Sunday Long Read: A Drity River Runs Through It

I've talked about Portland before, America's whitest major city by a mile with a 72% white populace and one of the most segregated cities in America.  Now the city is trying to fix its long history of racism by starting with environmental justice and cleaning up the badly polluted Willamette River.

When Wilma Alcock was young, she fished the Willamette River nearly every weekend. Her favorite spot was Mock’s Bottom—a crescent of land that lies at the base of the steep bluffs along Willamette Boulevard. It has since been swallowed up by the Swan Island Industrial Park, but back then it was just marshy riverbank.

On warm summer evenings and crisp fall days, Alcock clambered down to the water to dip her line in the lazy current. She caught bluegills, ring-tail perch, and crappie—a tasty black and white speckled sunfish. “We used to catch them plentiful,” Alcock recalls. Now seventy-nine and retired after a career in nursing and childcare, she has an infectious laugh, short white hair, and smooth skin that belies her age.

Alcock grew up fishing, like many people of her generation in Portland’s African American community. She learned from her father, who always called her Bill. “You know, Wilma, William, Bill,” she explains. She got a cane pole at age eight and baited her first worm not long after. That’s when, she says, the “first little bit of callousness” came into her life. She knew how to cast by ten and has fished ever since.

But Alcock stopped fishing the Willamette in the 1970s. Part of the reason was that she was busy raising her four children. But it was also because the river had become so polluted that her catch was visibly unhealthy. “You didn’t need nobody to tell you not to eat the fish,” Alcock says.

Signs warning against eating fish from the Willamette eventually went up in 2004, four years after the Environmental Protection Agency declared the Portland Harbor a federal Superfund site—a ten-mile reach from the Broadway Bridge to Sauvie Island. While salmon and other migratory fish are safe to eat, the Oregon Health Authority advises healthy adults to eat a maximum of one meal of resident fish per month. For children and pregnant or nursing women, that number is zero.

The EPA has now released a plan to clean up the river after sixteen years of environmental studies. Three million cubic yards of contaminated sediments will be dredged from the river and more will be either removed from the banks or sealed in place. The cleanup will take thirteen years and cost polluters at least a billion dollars, but it will make the fish safer to eat and hasten the recovery of the river’s ecosystem.

Environmental justice advocates also see the cleanup effort as an opportunity to do right by those who have suffered the most from the pollution. Although the contamination has affected everyone who uses the Willamette, the impacts have fallen disproportionately on those who tend to fish the most: tribal members, people of color, low-income residents, and those from other marginalized groups who rely on the river for food.

Organizations like the Portland Harbor Community Coalition, an alliance of individuals and associations representing Native American, African American, immigrant, refugee, and homeless communities, are trying to ensure that people from impacted groups get access to jobs associated with the billion-dollar project. They also want community members to have a role in monitoring progress and deciding how riverfront real estate should be used after it’s restored.

“We have a chance to actually do something different here,” says Donovan Smith, an African American artist and journalist who serves as PHCC’s media coordinator. (Smith is also a contributor to Oregon Humanities' This Land project.)

Many in Portland’s Black community say the cleanup offers a way to reclaim a connection to the Willamette River. That connection began with World War II shipyards and continued over decades spent living along the water and fishing. But the bond suffered as pollution made the fish unsafe and economic changes pushed many African Americans out of neighborhoods near the river. Many say the connection has been lost.

“It all kind of just blends together with all the displacement, the gentrification,” says Alcock, a PHCC member with deep ties to the river. “All of it is just one big old ball.”

It's a start, and there are plenty of old wounds in Portland and in Oregon in general, a state founded by white supremacists and a city that had racial exclusion laws worse than any Jim Crow Southern state.

But it's a start.  Portland still has a long, long way to go.

The Fulcrum Crumbles In Riyadh

Saudi Arabia's King Salman just cleaned house, in this case pretty much the entire House of Saud, the most notable arrest in Salman's purge is billionaire Prince Alaweed Bin Talal.

Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a prominent member of the county's royal family and a wealthy investor, was arrested on Saturday in connection with a wide-ranging anti-corruption initiative, according to local reports.

Saudi Arabia's King Salman removed a host of prominent officials in a sweeping crackdown, in which dozens of princes and former ministers were detained. News outlets, including Saudi-owned Al Arabiya, and The Wall Street Journal, reported Bin Talal was among those arrested. CNBC could not immediately confirm Bin Talal's status.

Bin Talal is considered one of the most prominent members of the Saudi royal family, and has been the subject of numerous profiles in U.S. and international publications. He has made numerous appearances on CNBC dispensing investment advice — such as last month, when he predicted bitcoin was little more than a speculative bubble that would soon "implode"

The billionaire is an American-educated philanthropist and investor who is heavily invested in U.S. corporate giants like Citigroup, Apple, 21st Century Fox and Twitter, just to name a few. Between 1991 and 1995, bin Talal came to the rescue of President Donald Trump, whose real estate empire was under strain. Bin Talal purchased a yacht, and invested in Trump's Plaza Hotel.

It's that last part that I think is a big part of the puzzle. Don't forget that this action is coming on the heels of last week's announcement of a massive new half-trillion dollar Saudi mega-city project.  That level of grandeur would almost certainly attract massive corruption, but King Salman got his house in order.

Literally.

And later Saturday a missile attack from Yemen was intercepted.

Saudi Arabia says it has intercepted a ballistic missile fired from Yemen, after a loud explosion was heard near Riyadh airport on Saturday evening.

The missile was destroyed over the capital and fragments landed in the airport area, officials quoted by the official Saudi Press Agency said.

A TV channel linked to Houthi rebels in Yemen said the missile was fired at the King Khalid International Airport.

The civil aviation authority said that air traffic was not disrupted.

Saudi forces have reported shooting down Houthi missiles in the past , though none has come so close to a major population centre.

Not to mention Lebanese PM Saad al-Hariri resigning out of fear of assassination.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has resigned, saying in a televised broadcast from Saudi Arabia that he feared for his life, while also fiercely criticising Iran.

He accused Iran of sowing "fear and destruction" in several countries, including Lebanon.

Mr Hariri's father, former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, was assassinated in 2005.

The Hariri family is close to Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional competitor.

Mr Hariri has been prime minister since December 2016, after previously holding the position between 2009 and 2011.

"We are living in a climate similar to the atmosphere that prevailed before the assassination of martyr Rafik al-Hariri," he said in the broadcast from the Saudi capital Riyadh.

