The Iceman Comey-eth

Former FBI Director James Comey skipped his prepared opening remarks that were released yesterday and went right into his professional opinion on the situation he found himself in with Donald Trump.  That opinion is that he believes the man in the Oval Office is a complete liar.

Comey said he was baffled and concerned by Trump’s assertion on television that he had fired the former FBI director because of the Russia investigation, as well as the initial excuse from the administration that Trump had fired Comey due to his botched handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

“That didn’t make any sense to me,” Comey said. “And although the law required no reason at all to fire an FBI director, the administration then chose to defame me and, more importantly, the FBI by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple. And I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them, and I am so sorry that the American people were told them.” 

Comey is widely respected for his efforts to remain above the political fray. For a man in that position, these are simply incredible allegations. 

Comey went on to try to assure the American public that the FBI is a good organization that will remain independent, under Trump and after. 

The FBI’s “mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States,” Comey said. “I will deeply miss being part of that mission. But this organization and its mission will go on long beyond me and long beyond any particular administration.” 

He added, “I have a message before I close for my former colleagues of the FBI. But, first, I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is and always will be independent. And now to my former colleagues, if I may: I am so sorry that I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to you properly. It was the honor of my life to serve beside you, to be part of the FBI family, and I will miss it for the rest of my life. Thank you for standing watch, thank you for doing so much good for this country. Do that good as long as ever you can.”

It got significantly worse for the White House from there.

Former FBI director James B. Comey said Thursday he helped reveal details of his private conversations with President Trump because he thought doing so would spur the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the administration — a remarkable admission showing the degree of concern he had about both Russian interference with U.S. politics and his doubts about the Justice Department’s ability to probe such activity. 

Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey described how details of his private memos about his one-on-one conversations came to light shortly after his dismissal. 

“The president tweeted on Friday after I got fired that I’d better hope there are not tapes,” Comey said. He said he woke up on Monday thinking that if there are tapes, there might be corroboration of Comey’s account. Comey said he asked “a friend of mine to share” a memo he had written about his conversation with Trump “with a reporter.” 

Comey said the memo was one he had written about his Oval Office conversation with Trump in which the president had expressed a desire that the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn be dropped. 

He said the person he asked to share the information was “a good friend of mine” who is a professor at Columbia Law School. “I thought it might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” 

Asked by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) why he felt he had the authority to do that, Comey replied: “As a private citizen, I felt free to share that. I thought it was very important to get it out.” 

Comey said he used someone else to share the information because he was worried, with reporters camped out at his home, that giving the information to a reporter directly “would be like feeding seagulls at the beach.’’

The friend is Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who confirmed his role but declined further comment. The reporter is Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, who declined to comment.

In other words, Comey leaked his own memos on purpose to stop Trump, because he knew that Trump was lying and attempting obstruction of justice.

After three hours, Comey entered into second,closed session testifying involving classified information.  At several points when asked about additional members of the Trump regime, mainly former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Comey deferred his answers to the closed session, which cannot be good for the prospects of either men.

Comey also said that in his professional opinion he was "sure" that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia involved obstruction of justice.  Comey did say at the time before his firing that Trump wasn't under investigation.  He all but confirmed that today Trump is facing such an investigation by Mueller, as is Flynn, Paul Manafort, and probably AG Jeff Sessions.

The Trump Regime is in trouble, and badly so.  Comey will help see to that. He flat-out said that he believed he was fired over the Russia investigation and Mike Flynn, period.  What Congress chooses to do with that information, and what voters choose to do as a result, we shall see.

Not Russian To Judgment

With James Comey taking the stand this morning, it's important to keep his testimony in perspective. The Trump Regime is guilty of a lot of things and is generally a vile group of kleptocrats covering their asses over what amounts to a huge Russian money laundering scheme.  They're crooks and cads and there's plenty of evidence supporting that.  But beyond that, we need to greatly temper the impulse to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, because staring into the abyss too long results in said abyss wanting to have a word with you about timeshare investment opportunities.

If there’s an aesthetic hallmark of this brave new world of left-wing conspiracy theorists, it’s the long, connect-the-dots Twitter thread. The purest and most overelaborated example of this new genre of paranoia debuted on December 11, with the publication of an unreadable, 127-tweet thread known as “Time for Some Game Theory.” Written by Eric Garland, a previously obscure figure who describes himself as a “futurist, keynote speaker, author, intelligence analyst, columnist, and bassist,” the thread veers between the sort of groundless conjecture and outright gibberish that form the basis of President Trump’s own late-night Twitter epistles. (“The Russians f**king rule at covert shit,” reads one Garland tweet. “Always have. Ask a cold warrior. Mucho respect for our adversaries. They do clever work!”) Yet “game theory” thread spread through the internet like measles in an undervaccinated population, garnering widespread praise and driving Garland’s following from 5,000 to 30,000 overnight. 

