1992, 3,4-DAP, was made by Jacobus Pharmaceuticals, a small New Jersey company, until a different company, Catalyst, recently received the exclusive rights to the drug. Catalyst added a preservative, renamed it Firdapse, and is now charging north of $375,000 a year for the life-changing drug.

 

While history shows (this liberal blogger would posit) that capitalism is the system that promotes the greatest benefits for the greatest number, no one should imagine that morality governs the current or any other iteration of capitalism. It was legal to buy and sell slaves in 1819. Coal mining companies could require workers to accept payment in scrip and shop at the company store in 1919. Catalyst can charge a fortune for a drug the company didn’t invent in 2019. 

All they did was add a preservative, give the drug a slightly different chemical configuration, and market Firdapse as a “new product.” 

You don’t have to be a socialist to argue that capitalism, as it functions in America today, could use a tune up for sure.

___ 

 

2/12/19: Nary a day goes by that the president doesn’t remind us of what a moron he is. When Sen. Amy Klobuchar announces she will run for president in 2020, the ever-alert Trump notices that she is making her announcement from an outdoor podium, amid swirling snow. This convinces him that global warming cannot be real! Because it’s snowing in Minnesota. 

In February.

 

“Extreme weather bingo.” 

We have highlighted the president’s incredible idiocy on this topic before. Let’s look at accumulating evidence. We know 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record. This week scientists reported on a hole they’ve found in the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. The hole is six miles long and 1,000 feet deep and the melting that caused it has occurred over the last three years. That hole represents a loss of 14 billion tons of ice. But the threat is many times greater. The Thwaites Glacier is the size of Florida and is retreating by 650 feet per year. If it crumbles in the next 50-100 years, which scientists fear, it could raise global sea levels by two feet all by itself. 

At the top of the world, melting Arctic ice is leading to collapse of polar bear habitat. This week, 52 bears invaded the town of Belyusha Guba, along Russia’s Siberian coast. “People are scared, afraid to leave the house…afraid to let their children go to school,” Zhigansha Musin, a local school administrator, tells reporters. “Constantly in the village are from six to 10 polar bears.” 

Scientists note that warming in the Arctic is occurring at twice the rate seen at lower latitudes. 

Citizens of Guba see polar bears in the streets. 

Trump sees snowflakes in Minnesota and gets confused. 

Reports from The Netherlands and Australia also hint at calamity ahead. In the Netherlands a popular one-day 124-mile speedskating race has to be moved to Austria this winter. The race is held only when six inches or more of ice cover Dutch lakes and canals, creating a course that takes racers through eleven towns. Between 1909 and 1963 there were 12 years when ice was thick enough, allowing for the race to be held once every four years. Since 1963, there have been three races, one every eighteen years. So, this year, the race was moved to Austria. 

We head next to Australia. Weather conditions across the country are often harsh. But scientists are now talking about “extreme weather bingo,” a result of climate change. Swaths of the Outback have not seen rain in years, wiping out cattle raising. Coastal communities are arguing with inland towns as depleted rivers supply less and less water. When rains did come along the northern coast this year, they came in torrents. Major cities experienced record flooding. (Scientists continue to point out that warmer temperatures mean more evaporation and more moisture in the atmosphere; and when rains do come, they come in sheets not often seen before.) January was Australia’s hottest month ever, 2.9 degrees above the long-term mean. 

So, yes, on this topic (and many others), our president is a fool.

___

 

 2/13/19: Yet another secret meeting with Trump campaign people and Russians is revealed. 

On August 2, 2016, we learn (more than two-and-a-half years after it happened) that Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, and his right-hand man Rick Gates, met for dinner with a third party at a Manhattan cigar bar, the Grand Havana Room. That third party, Konstantin Kilimnik, was a man with connections to Russian intelligence. He, too, is now under indictment in the Russia probe. 

 

“The people of Crimea…would rather be with Russia.” 

Among other topics Manafort, Gates and Kilimnik discussed a possible peaceful resolution to the conflict in the Ukraine. It was, in fact, the invasion of Ukrainian territory and the seizure of Crimea by Putin’s forces that led to the Obama administration slapping Russia with sanctions. 

At this same meeting, it is alleged, Manafort turned over valuable polling data to Kilimnik. This data would (in theory) help Russian hackers target U.S. social media sites successfully. It is also alleged that Manafort expected to be paid $2.4 million for the trove. After the three men finished dinner, chatted, and smoked cigars, they decided it would be wise to leave by three separate doors, just like any set of friends out for dinner and conspiring to steal an election. 

Something else interesting had happened the day before: that is August 1, 2016. 

Candidate Trump had informed George Stephanopoulos, host of This Week on ABC that, “The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.” 

Then he blamed the problem in the Ukraine on the Obama administration, not on the invaders, themselves. 

So, while this blogger would argue that we still have not seen evidence that would merit impeachment of President Trump, the case is taking shape. If a gang of eight is suspected of robbing a bank, and five gang members (Flynn, Gates, Manafort, Papadopoulos and Cohen), lie about where they were on the night of the heist, you begin to believe the gang robbed the bank. If two alleged accomplices (Don Jr. and Stone) are caught with safe-cracking tools in their cars, you realize there is evidence the gang robbed the bank. Does that prove the head of the gang, President Trump, gave the orders, or that he was directly involved? 

Not yet. 

At this point you begin to suspect police are going to find marked $100 bills, covered in red dye, under Trump’s bed.

___ 

 

2/14/19: President Trump is more than halfway through his term and still a little lacking in his promise to shrink the federal deficit to nothingness and drown us in black ink. Candidate Trump once promised he could wipe out the nation’s entire $19 trillion in debt in eight years, if we gave him two terms. 

The Congressional Budget Office has just announced that the deficit isn’t shrinking, despite a healthy economy. 

It just passed $22 trillion. It is predicted that an additional $12.4 trillion will be added by the end of 2029.

 

* 

ALSO ANNOUNCED: The Inspector General for the Department of Education announces that the department’s student loans unit has failed to hold companies that manage more than a trillion dollars’ worth of Federal Student Aid loans to account for breaking rules meant to protect borrowers. 

This in turn has allowed those companies to pocket government dollars that should have been refunded to borrowers. 

“It’s hard to look at this as anything other than completely damning,” Seth Frotman of the Student Borrower Protection Center tells NPR. “This is the most damaging in a long line of investigations, audits, and reports that show the Department of Education is asleep at the switch when it is responsible for over a trillion dollars of student loan debt.” 

If you’d like to read about some of the predators in the student loan business, and some of the frauds who run various for-profit colleges, click on this link. My “favorite” is the school in Florida, FastTrack, which hired former strippers as student recruiters, before going belly up in the wake of an investigation.

___

2/15/19: Once again we learn that a wall along the border with Mexico isn’t going to solve our most vexing crime problem. Friday morning, Gary Martin, who suspects he’s about to be fired, carries a gun to work at the Henry Pratt Co. in Aurora, Illinois. Martin shoots and kills five co-workers. 

In an ensuing standoff he wounds five police officers before they can kill him and end the bloody standoff. 

Martin is not an illegal immigrant. He did not sneak across the border. A year and a day after Trump told the loved ones of victims and the survivors of the Parkland, Florida high school shooting that GOP lawmakers were “afraid of the N.R.A,” the biggest coward of all has done nothing to stem the tide of blood in the streets. Instead, the president marches out to the Rose Garden and declares a national emergency because Congress won’t give him the money to build the Great Wall of Trump. 

In declaring that “emergency,” he admits, “I could build the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this.” 

After blaming Democrats for not realizing that his every wish is their command, the plump president (now officially obese) tells gathered reporters that he really wants the wall. So, he is going to get the money he wants in any way he wants. “I just want to do it faster,” he says.

Or to put it plainly, the strictures in the U.S. Constitution often annoy the President of the United States.

 

____________________ 

The Founding Fathers were always clear. Too much power in any one person’s hands or vested in any one body, would represent a threat to freedom.

____________________ 

 

In order to gain necessary perspective, we need to take a trip to Philadelphia in 1787. What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they talked about forming a new government, including creation of the office of the presidency? 

Roger Sherman, a Connecticut delegate, argued that the “Executive magistracy” would exist to carry out the will of the Legislature. Therefore, the Executive “ought to be appointed by and accountable to the Legislature only [emphasis added, throughout].” 

Edmund Randolph of Virginia was opposed to that idea. The Executive would have to have “vigor, dispatch & responsibility.” He thought three men, acting as an Executive board, would be best. 

James Wilson noted that there was always a concern that the Executive might be “the fetus of monarchy.” Nevertheless, he was for one man to head the government, believing the republican manners of the people would suffice to keep the Executive under control. Wilson, who represented Pennsylvania, was for direct election of the president by the people. (No Electoral College required.) He suggested a term of three years, “on the supposition that a re-eligibility would be provided for” in the new Constitution. Another delegate suggested a term of seven years, with no chance for a second. George Mason, later known as the “father of the Bill of Rights,” supported that idea. 

