Did Nazi That Coming, Con't

The good thing about Germany is that they actually arrest their neo-Nazi politicians. Here in the states, we agonize over their rights to be antisemitic assholes and occasionally elect one to the White House.

 

A legislator with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party was arrested on Monday on charges including displaying forbidden totalitarian symbols, with neighbours of his fraternity complaining of often hearing the Nazi “Sieg Heil” victory salute.

Newly elected Daniel Halemba, 22, was due to take up his seat in the Bavarian regional parliament later on Monday. He is a member of the Teutonia Prague student fraternity, whose premises were raided by police in September.

During the raid, officials said, they found forbidden symbols – Germany’s constitution forbids the display of symbols of totalitarian regimes such as the swastika – and neighbours complained of hearing “Sieg Heil” (Hail Victory) from inside.

A prosecution spokesperson said Halemba would be brought before court later on Monday or Tuesday. Charges include inciting racist abuse.

A national conversation that is increasingly dominated by discussion of migration has helped the AfD to a series of strong electoral showings far beyond its old heartlands in the post-industrial east, with voters seemingly unperturbed by its rightward drift.

The party, second in polls in several eastern states, achieved record results in the western states of Bavaria and Hesse on 8 October.

The party and its youth wing are under observation in several states, with prominent figures such as the lead European parliament candidate Maximilian Krah comparing immigration to colonialism and stating that “oriental landgrabs” lead to “sexual abuse of European girls”.

Halemba, who joined the fraternity as a law student in Würzburg, has named Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD’s far-right wing, as his political role model.

“They want to arrest me, an elected state parliament member, three days before I take my seat, using a totally lawless arrest warrant,” said Halemba in a video shared on his lawyer’s Telegram channel.

 

"Maybe the Nazis were on to something" is certainly a political position you could take, but so it "Maybe neo-Nazis should be punched in the junk and arrested."

 

I'm a fan of the latter.

Antifa, With German Efficiency

Thousands of German police conducted early-morning raids and arrested more than two dozen right-wing domestic terrorists allegedly plotting a fascist coup to overthrow the country's government.

 

Authorities in Germany arrested 25 people on Wednesday who are suspected of planning to violently overthrow the government in a far-right extremist plot.

More than 3,000 police officers, including special forces, made 130 early morning searches across 11 of Germany's 16 federal states in one of the biggest counterterrorism operations in the country's history.

Suspects from the so-far unnamed group include a nobleman with a historic royal title and various armed forces veterans. It is centered on the so-called Reichsbürger, or Reich Citizens, movement which is motivated by conspiracy theories about the role and legitimacy of the modern German state.

Those arrested will appear in court Wednesday and Thursday. The homes of a further 27 people suspected of being members or supporters of the group have been searched.

“We defend ourselves with all strength against the enemies of democracy," German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser wrote on Twitter.

She said the group was "driven by fantasies of violent overturn and conspiracy ideologies" and hated democracy and the state. "Further investigations will give a clear picture of how far the coup plans had progressed," she said.

The German prosecutor's office said the suspects belong to a terrorist group founded in November 2021 at the latest, which aims to overthrow the government in Berlin and install its own leaders through the "forcible elimination of the democratic constitutional state."

"The members of the association are aware that this project can only be realized through the use of military means and violence against state representatives," the prosecutor's office said in a statement early Wednesday. It said there was "the suspicion that individual members of the association have made concrete preparations to forcibly invade" the German lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, "with a small armed group."

 

This would have been a competent version of America's January 6th attack, and they supposedly had some serious hardware on them. I don't know if our good friends in Moscow were involved, but I wouldn't be surprised.

 

Or, you know, our good friends in the GOP.

The group had planned to overthrow the German government, in part by assassinating government officials and installing “Heinrich XIII P.R.,” identified by German officials as 71-year-old Prince Heinrich XIII, a German noble of the House of Reuss. Heinrich was among those arrested.

According to a press release from the German attorney general’s office, the group was founded around November 2021. Prosecutors allege the organization adheres to the ideology of the “Reichsbürger,” or Citizens of the Reich, and is heavily influenced by QAnon. According to the statement, the group is “firmly convinced that Germany is currently governed by members of a so-called ‘deep state.’” The group also believes an “Alliance” of “technically superior secret society of governments, intelligence services and the military of various states, including the Russian Federation and the United States of America” had assets present in Germany prepared to assist in securing liberation from “deep state” forces.

The organization had reportedly engaged in paramilitary training for its members, and began acquiring arms and equipment in preparation for its coup. Several of the accused individuals were preparing to occupy government positions and head agencies following the overthrow. According to prosecutors, the group targeted members of the Bundeswehr, the German military, and the German police. 

More on this as we get information, but yeah, this was a serious threat, enough so that police acted first, rather than, you know, allow the attack to happen. The Germans actually deal with their neo-Nazi politicians. Here in America they run for office as Republicans.

Maybe we should consider doing the same?

The Merkel Era Ends

Germany's next Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, takes office today and with it comes the end of the Angela Merkel era after 16 years and four US presidents.

Angela Merkel was assured of a place in the history books as soon as she became Germany’s first female chancellor on Nov. 22, 2005.

Over the next 16 years, she was credited with raising Germany’s profile and influence, working to hold a fractious European Union together, managing a string of crises and being a role model for women.

Now that near-record tenure is ending with her leaving office at age 67 to praise from abroad and enduring popularity at home. Her designated successor, Olaf Scholz, is expected to take office Wednesday.

Merkel, a former scientist who grew up in communist East Germany, is bowing out about a week short of the record for longevity held by her one-time mentor, Helmut Kohl, who reunited Germany during his 1982-1998 tenure.

While Merkel perhaps lacks a spectacular signature achievement, the center-right Christian Democrat came to be viewed as an indispensable crisis manager and defender of Western values in turbulent times.

She served alongside four U.S. presidents, four French presidents, five British prime ministers and eight Italian premiers. Her chancellorship was marked by four major challenges: the global financial crisis, Europe’s debt crisis, the 2015-16 influx of refugees to Europe and the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s undeniable that she’s given Germany a lot of soft power,” said Sudha David-Wilp, the deputy director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Berlin office. “Undoubtedly she’s elevated Germany’s image in the world.”

“When she first came onto the scene in 2005, a lot of people underestimated her, but she grew in stature along with Germany’s role in the world,” David-Wilp added. Others in Europe and beyond “want more of an active Germany to play a role in the world — that may not have been the case before she was in office, necessarily.”

In a video message at Merkel’s final EU summit in October, former U.S. President Barack Obama thanked her for “taking the high ground for so many years.”

“Thanks to you, the center has held through many storms,” he said.

 

I've only been here on ZVTS for 13 years, by comparison. Scholz has enormous shoes to fill and right off the bat there's a good chance he'll be facing a massive refugee crisis should things go badly in Ukraine, along with COVID Omicron sweeping across Europe, and growing violent protests over vaccine mandates in the EU.

 

With Merkel, the heart of the European Union project, out of the way, it's anyone's guess as to what happens next.

Sunday Long Read: The Dresden White Diamond Affair

Our Sunday Long Read is another true crime story, this time from GQ's Joshua Hammer, about the brazen billion-dollar theft of Germany's most famous diamond in November 2019 and the Lebanese crime family thought to be behind a decade of heists in Berlin.