Garland’s thread depicts how the Russians, reduced by the end of the Cold War to “Drunk Uncle status,” systematically used everything from George W. Bush’s recklessness in Iraq to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA to undermine confidence in the U.S. intelligence community. “DID YOU KNOW YOUR TOASTER IS SPYING ON YOU?” Garland tweeted, parodying the mind-set of an American duped by the diabolical Russian conspiracy. “THE GUBMINT! IT IS EVERYWHERE! THEY SPY ON (*controls snickering*) ALLIES! ALL BAD!” According to Garland, Russia’s long con led directly to our current political predicament: “Trump says he don’t need no stinkin’ intel agencies. Russia (BWA HAHAHAHAAAA) blames Ukraine! LOLOLOLOLZZZ.” The only way forward, Garland concludes, is to embrace his “game theory” in all its intricate zaniness. “To be American,” he tweets, “is to accept that unflinchingly and to soldier forth for future generations, and DO BETTER, GODDAMN IT.”

Garland's now infamous "game theory" Twitter thread got me worked up too, remember?   Six months later all of it looks pretty silly, and it's only gotten worse.

Other Twitter-threaders were quick to follow in Garland’s paranoid footsteps. Adam Khan, a Silicon Valley marketing consultant, linked to a report about a Treasury Department probe into real estate deals in Miami and New York, which noted that shell companies making all-cash offers sometimes serve as fronts for corrupt officials or drug smugglers looking to launder money. Khan, however, takes this indisputable fact one step further: Because some Trump properties have been bought by anonymous shell companies, he must therefore be in cahoots with Russian oligarchs. Tweet-annotating the report with conspiratorial red arrows, Khan insists that he has discovered the “mechanism used by foreign money launderers to park ill-gotten gains in Trump properties, funnel money to him.” Such a conclusion is, in fact, quite plausible, and raises legitimate questions that should be investigated. But a shell company does not automatically mean money laundering. This form of internet sleuthing is little more than garden-variety inductive fallacy: While the underlying premise is true, the conclusion could well be false. But like Trump’s leaps of illogic, such left-wing conspiracy thinking is a hit on Twitter: Khan has 154,000 followers. 

Then there’s Seth Abramson, a poet at the University of New Hampshire, who has 119,000 followers. In one long-winded and breathless Twitter thread, published in March, Abramson rattled off 40 tweets (plus an additional 10 tweets of “notes”) that began: “The plot to sell America’s foreign policy for foreign oil _and_ steal an election in the bargain began”—wait for it—“at the Mayflower Hotel.” The venue for Trump’s first major foreign policy address, Abramson notes, was switched at the last minute from the National Press Club to the Mayflower. In Abramson’s analysis, it was changed because the hotel has “restricted, VIP-only areas” that enabled Trump to meet in secret with the ambassadors for Russia, Italy, and Singapore, who jointly negotiated the sale of 19 percent of Russia’s state oil company. Here, behind closed doors, is where Trump agreed to do Russia’s bidding in return for a cut of the oil: “The Mayflower Speech,” Abramson concludes, “should get the most attention in Congress.” The entire thesis is founded on the simple fact of a hotel booking; in the conspiracy mind-set, even the most mundane logistical details reveal a deeper, preordained plot. 

For further evidence, conspiracy theorists routinely rely on unnamed and untraceable sources. Everyone, it seems, has an unnamed contact in the intelligence community these days. Andrea Chalupa, the author of a book on the “untold story” of Animal Farm, recently tweeted that an “Active IC agent told me Russia developed Trump for over decade, could have arrested him for sex crimes, instead collected kompromat”—the Russian term for compromising material. Claude Taylor, a former aide to Bill Clinton turned travel photographer, tweeted in March that Trump was on the verge of resigning, and seconded Mensch’s claim that a “Grand Jury under auspices of FISA court” had issued a “sealed indictment … to serve as the basis of Impeachment.” Never mind that FISA courts don’t issue indictments, or that impeachment begins in the House of Representatives, not with a grand jury. This is a former White House aide—he must have some form of inside intelligence. 

It should come as no surprise that Twitter is the medium of choice for left-wing conspiracy theories. As Trump himself has demonstrated, Twitter cares about only one thing: whether content is sensational enough to go viral. Twitter enables conspiracy thinkers to unfold their crazy scenarios in incremental, isolated blasts, each “fact” as disconnected from the others as it is from reality. What matters isn’t the background or experience of the theorists, or whether any of their claims are substantiated. Much like adorable cat GIFs or Ellen DeGeneres selfies, conspiracy tweets play not to our desire to understand the world, but to our deep-seated need to share the things we find most comforting.

Make no mistake, Eric Garland, Adam Khan, Seth Abramson, the crew at Palmer Report, the "Patribiotics" combo of Chuck Clymer and Louise Mensch, and as much as I hate to admit it, Sarah Kendzior, are badly hurting the liberal cause with unsubstantiated garbage thrown against the wall in hoping that one or two things turn out to be right.