The question was put – with the issue being how to create an effective Executive without granting too much power – state delegations each having one vote. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia voted “ay,” for a seven-year term. Delegates from Massachusetts were split. Connecticut, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia voted “no,” making the vote 5-4, with Massachusetts tied. 

Like political leaders today, the Founding Fathers were often divided on matters of grave import. The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution never wavered in one respect. Too much power in any one person’s hands or vested in any single body, would represent a threat to freedom. 

Pierce Butler, representing South Carolina, had this to say: “It had been observed in all countries [that] the Executive power is in a constant course of increase… Gentlemen seemed to think that we had nothing to apprehend from an abuse of the Executive power. But why might not a Cataline or a Cromwell arise in this Country as well as in others,” he asked his fellow delegates? 

(Or a Trump.) 

 

“The immediate choice of the people.” 

What, then, were the Founding Fathers thinking when they decided to vest the power of the purse in the hands of the House of Representatives? Why not rest it in the president’s hands, instead? 

Under Section 5 of Article IV, of the proposed Constitution, it was agreed that this power should reside in the House. On August 8, 1787, after nearly three months of debate, the question arose once more. By that time, the large and small states (in population) had agreed to what we call The Great Compromise. States with larger populations would have more votes in the House. All states would have two votes in the Senate, giving the less populous states a check on the power of their more populous neighbors. 

Now, according to James Madison’s notes, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina “moved to strike out Sect. 5, Art. IV.” 

Pinckney could see no reason to leave that power of the purse in the hands of the House alone. He felt the Senate should have the same power. 

Madison’s notes for August 8 capture the moment: 

Mr. Ghorum. Was ag^st allowing the Senate to originate; but only to amend [money bills].

 

Mr. Gov^r Morris. It is particularly proper that the Senate sh^d have the right of originating money bills. They will…consist of a smaller number, and will be able to prepare such bills with due correctness; and so as to prevent delay of business in the other House.

 

Col. Mason was unwilling to travel over this ground again. To strike out the section, was to unhinge the compromise [the agreement on the number of votes in the House and Senate] of which it made a part. The duration of the Senate [the six-year terms of senators] made it improper. He does not object to that duration. On the Contrary he approved of it. But joined with the smallness of the number, it was an argument against adding this to the other great powers vested in that body. His idea of an Aristocracy was that it was the govern^t of the few over the many. An aristocratic body, like the screw in mechanics, work^s its way by slow degrees, and holding fast whatever it gains, should ever be suspected of an encroaching tendency. The purse strings shou^d never be put into its hands.

 

Again, serious disagreement arose. Mr. Butler was for leaving the section in. Mr. Wilson was “opposed to it [the measure to strike out Sect. 5] on its merits.” Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut was “willing it should stand” if it was important to other members of the body. Madison “was for striking it out.” On the question of striking that section, New Hampshire voted “no.” Massachusetts voted “no.” Connecticut was a “no.” New Jersey voted “ay.” So did Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. North Carolina was another “no.” 

The question was revived the next day. On August 9, Mr. Randolph expressed his unhappiness with the vote of the day before, “concerning money bills, as endangering the success of the plan [for the new government], and extremely objectionable in itself; and gave notice that he should move for a reconsideration of the vote.” Hugh Williamson of North Carolina “said he had formed a like intention.” 

Colonel Mason was for postponing the matter. But he agreed “that it was of essential importance to restrain the right to the House of Representatives.” Members of the House were directly elected every two years and were therefore “the immediate choice of the people.” 

Senators were not to be chosen by popular vote under the new government plan. So, the power to tax should rest with the House, as also the power to decide how to spend the people’s money. Mason made his position clear. “He said that unless the exclusive originating of money bills should be restored to the House of Representatives, he should, not from obstinacy, but duty and conscience, oppose throughout [the Constitution] the equality of Representation in the Senate.” 

If the Senate could pass appropriations, he did not believe the smaller states in population should have an equal vote with the larger. 

 

The English had handcuffed the king. 

On August 13, the question was raised again. This time Randolph moved for a change in the wording of Article IV, Section 5. It should be made more precise, to ease the concerns shared by others in the Constitutional Convention. “Bills for raising money for the purpose of revenue or for appropriating the same,” he suggested, “shall originate in the House of Representatives and shall not be so amended or altered by the Senate as to increase or diminish the sum to be raised, or change the mode of levying it, or the objects of its appropriation.” 

Col. Mason was for adopting Randolph’s wording. He reminded delegates that “the Senate did not represent the people, but the States in their political character. It was improper therefore that it should tax the people.” He cited in support of this construction, the good example of England: “The House of Lords does not represent nor tax the people, because not elected by the people.” 

The English had also handcuffed the king when it came to raising taxes or spending the people’s money. 

John Dickenson, representing Delaware, spoke up: “Eight States have inserted in their Constitutions the exclusive right of originating money bills in favor of the popular branch of the Legislature.” 

That is, the House of Representatives (the name varied) for each state, not their Senate. 

“When the people behold in the Senate, the countenance of an aristocracy; and in the president, the form of a little monarch,” Randolph asked, “will not their alarms be sufficiently raised without taking from their immediate representatives, a right which has been so long appropriated to them?” 

That is: control over the purse strings. 

In the end, it was not till Saturday, September 8, the final day of the Convention, that the money question was resolved. This time the states voted for clauses separately. First, “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the house of Representatives.” 

Nine states voted “ay.” Only Delaware and Maryland voted “no.” 

It was moved separately that the existing wording, that appropriation bills would be “subject to alterations and amendments by the Senate” be struck. It was to be replaced with wording from the Massachusetts State Constitution. That is: “but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as in other bills.” Madison reports that this change was adopted “nem. con.” 

Or, in Latin: “nemine contradicente,” “with no one dissenting.” 

Not once did any of the Founding Fathers suggest that the President of the United States should have control over appropriations or have any role in amending or altering spending bills once made. 

Today, 232 years later, along comes President Trump.

___

2/16/19: President Trump decides to handle the national emergency – that is: Congress won’t grant him the money for his Wall – by leaping aboard Air Force One and flying off to Mar-a-Lago. 

It’s possible he’s heading south to make sure any illegal immigrant workers have been culled from the payroll at another one of his private clubs. 

Then again, when last seen, he is bellying up to the omelet bar at his club, before heading off for a round of golf.

___

2/17/19: The president has the whole day to relax at Mar-a-Lago and contemplate his next moves. 

If he has nothing better to do, he could pick up the latest copy of National Geographic. In a new story, scientists warn that by 2080 the city you live in will have a climate similar to what a city 500 miles to the south has today. Baltimore will be like Jacksonville, Florida. Montreal will be like Charlottesville, Virginia. Louisville, Kentucky will feel like Pensacola, only without the cool beaches.

 

* 

AND IF 2080 sounds like a long way away, let’s shrink our time frame for discussion to 19-24 years. 

That’s the term of imprisonment prosecutors recommended for Paul Manafort, to run till at least 2038 and possibly 2043. Since Manafort is already 69, it’s essentially a life sentence.

 

_____________________ 

At least ten members of the Trump campaign knew Hope Hicks was lying, just two days after the election.

_____________________ 

 

Why such a harsh sentence for a man who specialized in Russian-friendly, white collar crime? Special Counsel Mueller clearly believes Manafort has evidence that goes to the heart of the investigation. If he can shake it loose, Trump is likely doomed. Should Manafort break, the road to a successful impeachment is clear. And I don’t mean if he breaks because prosecutors are using Gestapo tactics. 

I mean: Manafort simply spills the beans he threw in the pot. 

Manafort knows if Candidate Trump knew about and conspired to hide the outreach to Russians that we know occurred. 

Consider a few of the key facts that have been pried loose in the last two years, either by the free press or investigators doing their jobs. They don’t hang the president yet. But the metaphorical rope is over the branch. 

Then consider the scores of denials. On July 24, 2016, George Stephanopoulos asked Manafort, “Are there any ties between Mr. Trump, you or your campaign and Putin and his regime?” 

“No, there are not,” he replied. “That’s absurd.” 

By that time, the secret June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower had been held and Manafort had attended. 

Eight days after giving his answer to Stephanopoulos, as we have learned, Manafort headed straight to a Manhattan cigar bar to talk with a Russian friend again. 

On November 10, 2016, just days after Trump’s surprise election win, spokeswoman Hope Hicks told reporters, “There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.” 

The short list of those who knew at that absolute instant that this was a bald-faced lie would include, but not be limited to: 

Michael Caputo

Michael Cohen

General Michael T. Flynn

Rick Gates

Jared Kushner

Paul Manafort

George Papadopoulos

Roger Stone

Donald Trump Jr.

