Last Call For Russian To Judgment

Charlie Savage at the New York Times dropped this piece tonight on Carter Page's FISA application, the basis of the investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The Trump administration disclosed on Saturday a previously top-secret set of documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Trump campaign adviser who was at the center of highly contentious accusations by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that the F.B.I. had abused its surveillance powers. 

[Read the documents here.] 

Democrats in February rejected the Republican claims that law enforcement officials had improperly obtained a warrant to monitor Mr. Page, accusing them of putting out misinformation to defend President Trump and sow doubts about the origin of the Russia investigation. But even as Republicans and Democrats issued dueling memos characterizing the materials underlying the surveillance of Mr. Page, the public had no access to the records. 

On Saturday evening, those materials — an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Mr. Page, along with several renewal applications — were released to The New York Times and other news organizations that had filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain them. Mr. Trump had declassified their existence earlier this year. 

“This application targets Carter Page,” the document said. “The F.B.I. believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government.” A line was then redacted, and then it picked up with “undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law. Mr. Page is a former foreign policy adviser to a candidate for U.S. president.”

Mr. Page has denied being a Russian agent and has not been charged with a crime in the nearly two years since the initial wiretap application was filed. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. 

The spectacle of the release was itself noteworthy, given that wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is normally one of the government’s closest-guarded secrets. No such application materials had apparently become public in the 40 years since Congress enacted that law to regulate the interception of phone calls and other communications on domestic soil in search of spies and terrorists, as opposed to wiretapping for ordinary criminal investigations.

The contents of the documents were the source of the now infamous "Memogate" disaster in February as Republicans wanted to release "proof" that the Mueller investigation was somehow illegitimate because it was started by the "illegal" wiretap of Page.  Devin Nunes managed to screw that plan up royally.

It seems however that the Trump regime is trying the plan again by releasing redacted FISA documents, but I'm not sure what they're trying to sccomplish, as the documents make it clear Carter Page was a Russian agent working for the Trump Campaign.

I guess the plan is to try to undermine it, certainly the right-wing "legal eagles" at Power Line, Breitbart and The Federalist will be trying to do so, but the FISA documents are brutally damning.

Page has most certainly been flipped by Mueller already.  My guess is that we're about to find out very soon who Page has flipped on, and that the Trump crew wants to get away from Putin and kids in cages and get next week going on attacking the Mueller probe.

Put It On My Tabloid

One of the many side effects of the Cohen tapes are that people are starting to ask questions about what constitutes political news, and what constitutes political advocacy, even for a Trump-friendly tabloid like National Enquirer publisher AMI.

Federal authorities examining the work President Trump’s former lawyer did to squelch embarrassing stories before the 2016 election have come to believe that an important ally in that effort, the tabloid company American Media Inc., at times acted more as a political supporter than as a news organization, according to people briefed on the investigation. 

That determination has kept the publisher in the middle of an inquiry that could create legal and political challenges for the president as prosecutors investigate whether the lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, violated campaign finance law. 

It could also spell trouble for the company, which publishes The National Enquirer, raising thorny questions about when coverage that is favorable to a candidate strays into overt political activity, and when First Amendment protections should apply. 

A.M.I.’s role in the inquiry received new attention on Friday with news that federal authorities had seized a recording from Mr. Cohen in which he and Mr. Trump discussed a $150,000 deal A.M.I. struck before the election, effectively silencing a woman’s claims of an affair by buying the rights to her story and not publishing it. The men also discussed whether Mr. Trump should buy the rights away from the company, which he did not ultimately do, according to a lawyer for the president, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

The recording, from early September 2016, undercuts previous statements from Mr. Trump’s representatives that he did not know about the agreement between A.M.I. and the woman, the former Playboy model Karen McDougal. It also raises questions about the extent of Mr. Cohen’s involvement in the deal. 

From the beginning of the campaign, A.M.I. promoted Mr. Trump and savaged his opponents, sometimes with unsubstantiated stories alleging poor health, extramarital affairs and the use of prostitutes. A.M.I.’s chairman, David J. Pecker, is a close friend of the president and his former lawyer, and company leaders were in regular contact with Mr. Cohen, former employees have said in interviews.

By burying Ms. McDougal’s story during the campaign in a practice known in the tabloid industry as “catch and kill,” A.M.I. protected Mr. Trump from negative publicity that could have harmed his election chances, spending money to do so. 

The authorities believe that the company was not always operating in what campaign finance law calls a “legitimate press function,” according to the people briefed on the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. That may explain why prosecutors did not follow typical Justice Department protocol to avoid subpoenaing news organizations when possible, and to give journalists advance warning when demanding documents or other information.

So the feds are happy to look into this, and when you've got a candidate on tape saying he's glad to pay $150,000 to kill a nasty story on you specifically, well, it becomes very troublesome.

Of course I fully expect this to end up in front of Trump's Supreme Court some day with a 5-4 ruling finding that AMI's free speech rights were violated.  That'll be a fight for another year, I suspect.

