July 18, 2018: Russians to the Right, Russians to the Left, Russians Dead Ahead, Sh*tloads of Russians!

 

7/18/18: Who’s sweating profusely today when it comes to the Russia investigation? If you’ve been busy shampooing the dog, several shoes dropped this week. On Friday Special Counsel Robert Mueller dropped combat boots on a dozen Russian military officers charged with influencing the election in 2016. 

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“I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.” 

Candidate Trump

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The White House immediately released a statement saying: Hey, no Americans were indicted for collusion with said Russians! But the White House knew plenty and Trump and his team were praying that Americans heading for the beach or the pool would be too busy slathering on sunscreen to take note. According to the indictment at least one unnamed Trump associate had a series of contacts with Guccifer 2.0, now conclusively shown to be a Russian front. Roger Stone has admitted that unnamed Trump associate is “probably” him. (See: 6/17/18.) 

Ms. Butina.

What other shoes dropped? On Sunday, the F.B.I. arrested Maria Butina, a young Russian. She was charged with working as an unregistered foreign agent, one step removed from an espionage charge. For at least three years Butina is alleged to have acted on U.S. soil in the interests of the Russian Federation. Purportedly a gun-rights activist back home, she wormed her way into the graces of the N.R.A. It may have helped that according to court records she was willing to trade sex in return for access. We know the N.R.A. paid her way to this country more than once so she could speak on gun rights. Her public stance was in favor of private ownership of guns by Russian citizens. 

Butina also went to the trouble to speak on at least one American campus and called Putin “a dictator and a tyrant.” 

That at least was true.

 

Strangely enough, her criticism never led to arrest whenever she returned home. We now know that she rubbed shoulders with a variety of top Republican movers and shakers. She also rubbed other body parts. In one photo, the attractive redhead from Siberia stands smiling next to Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin. In another, she looks fetching in pearls, with N.R.A. president Wayne LaPierre gaping by her side. 

In July 2015 she was in the audience at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. By chance or design she was called on to ask then-candidate-Trump a question. What would his position toward Russia be, she asked, if he were elected? 

Would the sanctions be lifted? 

“I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin…I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin, OK?” Trump told her. “And I mean, where we have the strength. I don’t think you’d need the sanctions. I think we would get along very, very well.” 

In August she was back home when Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, was visiting. The congressman says he can’t remember much about the young lady. Yes, Butina did arrange a breakfast with Alexander Torshin, but all he, your good old congressman, had was tea and toast. 

Because…you know…the waistline. 

No, seriously, Rohrabacher said the breakfast was of “no consequence,” which is probably a good way to cover your ass, if you broke bread with a Russian spy and her Russian spy master.

 

If you do a little digging, you understand why Rohrabacher might be feeling the heat. He is said to have met in early 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya. She’s the Russian lawyer who took part in the Trump Tower meeting that June, a meeting which is of key interest to Mueller’s team. (See: 7/13/18.) 

Well, now, what did Rep. Rohrabacher think about the indictment of Maria, this poor little girl! “It’s ridiculous. It’s stupid,” he fumed. “She’s the assistant of some guy who is the head of the bank and is a member of their Parliament. That’s what we call a spy? That shows you how bogus this whole thing [the Mueller investigation] is.” 

Actually, that “some guy who is the head of the bank” is a seriously shady character. Torshin is one of 24 individuals and 14 Russian companies sanctioned by the Treasury Department in May. 

They ended up on that list because they were individuals and entities that had benefitted “from [ties with] the Putin regime and play a key role in advancing Russia’s malign activities.” 

So, yes, Mr. Rohrabacher – we’re talking malign Russian activities. And you’re just slinging the bull.

 

Who exactly will be squashed by all the falling shoes we cannot yet know. Several Americans would be wise to scurry for cover. We know Torshin is an ally of Putin. This latest indictment (not directly tied to the Mueller investigation, but of obvious interest) makes clear that Torshin was giving Butina orders. Both became life members of the N.R.A., which even the head of the N.R.A. would admit is not a great look. 

Rohrabacher may be in trouble. Some say he’s the congressman in Paragraph 43 of the latest Mueller indictment. (See: 7/13/18.) 