 

Dirk Syndram stared out the car window from the passenger seat as the blackened streets of Dresden, Germany, zipped by. As a museum director, Syndram doesn't get many phone calls in the middle of the night; he isn't often roused from his bed and driven into work in the predawn darkness. That sort of thing can only mean the worst has happened.

As his car slowed to a stop outside the Residenzschloss—the city's iconic Baroque palace—Syndram could see that the cops had the whole area sealed off. It was now a little before six o'clock on the morning of November 25, 2019, and from the street that ran past the palace, a keen observer might have noticed the damage in a nook on the ground floor. A section of an iron gate had been pried apart. Behind it, where there had once been a window, there was now a gaping hole.

Police wouldn't allow him through to survey the damage, but Syndram didn't need to go inside to understand what had happened. He knew—better than anybody—what the thieves had been after. The window led to the so-called Green Vault, a glittering repository of 3,000 of the most precious royal treasures in Europe: gemstone-studded sculptures, ornate ivory cabinets, miniature dioramas, massive diamonds, and hundreds of other rare objects of enormous cultural significance—much of the trove commissioned or acquired by the early-18th-century monarch Augustus II, nicknamed Augustus the Strong, who socked it all away in his sprawling Residenzschloss, or Royal Palace, on the Elbe River.

Syndram, who'd been the Green Vault's director since 1993, was horrified and mystified: The museum, Syndram would later tell a reporter, had in recent years conducted tests of its security system and determined that all was working perfectly. What could have possibly gone wrong?

When news of the heist hit the press, the robbery was described as one of the most costly art heists in history. Reports valued the looted treasure at as much as $1.2 billion. That figure was debatable, but the scale of the loss was staggering, and Syndram knew a detail that made the problem much, much worse: None of the art was insured. The premiums on a collection that valuable would be too taxing for the museum to handle.

Eventually authorities let Syndram inside to inspect the crime scene. He walked through vaulted and mirrored antechambers into the Hall of Precious Objects, where he could see the thieves' point of entry. Much of the room was intact, the idiosyncratic treasures—gilded ostrich eggs, nautiluses and sea snails set in silver, crystal bowls—appeared untouched. Aside from the missing window, the only sign of the intruders was on the floor, where Syndram noticed an exquisite jewelry box that had been knocked off a display table. It remained undamaged.

Syndram passed through another room and into the burglars' ultimate destination: the Chamber of Jewels. In a far corner, a display case had been hacked to pieces, the safety glass reduced to thousands of tiny shards. Syndram could see that the thieves had made off with a slew of very particular treasures: a diamond-laden breast star of the Polish Order of the White Eagle; a sword hilt containing nine large and 770 smaller diamonds; an epaulet adorned with the Dresden White Diamond, a 49-carat cushion-cut stone of unusual radiance and purity believed to have been unearthed from the fabled Golconda mines of India. Gone as well were many diamond-studded buttons and shoe buckles worn by Augustus the Strong at wild-boar hunts and weddings.

Syndram stared at the shattered showcase. He felt as if someone had injured a person he loved. He had been the individual responsible for returning the collection to the Green Vault, after decades of displacement and near destruction during World War II and its convulsive aftermath. “The theft was brutal, shameless,” the director would later say. It was also astonishingly fast. Apparently aware that they had a narrow window of time between triggering the alarm and the arrival of the police, the thieves had used less than five minutes to get in and out of the museum. They seemed to know exactly what they had come for. Or did they? Syndram couldn't decide for sure.

 

This is another one of those stories that would make an excellent movie, but it's not fiction. The crime was bold and brazen, but there's always the problem of finding a buyer for an internationally famous piece of art or having to break it up into pieces in order to sell it. The police need to find the crooks before that happens, and this race is a good one.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein takes to CNN for long read piece on Donald Trump's phone calls to foreign leaders, and how they are so awful, how Trump is such a belligerent numbskull, that even his most basic interactions with our allies and our enemies are nearly all perfect examples of major national security breaches by and of themselves.

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations. 

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest. 

These officials' concerns about the calls, and particularly Trump's deference to Putin, take on new resonance with reports the President may have learned in March that Russia had offered the Taliban bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan -- and yet took no action. CNN's sources said there were calls between Putin and Trump about Trump's desire to end the American military presence in Afghanistan but they mentioned no discussion of the supposed Taliban bounties. 

By far the greatest number of Trump's telephone discussions with an individual head of state were with Erdogan, who sometimes phoned the White House at least twice a week and was put through directly to the President on standing orders from Trump, according to the sources. Meanwhile, the President regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America's principal allies, especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was "stupid."

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources. 

In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders. 

The full, detailed picture drawn by CNN's sources of Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders is consistent with the basic tenor and some substantive elements of a limited number of calls described by former national security adviser John Bolton in his book, "The Room Where It Happened." But the calls described to CNN cover a far longer period than Bolton's tenure, are much more comprehensive — and seemingly more damning -- in their sweep. 

Like Bolton, CNN's sources said that the President seemed to continually conflate his own personal interests -- especially for purposes of re-election and revenge against perceived critics and political enemies -- with the national interest. 

To protect the anonymity of those describing the calls for this report, CNN will not reveal their job titles nor quote them at length directly. More than a dozen officials either listened to the President's phone calls in real time or were provided detailed summaries and rough-text recording printouts of the calls soon after their completion, CNN's sources said. The sources were interviewed by CNN repeatedly over a four-month period extending into June. 

The sources did cite some instances in which they said Trump acted responsibly and in the national interest during telephone discussions with some foreign leaders. CNN reached out to Kelly, McMaster and Tillerson for comment and received no response as of Monday afternoon. Mattis did not comment. 

The White House had not responded to a request for comment as of Monday afternoon. 

One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.

The piece is long, with Bernstein's usual attention to detail, a story researched over several months with multiple named and anonymous sources within the Trump regime itself confirming the facts. It is also a crushing indictment of the Trump regime, and in particular, of Trump himself.

The people who come out looking the worst here are once again the people who enabled Trump time and time again, who knew of this behavior and not only did nothing to stop it, they encouraged it in order to keep him happy, placating a man so unstable and fragile that he remains incapable of anything that isn't of a transactional nature that directly benefits him and his ego.

Pathetic, the whole lot.

They need to go to jail.

Zee Germans Are Nervous

Trump continues to do everything possible to make Vladimir Putin ecstatic, and it's coming at the cost of every other nation on earth, including the US. The latest obvious pro-Russian move: Trump is withdrawing a third of our troops in Germany to punish Chancellor Merkel and the EU.

President Donald Trump’s directive to pull 9,500 troops from Germany hits home hard for friends of America like Edgar Knobloch, whose Bavarian town has been home to U.S. service members for seven decades.

Like Chancellor Angela Merkel, the mayor of Grafenwoehr was caught off guard. It’s the latest sign of the U.S.’s deterioration of ties with a loyal ally, one that not only hosts most of its troops in Europe but also has seen them fuel the local economy.