Trump Cards, Con't

The Donald lost his marbles on the tweeting machine this morning after yesterday's Cohen tape story broke, and if you're wondering just how damaging the information on those tapes is, Trump is once again using his office and FOX News state media to call for the arrest of a private American citizen.

President Trump on Saturday described former lawyer Michael Cohen’s taping of a private conversation between them as “totally unheard of & perhaps illegal,” but he reassured supporters that he has done nothing wrong. 

Trump did not mention Cohen by name but appeared to be responding to reports that Cohen recorded a conversation with him in September 2016 in which they discussed possible payments to former Playboy model Karen McDougal -- who claimed she had an affair with Trump in 2006. 

The New York Times first reported that the FBI seized the recording during the raid earlier this year on Cohen’s office as part of an investigation into the former Trump lawyer's payments to women to shut down stories about his client leading up to the 2016 election -- a practice known as “catch-and-kill.” Fox News has confirmed the details of the tape. 

On Saturday, Trump appeared to slam both the FBI raid and Cohen’s behavior as “inconceivable.” 

“Inconceivable that the government would break into a lawyer’s office (early in the morning) - almost unheard of,” he tweeted. “Even more inconceivable that a lawyer would tape a client - totally unheard of & perhaps illegal.”

It's not, at least not in New York state, which has one-party consent laws for recording conversations (unlike California, which is two-party consent).   Trump knows that, it's one of the many reasons why he's based his business in NYC and not LA.

Again, the closer the various federal and state investigations get to pay dirt, the more Trump's words now will become his vile actions later.  So far, America is definitely flunking this test.

Race To The Bottom, Con't

Republicans haven't stopped being the Southern Strategy Dxiecrat party of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, even as they became the Reagan/Bush party of "young bucks and Cadillac queens" and obsessed with the "soft bigotry of low expectations".  We've just come right back around full circle to the days of Jesse and Strom again, where good ol' Southern white supremacy is on full display with Midwest Republicans like Minnesota's Jason Lewis.

Republican Rep. Jason Lewis has a long history of racist rhetoric about African-Americans, pushing claims of a "racial war" by blacks on whites and arguing that violence regularly occurs at black gatherings. He also frequently claimed that black people have an "entitlement mentality" and viewed themselves as victims. 

Lewis made those comments on "The Jason Lewis Show," a syndicated radio program Lewis hosted from 2009 until 2014 with the tagline "America's Mr. Right." CNN's KFile obtained five months of audio from Michael Brodkorb, the former deputy chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota. Brodkorb, who is currently a columnist for the MinnPost and works in public affairs, initially reported on several comments from Lewis in 2016. KFile contacted Brodkorb to request the raw audio files of Lewis' show, which he provided. 

CNN's KFile reported on Wednesday that Lewis made a large number of deeply misogynistic comments on the show, including one monologue in which he lamented not being able to call women "sluts" anymore. 

Narrowly elected to represent Minnesota's 2nd District in 2016, Lewis is now considered one of the most endangered House Republicans in the midterm election. CNN rates the race as a "toss up," the most competitive designation. 

In a statement to CNN on Friday, Lewis' office said highlighting the congressman's past statements amounted to "an orchestrated attempt at making anyone who supports reducing illegitimacy or crime in minority communities, Voter ID laws and work requirements for public assistance back off their public policy positions." 

On his radio show in 2012, Lewis, who has described himself as libertarian Republican, regularly expressed a belief that African-Americans had an "entitlement mentality," leading to violence in the community. 

"There's a cultural problem in the African-American community that is leading to this. The entitlement mentality," Lewis said in December 2012. "You're a victim. It's OK to hate women, beat up women. It's OK to hate gays. All this, we're just sort of feeding this to people who are very lost because of the breakdown of society to begin with."

There's so much to unpack here about Lewis and his screaming hatred for black folks.  I used to live in Minnesota and there's not a hell of a lot of us in the state outside the Twin Cities, believe me.  In the Ohio Valley and the Midwest, there's still a lot of states with 90%+ white populations.  Republicans in these states absolutely believe this nonsense about us because it's been programmed into them for 30 or 40 years.

I'll be the first to admit that there's a toxic masculinity problem in America too, and it affect the black community for sure, but pretending it's just the province of black neighborhoods (or of Latino machismo) and somehow not an issue in men of all races in America is just blithe projection, especially when you're lamenting not being able to call women "sluts".

And the racism, the smug condescension, the need to control black America and to "civilize" us that Lewis displays, that we're all "criminals and savages" and that justifies us being treated as obstinate beasts of burden, well that's definitely a product of the FOX News generation of Southern Strategy Republicans taking a 50-state approach.

Lewis's opponent is Democrat Angie Craig, and I hope she wins by twenty points.  We need to get rid of these guys and their baggage.  Vote like it matters, folks.  It does.

Last Call For The Friday News Dump

I gotta tell ya, the Friday News Dump in the Trump era is really something beautiful, in the way moonlight glittering off the blades of an invading army is beautiful.

President Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Mr. Trump two months before the presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump, according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording. 

The F.B.I. seized the recording this year during a raid on Mr. Cohen’s office. The Justice Department is investigating Mr. Cohen’s involvement in paying women to tamp down embarrassing news stories about Mr. Trump ahead of the 2016 election. Prosecutors want to know whether that violated federal campaign finance laws, and any conversation with Mr. Trump about those payments would be of keen interest to them. 

The recording’s existence appears to undercut the Trump campaign’s denial of any knowledge of payments to the model. And it further draws Mr. Trump into questions about tactics he and his associates used to keep aspects of his personal and business life a secret. And it highlights the potential legal and political danger that Mr. Cohen represents to Mr. Trump. Once the keeper of many of Mr. Trump’s secrets, Mr. Cohen is now seen as increasingly willing to consider cooperating with prosecutors. 

The former model, Karen McDougal, says she began a nearly yearlong affair with Mr. Trump in 2006, shortly after Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, gave birth to their son Barron. Ms. McDougal sold her story for $150,000 to The National Enquirer, which was supportive of Mr. Trump, during the final months of the presidential campaign, but the tabloid sat on the story, which kept it from becoming public. The practice, known as “catch and kill,” effectively silenced Ms. McDougal for the remainder of the campaign.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, confirmed in a telephone conversation on Friday that Mr. Trump had discussed payments to Ms. McDougal with Mr. Cohen on the tape. He said the recording was less than two minutes long, said Mr. Trump did not know he was being recorded and claimed that the president had done nothing wrong. 

Mr. Giuliani said there was no indication on the tape that Mr. Trump knew before the conversation about the payment from the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., to Ms. McDougal.

Two things:

1) Lordy, there are tapes.

2) Rudy Giuliani is still the worst criminal defense lawyer who ever lived, right behind Michael Cohen.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Democrats are getting young voters registered ahead of the 2018 midterms, particularly 18 to 29-year-old voters who are very eager to vote for the first time in the era of Trump and the Parkland High shooting in Florida.

Young voters are flocking to register to vote in key battleground states in the wake of the February school shooting at a Parkland, Fla. high school, according to a new analysis from Democratic data firm TargetSmart.

The report, released exclusively to NBC News, shows that young voters between the ages of 18 and 29 years old make up an increasing share of those registering to vote in a handful of key states. 

Pennsylvania has seen the sharpest increase—61 percent of new voter registrations come from young voters, compared to 45 percent before the shooting. 

Virginia, Indiana and New York have all seen an increase of about 10 percentage points in the youth share of new voter registrants, while Arizona and Florida have seen gains of about 8 percent. All of these states are home to some key Senate or House races that will play a crucial role in deciding control of Congress. 

Other key battleground states—like California, North Carolina and Ohio—have seen more modest increases. And in West Virginia, home to one of the top Senate races on the map, the youth share of new registrants fell 11.5 percentage points. 

Democrats are boosted by the general upward trend—TargetSmart found a 2 percent uptick in the share of youth registrants across the country—considering young voters skew more liberal and are more supportive of enacting new gun control measures. The February shooting in Parkland, where 17 people were killed, has served as a motivator for activists looking to make the case to pass new measures like expanding background checks and restricting access to certain weapons.

Of course, the question then becomes will Millennials even bother to vote at all even after registering, and the evidence still points to at least 75% of them staying home.  In 2014, Millennial turnout was just 21.4% and they made up just 13% of people who voted, and Democrats were stomped in races across the country as a result.

The thing is if even 30% of voters born after 1980 actually showed up to the polls, Dems would take back the House and most likely the Senate as well.  But if the turnout model is 2014 again, where white men make up a third of Millennials who do actually vote, then we're in trouble.

It's not just how many people show up, it's who shows up too, and our voting system has long been biased against younger voters.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

It's hard to overestimate the contribution America's media pundits made to helping Russia damage Hillary Clinton in 2016, and it seems some of the worst offenders are now starting to have second thoughts after finding out this week that they squarely fell into the useful idiot category over the last two years or so.  Our first contestant: Politico's Blake Hounshell.

When I wrote, back in February, that I was skeptical that President Donald Trump would ever be proved to have secretly colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election in his favor, I mistyped.

What I meant to write was that I wasn’t skeptical.

Last week’s events have nullified my previous skepticism. To recap: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein revealed indictments against 12 Russians for the hacks of the Democratic National Committee, and we learned that Russian hackers went after Hillary Clinton’s private office for the first time on the very day Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” At the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump attacked a close European ally—Germany—and generally questioned the value of the alliance. Next, he visited the United Kingdom and trashed Prime Minister Theresa May. Then, in Helsinki, he met with Vladimir Putin privately for two hours, with no U.S. officials present other than a translator. After this suspicious meeting, he sang the Russian strongman’s praises at a news conference at which he said he viewed Putin’s denials on a par with the unanimous and unchallenged conclusions of America’s intelligence agencies.