Longtime Republican fixer, Paul Erickson, is likely to get whacked with a size-22 shoe. For some reason he formed a company with Butina in South Dakota in 2016. That company is the subject of a fraud investigation. Erickson is not named in the indictment but is thought to be the unnamed political operative with whom she was said to be coordinating activities. Erickson, almost twice her age, and Butina were shacking up and Erickson had been helping her do homework while she studied (under a student visa gained by lying on her application) at American University. 

 

“Everything has to be quiet and careful.” 

From the official indictment, we know Torshin was telling Butina to play the long game during the 2016 campaign. He advised her “not [to] burn out prematurely.” She admitted she was tired of living with Erickson. (She was also tired of offering to have sex with other men high up in conservative ranks in order to gain political access.) She responded via Twitter: “Only incognito!” That is, she was operating in secret. “Right now everything has to be quiet and careful.” 

“In the F.B.I. affidavit,” The New York Times reports, Ms. Butina assured some unnamed person, likely Erickson, “that the Kremlin had approved her efforts [emphasis added] to connect members of the Trump team with allies or associates of Vladimir Putin. ‘All that we needed was “yes” from Putin’s side.’” 

Later she wrote again to her American contact, “My dearest president [Putin, not Trump] has received ‘the message’ about your group initiatives.”

 

That exchange came in March 2016. So, you can understand why the F.B.I. might have been suspicious. We now know Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos met with what he thought were Russian agents offering dirt on Hillary Clinton that same month. Later he lied about it. 

Stone met his Russian in May. Eventually, he denied meeting with any Russians in testimony before Congress. 

Torshin tried to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin that month. 

In June 2016, Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner took a secret meeting with individuals they knew were Russian agents. 

We know Torshin scored a short meeting with Don Jr. at an N.R.A. convention in May 2016. We know Butina and Torshin attended President Trump’s inauguration. In February 2017, she and Torshin organized a delegation of a dozen Russians to attend the National Prayer Breakfast and hear the Putin Pal President speak. Torshin scored a meeting at the White House later that year. At the last minute, his meeting with Trump was canceled when a White House security aide noticed that Torshin was under investigation for money laundering in Spain.

 

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ON MONDAY, Mueller’s team swatted a big cockroach with a wingtip. Mueller asked a judge for immunity for up to five witnesses to testify in the coming trial of former Trump campaign manager Manafort. That means there are five people who may be compelled to give testimony as witnesses. They are to be granted “use immunity,” which means nothing they say can be used against them. 

They will not be able to plead the Fifth. 

Is it still possible that President Trump will be absolved of all crimes during his campaign? I taught history for decades. I go only with facts I think are proven. He could be innocent. He could be nothing more than a poor dupe. I can’t deny, however, that I think a Nike Mag 2016 basketball shoe (cost: $26,000) may be hovering over his orange, hair-spray-helmeted head.

 

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“I do not believe special counsel Mueller is on a witch hunt. I think it’s a professional investigation conducted by a man that I’ve known to be a straight shooter.” 

F.B.I. Director Wray

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F.B.I. DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER WRAY sits down in front of an audience at the Aspen Security Conference in Colorado. He’ll be taking questions from moderator Lester Holt of NBC. For the third time, over the course of more than a year, including this past May and in June 2017, Wray makes it clear he does not believe the Russia investigation is a witch hunt. 

In the wake of the president’s recent statements in Helsinki, that he believes Putin, then he doesn’t, then he kind of does, you sense exasperation and a real hint of doubt about the innocence of the president in Director Wray’s response. “I do not believe special counsel Mueller is on a witch hunt. I think it’s a professional investigation conducted by a man that I’ve known to be a straight shooter.” 

Remember now. Wray was Trump’s pick to head the F.B.I. He just backed up Mueller 100 percent. 

Holt wonders: “There have also been stories that you threatened to resign. Have you ever hit a point on that issue of sources and methods or anything else when you said, this is a line?” 

Wray replies, “I’m a low-key, understated guy, but that should not be mistaken for what my spine is made out of. I’ll just leave it at that.” 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (8/22/19): Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, resigns from the company and admits having an on-and-off sexual relationship with Ms. Butina for three years. This was at the same time Ms. Butina was living with longtime Republican fixer Paul Erickson. 

Byrne says he only did it for the sake of the country. That was the only reason he had sex with the young redhead. He sacrificed patriotic semen for us all. 

Byrne told an interviewer on Fox Business News, where no story is too stupid to fly, that the F.B.I. encouraged him to boink the babe. 

