Last Call For Israeli Getting Serious Out Here, Con't

Two wild post-Gaza invasion stories from Team WIN THE MORNING this week, first, that the US Senate is looking at a peacekeeping force in Gaza "after it falls".

Talks are underway to establish a multinational force in Gaza after Israel uproots Hamas, two senators confirmed Wednesday, the clearest sign yet that the U.S. and its partners are seriously weighing deploying foreign troops to the enclave.

Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told POLITICO that there’s early, closed-door diplomacy over establishing a peacekeeping force in Gaza, though it was not likely to include American troops.

“There are ongoing conversations regarding the possible composition of an international force,” Van Hollen said, refusing to go into specific detail. “They are very preliminary and fragile.”

“I do think it’d be important to have some kind of multinational force in Gaza as a transition to whatever comes next,” he continued.

Hamas, the militant group that killed 1,4000 people in Israel on Oct. 7, has ruled Gaza for more than 15 years. Israel launched a retaliatory military operation after the attack to end Hamas’ rule, including a massive bombing campaign, ground invasion and siege that has killed more than 8,000 people.

The National Security Council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bloomberg News first reported that the United States and Israel were in discussions about establishing a peacekeeping force to maintain order in the enclave. In a statement to Bloomberg, NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson denied that “sending U.S. troops” to be part of the coalition was under discussion.

Blumenthal said the congressional delegation that he traveled with to Israel last month discussed the possibility of having Saudi Arabian troops in the force. He noted, however, that he hadn’t heard of U.S. troops heading to Gaza as part of the deliberations.

“There certainly has been discussion with the Saudi about their being part of some international peacekeeping force if only to provide resources, and, longer term, supporting Palestinian leadership and a separate state, obviously. Reconstruction of Gaza will require a vast amount of resources, which the Saudis potentially could help provide,” he said.

“I’m not sure how active the conversation is about U.S. troops,” Blumenthal continued. “I would think that maybe an international force could be mustered without U.S. troops.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who traveled to the Middle East with Blumenthal, said lawmakers discussed with Israeli officials how aid and security would be administered in Gaza after the war. He said he favored the idea of a multinational force, but said sensitivities in the region to U.S. troops would prevent them from being a major part of any such force.

“It’s got to be credible, it’s got to provide security, and it has to involve the surrounding states that believe in a two-state solution,” Cardin said.

 

I can't believe for a moment that there would be any GOP support for a single US soldier as part of said Gaza peacekeeping force, especially in an election year.  If the Bonesaw Boys in Riyadh want to handle it, well, we've certainly provided enough weapons to the House of Saud for a force, but all of this seems...pretty damn grim, even for the pragmatism of Senate Dems.

On the other hand, that brings us to story two, where the White House doesn't seem to think Netanyahu is going to survive politically anyway, and they're probably right.

Joe Biden and top aides have discussed the likelihood that Benjamin Netanyahu’s political days are numbered — and the president has conveyed that sentiment to the Israeli prime minister in a recent conversation.

The topic of Netanyahu’s short political shelf life has come up in recent White House meetings involving Biden, according to two senior administration officials. That has included discussions that have taken place since Biden’s trip to Israel, where he met with Netanyahu.

Biden has gone so far as to suggest to Netanyahu that he should think about lessons he would share with his eventual successor, the two administration officials added.

A current U.S. official and a former U.S. official both confirmed that the administration believes Netanyahu has limited time left in office. The current official said the expectation internally was that the Israeli PM would likely last a matter of months, or at least until the early fighting phase of Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip was over, though all four officials noted the sheer unpredictability of Israeli politics.

“There’s going to have to be a reckoning within Israeli society about what happened,” said the official who, like others, was granted anonymity to detail private conversations. “Ultimately, the buck stops on the prime minister’s desk.”

The administration’s dimming view of Netanyahu’s political future comes as the president and his foreign policy team try to work with, and diplomatically steer, the Israeli leader as his country pursues a complicated and bloody confrontation with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza and attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

 

This of course all depends on how the Gaza ground invasion goes. If things get as bad as I think they will, the backlash could end Netanyahu's war government quickly.

 

But if the US gets sucked into Yet Another Middle East Quagmire™ all bets are off, and it's not Netanyahu's political shelf life we'll be talking about, but Biden's.

 

Luckily Biden is smarter than that, and so are the people surrounding him on foreign policy. Biden's decades of foreign policy experience in the Senate is exactly what we need now.

Last Call For Israeli Getting Serious Out There, Con't

President Biden is expected to visit Israel on Wednesday as part of a wider Mideast shuttle diplomacy tour this week.

It took an explicit commitment from his Israeli counterpart to open Gaza for humanitarian aid for President Joe Biden to agree to make an extraordinary wartime trip to Tel Aviv.

While the trip will amount to a dramatic show of support for Israel as it prepares the latest stage of its response to last week’s Hamas attacks, it will also act as Biden’s strongest push for easing the suffering of civilians and allowing those who want to leave Gaza out. That mission got more complicated Tuesday as Biden was about to take off on Air Force One for the region – a planned summit with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was canceled after an explosion at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City killed hundreds. Palestinian officials quickly blamed Israel for the blast as the Israelis denied responsibility and pinned the blame on a failed rocket by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The high-stakes diplomacy with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his interlocutor of four decades, underscores the delicate balance Biden is striking as he embarked upon the last-minute wartime visit Tuesday evening.

The White House had attempted to balance the public and military support for Israel with the reality that Arab partners are critical to Biden’s approach by going to Jordan for a summit with the key Arab leaders. But the last-minute scrapping of that meeting meant Biden would no longer go to Amman and instead faces a new diplomatic headache.

At stake on the trip to Israel are the lives of millions of civilians, including Americans, currently stuck in the coastal Palestinian enclave where a humanitarian crisis is underway as Israeli troops mass at its borders ahead of an expected ground invasion.

While there was no explicit stipulation from the US that Israel not launch its invasion until Biden leaves the region, that’s the understanding among American officials who have spent the past several days debating and planning the president’s visit, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

American officials want humanitarian plans for Gaza fully signed off on and implemented before start of the invasion, the people said, describing that task as among Biden’s main objectives during his visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

 

Secretary of State Tony Blinken is getting some heavy diplomatic backup. He's going to need it. 

 

An attack on al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, a Christian-run medical complex in central Gaza City, killed 200 to 300 people on Tuesday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

The ministry’s spokesman, Ashraf Al Qudra, estimated that at least 200 were injured.

Officials in Gaza and in Israel blamed each other for the carnage.

Al Qudra said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had targeted the hospital for bombing. Hamas also blamed Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied that, saying, “It was barbaric terrorists in Gaza that attacked the hospital in Gaza, and not the IDF.”

