Russian To Judgment, Con't

I've talked about Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross before, and his ties to Russian money laundering when he was Vice Chairman of Cyprus's largest bank, Bank of Cyprus (always a fun Russian money laundering destination!)  Now that the floodgates have opened on the Mueller probe, we're getting all sorts of new information on Trump regime malfeasance, and Ross is definitely on the list.

A new trove of more than 13 million leaked documents implicates top officials and associates of President Donald Trump—as well as foreign politicians—in shady business relationships tied to offshore financial accounts.

In at least two cases, the documents highlight top administration officials’ previously undisclosed connections to Russia and Kremlin-linked interests.

The so-called Paradise Papers were leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the same publication that obtained the “Panama Papers.” Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the new documents with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which led a global effort of 96 media organizations from 67 countries to pore through the records. The findings were published on Sunday.

The documents show that many of the wealthy individuals Trump brought into his administration have worked to legally store their money in offshore havens where they would be free from taxation in the United States. Trump has promised repeatedly to “drain the swamp,” in condemning the idea that well-connected individuals in Washington, D.C., preserve their own interests at the expense of the rest of the country.

Among the Trump administration officials implicated in the leaks is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who according to the documents concealed his ties to a Russian energy company that is partly owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s judo partner Gennady Timchenko and Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov. Through offshore investments, Ross held a stake in Navigator Holdings, which had a close business relationship with the Russian firm. Ross did not disclose that connection during his confirmation process on Capitol Hill.

“In concealing his interest in these shipping companies—and his ongoing financial relationship with Russian oligarchs—Secretary Ross misled me, the Senate Commerce Committee, and the American people,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said in a statement on Sunday. He characterized Ross’ financial disclosures as a “Russian nesting doll, with blatant conflicts of interest carefully hidden within seemingly innocuous companies.”

Ross has been linked to Russian interests before; in 2014, he poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Bank of Cyprus, an institution regarded by financial watchdogs as a haven for Russian money laundering. Ross became a vice chair of the bank, along with a reported former KGB official. Ross was joined in his investment by the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Former Deutsche Bank executive Josef Ackermann was installed as chairman. Deutsche Bank—one of Trump’s biggest creditors—subsequently paid hundreds of millions to settle disputes that it shipped $10 billion or more to Russia in suspect loans.

Ahh, but Ross isn't alone.

Top White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is also implicated. The documents reveal that Russian tech leader Yuri Milner invested $850,000 in a startup called Cadre that Kushner co-founded in 2014.

Milner has long had a reputation in Silicon Valley as a big-league investor; his firm at one point owned major chunks of both Facebook and Twitter. But Milner was never considered particularly Kremlin-connected. These new documents call that reputation into question. The investing arm of Gazprom, the state-backed energy company, financed a share of Facebook worth up to $1 billion; A Kremlin-owned bank invested $191 million into a Milner firm, and some of that money was then injected into Twitter.

Despite Milner’s investment in his startup, Kushner said in July that he told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door meeting that he never “relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.”

Representatives for Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA), the chairman and vice chairman of the committee, did not immediately return requests for comment. Kushner, who still has a stake in Cadre, did not previously disclose the firm’s other business ties.

So to recap, both Trump's Commerce Secretary and, you know, his son-in-law, are neck deep in Russian money laundering.  No big deal.

But I guarantee you Mueller's been on this trail for months.  Kushner, Ross, the Flynns, Sessions...lots of perjurt, lots of lies to Senate committees, lots of straight up criminal activity.

I still think the Flynns are either cooperating or will soon be.  As to who's next, things get really interesting when we eventually get to Kushner.  That's when Trump will make his move.

Of course, that move could come a lot sooner if it's Trump's own son in the dock.

A Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump’s oldest son last year says he indicated that a law targeting Russia could be re-examined if his father won the election and asked her for written evidence that illegal proceeds went to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, said in a two-and-a-half-hour interview in Moscow that she would tell these and other things to the Senate Judiciary Committee on condition that her answers be made public, something it hasn’t agreed to. She has received scores of questions from the committee, which is investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Veselnitskaya said she’s also ready -- if asked -- to testify to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Her June 9, 2016 encounter with Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign manager Paul Manafort in New York plays a key role in allegations that the campaign worked with Russia to defeat Clinton.

Veselnitskaya said she went to New York to show Trump campaign officials that major Democratic donors had evaded U.S. taxes and to lobby against the so-called Magnitsky law that punishes Russian officials for the murder of a Russian tax accountant who accused the Kremlin of corruption.

Vladimir isn't getting what he wants right now.  He wants sanctions from the Magintsky Act gone and doesn't understand why Trump can't deliver on his promises...so maybe it's time to put some serious pressure on him ahead of the expected Putin-Trump meeting in Vietnam later this week at the Asia-Pacific Economic Council summit.

Having one of his agents saying she will fully cooperate with Mueller on Donny Jr's collusion is about as "pressure" as it gets.

Keep in mind that there's plenty of other Moscow connections to Trump's businesses being investigated too.

Documents released last week as part of Papadopoulos’s guilty plea show that Mueller’s team is deeply interested in the Trump campaign’s operations, including possible links to Moscow, at even the lowest levels. And Mueller’s interest in Russian contacts may extend to Trump’s business, as well, with the special counsel’s office recently asking for records related to a failed 2015 proposal for a Moscow Trump Tower, according to a person familiar with the request.