Why anyone would be listening to right-wing British nutjob Mensch now that she's found a new group of suckers to con is beyond me, but I'm going to stick with the real stuff.

John Schindler is getting close to this end of the pool too.  For now he's been mostly correct about his claims but his call last week that NSA head Adm. Mike Rogers was going to have "a tale to tell" in this week's Senate Intelligence Committee testimony was a complete bust. Rogers probably did order the preservation of anything related to Trump/Russia for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but that's clearly the limit to as far as Rogers is willing to go right now.

We'll see where we are, but getting rid of Trump isn't going to happen through impeachment and removal.  Resignation maybe, but never by Congress.

Keep those grains of salt handy to take with all this.

StupidiNews!

• Voters in the UK head to the polls today to decide on Parliament and a new government as PM Theresa May's call for early elections to cement Conservative power could backfire.
• Michigan could be the latest state to approve concealed carry of firearms without a permit or training as a package of legislation has passed the state House with bipartisan support.
• Former FBI Director James Comey will in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee today on conversations with Donald Trump over possible obstruction of ongoing FBI investigations.
• North Korea has launched several short-range missiles as a display of force one day after South Korean President Moon Jae-in suspended the deployment of a US anti-missile system.
• Satellite TV provider Dish Network has been hit with a $280 million civil fine over telemarketing practices, the company says it will appeal the judge's ruling.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Former FBI Director James Comey has authorized the Senate Intelligence Committee to release his repared testimony for tomorrow, and it's basically a diary of Trump's attempts to influence the investigation into Mike Flynn and Russia.  Ben Wittes at Lawfare goes over the seven-page release:

The first broad theme I want to highlight here is the effort on the part of the President to engage his FBI director in a relationship of patronage and the overwhelming discomfort this effort caused Comey. This is a theme I wrote about based on my own contemporaneous conversations with Comey, but to see it fleshed out across a number of different incidents is nevertheless jarring.

Comey is explicit that he saw Trump as attempting to enmesh him in an inappropriate relationship at the time. Of the January 27 dinner, for example, he writes that, “My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship.” And it’s hard to read this meeting any other way, at least not as Comey describes it. The President repeatedly asked for “loyalty,” was not satisfied with a promise of “honesty,” and the two compromised only awkwardly over the term “honest loyalty.” Trump specifically dangled the question of Comey’s keeping his job over his head. In their last conversation, on April 11, Comey reports that Trump emphasized to him that “I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing you know.” 

Throughout the document, Comey reports extreme discomfort with Trump’s behavior generally, and this aspect of it particularly. At that dinner, Comey felt compelled to tell the President that he was not “reliable” in the way politicians expect. He reports that the President’s efforts to engage him in a “patronage” relationship “concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.” He describes the interaction as a “very awkward conversation.”

Legal experts much more experience than I'll ever be point out that obstruction of justice as a legal term doesn't care a whit about feelings or intent, but rather the act of interference itself, either by word or by deed.

This brings me to the second broad theme about Trump’s conduct, which is the serial investigative inquiries made directly of the FBI. The first one, on the occasion of the January 6 briefing about the Steele dossier, is probably forgivable. Comey had to brief the President-elect on what he described as “salacious and unverified” allegations. It’s not clear what precisely Trump said or did in response to the briefing, and, in fact, Comey suggests that he did not directly ask whether the FBI was investigating the matter. That said, and I’ll return to this point below, it was “based on President-Elect Trump’s reaction to that briefing” that Comey felt compelled to assure him that he was not personally the subject of “an open counter-intelligence case.” So that case is a little murky.

The pages of the testimony are laced, however, with examples of other inappropriate queries of the FBI director on investigative matters. There’s the conversation about General Michael Flynn; there is a subsequent inquiry on the Steele material; there are questions about when Comey was going to publicly state that Trump wasn’t personally under investigation.

It’s hard to express to people who are not steeped in federal law enforcement just how inappropriate these inquiries are, particularly when they involve an investigation in which the President has such deep and multifaceted personal stakes. No, they are not illegal. The President, after all, has constitutional authority to ask for whatever information he wants from his subordinates in the executive branch. But of course, the President also has the authority to give the State of the Union address in Latin and have it consist entirely of obscenities directed at the Speaker of the House. To people who know the norms of federal law enforcement, the conduct described here is closer to that end of the spectrum of presidential behavior than it is to the normal range.

So there's a legal question, and a conduct question.  Whether or not this rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors is solely up to the House, and there's a 0% chance of that happening while the GOP runs the House.

But again, even if the Dems win back the House and flip the Senate, they won't have the 67 votes in the upper chamber to remove Trump from office, and there's no reason to believe he'd vacate the office anyway. Even voting him out of office may not be enough.

We'll see what Comey chooses to expand upon tomorrow, but my guess is that the country's going to move into a new stage where Trump is bunkered up and furious, and all the while the Senate is plotting to pass Trumpcare under the radar.