This medieval town, with a tiny population dwarfed by the size of the American military presence, shows just what a shadow the U.S. has cast over Europe after World War II and what its retreat symbolizes in the eyes of locals and international observers. Another troop cut would signal a further break with a legacy of two generations.

Located near the former East German border, Grafenwoehr is a place where overseas U.S. military infrastructure and community bonds survived the end of the Cold War. Locals celebrate Thanksgiving and enjoy spare ribs. Every year, they turn out by the thousands for the German-American Folk Festival to share beer, bratwurst and country music with the roughly 11,000 U.S. troops based at NATO’s biggest training area in Europe.

“They’re completely integrated here,” Knobloch, 55, said in an interview. “Restaurants are bilingual. There are mixed marriages, mixed families. You often hear from the older members of the community: ‘The Americans liberated us.’”

There hasn’t been much nostalgia between Trump and Merkel, who have clashed repeatedly over trade and Germany’s slow timetable for meeting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s defense spending target. Last month, Merkel snubbed Trump on his plan to hold an in-person Group of Seven summit in June which he’d like Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend.

While Trump has taken aim at Germany’s economic might, Merkel — the longest-serving G-7 leader after 15 years in power — has stared him down across a broad front, from defending the rules-based global economy to policy disputes such as defense spending. A physicist by training, Merkel also contrasted with Trump in her science-based approach to reopening Germany from its coronavirus lockdown.

Lawmakers and government officials in Berlin criticized Trump’s troop decision, which would cut U.S. forces in Germany by slightly more than a quarter, as a snub.

“These plans demonstrate once again that the Trump administration neglects a central element of leadership: the involvement of alliance partners in the decision-making process,” Johann Wadephul, deputy head of Merkel’s parliamentary caucus, said in an emailed statement.

Trump’s decision and the way it was communicated hint at how much Germany’s relations have cooled with a U.S. president who has publicly questioned NATO’s value. By mid-day Saturday, the German government had no official word from Washington on the drawdown plan.

There's no doubt that the withdrawal is 100% related to Merkel rejecting Trump's ask to give Putin what he wants more than anything: back into the G-7 as the eighth member with his dictatorship given all the legitimacy in the world. Merkel said no, and Putin had juuuuuust the perfect suggestion to Donald if she turned him down, which of course Putin knew she would.  Let's not forget that when Donny was hiding in his bunker earlier this week, the person he called for advice was Vlad himself.

That's where the G-8 idea came from, and this is where the withdrawal idea came from, an idea to remind Germany that Russia is a lousy neighbor with the largest army in Europe still.

Besides, Vlad definitely wants a disgruntled German youth to question why the US is there, and maybe ask why Russia shouldn't be closer.

German neo-Nazis have been getting military-style training at camps run by a far-right Russian terrorist organization, German media reported Friday, in the latest sign of deepening international cooperation between white supremacist networks.

Citing intelligence sources, German news magazine Focus reported that the extremists had attended a camp held near Saint Petersburg, where they were shown how to use weapons and explosives, and received close combat training.

The training camp, known as Partizan, is run by the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), an ultranationalist, quasi-paramilitary organization which claims to be fighting for the “predominance of the white race.”

The U.S. government added RIM to its list of specially designated global terrorist groups in April — the first time it had taken such action against a white supremacist organization — saying it had “provided paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe.”

The Russian government considers RIM to be extremist, but has not banned the group.

The German extremists who attended the camp belonged to the youth wings of two fringe German political parties widely considered to be neo-Nazi movements: the National Democratic Party and The Third Path. The Focus report did not provide further details of their attendance at the camp, but said that extremists from Sweden and Finland had previously attended the camps and gone on to fight in pro-separatist militias in eastern Ukraine.

Experts told VICE News that the German attendance at the camp highlighted the growing cooperation between white supremacist groups internationally, as they sought to build relationships with allies in other countries.

“It signals that RIM is a critical node in the transnational white supremacy extremist movement,” said Mollie Saltskog, intelligence analyst at The Soufan Group. “RIM is going beyond networking and ideology, and is actually providing paramilitary training to individuals who adhere to this violent ideology."

Vlad is playing a very long game here and he figures he'll be around for a long, long time in order to see it through. And at the end of that game?

Well, let's just say a reconstituted Soviet Union is the least of our worries.

Germany's Race To The Bottom

Donald Trump is just the symptom of the cancer of white supremacy across the globe, and that includes a country that had a major issue with it 75 years ago and again now, and the world paid the price.

A man suspected of shooting dead nine people in shisha bars in a German town before killing himself and his mother had posted a manifesto online including conspiracy theories and deeply racist views, prosecutors said on Thursday.

The presumed attacker - a 43-year-old German man identified as Tobias R. - was found dead close to a gun soon after the shootings late on Wednesday in Hanau, near Frankfurt, authorities said.

At least five of the victims were Turkish nationals, Ankara’s ambassador to Berlin told state broadcaster TRT Haber as his government demanded robust action.

Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the “poison” of racism. Her deputy, Olaf Scholz, took to Twitter to say: “Politically, nobody can deny that 75 years after the Nazi dictatorship there is real terror again”.
The gunman burst into in a bar in downtown Hanau then drove to a second bar in town and opened fire again, police and witnesses said.

“First we heard five or six rounds of gunfire,” a German-Turkish survivor who gave his name as Muhammed told Reuters from his hospital bed in Hanau.

“Then I saw the man entering. I was eating my meal at that time. We were all eating. We gave orders. The man entered,” he said, sobbing.

“We were 10 to 12 people. Two, three or four people managed to survive. I am one of them.”

Officers chased a car leaving the scene of the last shooting to another address, where they found the bodies of the suspect and his 72-year-old mother, both with gunshot wounds, police said.

“On the suspected perpetrator’s home page, he had put up video messages and a kind of manifesto that, in addition to obscure thoughts and absurd conspiracy theories, pointed to deeply racist views,” said Prosecutor General Peter Frank.

The suspect gunned down people in two separate locations.  This wasn't a spur of the moment attack against an individual, he was trying to kill as many people as he could, and in this case they were Turks.

If even the Germans are admitting that there's a white supremacist problem in the Western world, then it's gotten pretty universally bad.

Sunday Long Read: Follow The Funny Money, Honey

This week's Sunday Long read comes to us from the NY Times Magazine, where Dave Enrich  gives us an excerpt from his new book on the subject, Dark Towers, and the story of Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank, and a man named Mike Offit.

The roughly $425 million that Offit helped arrange for Trump back in 1998 was the start of a very long, very complicated relationship between ­Deutsche Bank and the future president. Over the course of two decades, the bank lent him more than $2 billion — so much that by the time he was elected, ­Deutsche Bank was by far his biggest creditor. Against all odds, Trump paid back most of what he owed the bank. But the relationship cemented ­Deutsche Bank’s reputation as a reckless institution willing to do business with clients nobody else would touch. And it has made the company a magnet for prosecutors, regulators and lawmakers hoping to penetrate the president’s opaque financial affairs.

Last April, congressional Democrats subpoenaed ­Deutsche Bank for its records on Trump, his family members and his businesses. The Trump family sued to block the bank from complying; after two federal courts ruled against the Trumps, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, with oral arguments expected in the spring. State prosecutors, meanwhile, are investigating the bank’s ties with Trump, too. The F.B.I. has been conducting its own wide-­ranging investigation of ­Deutsche Bank, and people connected to the bank told me they have been interviewed by special agents about aspects of the Trump relationship.