"I have sensed what is being plotted covertly to target my life."

Mr Hariri also attacked the Iran-backed Shia movement Hezbollah, which wields considerable power in Lebanon.

Addressing "Iran and its followers" he said Lebanon would "cut off the hands that wickedly extend into it".

Iran said the resignation would create regional tensions and rejected Mr Hariri's accusations as "unfounded".

As a good friend has reminded me, all this is connected.  The shadow war between Riyadh and Tehran is old and ugly, and just because it's the 21st century doesn't mean it's any less dangerous.  The Saudis have been making moves all throughout 2017 in order to consolidate power and shut out Iran.  That mega-city project is the future as oil dies in the sands, and King Salman isn't taking any chances that his family is going to try to screw him over on it.

Everyone left is 100% on board, or soon will be.  The House of Saud is moving forward because they're running out of time.  Trump may be taking America back to a fossil fuel nightmare, but the Saudis aren't as stupid.

Let's not kid ourselves though, as the Saudis remain a brutally oppressive theocratic monarchy with deadly authoritarian tendencies.  They are not our buddies, or anyone's buddies for that matter, they are part and parcel of the problem in the Middle East for the last several decades, and that power they wield comes from oil.

But what this really comes down to is the fact that Jared Kushner was in Saudi Arabia last week.  The last time Kushner was in Saudi Arabia, we got the whole Qatar mess.  Now, days after his latest visit to Riyadh, we have a massive purge including a Saudi business billionaire who has a long-running feud with one Donald Trump.

Prince Alwaleed was giving interviews to the Western news media as recently as late last month about subjects like so-called crypto currencies and Saudi Arabia’s plans for a public offering of shares in its state oil company, Aramco. 

He has also recently sparred publicly with President Donald J. Trump. The prince was part of a group of investors who bought control of the Plaza Hotel in New York from Mr. Trump, and he also bought an expensive yacht from him as well. But in a twitter message in 2015 the prince called Mr. Trump “a disgrace not only to the GOP but to all America.” 

Mr. Trump fired back, also on Twitter, that “Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal wants to control our U.S. politicians with daddy’s money.”

And Trump tweeted today about a new IPO by Aramco here in the US.  Out of the blue.

You do the math.

Last Call For Neighbors: The Movie

Seems Rand Paul had a bit of an altercation with a neighbor out in Warren County because, well, people really should beat up senators at all, that's bad, but hey, America's a different place now.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is recovering after being assaulted at his Kentucky home on Friday, joining a growing list of lawmakers who have been injured or threatened with violence this year.

Paul, a second-term senator, suffered a minor injury when he was assaulted at his Warren County, Ky., home Friday afternoon. Kelsey Cooper, Paul’s Kentucky-based communications director, said in a statement Saturday that the senator “was blindsided and the victim of an assault. The assailant was arrested, and it is now a matter for the police.”

Kentucky State Police charged 59-year-old Rene Boucher with fourth-degree assault with a minor injury. He is being held at Warren County jail on $5,000 bond, state police said.

Paul and Boucher live in the same gated community along Rivergreen Lane in Bowling Green, Ky., according to two people close to Paul who asked for anonymity out of respect for the senator. Boucher is an anesthesiologist who has been recovering from injuries related to a recent bike accident, according to one of the people close to Paul.

He is the inventor of the Therm-a-Vest, a cloth vest partially filled with rice and secured with Velcro straps that is designed help with back pain, according to the Bowling Green Daily News.

Troopers responded to Paul’s residence at 3:21 p.m. on Friday after reports of an assault. Upon arrival, troops determined Boucher “had intentionally assaulted Paul causing a minor injury,” state police said.

Paul, 54, has served in the Senate since 2011. He is an ophthalmologist who has practiced in Bowling Green, Ky., where he moved with his wife in 1993. He ran unsuccessfully for president in 2016, focusing the closing months of his bid on attacking then-candidate Donald Trump and his readiness for office. In recent months, he was a lead opponent of Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But more, recently Paul has emerged as a leading defender of Trump’s policies and has golfed with the president at Trump’s Virginia golf course.

It’s unclear whether the attack against Paul was politically motivated. But an unprecedented wave of threats against House and Senate lawmakers this year has prompted congressional security officials to review and follow up on thousands of threatening messages to members of both parties.

There's no excuse for assault, none, period, sorry.  Boucher is probably going to be spending a lot of time thinking about what he did in decidedly substandard housing conditions.  Especially after the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise earlier this year, I have to say that I hope this guy gets the full weight of the law hammering him down.

Political disagreements are one thing, physical violence is entirely another.

And yeah, I know this means punching Nazis is wrong.  It also means it's going to have consequences when you do it.

I loathe Rand Paul, he's caused damage to me personally with his voting record, but I'm not going to beat him with assault.  I'm going to beat him by voting against him and getting other Kentuckians to do the same.

Turtling Up To Tear It Down

If you're still expecting Mitch McConnell to lift a finger to protect Robert Mueller's job as special counsel or to rein in social media giants, remember he's a Republican, and he only cares about empowering Trump and stealing power.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Saturday that special counsel Robert Mueller is not in need of congressional protection from President Donald Trump.

"I don’t hear much pressure to pass anything," McConnell told MSNBC's Hugh Hewitt. "There’s been no indication that the President or the White House are not cooperating with the special counsel."

McConnell added, "I think the view up here is let him do his job."

Senators on both sides of the aisle have introduced bills to shield Mueller, whose investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential collusion between Moscow and Trump's campaign yielded two indictments and an unsealed guilty plea this week.

But those proposals have stalled in the chamber. And given that McConnell determines what bills get floor time in the Senate, it seems unlikely that will change.

He also doesn't care about Russian interference in social media.

McConnell also threw cold water on legislation requiring social media companies to disclose who pays for ads — part of a bipartisan effort intended to thwart future Russian attempts to secretly interfere in an election.

"I’m a little skeptical of these disclosure-type proposals that are floating around, which strikes me would mostly penalize American citizens trying to use the internet and to advertise," McConnell told Hewitt.

McConnell has a long history of pushing back on campaign finance regulations he sees as a threat to the First Amendment.

Asked by Hewitt if he would support a 9/11-style commission that looks at some of these issues, which Graham has floated, McConnell suggested it wasn't needed. "Yeah, I don’t know whether we need some special entity to do it or not. We have committees here."