A key question in the investigation — and one that hangs over Trump’s presidency — is whether these instances add up to a concerted Russian government effort to probe and infiltrate the Trump campaign, or whether they were isolated coincidences and, therefore, inconsequential. Ultimately, Mueller must decide whether anyone in Trump’s orbit coordinated with the Russians, and, if so, if such actions were illegal or just unseemly. Collusion itself is not a crime.

The new court filings, along with recent interviews and other documents reviewed by The Washington Post, reveal more details than were previously known about the extent to which Trump’s campaign became a magnet for people who believed U.S. policy toward Russia should be retooled — and for Russians who agreed.

In all, documents and interviews show there are at least nine Trump associates who had contacts with Russians during the campaign or presidential transition. Some are well-known, and others, such as Papadopoulos, have been more on the periphery. 

We'll see what Mueller, Congress, and America does with this information.  Again, anything directly implicating Trump's family (Kushner or Trump Jr.) forces him to try to make his move to fire Mueller, that's when the real fight begins.  That's coming soon, trust me.

And it's when we decide whether or not we're still in what's left of a representative democracy or a proto-fascist authoritarian regime.

Meanwhile In Bevinstan...

Kentucky GOP House Speaker Jeff Hoover stepped down after Democrats and Republicans alike called for his resignation over news of a sexual harassment settlement with a staffer that broke Friday.

Jeff Hoover resigned his post as speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives Sunday, a day after defiantly rejecting calls to step down by Gov. Matt Bevin and others who said they were disgusted by allegations of sexual harassment against Hoover and three other GOP lawmakers.

A tearful Hoover, with family members looking on, acknowledged that he had “engaged in inappropriate text messages” with a legislative staffer in his office and asked the people of Kentucky “to forgive me for my actions.”

A Jamestown attorney who has been in the House since 1997, Hoover said he never engaged in “unwelcome or unwanted conduct” and “at no time were there ever any sexual relations of any kind.”

Hoover, who was elected in January as the first Republican House speaker since 1921, said that he and the three other lawmakers “absolutely and expressly denied that any sexual harassment had taken place.”

He said he would stay on as representative of the 83rd House District, which includes Clinton, Cumberland, Russell and part of Pulaski counties.

A joint statement from the other House GOP leaders said House Speaker Pro Tem David Osborne of Prospect will assume “operational control” of the House.

The House Republican leadership team said it will meet with legal counsel Monday to assess staff members mentioned in the sexual harassment scandal.

“This is an unfolding situation and no one in the Capitol has all the facts” said the leadership team.

The team also thanked Hoover for his service as speaker and for agreeing to resign.

“A protracted fight among the leaders of the Republican Party, entrusted by the voters to govern this state, is not in the best interest of our commonwealth,” it said.

There was no immediate comment from Bevin.

Louisville attorney Thomas Clay, who represented the legislative staffer who complained against Hoover, confirmed Sunday that she had entered into mediation with Hoover’s attorney and was satisfied with the outcome. He did not elaborate.

I would have liked to see Hoover lose his job altogether, but that will be up to Kentuckians in his district next November.

Also, the three other GOP state lawmakers mentioned were all three committee chairs, they will be relieved of their chairmanships pending a formal House investigation.

It also means any chance of a special legislative session for Bevin's pension grab plan is now super, super dead.  Kentucky Democrats responded strongly:


It's good to see Kentucky Dems stand up for the actual victims here, the women Hoover and his gang harassed. I don't feel sorry for Hoover for one bit.

It's too much to hope for jail time, but I'd settle for these men never holding office again.

StupidiNews!

• At least 26 people were killed as a gunman opened fire in a Texas church service in the small town of Sutherland Springs, the gunman fled and was later killed by police.
• The US Navy's "Fat Leonard" bribery scandal has now expanded to include 440 active-duty and retired Navy personnel, including 60 current and former admirals.
• The death toll in Vietnam from Typhoon Damfrey has risen to 49 and more deaths are expected from storm flooding, just days before Donald Trump arrives for the APEC summit in Danang.
• The House GOP tax bill goes to committee this week, where GOP House Ways and Means chair Rep. Kevin Brady says he will be making substantial changes to the legislation.
• The Trump regime wants to reopen the possibility of new uranium mining on National Forest land by overturning a 2012 Obama directive to protect Grand Canyon lands.

Last Call For Neighbors: The Movie, Con't

So it wasn't just a small altercation Rand Paul got into with his neighbor on Friday, it was a beating that resulted in Paul ending up with five broken ribs.

A senior adviser for Rand Paul says the U.S. senator is recovering from five broken ribs following an assault at his home.

Doug Stafford said it is unclear when Paul will return to work since he is in considerable pain and has difficulty getting around, including flying. Stafford said Sunday that the broken ribs include three displaced fractures, which can lead to life-threatening injuries. The severe pain can last for weeks or months.

Police arrested 59-year-old Rene Boucher on Saturday and charged him with misdemeanor fourth-degree assault with a minor injury. Boucher is accused of attacking Paul on Friday, but officials have not released a motive.

Boucher lives next door to Paul and his wife, according to Warren County property records.

Boucher was released from jail on Saturday. He has not returned a call seeking comment.

Violence in politics is nothing new, but dear god, five broken ribs?  What did Boucher do, hit him with a baseball bat?  This could have killed the guy.  I hate Rand Paul with a passion but the guy doesn't deserve broken ribs.

The hell is wrong with you, Bowling Green?

It's Mueller Time, Con't

NBC News is all but reporting that former Trump NSA Michael Flynn and his son Michael Jr. are the next targets in the ongoing Russia probe, and that the evidence is there for charges to be filed.