If they ever become public, the bank’s Trump records could serve as a Rosetta Stone to decode the president’s finances. Executives told me that the bank has, or at one point had, portions of Trump’s personal federal income tax returns going back to around 2011. (Deutsche Bank lawyers told a federal court last year that the bank does not have those returns; it is unclear what happened to them. The Trump Organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The bank has documents detailing the finances and operations of his businesses. And it has records about internal deliberations over whether and how to do business with Trump — a paper trail that most likely reflects some bank employees’ concerns about potentially suspicious transactions that they detected in the family’s accounts.

One reason all these files could be so illuminating is that the bank’s relationship with Trump extended well beyond making simple loans. ­Deutsche Bank managed tens of millions of dollars of Trump’s personal assets. The bank also furnished him with other services that have not previously been reported: providing sophisticated financial instruments that shielded him from risks and outside scrutiny, and making introductions to wealthy Russians who were interested in investing in Western real estate. If Trump cheated on his taxes, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know. If his net worth is measured in millions, not billions, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know. If he secretly got money from the Kremlin, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know.

Until the 1990s, ­Deutsche Bank was a provincial German company with a limited presence outside Europe. Today it is a $1.5 trillion colossus, one of the world’s largest banks, with offices in 59 countries — and, thanks to its well-­documented pattern of violating laws, an international symbol of greed, recklessness and hubris. Its rap sheet includes manipulating international currency markets; playing a central role in rigging a crucial benchmark interest rate known as Libor; whisking billions of dollars in and out of Iran, Syria, Myanmar and other countries in violation of sanctions; laundering billions of dollars on behalf of Russian oligarchs, among many others; and misleading customers, investors and American, German and British regulators.

­Deutsche Bank’s envelope-­pushing helped it become the global power player it is today, but it also left the company dangerously frail. Its books remain stuffed with trillions of dollars of risky derivatives — the sort of instruments that many other banks have disposed of since the 2008 financial crisis but that persist as a kind of unexploded ordnance in ­Deutsche Bank’s accounts, threatening to inflict severe damage on the bank and the broader financial system if something were to cause them to detonate. Its financial cushions to absorb future shocks are threadbare. Its core businesses are not performing well; the bank lost $5.8 billion last year. Because of Deutsche Bank’s size and its connections with hundreds of other major banks around the world, serious problems could spread, virus­like, to other financial institutions. The International Monetary Fund a few years ago branded ­Deutsche Bank “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” in the global banking system.
­Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Trump, rather than being an odd outlier, is a kind of object lesson in how the bank lost its way. The company was hungry for growth, especially in the United States, and it was happy to cozy up to clients that better-­established players viewed as too damaged or dangerous. Along the way, it missed one opportunity after another to extricate itself from the Trump relationship or at least slow its expansion. With hindsight, the procession of miscues and bad decisions appears almost comical.

I have spent the past two years interviewing dozens of ­Deutsche Bank executives about the Trump relationship, among other subjects. Quite a few look back at the relationship with a mixture of anger and regret. They blame a small group of bad bankers for blundering into a trap that would further damage ­Deutsche Bank’s name and guarantee years of political and prosecutorial scrutiny. But that isn’t quite right; in fact, the Trump relationship was repeatedly blessed by executives up and down the bank’s organizational ladder. The cumulative effect of those decisions is that a German company — one that most Americans have probably never heard of — played a large role in positioning a strapped businessman to become president of the United States.

Without Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump would have been a failed real estate tycoon who ended up bankrupt and broke.  He would have been a cautionary tale of greed.

Instead he is in the White House.

That alone makes them the Holy Grail of Trump's dark secrets.

Holidaze: Das Trumpenfuhrer

When polling outfit YouGov asked Germans which world leader they thought was the largest threat to world peace, the results weren't even close.

41% of Germans believe President Trump is more of a threat to world peace than North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping or Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a YouGov survey reported by DW.

Why it matters: The results show the degree to which trust in U.S. leadership has eroded under Trump, even among countries like Germany that are traditionally viewed as close allies.

Details: 2,000 Germans participated in the survey, which was conducted between Dec. 16 and 18. Kim Jong-un came in second at 17%, followed by Putin and Khamenei at 8% and Xi at 7%.

Hey, at least he won something.

Sunday Long Read: The Dark History Of White Supremacy

Adam Serwer explores how The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave has also been a beacon for white supremacy in other countries, and much of the history of white supremacy and "racial purity" comes from an American author from 100 years ago named Madison Grant.

Robert Bowers wanted everyone to know why he did it.

“I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social-media network Gab shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27 and gunning down 11 worshippers. He “wanted all Jews to die,” he declared while he was being treated for his wounds. Invoking the specter of white Americans facing “genocide,” he singled out HIAS, a Jewish American refugee-support group, and accused it of bringing “invaders in that kill our people.” Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announcing that Bowers would face federal charges, was unequivocal in his condemnation: “These alleged crimes are incomprehensibly evil and utterly repugnant to the values of this nation.”

The pogrom in Pittsburgh, occurring just days before the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, seemed fundamentally un-American to many. Sessions’s denunciation spoke to the reality that most Jews have found a welcome home in the United States. His message also echoed what has become an insistent refrain in the Donald Trump era. Americans want to believe that the surge in white-supremacist violence and recruitment—the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us”; the hate crimes whose perpetrators invoke the president’s name as a battle cry—has no roots in U.S. soil, that it is racist zealotry with a foreign pedigree and marginal allure.

Warnings from conservative pundits on Fox News about the existential threat facing a country overrun by immigrants meet with a similar response. “Massive demographic changes,” Laura Ingraham has proclaimed, mean that “the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” in much of the country: Surely this kind of rhetoric reflects mere ignorance. Or it’s just a symptom of partisan anxiety about what those changes may portend for Republicans’ electoral prospects. As for the views and utterances of someone like Congressman Steve King (“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”), such sentiments are treated as outlandish extremism, best ignored as much as possible.

The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth. History, though, tells a different story. King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.

The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States. What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents. Perhaps the most important among them was a blue blood with a very impressive mustache, Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.

Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him. Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide” (the term genocide hadn’t yet been coined in Grant’s day). In an introduction to the 2013 edition of another of Grant’s works, the white nationalist Richard Spencer warns that “one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogeneous and ‘assimilated,’ nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.” This language is vintage Grant.

Most Americans, however, quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications. Reflexive recoil was more like it: When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

Madison grant came from old money. Born in Manhattan seven months after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, he attended Yale and then Columbia Law School. He was an outdoorsman and a conservationist, knowledgeable about wildlife and interested in the dangers of extinction, expertise that he soon became intent on applying to humanity. When he opened a law practice on Wall Street in the early 1890s, the wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe was nearing its height. “As he was jostled by Greek ragpickers, Armenian bootblacks, and Jewish carp vendors, it was distressingly obvious to him that the new arrivals did not know this nation’s history or understand its republican form of government,” Spiro writes in his biography.

We've been here before.