Nothing will change until McConnell is removed from power.  Count on that.  The only reason he hasn't already killed the investigation is because it's still possibly a useful tool to hurt the Democrats with.  Once that ceases to be, expect Mueller to be dismissed.

Vladimir's Build-A-Troll Factory

Twitter user Jenna Abrams built up 70,000 followers over 3 years, was featured in dozens of stories, and fought with journalists. advocates, and social media stars over immigration and Donald Trump. She was a right-wing troll who championed everything from segregation to Trump.

She was also a 100% manufactured product of Russian intelligence operatives designed to sow political chaos.

Jenna Abrams, the freewheeling American blogger who believed in a return to segregation and said that many of America’s problems stemmed from PC culture run amok, did not exist. 

But Abrams got very real attention from almost any national news outlet you can think of, according to a Daily Beast analysis of her online footprint. 

Abrams, who at one point boasted nearly 70,000 Twitter followers, was featured in articles written by Bustle, U.S. News and World Report, USA Today, several local Fox affiliates, InfoWars, BET, Yahoo Sports, Sky News, IJR, Breitbart, The Washington Post, Mashable,New York Daily News, Quartz, Dallas News, France24, HuffPost, The Daily Caller, The Telegraph, CNN, the BBC, Gizmodo, The Independent, The Daily Dot, The Observer, Business Insider, The National Post, Refinery29, The Times of India, BuzzFeed, The Daily Mail, The New York Times, and, of course, Russia Today and Sputnik. 

Many of these stories had nothing to do with Russia—or politics at all. Instead, stretching back to 2014, Abrams’ account built up an image of a straight-talking, no-nonsense, viral-tweet-writing young American woman. She was featured in articles as diverse as “the 15 funniest tweets this week” to “#FeministAMovie Proves Why Twitter Can’t Have Nice Things.” Then, once she built her following, she would push divisive views on immigration, segregation, and Donald Trump, especially as the 2016 election loomed. 

Abrams’ pervasiveness in American news outlets shows just how much impact Russia’s troll farm had on American discourse in the run-up to the 2016 election—and illustrates how Russian talking points can seep into American mainstream media without even a single dollar spent on advertising.

Remnants from some of Abrams’ most elaborate conspiracies and xenophobic opinions still remain in replies from celebrities sparring with—or agreeing with—her account.
Roseanne Barr responded to one of Abrams’ tweets on Feb. 2, 2016, to call a common enemy “pro-pedophile.” Abrams’ tweet earlier in the day about a Saudi Arabian Starbucks went viral, meriting pickup from The Telegraph and Russia Today, and even a response from Starbucks’ corporate Twitter account. 

Barr elaborated in a tweet later in the month, saying “dems repubs libertarians indies greens, black white yellow red-all religions” are “#PEDOPHILES.” 

Even Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia and an expert in Russian propaganda, got into a number of Twitter spats with Abrams. McFaul responded to Abrams’ posts in 10 separate months between February of 2015 and August of 2016.
Before they knew the account was run by paid disinformation agents, Abrams’ ahistorical slavery revisionism irked journalists and historians alike. 

Al Letson, the host of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal podcast, received over 65,000 retweets and 153,000 likes when he refuted Abrams’ incorrect Civil War claim. 

“It’s much easier to say the Civil War was about money, when your ancestors weren’t the currency,” said Letson, whose tweet is still pinned to the top of his Twitter page.
Historian Kevin Kruse’s quote-tweet of Abrams accrued over 41,000 retweets.
“No, the Civil War was about slavery,” he wrote. “Sincerely, Historians.” 

“I responded to the tweet because it echoed an argument I’ve heard many times: that the Civil War was somehow not about slavery, even when the seceding states and the Confederate government made it quite clear, in their own words at the time, that it was entirely about slavery,” Kruse told The Daily Beast.

The Russians knew exactly how to use social media against the country.  That helped to elect Trump and the GOP by stocking voter anger and depressing Democratic turnout.   We were played for suckers, and now we may lose our country because of it.

And both our broken media and Congress went along.  But let's not forget the blame lies on the shoulders of Twitter itself, more interested in taking money than policing its sewers.

In early 2015, a Twitter employee discovered a vast amount of Twitter accounts with IP addresses in Russia and Ukraine. The worker, Leslie Miley, said most of them were inactive or fake but were not deleted at the time. Miley, who was the company's engineering manager of product safety and security at the time, said efforts to root out spam and manipulation on the platform were slowed down by the company's growth team, which focused on increasing users and revenue.

"Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts, or remove accounts had to go through the growth team," Miley said. "They were more concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts."

Facebook too was glad to have millions of fake users in order to generate revenue numbers and goos stock prices. They deleted millions of fake accounts before the election, but they left hundreds of millions of fake accounts untouched.

Facebook has admitted that up to 270m accounts on the social network are illegitimate, raising questions over the social network's integrity as it is under pressure over Russian meddling in elections across the world. 

Buried in the social network's results on Wednesday night, it disclosed that there are tens of millions more fake and duplicate accounts than it had previously thought. 

Around 2-3pc of its 2.1bn monthly users in the third quarter of 2017 were "user-misclassified and undesirable accounts", Facebook said, up from the 1pc it had estimated in July. 

Another 10pc of its accounts are duplicates of real users, almost doubling its estimate of 6pc from last quarter's results. This suggests that in total, up to 13pc of its 2.1bn monthly users - almost 270m accounts - are illegitimate.

And there's no doubt that a major chunk of fake accounts were made for Russian influence of our political system in order to help Donald Trump and the GOP.

Oil's Well That Ends Well For US Diplomacy

Donald Trump keeps isolating the US from international agreements and diplomatic cooperation on a number of area, and no executive agency has taken damage quite like the State Department.  We're now a year into his term and Trump continues to refuse to appoint diplomatic staff to key positions.  It's gone way past the fact he doesn't care, as far as American diplomacy still exists, it's now "you deal with Trump, and you do what he wants." 

President Trump pushed back Thursday on concerns about a lack of nominees for key positions at the State Department, arguing it wouldn't affect his agenda.

"Let me tell you, the one that matters is me, I'm the only one that matters because when it comes to it that's what the policy is going to be," Trump said on Fox News when pressed about vacancies by Laura Ingraham.

"We don't need all the people that they want," Trump continued. "Don't forget, I'm a business person and I tell my people, well you don't need to fill slots, don't fill them."

A number of top positions remain unfilled at the State Department, among other agencies, including officials overseeing Southeast Asia and arms control.