With every other world leader, the physically imposing Trump attempts to dominate—witness his alpha-male handshakes with French President Emanuel Macron or his flamboyant man-spreading next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Yet with the diminutive Putin—who is maybe 5 feet, 6 inches tall—he’s oddly submissive. During the public portion of their encounter, Trump was slumping in his chair, as if defeated. Why? Why did he insist on a one-on-one meeting with Putin in the first place?

Because Trump respects and wants what Putin has: a President-for-Life gig where he can do whatever, and arguably Putin is the wealthiest person on the planet if you start counting up the assets he truly controls.  The guy is worth maybe $200 billion, easily doubling what Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk have.  Trump wants that so badly that he can taste it, and this is a man whose taste buds are drowning in burnt steaks with ketchup.  Putin's enormous wealth is one of the worst-kept secrets on Earth, and Trump wants that for himself.

What about my argument that Trump was constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret? That, too, is no longer operative. Since I first wrote, we’ve learned that Trump—a skinflint who once had his own charity pay a $7 fee to register his son for the Boy Scouts—was willing to shell out $130,000 of his own money to hush up a fling with a porn actress, Stormy Daniels. And he still hasn’t copped to sleeping with her, despite the discovery of their nondisclosure agreement and contemporaneous evidence that the affair really happened. None of this leaked out until well after the election, proving that Trump is indeed capable of keeping his yap shut when he wants. Not convinced? How about the fact that Brett Kavanaugh’s name didn’t leak out as Trump’s latest Supreme Court pick until minutes before the announcement?

Politically speaking, Trump’s devotion to his pro-Putin line doesn’t make sense. Yes, the GOP base is impressionable, and perhaps Republican voters would accept it if Trump came out and said, “You bet, Russia helped get me elected, and wasn’t that a good thing? We couldn’t let Crooked Hillary win!” But nobody would say his odd solicitousness toward the Kremlin leader is a political winner, and it certainly causes an unnecessary amount of friction with Republicans in Congress. He’s kept it up at great political cost to himself, and that suggest either that he is possessed by an anomalous level of conviction on this one issue, despite his extraordinary malleability on everything else—or that he’s beholden to Putin in some way.

Ahh, but Trump's friendship with Vladimir very much is a political winner, especially among the white supremacist set that admires Russian "purity".  They want Trump to have what Putin has too, because it would mean that Trump would be a fascist with the power to make their fever dreams of a "white ethno-state" very much a reality.   This is Trump's base, and they love him for it, and as for the rest of Trump's voters, well it's not a dealbreaker for them, now is it?

As I keep saying, Republicans overwhelmingly approve of Putin and Trump's relationship with him.  And yes, they will absolutely start saying "Well if the Russians helped us beat that Hillary bitch, then I'm all for it to continue."

This is exactly what's happening, guys.  There's some pushback now, but once it becomes clear that Republicans want to win in 2018 by any means necessary, then they'll take the help.  Also, the pushback has been symbolic and meaningless.

Besides, the zeitgeist has moved on from kids in cages and migrant families in detention camps, remember?  Putin is already helping the GOP in 2018.

StupidiNews!

• Missouri police are still searching for survivors after 11 people were killed and several injured when a duck boat capsized during a thunderstorm near Branson's Table Rock Lake.
• Israeli lawmakers have approved a bill that defines the country as a strictly Jewish state, bringing harsh criticism from Israeli Arabs and Christians and the European Union.
• French President Emmanuel Macron has fired a bodyguard caught on camera beating a protester during May Day protests in Paris after "new facts" emerged about the incident this week.
• Donald Trump says America is "ready to go" on nearly a half-trillion in Chinese import tariffs as his trade war with Beijing escalates to a new level that could greatly affect the global economy.
• Cable giant Comcast has folded its cards on the bidding war with Disney over 21st Century Fox's media properties, Disney will pay $71.3 billion for Fox's movie and TV assets.

Last Call For Meanwhile In Bevinstan...

Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is throwing in the towel on his Medicaid dental and vision cuts after massive outrage from the hundreds of thousands of people who lost coverage and a defeat in federal court.

In a surprise reversal, Kentucky officials have announced the state will rescind Medicaid cuts that eliminated dental, vision and non-emergency transportation services for nearly 400,000 Kentuckians.

In a statement released late Thursday, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services announced that "we have begun the process to reinstate vision and dental coverage, as well as non-emergency transportation services."

The statement provided no explanation for reversing cuts officials had insisted were necessary as recently as Wednesday in testimony before a state legislative committee.

It came shortly after the Courier Journal reported sources had said the administration of Gov. Matt Bevin was working on an announcement that the cuts were being rescinded.

Advocates were delighted with the prospect that dental benefits would be restored.

"That is such good news," said Jennifer Hasch, manager of dental services for the Shawnee Christian Healthcare Center in West Louisville. "I think people are going to be thrilled. I think it's weight lifted for our office, both for our patient population and our team."

State Rep. Joni Jenkins, a Shively Democrat, who had criticized the governor for cutting the benefits, said she welcomes the news.

"I'm very pleased if that's true," she said.