A century ago, we had leaders and wealthy elite and even presidents who said "there are many fine people on both sides" of the debate over racial purity.   It took a German politician of Austrian nationality putting Madison Grant's ideas into practice before we fought against it.

But here we are again.

 

Russian To Judgment, Con't

There are now four major investigations into Donald Trump (the Mueller probe, House Democrats, Southern District of NY Federal, and NY State AG) and while we've heard a lot of recent action on the first three, it's the fourth one that should have Trump up sweating off his orange bronzer at night.

The New York attorney general’s office late on Monday issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank for records relating to the financing of four major Trump Organization projects and a failed effort to buy the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League in 2014, according to a person briefed on the subpoenas.

The inquiry opens a new front in the scrutiny of Deutsche Bank, one of the few lenders willing to do business with Donald J. Trump in recent years. The bank is already the subject of two congressional investigations and was examined last year by New York banking regulators, who took no action.

The new inquiry, by the office of the attorney general, Letitia James, was prompted by the congressional testimony last month of Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, the person briefed on the subpoenas said. Mr. Cohen testified under oath that Mr. Trump had inflated his assets in financial statements, and Mr. Cohen provided copies of statements he said had been submitted to Deutsche Bank.

The inquiry by Ms. James’s office is a civil investigation, not a criminal one, although its focus and scope were unclear. The attorney general has broad authority under state law to investigate fraud and can fine — or in extreme cases, go to court to try to dissolve — a business that is found to have engaged in repeated illegality.

The request to Deutsche Bank sought loan applications, mortgages, lines of credit and other financing transactions in connection with the Trump International Hotel in Washington; the Trump National Doral outside Miami; and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the person said.

Investigators also requested records connected to an unsuccessful effort to buy the Bills, the person said. Mr. Trump gave Deutsche Bank bare-bones personal financial statements in 2014 when he planned to make a bid for the team, The New York Times has reported. The deal fell through when the team was sold to a rival bidder for $1.4 billion.

Mr. Trump worked with a small United States-based unit of Deutsche Bank that serves ultra-wealthy people. The unit lent Mr. Trump more than $100 million in 2012 to pay for the Doral golf resort and $170 million in 2015 to transform the Old Post Office Building in Washington into a luxury hotel.

New Jersey-based Investors Bank was subpoenaed for records relating to Trump Park Avenue, a project it had backed.

A spokeswoman for Deutsche Bank said on Tuesday that it had received the subpoena.

Investors Bank declined to comment. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

Now again, this is a civil case so far.  But if it turns up criminal activity, and it most certainly will given Trump's deep history of money laundering and fraud, all bets are off.

The other issue is what Mueller is up to on the counterintelligence front, and as former US Attorney Nelson Cunningham explains, that report can't be buried.

The most public and familiar one is as a criminal investigator under the special counsel regulations. But Mueller has also carried a second charge, as a counterintelligence expert, with a much broader charge to determine and report the scope of any interference and any links to the Trump campaign—what Trump himself might refer to as “collusion.”

In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey testified that the Russia investigation was commenced “as part of our counterintelligence mission . . . also includ[ing] an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s May 17, 2017 order appointing Mueller special counsel specifically and carefully incorporated this announced scope and mission.

From the start, then, Mueller has been conducting a counterintelligence investigation, while “also” assessing whether any crimes were committed. Not the other way around.

Comey and Rosenstein knew what they were doing. It is the mission of a criminal investigation to produce indictments and trials, which tell stories and render conclusions only imperfectly. Thanks to the special counsel regulations, there is also “a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions.” But what will go into this report and what the Congress and public may ultimately see is highly proscribed.

It is the central mission of a counterintelligence investigation, however, to produce . . . well, a report. These findings and conclusions are shared with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and relevant agencies of the 17-member intelligence community (CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.). The report may be honed into a formal IC “assessment” reflecting the consensus view of the 17 agencies. It was just such a report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” that on Jan. 7, 2017 was shared with incoming President Trump. Its disclosure brought into public view the Intelligence Community’s bombshell conclusion that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered an effort to discredit Hillary Clinton and to “help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”

Significantly, unlike a final criminal report, a Mueller counterintelligence report cannot be bottled up. By statute it must be shared with Congress. The House and Senate intelligence committees are legally entitled to be given reports, in writing, of significant intelligence and counterintelligence activities or failures. Mueller’s findings will certainly qualify.

Where matters are too delicate to share with all the members of the intelligence committees, statute and established practice provide that disclosure may be made to a smaller circle known as the “Gang of Eight:” the chair and ranking member of each intelligence committee, and the Democratic and Republican leaders of each chamber.

Already, these obligations have generated significant disclosures to Congress of Russia’s activities. In August 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed members of the Gang of Eight on the then-new signs of Russian interference and hacking. The explosive disclosure in the January 2017 IC assessment that Putin had ordered interference specifically to assist then-candidate Trump was also thanks to these provisions. And in May 2017, then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe informed the Gang of Eight that in the wake of Comey’s firing, the FBI had focused its counter-intelligence investigation on the president himself.

Mueller inherited this investigation just days later, and he inherited this reporting framework as well. Twenty-two months of relentless investigation have followed since.

Bottom line: the investigations into Donald Trump's criminality will continue for some time, because there's decades of filth to dig through.

 

The Drums of War, Con't

By all accounts, this weekend's annual Munich Security Conference in Germany was a complete and total diplomatic disaster for the Trump regime.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Mike Pence and America to schisse off with Trump's plans to attack Iran, and that there would be no European "Coalition of the Willing" for this little adventure in Tehran.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany delivered a strong rejoinder on Saturday to American demands that European allies pull out of the Iran nuclear deal and gave a spirited defense of multilateral institutions in a world increasingly marked by great-power rivalry.

In an uncharacteristically passionate speech, Ms. Merkel said the nuclear deal was the best way of influencing Iranian behavior on a range of non-nuclear issues, from missile development to terrorism.

Without mentioning President Trump or the United States by name in what may be her last speech to this major security conference, Ms. Merkel criticized other unilateral moves, such as Mr. Trump’s decision to pull American troops out of Syria, a suggestion that he would withdraw quickly from Afghanistan and his decision to suspend the Intermediate Range Missile Treaty with Russia, which directly affects European security.

“We sit there in the middle with the result,” she said.

Ms. Merkel spoke immediately before the United States vice president, Mike Pence, and addressed a packed auditorium with an audience that included Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, as well as the Russian foreign minister and a high-ranking Chinese official, who all pointedly remained seated when the chancellor received a standing ovation.

Her reception was in sharp contrast to the polite near-silence that greeted Mr. Pence’s address. Aware of a growing anxiety among European allies that the United States administration’s erratic leadership stance was a threat to their security, the vice president came to Munich laser-focused on the Trump administration’s message.
He repeated his demand from this past week in Warsaw that Germany, France and Britain should join Washington in pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal.

“The time has come for the Europeans to leave the Iranian nuclear deal,” Mr. Pence said.

In contrast to the chancellor, Mr. Pence focused less on working together and more on a list of demands for American allies based on American interests, with a heavy emphasis on a combative approach to Iran.

“The Iranian regime openly advocates another Holocaust, and it seeks the means to achieve it,” Mr. Pence said.