Trump has fallen behind his four predecessors in the number of appointments confirmed by the Senate by this time, while he also has fewer nominations sent compared to the four previous administrations, according to an appointee tracker from The Washington Post and Partnership for Public Service.

The president blamed Senate Democrats for more nominees not being approved, though acknowledged that he has focused on nominating fewer people.

"We're filling up roles. And, don't forget, Schumer and the Democrats are just obstructing. You can't get anything through. We have almost about half the number of people coming through as Obama had. They are obstructing," Trump said.

And when it comes to anything involving transparancy and international cooperation to rein in corruption, the US is now freely abandoning its leadership role instead.

The United States has withdrawn from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an international effort to fight corruption in managing revenues from oil, gas and mineral extraction.

There had been doubts about continued U.S. participation in the EITI since earlier this year when Congress killed the so-called resource extraction rule, which required companies like Exxon Mobil Corp to disclose taxes and other fees paid to foreign governments, such as Russia.

In a letter to the EITI board on Thursday, the director of the U.S. Office of Natural Resources Revenue, Gregory J. Gould, wrote that “effective immediately” the United States was withdrawing as an EITI implementing country.

He wrote that while the U.S. remains committed to fighting corruption “it is clear that domestic implementation of EITI does not fully account for the U.S. legal framework.”

The EITI, which was founded in 2003, and which the United States joined in 2014, sets a global standard for governments to disclose their revenues from oil, gas, and mining assets, and for companies to report payments made to obtain access to publicly owned resources, as well as other donations.

“It put more information in the hands of the public,” said Michael Ross, executive director of the Project on Resources Governance and Development at the University of California Los Angeles.

“It involved the U.S. government disclosing all the money it was getting from oil, gas and mining companies and getting these companies to publicly disclose the payments they were making.”

There are 52 countries in the EITI, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South America.

In just one year Trump has reduced the US to corrupt proto-fascist regime and international pariah status, bordering on dangerous rogue nation that the rest of the world may have to take action against.  The danger of a major global war has never been higher, and the instigator will be us when it happens.

We're the bad guys in 2017, and nobody's worse than Trump.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

The Russian operation to destroy Hillary Clinton and put Trump in the White House was a master class in propaganda and media manipulation, and America was uniquely vulnerable to Putin's attacks.  But they had help: good ol' fashioned phishing for information that yielded Clinton campaign emails and the mother lode of inside info.

An Associated Press investigation into the digital break-ins that disrupted the U.S. presidential contest has sketched out an anatomy of the hack that led to months of damaging disclosures about the Democratic Party’s nominee. It wasn’t just a few aides that the hackers went after; it was an all-out blitz across the Democratic Party. They tried to compromise Clinton’s inner circle and more than 130 party employees, supporters and contractors. 

While U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia was behind the email thefts, the AP drew on forensic data to report Thursday that the hackers known as Fancy Bear were closely aligned with the interests of the Russian government. 

The AP’s reconstruction— based on a database of 19,000 malicious links recently shared by cybersecurity firm Secureworks — shows how the hackers worked their way around the Clinton campaign’s top-of-the-line digital security to steal chairman John Podesta’s emails in March 2016. 

It also helps explain how a Russian-linked intermediary could boast to a Trump policy adviser, a month later, that the Kremlin had “thousands of emails” worth of dirt on Clinton.

The Fancy Bear job remains the key to how the Russians were able to bog Clinton down for months but hitting her campaign and the DNC's email servers as well.  But once they had the raw data, they needed to distribute it for maximum damage, and that's where Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks came in.

Guccifer 2.0 acted as a kind of master of ceremonies during the summer of leaks, proclaiming that the DNC’s stolen documents were in WikiLeaks’ hands, publishing a selection of the material himself and constantly chatting up journalists over Twitter in a bid to keep the story in the press. 

He appeared particularly excited to hear on June 24 that his leaks had sparked a lawsuit against the DNC by disgruntled supporters of Clinton rival Bernie Sanders. 

“Can it influence the election in any how?” he asked a journalist with Russia’s Sputnik News, in uneven English. 

Later that month Guccifer 2.0 began directing reporters to the newly launched DCLeaks site, which was also dribbling out stolen material on Democrats. When WikiLeaks joined the fray on July 22 with its own disclosures the leaks metastasized into a crisis, triggering intraparty feuding that forced the resignation of the DNC’s chairwoman and drew angry protests at the Democratic National Convention. 

Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and DCLeaks ultimately published more than 150,000 emails stolen from more than a dozen Democrats, according to an AP count. 

The AP has since found that each of one of those Democrats had previously been targeted by Fancy Bear, either at their personal Gmail addresses or via the DNC, a finding established by running targets’ emails against the Secureworks’ list.

There's no doubt that the DC Leaks emails were bait for hungry journalists who were more than happy to print whatever would hurt the hated Hillary Clinton, the woman that the DC media had been trying to bring down for 25 years.

And now they would.

All three leak-branded sites have distanced themselves from Moscow. DCLeaks claimed to be run by American hacktivists. WikiLeaks said Russia wasn’t its source. Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be Romanian.

But there were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta’s inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. 

The official said the word “CONFIDENTIAL” was not in the original document. 

Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.

Of course the emails were doctored.  Enough real email data was included to assure the veracity of the sources, but the flashing lights and bells and whistles were tailor-made to attract DC media sharks.

They took the bait.

Within hours of the devastating Trump Access Hollywood tape being released, Guccifer and friends had flooded the airwaves with SCANDALOUS CLINTON EMAIL LEAKS, edited for consumption, and the Trump rape story was forgotten.

It was exactly what Trump needed to stay in the race, and it was planned for months, if not years.  The Russians owned us on this and are happy to destroy us with Trump and the GOP.

Soon, we may not be able to stop them from doing so any longer.

Running Government As His Corporation

Trump once again took to Twitter today to demand investigation and prosecution of his political foes in his usual whine.

Josh Marshall dissects Trump's increasingly broken mentality as CEO of America, Inc. and his repeated calls for the FBI to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

What is most striking to me about these comments is how natural it all seems to him, how frank he is about it. It seems like the most logical thing in the world to him that he should be able to tell the FBI who to ‘go after’ Secretary Clinton. And I think he’s being very genuine about this. It’s both childish and childlike, in addition to being profoundly predatory. 