Federal investigators have gathered enough evidence to bring charges in their investigation of President Donald Trump's former national security adviser and his son as part of the probe into Russia's intervention in the 2016 election, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation.

Michael T. Flynn, who was fired after just 24 days on the job, was one of the first Trump associates to come under scrutiny in the federal probe now led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

Mueller is applying renewed pressure on Flynn following his indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, three sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.

The investigators are speaking to multiple witnesses in coming days to gain more information surrounding Flynn's lobbying work, including whether he laundered money or lied to federal agents about his overseas contacts, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.

Mueller's team is also examining whether Flynn attempted to orchestrate the removal of a chief rival of Turkish President Recep Erdogan from the U.S. to Turkey in exchange for millions of dollars, two officials said.

A spokesperson for the special counsel had no comment.

Flynn's son, Michael G. Flynn, who worked closely with his father, accompanied him during the campaign and briefly worked on the presidential transition, could be indicted separately or at the same time as his father, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.

If the elder Flynn is willing to cooperate with investigators in order to help his son, two of the sources said, it could also change his own fate, potentially limiting any legal consequences.

The pressure on Flynn is the latest signal that Mueller is moving at a rapid, and steady, pace in his investigation. Last week, investigators unsealed indictments of Manafort and Manafort's business partner Rick Gates. They pleaded not guilty.

Once again, Mueller has a lot to work with and a lot of people to get even more information from.  If Michael Flynn is willing to cooperate in order to save his son from prison, that could bring new information that he had access to as National Security Adviser, mainly involving Trump's relationship with Russia and Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

Other sources are reporting that Flynn is already cooperating and has been for some time (which is why Manafort and Gates were charged before either of the Flynns, who were more germane to the Russia case than Manafort.)  If that's true, then things are moving even faster than I expected.  News on Flynn's fate may even come as early as this week.

Stay tuned.  It could be Mueller Time again very soon.

Sunday Long Read: A Drity River Runs Through It

I've talked about Portland before, America's whitest major city by a mile with a 72% white populace and one of the most segregated cities in America.  Now the city is trying to fix its long history of racism by starting with environmental justice and cleaning up the badly polluted Willamette River.

When Wilma Alcock was young, she fished the Willamette River nearly every weekend. Her favorite spot was Mock’s Bottom—a crescent of land that lies at the base of the steep bluffs along Willamette Boulevard. It has since been swallowed up by the Swan Island Industrial Park, but back then it was just marshy riverbank.

On warm summer evenings and crisp fall days, Alcock clambered down to the water to dip her line in the lazy current. She caught bluegills, ring-tail perch, and crappie—a tasty black and white speckled sunfish. “We used to catch them plentiful,” Alcock recalls. Now seventy-nine and retired after a career in nursing and childcare, she has an infectious laugh, short white hair, and smooth skin that belies her age.

Alcock grew up fishing, like many people of her generation in Portland’s African American community. She learned from her father, who always called her Bill. “You know, Wilma, William, Bill,” she explains. She got a cane pole at age eight and baited her first worm not long after. That’s when, she says, the “first little bit of callousness” came into her life. She knew how to cast by ten and has fished ever since.

But Alcock stopped fishing the Willamette in the 1970s. Part of the reason was that she was busy raising her four children. But it was also because the river had become so polluted that her catch was visibly unhealthy. “You didn’t need nobody to tell you not to eat the fish,” Alcock says.

Signs warning against eating fish from the Willamette eventually went up in 2004, four years after the Environmental Protection Agency declared the Portland Harbor a federal Superfund site—a ten-mile reach from the Broadway Bridge to Sauvie Island. While salmon and other migratory fish are safe to eat, the Oregon Health Authority advises healthy adults to eat a maximum of one meal of resident fish per month. For children and pregnant or nursing women, that number is zero.

The EPA has now released a plan to clean up the river after sixteen years of environmental studies. Three million cubic yards of contaminated sediments will be dredged from the river and more will be either removed from the banks or sealed in place. The cleanup will take thirteen years and cost polluters at least a billion dollars, but it will make the fish safer to eat and hasten the recovery of the river’s ecosystem.

Environmental justice advocates also see the cleanup effort as an opportunity to do right by those who have suffered the most from the pollution. Although the contamination has affected everyone who uses the Willamette, the impacts have fallen disproportionately on those who tend to fish the most: tribal members, people of color, low-income residents, and those from other marginalized groups who rely on the river for food.

Organizations like the Portland Harbor Community Coalition, an alliance of individuals and associations representing Native American, African American, immigrant, refugee, and homeless communities, are trying to ensure that people from impacted groups get access to jobs associated with the billion-dollar project. They also want community members to have a role in monitoring progress and deciding how riverfront real estate should be used after it’s restored.

“We have a chance to actually do something different here,” says Donovan Smith, an African American artist and journalist who serves as PHCC’s media coordinator. (Smith is also a contributor to Oregon Humanities' This Land project.)

Many in Portland’s Black community say the cleanup offers a way to reclaim a connection to the Willamette River. That connection began with World War II shipyards and continued over decades spent living along the water and fishing. But the bond suffered as pollution made the fish unsafe and economic changes pushed many African Americans out of neighborhoods near the river. Many say the connection has been lost.

“It all kind of just blends together with all the displacement, the gentrification,” says Alcock, a PHCC member with deep ties to the river. “All of it is just one big old ball.”

It's a start, and there are plenty of old wounds in Portland and in Oregon in general, a state founded by white supremacists and a city that had racial exclusion laws worse than any Jim Crow Southern state.

But it's a start.  Portland still has a long, long way to go.