The two speeches were a reminder of how far apart Europe and the United States are on a range of global issues.

In fact, the conference was such a disaster that Europe has now all but given up on any sort of productive relationship with America as long as we're infected by MAGA fever.

European leaders have long been alarmed that President Trump’s words and Twitter messages could undo a trans-Atlantic alliance that had grown stronger over seven decades. They had clung to the hope that those ties would bear up under the strain.

But in the last few days of a prestigious annual security conference in Munich, the rift between Europe and the Trump administration became open, angry and concrete, diplomats and analysts say.

A senior German official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on such matters, shrugged his shoulders and said: “No one any longer believes that Trump cares about the views or interests of the allies. It’s broken.”

The most immediate danger, diplomats and intelligence officials warned, is that the trans-Atlantic fissures now risk being exploited by Russia and China.

Even the saturnine Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, happily noted the strains, remarking that the Euro-Atlantic relationship had become increasingly “tense.”

“We see new cracks forming, and old cracks deepening,” Mr. Lavrov said.

The Europeans no longer believe that Washington will change, not when Mr. Trump sees traditional allies as economic rivals and leadership as diktat. His distaste for multilateralism and international cooperation is a challenge to the very heart of what Europe is and needs to be in order to have an impact in the world.

But beyond the Trump administration, an increasing number of Europeans say they believe that relations with the United States will never be the same again.

Karl Kaiser, a longtime analyst of German-American relations, said, “Two years of Mr. Trump, and a majority of French and Germans now trust Russia and China more than the United States.”

Trump's damage to the US-EU relationship may never be fixed in my lifetime.  The rest of the world is passing America by, as we are led by a dolt, elected by reactionary fools, and no longer deserving of anything but epithets and epitaphs. 

Germany is straining under the pressure of being the world's new Western leader, as the UK and France are increasingly paralyzed.  Canada and Australia have their own problems.  It is Russia and China right now who are running rampant, and the 21st century will belong to them, not us.

It's Mueller (On German) Time

The headquarters of Germany's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, was raided today by scores of German police in connection with a massive international money laundering scheme.

One hundred seventy officers searched the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and five other sites in the area early Thursday as part of a money-laundering investigation involving hundreds of millions of euros, prosecutors in Frankfurt said.

Two employees, who were not publicly identified but whose ages were given as 50 and 46, and other “unidentified people in positions of authority” are suspected of failing to report possible money laundering for transactions worth 311 million euros, or more than $350 million.

The money flowed to organizations in the British Virgin Islands before spring 2016, prosecutors said in an emailed statement.

The German bank confirmed in a statement that the police were investigating several of its offices in Germany and said the investigation related to the Panama Papers, a trove of files that put a spotlight on global money laundering. “We are cooperating fully with the authorities,” Deutsche said in the statement.

In April 2016, news organizations in cooperation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released the Panama Papers, which revealed how some of the world’s wealthiest individuals, including more than 900 customers of Deutsche Bank, dodged taxes in their home countries by transferring money to offshore accounts.

Prosecutors said the documents indicated “that Deutsche Bank helped customers found offshore organizations in tax havens by transferring illegally acquired money without alerting authorities to suspected money laundering.”

Paper and electronic documents were gathered during Thursday’s raid, they said.

The prosecutor’s office said two bank employees were suspected of helping Deutsche Bank clients set up offshore accounts and the bank had failed to report the suspected money laundering.

A lot of people are going to jail over this one, but my guess is that the client list of laundered cash may involve one or more members of the Trump Organization.   Remember, Donald Trump and his kids have a long-standing relationship with the bank including a $285 million loan for Jared Kushner that happened just before Election Day 2016 and Trump still owes them $175 million or so.

You'd better believe that this raid and Mueller shifting to the endgame are related.  Mueller has documents from the bank and that trail leads to the Russian mob.  And if you think Trump is having a bad day...it just got infinitely worse for him.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has reached a tentative deal with Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney and long-time fixer for President Donald Trump, sources told ABC News.

Cohen is scheduled to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday where he is expected to enter a guilty plea for misstatements to Congress in closed-door testimony last year about his contacts with Russians during the presidential campaign.

Once among the president’s most loyal and zealous defenders in business and politics, Cohen has now promised to “put family and country first” by cooperating with prosecutors, becoming perhaps the most pivotal public witness against his former boss.

Cohen’s earlier plea deal with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York implicated President Trump in campaign finance felonies. Since then, Cohen has spent more than 70 hours in interviews with Mueller's team. The questioning has focused on contacts with Russians by Trump associates during the campaign, Trump’s business ties to Russia, obstruction of justice and talk of possible pardons, sources familiar with the discussions have told ABC News.

“The potential significance of Cohen’s cooperation is immense,” said Kendall Coffey, a former United States Attorney in Florida.

Cohen now giving testimony to Mueller on Trump's failed Moscow Trump Tower scheme and this bank raid on Trump's largest loan partner for money laundering are, as they say, a hell of a coincidence.

Things are moving very quickly now on the Mueller front as Trump jets to Argentina for the G20 summit and of course a meeting with his boss, Putin.  Stay tuned.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Whatever scintilla of a doubt that somehow had not been crushed into atoms that Donald Trump was not fully compromised and conducting US foreign policy at the behest of one Vladimir Putin was annihilated this morning in Helsinki at the joint press conference following Trump's two-hour private meeting with his Russian supervisor.

Asked whether he believes his own intelligence agencies, which say that Russia interfered in the 2016 United States election, or Mr. Putin, who denies it, Mr. Trump refused to say, but he expressed doubt about whether Russia was to blame. 

Mr. Trump raised the matter of Russian electoral meddling, the two leaders said at a news conference after their meetings, and Mr. Putin reiterated his denial of Russian involvement. 

Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, and other American intelligence officials “said they think it’s Russia,” Mr. Trump said. “I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” 

But when asked directly whom he believes, Mr. Trump changed the subject to misconduct by Democrats during the campaign. 

The president’s ambivalence, after the indictments of Russian intelligence agents for the election hacking, and after the findings of congressional committees, represents a remarkable divergence between Mr. Trump and the American national security apparatus. 

Mr. Putin said: “President Trump mentioned the so-called interference of Russia in the American elections. I had to reiterate things I said several times: that the Russian state has never interfered, and is not going to interfere, in internal American affairs, including the election process.” 

He offered to have Russian intelligence agencies work with their American counterparts to get to the bottom of the matter.

“I addressed directly with President Putin the issue of Russian interference in our elections,” Mr. Trump said. “I felt this was a matter best discussed in person. President Putin may very well want to address it, and very strongly, because he feels very strongly about it, and he has an interesting idea.”

To recap: Trump went to Finland to meet the leader of a country that did untold damage to our electoral process, shook his hand, looked him in the eye, and said "I don't believe you did it" and not only did he not confront Putin about the 2016 election hacking of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party, he publicly sided with Putin in front of him over America's entire intelligence community.

Needless to say, the unprecedented and historical damage from today will reverberate for decades.  Germany, arguably our most important ally in the EU and NATO right now, with a $4 trillion economy, has all but given up on the US coming to its senses.