Photos of the hospital showed fire engulfing the halls, shattered glass and body parts scattered across the wreckage. Videos posted to a Palestinian paramedic’s Instagram stories show first responders arriving at the hospital and taking bloodied bodies out.

Looking visibly shell-shocked in a video shared with NBC News, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah said there were three artillery attacks on the hospital. “Part of the roof started to fall,” he said, as he was treating a patient for a jugular injury.

If the hospital bombing death toll of 200-300 is confirmed, it would be the deadliest incident inside Gaza since Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

Doctors Without Borders said on the X platform that it was “horrified” by the bombing.

 

Understand that Israelis may be rallying 'round the flag right now, but not rallying around Bibi. 

One Israeli cabinet minister was barred from a hospital visitors' entrance. Another's bodyguards were drenched with coffee thrown by a bereaved man. A third had "traitor" and "imbecile" shouted at her as she came to comfort families evacuated during the horror.

The shock Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas gunmen has rallied Israelis to one another. But there is little love shown for a government being widely accused of dropping the country's guard and engulfing it in a Gaza war that is rattling the region.

Whatever ensues, a day of judgment looms for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after a record-long career of political comebacks.

Public fury over some 1,300 Israeli fatalities has been further fuelled by Netanyahu's signature self-styling as a Churchillian strategist who foresaw national-security threats.

Another backdrop is social polarisation this year over his religious-nationalist coalition's judicial overhaul drive, which triggered walkouts by some military reservists and raised doubts - now borne out in blood, some argue - about combat-readiness.

"October 2023 Debacle" read a headline in top-selling daily Yedioth Ahronoth, language meant to recall Israel's failure to anticipate a twin Egyptian and Syrian offensive in October 1973, which eventually led then-Prime Minister Golda Meir to resign.

That ouster put paid to the hegemony of Meir's centre-left Labour party. Amotz Asa-El, research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, predicted a similar fate for Netanyahu and his long-dominant, conservative Likud party.

 

The moment this war ends, so does Netanyahu's career. My prediction: Bibi will attack Gaza with a full-scale ground invasion and this war will drag on for as long as it needs to. He won't listen to Biden. He certainly won't listen to China and the BRICS nations, warning very loudly that such a ground invasion and occupation will have a price.

Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip have gone "beyond the scope of self-defense," China's foreign minister has said, as the encroaching possibility of an Israeli ground attack threatens to further endanger Palestinian civilians who have been caught up in the fighting.

Protecting "the basic needs of the people in Gaza" is a priority and "China opposes and condemns all acts that harm civilians," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said during a call with Saudi Arabia Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in remarks reported by Chinese media.

Remember, the expanded roster of BRICS nations into next year includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Iran. Needless to say, if Netanyahu decides he wants to stay in power no matter what the price is, these are four Middle Eastern countries that can impose a staggering cost, with Russia and China backing them up.

Pray Biden can help Bibi come down to Earth and face the consequences, or "Much larger Middle Eastern War" is on the menu.

[UPDATE] It's not looking good for Biden's trip at all. Both Jordan's King Abdullah and Egypt's President al Sisi are telling Biden to go pound sand.

Jordan has cancelled a summit it was to host in Amman on Wednesday with U.S. President Joe Biden and the Egyptian and Palestinian leaders to discuss Gaza, Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said.

Safadi said the meeting would be held at a time when the parties could agree to end the "war and the massacres against Palestinians", blaming Israel with its military campaign for pushing the region to "the brink of the abyss."

Jordanian and Egyptian officials are pissed about the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital massacre. Hell, at this point I don't know if Bibi will even bother holding off the ground assault until after Biden leaves.

This was already bad. It's now starting to look way, way worse.

Last Call For Oil's Not Well, Con't

The post-Trump Saudis are at this point trying to do everything they can to get Trump back, because he could (and still can) be bought.

Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ oil producers on Sunday announced further oil output cuts of around 1.16 million barrels per day, in a surprise move that analysts said would cause an immediate rise in prices and the United States called inadvisable.

The pledges bring the total volume of cuts by OPEC+, which groups the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries with Russia and other allies, to 3.66 million bpd according to Reuters calculations, equal to 3.7% of global demand.

Sunday's development comes a day before a virtual meeting of an OPEC+ ministerial panel, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, and which had been expected to stick to 2 million bpd of cuts already in place until the end of 2023.

Oil prices last month fell towards $70 a barrel, the lowest in 15 months, on concern that a global banking crisis would hit demand. Still, further action by OPEC+ to support the market was not expected after sources downplayed this prospect and crude recovered towards $80.

The latest reductions could lift oil prices by $10 per barrel, the head of investment firm Pickering Energy Partners said on Sunday, while oil broker PVM said it expected an immediate jump once trading starts after the weekend.

"I expect the market to open several dollars higher ... possibly as much as $3," said PVM's Tamas Varga. "The step is unreservedly bullish."

Top OPEC producer Saudi Arabia said it would cut output by 500,000 bpd. The Saudi energy ministry said the kingdom's voluntary reduction was a precautionary measure aimed at supporting the stability of the oil market.

"OPEC is taking pre-emptive steps in case of any possible demand reduction," Amrita Sen, founder and director of Energy Aspects, said.

 

Oil was under $70 this time last week, and I fully expect it to hit $100+ again, only this time at the pump you'll see prices well above $5 per gallon, and when that starts breaking the economy along with rising interest rates, the housing bubble, Big Casino banks, and global instability, it could be the move that finally cracks the road.

 

Things get very bad for the US economy after that, and sabotaging it is being done on purpose.

Last Call For Ukraine On The Membrane, Con't

President Biden's surprise trip to Ukraine's front lines, accompanying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, to announce in person that the US and EU will continue "unwavering support" for the government in Kyiv and the people of Ukraine seems like one of those fateful moments that will eventually be an answer on a history test someday.

 

Mr. Biden arrived early Monday morning to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky after a 10-hour overnight train ride through Ukraine, and the two stepped out into the streets of Kyiv even as an air-raid siren sounded, a dramatic moment that underscored the investment the United States has made in Ukraine’s independence.

“One year later, Kyiv stands,” Mr. Biden declared at Mr. Zelensky’s side in Mariinsky Palace, the gilded ceremonial home of the Ukrainian president. “And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands.”

“Thank you so much for coming, Mr. President, at a huge moment for Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said.

In Kyiv for just five hours, Mr. Biden promised to release another $500 million in military aid in coming days, mentioning artillery ammunition, Javelin missiles and Howitzers, but he did not talk about the advanced arms that Ukraine has sought. Mr. Zelensky told reporters that he and the American president had spoken about “long-range weapons and the weapons that may still be supplied to Ukraine, even though it wasn’t supplied before.”

Mr. Biden joined Mr. Zelensky for a visit to St. Michael’s monastery in downtown Kyiv, where the sun glittered off the golden domes as the air-raid alarm wailed. Trailing two soldiers bearing a wreath, the two leaders walked along the Wall of Remembrance, with portraits of more than 4,500 soldiers who have died since Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and first fomented a rebellion in eastern Ukraine.