It was part of a “soft coup” (no pun intended) to undermine Donald J. Trump! “There is a Deep State, like a submarine, lurking just beneath the waves at periscope depth, watching our shipping lanes,” he claimed. “And a nuclear icebreaker named the USS Bill Barr has snuck up on them and is about to ram them at midship.”

December 16, 2019: Trump Wins a Big Award for the Fifth Year in a Row

 

12/16/19: The votes are in and Donald J. Trump, without help from any foreign country, has won for a fifth year in succession. Politifact, a non-profit fact-checking site, recognizes him for telling the “Lie of the Year.”

This year, his winning whopper, oft-repeated, was saying that the whistleblower got his July 25 phone call “almost completely wrong.”

 

This was not Trump’s first win. In 2018 he shared the award with other liars on the right, after claiming that Parkland High School students who were calling for stricter gun control were “crisis actors.” 

The year before that he swept to victory by insisting that Russian meddling in the 2016 election was a “made up story,” a “witch hunt” and “a hoax.” 

That followed his epic win in 2016, when he repeatedly labeled any news story he didn’t like “fake news.” 

That win was part of what would become an impressive streak, since he also won in 2015, for his body of work (Politifact rated 76% of all of Candidate Trump’s claims partly false, false, or “pants-on-fire” false).

 

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IN A COURT FILING this week, lawyers for Purdue Pharma admitted that the Sackler family, which owns the company, had transferred at least $1.36 billion in profits to overseas accounts or affiliated companies. 

The parent company has filed for bankruptcy, to shield itself from 2,600 lawsuits. But the family will always have their memories. 

And at least $1.36 billion.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (4/21/22): Technically, Trump didn’t win in 2020, for “Lie of the Year,” but contributed mightily. The winning whopper was the “infodemic” surrounding the outbreak and spread of COVID-19. All the, “don’t worry, it’s only the flu,” “use hydroxychloroquine and you’ll be fine,” “don’t get the shots, your body will become magnetized,” lumped together, in what the site fact checkers called “junk science.” 

Still, Politifact wasn’t letting the president off the hook. “It was a symphony of counter narrative,” they noted, “and Trump was the conductor, if not the composer.” Trump and others contributed to the deaths of (soon to be) more than a million Americans. 

In 2021, the “Lie of the Year” went not to Trump, although “the election was stolen” lie seeded the field from which the winning lie bloomed. 

This time, the “Lie of the Year” was a collection of falsehoods related to the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6. For example, “it was really a false flag,” operation, or “FBI agents tricked the mob into going on a rampage,” or the people who attacked were really no worse than a group of ordinary tourists.

President Trump and the Coal Miner's Granddaughter

At a March 2016 campaign rally, Hillary Clinton told her audience what was going to happen if she won. “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she said. 

At that point, it was already clear that Donald Trump was the most loathsome man ever to run for the nation’s highest office. I knew Secretary Clinton meant she was going to focus on clean energy. Still, it was a tone deaf comment and I thought to myself, If I was a coal miner, I’d probably vote for Trump too.

I was reminded of that incident again one recent morning. I was driving over to my son’s house because I watch my three-year-old granddaughter on Fridays. On the radio NPR was doing an interview with an Ohio miner. He said Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord gave him a “sense of security.” He had “bills to pay.” He only wanted to provide for his family.

I thought he sounded like any good family man. He cared about his wife and children, just as the rest of us care about ours. And that’s a fundamental element in this story. The problem is this tale doesn’t terminate with one coal miner, or one generation, or one snowball (as we shall see).

This story encompasses one planet.

The decision this week by President Trump, who has no better grip on climate science than my granddaughter—and she can be excused because she’s three!—ignores that final element, that one planet. In my mind, if you don’t sympathize with that Ohio miner something is wrong with you. If he loses his place in the mines, or a thousand peers lose theirs, you should hope he wins the lottery and they all get hired by some good company that will still go ahead and pay them $25 or $30 per hour.

(As a card-carrying liberal, I’m for higher wages for the average worker.)

Unfortunately, our country finds itself saddled with an intellectual dwarf in the White House, a man who thinks not in terms of planets but snowballs. 

That means the coal miner’s granddaughter, and Trump’s grandchildren, and yours, and mine, are all going to pay for his gross stupidity.