Sources told the Courier Journal that the state plans to reinstate the benefits by Aug. 1, but will make them retroactive to July 1, so people can visit the dentist or eye doctor during July and the provider can bill Medicaid for the services. The sources asked not to be identified, saying they were not authorized to comment.

The abrupt cuts effective July 1 created an uproar across Kentucky, catching patients and providers off guard, causing the most disruption in dental services. Dentists were forced to turn away hundreds of patients who had lost benefits overnight, many suffering from pain from severe infection and dental abscesses.

While health advocates say all three services cut—dental, vision and transportation are important—the loss of dental services were most critical because of the very poor dental health of some Kentuckians and the fact that dental abscesses and infection can be life-threatening.

Needless to say, the local news coverage over the last couple of weeks has been brutal.  The state's top health official, Health and Family Services Cabinet Secretary Adam Meier, blew his stack in an angry letter to Kentucky Democrats blaming them and the Louisville Courier-Journal coverage of the cuts for "false information".

It's funny, because Bevin's health care reforms and been nothing but disaster after disaster, with the Kynect elimination and its replacement with the awful benefind system, an online benefits portal so badly designed that tens of thousands lost benefits that they qualified for.  Now these cuts have been rolled back because Republicans are getting crushed politically, and Bevin won't admit that, but it's true.

This is good for now, but I can't help but think that Bevin will try again.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

As I said yesterday, there's plenty of evidence that Trump is going along with Putin because his ego won't allow him to admit the Russians helped him, and that he likes Putin and his autocracy, something he imagines he can have here in America.  But that doesn't mean that the evidence that Putin has compromising material on Trump should be dismissed either, as they aren't mutually exclusive, and besides, the NY Times dropped a bombshell last night that heavily favors the theory that both conditions are true.

Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.

I've long suspected that Trump was briefed on the Russian attacks at some point during the transition before he was sworn in or soon after, but the story gives us an exact date (January 6, 2017) and includes the fact that Trump was outright told, using intelligence from the crown jewels of specific CIA methods and means themselves as evidence, that Putin ordered these attacks as well.

America got a nice chunk of that briefing as an unclassified version was released to the public that day.  I wrote about it on January 7th last year, and how Trump supporters immediately dismissed it on January 8.

That hasn't changed.  What did change was that the question of "What did Trump know and when did he know it?" has been definitively answered. 

The Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was briefed that day by John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was also there; after the formal briefing, he privately told Mr. Trump about the “Steele dossier.” That report, by a former British intelligence officer, included uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump’s activities during a visit to Moscow, which he denied.

According to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were later briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election interference.

They included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian military intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.

And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.

Again, Trump was outright told by America's top intelligence officers that the Russians hacked the Clinton campaign with the intent of damaging her chances in the 2016 presidential contest, and that they were working with WikiLeaks.  Trump was also told of the Steele Dossier.  Finally, Trump was told the exact case behind why the US intelligence community believed Putin gave these orders.

Since we now know when the briefing was, we now know that Trump's guilty-looking response came the same day.

After the briefings, Mr. Trump issued a statement later that day that sought to spread the blame for the meddling. He said “Russia, China and other countries, outside groups and countries” were launching cyberattacks against American government, businesses and political organizations — including the D.N.C.

Still, Mr. Trump said in his statement, “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”

Mr. Brennan later told Congress that he had no doubt where the attacks were coming from.

“I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election,” he said in testimony in May 2017. “And they were very aggressive.”

For Mr. Trump, the messengers were as much a part of the problem as the message they delivered.

Mr. Brennan and Mr. Clapper were both Obama administration appointees who left the government the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated. The new president soon took to portraying them as political hacks who had warped the intelligence to provide Democrats with an excuse for Mrs. Clinton’s loss in the election.

Mr. Comey fared little better. He was fired in May 2017 after refusing to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump and pushing forward on the federal investigation into whether the Trump campaign had cooperated with Russia’s election interference.

Former Obama DNI James Clapper is confirming that briefing happened this morning. And let's keep in mind that instead of supporting the finding and cooperating, Trump immediately chose to attack the people who told him Putin was behind the hacking, and to mislead America about it even before he took office two weeks later.  Just a week after that briefing was held, GOP Sen. Richard Burr opened up the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the Russian attacks.

It was also the same time period that heavy suspicion started falling on Michael Flynn, then still Trump's incoming National Security Adviser, for his multiple phone calls to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on the day then President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in December 2016.

So what does all this mean?  Whenever Trump has publicly gone after the US intelligence community, they have fired back with a pretty solid leak precisely laying out why Trump is full of horseshit on the matter.  This time is similar, but now the stakes are high enough after Trump's performance in Helsinki that they are willing to put specific information like this out in the open in order to refute Trump's latest lies.

There's no doubt left that Trump knew Putin was behind the attacks and the propaganda.  And immediately, Trump started lying about it to the American public.

I'd like to know when Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan were told of this, especially McConnell.  McConnell doesn't get nearly enough flack for blocking any efforts to make this a public bipartisan statement before the election.