 

And, if not yet proven, almost assuredly the President-Elect himself. (The only way he doesn’t know is that everyone else on the list, above, has been lying to him, including his own son.) 

At a press conference on January 11, 2017, nine days before taking office, Trump assured reporters that he had had no business dealings with Russia during the campaign. He made it clear, he could easily have done business in Russia if he wanted, but knew it would have been a conflict. He said that himself. 

The president made similar denials on February 7, 2017, and May 11, 2017. 

 

Cohen knew that was a lie. Trump knew Cohen was lying. 

Today we know Trump’s business dealings with the Russians continued until at least June 2016. We know because last November, prosecutors nailed his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, on several felony counts. Cohen had been lying to investigators for two years. He had insisted that all business dealings with Trump and the Russians ended in January 2016. That would have been before the Iowa caucuses, before Trump was the presumptive GOP nominee. 

For two years, Trump understood that Cohen was lying. Why wouldn’t he correct him, publicly, or admit the truth himself, back on January 11, 2017? 

Four days later, Chris Wallace of Fox News asked the future VP if there were any contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. “Of course not,” Mike Pence replied. “Why would there be?” 

Good question.

 

* 

SO, HOW IS TRUMP HOLDING UP under the strain of the Russia investigation – and now the national emergency down on the border with Mexico? 

We can go to his tweets to “read” his mind. 

At 7:52 a.m., and again, four minutes later, in a pair of unhinged tweets we get fresh evidence that the current occupant of the White House/Mar-a-Lago would crush his critics and strangle the free press if he dared. Clearly a comic skit from the night before is under his skin:  

Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution [emphasis added]? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!

 

Then this: 

THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! 

 

Let us pause a moment to scratch our heads. Can anyone remember when reporters lied about contacts with Russians?

___ 

 

2/18/19: Historians will note someday that stupidity was one of the defining features of the Trump administration. 

On Monday, Roger Stone, the latest Trump adviser indicted in the Russia investigation and currently free on bail, decided it would be amusing to post a message and picture on Instagram. It tickled Stone to label the Special Counsel as “Deep State hitman Robert Mueller.” 

Stone must have chortled to himself. So far, so good. This would class as free expression. Next, he posted a photo of the judge who will be handling his case, who had released him Friday on bail, but under a partial gag order. In the corner, crosshairs showed beside the head of District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson. 

Internet sleuths discovered that this same picture could be found on – among others – a conspiracy website with an anti-Semitic perspective and a pro-Russian site called, “Russia News Now.” 

Russians!! Again! 

Stone soon realized his mistake, or at least his alarmed defense lawyers did. First, he photo-shopped the crosshairs out of the picture. Then he freaked and deleted the whole mess. 

Judge Jackson, however, had been notified. Stone has been ordered to grace her court again Thursday. 

In other “proof-of-stupid” news, Trump spent the morning at Trump National Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Including Presidents’ Day, he has spent 172 days since taking office at various golf clubs, most of which he owns. This is not criminal stupidity. It is, however, gratuitous stupidity. Mr. Trump used to hate it when President Obama played golf “all the time.” 

When not busy lining up putts, the president tended to focus on tweeting, early, often, and late. One topic especially had him stewing: former Acting F.B.I. Director Andrew McCabe, who was popping up all over cable news. 

For that reason, at 7:15 a.m., in the president’s second tweet of the day, we had this: 

Wow, so many lies by now disgraced acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty), look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught.....

 

Fifteen hours later, having spent the afternoon hinting he’d enjoy attacking Venezuela, Trump still had the red ass about McCabe. Trump turned to juvenile stupidity: “Remember this, Andrew McCabe didn’t go to the bathroom without the approval of Leakin’ James Comey!” 

See what he did! “Bathroom.” “Leakin’.” It’s like we have an immature 13-year-old in the Oval Office. 

As for Mr. McCabe, he spent a good part of Monday talking about his new book: The Threat: How the F.B.I. Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump. First sentence: “Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law.” There’s nothing juvenile about that line.

___ 

 

2/19/19: If you’re following the Russia investigation, and you happen to be an avid Trump fan, Tuesday was not a good day. 

Then again, if you are an avid Trump fan, you’re not following the investigation. Or, if you are, you get your facts through the filter of Fox News. On Fox News, if Trump were caught naked in bed with Sen. Lindsey Graham snuggling up on one side and Vladimir Putin snuggling up on the other, and piles of rubles scattered about, Sean Hannity would help you forget. He’d run another scary story about caravans of dark-skinned people storming our borders. Laura Ingraham would follow with a tall tale about how the Green New Deal was going to make it impossible to own flatulent cows. 

The problem with focusing on cow farts, however, is increasingly clear. Because real news intrudes.

 

____________________ 

McCabe could have killed the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016. He didn’t. Neither did Comey.

____________________ 

 

Start with Andrew McCabe, repeatedly labeled by Trump and his sycophants as a “liar,” and think logically. McCabe built a career in the F.B.I. He spent part of that career fighting the Russian mob. McCabe was a lifelong Republican. No one ever called him a liar until he crossed Trump, a man whose businesses model is lying. But here’s what McCabe’s now saying, since he was fired. 

Leave aside any errors of judgment he may have made and alleged lies about contacts with reporters. McCabe is trying to tell us that by the late spring of 2016, top officials at the F.B.I. were so concerned about suspicious contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russians, that an investigation had to be launched. 

You can explain this a thousand times to Trump fans, but it never seems to cool their cult-like love. So, here we go again: McCabe could have killed the Trump campaign that summer had he revealed the existence of this investigation. He did not. Nor did F.B.I. Director James Comey. The alarming contacts involving Trump aides and Russians did not end once Trump won the presidency. General Flynn, his choice for National Security Advisor, was caught lying to the Vice President. The Department of Justice notified the White House. It took eighteen days to fire Flynn, much longer than it took to fire Sally Flynn, who delivered the warning. 

On February 14, 2017, Trump called in F.B.I. Director Comey for a talk. Comey says the president asked him to “go easy” on Flynn. Comey says he was alarmed enough by what sounded like a desire to obstruct justice, to start taking notes on his laptop on the ride back to headquarters. He testified before Congress that he kept notes on all talks with Mr. Trump afterwards. Trump later said he didn’t believe Comey took contemporaneous notes. Several other top F.B.I. officials backed Comey, saying he had shown them the notes at the time. Then Trump hinted that he, Trump, had tapes of their talks, to back up his version of events. Then he admitted he didn’t. Comey had testified under oath. Trump was just slinging the BS. 

 

“A double agent” helping “our most fearsome enemy.” 

At any rate, McCabe is now saying, including in his book, that upon the firing of Director Comey – which Trump said had to do with the Russia investigation – F.B.I. officials decided to open a counterintelligence investigation aimed at the president himself. Top law enforcement officers had to know “if the president committed obstruction of justice.” Evidence suggested, McCabe explained, that Trump “might” be working for a foreign power. McCabe didn’t say the president was. He did say that he and others had to consider the possibility that Trump was “a double agent” helping “our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia.” 

Like anyone, McCabe has his axes to grind. But in interviews he comes across as thoughtful, sober, self-deprecating, and funny, not as a man prone to making wild claims. He says he too has contemporaneous notes that might be useful in court. Almost every time he shares a new anecdote with reporters, there are witnesses who, if need be, could verify his account. 

At one point he and F.B.I. intelligence experts met with President Trump. They were there to brief him on the situation with North Korea and warn that Kim Jong-un had missiles that could strike the USA. Trump said he didn’t believe the intelligence. He didn’t believe the North could hit us. “He said he knew this,” McCabe says, “because Vladimir Putin had told him so.” 

McCabe says he and all the experts were stunned, and again says he has witnesses. 

On right-wing news the focus is not on this “holy shit” moment. No one on the right seems to care that top law enforcement officers had to ask if the president was a Russian asset. Instead, there is furious talk about a “palace coup” that McCabe and Comey and others were brewing. McCabe says, yes, he and other top officials were deeply alarmed. Today we know they had ample cause. In the last two years we have learned conclusively that Trump campaign officials and/or family members met with Russians in March, April, May, June, July, and August 2016. 

Over and over, they insisted they had not. Yet, on right-wing news, we’re supposed to believe McCabe is the liar.

 

* 

WE CAN ASSUME the president’s mood did not improve once he picked up his copy of The New York Times, or had the news explained, since he hates to read. In a scathing article, the Times tied together the threads of Trump’s two-year battle to thwart investigators. Naturally, you knew Trump would start tweeting about “Fake News” as soon as he caught wind. 

So, let’s start with sources. According to reporters for the Times, “Interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and others close to Mr. Trump, as well as a review of confidential White House documents, reveal numerous unreported episodes in a two-year drama.” 

That’s right. The Times has “confidential White House documents.” 