The air-raid alarm had stopped by the time Mr. Biden got back into his motorcade and departed the monastery, and alarms sound almost daily in Kyiv, but the blare of the siren added to the bristling tension of the moment. Ukrainian officials have been warning that Russia plans a large-scale missile bombardment timed to the anniversary of the war on Friday.

 

All evidence points toward Russia's "major offensive" to break Kyiv will get under way this week as the anniversary of Russia's formal "special military operation" approaches, and just as Biden announced support for Ukraine, China now has a fateful decision of its own to make when it comes to backing Moscow as Beijing's new top diplomat heads to Moscow.

Wang Yi – who was promoted as Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s top foreign policy adviser last month – is due to arrive in Moscow this week as part of his eight-day Europe tour, a trip that brings into focus China’s attempted diplomatic balancing act since Russia tanks rolled into Ukraine a year ago.

The optics of the two trips – taking place just days before the one-year anniversary of the brutal war on Friday – underscores the sharpening of geopolitical fault lines between the world’s two superpowers.

While relations between the US and China continue to plummet – most recently due to the fallout from a suspected Chinese spy balloon that entered US airspace, China and Russia are as close as ever since their leaders declared a “no-limits” friendship a year ago – partly driven by their shared animosity toward the United States.

And as the US and its allies reaffirm their support for Ukraine and stepped up military aid, Beijing’s deepening partnership with Moscow has raised alarms in Western capitals – despite China’s public charm offensive in Europe to present itself as a negotiator of peace.

At the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Wang addressed a room of European officials as “dear friends” and touted China’s commitment to peace, while apparently attempting to drive a wedge between Europe and the US.

“We do not add fuel to the fire, and we’re against reaping benefits from this crisis,” Wang said in a thinly veiled dig at the US, echoing the propaganda messaging that regularly made China’s nightly prime-time news program – that the US is intentionally prolonging the war because its arms manufacturers are earning fat profits from weapon sales.

“Some forces might not want to see peace talks to materialize. They don’t care about the life and death of Ukrainians, nor the harm on Europe. They might have strategic goals larger than Ukraine itself. This warfare must not continue,” Wang said.

 

China doesn't want open military conflict, but it does want Taiwan back and has all but said as much. Some sort of joint operation between Putin and President Xi to get both Ukraine and Taiwan back is one of those Really Bad Scenarios™ that isn't out of the realm of possibility, either.

Things get...very complex from there. Would Biden also pledge "unwavering support" for Taipei and commit forces to defend Taiwan, and would it matter as far as keeping China out?

We'll see. Again, it seems like this is one of those moments where the history of the planet revolves around. Putin running out of troops and materiel and being forced to surrender could happen, or China and the rest of the BRICS+ nations could also pledge support. If the Saudis and Emirates jump in on Russia's side, as they have threatened to do on a number of occasions in the last several months, all bets are off. 

I'm glad Biden is in charge here instead of Trump, though. today proved that.

Saud Songs They Sing

With the US average of gas prices headed back for $4 per gallon after OPEC's production cut, both the Biden administration and high-ranking Democratic members of Congress suddenly, finally has a real appetite for cutting the Kingdom loose with potential significant effect.

President Biden is re-evaluating the relationship with Saudi Arabia after it teamed up with Russia to cut oil production in a move that bolstered President Vladimir V. Putin’s government and could raise American gasoline prices just before midterm elections, a White House official said on Tuesday.

“I think the president’s been very clear that this is a relationship that we need to continue to re-evaluate, that we need to be willing to revisit,” the official, John F. Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council at the White House, said on CNN. “And certainly in light of the OPEC decision, I think that’s where he is.”

Mr. Kirby signaled openness to retaliatory measures proposed by Democratic congressional leaders outraged by the oil production cut announced last week by the international cartel known as OPEC Plus. Among other things, leading Democrats have proposed curbing American security cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including arms sales, and stripping OPEC members of their legal immunity so they can be sued for violations of American antitrust laws.

“The president’s obviously disappointed by the OPEC decision and is going to be willing to work with Congress as we think about what the right relationship with Saudi Arabia needs to be going forward,” Mr. Kirby said. He sounded a note of urgency. “The timeline’s now and I think he’s going to be willing to start to have those conversations right away,” he said. “I don’t think this is anything that’s going to have to wait or should wait quite frankly for much longer.”

The comments came just a day after Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assailed Saudi Arabia for effectively backing Russia in its brutal invasion of Ukraine and called for an immediate freeze on “all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” vowing to use his power to block any future arms sales.

“There simply is no room to play both sides of this conflict — either you support the rest of the free world in trying to stop a war criminal from violently wiping off an entire country off of the map, or you support him,” Mr. Menendez said. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia chose the latter in a terrible decision driven by economic self-interest.”

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said on Tuesday morning that Saudi Arabia clearly wanted Russia to win the war in Ukraine. “Let’s be very candid about this,” he said on CNN. “It’s Putin and Saudi Arabia against the United States.

If long-time Democratic foreign policy hands like Menendez and Durbin, and eve Biden himself, are tossing Prince Bonesaw McGraw and his merry band of sheiks  out of the tent, this is real. The question is how much damage Riyadh has done. It might be the first time I can remember where US foreign policy is about to take major steps back on Saudi Arabia.

Biden can't push them too far though. If Riyadh decides to start pricing oil in rubles instead of greenback, the dollar craters and everyone now it. They've subtly mentioned this earlier this year, not exactly correcting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov when he said that the Saudis were invited to join the BRICS compact. Such a move really would be siding with Putin against the US.

We'll see, but the OPEC production cut is going to have consequences, and so will the US and European actions that follow.

Saudi Arabia, Coca-Cola

The Saudis are playing real hardball these days, because they know they have President Biden and the West over a barrel (of oil).

 

Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, hit back at Joe Biden after the US President confronted him about the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi during a meeting between the two leaders on Friday. 

In the meeting, Bin Salman, also known as MBS, denied responsibility for the killing of Khashoggi at the kingdom's Istanbul consulate. Biden said he indicated that he disagreed with MBS, based on US intelligence assessments, according to the source. 

In response to Biden bringing up Khashoggi, MBS cited the sexual and physical abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison by US military personnel and the May killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank as incidents that reflected poorly on the US, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the Saudi foreign minister, told reporters on Saturday. 

"The Crown Prince responded to President Biden's remarks on ... Khashoggi after quite clearly -- that this crime, while very unfortunate and abhorrent, is something that the kingdom took very seriously (and) acted upon in a way commiserate with its position as a responsible country," bin Farhan said. "These are issues, mistakes that happen in any country, including the US. The Crown Prince pointed out that the US has made its own mistakes and has taken the necessary action to hold those responsible accountable and address these mistakes just as the kingdom has." 

Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir echoed the sentiment in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer shortly after the end of the meeting, which Jubeir was part of. 

"We investigated, punished and ensure that this doesn't happen again," Jubeir said when asked about the Khashoggi murder. "This is what countries do. This is what the US did when the mistake of Abu Ghraib was committed."

 

On top of that,  the Saudis are publicly talking about joining China and Russia and the other BRICS nations...according to Russia and China, anyway...

The president of the BRICS International Forum expects Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to join the group "very soon". In an interview with Russia's Izvestia, Purnima Anand said that China, Russia and India discussed this issue during the 14th BRICS Summit, which was held online last month.

"All these countries have shown an interest in joining and are preparing to apply for membership. I think this is a good step, because expansion is always perceived positively; this will clearly increase the influence of BRICS in the world," explained Anand. "I hope that the accession of countries to BRICS will happen very quickly, because now all representatives of the core of the association are interested in expanding the organisation, so it will be very soon."

She stressed that the accession of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey may not take place at the same time.

Earlier, Li Kexin, Director-General of the Department of International Economic Affairs of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said that several countries were "knocking on the doors" of the organisation, including Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Argentina.

The BRICS forum is a political organisation that began negotiations for its formation in 2006 and held its first summit in 2009. Its members were the countries with emerging economies, namely Brazil, Russia, India, and China, operating under the name BRIC, before South Africa joined the organisation in 2010, making it BRICS.

The organisation's countries are characterised as being among the industrialised developing countries with large and emerging economies. Half of the world's population lives in these five countries, and their combined gross domestic product is equivalent to that of the US ($13.6 trillion). Their total foreign exchange reserves are $4 trillion.

 

If the Saudis, Egypt, and Turkey actually did this, it would mean massive chaos in the oil markets and in NATO itself, which is what Russia and China want. But right now, having them pretend that this is possible serves all of those country's individual interests, especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Realpolitik is a bitch at times.

Jared, The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Donald Trump's son-in-law got $2 billion from the Saudis for his "investment firm" despite serious concerns about ever seeing a dime in profit from it, because the point was to pay off the Trump Crime family.

Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal.

A panel that screens investments for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund cited concerns about the proposed deal with Mr. Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners, previously undisclosed documents show.

Those objections included: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.

But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and a beneficiary of Mr. Kushner’s support when he worked as a White House adviser — overruled the panel.

Ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.

Mr. Kushner played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia who had criticized the kingdom’s rulers.

 

So a $2 billion bribe from Prince Hacksaw of the Desert. Here's the real question: would you trust Jared Kushner with $2 billion, given his long track record as a grifter, thief, slum landlord and con man?

No sane person would. Look, investing 10 million or so is a big risk. Investing $2 billion in anything is alarming. Investing $2 billion in a member of the Trump family is laughably illegal. And how do we know it's a payoff and not an investment? The real investment money went to Trump's money guy, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The Saudi fund agreed to invest twice as much and on more generous terms with Mr. Kushner than it did at about the same time with former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — who was also starting a new fund — even though Mr. Mnuchin had a record as a successful investor before entering government, the documents show. The amount of the investment in his firm, Liberty Strategic Capital — $1 billion — has not been previously disclosed.

A spokesman for Mr. Kushner’s firm said of its relationship with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, “Affinity, like many other top investment firms, is proud to have PIF and other leading organizations that have careful screening criteria, as investors.”

A spokesman for the Saudi fund declined to comment on its investment process. If any additional discussions about the deal took place, they were not reflected in the documents and correspondence obtained by The New York Times.

The Times reported last fall that Mr. Kushner had been seeking a Saudi investment. Now, the internal fund records and correspondence obtained by The Times show the outcome, scale and timing of his firm’s deal as well as the debate it aroused. Those documents and other filings indicate that at this point Mr. Kushner’s venture depends primarily on the Saudi money.

Mr. Kushner planned to raise up to $7 billion in all, according to a document prepared last summer for the Saudi fund’s board. But so far he appears to have signed up few other major investors.

 

Weird how Kushner can't get anything else other than the Saudi money in his firm. It's almost like other folks in Trump's orbit don't think it's a wise financial investment. After all, a firm the Saudis are willing to give $2,000,000,000 to ought to be a shoe-in for RoI, right?

I mean it's not like this is a huge, massive bribe right in front of our eyes that happened ten months ago, right? And surely these billions in overseas money would never end up in Trump's campaign coffers, going forward, yes?

Oh well. The documents that showed all this weren't on Hunter Biden's laptop, so nobody gives a good good god damn I guess.

Last Call For It's A Gas Gas Gas, Con't

The hard reality of the economic cost of world politics is hitting home at the pump.

U.S. gasoline prices at the pump jumped 11% over the past week to the highest since late July 2008 as global sanctions cripple Russia's ability to export crude oil after its invasion of Ukraine, automobile club AAA said on Sunday.

AAA said average U.S. regular grade gasoline prices hit $4.009 per gallon on Sunday, up 11% from $3.604 a week ago and up 45% from $2.760 a year ago.

The automobile club, which has data going back to 2000, said U.S. retail gasoline prices hit a record $4.114 a gallon on July 17, 2008, which was around the same time U.S. crude futures soared to a record $147.27 a barrel.

The most expensive gas in the country is in California at $5.288 a gallon, followed by Hawaii ($4.695), Nevada ($4.526) and Oregon ($4.466), according to AAA.

U.S. gasoline futures , meanwhile, soared to a record $3.890 per gallon on Sunday.

Gasoline price provider GasBuddy said the average price of U.S. gasoline spiked nearly 41 cents per gallon, topping $4 for the first time in almost 14 years, and stands just 10 cents below the all-time record of $4.103 per gallon.

GasBuddy said that weekly increase was the second largest ever, following a jump of 49 cents per gallon during the week of Sept. 3, 2005, after Hurricane Katrina tore through the U.S. Gulf Coast.

"Increasing oil prices continue to play a leading role in pushing prices higher," AAA said in a release, noting "pump prices will likely continue to rise as crude prices continue to climb."

U.S. crude futures soared more than 12% to $130.50 per barrel late Sunday, their highest since July 2008, as the United States and its European allies consider banning imports of Russian oil. read more

 

Gas prices around here went from $3.29 to $3.69 this week.  I expect it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better in the weeks and months ahead, too. The Biden administration is already reaching out to OPEC, who admittedly, would like to cash in on oil prices spiking to record levels.

President Biden’s advisers are discussing a possible visit to Saudi Arabia this spring to help repair relations and convince the Kingdom to pump more oil, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: A hat-in-hand trip would illustrate the gravity of the global energy crisis driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Biden has chastised Saudi Arabia, and the CIA believes its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was involved in the dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. 