Tune in tomorrow.

We're Not Even People To Eric Trump

So does Eric Trump represent the right as a whole, or the views of his father, when he told Sean Hannity last night that critics of the Trump regime don't even qualify as people to him?

Eric Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s show Tuesday night and lashed out at those who oppose his father’s administration, saying they’re “not even people.”

Hannity introduced the segment by complaining about the mainstream media floating “baseless Russian conspiracy theories” and what he described as Democrats on the Hill searching for “any evidence of collusion,” namely the investigation into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign’s ties to the Kremlin.

“I’ve never seen hatred like this,” Eric Trump said. “I mean, to me, they’re not even people.”

Eric Trump also called the recently elected Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez a “total whackjob,” then decried the increase in name-calling.

“We deserve so much better than this as a country,” Eric Trump added.

I mean I've said before on a number of occasions that Republicans consider Democrats, black folks, Latinx folks, Asian folks, LBGTQ folks, etc to be second-class citizens and even that we're viewed as less than human, but this is the son of the man in the White House publicly admitting on TV that he doesn't consider his father's critics to qualify as people.

We are nothing more than what, chattel?  Animals to be exploited?  Vermin to be exterminated by the Trump regime?  This is the son of the man in the Oval Office saying that basic human rights only belong to those who support Trump, and in some parallel universe where Chelsea Clinton said this about the people who go after her parents, there would be Republican lawmakers openly calling for her arrest, if not her public execution.

But this is Trump's America now.

Qatar Pin, Linchpin, Grenade Pin, Boom, Con't

So yesterday I gave my reasons to support what I think happened in Qatar, and now we have the why of the matter, and why Trump was so eager to do this.  Remember what I said Monday?

Of course, the larger issue goes back to Qatar being the largest producer of natural gas. Qatar has long wanted a pipeline through Syria to sell its product in Europe.  The war in Syria has made that pipeline impossible for years.  And guess who's currently the biggest natural gas dealer to Europe right now?

Our friend Vlad.  So what if wrecking the Qatari ambition for a pipeline becomes the price Doha has to pay to get back in the Gulf States country club?

Guess what we found out late yesterday?

US investigators believe Russian hackers breached Qatar's state news agency and planted a fake news report that contributed to a crisis among the US' closest Gulf allies, according to US officials briefed on the investigation. 

The FBI recently sent a team of investigators to Doha to help the Qatari government investigate the alleged hacking incident, Qatari and US government officials say. 

Intelligence gathered by the US security agencies indicates that Russian hackers were behind the intrusion first reported by the Qatari government two weeks ago, US officials say. Qatar hosts one of the largest US military bases in the region. 

The alleged involvement of Russian hackers intensifies concerns by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies that Russia continues to try some of the same cyber-hacking measures on US allies that intelligence agencies believe it used to meddle in the 2016 elections. 

US officials say the Russian goal appears to be to cause rifts among the US and its allies. In recent months, suspected Russian cyber activities, including the use of fake news stories, have turned up amid elections in France, Germany and other countries. 

It's not yet clear whether the US has tracked the hackers in the Qatar incident to Russian criminal organizations or to the Russian security services blamed for the US election hacks. One official noted that based on past intelligence, "not much happens in that country without the blessing of the government." 

The FBI and CIA declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the Qatari embassy in Washington said the investigation is ongoing and its results would be released publicly soon.

Man it does not end with these guys. 

Final piece of the puzzle falls into place.  Forget wrecking the pipeline like I said before, what if the aim is to put Qatar's LNG out of business and corner the market?

Trump's more than ready to destroy the US relationship with Qatar because Russia wants him to, and Russia provided the cover to do so.  Maybe Trump is a dupe and was fed this fake report, maybe he went along with it willingly, but the point is he did Russia's bidding.

Think about that.

StupidiNews!

• Islamic State is claiming responsibility for a pair of attacks in Tehran Wednesday, gunmen stormed Iran's Parliament building and a shrine killing 7 and injuring 35.
• Former President Barack Obama met with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau in Montreal yesterday as Canada announced a new foreign policy doctrine to "wait out" the Trump regime.
• Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers and DNI Dan Coats will all testify in front of the Senate today on Trump and Russia.
• US consumer debt has matched its 2008 high this year as strapped Americans face nearly $13 trillion in total mortgage, credit card, bank loan, auto loan and student loan debt.
• The head of the US Patent Office, Michelle Lee, has resigned her position without comment despite several companies sending a joint letter to Trump asking him to keep Lee on.

Last Call For Meanwhile Here In Cincy

Cincinnati is home to more than a few Fortune 500 companies, but nobody's bigger in the Queen City than grocery giant Kroger.  The company is finally planning to build a major downtown store next to its corporate HQ as part of a new mixed-use building.

Kroger plans to open a Downtown supermarket in the summer of 2019, giving neighborhood residents, city officials and boosters what they've sought for decades. 