The Times has a reputation to uphold as the nation’s “newspaper of record.” And whether you like their editorial policies, or the articles they run, they have solid sources. Insiders at the Justice Department, for example, told them Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, now replaced, told other officials his job at DOJ was to “jump on a grenade” for the president. That’s bad enough – and helps us understand why a hack like Whitaker was given the post to begin. 

Sources also tell the Times that Trump called Whitaker at least once to inquire about the investigation involving his former fixer and personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Could Whitaker figure out a way to put Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, back in charge? A Trump-appointee, Berman had rightly recused himself from having a role in that investigation. Trump wanted Whitaker to interfere. 

If that doesn’t sound like “obstruction of justice” to you, you need to grab a dictionary and puzzle out the words. 

 

Attacking the law enforcement apparatus of his own government. 

The Times article continues, with this update included later: 

On Tuesday, after The Times article published, Mr. Trump denied that he had asked Mr. Whitaker if Mr. Berman could be put in charge of the investigation. “No, I don’t know who gave you that, that’s more fake news,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s a lot of fake news out there. No, I didn’t.”

 

A Justice Department spokeswoman said Tuesday that the White House had not asked Mr. Whitaker to interfere in the investigations. “Under oath to the House Judiciary Committee, then-Acting Attorney General Whitaker stated that ‘at no time has the White House asked for nor have I provided any promises or commitments concerning the special counsel’s investigation or any other investigation,’” said the spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec. “Mr. Whitaker stands by his testimony.”

 

If your knee-jerk reaction is to believe the president and his defenders, remember who these people are. Trump is the guy who lied to all three wives about multiple affairs and attempted affairs. He surrounds himself with people who were, or now are, convicted felons. Whitaker was once a board member for World Patent Marketing. When customers began complaining about being scammed, Whitaker knew about the complaints but took no action. World Patent had to shut down after ripping off customers to the tune of $26 million. 

By contrast, the Times article notes that Trump’s many attacks on investigators, his public threats against witnesses, and hints at possible pardons are well known. “But fusing the strands reveals an extraordinary story of a president who has attacked the law enforcement apparatus of his own government like no other president in history, and who has turned the effort into an obsession.” 

For the first time, we learn that less than a month after taking office, on February 14, 2017, the president and his top advisers were already facing fallout regarding the campaign and contacts with Russians. All those contacts were being denied at that time – and dozens have been verified since. 

On that very day, Press Secretary Sean Spicer was preparing to go out and brief the press about the firing of General Flynn. A group of advisers had gathered in the Oval Office to discuss strategy. 

The Times explains: 

As the group in the Oval Office talked, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers mentioned in passing what Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, then the speaker of the House, had told reporters – that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Flynn to resign.

 

It was unclear where Mr. Ryan had gotten that information, but Mr. Trump seized on Mr. Ryan’s words. “That sounds better,” the president said, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Mr. Trump turned to the White House press secretary at the time, Sean Spicer, who was preparing to brief the news media.

 

“Say that,” Mr. Trump ordered.

 

But was that true? Mr. Spicer pressed.

 

“Say that I asked for his resignation,” Mr. Trump repeated.

 

Once Spicer stepped to the podium, lawyers for the White House Counsel’s Office began listening with interest as he outlined “what was a sensitive national security investigation” to reporters. “But when Mr. Spicer’s briefing began, the lawyers started hearing numerous misstatements – some bigger than others – and ended up compiling them all in a memo.” That memo is apparently now in reporters’ hands. Based on my knowledge of the case, this blogging fool would expect the man who placed it there was Don McGahn, former White House Chief Counsel. 

At any rate, by the summer of 2017, Trump and his top advisers seem to have been flirting dangerously with obstruction of justice. The president humiliated Attorney General Jeff Sessions, hoping he would quit, so a new man could be put in charge of the burgeoning investigation. 

 

The very essence of obstruction of justice. 

In a second damning revelation, the Times describes what, if proven, would be the very essence of obstruction of justice: 

One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers also reached out that summer to the lawyers for two of his former aides – Paul Manafort and Mr. Flynn – to discuss possible pardons. The discussions raised questions about whether the president was willing to offer pardons to influence their decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the Mueller investigation.

 

There were also those working in the White House who came to believe the president had perverse motives. The Times continues:

 

The president even tried to fire Mr. Mueller himself, a move that could have brought an end to the investigation. Just weeks after Mr. Mueller’s appointment, the president insisted that he ought to be fired because of perceived conflicts of interest. Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, who would have been responsible for carrying out the order, refused and threatened to quit.

 

The president eventually backed off.

 

A good chunk of the rest of the story focuses on Republican lawmakers’ efforts to shield the president from investigators. 

Then there’s a change in strategy on the part of the White House. In April 2018, a new legal team takes over, including Rudy Giuliani. A public relations battle erupts. Rudy heads up a scorched-earth approach, attacking the investigators at every turn. 

Behind the scenes, Mr. Giuliani was getting help from a curious source: Kevin Downing, a lawyer for Mr. Manafort. Mr. Manafort, who had been Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, had agreed to cooperate with the special counsel after being convicted of financial crimes in an attempt to lessen a potentially lengthy prison sentence. Mr. Downing shared details about prosecutors’ lines of questioning, Mr. Giuliani admitted late last year.

 

It was a highly unusual arrangement – the lawyer for a cooperating witness providing valuable information to the president’s lawyer at a time when his client remained in the sights of the special counsel’s prosecutors. The arrangement angered Mr. Mueller’s investigators, who questioned what Mr. Manafort was trying to gain from the arrangement.

 

Cough. Cough. PARDON! 

Nevertheless, the president’s best efforts to contain the damage failed. Cohen was indicted and pled guilty. He agreed to testify. Trump switched from calling Cohen a man he “liked and respected” to labeling him, mafia-style, “a rat.” 

Rudy, who had said Cohen was “an honest man,” suddenly decided he was a “pathological liar.” 

When Trump hinted in a tweet that members of Mr. Cohen’s family might be in legal jeopardy, almost anyone with a basic understanding of how the courts work knew this was tantamount to witness intimidation. The president responded to criticism by saying of his former lawyer, “He’s only been threatened by the truth.” He didn’t deny that Cohen was being threatened.

 

* 

ALL DAY WEDNESDAY, McCabe kept appearing on cable news to add fresh detail to his story and continue to raise serious questions about the President of the United States. He told interviewers that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were so alarmed by the president’s behavior, particularly after he fired Director Comey in May 2017, that Mr. Rosenstein broached the subject of wearing a wire to the White House to gather evidence. McCabe says he approached the F.B.I. General Counsel about the idea. After the General Counsel “picked himself up off the floor” he told McCabe “we’re not there yet. That’s a bridge too far.” 

On Sean Hannity’s nightly program this was evidence of a “palace coup.” To a rational person, however, it sounds exactly like top law enforcement officials dealing with the shocking possibility that the new president was a witting or unwitting puppet of Vladimir Putin. 

Again, McCabe has made it clear in every interview. There are witnesses to all these discussions. Rosenstein, he says, brought up the 25^th Amendment, which allows for removal of a president unfit to serve. Discussing that possibility, that it might be necessary to remove a Russian agent from the Oval Office, is not evidence of a “palace coup.” It shows how concerned Rosenstein, like McCabe a lifelong Republican, and others at the top of the F.B.I. must have been. 

There could be no “Deep State” coup to remove Trump, launched by McCabe and Comey. The vice president must initiate the process to put the 25^th Amendment in action. The majority of cabinet members and top Congressional leaders, half Democrats, half Republicans, would have to concur. 

There could be no “coup.” 

 

“No one objected.” 

In addition, the concerns of top law enforcement officials were made crystal clear to leaders in Congress. This counterintelligence investigation wasn’t launched in the dark. McCabe sat down with “The Gang of Eight” – four top Democratic leaders in Congress, and four top Republicans. 

McCabe says he shared the F.B.I.’s fears and told them an investigation had been launched. “No one objected,” McCabe said during an interview on NBC. “Not on legal grounds, not on constitutional grounds and not based on the facts.” 

“Opening a case of this nature [is] not something that an F.B.I. director, not something that an acting F.B.I. director would do by yourself, right?” he asked his host, Samantha Guthrie, rhetorically. “This was a recommendation that came to me from my team. I reviewed it with our lawyers. I discussed it at length with the deputy attorney general, and I told Congress what we had done.” 

He wasn’t hiding anything. 

In a telling aside (if you want to consider who is most likely lying about these matters) McCabe told Guthrie that in a call with the president, Trump referred to McCabe’s wife as “a loser.” McCabe said it was hard to stifle his anger and the urge to defend his wife, but he didn’t have the luxury. He had to do his job. 

Reporters asked the president about that claim Wednesday. He assured them that this was another lie being peddled by McCabe and insisted he would never call anyone’s wife “a loser.” 