But there's now no question that Trump knew.  Does it matter, however?  As I've said, it'll only matter if Trump's hold on his cult can be broken.  There's no evidence that this will ever happen, even now.

79% of Republicans approve of Trump's summit disaster.  85% still say the Russian investigation is a distraction.  And these people will go out in November and pull the lever for Republicans and demand that Congress protect "our leader".  CBS News found similar numbers, with 68% of Republicans approving of Trump's Helsinki performance, and in fact 42% saying that they simply believe that US intelligence agencies are lying about the entire Russia investigation.  Expect that figure to go up dramatically and soon.

Any Republican who speaks out now will be crucified on national television and none of them want to be that martyr, because they crave power more than patriotism.  Trump is already parroting Russian talking points that all Democrats and any right-wing critics must want an open war with Russia.  Tens of millions of Republican voters will agree and demand continued congressional GOP cowardice, and they will get it.

And we will continue to be doomed until that wall breaks, if it ever does.  But never forget, Trump knew.  Which means all the Republican leadership knew too, and they went along 100%.

StupidiNews!

• California's state Supreme Court has blocked a ballot measure that would split the state into three separate states over questions regarding the validity of collected ballot signatures.
• Donald Trump is again proposing separate bilateral trade deals with Mexico and Canada, putting the future of NAFTA in doubt as Mexico's new president has signaled that he wants an agreement.
• Trump's nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kathy Kraniger, faces a Senate confirmation hearing today amid questions over her qualifications from both parties.
• The EU is expected to announce a new list of retaliatory tariffs on US goods ahead of trade talks in DC next week between EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Trump.
• The FDA is coming out against the term "milk" being used in conjunction with "non-lactation" products like soy, almond, and coconut milk in a move long-sought by US dairy farmers.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

If you're wondering what Putin got out of Monday's Helsinki meeting with his star employee Donald Trump, the answer is delicious, delicious real estate that will suddenly become available in the Balkans.

President Trump, who rattled U.S. allies at a NATO meeting last week, voiced concern in a television interview broadcast Tuesday night that sending troops from the alliance to defend an “aggressive” Monte­negro could result in World War III. 

Trump was asked about Monte­negro, which joined NATO last year and has a population smaller than the District of Columbia, during a Fox News interview with host Tucker Carlson. 

Carlson pressed Trump on the purpose of the alliance, which was created in 1949 to protect the United States, Canada and a host of Western European nations from Soviet incursion. The organization calls for member nations to come to the aid of any ally that is attacked. 

“Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?” Carlson asked in the interview, which was recorded Monday following Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin in Helsinki.

“I understand what you’re saying, I’ve asked the same question,” Trump responded. “You know, Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people. … They are very aggressive people, they may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III. But that’s the way it was set up. Don’t forget, I just got here a little more than a year and a half ago.”

Understand that this is Trump, a day after coming back from a two-hour closed door meeting with Russia's president, now saying that he doesn't believe America should answer its Article V NATO responsibilities in case a NATO country is say, I don't know, annexed by Moscow or something.  You know, no big deal, right?

Also, this is the same day Trump came back from Finland after meeting Putin and said that he looks forward to working with Russia militarily.

Russia announced it was ready to pursue agreements reached by Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump "in the sphere of international security," though the White House and Pentagon would not confirm any agreements had been made or offer any details. 

Trump and Putin met for about two hours during their summit in Helsinki with only translators present. It is still not clear what the two men discussed or agreed to during their meeting. 

"The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation is ready for practical implementation of the agreements reached between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in the sphere of international security achieved at the Helsinki summit," Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a Russian military spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday. 

The Russian military "is ready to intensify contacts with the US colleagues in the General Staff and other available channels to discuss the extension of the START treaty, cooperation in Syria, as well as other issues of ensuring military security," Konashenkov said. 

The National Security Council would not confirm what Trump had agreed to in the one-on-one with Putin. A spokesman for the NSC told CNN on Tuesday that they were still "reviewing the discussion."

Russians are all ready to jump into this agreement with Trump, but we don't know what's in it.  The NSC doesn't even know, because nobody told them.  Trump didn't tell anybody, it seems.

So once again, we have Trump saying "screw NATO" and "Here's our new military agreement with Russia".  You don't have to be a think tank fellow to see the implications here, especially when you factor in Russia's little adventure in taking Crimea from Ukraine, which everyone seems to have accepted as geopolitical fact now.

So yeah, if you're wondering what Putin is getting out of this?  A whole row of green lights from America.  And our response?  Well, the Washington Post is certainly outraged, but as long as Trump's approval ratings among Republicans remains at the 85-90% level it is now, nothing will change.  maybe that means Mueller drops a nuke, maybe that means the GOP gets clobbered in the midterms so badly that they turn on him, but most likely this leads to Mueller being fired and the fight that follows.

We'll see.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Last weekend I talked about the plan by the House GOP Freedom Caucus to bring impeachment proceedings against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Those articles of impeachment were supposed to come to the House floor as early as Monday, and were supposed to give Donald Trump the cover he needed to fire Rosenstein and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whom Rosenstein appointed.