The company will build a grocery store at the corner of Court and Walnut streets as part of a $90 million, mixed-use tower, officials are announcing Tuesday. The site, next to the Hamilton County Administration building and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles between Court and Central Parkway, is currently a 175-space parking lot. 

One block east of Kroger's headquarters, the two-story supermarket will anchor an 18-story project developed by the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC). It will house 139 apartments and a six-story, 550-space parking garage. 

Kroger will close its smaller, unprofitable Vine Street store in Over-the-Rhine once the new store opens. Kroger officials say the 45,000-square-foot Downtown store will be a relocation of its Vine Street market with just 11,000 square feet of retail space. It will serve Over-the-Rhine, Downtown and the West End. 

The new supermarket will have a second-level wine and beer bar – an amenity that Kroger also installed at its newly opened Corryville store – designed to broaden the store's appeal and encourage some shoppers to linger. 

Developers will seek $8.5 million from the city for the parking garage and residential aspects of the project. Kroger is investing $19 million into the site. 

Mayor John Cranley hailed the project, which must be approved by City Council, as a hard-won milestone for the city. 

"I feel like getting a Downtown grocery store has been like chasing Moby Dick for 20 years and we're finally catching it!" Cranley said. "This is a sign that renaissance of Downtown and OTR is here to stay and is accelerating."

Frankly, Kroger has caught a lot of well-deserved flak for turning downtown Cincy into a food desert. It does have a store about 6 blocks north of its HQ in OTR on Vine, but as the story says, it's "not profitable" and the company hasn't bothered to build a new downtown store to serve the people in the city it calls home in decades.

That is at least looking to change, to the company's credit.  That is if City Council doesn't scuttle it, which is entirely possible if they don't get what they want from Mayor Cranley out of this, so it's not a done deal by any stretch.

We'll see where this goes.  After fighting the streetcar for years, Cranley really loves to take all the credit for OTR's revival.  He seems really excited about this, which means the rest of City Council might have him over a barrel.  I predict this will pass and get built, but it's going to cost Cranley something.  Question, as always around here, is what.

Qatar Pin, Linchpin, Grenade Pin, Boom, Con't

Yesterday I talked about Qatar, purported US ally in the Middle East, home of CENTCOM's forward base in the region, and why suddenly Saudi Arabia turned on it along with basically every other Gulf State and blockaded it on Monday. None of it made sense, it was way too complex to slice up in such a short period of time, and it was basically completely bonkers to the point of endangering the region.

Today we find out that, because Tang the Conqueror can't keep his damn mouth shut on Twitter, there's a significant chance that Trump's trip to Saudi Arabia last month meant Riyadh simply talked Trump into giving them the green light for screwing over Doha with "state sponsor of terrorism" as an excuse, completely ignoring the Saudis doing the same thing on the Sunni side.

President Trump took to Twitter Tuesday morning, saying that during his trip to the Middle East, he warned about funding "radical ideology" and leaders there "pointed to Qatar."

Mr. Trump's comments come as Saudi Arabia and three other Arab countries have officially severed ties with Qatar and moved to cut off land, sea and air routes to the energy-rich nation that is home to a major U.S. military base, accusing it of supporting regional terror groups. 

Mr. Trump issued additional tweets, saying his visit to the region was "already paying off" and that "perhaps this will be the beginning of the end of the horror of terrorism."

Literally the Saudis told Trump that Qatar was the "real bad guy" on the peninsula and Trump of course completely believed them, so much so that now we're openly supporting the blockade of Qatar until further notice.  The Saudis couldn't be happier.  Iran couldn't be more pissed off.

I guess what the Qatari government really should have done instead of that CENTCOM base is to put a Trump Hotel in Doha like the Saudis have.

This is how we conduct our foreign policy now, whoever gets Trump's ear can use that access to go after any of our other allies that they may not like.  Qatar vs Saudi Arabia is bad enough, but let's magnify that to say, India vs Pakistan and you begin to see the potential downside of this mess.

Reality Is Stranger Than Fiction

If the Trump Regime's plan to go after leakers was designed to take the spotlight off Russian interference with our election systems, the first iteration has failed miserably as the Justice Department has all but confirmed now that Moscow used phishing attacks to infiltrate voter registration systems and to compromise election officials in multiple states ahead of last year's elections.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday charged a federal contractor with sending classified material to a news organization that sources identified to Reuters as The Intercept, marking one of the first concrete efforts by the Trump administration to crack down on leaks to the media.

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, was charged with removing classified material from a government facility located in Georgia. She was arrested on June 3, the Justice Department said.