The problem of course, if you want to defend Trump, is that it doesn’t take any effort at all to search his Twitter feed to bolster the foundation for McCabe’s claim. The president has tweeted about Mr. McCabe, Lyin’ James Comey, “Peter S. and his lover, agent Lisa Page & more” as “some of the losers that tried to do a number on your President.” On Twitter he has labeled Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Jeb Bush, writers Frank Bruni, Bill Kristol, and Michael Wolff and “the Phony Club for Growth” as “losers.” Rep. Trey Gowdy was “the Benghazi loser.” “Boring anti-Trump [debate] panelists, mostly losers in life” were a special category. 

And there’s this revealing use of the term “loser” in the second of three themed April 21, 2018, tweets. 

They appeared in rapid succession at 8:10 a.m. and distill the president’s way of thinking (lying) in 112 words: 

The New York Times and a third rate reporter named Maggie Haberman, known as a Crooked H flunkie who I don’t speak to and have nothing to do with, are going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will “flip.” They use.... 

 

....non-existent “sources” and a drunk/drugged up loser who hates Michael, a fine person with a wonderful family. Michael is a businessman for his own account/lawyer who I have always liked & respected. Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if....

 

....it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media!  

 

The true Trump, his words preserved like insects in amber. 

Here we have the true Trump, his words preserved like insects in amber. There are the juvenile insults: “Crooked H flunkie,” “drunk/drugged up loser.” You have the claim of “non-existence ‘sources’” and the heart-rending, oft-repeated howl about a diabolical “Witch Hunt.” 

As has often been the case, Trump was quickly proven wrong, and the free press was proven right. The Times had impeccable sources. Investigators used evidence found in a raid on Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room to charge the man the president had said he “always liked & respected” with multiple felonies. 

Cohen did flip. 

The real “loser” was Trump.

 

* 

IT IS ONLY FAIR TO ADD, that Mr. McCabe is not claiming Trump is a double agent for the Russians. He’s not saying definitively that the president obstructed justice or tried to derail a legitimate investigation. He’s saying that top law enforcement officials had reason to be concerned. 

The president’s defenders would like you to focus on mistakes of judgment McCabe made, on unflattering emails about Trump that various F.B.I. agents shared. They like to focus on the Steele dossier, and how it was a “Hillary Clinton hit job” (by the way, you should read it; because a number of allegations have been proven true). They would like you to think that several lifelong Republicans at the top of the F.B.I. were angry Democrats dressed in elephant hides. They would like you to believe that judges appointed by Democratic presidents can’t be trusted but judges appointed by Trump can. They would like you to ignore the 34 felony convictions racked up in the Russia/and Russia-related investigations. They would like you to believe that Trump and his team had nothing to hide, and that McCabe and top law enforcement officials did.

___ 

 

2/20/19: If news about the Russian investigation is not good, at least Trump can brag again about the stock market. 

Tuesday, the Dow closed at 25,891. 

Of course, in bragging, Trump couldn’t refrain from lying too. “Had the opposition party (no, not the Media) won the election,” he claimed without a shred of historical evidence, “the Stock Market would be down at least 10,000 points by now. We are heading up, up, up!” 

This was a bizarre argument to make since you can check out all kinds of charts and see that the market went up steadily under President Obama, after losing, in the last few months of his time in office, more than 50% of its value under George W. Bush. 

See also: President Bill Clinton, and stocks going way up.

___

 

 

2/21/19: Yesterday the news exploded with interlocking developments, few of a promising nature for the president. 

On Tuesday, Trump posted his most direct attack on the free press via Twitter, singling out The New York Times as “THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.” 

Then the story broke that a white nationalist, Christopher Paul Hasson (a U.S. Coast Guard officer) had been arrested and charged with plotting murder on a mass scale. Since at least 2017, Hasson has been stockpiling arms and ammunition and compiling a list of targets. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made the list. So did news anchors at MSNBC and CNN, the very people Trump attacks constantly for spreading “Fake News.” Hasson had plans to poison thousands if he could manage, in hopes of sparking a race war, with a final muddled goal of creating a “white homeland.” (I think it’s safe to assume he was probably all in on the Great Wall of Trump.) 

“Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch,” Hasson complained in one email draft. Whites who wouldn’t join the fight would have to “die as will the traitors who actively work toward our demise.” 

Naturally, it turns out that the names on Hasson’s hit list match up almost perfectly with those the president constantly vilifies: 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Trump has tweeted: “Goofy Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to as Pocahontas…a lowlife!”  

Sen. Chuck Schumer: “Nancy Pelosi and her sidekick, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, want to protect illegal immigrants far more than the citizens of our country. The United States cannot stand for this.” 

Sen. Richard Blumenthal: “How does Da Nang Dick (Blumenthal) serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee when he defrauded the American people about his so called War Hero status in Vietnam…” 

(Yes, that was Trump complaining about somebody ducking service in Vietnam.)

 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “The Democrat Agenda is a Socialist Nightmare.” 

Beto O’Rourke: “He will never be allowed to turn Texas into Venezuela!” 

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough: “Crazy Joe Scarborough.”

Rep. Maxine Waters: “She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!” 

Be careful, indeed. Where Waters had told supporters to make Trump supporters “uncomfortable” (a mistake, yes), Hasson had stockpiled 15 rifles, 1,000 rounds of ammo and assorted brands of poison. 

When asked by reporters if he thought he needed to tone down his rhetoric, Trump said he didn’t think there was a problem and Press Secretary Pinocchio insisted that words of hate don’t matter.

 

* 

Politically damaging, but not criminal conduct. 

SPEAKING OF TRUMP LOYALISTS, there’s good news and bad for the president and his red, white, and blue fans. First the good: There are rumors that the Mueller probe is wrapping up its work. The Washington Post notes that only 12 of 17 prosecutors are still on the job. Several have contacted old bosses about future moves. Now, the bad: We don’t know what the final report will say but the Post explains, “An adviser to President Trump said there is palpable concern among the president’s inner circle that the report might contain information about Trump and his team that is politically damaging, but not criminal conduct.” 

Unfortunately for Team Trump, we know that as lawyers leave the investigation, they may be assigned to prosecute cases against individuals who have been identified by the probe as having criminal liability. Two prosecutors who have left the Mueller office are pursuing the case against Roger Stone. 

According to the Post, Mueller has always viewed his job as that of an investigator not a prosecutor. That means evidence he and his team gather may be handed to other federal authorities for continuing action. Or, as Winston Churchill once said, “This is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.” 

We found out today that two more potential witnesses in the Russia/Trump saga, whether a story of felonious behavior or financial sleaze, have been identified (to the public). As CNN explains, Senate investigators have been seeking for months to question a Moscow-based American businessman whose ties to Trump go back to 1996. For some odd reason, that businessman, David Geovanis, is not anxious to return to the U.S. 

The facts are straightforward, the bizarre possibilities many. Geovanis helped organize a 1996 trip to Moscow by Trump, when Trump was not yet tinted orange, but already dreamed of building a Trump Tower Moscow. Later Geovanis worked for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The oligarch’s ties to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort have riveted investigators. 

What makes the story even more fun is that witnesses called to testify before the Senate Judicial Committee told CNN they were asked about a photograph from that period. In it, Geovanis is seen posing with three scantily clad women. “The portrait, once displayed in a Russian gallery under the title ‘The Capitalist,’ depicts the subjects in front of a picture of the former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. It’s not clear whether the portrait is a single photograph or a composite,” CNN notes. 

A third witness “has alleged in written testimony, seen by CNN, that Geovanis may be valuable in the mystery of whether Russia has material on Trump that could be personally embarrassing to him.” 

Geovanis was born in Brockton, Massachusetts. Like Trump he went to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He landed in Moscow and went to work for a Russian outfit called Brooke Group, which owned land earmarked for the site of a proposed Trump Tower. “When Trump came to town to promote the project, sources say, it was Geovanis’ job to show him around.” 

You know, show him the World War II monuments, take him to the zoo – maybe line up some hookers? 

 

A mysterious call that went to Howard Lorber. 

That “hookers” part is just a liberal blogger’s joke. Still, it’s worth noting that the owners of Brooke Group were Bennett LeBow and Howard Lorber. Both were big donors to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Lorber became a person of interest in the investigation recently when it was revealed that a mysterious phone call had gone to his number. That call was one of three Don Jr. made before, during and after a secret meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in June 2016. 

So, let’s just say: Wow! 

Here’s the photo that Senate investigators wanted to know about – and just for fun, I think you should imagine Donald J. Trump standing there, himself, “The Capitalist” in every sense of the word.

 

Then imagine the sultry Russian women cavorting with a younger, less jowly version of our president under the sheets.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (5/18/2022): Mr. Geovanis seems to have slipped from the news after this story broke. A U.S. Senate report released in August 2020, when Republicans controlled the investigating committees, did mention him. A couple of fresh tidbits of note: In 2007, Citizen Trump sent Vladimir Putin a love letter. “As you have probably heard, I am a big fan of yours,” Trump wrote, after Putin was chosen Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.” 

