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.

Abby Huntsman Is As Useless As Her Father

I'm not sure how Abby Huntsman ended up on MSNBC's The Cycle...scratch that.  I know exactly how she did, spouting her dad's same No Labels nonsense for the Millennials. LA Times econ reporter Michael Hiltzik has her pegged.

Abby Huntsman is really, really upset about Social Security. We know this because the television presenter, a daughter of former GOP Presidential contender Jon Huntsman, went on an extended rant about it Thursday on MSNBC's "The Cycle." The show is aimed at a younger audience of news consumers and Huntsman, 27, is one of the four youthful co-hosts.

She thinks Social Security is going bankrupt, leaving her and her generation with nothing. "This is infuriating," she said, bouncing up and down in her chair like a petulant toddler, "because none of our elected officials seem to care enough to do anything about it."

Unfortunately, almost everything she said about Social Security in the name of making it "sustainable" for her generation was wrong.

Dead wrong.

Huntsman wants to tell it like it is, but she fails due to lack of information. And if her generation believes what she said, it's going to be in deep trouble.

Let's get one thing straight:  Nobody in my generation (the youngest Gen Xers) and younger believes we'll ever see a dime of Social Security.  I still have a minimum of 35 years of work ahead of me.  For those in their early 30's, it's 40, and those in their 20's it's 45 or 50.  I understand the appeal of "after the Boomers drain the system, odds are really good there won't be a lot left for us."

But that's simply not true.

The most dire projections of the program's future say that "doing nothing about it"--no benefit cuts, no tax increases--will leave the program still able to pay 75%-80% of scheduled benefits. Not "nothing at all." And that 75% to 80% would still be much more per month 75 years from now than retirees get today.

By the way, it's also untrue that President Obama's budget plan makes "no mention of entitlement reform. None," as Huntsman claims. His budget proposes a very damaging cutback in Social Security disability, as we documented here, as well as changes to Medicare payment formulas to save money.

Huntsman has stitched her spiel together out of scraps and tatters of misinformation, of a sort we've heard from the older generation for years. They're no more accurate coming out the mouths of a "millennial." But it's tragic to see that what she's learned from her elders is how to mislead her public.

Which is exactly the platform her dad ran on in 2012.  She's just as useless.

Snow White And Jon Huntsman

An interesting admission this week from Obama campaign head Jim Messina that while Mitt Romney was still formidable enough an opponent to really give Team O a run for their money up until the last week or so of the race, it was Jon Huntsman who Messina thought would have made a far more effective foe.

We were honest about our concerns about Huntsman,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said at a Politico breakfast event Tuesday. “I think Huntsman would have been a very tough candidate.”

As for the president, he liked Mr. Huntsman enough to appoint him ambassador to China in 2009. Mr. Messina, who was working in the White House at the time, said he helped Mr. Huntsman win Senate confirmation.

“As someone who helped manage his confirmation for Chinese ambassador, he’s a good guy,” Mr. Messina said. “We looked at his profile in a general election and thought he would have been” a formidable candidate.  Politico’s video of the remarks is here.

Mr. Huntsman’s candidacy never caught on. In 2011, he sent out a tweet affirming that he believed in evolution and trusted “scientists on global warming.”

“Call me crazy,” Mr. Huntsman said at the time.

But I don't think Huntsman would have fared any better.  Remember, Mitt Romney's problem (or one of them) was that evangelical whites stayed home.  Huntsman would have had the same problem, plus unlike Romney, he went out of his way to antagonize the base in order to get the middle.  And in a moment of rare clarity, even Katrina Trinko at the National Review admits Huntsman was even less of a moderate than Mitt pretended to be:

It fits into the whole tea-party narrative to depict Huntsman as a moderate who was banished by the wild GOP. But that ignores that Huntsman was in some ways to the right of Mitt Romney (Utah’s health-care system relied on exchanges, not an individual mandate, and Huntsman came out for the Ryan plan, as I recall, long before Romney did).

Particularly on economic issues, Huntsman is a Paul Ryan Austerian.  He would have had as hard a time capturing the center as Romney did, plus he would have come up even shorter on support from the base considering his stint as President Obama's Ambassador to China.

If anything, he has even less of a chance in 2016.