Germany’s foreign minister said on Monday Europe could not rely on Donald Trump and needed to close ranks after the U.S. president called the European Union a “foe” with regard to trade. 

We can no longer completely rely on the White House,” Heiko Maas told the Funke newspaper group. “To maintain our partnership with the USA we must readjust it. The first clear consequence can only be that we need to align ourselves even more closely in Europe.” 

He added: “Europe must not let itself be divided however sharp the verbal attacks and absurd the tweets may be.”

For Berlin to admit this on the same day as this summit is staggering.  The NATO alliance is crumbling before our eyes.  Both Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and CIA Director Gina Haspel should resign in protest over this, along with the US Ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

None of them will however.  The reality is that Trump is so weak that he can't accept that he didn't win without Russian help and everyone knows it, so on we will go with this farce until something happens that's just too much for us to take and we shut him down.

Meanwhile, while all this was happening, there was yet another arrest and indictment in the Mueller investigation to greet Trump when he arrives back in the states on charges of being an unregistered foreign agent.

A Russian woman who tried to broker a pair of secret meetings between candidate Donald J. Trump and the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, during the 2016 presidential campaign, was charged Monday and accused of carrying out a secret Russian effort to influence American politics. 

The Justice Department said in court documents that the woman, Mariia Butina, worked to establish “back channel” lines of communication with American politicians. “These lines could be used by the Russian Federation to penetrate the U.S. national decision-making apparatus to advance the agenda of the Russian Federation.” 

Ms. Butina, whose first name is more commonly spelled Maria, twice tried to set up a meetings between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin in 2016. The charges announced Monday do not name Mr. Trump but they make clear that Ms. Butina’s overtures were part of a Russian intelligence operation.

The affidavit that goes along with this arrest is astonishing.

I understand the argument that the 12 Russian GRU agents indicted on Friday will never see the inside of a US courtroom, but Maria Butina is under federal arrest right now and she was arranging meetings to influence politicians in our nation's capital.

Again, this is Mueller laying out Americans working with Russian agents with then intent of influencing US politics.  It's a bad, bad look for US Person 1 and US Person 2 here, and I'm willing to bet cash money that one or both of these American citizens were part of the Trump campaign at the time.  there's also no doubt that the Russian Official is Butina's boss, our old friend and Russian gun aficionado Alexander Torshin.

Oh, and speaking of working for the Russians:

Hi, NRA. Howsit going over there?  You guys doing OK?  Cause US Person 1 sounds like they might be former NRA President and Moonie Times opinion page editor David Keene, or possibly even the most recent NRA president, Wayne LaPierre.

The Washington Post believes Person 1 is GOP consultant Paul Erickson, who was the fixer for the proposed meeting between Donald Trump, Butina, and Torshin at the 2016 NRA Convention in Louisville, while Casey Michel at Think Progress believes Person 2 is George O'Neill Jr., a Rockerfeller heir who has been big in GOP circles and threw quite a dinner that included Butina, Torshin, and Erickson.

I wouldn't hold your breath for the sanity part, as Trump as the GOP are in too deep, but we still ostensibly have an election in November that could go a long way in restoring sanity to our country.  But as Charlie Pierce notes, that may be far too late.  Republican senators could stop Trump now if they wanted.

The fact is that there is only one constitutional method by which this renegade presidency* can be stifled before the November midterm elections—and it needs to be reined in as quickly as possible. The only available option is to have two or three Republican senators announce that, hereafter, they will caucus and vote with the Democratic minority between now and November. 

It is clear that nobody can control the president*. Impeachment has to begin in the House of Representatives, and, at the moment, the House is a barn full of maniacs and its speaker is an invertebrate life-form who can’t keep woodchucks from eating his car. The Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill are very limited, institutionally, in what they can do. The people in general have to wait until this fall to make their feelings known, and that through a compromised system of national elections.

They will do nothing, of course.  They are compromised just as much as Trump is, and they know it.

We are being sold out in real time, guys.  Putin made it clear what Trump's marching orders are.  We'll only find out when it's far past time we could have done anything about it.

Trump Cards, Con't

Trumpian "foreign policy" means "everyone's a rival and nobody is to be trusted, and only one nation can win in Donald Trump's book.

Coming off a contentious NATO summit and a trip to the U.K. in which he seemed to undercut the government of America's closest ally, President Trump took aim at another Western institution just days before his high-stakes meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In an interview with "CBS Evening News" anchor Jeff Glor in Scotland on Saturday, President Trump named the European Union -- comprising some of America's oldest allies -- when asked to identify his "biggest foe globally right now." 

"Well, I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn't think of the European Union, but they're a foe. Russia is foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically, certainly they are a foe. But that doesn't mean they are bad. It doesn't mean anything. It means that they are competitive," Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Turnberry, Scotland.

"I respect the leaders of those countries. But, in a trade sense, they've really taken advantage of us and many of those countries are in NATO and they weren't paying their bills," he added. 

On Sunday, British Prime Minister Theresa May told the BBC that Mr. Trump had encouraged her to "sue the EU" rather than negotiate over the U.K.'s departure from the bloc. May's conservative government is deeply split over her handling of Brexit, and her hold on power was further weakened by Mr. Trump's comments to a British tabloid that her approach had likely "killed" any chance of a new trade deal with the U.S. once Brexit is complete. (Mr. Trump tried to walk back his criticism in a joint press conference on Friday.) 

At the summit of NATO allies in Brussels last week, Mr. Trump took a hard line toward member nations for failing to meet targeted defense spending goals. He claimed his tough stance had paid off in getting allies to spend more on defense, telling reporters on Thursday that members had "upped their commitments and I am very happy." 

The president kicked off the NATO summit by blasting Germany as "totally controlled" and "captive by Russia" over a natural gas pipeline project, known as the Nord Stream 2. The U.S. fears the deal could give Moscow greater leverage over Western Europe. In Saturday's interview, the president reiterated the criticisms he made in Brussels. 

"Germany made a pipeline deal with Russia. Where they're going to be paying Russia billions and billions of dollars a year for energy, and I say that's not good, that's not fair. You're supposed to be fighting for someone and then that someone gives billions of dollars to the one you're, you know, guarding against. I think it's ridiculous, so I let that be known also this time," Mr. Trump told Glor. "I'll tell you what, there's a lot of anger at the fact that Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars. There's a lot of anger. I also think it's a very bad thing for Germany. Because it's like, what, are they waving a white flag?" 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, told reporters after the president's comments in Brussels that she had "experienced myself how a part of Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union" and said her country today made "independent policies" and "independent decisions. 

In the CBS News interview, Mr. Trump also continued to criticize the special counsel's Russia investigation, saying it is having an impact on America's standing in the world. "I think we're greatly hampered by this whole witch hunt that's going on in the United States," the president said. "I think it hurts our relationship with Russia. I actually think it hurts our relationship with a lot of countries. I think it's a disgrace what's going on." 

Mr. Trump heads to Helsinki on Sunday ahead of his meeting with Putin on Monday. He told Glor he has "low expectations" for the summit. "Nothing bad is going to come out of it, and maybe some good will come out," he said.

Anger, projection, ignorance, mistrust, and blame-shifting.  All classic Trump personal traits, now they are America's traits in the arena of diplomacy and foreign policy.   The fact that this summit is still even happening at this point is proof enough of how much of a disaster this is going to be.