He even underlined “big fan” in pen. 

The Senate report also noted that Geovanis had said he believed Trump may have had a “brief romantic relationship” with a former Miss Russia, during his stay in Moscow; but this was never proven. The report goes on to say that Geovanis had known “ties to Kremlin-linked oligarchs” and contacts that are “associated with Russia’s intelligence and security services.” The Senate report adds, “Geovanis also has a reputation in Moscow for a pattern of conduct regarding women that could make him, and potentially those around him, vulnerable to kompromat operations.” 

Not much else turns up when I do a quick internet search on Geovanis. Wikipedia says he became a Russian citizen in 2014. I don’t see any stories about him after the August 2020 report. We can report, however, that Mr. Geovanis never got within reach of Senate investigators. If he has ever traveled to this country again, it is unknown to us.

___

2/22/19: President Trump proves once more that he is one of the least-informed human beings ever to take a seat – and that includes visitors – in the Oval Office. Reporters ask him about voter fraud in North Carolina. That is: Republican orchestrated, proven voter fraud. Trump responds by saying he’s opposed to all voter fraud, including made up voter fraud cases. 

For example: Texas! (See: 1/31/19.) 

It turns out Mark Harris, the Republican candidate in the Ninth Congressional District in North Carolina, was warned by his son (a lawyer) that he was breaking a variety of campaign laws. Dad decided to break them anyway. He rolled up a 905-vote victory margin, out of a total of 275,000 votes cast. Next stop, Washington D.C. where Harris planned to help drain the swamp. 

Instead, an elections board voted unanimously to overturn the results and called for a new election.

 

* 

YET ANOTHER former Trump campaign aide is fighting enforcement of a non-disclosure agreement, which all persons working for this president are required to sign, even though courts may decide such NDA’s are illegal in the realm of government. The aide in this case is Jessica Denson, who ran into trouble in the early days of the Trump administration. 

Her claim is that her boss, Camilo Sandoval, a former senior staffer at Veterans Affairs, harassed her and then tried to steal and hack her electronic devices. Denson alleges that Sandoval tried to engage others in a plan to snatch her personal laptop, and slandered her reputation. 

“I went to the campaign, thinking that they would support and protect me, and instead the chief information officer, Jeff DeWit, and the human resources director, Lucia Castellano, completely retaliated against me,” she alleges, “took away all the work I was doing, banned me from Trump Tower, told people to keep me away from Donald Trump and ultimately prevented me from being able to continue any kind of career or opportunity to serve in the administration.” 

“In retrospect,” she tells CNN, “what I feel is that these NDAs created an environment where people like Camilo Sandoval, who wanted to commit abuses on other people, felt they could act with impunity and engage in illegal conduct [emphasis added] and it would never see the light of day.”

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: The Trump campaign eventually sued Denson for $50,000, for violating her NDA, and won a temporary judgement. During the 2020 campaign, Denson lambasted the president. She described Trump’s first campaign as “a vile, self-serving branding exercise for one man and his family.” 

On March 31, 2021, a federal court ruled, in a class action lawsuit filed on her behalf, that the NDAs required by the Trump campaign stood in violation of free speech guarantees in the First Amendment.)

___ 

 

2/23/19: Another ordinary weekend in Trumpistan, which means extraordinary lunacy on display.

 

____________________ 

Almost every scientist in the world knows it’s a serious subject.

____________________ 

 

Cow farts are in the news. “Cow farts” is the new “death panels for granny” phrase which the right will trot out to stupefy the uninformed and banish complex thought from right-wing craniums. After all, you can’t expect Trump fans to read a lengthy NASA report or count all the countries that believe climate change is a threat. You’re not going to hear Sean Hannity talk about the gaping hole in the Thwaites Glacier. You’re going to hear Fox News pundits boil down the Green New Deal to the God-given right of Americans to own flatulent bovines, instead. 

At that point it’s not a serious discussion, whereas almost every scientist in the world knows it’s a serious subject. 

What we must do is unclear. So, you could discuss detailed scientific reports related to climate change, from NOAA or the Department of Defense. Or you could do what President Trump just did. 

Having nominated Heather Nauert, a former Fox News babe, to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, he was forced to try again after she withdrew from consideration. 

Oh, please, please, tell me there’s an illegal immigrant in her story! Not exactly, but close! Nauert had long employed a nanny who was in the United States legally, but lacked papers required to work. That meant if Nauert filed tax documents the truth would out. So Nauert decided not to file the documents or mention the nanny while serving as spokeswoman for the State Department for two years. 

Once the promotion to ambassador was offered the back taxes were paid, but the damage was done. And there it was again: A Trump official undercutting American wages by hiring immigrant help. 

Just like Trump. 

 

Trump nominates climate change denier as U.N. ambassador. 

So Nauert was out and, ta da! Kelly Knight Craft was in! The new nominee is qualified for the U.N. post based on two criteria. First, she and her husband Joseph Craft III are big donors to the GOP. Second, she’s a climate change denier and Mr. Craft owns a big coal company in Kentucky. Asked in 2017, if she thought climate change was an issue, Ms. Craft did not reply, “Well, yes, because 2017, 2016 and 2015 have been the three hottest years ever recorded.” 

She did not say, “Nearly 200 countries agree climate change is a threat and under this president we are the only nation in the world to withdraw from talks on the issue.” 

Instead, she gave the: my-husband-sells-coal-and-so-I-will-give-you-a-cow-farts-type-of-response. “I believe there are scientists on both sides [emphasis added] that are accurate,” Ms. Craft said. “I think that both sides have their own results, from their studies, and I appreciate and I respect both sides of the science.” 

That is exactly the kind of answer you’d expect from the ill-informed, unqualified-for-her-post-wife of a coal baron. 

Mr. Craft isn’t just a coal baron. He’s a really powerful coal baron. If he cares about the future of the planet, he cares about being rich far more. Last year, he earned $1,361,390 for his work at Alliance Holding GP. He is “a former Chairman and current Board member of the National Coal Council, a Board Member of the National Mining Association, and a Director and current Chairman of American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.” Craft was, until 2012, a billionaire. A divorce from his first wife knocked him off the billionaire pedestal and left him a pauper with a paltry $625 million. You figure he needed the fat tax cuts he got under the Trump Tax Plan. 

You might imagine that this story about Ms. Craft would be the only time you heard about climate deniers all week. With the Trump administration you would be wrong. The New York Times acquired a memo indicating that a Presidential Committee on Climate Security will soon be impaneled, consisting of 12 individuals, including William Happer, who is to head the team. 

As Newsweek explains, Happer is, shall we say, “out there” when it comes to the topic of climate change: 

[The] Princeton physicist is a known climate change denier, who once compared the “demonization of carbon dioxide” to the “demonization of poor Jews under Hitler.”

 

In 2015, Happer made news after undercover members of the environmental campaign group Greenpeace posed as oil company representatives and persuaded him to write a scientific paper, The New York Times reported. He assured them it would be an unpaid “labor of love.”

 

Happer told the Greenpeace members, whom he believed were from an unnamed oil company: “More CO₂ will benefit the world. The only way to limit CO₂ would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”

___

 

 2/24/19: Did someone just say, “immorality?” Today we learn that a federal judge has accused current Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta of violating the rights of sexual abuse victims. The case involves a non-prosecution agreement worked out in 2008 with Jeffrey Epstein. 

 

He was facing life in prison if he went to trial. 

Let the Miami Herald tell you who he is:  

Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls – with the help of young female recruiters – to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.

 

If you don’t think this story has enough to interest conspiracy theorists of all political persuasions, consider this: 

The eccentric hedge fund manager, whose friends included former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show.

 

The more you read about Epstein, the more disgusting the story becomes. He was facing life in prison if he went to trial. Acosta, the man in charge of the case, met him privately for breakfast and a deal was struck. 

Epstein would serve 13 months in a county jail; but the non-prosecution agreement would shut down an F.B.I. investigation looking for additional victims and likely to uncover powerful individuals who had participate. Epstein plead guilty to two charges of soliciting prostitution. The agreement was kept secret from his victims, some as young as 13. That meant none of them and none of their lawyers would show up in court and protest the deal. 

In a second article, the Herald offered up the sordid details of the molestation of as many as 102 middle school and high school girls. 

The girls arrived, sometimes by taxi, for trysts at all hours of the day and night. Few were told much more than that they would be paid to give an old man a massage – and that he might ask them to strip down to their underwear or get naked. But what began as a massage often led to masturbation, oral sex, intercourse and other sex acts, police and court records show. The alleged abuse dates back to 2001 and went on for years.

 

Yet, as the Herald notes, Acosta was on a list of possible replacements for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. 