The Fulcrum Crumbles In Riyadh

Saudi Arabia's King Salman just cleaned house, in this case pretty much the entire House of Saud, the most notable arrest in Salman's purge is billionaire Prince Alaweed Bin Talal.

Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a prominent member of the county's royal family and a wealthy investor, was arrested on Saturday in connection with a wide-ranging anti-corruption initiative, according to local reports.

Saudi Arabia's King Salman removed a host of prominent officials in a sweeping crackdown, in which dozens of princes and former ministers were detained. News outlets, including Saudi-owned Al Arabiya, and The Wall Street Journal, reported Bin Talal was among those arrested. CNBC could not immediately confirm Bin Talal's status.

Bin Talal is considered one of the most prominent members of the Saudi royal family, and has been the subject of numerous profiles in U.S. and international publications. He has made numerous appearances on CNBC dispensing investment advice — such as last month, when he predicted bitcoin was little more than a speculative bubble that would soon "implode"

The billionaire is an American-educated philanthropist and investor who is heavily invested in U.S. corporate giants like Citigroup, Apple, 21st Century Fox and Twitter, just to name a few. Between 1991 and 1995, bin Talal came to the rescue of President Donald Trump, whose real estate empire was under strain. Bin Talal purchased a yacht, and invested in Trump's Plaza Hotel.

It's that last part that I think is a big part of the puzzle. Don't forget that this action is coming on the heels of last week's announcement of a massive new half-trillion dollar Saudi mega-city project.  That level of grandeur would almost certainly attract massive corruption, but King Salman got his house in order.

Literally.

And later Saturday a missile attack from Yemen was intercepted.

Saudi Arabia says it has intercepted a ballistic missile fired from Yemen, after a loud explosion was heard near Riyadh airport on Saturday evening.

The missile was destroyed over the capital and fragments landed in the airport area, officials quoted by the official Saudi Press Agency said.

A TV channel linked to Houthi rebels in Yemen said the missile was fired at the King Khalid International Airport.

The civil aviation authority said that air traffic was not disrupted.

Saudi forces have reported shooting down Houthi missiles in the past , though none has come so close to a major population centre.

Not to mention Lebanese PM Saad al-Hariri resigning out of fear of assassination.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has resigned, saying in a televised broadcast from Saudi Arabia that he feared for his life, while also fiercely criticising Iran.

He accused Iran of sowing "fear and destruction" in several countries, including Lebanon.

Mr Hariri's father, former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, was assassinated in 2005.

The Hariri family is close to Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional competitor.

Mr Hariri has been prime minister since December 2016, after previously holding the position between 2009 and 2011.

"We are living in a climate similar to the atmosphere that prevailed before the assassination of martyr Rafik al-Hariri," he said in the broadcast from the Saudi capital Riyadh.

"I have sensed what is being plotted covertly to target my life."

Mr Hariri also attacked the Iran-backed Shia movement Hezbollah, which wields considerable power in Lebanon.

Addressing "Iran and its followers" he said Lebanon would "cut off the hands that wickedly extend into it".

Iran said the resignation would create regional tensions and rejected Mr Hariri's accusations as "unfounded".

As a good friend has reminded me, all this is connected.  The shadow war between Riyadh and Tehran is old and ugly, and just because it's the 21st century doesn't mean it's any less dangerous.  The Saudis have been making moves all throughout 2017 in order to consolidate power and shut out Iran.  That mega-city project is the future as oil dies in the sands, and King Salman isn't taking any chances that his family is going to try to screw him over on it.

Everyone left is 100% on board, or soon will be.  The House of Saud is moving forward because they're running out of time.  Trump may be taking America back to a fossil fuel nightmare, but the Saudis aren't as stupid.

Let's not kid ourselves though, as the Saudis remain a brutally oppressive theocratic monarchy with deadly authoritarian tendencies.  They are not our buddies, or anyone's buddies for that matter, they are part and parcel of the problem in the Middle East for the last several decades, and that power they wield comes from oil.

But what this really comes down to is the fact that Jared Kushner was in Saudi Arabia last week.  The last time Kushner was in Saudi Arabia, we got the whole Qatar mess.  Now, days after his latest visit to Riyadh, we have a massive purge including a Saudi business billionaire who has a long-running feud with one Donald Trump.

Prince Alwaleed was giving interviews to the Western news media as recently as late last month about subjects like so-called crypto currencies and Saudi Arabia’s plans for a public offering of shares in its state oil company, Aramco. 

He has also recently sparred publicly with President Donald J. Trump. The prince was part of a group of investors who bought control of the Plaza Hotel in New York from Mr. Trump, and he also bought an expensive yacht from him as well. But in a twitter message in 2015 the prince called Mr. Trump “a disgrace not only to the GOP but to all America.” 

Mr. Trump fired back, also on Twitter, that “Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal wants to control our U.S. politicians with daddy’s money.”

And Trump tweeted today about a new IPO by Aramco here in the US.  Out of the blue.

You do the math.

Last Call For Neighbors: The Movie

Seems Rand Paul had a bit of an altercation with a neighbor out in Warren County because, well, people really should beat up senators at all, that's bad, but hey, America's a different place now.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is recovering after being assaulted at his Kentucky home on Friday, joining a growing list of lawmakers who have been injured or threatened with violence this year.

Paul, a second-term senator, suffered a minor injury when he was assaulted at his Warren County, Ky., home Friday afternoon. Kelsey Cooper, Paul’s Kentucky-based communications director, said in a statement Saturday that the senator “was blindsided and the victim of an assault. The assailant was arrested, and it is now a matter for the police.”