That’s why he fired James Comey. At the most basic level he sees the US government as his company. It goes without saying that Trump would fire an employee who wasn’t following direction or wasn’t loyal, let alone one who he believed might be working against him. They’re “my generals”, remember. 

This is precisely true, and very disturbing.  Trump's proto-fascist impulses are based on him being The Boss, and people do what The Boss says or he fires them.  Trump believes being able to do this is a vital part of how he should run the executive branch.  Not even Bush and Cheney went this far. But he won't stop, and Marshall doesn't believe he'll stop either.

Here is my sense of where we are. After James Comey was fired and they brought in reasonably professional lawyers, it’s been made clear to President Trump that he can’t be directly interfering with the investigation or using the DOJ as his personal police force. Kelly is likely a key part of this imperative as well. At the moment at least he’s following this advice. Thus his frustration. But he’s also being pushed by the Roger Stones and Steve Bannon types to go to war with Mueller, perhaps fire him. 

I was on TV this evening with Sam Nunberg, one of a number of Trumpers who was fired during the campaign but is still a total loyalist and seems to be in league with Bannon or at least in agreement with him. He was saying Trump must fire Ty Cobb, the lawyer who’s managing the Russia probe for the President. Cobb seems to be a bit of a clown himself. But he is a real white collar defense lawyer – not one of Trump’s goon lawyers from New York City. He is sticking to the quaint idea that you shouldn’t try to obstruct justice or otherwise interfere with the investigation. At least his stated aim as of now – and this is backed up by some reporting – is to be as cooperative as possible in the hopes of getting Mueller to complete his investigation and give the President a clean bill of health. 

That may be a good strategy out of the options the President has available to him. But it is certainly not at all in line with President Trump’s core impulses. He has a lot of friends, who he seems to be talking to regularly, telling him to go with those impulses. We shouldn’t be surprised if, feeling endangered and enraged, he gives into those impulses.

Trump's pathology is very predictable.  The only question is when he tries to fire Mueller, and what the GOP in Congress will do about it.

My guess remains "nothing".  And then we will find ourselves in a real constitutional crisis, and perhaps worse.  Who is going to stop Trump?  Nobody stepped up so far.  Why should we believe anyone will in the future?

What would be the bridge too far?  We don't know, because nobody seems to give a damn in the other two branches of government as of yet.

We'll see.

Meanwhile In Bevinstan...

GOP Gov. Matt Bevin's plan to screw Kentucky state employees out of pension benefits has hit a pair of rather fatal snags: one, he doesn't have the votes, and two, Kentucky's GOP House Speaker Jeff Hoover is facing sexual harassment claims that are threatening to blow up his career.

Gov. Matt Bevin’s draft bill to reshape Kentucky’s retirement systems has run aground in the state House, where growing concerns for the financial security of school teachers and public employees were joined Thursday by sexual harassment allegations that put House Speaker Jeff Hoover’s political future in doubt. 

Hoover, R-Jamestown, stood alongside Bevin and Senate President Robert Stivers last month to unveil the framework of controversial pension changes that Kentucky’s Republican leaders are promoting. His role could be threatened by a news report that said Hoover — who is married with three daughters — has settled a sexual harassment claim made by a woman employed in his House office. 

Even without Hoover’s troubles as a distraction, “the votes aren’t here for this bill is what I’m hearing,” said state Rep. Brian Linder, R-Dry Ridge, co-chairman of the Public Pension Oversight Board. Various changes would have to be made to satisfy different interest groups raising objections and win the necessary House votes, Linder said. 

“I’m kind of a compromiser,” Linder said. “I’ve always worked in my life to try and get people to common ground.” 

As for Hoover, Linder said, “as speaker, he plays an important role in all of this.”

“I haven’t really had a chance to talk to anybody about this yet,” Linder said. “I came in late this morning, so I haven’t really had a chance to gauge anybody’s feelings about this. But he’s obviously been a big part of this, so I don’t know how this is going to go forward.” 

Another lawmaker was more blunt. State Rep. C. Wesley Morgan, R-Richmond, said the allegations against Hoover are serious enough, if true, to derail the pension debate for the present. 

“It would absolutely be a disaster for any immediate special session,” said Morgan, who opposes the draft pension bill that Bevin made public last Friday. 

State Rep. James Kay, D-Versailles, said it’s time to pause the pension debate, anyway, regardless of “Speaker Hoover’s issues.” 

“It’s never helpful to be discussing those type of things,” said Kay, who is also a member of the pension oversight panel.

Kentucky's House GOP I think wasn't prepared for how awful Bevin has been at trying to sell this plan, especially in smaller rural counties where the government is one of the largest employers in GOP communities.  People around here like teachers and county clerks and game wardens and the nice lady at the DMV, they know them personally, they go to church with them and see them at their kids' ball games and 4-H and ROTC.

It was cool when they could blame Bevin for across-the-board cuts.  But going after teachers and other state employees like this when Bevin is trying to force them to take their share of the burden only pisses everyone off.

So now, Hoover's sexual harassment settlement is a pretty good excuse for the KY GOP to run for the hills, and they will.

Watch.

StupidiNews!

• Syrian state media is claiming victory after ousting Islamic State forces from Deir Ezzor, the last major Syrian city in ISIS hands.
• Donald Trump's Twitter account was accidentally deactivated for 11 minutes last night by a Twitter employee on their final day, according to the social media company.
• Trump's 11-day Asia trip begins in Japan today, and includes the APEC summit in Vietnam, where he could meet with Vladimir Putin.
• The House GOP tax bill includes measures to tax offshore cash stockpiles by multinationals, something Apple, Microsoft and Google parent company Alphabet plan to fight.
• However the House GOP tax bill also ends the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit on January 1, which could short-circuit sales of electric cars in the US.

Last Call For The Rivers Of Brazile

Rivers of tears, it seems.  Former interim DNC head Donna Brazile's new tell-all book is previewed in Politico Magazine this week, and the accusations against former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz and former Clinton campaign strategist Robby Mook are extremely ugly.

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call. 

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations. 

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.
By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt. 

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.” 

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance. 

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

Brazile goes on to say that not only did Clinton campaign assume the DNC's debt and pay it off, but that Clinton strategist Robby Mook had reached an agreement with Debbie Wasserman Schultz that Clinton would be calling the shots in the party from then on.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?” 

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse. 

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

It's not a pretty sight at all, although the fact that the Clinton campaign was paying off the DNC's debt was again broken by the Washington Post more than a year ago.  The Bernie folks long accused Clinton of rigging the party's committees to help Clinton, but the problem is joint fundraising agreements have been used by both parties for years.