The charges were announced less than an hour after The Intercept published a top-secret document from the U.S. National Security Agency that described Russian efforts to launch cyber attacks on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and send "spear-phishing" emails, or targeted emails that try to trick a recipient into clicking on a malicious link to steal data, to more than 100 local election officials days before the presidential election last November.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the case beyond its filing. Federal Bureau of Investigation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While the charges do not name the publication, a U.S. official with knowledge of the case said Winner was charged with leaking the NSA report to The Intercept. A second official confirmed The Intercept document was authentic and did not dispute that the charges against Winner were directly tied to it.

The Intercept's reporting reveals new details behind the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian intelligence services were seeking to infiltrate state voter registration systems as part of a broader effort to interfere in the election, discredit Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and help then Republican candidate Donald Trump win the election.

The new material does not, however, suggest that actual votes were manipulated.

Multiple observations here:  first, the NSA analysis document on the Russians using phishing to get into voter registration systems is authentic, which means yes, the Russians did try to undermine confidence in our election infrastructure and got caught.  The notion that the Russians weren't behind this is now factually wrong and this confirms what we've known for months now.  We have a serious international problem on our hands.  The Russians messed with our elections, period.  How does fiddling with voter registration systems help Trump and the GOP?  Why that one's simple, guys. Purging the rolls of Democrats.  Particularly in say, zip codes where there's a heavy black and/or Latino presence in swing states like NC or Florida.  Or say...Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Second, the Trump regime must have known about this NSA report, and have made multiple attempts to lift sanctions on Russia anyway, despite the fact they knew the Russians tampered with at least one major voter registration logistics company and the election officials that used that company, which according to the story is VR Systems based in Florida...see point one above.  There was no bigger electoral prize up for grabs in 2016 than the Sunshine State, with NC close behind.  If Clinton has taken both of them, she'd be President right now.

Third, in their zeal to go after the leaker, a 25-year-old woman, all the Trump regime has done is authenticate the story.  They've also sent a message that Trump and Sessions are far more worried about protecting Russia here than our election systems, and the people who are coming forward with the truth.  They also need a colossal distraction from this week's Senate Russia hearings.

Fourth, The Intercept appears to have immediately burned their NSA source in Ms. Winner here through a combination of wanting to get this story out first, and being sloppy as hell on protecting its source from Trump and Sessions.  Considering all they went though to keep Ed Snowden safe, they sure screwed the pooch on protecting Reality Winner.  Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are very upset with The Intercept that they so "carelessly" exposed a source.

Fifth, her name is Reality Leigh Winner.  Somebody thought that was a good name. I have no words. You'd get thrown out of your editor's office if you came to them with an NSA leaker character in your fiction novel named that, and for good reason.  Of course, she's a flesh-and-blood person whose life is about to be utterly destroyed by Trump for political cover, so it's actually not as amusing as you think.

Finally, here's an off-the-wall thing here.  We basically knew all this stuff beforehand.  We knew that local/state election officials had been compromised, we knew at least one major voter registration logistics company had been phished, and we knew that the Russian goal was to undermine confidence in our election systems.

The question becomes why The Intercept would do this now, and burn a source so casually like this.  If you were the Trump regime, and you wanted to protect Russia and parade a leaker around in chains and an orange jumpsuit in order to terrify the press and other potential leakers, you would need, well, an obvious case of somebody leaking a Russia document that doesn't really say too much.  Yeah, I know, the Feds caught her pretty much right after she mailed the Intercept with the document and would have busted her anyway, but the Intercept didn't have to go to the NSA over this either.  Maybe it saved the Feds a little leg work, maybe it didn't.

But you would be forgiven if one might think that Team Double G were told to burn their source on purpose, days before NSA chief Mike Rogers and FBI Director James Comey are to testify under oath to the Senate.

Just saying.

StupidiNews!

• David Rank, the acting US Ambassador to China, has resigned his post over the Trump regime's decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.
• Democrats are going after 11 vulnerable House Republicans who voted for Trumpcare ahead of 2018 elections, starting with GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan's seat in Wisconsin.
• After being expelled from the Gulf Cooperation Council over charges of supporting terrorism on Monday, Qatar is turning to Kuwait to mediate its dispute with the other Gulf States.
• Wonder Woman has opened to a $100 million domestic box office take, earning the best debut for a female director in film history for Patty Jenkins.
• Video game companies are slowly working out deals with unionized voice talent, many of whom went on strike last October.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

So it turns out that everyone really was expecting Donald Trump to reaffirm America's military commitment to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the mutual military defense part of the agreement that has only been invoked once, after 9/11. Only Trump changed the speech himself at the last minute and left that part out on purpose.

When President Donald Trump addressed NATO leaders during his debut overseas trip little more than a week ago, he surprised and disappointed European allies who hoped—and expected—he would use his speech to explicitly reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense of the alliance’s members, a one-for-all, all-for-one provision that looks increasingly urgent as Eastern European members worry about the threat from a resurgent Russia on their borders.

That part of the Trump visit is known. 

What’s not is that the president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.

Whoopsie!