Kentucky State Police charged 59-year-old Rene Boucher with fourth-degree assault with a minor injury. He is being held at Warren County jail on $5,000 bond, state police said.

Paul and Boucher live in the same gated community along Rivergreen Lane in Bowling Green, Ky., according to two people close to Paul who asked for anonymity out of respect for the senator. Boucher is an anesthesiologist who has been recovering from injuries related to a recent bike accident, according to one of the people close to Paul.

He is the inventor of the Therm-a-Vest, a cloth vest partially filled with rice and secured with Velcro straps that is designed help with back pain, according to the Bowling Green Daily News.

Troopers responded to Paul’s residence at 3:21 p.m. on Friday after reports of an assault. Upon arrival, troops determined Boucher “had intentionally assaulted Paul causing a minor injury,” state police said.

Paul, 54, has served in the Senate since 2011. He is an ophthalmologist who has practiced in Bowling Green, Ky., where he moved with his wife in 1993. He ran unsuccessfully for president in 2016, focusing the closing months of his bid on attacking then-candidate Donald Trump and his readiness for office. In recent months, he was a lead opponent of Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But more, recently Paul has emerged as a leading defender of Trump’s policies and has golfed with the president at Trump’s Virginia golf course.

It’s unclear whether the attack against Paul was politically motivated. But an unprecedented wave of threats against House and Senate lawmakers this year has prompted congressional security officials to review and follow up on thousands of threatening messages to members of both parties.

There's no excuse for assault, none, period, sorry.  Boucher is probably going to be spending a lot of time thinking about what he did in decidedly substandard housing conditions.  Especially after the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise earlier this year, I have to say that I hope this guy gets the full weight of the law hammering him down.

Political disagreements are one thing, physical violence is entirely another.

And yeah, I know this means punching Nazis is wrong.  It also means it's going to have consequences when you do it.

I loathe Rand Paul, he's caused damage to me personally with his voting record, but I'm not going to beat him with assault.  I'm going to beat him by voting against him and getting other Kentuckians to do the same.

Turtling Up To Tear It Down

If you're still expecting Mitch McConnell to lift a finger to protect Robert Mueller's job as special counsel or to rein in social media giants, remember he's a Republican, and he only cares about empowering Trump and stealing power.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Saturday that special counsel Robert Mueller is not in need of congressional protection from President Donald Trump.

"I don’t hear much pressure to pass anything," McConnell told MSNBC's Hugh Hewitt. "There’s been no indication that the President or the White House are not cooperating with the special counsel."

McConnell added, "I think the view up here is let him do his job."

Senators on both sides of the aisle have introduced bills to shield Mueller, whose investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential collusion between Moscow and Trump's campaign yielded two indictments and an unsealed guilty plea this week.

But those proposals have stalled in the chamber. And given that McConnell determines what bills get floor time in the Senate, it seems unlikely that will change.

He also doesn't care about Russian interference in social media.

McConnell also threw cold water on legislation requiring social media companies to disclose who pays for ads — part of a bipartisan effort intended to thwart future Russian attempts to secretly interfere in an election.

"I’m a little skeptical of these disclosure-type proposals that are floating around, which strikes me would mostly penalize American citizens trying to use the internet and to advertise," McConnell told Hewitt.

McConnell has a long history of pushing back on campaign finance regulations he sees as a threat to the First Amendment.

Asked by Hewitt if he would support a 9/11-style commission that looks at some of these issues, which Graham has floated, McConnell suggested it wasn't needed. "Yeah, I don’t know whether we need some special entity to do it or not. We have committees here."

Nothing will change until McConnell is removed from power.  Count on that.  The only reason he hasn't already killed the investigation is because it's still possibly a useful tool to hurt the Democrats with.  Once that ceases to be, expect Mueller to be dismissed.

Vladimir's Build-A-Troll Factory

Twitter user Jenna Abrams built up 70,000 followers over 3 years, was featured in dozens of stories, and fought with journalists. advocates, and social media stars over immigration and Donald Trump. She was a right-wing troll who championed everything from segregation to Trump.

She was also a 100% manufactured product of Russian intelligence operatives designed to sow political chaos.

Jenna Abrams, the freewheeling American blogger who believed in a return to segregation and said that many of America’s problems stemmed from PC culture run amok, did not exist. 

But Abrams got very real attention from almost any national news outlet you can think of, according to a Daily Beast analysis of her online footprint. 

Abrams, who at one point boasted nearly 70,000 Twitter followers, was featured in articles written by Bustle, U.S. News and World Report, USA Today, several local Fox affiliates, InfoWars, BET, Yahoo Sports, Sky News, IJR, Breitbart, The Washington Post, Mashable,New York Daily News, Quartz, Dallas News, France24, HuffPost, The Daily Caller, The Telegraph, CNN, the BBC, Gizmodo, The Independent, The Daily Dot, The Observer, Business Insider, The National Post, Refinery29, The Times of India, BuzzFeed, The Daily Mail, The New York Times, and, of course, Russia Today and Sputnik. 

Many of these stories had nothing to do with Russia—or politics at all. Instead, stretching back to 2014, Abrams’ account built up an image of a straight-talking, no-nonsense, viral-tweet-writing young American woman. She was featured in articles as diverse as “the 15 funniest tweets this week” to “#FeministAMovie Proves Why Twitter Can’t Have Nice Things.” Then, once she built her following, she would push divisive views on immigration, segregation, and Donald Trump, especially as the 2016 election loomed. 