It also means that the money Bernie did take from the DNC, well...80% came from Hillary.

Think about that.

The fact remains Bernie was crushed in the primaries, especially in the South and West Coast.  But I guarantee you that this is going to be used to deal more damage to the DNC and further rip it apart ahead of 2018.

It's shooting yourself in foot badly enough that you bleed out.

Reality though remains Trump has this country in a pit, and fighting over the DNC's finances isn't going to fix Trump at all.

Sure as hell will distract from it. And that's exactly what Brazile did.  She threw a pipe bomb in a china shop and the DNC just got blown to bits.  Where do Dems go in 2018?  I don't know, but they won't get help from the DNC.  How Perez and Ellison remain on the job after this mess, why would they want to?  Was this Brazile's plan all along, to just burn it all down in order to sell a damn book?

Unless Trump stumbles so badly the Dems win in spite of this mess (which can still definitely happen) 2018 might be a lost cause after this, and it's pissing me off.  For Brazile to do this days before the 2017 elections in Virginia and New Jersey is irresponsible as hell.

We'll see what happens, but this, as they say, is why Dems keep losing, and deserve to keep losing.

The Russians And Silly Conned Valley

Turns out the Russians who designed and paid for ads on Facebook that reached tens of millions of people in order to convince them to drop Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump knew how to manipulate American voters better than either of the campaigns that were running.

Lawmakers on Wednesday released a trove of ads that Russian operatives bought on Facebook, providing the fullest picture yet of how foreign actors sought to promote Republican Donald Trump, denigrate Democrat Hillary Clinton and divide Americans over some of the nation’s most sensitive social issues.

The ads that emerged, a sampling of the 3,000 that Russians bought during the 2016 presidential campaign and its aftermath, demonstrated in words and images a striking ability to mimic American political discourse at its most fractious. The targeting information also showed a shrewd understanding of how best to use Facebook to find and influence voters most likely to respond to the pitches.

As a group, the ads made visceral appeals to voters concerned about illegal immigration, the declining economic fortunes of coal miners, gun rights, African American political activism, the rising prominence of Muslims in some U.S. communities and many other issues. Some of the ads, many of which were bought in Russian rubles, also explicitly called for people to attend political rallies amid a campaign season that already was among the most polarizing in recent U.S. history.

They were targeted to many types of Facebook users, including professed gun lovers, fans of Martin Luther King Jr., supporters of Trump, supporters of Clinton, residents of specific states, and Southerners who Facebook’s algorithms concluded were interested in “Dixie.”

One ad, from a phony group called Donald Trump America, touted a petition to remove Clinton from the presidential ballot, saying, “Disavow support for the Clinton political dynasty.”

Another ad, from a Russian-controlled group called Heart of Texas, announced a rally to take place May 21, 2016, under the banner of “Stop Islamization of Texas.” A separate Russian-controlled group, United Muslims of America, publicized a competing rally to “Save Islamic Knowledge” at the same place and time, prompting two groups to face off in competing demonstrations in Houston — a sign of how Russians hoped to turn divisions into open conflict.

This crossover of online influence to real-world consequences was among the issues raised in contentious Capitol Hill hearings Wednesday as lawmakers scolded attorneys for technology companies they said did not do enough to thwart Russian disinformation.

“I don’t think you get it,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), whose home state includes the headquarters for Facebook, Google and Twitter. “What we’re talking about is a cataclysmic change. What we’re talking about is the beginning of cyberwarfare. What we’re talking about is a major foreign power with sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election and sow conflict and discontent all over this country. We are not going to go away, gentlemen. And this is a very big deal.”

Facebook in particular knew just what buttons to push and who to push those buttons on, admitting this week to Congress that their Russian ads reached well over a hundred million people during the 2016 campaign.

An estimated 126 million Americans, roughly one-third of the nation’s population, received Russian-backed content on Facebook during the 2016 campaign, according to prepared testimony the company submitted Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee and obtained by NBC News.

Underscoring how widely content on the social media platform can spread, Facebook says in the testimony that while some 29 million Americans directly received material from 80,000 posts by 120 fake Russian-backed pages in their own news feeds, those posts were “shared, liked and followed by people on Facebook, and, as a result, three times more people may have been exposed to a story that originated from the Russian operation.”

And let's keep this in mind, this was a top-class Russian operation through both targeted ads and through fake posts with the express intent of electing Donald Trump.  It wasn't just Facebook, either.

Twitter also revealed Russian-backed entities played a larger role than previously disclosed. Two sources told NBC News Monday that the company found 36,746 automated accounts — or bots —that were linked to Russia between September 1 and November 15, 2016. The accounts tweeted 1.4 million times and were seen 288 million times.

According to prepared testimony, Twitter acting general counsel Sean Edgett plans to tell Congress these "Russian-linked, automated accounts constituted less than three quarters of a percent (0.74%) of the overall election-related tweets on Twitter at the time."

Twitter also found 2,752 accounts associated with the Russia-run Internet Research Agency, up from the 201 the company originally disclosed. The company has suspended all 2,752 accounts and is "proactively giving committee investigators the handles of these accounts."

Twitter and Facebook , along with Google's ad network, were so easy to use and manipulate for their purposes that it was literally criminal.  The reality is that US tech giants and social media aided and abetted the theft of a presidential election.

Now the question becomes how much of an active role did the Trump campaign play in knowingly spreading these fake messages.

Former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn followed five Twitter accounts based out of the Russian-backed “troll factory” in St. Petersburg—and pushed their messages at least three times in the month before the 2016 election.

Over 2,750 troll accounts based out of the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency were made public by House investigators on Wednesday. The accounts, some of which had previously been identified by The Daily Beast as Russian-generated, were pulled from Twitter due to their ties to the troll factory over the past three months.

The Daily Beast had previously discovered Flynn, Donald Trump Jr., Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, and Trump campaign digital director Brad Parscale retweeted Ten_GOP several times in the month before the election.

And remember, the Russian operation wasn't just about ads, it was about active cyberwarfare and hacking of Democrats.  I

The Justice Department has identified more than six members of the Russian government involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers and swiping sensitive information that became public during the 2016 presidential election, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Prosecutors and agents have assembled evidence to charge the Russian officials and could bring a case next year, these people said. Discussions about the case are in the early stages, they said.