The possibility also shows how Russia's invasion is scrambling world's alliances, forcing the U.S. to reorder its priorities — and potentially recalibrating its emphasis on human rights. 

Biden officials are in Venezuela this weekend to meet with the government of President Nicolás Maduro. Some Republicans and Democrats in Washington suggest Venezuela's oil could replace Russia's, according to the New York Times. 

Any visit to the Persian Gulf would come amid a busy presidential travel schedule during the next few months. 

Biden will likely take trips to Japan, Spain, Germany and, potentially, Israel, Axios has also learned.

 

THat's right, the Biden administration is cozying up to the regimes in both Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, who frankly want to money but would also love to tell Biden to go screw himself.  

Morals take a backseat to realpolitik, and I've run this blog long enough to more than accept that there are time where that will happen.

We'll see how this shakes out, but if this is Biden's Plan A, you probably don't want to know the political fallout of Plans B through whatever.

Last Call For Executing A Training Exercise

Turns out the Obama State Department was responsible for the training contract of four members of the Saudi hit squad that butchered US journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, trained through a private military contractor.

Four Saudis who participated in the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the United States the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department, according to documents and people familiar with the arrangement.

The instruction occurred as the secret unit responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing was beginning an extensive campaign of kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudi citizens ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, to crush dissent inside the kingdom.

The training was provided by the Arkansas-based security company Tier 1 Group, which is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The company says the training — including “safe marksmanship” and “countering an attack” — was defensive in nature and devised to better protect Saudi leaders. One person familiar with the training said it also included work in surveillance and close-quarters battle.

There is no evidence that the American officials who approved the training or Tier 1 Group executives knew that the Saudis were involved in the crackdown inside Saudi Arabia. But the fact that the government approved high-level military training for operatives who went on to carry out the grisly killing of a journalist shows how intensely intertwined the United States has become with an autocratic nation even as its agents committed horrific human rights abuses.

It also underscores the perils of military partnerships with repressive governments and demonstrates how little oversight exists for those forces after they return home.

Such issues are likely to continue as American private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to shore up their business as the United States scales back overseas deployments after two decades of war.

The State Department initially granted a license for the paramilitary training of the Saudi Royal Guard to Tier 1 Group starting in 2014, during the Obama administration. The training continued during at least the first year of former President Donald J. Trump’s term.

Louis Bremer, a senior executive of Cerberus, Tier 1 Group’s parent company, confirmed his company’s role in the training last year in written answers to questions from lawmakers as part of his nomination for a top Pentagon job during the Trump administration.

The administration does not appear to have sent the document to Congress before withdrawing Mr. Bremer’s nomination; lawmakers never received answers to their questions.

In the document, which Mr. Bremer provided to The New York Times, he said that four members of the Khashoggi kill team had received Tier 1 Group training in 2017, and two of them had participated in a previous iteration of the training, which went from October 2014 until January 2015.

“The training provided was unrelated to their subsequent heinous acts,” Mr. Bremer said in his responses.

He said that a March 2019 review by Tier 1 Group “uncovered no wrongdoing by the company and confirmed that the established curriculum training was unrelated to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”

 

It's all related. The number of horrific things that happened during the Trump years that start with "following Obama administration policy" is disturbingly high, but there you are. For all his loud screaming about how awful Obama was, Trump was sure good at taking a bad Obama idea that he liked and making it into a hideous one.

Why we continue to be friends with the Saudi regime, well, we all know the answer to that.

Last Call For Cashing In On Khashoggi

Our fragile diplomatic relationship with Saudi Arabia would apparently be jeopardized if the Biden administration actually leveled travel sanctions against Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan for ordering of the death of US journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

President Biden has decided that the price of directly penalizing Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is too high, according to senior administration officials, despite a detailed American intelligence finding that he directly approved the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and Washington Post columnist who was drugged and dismembered in October 2018.

The decision by Mr. Biden, who during the 2020 campaign called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value,” came after weeks of debate in which his newly formed national security team advised him that there was no way to formally bar the heir to the Saudi crown from entering the United States, or to weigh criminal charges against him, without breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies.

Officials said a consensus developed inside the White House that the price of that breach, in Saudi cooperation on counterterrorism and in confronting Iran, was simply too high.

For Mr. Biden, the decision was a telling indication of how his more cautious instincts kicked in, and it will deeply disappoint the human rights community and members of his own party who complained during the Trump administration that the United States was failing to hold the crown prince, known by his initials M.B.S., accountable for his role.

Many organizations were pressing Mr. Biden to, at a minimum, impose the same travel sanctions against the crown prince as the Trump administration imposed on others involved in the plot.

Mr. Biden’s aides said that as a practical matter, Prince Mohammed would not be invited to the United States anytime soon, and they denied that they were giving Saudi Arabia a pass, describing series of new actions on lower-level officials intended to penalize elite elements of the Saudi military and impose new deterrents to human rights abuses.

Those actions, approved by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, include a travel ban on Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, who was deeply involved in the Khashoggi operation, and on the Rapid Intervention Force, a unit of the Saudi Royal Guard.

The declassified intelligence report concluded that the intervention force, which operates under the crown prince, directed the operation against Mr. Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Mr. Khashoggi entered the consulate on Oct. 2, 2018, to get papers he needed for his forthcoming marriage, and, with his fiancée waiting outside the gates, was instead met by an assassination team.

An effort by the Saudi government to issue a cover story, contending that Mr. Khashoggi had left the consulate unharmed, collapsed in days.

 

So what will Joe Biden actually do about it?

President Joe Biden on Saturday said his administration would make an announcement on Saudi Arabia on Monday, following a U.S. intelligence report that found Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The Biden administration has faced some criticism, notably an editorial in the Washington Post, that the president should have been tougher on the crown prince, who was not sanctioned despite being blamed for approving Khashoggi’s murder.

Asked about punishing the crown prince, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, who is also known as MbS, Biden said: “There will be an announcement on Monday as to what we are going to be doing with Saudi Arabia generally.”

 

So we'll find out soon.

Last Call For The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Jared Kushner is headed to Saudi Arabia for any number of nefarious purposes in the wake of an Iranian nuclear scientist being assassinated last week.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is headed to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week for talks in a region simmering with tension after the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist.

A senior administration official said on Sunday that Kushner is to meet the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the Saudi city of Neom, and the emir of Qatar in that country in the coming days. Kushner will be joined by Middle East envoys Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook and Adam Boehler, chief executive of the US International Development Finance Corporation.

The visits would focus on resolving a dispute between Qatar and a Saudi-led alliance, the Wall Street Journal reported, but a number of issues could be on the agenda.

Kushner and his team helped negotiate normalization deals between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan since August. The official said they would like to advance more such agreements before Donald Trump hands power to president-elect Joe Biden on 20 January.