But that was before Trump's disastrous performance in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin, a debacle so bad that even Republicans are now starting to realize just how far gone Trump is down the "useful idiot to Russia" path, and suddenly that impeachment maneuver against Rosenstein looks like the aiding and abetting of a foreign asset that it is.

A long-simmering rift between Speaker Paul Ryan and President Donald Trump’s top Hill allies is starting to boil over as both sides fight over an effort to oust Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The Wisconsin Republican and retiring House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) have stifled conservatives’ push in recent weeks to impeach Rosenstein, who oversees special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian contacts with Trump's 2016 campaign.

Gowdy scoffed at the suggestion on national television Sunday. And Ryan — who has long sought to avoid such confrontations with the Justice Department — told reporters Tuesday morning that DOJ is “now coming into compliance” with congressional subpoenas as part of lawmakers’ scrutiny into alleged FBI bias against Trump.

But those comments drew a swift rebuke from conservative Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who are leading the impeachment campaign and argue that Rosenstein is slow-walking their oversight of the FBI. Meadows told reporters Tuesday morning that Ryan appeared misinformed about what Justice has and has not turned over.

"I can tell you that I guess the speaker’s staff is not fully informing him of what DOJ’s actually complying with,” Meadows said.

Meadows also noted that the House had already adopted a resolution giving the Justice Department until July 6 to turn over the remaining documents that lawmakers have requested. While Ryan has said those documents are being handed over, Meadows said that’s hogwash.

“We’re still waiting on tens of thousands… of documents that many of the people here today have been advocating for a long time,” Meadows said. “How long do we have to wait?”

The sniping follows Trump's widely criticized summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which has led even loyal Republicans to question his judgment. Ryan allies and top Republicans thought the bipartisan outcry over Trump’s refusal to accept his own intelligence community's conclusions — that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — would shift attention away from their own internecine procedural gripes.

Indeed, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say it has bolstered the importance of Mueller's probe, which led to last week’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for the 2016 hacks of the Democratic National Committee.

But Trump’s supporters on Capitol Hill are vowing to keep up the pressure on Rosenstein and are prepping an increasingly aggressive push against him for what they claim is his resistance to turning over documents connected to the FBI's Russia probe.

"All options are still on the table," said Jordan when asked about the prospect of impeaching Rosenstein. The Freedom Caucus co-founder argued that “we have caught them hiding information from us [and] redacting information that should not have been redacted.”

He added: “If that is not a sufficient reason to move forward [with impeachment], particularly when they are not in compliance with the resolution that was passed by the full House of Representatives two weeks ago, I do not know what is. … All options are still on the table.”

So the plan has run into a buzzsaw.  House Freedom Caucus members still plan to push forward, but they can't without Ryan.  Oh, and there's still the little matter of Jim Jordan still being in the House at all as calls for his resignation over his role in Ohio State's wrestling sexual abuse scandal when he was assistant coach for the team are getting very very loud.

As long as Ryan and Gowdy continue to block the Freedom Caucus's impeachment circus, the plan is off.  It's possible that Trump could fire Rosenstein and Mueller at any time, yes, but the last several days shows us there are at least some limits to how far the GOP is willing to follow Trump off an obvious cliff.

At least, it shows that limits are self-imposed by cowardice, and that Republicans are still capable of being more afraid of voters and public sentiment than they are of Trump.  Even for a split-second, that's an improvement.

But in the near-term, the reality of Trump's overwhelming approval by GOP voters will reassert itself, and the Cult of Trump will continue, and eventually, he will make his move on Mueller.  After all, attacking Mueller is the main midterm strategy of the GOP.

Headed into a election that’s expected to favor Democrats, a top GOP Senate strategist says Republicans are counting on President Donald Trump’s media dominance to turn out their voters in November — and drown out opponents’ messaging. 

If successful, Republicans could pick up as many as four Senate seats this November, even as the left swamps their candidates in fundraising and enthusiasm, GOP operative Josh Holmes told Beyond the Bubble on Monday. 

“Everybody thinks that President Trump is some kind of drag on the Republican Party, [when] in this case, he’s just the essential ingredient,” said Holmes, who’s helped engineer his party’s Senate strategy for the past 16 years as a chief aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. 

“What the president is doing by continuing to discuss the investigation [into allegations of collusion between his campaign and Russia] and the quote-unquote ‘witch hunt,’ particularly on prime time Fox [News], is doing more to mobilize base voters than any legislative issue we’ve seen,” added Holmes.

It may be delayed for a bit by the Helsinki debacle, but it's still coming.  Keeping Mueller around as a boogeyman has paid off so far for Trump and the GOP, but eventually Mueller's going to hit pay dirt, and when that happens, the real fight will begin.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

GQ political reporter Julia Ioffe argues that Monday's summit debacle proves the Sword of Damocles that Putin is dangling over Donald Trump's head isn't a pee tape or blackmail, but the results of the 2016 presidential election itself.