They had the Trump Organization digitally compromised for years and set him up as their agent.

In 2013, a hacker (or hackers) apparently obtained access to the Trump Organization’s domain registration account and created at least 250 website subdomains that cybersecurity experts refer to as “shadow” subdomains. Each one of these shadow Trump subdomains pointed to a Russian IP address, meaning that they were hosted at these Russian addresses. (Every website domain is associated with one or more IP addresses. These addresses allow the internet to find the server that hosts the website. Authentic Trump Organization domains point to IP addresses that are hosted in the United States or countries where the company operates.) The creation of these shadow subdomains within the Trump Organization network was visible in the publicly available records of the company’s domains. 

Here is a list of a Trump Organization shadow subdomains.

The subdomains and their associated Russian IP addresses have repeatedly been linked to possible malware campaigns, having been flagged in well-known research databases as potentially associated with malware. The vast majority of the shadow subdomains remained active until this week, indicating that the Trump Organization had taken no steps to disable them. This suggests that the company for the past four years was unaware of the breach. Had the infiltration been caught by the Trump Organization, the firm should have immediately decommissioned the shadow subdomains, according to cybersecurity experts contacted by Mother Jones. 

Two weeks ago, a computer security expert, who wishes to remain unidentified, contacted Mother Jones and provided the list of the shadow Trump Organization subdomains. He explained what he believed had happened. Some hacker—or group—had gained access to the Trump Organization’s GoDaddy domain registration account. Like many companies, the Trump Organization has registered a long list of domain names, many of which it has never put to use. Some examples: barrontrump.com, donaldtrump.org, chicagotrumptower.com, celebritypokerdealer.com, and donaldtrumppyramidscheme.com.The existence of these shadow subdomains suggests a possible security compromise within Trump’s business network that created the potential for unknown actors—using these Trump Organization subdomains—to launch attacks that could trick computer users anywhere into handing over sensitive information and unknowingly allow the attackers access to their computers and network. In fact, the IP addresses associated with the fake subdomains are linked to an IP address for at least one domain previously used by hackers to deploy malware known as an “exploit kit,” which can allow an attacker to gain a computer user’s passwords and logins or to take over another computer and gain access to the files within it.

The Russians didn't just hit "America".  They hit the Democrats, with the intent of helping Donald Trump win, and they helped Trump win because he was 100% compromised, if not willing, to help the Russians in return.

Period.

Never forget that.

Climate Of Theocracy

Scott Pruitt's EPA is following through on its plans to ban anyone taking EPA grant money (which would basically be most of the world's top climate scientists) from its major advisory committees.  Also they're justifying it by using a passage from the Bible.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Tuesday afternoon sweeping changesto who can advise the agency on its research and regulatory priorities, opening the door to more industry participation. 

Effective immediately, scientists who receive EPA funding cannot serve on the agency's three major advisory groups. Some Republican lawmakers have been pushing for similar changes to the agency's advisory boards for years. 

"We want to ensure that there’s integrity in the process and that the scientists that are advising us are doing so without any type of appearance of conflict of interest," EPA head Scott Pruitt said at a press conference announcing the directive. 

Pruitt used a story from the Book of Joshua to help explain the new policy. 

On the journey to the promised land, "Joshua says to the people of Israel: choose this day whom you are going to serve," Pruitt said. "This is sort of like the Joshua principle — that as it relates to grants from this agency, you are going to have to choose either service on the committee to provide counsel to us in an independent fashion or chose the grant. But you can’t do both. That’s the fair and great thing to do." 

A large coalition of science organizations, science advocates, environmentalists, and politicians lined up in fierce opposition to the policy changes, arguing the rules not only disqualify top environmental and health researchers from advising but also favor scientists paid for by EPA-regulated companies. They also have pointed out that EPA has strict rules in place for disclosing any conflicts of interest. 

"Frankly, this directive is nuts," Al Teich of George Washington University wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News.

"There is an important role for citizen advisors who are not experts in a scientific field and who represent various constituencies on advisory committees," wrote Teich, a research professor of science, technology, and international affairs. "But they should complement, not replace the experts. Disqualifying the very people who know the most about a subject from serving as advisors makes no sense."

It makes all the sense in the world if you're trying to get rid of scientists leading the EPA and instead leave everything climate-related to CEOs, lawyers, and bureaucrats. who can then say "We don't believe your science is sound" on anything the Trump regime doesn't want to hear.  Sure, basically every other country on earth besides Syria is on board with doing something about climate, but not us.

And it's already too late, anyway.  It's only a question now of how damaging climate effects will be over the next century.

• Donald Trump tweeted that the suspect in Tuesday's truck attack in Manhattan deserved the death penalty, the FBI confirms the suspect had multiple ISIS videos on his phone.
• US Navy investigators have concluded that both collisions involving Navy ships in 2017 were avoidable and preventable, and that lax crew training contributed to the 17 sailor deaths.
• Ground will finally be broken in Washington DC for the Dwight Eisenhower monument, the monument was approved by Congress in 1999 but stalled for years over design disputes.
• The Houston Astros won their first ever World Series crown by knocking off the LA Dodgers 5-1 in Game 7, the Astros took a 5-0 lead in the 2nd and never looked back.
• AT&T has given up on a lawsuit blocking Google Fiber's use of their utility poles in Louisville, a judge dismissed the suit in August and AT&T now says it will not appeal.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Just another set of reminders that in the end, the Trump regime collusion villains may have gotten elected, but they're bad at not being caught anyway.  The information included in the Papadopoulos indictment is pretty damning.

Former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos made a significant claim in an email: Top Trump campaign officials agreed to a pre-election meeting with representatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The message, if true, would bolster claims that Trump’s campaign attempted to collude with Russian interests. But it’s unclear whether Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was merely boasting when he sent the July 14, 2016, email to a Kremlin-linked contact. There’s also no indication such a meeting ever occurred.

The email is cited in an FBI agent’s affidavit supporting criminal charges against Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy volunteer on Trump’s campaign. But it’s not included in court documents that detailed his secret guilty plea and his cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The evidence gleaned during Papadopoulos’s three months of cooperation could further advance Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion by Trump’s aides. This latest email, one of many unsealed on Monday, runs counter to the steadfast denials by Trump and his supporters that anyone attempted to work with the Russians. Trump tweeted on Tuesday that Papadopoulos, a low-level adviser that few people on the campaign knew, “has already proven to be a liar.”