The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion. (According to NSC spokesman Michael Anton, who did not dispute this account, “The president attended the summit to show his support for the NATO alliance, including Article 5. His continued effort to secure greater defense commitments from other nations is making our alliance stronger.”) 

Either way, the episode suggests that what has been portrayed—correctly—as a major rift within the 70-year-old Atlantic alliance is also a significant moment of rupture inside the Trump administration, with the president withholding crucial information from his top national security officials—and then embarrassing them by forcing them to go out in public with awkward, unconvincing, after-the-fact claims that the speech really did amount to a commitment they knew it did not make.

In the end Trump always throws his employees under the bus.  Always.  And he did this not out of "skepticism" but because it directly benefited his actual patron, Vladimir Putin.

So yes, he sandbagged his own foreign policy team on this.  Makes you wonder what else he's screwed his cabinet picks over with, and maybe it explains why he still can't find anyone willing to be FBI Director after more than a month and why scores of cabinet positions at the senior level remain unfilled.

After all if Trump just ignores their advice and does things because of "instinct" who needs advisers, cabinet members, and their deputies and support staff?

Not Trump. He doesn't need anyone.

But Vlad.

Conn Baby Gone

The big story here in Kentucky today is the disappearance of Eric Conn, the trial lawyer who plead guilty earlier this year to more than a half-billion in Social Security fraud and was facing 12 years in federal prison.  Under house arrest, it seems Conn took off his monitoring device and fled the country.

The FBI office in Louisville issued a press release saying Conn had removed his electronic monitoring device in violation of his bond and that authorities didn’t know where he was. 

Conn pleaded guilty to stealing from the Social Security Administration and paying bribes to a judge to rubber-stamp disability claims for thousands of his clients. Conn remained free on bond pending his sentencing next month, but a judge had ordered him to be on home detention with electronic monitoring. 

Conn faced up to 12 years in prison. He had also been ordered to pay more than $80 million — $5.7 million to repay fraudulent earnings; $46.5 million to the Social Security Administration; and $31 million to the government and two whistleblowers who helped expose his wrongdoing and their attorneys. 

After Conn was arrested in April 2016, prosecutors argued he should have to stay in jail pending trial, partly because of the risk that he could flee.

Employees in Conn’s office had heard him say he would flee to Cuba or Ecuador to avoid criminal charges, and Conn had wired substantial sums of money out of the country at times, an FBI agent testified at one hearing. 

“If he were to leave, to cross a border, he could go to wherever he has stashed some money and flee,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Trey Alford said at the time. 

Conn’s attorneys pointed out that he had not fled even though he’d known for years that he was under investigation, and that he had substantial ties to home, including his elderly mother and teen daughter. 

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert E. Wier allowed Conn out of jail but set a number of conditions, including home detention with GPS monitoring at his large house in Pikeville. Wier also required Conn to pledge his home to secure a $1.25 million bond and to surrender his passport. 

Conn said at the time that he was not a threat to skip town. 

“Your trust is not misplaced,” he told Wier. 

The court issued an arrest warrant for Conn Saturday after he disappeared, according to the release from FBI chief counsel David Habich.

Despite the fact that the guy's name is literally "Conn" and he defrauded the government for nine figures, it amazes me that you get more prison time for carjacking a rusted out Dodge pickup than stealing half of one billion dollars, but that's America for you.  Meanwhile, maybe the Louisville FBI ought to figure out how this guy got away.

It's almost criminal.

Qatar Pin, Linchpin, Grenade Pin, Boom

That "major diplomatic crisis beyond Trump's control" scenario has just happened, and of course it involves America's Gulf State allies in the Middle East.  There are several players in the region, but Monday's meltdown involves natural gas-rich Qatar, and it looks like the Saudis believe they have the green light to squeeze Iran's Shiite allies in the region.

Saudi Arabia and three other Arab countries cut off most diplomatic and economic ties to Qatar, in an unprecedented move designed to punish one of the region’s financial superpowers for its ties with Iran and Islamist groups in the region.

Oil gained and Qatari stocks plunged after Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt said they will suspend air and sea travel to and from the Gulf emirate. Saudi Arabia will also shut land crossings with its neighbor, potentially depriving the emirate of imports through its only land border. Qatar called the accusations “baseless” and said they were part of a plan to “impose guardianship on the state, which in itself is a violation of sovereignty.”

Qatar is one of the world’s richest countries and of strategic importance, being the biggest producer of liquefied natural gas. A country with a population smaller than Houston, its $335 billion sovereign wealth fund holds stakes in companies from Barclays Plc and Credit Suisse Group. It also hosts the forward headquarters of CENTCOM, the U.S. military’s central command in the Middle East.

Emboldened by warmer U.S. ties under President Donald Trump, the Saudi-led alliance is seeking to stamp out any opposition to forming a united front against Shiite-ruled Iran. And while Monday’s escalation is unlikely to hurt energy exports from the Gulf, it threatens to have far-reaching effects on Qatar.