US officials believe enticing Saudi Arabia into a deal with Israel would prompt other Arab nations to follow suit. But the Saudis do not appear to be on the brink of reaching such a landmark deal and officials in recent weeks have been focusing on other countries, with concern about Iran’s regional influence a uniting factor.

Kushner’s trip comes after the killing on Friday of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Tehran by unidentified assailants. Western and Israeli governments believe Fakhrizadeh was the architect of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Days before the killing, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, travelled to Saudi Arabia and met with Prince Mohammed, an Israeli official said, in what was the first publicly confirmed visit by an Israeli leader. Israeli media said they were joined by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

 

When I said earlier this month that there's any number of ways that the Trump regime could badly sabotage the incoming Biden administration during the lame duck period, this is exactly what I mean.  Jared's been Trump's bag man in the Middle East for years, and Netanyahu, still facing his own bribery and corruption trial scandal which keeps getting mysteriously delayed, is certainly not going to be a fan of Biden after the way he treated Obama for years.

Some sort of last-minute deal between MBS and Netanyahu that ties Biden's hands is exactly what I expect following this meeting, especially something that involves Iran.

Don't be surprised if Trump hands Biden a new Middle East war to deal with in his first 30 days.

 

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump regime purge of various executive agency inspectors general continued over the weekend with the announcement that Trump was giving State Department IG Steve Linick his 30-day notice, but as Greg Sargent reports, Linick's ouster appears to be especially corrupt.

House Democrats have discovered that the fired IG had mostly completed an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s widely criticized decision to skirt Congress with an emergency declaration to approve billions of dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia last year, aides on the Foreign Affairs Committee tell me.

“I have learned that there may be another reason for Mr. Linick’s firing,” Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement sent to me. “His office was investigating — at my request — Trump’s phony declaration of an emergency so he could send weapons to Saudi Arabia.”
Committee Democrats have also learned that the State Department was recently briefed on the IG’s conclusions in that investigation, aides say. They do not know what role this investigation — and its conclusions — played in Linick’s removal, if any.

But the committee is now trying to establish what those conclusions were and what links they might have to the firing, the aides confirm.

“We don’t have the full picture yet, but it’s troubling that Secretary Pompeo wanted Mr. Linick pushed out before this work could be completed,” Engel said in the statement to me.

The White House has confirmed Linick’s firing came at Pompeo’s request. Trump claimed he no longer has “confidence” in Linick, a thin justification that highlights Trump’s purging of officials exercising oversight on his administration.

Many news organizations have reported that the fired IG had been examining charges that Pompeo had been directing a staffer to run errands for him. Some reported that Pompeo has undertaken abuses of taxpayer funds, including frequent visits to his home state of Kansas. It’s unclear whether these are linked to Linick’s firing.

But the fact that Linick has also mostly completed an investigation into the decision to fast-track arms to the Saudis adds another layer to this whole story.

Pompeo is corrupt as hell, so he had Trump fire the person investigating him. It really doesn't get much more blatant than "firing the cop looking into your illegal stuff" but again, this doesn't even make the Top Ten Trump Regime Scandals List™ overall.

Old enough to remember the Iran-Contra hearings over less than this.

Still, Pompeo should definitely be made to resign.  Of course, this entire regime should, starting with Trump.

That won't happen.

Oil's Well That Ends Badly

It seems that Mobster-In-Chief Trump continues to quid pro quo everything and make threats for days, even when it comes to the Saudis who basically own his real estate.

As the United States pressed Saudi Arabia to end its oil price war with Russia, President Donald Trump gave Saudi leaders an ultimatum.

In an April 2 phone call, Trump told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that unless the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) started cutting oil production, he would be powerless to stop lawmakers from passing legislation to withdraw U.S. troops from the kingdom, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. 

The threat to upend a 75-year strategic alliance, which has not been previously reported, was central to the U.S. pressure campaign that led to a landmark global deal to slash oil supply as demand collapsed in the coronavirus pandemic - scoring a diplomatic victory for the White House. 

Trump delivered the message to the crown prince 10 days before the announcement of production cuts. The kingdom’s de facto leader was so taken aback by the threat that he ordered his aides out of the room so he could continue the discussion in private, according to a U.S. source who was briefed on the discussion by senior administration officials. 

The effort illustrated Trump’s strong desire to protect the U.S. oil industry from a historic price meltdown as governments shut down economies worldwide to fight the virus. It also reflected a telling reversal of Trump’s longstanding criticism of the oil cartel, which he has blasted for raising energy costs for Americans with supply cuts that usually lead to higher gasoline prices. Now, Trump was asking OPEC to slash output. 

A senior U.S. official told Reuters that the administration notified Saudi leaders that, without production cuts, “there would be no way to stop the U.S. Congress from imposing restrictions that could lead to a withdrawal of U.S. forces.” The official summed up the argument, made through various diplomatic channels, as telling Saudi leaders: “We are defending your industry while you’re destroying ours.” 

Reuters asked Trump about the talks in an interview Wednesday evening at the White House, at which the president addressed a range of topics involving the pandemic. Asked if he told the crown prince that the U.S. might pull forces out of Saudi Arabia, Trump said, “I didn’t have to tell him.” 

“I thought he and President Putin, Vladimir Putin, were very reasonable,” Trump said. “They knew they had a problem, and then this happened.” 

Asked what he told the Crown Prince Mohammed, Trump said: “They were having a hard time making a deal. And I met telephonically with him, and we were able to reach a deal” for production cuts, Trump said.

Saudi Arabia’s government media office did not respond to a request for comment. A Saudi official who asked not to be named stressed that the agreement represented the will of all countries in the so-called OPEC+ group of oil-producing nations, which includes OPEC plus a coalition led by Russia.

To recap, Trump leans on world leaders to help his reelection bid all the time and has done so for years, especially when it directly helps Vladimir Putin.

This is considered "diplomacy".

Any questions?

Last Call For Oil's Well That Ends Well, Con't

The Saudis are terrified of the economic slowdown from a global COVID-19 recession, and they are flooding the market to put the Russians and the US out of business in an all out oil price war.

Saudi Arabia slashed its export oil prices over the weekend in what is likely to be the start of a price war aimed at Russia but with potentially devastating repercussions for Russia’s ally Venezuela, Saudi Arabia’s enemy Iran and even American oil companies.

The Saudi decision to cut prices by nearly 10 percent on Saturday was a dramatic move in retaliation for Russia’s refusal on Friday to join the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in a large production cut as the coronavirus continues to slow the global economy and, with it, demand for oil.
The break in a three-year alliance between the Saudi-led oil cartel and Russia to support prices may be temporary. The moves over the weekend may well have been part of a negotiating chess game, and the Saudis and Russians can still reach a compromise. But if the collapse is lasting, oil executives say there is nothing to stop oil prices from tumbling to the lowest levels in at least five years.