Abrams’ pervasiveness in American news outlets shows just how much impact Russia’s troll farm had on American discourse in the run-up to the 2016 election—and illustrates how Russian talking points can seep into American mainstream media without even a single dollar spent on advertising.

Remnants from some of Abrams’ most elaborate conspiracies and xenophobic opinions still remain in replies from celebrities sparring with—or agreeing with—her account.
Roseanne Barr responded to one of Abrams’ tweets on Feb. 2, 2016, to call a common enemy “pro-pedophile.” Abrams’ tweet earlier in the day about a Saudi Arabian Starbucks went viral, meriting pickup from The Telegraph and Russia Today, and even a response from Starbucks’ corporate Twitter account. 

Barr elaborated in a tweet later in the month, saying “dems repubs libertarians indies greens, black white yellow red-all religions” are “#PEDOPHILES.” 

Even Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia and an expert in Russian propaganda, got into a number of Twitter spats with Abrams. McFaul responded to Abrams’ posts in 10 separate months between February of 2015 and August of 2016.
Before they knew the account was run by paid disinformation agents, Abrams’ ahistorical slavery revisionism irked journalists and historians alike. 

Al Letson, the host of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal podcast, received over 65,000 retweets and 153,000 likes when he refuted Abrams’ incorrect Civil War claim. 

“It’s much easier to say the Civil War was about money, when your ancestors weren’t the currency,” said Letson, whose tweet is still pinned to the top of his Twitter page.
Historian Kevin Kruse’s quote-tweet of Abrams accrued over 41,000 retweets.
“No, the Civil War was about slavery,” he wrote. “Sincerely, Historians.” 

“I responded to the tweet because it echoed an argument I’ve heard many times: that the Civil War was somehow not about slavery, even when the seceding states and the Confederate government made it quite clear, in their own words at the time, that it was entirely about slavery,” Kruse told The Daily Beast.

The Russians knew exactly how to use social media against the country.  That helped to elect Trump and the GOP by stocking voter anger and depressing Democratic turnout.   We were played for suckers, and now we may lose our country because of it.

And both our broken media and Congress went along.  But let's not forget the blame lies on the shoulders of Twitter itself, more interested in taking money than policing its sewers.

In early 2015, a Twitter employee discovered a vast amount of Twitter accounts with IP addresses in Russia and Ukraine. The worker, Leslie Miley, said most of them were inactive or fake but were not deleted at the time. Miley, who was the company's engineering manager of product safety and security at the time, said efforts to root out spam and manipulation on the platform were slowed down by the company's growth team, which focused on increasing users and revenue.

"Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts, or remove accounts had to go through the growth team," Miley said. "They were more concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts."

Facebook too was glad to have millions of fake users in order to generate revenue numbers and goos stock prices. They deleted millions of fake accounts before the election, but they left hundreds of millions of fake accounts untouched.

Facebook has admitted that up to 270m accounts on the social network are illegitimate, raising questions over the social network's integrity as it is under pressure over Russian meddling in elections across the world. 

Buried in the social network's results on Wednesday night, it disclosed that there are tens of millions more fake and duplicate accounts than it had previously thought. 

Around 2-3pc of its 2.1bn monthly users in the third quarter of 2017 were "user-misclassified and undesirable accounts", Facebook said, up from the 1pc it had estimated in July. 

Another 10pc of its accounts are duplicates of real users, almost doubling its estimate of 6pc from last quarter's results. This suggests that in total, up to 13pc of its 2.1bn monthly users - almost 270m accounts - are illegitimate.

And there's no doubt that a major chunk of fake accounts were made for Russian influence of our political system in order to help Donald Trump and the GOP.

Oil's Well That Ends Well For US Diplomacy

Donald Trump keeps isolating the US from international agreements and diplomatic cooperation on a number of area, and no executive agency has taken damage quite like the State Department.  We're now a year into his term and Trump continues to refuse to appoint diplomatic staff to key positions.  It's gone way past the fact he doesn't care, as far as American diplomacy still exists, it's now "you deal with Trump, and you do what he wants." 

President Trump pushed back Thursday on concerns about a lack of nominees for key positions at the State Department, arguing it wouldn't affect his agenda.

"Let me tell you, the one that matters is me, I'm the only one that matters because when it comes to it that's what the policy is going to be," Trump said on Fox News when pressed about vacancies by Laura Ingraham.

"We don't need all the people that they want," Trump continued. "Don't forget, I'm a business person and I tell my people, well you don't need to fill slots, don't fill them."

A number of top positions remain unfilled at the State Department, among other agencies, including officials overseeing Southeast Asia and arms control.

Trump has fallen behind his four predecessors in the number of appointments confirmed by the Senate by this time, while he also has fewer nominations sent compared to the four previous administrations, according to an appointee tracker from The Washington Post and Partnership for Public Service.

The president blamed Senate Democrats for more nominees not being approved, though acknowledged that he has focused on nominating fewer people.

"We're filling up roles. And, don't forget, Schumer and the Democrats are just obstructing. You can't get anything through. We have almost about half the number of people coming through as Obama had. They are obstructing," Trump said.

And when it comes to anything involving transparancy and international cooperation to rein in corruption, the US is now freely abandoning its leadership role instead.

The United States has withdrawn from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an international effort to fight corruption in managing revenues from oil, gas and mineral extraction.

There had been doubts about continued U.S. participation in the EITI since earlier this year when Congress killed the so-called resource extraction rule, which required companies like Exxon Mobil Corp to disclose taxes and other fees paid to foreign governments, such as Russia.