Keep in mind Trump is fully compromised by Putin.  The damage to the country will continue until Trump is removed from office, and will probably continue for decades after.

But we have to be rid of him first, and there's so much that Putin can do to us with the clear advantages he has.  You'll never convince me that he doesn't have the congressional GOP in his pocket either, House GOP members Paul Ryan, Devin Nunes, Darrell Issa and Dana Rohrabacher especially.  He probably has plenty on McConnell in the Senate too, but at this point, McConnell's gotten just about everything he's wanted to accomplish done, so it matters little to him.

It was Barack Obama who wanted to issue a joint statement condemning Russian election meddling with Republicans, but Mitch McConnell refused to cooperate. It was the Obama administration that secured documents relating to the Russia investigation so that they couldn’t be destroyed by Trump and the Republicans. It was Obama who warned for years that America’s election system and infrastructure needed to be upgraded and repaired. (A warning that was ignored by Republican state and local election officials.)

McConnell went even further. When Congress wanted to act, the Senate Majority Leader expressed doubt about the intelligence that Russia was attacking the United States and stopped Congress from taking action against Russia. 

The Republican Party prevented President Obama and the Democrats from doing anything to stop the Russian attack. In hindsight, we now know that this is because Republicans were also benefiting from the Russian activities. 

Trump knows why Obama didn’t do anything to stop his treason. Mitch McConnell is the reason why Russia was able to attack our country. McConnell was also a big part of why Trump was able to win the election. 

It'll take arguably the rest of my lifetime to fix this mess.  If ever.  But let's stop pretending Trump's perfidy wasn't aided and abetted by Republican leaders who knew damn well what Russia was up to and did everything they could to cover for Trump so that he would deliver what they wanted from him, just as much as Putin wanted Trump to deliver what he wanted from him.

They knew.  They deserve the same prison cell Trump does.

Trump Trading Blows, Con't

Yesterday I talked about how Donald Trump was planning to ditch the G-7 summit to go hang out with his new dictator pals in Singapore, and today he made good on that threat, but not before storming out with the ultimatum that all nations wanting to do business with the US must drop tariffs, or else.

President Trump told foreign leaders at the Group of Seven summit that they must dramatically reduce trade barriers with the United States or they would risk losing access to the world’s largest economy, delivering his most defiant trade threat yet to his counterparts from around the globe.

But there were numerous signs here that other leaders stood their ground, having stiffened after months of attacks and insults. Each leader now faces crucial decisions about how to proceed.

Trump, in a news conference before leaving for Singapore, described private conversations he held over two days with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Canada. He said he pushed them to consider removing every single tariff or trade barrier on American goods, and in return he would do the same for products from their countries. But if steps aren’t taken, he said, the penalties would be severe.

“We’re like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,” Trump said. “And that ends.”

The U.S. leader described the meetings with his counterparts as cordial, and he repeatedly blamed past U.S. leaders for what he views as a trade imbalance. He also said other nations had taken advantage of decades of U.S. complacency with regards to trade, something that he planned to end.

The two-day session under crystalline blue skies in Charlevoix, Quebec, put Trump’s transactional view of alliances, economic leverage and trade relationships into sharp focus for other nations often frustrated by Trump’s ad hoc decision-making.

At this second G-7 gathering of Trump’s presidency, the question of whether the U.S. leader would follow through on campaign boasts about punishing international freeloaders has been largely answered.

He did not back away or blunt his critiques, and despite first-name references to “Angela,” and “Justin,” Trump did little to disguise his distrust of the international consensus model of world affairs that the G-7 represents.

The thing is, our allies?  They're going to chose "or else".   They're not putting up with Trump's crap, and they are calling the bluff of a wildly unpopular elected official whose party is about to get crushed at the polls in five months.  When the economic damage of these tariffs starts to show up in jobs reports about September or October or so, you'll know what caused it.

Meanwhile, Trump is more than happy to go meet his actual boss Vladimir Putin in Vienna later this year, all while telling the G-7 allies to go to hell.

He's the best agent Putin could have asked for.

Trump Trading Blows, Con't

Donald Trump's trip Thursday to the G-7 summit in Quebec -- or as French President Emmanuel Macron called it "the G-6 plus 1" -- was such an unmitigated disaster that Trump is picking up his ball and leaving early.

President Donald Trump continued to criticize Canada early Friday morning after the White House announced he will leave the G-7 summit before its conclusion following a day of back-and-forth with fellow world leaders that foreshadowed confrontations during the meeting of the world's largest advanced economies.

Trump will be depart the summit in Quebec at 10:30 a.m. Saturday and head directly to Singapore, the site of his June 12 meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. The G-7 summit is scheduled to wrap up later on Saturday.

Before the Thursday night announcement, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada both promised to confront Trump over his recent decision to impose tariffs on U.S. allies.

Trump, in response, laid into the two leaders on Thursday evening and Friday morning over those plans.

“Please tell Prime Minister Trudeau and President Macron that they are charging the U.S. massive tariffs and create non-monetary barriers,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “The EU trade surplus with the U.S. is $151 Billion, and Canada keeps our farmers and others out. Look forward to seeing them tomorrow.”

On Friday a little after 6 a.m., he tweeted, “Canada charges the U.S. a 270% tariff on Dairy Products! They didn’t tell you that, did they? Not fair to our farmers!” and “Looking forward to straightening out unfair Trade Deals with the G-7 countries. If it doesn’t happen, we come out even better!”

By pulling out early, Trump will skip sessions focused on climate change, the oceans and clean energy. He will also miss the traditional group-photo opportunity among fellow heads of state. The president may also miss the opportunity to host a summit-ending news conference, something world leaders traditionally do. The leader of the host nation, in this case Trudeau, also takes questions and gives closing remarks. Trump chose not to hold a news conference last year, becoming the only G-7 leader not to do so before leaving Italy, according to The Hill. He opted instead for a speech at a nearby naval air station.

The summit traditionally concludes with a joint statement spelling out the areas of agreement on the wide range of policy issues discussed. But before Trump's announcement, Macron urged the other five nations to hold strong and not let potential U.S. opposition water down their communiqué.

The 2017 statement, for example was notable for its explicit mention that the U.S. did not share its allies‘ support of the Paris Climate Accord. Less than a week later, Trump announced in the White House Rose Garden that the U.S. would be exiting the climate agreement.

“Maybe the American president doesn’t care about being isolated today, but we don’t mind being six, if needs be,” Macron said, part of his plea to confront Trump head-on.

Trump is such a petulant child, and his utter failure to even remain on the same continent with the G-7 leaders, our closest economic and military allies, proves beyond a doubt that the North Korean "summit" he's heading to next week in Singapore will be one of the most comical crash-and-burn cockups in US diplomatic history.

Our isolation from the world is proceeding at a brisk pace, and clearly the rest of the planet is willing to and prepared to operate without our "leadership" anymore.  It's probably the best option given the circumstances.

Oh, and Trump's biggest complaint?

Russia wasn't invited.  They haven't been since they, you know, invaded the Ukraine and took the Crimea region.

I wonder when we get kicked out?