“If a true price war ensues, there will be plenty of pain in the oil markets,” said Badr Jafar, president of Crescent Petroleum, a United Arab Emirates oil company. “Many will be bracing for the economic and geopolitical shocks of a low-price environment.”

A major drop in oil prices would hurt producers around the world, particularly Venezuela and Iran, whose oil-based economies are already under pressure from American sanctions. Export earnings of both countries have already been reduced to a trickle, and a further decline would stretch their abilities to pay for vital services and security.

The one bright spot may be at the gas pump. The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States, according to the AAA Motor Club, has already fallen five cents in the last week, to $2.40 from $2.45, and prices could easily drop below $2 a gallon in some states in the coming weeks. Lower-income drivers, who typically own older, less fuel-efficient vehicles and spend a higher percentage of their wages on energy, stand to gain the most.

But a prolonged price collapse would add to financial pressure on highly indebted American oil companies, dozens of which have gone out of business in recent years, with a decline in American oil production likely to follow. Oil companies have been laying off workers in Texas and other oil producing states.
Canadian oil sands development, already lagging because of environmental concerns and costs, stands to be hit hard by a price war. And developing countries that depend on oil, like Nigeria, Angola and Brazil, may suffer significant economic slowdowns.

US West Texas Intermediate crude was at $53 a barrel back on February 20 and $63 a barrel at the start of the year.

As of Sunday night, WTI was trading at half that.  $32-$34 a barrel. Brent Sea Crude, the international benchmark, was at $36 a barrel or so.

The oil market has collapsed.

Russia cannot be happy.  Trump cannot be happy.  It's going to be a goddamn insane week on the markets and we're already into correction territory, headed into bear market and the end of the 12-year stock market rally.

It's gonna get nuts.  Fast.  Dow futures are trading limit down right now, over 1,000 points.  10-year tresuries are not only below 15, they are below 0.5%.  It is a *complete meltdown* of the markets.

Monday is going to be a slaughter.

Last Call For The Crown Prince Of Cyber Crime

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman apparently had Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos's phone hacked months before Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi was butchered at MBS's orders.

The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian.

The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world’s richest man, according to the results of a digital forensic analysis.

This analysis found it “highly probable” that the intrusion into the phone was triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of the Saudi heir to Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post.

The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.

Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.

The extraordinary revelation that the future king of Saudi Arabia may have had a personal involvement in the targeting of the American founder of Amazon will send shockwaves from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.

It could also undermine efforts by “MBS” – as the crown prince is known – to lure more western investors to Saudi Arabia, where he has vowed to economically transform the kingdom even as he has overseen a crackdown on his critics and rivals.

The disclosure is likely to raise difficult questions for the kingdom about the circumstances around how US tabloid the National Enquirer came to publish intimate details about Bezos’s private life – including text messages – nine months later.

It may also lead to renewed scrutiny about what the crown prince and his inner circle were doing in the months prior to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was killed in October 2018 – five months after the alleged “hack” of the newspaper’s owner.

Now that second bold paragraph stating The Guardian doesn't know what was taken from Bezos's phone may be true, but we know part of what happened after the hack: Bezos's extramarital affair was exposed by Trump's favorite tabloid, the National Enquirer, which led to Bezos's costly divorce from his now ex-wife MacKenzie.

Bezos responded by flat out naming National Enquirer publisher David Pecker as the man behind his hacked phone, and last March he named MBS as the person who the operation was funded by.  This story today isn't news, what is news is the method, using WhatsApp and a nasty picture file that hid the back door.

Let's not forget that Bezos, as much of a billionaire villain that he is, has made mortal enemies of both Donald Trump and MBS.  Frankly, watching them battle it out is great.

Deportation Nation, Con't

With the third anniversary of Trump's Muslim ban coming up, and the Roberts Court having cleared Trump to ban people from specific countries for whatever reason he likes, the White House is planning on adding several more countries to the list later this month.

The White House is considering dramatically expanding its much-litigated travel ban to additional countries amid a renewed election-year focus on immigration by President Donald Trump, according to six people familiar with the deliberations.

A document outlining the plans — timed to coincide with the third anniversary of Trump’s January 2017 executive order — has been circulating the White House. But the countries that would be affected are blacked out, according to two of the people, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the measure has yet to be finalized.

It’s unclear exactly how many countries would be included in the expansion, but two of the people said that seven countries — a majority of them Muslim — would be added to the list. The most recent iteration of the ban includes restrictions on five majority-Muslim nations: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as Venezuela and North Korea.

A different person said the expansion could focus on several countries that were included when Trump announced the first iteration of the ban but later removed amid rounds of contentious litigation. Iraq, Sudan and Chad, for instance, had originally been affected by the order, which the Supreme Court upheld in a 5-4 vote after the administration released a watered-down version intended to withstand legal scrutiny.

Trump later criticized his Justice Department for the changes.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the effort, which several of the people said was timed for release in conjunction with the third anniversary o f Trump’s first travel ban. That order sparked an uproar when it was announced on Jan. 27, 2017, with massive protests across the nation and chaos at airports where passengers were detained.

Iraq of course is the big one, and it's no coincidence that this story is out as Iraq threatens to send US troops backing.  My guess is that if Iraq allows US troops to stay, then Iraq won't be added to the list.  It's extortion, of course, but it's the only thing the man in the White House understands.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE won't be on that list of course.  They're the" good ones".

Holidaze: Death Of A Journalist

The Saudis have found a sufficient number of scapegoats to sacrifice for the death of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, and the United States will continue to pretend that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman didn't personally order Khashoggi's execution, because the Trump regime owes the Saudi royal family hundreds of millions of dollars.

Saudi Arabia on Monday sentenced five people to death and three more to jail over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year and said the killing was not premeditated, a verdict criticized by a U.N. investigator as a “mockery” of justice.

The court dismissed charges against the remaining three of the 11 people that had been on trial, finding them not guilty, Saudi Deputy Public Prosecutor and spokesman Shalaan al-Shalaan said. None of the defendants’ names was immediately released.

“The investigation showed that the killing was not premeditated ... The decision was taken at the spur of the moment,” Shalaan said, a position contradicting the findings of a United Nations-led investigation.

Khashoggi was a U.S. resident and critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler. He was last seen at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018, where he had gone to obtain documents for his impending wedding. His body was reportedly dismembered and removed from the building, and his remains have not been found.

Eleven Saudi suspects were put on trial over his death in secretive proceedings in the capital Riyadh.

Khashoggi’s murder caused a global uproar, tarnishing the crown prince’s image. The CIA and some Western governments have said they believe Prince Mohammed, also known as MbS, ordered the killing.

The CIA, the UK, Canada, and the UN all know the truth, they've all said it multiple times, and nobody cares.  If the Saudis ever spilled the beans on Jared Kushner and Donald Trump, they'd be facing prison, but of course the Trump regime response is that everything is fine.