In a letter to the EITI board on Thursday, the director of the U.S. Office of Natural Resources Revenue, Gregory J. Gould, wrote that “effective immediately” the United States was withdrawing as an EITI implementing country.

He wrote that while the U.S. remains committed to fighting corruption “it is clear that domestic implementation of EITI does not fully account for the U.S. legal framework.”

The EITI, which was founded in 2003, and which the United States joined in 2014, sets a global standard for governments to disclose their revenues from oil, gas, and mining assets, and for companies to report payments made to obtain access to publicly owned resources, as well as other donations.

“It put more information in the hands of the public,” said Michael Ross, executive director of the Project on Resources Governance and Development at the University of California Los Angeles.

“It involved the U.S. government disclosing all the money it was getting from oil, gas and mining companies and getting these companies to publicly disclose the payments they were making.”

There are 52 countries in the EITI, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South America.

In just one year Trump has reduced the US to corrupt proto-fascist regime and international pariah status, bordering on dangerous rogue nation that the rest of the world may have to take action against.  The danger of a major global war has never been higher, and the instigator will be us when it happens.

We're the bad guys in 2017, and nobody's worse than Trump.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

The Russian operation to destroy Hillary Clinton and put Trump in the White House was a master class in propaganda and media manipulation, and America was uniquely vulnerable to Putin's attacks.  But they had help: good ol' fashioned phishing for information that yielded Clinton campaign emails and the mother lode of inside info.

An Associated Press investigation into the digital break-ins that disrupted the U.S. presidential contest has sketched out an anatomy of the hack that led to months of damaging disclosures about the Democratic Party’s nominee. It wasn’t just a few aides that the hackers went after; it was an all-out blitz across the Democratic Party. They tried to compromise Clinton’s inner circle and more than 130 party employees, supporters and contractors. 

While U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia was behind the email thefts, the AP drew on forensic data to report Thursday that the hackers known as Fancy Bear were closely aligned with the interests of the Russian government. 

The AP’s reconstruction— based on a database of 19,000 malicious links recently shared by cybersecurity firm Secureworks — shows how the hackers worked their way around the Clinton campaign’s top-of-the-line digital security to steal chairman John Podesta’s emails in March 2016. 

It also helps explain how a Russian-linked intermediary could boast to a Trump policy adviser, a month later, that the Kremlin had “thousands of emails” worth of dirt on Clinton.

The Fancy Bear job remains the key to how the Russians were able to bog Clinton down for months but hitting her campaign and the DNC's email servers as well.  But once they had the raw data, they needed to distribute it for maximum damage, and that's where Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks came in.

Guccifer 2.0 acted as a kind of master of ceremonies during the summer of leaks, proclaiming that the DNC’s stolen documents were in WikiLeaks’ hands, publishing a selection of the material himself and constantly chatting up journalists over Twitter in a bid to keep the story in the press. 

He appeared particularly excited to hear on June 24 that his leaks had sparked a lawsuit against the DNC by disgruntled supporters of Clinton rival Bernie Sanders. 

“Can it influence the election in any how?” he asked a journalist with Russia’s Sputnik News, in uneven English. 

Later that month Guccifer 2.0 began directing reporters to the newly launched DCLeaks site, which was also dribbling out stolen material on Democrats. When WikiLeaks joined the fray on July 22 with its own disclosures the leaks metastasized into a crisis, triggering intraparty feuding that forced the resignation of the DNC’s chairwoman and drew angry protests at the Democratic National Convention. 

Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and DCLeaks ultimately published more than 150,000 emails stolen from more than a dozen Democrats, according to an AP count. 

The AP has since found that each of one of those Democrats had previously been targeted by Fancy Bear, either at their personal Gmail addresses or via the DNC, a finding established by running targets’ emails against the Secureworks’ list.

There's no doubt that the DC Leaks emails were bait for hungry journalists who were more than happy to print whatever would hurt the hated Hillary Clinton, the woman that the DC media had been trying to bring down for 25 years.

And now they would.

All three leak-branded sites have distanced themselves from Moscow. DCLeaks claimed to be run by American hacktivists. WikiLeaks said Russia wasn’t its source. Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be Romanian.

But there were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta’s inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. 

The official said the word “CONFIDENTIAL” was not in the original document. 

Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.

Of course the emails were doctored.  Enough real email data was included to assure the veracity of the sources, but the flashing lights and bells and whistles were tailor-made to attract DC media sharks.

They took the bait.

Within hours of the devastating Trump Access Hollywood tape being released, Guccifer and friends had flooded the airwaves with SCANDALOUS CLINTON EMAIL LEAKS, edited for consumption, and the Trump rape story was forgotten.

It was exactly what Trump needed to stay in the race, and it was planned for months, if not years.  The Russians owned us on this and are happy to destroy us with Trump and the GOP.

Soon, we may not be able to stop them from doing so any longer.

Running Government As His Corporation

Trump once again took to Twitter today to demand investigation and prosecution of his political foes in his usual whine.

Josh Marshall dissects Trump's increasingly broken mentality as CEO of America, Inc. and his repeated calls for the FBI to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

What is most striking to me about these comments is how natural it all seems to him, how frank he is about it. It seems like the most logical thing in the world to him that he should be able to tell the FBI who to ‘go after’ Secretary Clinton. And I think he’s being very genuine about this. It’s both childish and childlike, in addition to being profoundly predatory. 

That’s why he fired James Comey. At the most basic level he sees the US government as his company. It goes without saying that Trump would fire an employee who wasn’t following direction or wasn’t loyal, let alone one who he believed might be working against him. They’re “my generals”, remember. 