Prosecutors didn’t explain why the email wasn’t included in the detailed admissions of Papadopoulos’s wrongdoing, and it’s possible they concluded the assertions weren’t true.

Writing to the Russian contact a week before the Republican National Convention, Papadopoulos proposed a meeting for August or September in the U.K. that would include “my national chairman and maybe one other foreign policy adviser” and members of Putin’s office and Russia’s foreign ministry.

“It has been approved by our side,” Papadopoulos wrote.

This is where the collusion story gets bad for the Trump regime.  Papadopoulos's supervisor was Jeff Sessions, who is now of course Attorney General.  Young George here has also been cooperating with Mueller for months.  If this was planned and approved with the intent of getting the dirt on Clinton, as it very well looks like, then things are going to get untenable for them and fast.

Of course, it's not helping that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are complete clowns, either.

A new court filing Tuesday showed exactly what Manafort and Gates told banks and investigators about their net worths and travel histories over the past few years.
Among the highlights: 

* Manafort currently has three US passports, each under a different number. He has submitted 10 passport applications in roughly as many years, prosecutors said. 

* This year, Manafort traveled to Mexico, China and Ecuador with a phone and email account registered under a fake name. (The name was not disclosed in the filings.) 

* Over the past year, Manafort traveled to Dubai, Cancun, Panama City, Havana, Shanghai, Madrid, Tokyo and Grand Cayman Island. 

* Both Manafort and Gates were frequent travelers to Cyprus. "Extensive travel of this nature further evidences a risk of flight," the prosecutor's filing said. 

* Manafort wrote on loan applications and other financial documents that his assets were worth between $19 million in April 2012 and $136 million in May 2016. 

* In some months, like while he served as Trump's national campaign chairman in August 2016, Manafort's assessment of his total worth fluctuated. In August 2016 he said his assets were worth $28 million, then wrote he had $63 million in assets on a different application. 

* Gates "frequently changed banks and opened and closed bank accounts," prosecutors said. In all, Gates opened 55 accounts with 13 financial institutions, the prosecutors' court filing said. Some of his bank accounts were in England and Cyprus, where he held more than $10 million from 2010 to 2013. 

Manafort's and Gates' attorneys have asked the judge to release them from house arrest.

These guys are going down on money laundering and conspiracy charges so hard that they might not hit the bottom before they die in prison.

Unless they roll over, that is.  Pay attention to the Cyprus connection, too.  Trump's Commerce Secretary is Wilbur Ross, who was vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, the island's biggest bank.  You'd better bet that Manafort and Gates and their money-laundering trail came across Wilbur Ross's desk at some point.

Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was vice-chair and leading investor in the Bank of Cyprus, the island’s largest bank, which was “one of the key offshore havens for illicit Russian finance," according to an extensive investigative report by financial journalist James Henry of DCReport.org. "Ross has been Vice Chairman of this bank and a major investor in it since 2014. His fellow bank co-chair evidently was appointed by none other than Vladimir Putin.”

“Ross’ involvement in the Bank of Cyprus raises many questions about his judgment, but also about the Trump Administration’s seemingly endless direct and indirect connections with friends and associates of Vladimir Putin, who all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies say conspired to interfere in the November 2016 U.S. election on behalf of Donald Trump,” Henry continued. “Whether or not these connections involve any criminality, these are the kind of relationships that most American business people would not tolerate for 30 seconds.”

“After all, as discussed below, since the 1990s Cyprus has served as one the top three offshore destinations for Russian and former Soviet Union flight capital, most of it motivated by tax dodging, kleptocracy, and money laundering,” Henry said, giving multiple citations. “As of 2013, just before the banking crisis, Russian depositsaccounted for at least a third of all bank deposits in Cyprus. As one leading newspaper put it, 'Russian money is in fact at the heart of the island’s economy.' Nor is Ross’ Bank of Cyprus in particular—now probably at least half owned by Russians any stranger to money laundering, tax dodging, or odious finance. With a market share of 30 percent, Bank of Cyprus has long been the market leader in Cypriot financial chicanery.”

If Mueller is following the money, Ross could be next on the list along with Sam Clovis, Jeff Sessions, and Mike Flynn.

Or maybe the next contestant is Jared Kushner. Vanity Fair's Gabe Sherman:

Until now, Robert Mueller has haunted Donald Trump’s White House as a hovering, mostly unseen menace. But by securing indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and a surprise guilty plea from foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, Mueller announced loudly that the Russia investigation poses an existential threat to the president. “Here’s what Manafort’s indictment tells me: Mueller is going to go over every financial dealing of Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization,” said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg. “Trump is at 33 percent in Gallup. You can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.” 

The first charges in the Mueller probe have kindled talk of what the endgame for Trump looks like, according to conversations with a half-dozen advisers and friends of the president. For the first time since the investigation began, the prospect of impeachment is being considered as a realistic outcome and not just a liberal fever dream. According to a source, advisers in the West Wing are on edge and doing whatever they can not to be ensnared. One person close to Dina Powell and Gary Cohn said they’re making sure to leave rooms if the subject of Russia comes up. 

The consensus among the advisers I spoke to is that Trump faces few good options to thwart Mueller. For one, firing Mueller would cross a red line, analogous to Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox during Watergate, pushing establishment Republicans to entertain the possibility of impeachment. “His options are limited, and his instinct is to come out swinging, which won’t help things,” said a prominent Republican close to the White House. 

Trump, meanwhile, has reacted to the deteriorating situation by lashing out on Twitter and venting in private to friends. He’s frustrated that the investigation seems to have no end in sight. “Trump wants to be critical of Mueller,” one person who’s been briefed on Trump’s thinking says. “He thinks it’s unfair criticism. Clinton hasn’t gotten anything like this. And what about Tony Podesta? Trump is like, When is that going to end?” According to two sources, Trump has complained to advisers about his legal team for letting the Mueller probe progress this far. Speaking to Steve Bannon on Tuesday, Trump blamed Jared Kushner for his role in decisions, specifically the firings of Mike Flynn and James Comey, that led to Mueller’s appointment, according to a source briefed on the call. When Roger Stone recently told Trump that Kushner was giving him bad political advice, Trump agreed, according to someone familiar with the conversation. “Jared is the worst political adviser in the White House in modern history,” Nunberg said. “I’m only saying publicly what everyone says behind the scenes at Fox News, in conservative media, and the Senate and Congress.” (The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment by deadline.)

Stay tuned.  It's going to move quickly now.