Donald Trump today described his campaign as “brilliant,” but those of us who were there remember it for what it was: lurching, volatile, scraping the bottom of the barrel for even remotely competent staff. As we now know, the campaign, in the form of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone, was willing to take all the help it could get. The trickle of indictments from Robert Mueller make it increasingly difficult to believe that there's no there there, that the Russians didn't meddle, that the Trump campaign didn't know about it, let alone actively welcome it, that all this stolen information just happened to coincide with Trump's statements and the campaign's ad buys and didn't change any votes.

Of course, Trump denies it now. It's hard to imagine even a politician less thin-skinned and prideful than him saying, essentially, “Yes, you're right. My victory was illegitimate, and therefore so is my presidency.” There is no other way to frame this: This is, and has always been, about the legitimacy of his presidency. And no one, especially not a sitting president who values the idea of himself above all else, would cede that ground.

And of course Putin denies it. Going into the summit, friends in the White House pool and TV hosts asked what Putin would do to Trump in their meeting. Would he try to intimidate him, like he did by bringing his black Labrador Konni to his meetings with the notoriously dog-phobic Angela Merkel? Would he push on all those financial ties Trump's sons have bragged about over the years? Of course not. In the end, the only approach that works with Trump is flattery. Trump wants Boris Johnson to be prime minster of England not just because he likes his position on Brexit, but because “he has said very nice things about me.” He likes Putin not just because he's an authoritarian Trump clearly wants to emulate, but because he believes Putin called him a “genius.” (The actual word used, “colorful,” was more of a backhanded compliment, but Putin wisely let the mistranslation stand.) And if Putin were smart, which he clearly is, he would have flattered Trump exactly the way he needed to be in their tête-à-tête: by echoing his denials. Of course we didn't interfere, Donald. You won fair and square. You did it all by your genius self.

I was always skeptical of the idea that Putin had kompromat on Trump that was something akin to the rumored pee-pee tape for two reasons. First, because the operative element in blackmail is shame, and as we saw with his reaction to another embarrassing tape, the one from Access Hollywood, Trump is un-blackmailable on that front. I also assumed that Trump would lash out at anyone who tried to pressure him openly: Do this, or we release the tape. No one puts Trump in a corner.

What didn't occur to me was the most obvious option, the one we saw revealed in Helsinki. When Putin was asked if he had compromising materials on Trump, Trump interjected and said, “I have to say, if they had it, it would have been out long ago.” And it’s true. It’s been out for ages, since the October 2016 warning by the intelligence community, then the January 2017 report from the Director of National Intelligence, then the drip-drip-drip of revelations in the press, and indictment after Mueller indictment, the last installment coming just three days before the Helsinki presser. Trump was right. It is out there.

The kompromat is the election result itself, and Trump is lashing out at the people who are trying to get him to do something on its basis: the press, the Democrats, the intelligence community, Robert Mueller, and Trump's own Department of Justice. We are the ones saying, Do this or else. And Trump is, predictably, lashing out. The only person, it seems, who knows how to use the blackmail to his advantage is Putin. True to the intelligence training he spoke about today, Putin knows his subject and his supple psychology, the nooks and crannies of his insecurities and obsessions. Why threaten him when you can get him to do your bidding with simple flattery: Of course we didn't interfere, Donald. You won fair and square. You did it all by your genius self.

It's a solid theory, for sure. Trump is doing Putin's budding because anything else would be an admission that he cheated and had help, that he didn't win on his own, and that he doesn't deserve it, that he's nothing more than a sham. His ego can't handle it.

That's all true, of course.  Trump has always been a sham, but now he's trapped in his own grift forever, and so are the Republicans around him and the voters who fell for the long con.  They will never, ever come clean on this, but it would destroy them for all time.  They would go down as the greatest villains in modern history, the dupes, the suckers, and the goats.

They flocked to Trump because they were terrified that America was passing them by.  Admitting they were willing participants in the con, because the best cons always make you want to believe in them, you see, that would end them.  They would lose everything, and they would deserve to lose everything.

Remember, Trump never thought he was going to win.  But he did, and he did it with help from Putin.  So now he's along for the ride, and Putin is driving.  We're all passengers now.

So they will play along until we disabuse of them of the notion that the con can continue.

StupidiNews!

• At least three people are dead after a midair collision between two small planes flying near Miami-Dade International Airport, the two planes were presumed to be pilot training flights.
• California firefighters are battling a blaze near Yosemite National Park, the Ferguson Fire has already scorched 20 square miles across steep terrain, making it difficult to combat.
• A six-story apartment building in New Delhi has collapsed into a neighboring building, killing at least three and injuring several as rescue workers are searching through the rubble.
• Google faces a $5 billion fine from EU antitrust regulators over Android mobile apps, more fines could be on the way as a separate antitrust probe into Google's online advertising platform continues.
• Support for a House bill to restore net neutrality rules continues to grow as the first Republican has signed on, Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado has joined 176 Democrats in demanding a floor vote.