Asked Friday about the matter, President Trump shrugged and offered Acosta his support. “I really don’t know too much about it,” he told reporters gathered in the Oval Office. “I know he’s done a great job as labor secretary, and that [series of crimes] seems like a long time ago.” 

Unless you were the victim, of course.

 

* 

SINCE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC of “sex crimes,” let’s add Robert Kraft to the mix. Kraft, 77, is famous for annual appearances at the Super Bowl, where his team, the New England Patriots, always wins. 

Federal and Florida state authorities have now broken up a prostitution ring, allegedly operating behind the façade of day spas, offering hard working rich guys relaxing massages. Kraft is just one of several big names caught up in the story – and supposedly caught on tape. 

What makes the story worse is that almost all of the women working in these spas have been trafficked from China. According to Police Sheriff William Snyder of Martin County, “These women were sleeping in massage parlors, on the massage tables and had no access to transportation.” 

So: no getaways. 

Add in the fact most had limited English, and you had the perfect sex workers and victims. “Sometimes, I would see people outside try to talk to them, and they wouldn’t understand,” said the owner of a business located next to one of the spas. “None of them speak English.” 

Even if convicted, Kraft could get off with a hundred hours of community service. If found guilty, we might want to consider what Sheriff Daryl Loar of Indian River County said about alleged male patrons like Kraft. “These ‘Johns’…were certainly supplying the funds to perpetuate human trafficking [emphasis added]” 

Kraft is a lifelong Democrat; but he’s a friend of Trump and donated a million dollars to his Inaugural Committee, a den of thieves itself. (To be fair, Kraft also donated to President Obama in the past.) 

So why the friendship? Kraft once explained: 

When Myra [his wife] died, Melania and Donald came up to the funeral in our synagogue, then they came for memorial week to visit with me. Then he called me once a week for the whole year, the most depressing year of my life when I was down and out. He called me every week to see how I was doing, invited me to things, tried to lift my spirits. He was one of five or six people that were like that. I remember that.

 

Asked for comment on the matter of Kraft’s weekend arrest, Trump responded, “Well it’s very sad, I was very surprised to see it. He’s proclaimed his innocence totally, but I’m very surprised to see it.” 

 

A liberal and a fan of the rule of law. 

Here’s a tip for Trump and Kraft and Epstein and Acosta and the rest of their kind. All individuals found guilty of participating in sex-trafficking should be thrown in jail. Those who have sex with the victims should pay massive fines or join traffickers in jail, for shorter stays. 

Sympathy should be with victims in every proven case. And if we of a liberal bent believed a wall was a realistic solution to ending sex-trafficking across the border, we’d be in favor. But the women Kraft was allegedly having sex with didn’t come across some desert stretch. Epstein’s victims weren’t immigrant girls. They were teens from South Florida, enticed into his web. 

As a liberal, let me say, I am a fan of law and order. I hope R. Kelly, also accused of abusing young girls, goes to jail and rots – if found guilty, I mean. I’m glad Jussie Smollett’s hoax “hate crime” was revealed and glad he lost his job. I wish the president would say something stronger about real hate crimes, however, and not encourage people like the guy who sent bombs to CNN. 

I hope Kraft pays a hefty fine, at least, for his participation.

 

* 

“Such respect for a brave man…who refused to break.” 

WITH THAT, we come to the end of our comments for the weekend. On Saturday we saw the sentencing documents in the case of Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign manager, and ten-time convicted felon. Prosecutors are calling for Manafort to spend a minimum of 17 ½ years in prison for his crimes. That doesn’t include charges filed against him in a separate venue. 

You can read a summary of Manafort’s misdeeds if you like and ponder the fact that federal prosecutors filed an 800-page document outlining evidence against him. Then you might remember what the president said about the felonious fellow. “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family,” Trump tweeted last August. “‘Justice’ took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break.’” 

“Such respect for a brave man!” Trump added – which seemed to be a hint that he might one day pardon Paul. 

So, let’s end with the idea that by a person’s friends we know them. Manafort has an extensive history of working with shady international characters. He had longstanding ties to Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs when Trump hired him; and you’d think a candidate for president might have checked that out and rejected him. Manafort has been convicted of money laundering and tax fraud. He’s accused of witness tampering last year, in hopes of keeping secret the story of all his contacts with Russians during the 2016 campaign. In court filings Saturday, prosecutors charged that Manafort had shattered a plea agreement and “brazenly violated the law.” 

The sentencing document further stated: 

Manafort chose repeatedly and knowingly to violate the law—whether the laws proscribed garden-variety crimes such as tax fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and bank fraud, or more esoteric laws that he nevertheless was intimately familiar with, such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

 

Manafort, the man the president called “brave,” had shown a “hardened adherence to committing crimes….His criminal actions were bold, some of which were committed while under a spotlight due to his work as the campaign manager and, later, while he was on bail from this Court.” 

So, would the right kind of walls help us with Manafort, Kraft, Epstein, Smollett, and several additional suspects from the Trump 2016 campaign? Yes. Yes, they would. As Don Jr. said recently, “Walls work.” 

This is particularly true when those walls have bars on all the windows.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/7/21): Kraft’s lawyers argued that the tapes from the massage parlor could not be admitted as evidence because police had violated clients’ rights by taping them taking advantage of trafficked women. 

The judge agreed and threw out the evidence; and the case collapsed.

___

 

 2/25/19: President Trump heads for Vietnam this afternoon, in preparation for a second summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, the dictator of North Korea. 

In an effort to get ready, he tweets twenty times in one day and then we find out, sought advice on dealing with North Korea from… 

Oh, for f**k sakes…Russia!

 

____________________ 

“He’s got a great personality. He’s a funny guy, he’s very smart, he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that I’m surprised by that.” 

President Trump

____________________ 

 

If that isn’t bad enough, it can be easy to forget Trump’s earlier bluster; but we must remember. On January 2, 2017, the president-elect tweeted: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!” 

So, he was going to keep us safe in our beds, from the moment he took over, because it wouldn’t happen! 

In April 2017, Trump offered this assessment of the murderous North Korean dictator in an interview on CBS. 

I can tell you this, and a lot of people don’t like when I say it, but he was a young man of 26 or 27 when he took over from his father, when his father died. He’s dealing with obviously very tough people. A lot of people, I’m sure, tried to take that power away, whether it was his uncle or anybody else. And he was able to do it. So obviously, he’s a pretty smart cookie.

 

It helps, of course, if you want to hold power, that you can use an anti-aircraft gun to murder your opponents. 

Still, Trump is impressed. Kim is a “smart cookie.” 

On June 30, 2017, Trump got it right when he responded to a question during a White House meeting with the leader of South Korea. “The North Korean dictatorship has no regard for the safety and security of its people or its neighbors and has no respect for human life [emphasis added, here and below],” he said.  

The two sides proceeded to trade threats and the North fired off a series of missiles, with increasing success. It “wouldn’t happen.” Then it did. The North Koreans now had a missile which could strike the USA. 

On August 8, during a televised meeting in the White House, Trump threatened nuclear war. 

North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening – beyond a normal statement – and as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power the likes of which the world has never seen before.

 

On September 19, Trump tagged Kim as “Rocket Man” during a speech to the United Nations. The North Korean regime was a “band of criminals.” 

Right again. 

 

If you want to be president, it’s going to be a bitch. 

Three days later he complained during a rally that “‘Rocket Man’ should have been handled a long time ago.” 

Okay: getting kind of whiny. 

Someone should tell the president that diplomacy is always a bitch. It was a bitch for George W. Bush. It was a bitch for his father and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and – hell, Harry Truman. If you want to be president, it’s going to be a bitch. The Trump administration did what it could, just like presidents and administrations have been doing the best they can to “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian problem since 1948. Under this president it took months for the U.S. to organize a new range of sanctions aimed at North Korea. Naturally, we went to the United Nations and our allies for help: the same as Obama when it came to dealing with Iran. China was pressured to curtail trade with Kim. As with Obama and Iran, sanctions worked imperfectly. 

By February 2018, the president was expressing optimism. “We have imposed the heaviest sanctions ever imposed.” 

(Redundancy is his forte.) 

In May 2018, we learned that Trump and Kim would be holding a summit meeting in Singapore. It was on. It was off. It was on again. Finally, the two met for talks in June. Trump came away giddy with success! Speaking with Greta Van Susteren on June 12, he changed his tune on Kim: 

“He’s got a great personality,” he told her. “He’s a funny guy, he’s very smart, he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that I’m surprised by that. I think that we have the start of an amazing deal. We’re going to denuke North Korea.” 

Van Susteren expressed doubt. 

Trump continued: “I understand the past and, you know, nobody has to tell me, he’s a rough guy. He has to be a rough guy or he has been a rough person. He’s smart, loves his people, he loves his country. He wants a lot of good things and that’s why he’s doing this.” 

This? What was “this?” 