The United States considers Saudi Arabia’s sentencing of five people to death and three more to jail over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi “an important step” in holding those responsible for the crime accountable, a senior official of the U.S. administration said on Monday.

“This is an important step in holding those responsible for this terrible crime accountable, and we encourage Saudi Arabia to continue with a fair and transparent judicial process,” said the official, who did not wish to be otherwise identified.

Profiles in courage.  Then again, when you're dealing with a psychopath who orders dissidents vivisected and dismembered with a bone saw, perhaps treading lightly is smart.  Especially when you owe them money.

There's a reason why Trump is willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court to stop anyone from seeing his tax returns, folks.

Last Call For Wag The Dog

I haven't talked much about this week's shooting at Pensacola Naval Air Base in Florida because the investigation is still ongoing and I don't trust the Trump regime when there are Saudi nationals involved, as the suspect appears to be.  People did get killed here, and that's a significant story.  But with Trump facing impeachment this week, it's very clear that some in the regime wants a "terrorist attack" story to bludgeon Democrats with.

National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien said that Friday's shooting at a naval base in Florida "appears to be a terrorist attack." The gunman was a member of the Saudi Air Force and an aviation student at the base.

"To me, it appears to be a terrorist attack," O'Brien said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "I don't want to prejudge the investigation, but it appears that this may be someone that was radicalized, whether it was here or it's unclear if he's got any other ties to other organizations."

The FBI identified the shooter as Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, 21. The gunman opened fire in a classroom at Naval Air Station Pensacola on Friday, killing three sailors and wounding two sheriff's deputies.

Alshamrani was killed after exchanging gunfire with the sheriff's deputies.

President Trump and top law enforcement officials have declined to say whether the shooting was terrorism related. A U.S. official told the Associated Press that Alshamrani and three others watched videos of mass shootings during a dinner party he hosted a dinner party earlier in the week.

O'Brien said the FBI doesn't know if Alshamrani was acting alone, but from what he is seeing in public reports, "this looks like something that's terrorism, or akin to terrorism." The Saudi government, he added, has committed to fully cooperating with the investigation.

"This is a guy who may very well have had said some things on Twitter that suggest he was radicalized," he said. "He went out and killed a number of Americans, so my point is it looks like terrorism."

A second lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force, Alshamrani was a student naval flight officer of Naval Aviation Schools Command.

The Navy identified the three sailors killed in Friday's attack as Joshua Kaleb Watson, 23, Airman Mohammed Sameh Haitham, 19, and Airman Apprentice Cameron Scott Walters, 21.

The problem for Trump is that it's a Saudi "terrorist attack" story, and the Saudis, if they really wanted to hurt Trump right now, could make his life absolutely miserable. He has to proceed carefully.  Other Republicans, not so much.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said Sunday the deadly shooting at a Navy base in Florida should “inform our ongoing relationship with Saudi Arabia,” calling for an investigation with Saudi cooperation and for greater vetting of U.S.-based Saudi nationals and trainees.

A Saudi aviation student training at Naval Air Station Pensacola shot three people to death on Friday and wounded 11 others before he was killed by police. After the shooting, Gaetz, whose congressional district includes the naval base, called it an “act of terrorism.” Authorities have not confirmed that characterization.

On Sunday, Gaetz said on ABC’s “This Week” that he “directly delivered” a no-tolerance message to the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Princess Reema bint Bandar, when she offered her condolences. The princess, who condemned the attack on Twitter, assured Gaetz that Saudi intelligence will work with the U.S. government, the congressman said.

“We want no interference from the kingdom as it relates to Saudis that we have,” Gaetz said.

“And if there are Saudis that we do not have that may have been involved in any way in the planning, inspiration, financing or execution of this,” he added, “we expect Saudi intelligence to work with our government to find the people accountable and hold them responsible.”

Well, not too much cooperation, otherwise somebody might figure out Trump and especially Jared Kushner are in deep to the Saudis for billions...

Last Call For The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Federal prosecutors are moving forward with the next stage of indictments in the Giuliani corruption investigation after last week's arrest of two ex-Soviet business pals of Rudy Giuliani on campaign finance charges.

We know Giuliani is facing a major federal probe from US attorneys in Manhattan over his corrupt clients, including aforementioned ex-Soviet Putin fixers Abe Parnas and Igor Fruman in Ukraine, and previously indicted Iranian gold trader Reza Zarrab, who worked for convicted ex-bank exec Mehmet Atilla.

Now the Turkish state bank at the heart of Zarrab's plan to evade Iranian sanctions has been charged with money laundering and violating US sanctions on Iran.

Federal prosecutors in New York on Tuesday charged Turkey’s Halkbank (HALKB.IS) with taking part in a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade U.S. sanctions against Iran.

The charges against the majority state-owned bank mirror those against one of its former executives, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, who was found guilty and sentenced to prison after a trial in Manhattan federal court last year.

A U.S. lawyer for Halkbank did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Prosecutors said that between 2012 and 2016, Halkbank helped run a scheme that allowed Iran to spend proceeds from sales of its oil and gas on international markets, in violation of U.S. sanctions, using a complex web of front companies. 

The scheme ran with the protection of high-ranking officials in Iran and Turkey, some of whom received tens of millions of dollars in bribes, the prosecutors said.

Trump asked Rex Tillerson to get Justice to drop charges against Zarrab on Rudy's behalf.  Just this stuff alone is enough to impeach and remove Trump and put Giuliani in a cage for the rest of his life, but it gets worse for Rudy tonight.

Former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. 

“A grand jury has issued a subpoena related to Manhattan federal prosecutors’ investigation into Rudy Giuliani, seeking documents from former Rep. Pete Sessions about his dealings with President Trump’s personal lawyer and associates, according to people familiar with the matter,” the newspaper reported.

“The subpoena seeks documents related to Mr. Giuliani’s business dealings with Ukraine and his involvement in efforts to oust the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, as well as any interactions between Mr. Sessions, Mr. Giuliani and four of Mr. Giuliani’s associates who were indicted last week on campaign-finance and conspiracy accounts, the people said,” The Journal explained. “Mr. Giuliani is the primary focus of the subpoena, the people said. Mr. Giuliani has denied wrongdoing and said he has had no indication his actions are being investigated by prosecutors.”

Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, Trump has had criminal deals with figures from all those countries, and sold out America every time to further his own goals.  And Rudy Giuliani connects almost all of those dots.

Giuliani is now daring House Democrats to do anything to him as he's refusing to cooperate with any subpoenas.  VP Mike Pence is now saying he won't comply either.  Trump has already said he won't cooperate, and Dems are apparently holding off an impeachment inquiry vote while they make their next move.  Meanwhile, more testimony from State Department sources continues this week in House closed-door sessions.

Rudy Giuliani going to jail one way or another, but I'd surely like to see inherent contempt used...