Air, sea, and land travel has been cut off to Qatar and its capital of Doha as well. All this started over -- surprise! -- an email leak between the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the US and several US foreign policy figures from the Obama and Dubya administrations complaining about Qatar's frenemy the UAE being allowed to get away with things that no other Gulf State could.

An unnamed source who late last week leaked emails between a powerful ambassador and top figures in the U.S. foreign policy community shared a fresh batch of private messages with HuffPost on Sunday just hours before a new Middle East crisis erupted.

The new dump appears to contain messages between the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba and top members of the Obama administration as well as figures at the Atlantic Council, an influential Washington think tank that receives funding from the Emirates, and Elliott Abrams, a prominent official in former President George W. Bush’s administration who is popular among some Trump administration officials.

Late Sunday, Otaiba’s nation, the UAE, and three other U.S.-friendly countries ― Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain ― announced that they had severed ties with their neighbor Qatar, a wealthy nation which hosts the largest American military facility in the region. The weekend email dump shows the ambassador and others privately blasting Qatar.

The dramatic change in diplomatic ties came after a leak of messages that showed Otaiba communicating with former Defense Secretary Bob Gates and prominent alumni of the Bush and Obama teams about his disdain for Qatar, his desire to shut down the U.S. military base there and his support for public criticism of the country. The stream of leaks also showed the level of tension among U.S. partners despite President Donald Trump’s recent visit to the Middle East and the scale of a campaign targeting one of the most important diplomats in the U.S.

In a message accompanying the latest dump, the source claimed the emails were meant to expose how moneyed foreigners hijack U.S. foreign policy to their own benefit and Americans’ loss. The source had previously denied any ties to Qatar. HuffPost has confirmed the authenticity of six of the email exchanges.

Qatar has long positioned itself as Shiite mediator between the Sunni Muslim states led by Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, because of its position in the region, its wealth, and its diplomacy.  The United Arab Emirates is the other side of that coin, only favoring the Sunni side.  The US happily helps out both countries as a result, and so far it's been nothing personal, just business (and business is good).

All that just disintegrated over these email leaks.

These leaks show a concerted effort by Qatar to slag the Emirati Ambassador to the US, while Qatar is saying that all the Iranian terror support is fake news, and in return the rest of the Gulf States have now considered Qatar a terrorist state (which is hysterically funny and awful once you recall that Saudi Arabia's militant Wahhabi faction of Muslim fundamentalists are pretty much terrorist factories.)

There's way more going on here than on the surface, and the US has multiple military, academic and corporate interests among all the Gulf States.  Having to take sides here when threading a series of needles is necessary is going to be bad enough, but let's remember our State Department is criminally understaffed, led by a oil executive who was hired by an idiot luxury hotelier who can't even keep his own hotels open.

In other words, the odds of this becoming a spectacular and bloody mess is extremely high. It's one thing for Qatar and the UAE to be in the middle of a fight, but it's entirely another for everyone to suddenly call Qatar an ISIS terrorist state and shut the place down.  And the bulk of the military forces in Qatar belong to...the US.  We have a nice little base outside Doha. Qatar says it's the victim here.  What happens to the US military in Qatar? What about the 5th Fleet US Naval HQ in neighboring Bahrain?

Absolutely nothing good can come from this.  This is going to get Middle East-ugly at wildfire-level speed, and Donald Trump is the US leader at the helm right now.

Good luck, and buckle the hell up, kids.  None of this makes sense, and it's moving way too quickly to contain.  Trump better figure it out or we're going to have an open shooting war on the Saudi Peninsula.

Of course, the larger issue goes back to Qatar being the largest producer of natural gas.  Qatar has long wanted a pipeline through Syria to sell its product in Europe.  The war in Syria has made that pipeline impossible for years.  And guess who's currently the biggest natural gas dealer to Europe right now?

Our friend Vlad.  So what if wrecking the Qatari ambition for a pipeline becomes the price Doha has to pay to get back in the Gulf States country club?

Remember, this all started days after Trump's Middle East trip to Riyadh. Qatar being completely cut off, unable to move natural gas at all, would be a huge help to the Russians and OPEC.  Heavy tension in the region would certainly start to push oil prices up.  Everyone would benefit.

Except for, you know, American consumers.

Just looking at the chessboard a few moves ahead, and I'm not liking what I'm seeing.  But off we go.

StupidiNews!

• British police have arrested 11 in connection with this weekend's London Bridge attack, the three attackers who were killed Saturday have been identified by law enforcement officials.
• Both former FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers will testify this week in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
• A growing diplomatic crisis in the Middle East now has several Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt cutting diplomatic ties to Qatar's government over suspected terrorist ties to ISIS.
• Legalized recreational marijuana use in California, the subject of an upcoming 2018 referendum, could mean a billion-dollar yearly tax windfall for the state.
• For the first time Saturday's successful SpaceX Dragon spacecraft supply run launch to the International Space Station included a Chinese science experiment.