Mark Twain once joked that everybody complained about the weather but nobody ever did anything about it. There’s a difference, though between climate and weather which Trump seems incapable of processing, despite his constant complaining.

Suppose you went outside one day and the temperature was twelve degrees above normal. Would that be proof global warming and/or climate change was occurring? You would be a fool to argue a position based on a single day’s weather. Yet that has been the level of sophistication Trump has brought to the topic. Sadly, the man in the Oval Office believes in James Inhofe’s snowball.

If you are not familiar with Inhofe, or his snowball, you can be sure, together, they represented complete and willful ignorance. In the winter of 2015, during a cold snap following a blizzard in the nation’s capital, Inhofe carried a snowball into the U.S. Senate. This was not a random snowball, packed by a lawmaker from Oklahoma, where snow is rare and (according to scientists) earthquakes related to fracking are common.

No. This was a proof.

Inhofe stepped to the podium on a cold January day and offered up juvenile analysis: “In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, do you know what this is?” Inhofe directed his remarks to Sen. Bill Cassidy, presiding over a mostly empty Senate chamber. A good guess at that moment might have been: A moron about to offer up a stunt to fool other morons? Alas, Cassidy, a fellow Republican, was not prepared to comment. In dramatic fashion Inhofe pulled out a plastic bag. He opened it. Inside was a snowball. Inhofe removed it. “It’s a snowball,” he explained, pretty much stating the obvious, even for any morons listening at the time. “And it’s just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”

“We hear the perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” Inhofe continued. He was referring to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). “But now the script has flipped,” he insisted.

Only the script hadn’t flipped.

It still hasn’t.

NASA and NOAA were relying on global data, the kind of data Trump has routinely ignored. According to their records 2014 was the hottest year on record. Not one day. Not one city. Not one fool with one snowball.

One planet.

You could go to the NASA website. You could pull it up on the internet. It’s as easy as packing a bit of snow.

For years, however, Trump has been too lazy or too busy grabbing women to bother with any science. He started seeing snowballs in 2011 when he first plunked down in the camp of the willfully ignorant. That fall he tweeted: “It snowed over 4 inches this past weekend in New York City. It is still October. So much for Global Warming.”

No, sir. 

That would be weather.

In the winter of 2012 he looked outside and spotted Frosty the Snowman, still not melting. “It’s freezing and snowing in New York—we need global warming!”

Again: that would be weather.

In 2013 he used slightly better evidence, mentioning trends for an entire month and an entire country: “Looks like the U.S. will be having the coldest March since 1996—global warming anyone?????????”

Only that still wasn’t climate. The year, itself, globally, proved one of the hottest on record.

Trump’s tiny toes turned blue again in December and it was back to complaining about weather, but not doing anything about it. “Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee—I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” he tweeted.

In 2014 he offered up another nugget of Trumpian wisdom: “Baltimore just set a record for the coldest day in March in a long recorded history -4 degrees. Other places likewise. Global warming con!”

He even backed up Inhofe in January 2015 with this fact-deprived, flailing stab at scientific thinking: “It’s record cold all over the country and world—where the hell is global warming, we need some fast!”

So, was it a hoax? Was 2014 the hottest year ever? 

NASA said it was.

What happened in 2015, the year that began in promising fashion, with James Inhofe’s snowball? Again, relying of worldwide data, from all four seasons, five oceans and seven continents, scientists said it was the new hottest year on record.

NASA reported.

The year did end on a hopeful note when the Paris Climate Accord was ratified and signed by 195 nations. It wasn’t a perfect document, because no human document is. But because the danger was clear, nations united.

By chance, six months before, Trump had opened his campaign for president. As one might have expected, he continued to display a complete lack of understanding of simplest science. At one point he sat down with loyalists at Fox News and said: “Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax.” People who studied it were probably only in it to make “a lot of money.”

Then the numbers were tabulated again—by dedicated men and women at NASA and NOAA. Once more, 2016 turned out to be the new hottest year on record. In fact, sixteen of the hottest seventeen had occurred in this young century. That’s why 194 nations still support the Paris agreement.

As for the United States, we now link arms in solidarity only with rogue nations Nicaragua and Syria.

In the end, we should sympathize with the coal miner and his plight. We should do what we can to help all workers in a similar predicament. But if we blow this battle, as President Trump seems intent on doing, we must surely fear for the coal miner’s granddaughter. 

I know I fear for my grandchildren. 

You should fear for yours.