In Trump’s mind a few hours of pleasant talk had solved the crisis. On June 13 he felt the overpowering urge to tweet:

 

The North did indeed cease actual missile testing, a provocation without doubt. They blew up one testing site, which on paper looked good. Then satellite photography indicated they were building new launching sites near the border with China – where we’d be reluctant to strike. 

That was bad. 

By September 30, 2018, however, Trump was telling everyone that Kim was sending him beautiful letters and they had “fallen in love.” He claimed we had been on the verge of war with North Korea before he took over – said Obama told him so – but now he was fixing it all by himself. Kim did not surrender a single nuclear weapon, but for Trump fans that was of no concern. 

let’s recap and consider a few differences in how the story is being covered now. On State of the Union, a CNN Sunday morning show, host Jake Tapper asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to comment. 

“Do you think North Korea remains a nuclear threat?” Tapper asked.

 

“Yes,” Pompeo replied.

 

“But the President said he doesn’t,” Tapper said.

 

“That’s not what he said...I know precisely what he said,” Pompeo said.

 

“He tweeted: ‘There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea,’” Tapper said.

 

“What he said was that the efforts that had been made in Singapore – this commitment that Chairman Kim made – have substantially taken down the risk to the American people. It’s the mission of the Secretary of State and the President of the United States to keep American people secure. We’re aiming to achieve that,” Pompeo said.

 

Again, all well and good. Diplomacy is always a bitch. 

But on Fox News the story was presented with a different slant. On Fox, Pompeo could insist that the current administration was no longer “cowering” before the North Korean threat. 

Okay, let’s be clear. North Korea still has all its nuclear weapons and in 25 months, with Trump in the Oval Office, Kim Jong-un hasn’t surrendered a single weapon, not even a BB gun. 

In fact, our president now says he’s not in any rush to disarm the North. According to Fox News, 

At a black-tie gathering of governors at the White House on Sunday evening, Trump said that he and Kim had “developed a very, very good relationship.”

 

“We see eye-to-eye, I believe, but you’ll be seeing it more and more over the next couple of days,” the president said. “I don’t want to rush anybody, I just don’t want testing. As long as there’s no testing, we’re happy.”

 

So it is, on Fox, that this is billed as tremendous progress. Trump is a genius on a world stage. If North Korea has nuclear weapons, but doesn’t flaunt them, we should re-elect Donald in 2020, and 2024, for good measure. When Fox reports, and you decide, they want you to decide that Obama was “cowering” when he couldn’t get the North to give up weapons – which it got when George W. Bush was in office. Plus, Obama was a terrible leader when he worked to impose harsh sanctions on Iran. And Obama was terrible when China, Russia and our key allies backed a deal which kept Iran from getting any nuclear weapons during the eight years he was in office, and that deal is still working today, even though Trump reneged on the U.S. part of the pact. 

So, yes, on Fox, Trump is the best! 

 

Diplomacy is always a bitch. 

Outside newsrooms where pundits practice punditry – in the real world – diplomacy is always a bitch. If you’re a pundit, or a rival politician, you can see what Obama does and when it doesn’t work perfectly, or when it sometimes doesn’t work at all, you put forward your plan. You claim your plan would have worked perfectly if only the president had listened to you. 

You can’t be proven wrong because your plan can never be put in place and tested and so you will always sound smart. 

Trump isn’t doing any worse than previous presidents in addressing the North Korean threat. He might end up doing better if he has time. The problem is that when it comes to diplomacy, Putin, Kim, and Prince Mohammed bin Salman have found that they can play the president for a sap. All they need to do is pander to his ego. That means there’s a real risk Trump could be fooled again in Hanoi. Meanwhile, new satellite images indicate that “North Korea’s main nuclear reactor for making weapons-grade plutonium may be operating” right now. 

And that’s with Donald J. Trump headed that way.

___

 

 

2/26/19: The president is getting settled in Vietnam, in preparation for the summit with Kim Jong-un. 

____________________ 

Five-sigma level certainty on climate change.

____________________ 

 

Meanwhile, scientists report that evidence for man-made global warming has reached a “gold standard” level of certainty. As Reuters explains, scientists, “said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a ‘five-sigma’ level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming.” 

So, you can say, like Trump’s new pick for U.N. ambassador, that there is “good science” on both sides of the issue. You have one chance that human-caused climate change is not really occurring. 

And let’s burn more coal! (See: 2/23-24/19.) 

Or you have 999,999 chances that human-caused climate change is occurring and talking about cow gas means you’re an ignoramus. See, for example: Sean Hannity’s show. Writing in the journal Nature, a U.S.-led team studying the matter warned, “Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals.”

 

Benjamin Santer, lead author of Monday’s study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he hoped the findings would win over skeptics and spur action.

 

“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” he told Reuters. “We do.”

 

It might not be clear what must be done to address the threat, or what sacrifices will be required and by whom. Of this much, scientists are clear. Burning fossil fuels has led to more floods, more droughts, more heat waves, and rising sea levels. 

In this case, experts from the United States, Canada and Scotland studied satellite data in drawing up conclusions. 

For his part, President Trump serves up what precious little he knows in simplistic tweets. 

In a July 2018 poll, 90 percent of Democrats (going with the 999,999 chances) said they believed there is solid evidence of global climate change. For Republicans (banking on the other chance), it was 50 percent. 

In fact, as recently as 2014, the United States led the world in climate deniers and led by a wide margin. 

* 

SINCE OUR TOPIC TODAY is lack of understanding, let’s go with what clueless Presidential Assistant Ivanka Trump said during an interview today. 

Asked about her father’s plans for the next two years, she said dad was a genius, whereas Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a nincompoop, and all wrong with her socialist, handouts-for-all plans for struggling Americans. 

(I am paraphrasing.) 

Referring to the congresswoman, who grew up in a middle class neighborhood in New York City, and worked as a bartender to pay bills after college, Ivanka explained, “I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years. People want to work for what they get.” 

Just as she did as the struggling daughter of a self-proclaimed billionaire – who then worked her way to the top, and landed a White House position by virtue of her DNA matching her father’s.

___

 

 

2/27/19: “Disgraced felon” Michael Cohen is set to testify publicly before the House Oversight Committee. 

It’s interesting to note that the term “disgraced felon” is coming from Press Secretary Pinocchio and other White House aides. That makes me wonder. Aren’t all felons “disgraced?” 

Or: just the felons who might have dirt on President Trump, both before he took office and after?

 

* 

PERHAPS you are familiar with the famous words of Pastor Martin Niemöller. Having watched the rise of the Nazis in Germany he summed up their march to power and tyranny this way: 

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist.

 

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist.

 

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew.

 

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.

 

This week, former White House advisor Sebastian Gorka decided to offer up his own variation of this tale, in an effort to scare the right-wing base. In Gorka’s eyes, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a Nazi in waiting, because she wanted to address climate change (which, by the way, would be coming for us all.) 

“First,” he offered, “they came for the hamburgers.” 

But he wasn’t a hamburger? Was that his message? 

“Then they came for our condiments?” 

Is that what he was trying to say? 

“Then they came for our sesame seed buns?” 

Yeah. It was a stupid comparison to try to make. But this is Team Trump we’re talking about, so they’re always trying to scare the base.

___ 

 

2/28/19: I think we can all agree that President Trump is having a lousy day. He flew all the way to Hanoi to work some “Art of the Deal” magic. He was going to “denuclearize” North Korea once and for all. This was a mere formality, of course, since he announced last summer that North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat. Now he returns with nothing to show for his trip. North Korea still has all the nuclear weapons it had last week and more than it had last summer. 

Evidence indicates the North may have been running a key reactor and producing additional plutonium while Trump and Kim Jong-un were sitting for dinner in Hanoi. According to multiple reports, including one from Fox News, Kim Jong-un may possess sixty nuclear weapons. 

Normally, I wouldn’t blame any president for this kind of failure. I don’t blame U.S. leaders when they can’t resolve the intractable Israeli/Palestinian issue. I don’t blame Mr. Trump now, save for the fact that he has been insufferable when commenting on his predecessor’s deal with Iran. He has called that deal “insane,” “defective to its core,” “an embarrassment” and “the worst deal ever made.” 

Now Trump, Trump supporters, and Republicans generally, may finally grasp how hard it is to get any kind of deal done with any foreign power in pursuit of nuclear weapons. It would be too much to ask, of course, for anyone from that side to admit that the deal with Iran kept that foreign foe from getting nuclear weapons for two terms of office when President Obama was in charge. Iran abides by most of the terms today. Trump insists he’s “in no rush” to get North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal – which is really admitting he doesn’t know what to do. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Meanwhile, Trump offers up sickening praise for Kim and insists the head of a reflexively repressive police state could not be blamed for the brutal mistreatment and eventual death of Otto Warmbier, a young American held by North Korean police for over a year. (See: March 1, 2019.)

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