This is precisely true, and very disturbing.  Trump's proto-fascist impulses are based on him being The Boss, and people do what The Boss says or he fires them.  Trump believes being able to do this is a vital part of how he should run the executive branch.  Not even Bush and Cheney went this far. But he won't stop, and Marshall doesn't believe he'll stop either.

Here is my sense of where we are. After James Comey was fired and they brought in reasonably professional lawyers, it’s been made clear to President Trump that he can’t be directly interfering with the investigation or using the DOJ as his personal police force. Kelly is likely a key part of this imperative as well. At the moment at least he’s following this advice. Thus his frustration. But he’s also being pushed by the Roger Stones and Steve Bannon types to go to war with Mueller, perhaps fire him. 

I was on TV this evening with Sam Nunberg, one of a number of Trumpers who was fired during the campaign but is still a total loyalist and seems to be in league with Bannon or at least in agreement with him. He was saying Trump must fire Ty Cobb, the lawyer who’s managing the Russia probe for the President. Cobb seems to be a bit of a clown himself. But he is a real white collar defense lawyer – not one of Trump’s goon lawyers from New York City. He is sticking to the quaint idea that you shouldn’t try to obstruct justice or otherwise interfere with the investigation. At least his stated aim as of now – and this is backed up by some reporting – is to be as cooperative as possible in the hopes of getting Mueller to complete his investigation and give the President a clean bill of health. 

That may be a good strategy out of the options the President has available to him. But it is certainly not at all in line with President Trump’s core impulses. He has a lot of friends, who he seems to be talking to regularly, telling him to go with those impulses. We shouldn’t be surprised if, feeling endangered and enraged, he gives into those impulses.

Trump's pathology is very predictable.  The only question is when he tries to fire Mueller, and what the GOP in Congress will do about it.

My guess remains "nothing".  And then we will find ourselves in a real constitutional crisis, and perhaps worse.  Who is going to stop Trump?  Nobody stepped up so far.  Why should we believe anyone will in the future?

What would be the bridge too far?  We don't know, because nobody seems to give a damn in the other two branches of government as of yet.

We'll see.

Meanwhile In Bevinstan...

GOP Gov. Matt Bevin's plan to screw Kentucky state employees out of pension benefits has hit a pair of rather fatal snags: one, he doesn't have the votes, and two, Kentucky's GOP House Speaker Jeff Hoover is facing sexual harassment claims that are threatening to blow up his career.

Gov. Matt Bevin’s draft bill to reshape Kentucky’s retirement systems has run aground in the state House, where growing concerns for the financial security of school teachers and public employees were joined Thursday by sexual harassment allegations that put House Speaker Jeff Hoover’s political future in doubt. 

Hoover, R-Jamestown, stood alongside Bevin and Senate President Robert Stivers last month to unveil the framework of controversial pension changes that Kentucky’s Republican leaders are promoting. His role could be threatened by a news report that said Hoover — who is married with three daughters — has settled a sexual harassment claim made by a woman employed in his House office. 

Even without Hoover’s troubles as a distraction, “the votes aren’t here for this bill is what I’m hearing,” said state Rep. Brian Linder, R-Dry Ridge, co-chairman of the Public Pension Oversight Board. Various changes would have to be made to satisfy different interest groups raising objections and win the necessary House votes, Linder said. 

“I’m kind of a compromiser,” Linder said. “I’ve always worked in my life to try and get people to common ground.” 

As for Hoover, Linder said, “as speaker, he plays an important role in all of this.”

“I haven’t really had a chance to talk to anybody about this yet,” Linder said. “I came in late this morning, so I haven’t really had a chance to gauge anybody’s feelings about this. But he’s obviously been a big part of this, so I don’t know how this is going to go forward.” 

Another lawmaker was more blunt. State Rep. C. Wesley Morgan, R-Richmond, said the allegations against Hoover are serious enough, if true, to derail the pension debate for the present. 

“It would absolutely be a disaster for any immediate special session,” said Morgan, who opposes the draft pension bill that Bevin made public last Friday. 

State Rep. James Kay, D-Versailles, said it’s time to pause the pension debate, anyway, regardless of “Speaker Hoover’s issues.” 

“It’s never helpful to be discussing those type of things,” said Kay, who is also a member of the pension oversight panel.

Kentucky's House GOP I think wasn't prepared for how awful Bevin has been at trying to sell this plan, especially in smaller rural counties where the government is one of the largest employers in GOP communities.  People around here like teachers and county clerks and game wardens and the nice lady at the DMV, they know them personally, they go to church with them and see them at their kids' ball games and 4-H and ROTC.

It was cool when they could blame Bevin for across-the-board cuts.  But going after teachers and other state employees like this when Bevin is trying to force them to take their share of the burden only pisses everyone off.

So now, Hoover's sexual harassment settlement is a pretty good excuse for the KY GOP to run for the hills, and they will.

Watch.

StupidiNews!

• Syrian state media is claiming victory after ousting Islamic State forces from Deir Ezzor, the last major Syrian city in ISIS hands.
• Donald Trump's Twitter account was accidentally deactivated for 11 minutes last night by a Twitter employee on their final day, according to the social media company.
• Trump's 11-day Asia trip begins in Japan today, and includes the APEC summit in Vietnam, where he could meet with Vladimir Putin.
• The House GOP tax bill includes measures to tax offshore cash stockpiles by multinationals, something Apple, Microsoft and Google parent company Alphabet plan to fight.
• However the House GOP tax bill also ends the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit on January 1, which could short-circuit sales of electric cars in the US.