Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The affidavit that goes along with this arrest is astonishing.

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

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

Oh, and speaking of working for the Russians:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's War On Women, Con't

Slate's Christina Cauterucci makes the case that Trump's inhumane migrant family separation policy is absolutely tied to his monstrous disregard for reproductive rights, and that the goal has always been punishing women as a deterrence and control mechanism.

The Trump administration and Trump’s surrogates have proved callous to the pain of the children and parents they’ve been dividing up and shipping all over the country. (Listen, if you haven’t already, to former Trump campaign chief Corey Lewandowski groaning “womp, womp“ when informed that a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome had been separated from her parents.) No plea for humanity rang true to the dozens of people behind the “zero tolerance” border policy—not the medical argument that the trauma could harm these children for the rest of their livesand reverberate for generations, not the human-rights argument that people seeking asylum shouldn’t be treated like criminals, not the family-values argument that parents and children should be kept together whenever possible. To justify the policy, Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen invoked the same simplistic rationale. People crossing the border are breaking immigration laws. People who break laws get jailed. People who get jailed lose their kids. 

The inaccuracies in this line of reasoning aside—for one, people seeking asylum aren’t breaking any laws—it was a useful bit of evidence that Trump and his cronies view children, and the pain they can cause their parents, as a disciplinary tool. For this administration, the cruelty of the family-separation policy was its primary selling point. In order for the policy to serve as a deterrent, it needed to be so inhumane that potential migrants would be scared into staying home despite the risk of extreme danger. (The fact that migrants haven’t been deterred from crossing the border demonstrates just how horrific the violence is in many parts of Central America.) The fact that children would suffer was a feature of the policy, not an unfortunate side effect. 

Deterrence is also a key element of the right wing’s philosophy on contraception and abortion. Some anti-abortion activists argue that permitting women to terminate their pregnancies encourages wanton behavior—specifically noncommittal, unprotected sex. In this sense, the prospect of forced pregnancy and childbirth, and the physical and/or emotional pain that goes with them, is meant as a punishment for the crime of promiscuity. 

Denying women abortions isn’t, as anti-abortion advocates often claim, just about saving the lives of unborn children. It’s also about imposing a moral judgment on women for having sex. Pro-lifers tend to frame childbirth as a consequence any sexually active single woman should be ready to assume. The phrase abortion on demand, a popular encapsulation of the presumed position of the pro-choice set, suggests that certain women, by virtue of their reasons or circumstances, deserve abortions more than others. Many, but not all, right-wing politicians make room within their anti-abortion frameworks for exceptions in cases of rape and incest. Their thinking goes something like this: A woman who was raped had no ability to prevent her pregnancy. Every other woman who gets pregnant bears the responsibility for doing so, and their bodies must suffer for failing to accept that responsibility, even if it means bringing a child into a family who is unable or unwilling to properly care for it. 

Consigning a woman to pregnancy and childbirth against her will is not a physically neutral act. It is corporeal punishment with lasting bodily impact. A woman who gives birth is 14 timesmore likely to die during or after labor than to die from complications of a legal abortion. Pregnancy, labor, and recovery all carry with them the inevitability of discomfort and, to varying degrees, pain. When the state forces a woman to give birth, it is extracting pain as a physical penalty—a price no cisgender man who has sex for nonprocreative purposes will ever have to pay. During his presidential campaign, Trump envisioned a world in which women who assert control over their own bodies would also have to pay a price. If Roe v. Wade were to fall, he told Chris Matthews, there would need “to be some form of punishment” for women who get illegal abortions—an “if she breaks a law, she must pay the price” philosophy that echoes the administration’s justification for family separation.

This has been the GOP goal for decades now, but Trump's personal animosity towards women, African-Americans, Latinx and Hispanic Americans, and LGBTQ Americans I think goes back to Trump's treatment by President Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner.  Donald Trump has never, ever forgiven Barack Obama for publicly embarrassing him seven years ago and Trump swore revenge not only on Obama, but Clinton, Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

He's wanted to punish the Obama coalition for years.  He's now been given the chance to do exactly that, and the first 18 months of his term has been utter rancor against Obama voters, seeking our destruction and surrender at his feet.

But Cauterucci is absolutely correct: Trump is all about punishing women in the most brutal fashion imaginable, with their own bodies as prisons, and with their own families as collateral damage.

The Party Of Trump, Con't

Once again, it's worth noting that the Republican party is the party of Trump, and Trump is the Republican party.  The cult of personality is so pervasive now, the GOP so metastasized now, that removal of Trump, the cancer on the party, would kill the patient, and yet the cancer is so widespread that not removing it will also be fatal.  Ryan Lizza asks Republicans what they think of Dear Leader, and the answer is grim resignation to being the party of Trump.

As the country awaits whatever conclusions Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation brings, the most important question in politics may be whether there is any red line Trump could cross and lose significant party support. Four and a half decades ago, Republicans stuck with Richard Nixon until incontrovertible evidence of his crimes emerged. Democrats never abandoned Bill Clinton because they believed his misdeeds weren’t impeachable. What is the red line for a contemporary GOP increasingly built around a personality cult? I put that question to a dozen Republicans in the House and Senate, a mix from across the ideological spectrum and from every region of the country. The conversations revealed a lot about the Trump GOP, but the red line, with respect to Trump’s behavior generally, or his conduct specific to the Mueller probe, was vanishingly thin and difficult to detect. And every time you think you see it—pee tape, porn-star liaison, erratic diplomacy, threats to fire Mueller—it keeps moving. As Republican senator Jeff Flake of Arizona put it, “I don’t know that there is one.” 

Flake never supported Trump and has been the president’s most consistent critic in Congress, though one who still votes for much of his agenda. When Flake was deciding whether to run for reelection this year, one of his political consultants told him there was only one path: “You’ve got to be okay with Trump’s policies or be quiet about them and be okay with his behavior or be quiet about it.” Flake decided to retire instead. 

Jenkins, the congresswoman from Kansas, relayed a conversation she recently had with a factory owner back home, who told her that while the guys on his shop floor “hate” Trump—they are from the Bible Belt, after all, she noted—“they love what he’s doing.” She then offered the most honest explanation I’ve heard for this phenomenon. “It’s kind of like supporting your favorite team and there’s a talented trash-talking personality on the other team,” she said. “That player is the worst human being on the face of the earth, but if that same talented player is on our team, well, you know, they’re our team, so we give him a pass.” 

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, was known as one of Trump’s most vociferous critics. I caught Graham on his cell phone while he was visiting Iraq in July. During the 2016 campaign, he called Trump “a kook,” adding, “I think he is unfit for office.” Graham is now much more diplomatic, offering himself up as a kind of translator between the #NeverTrump movement and the party’s base. On the plus side for him were the judges, the tax cuts, the fight against ISIS, and the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement. On the other side were Trump’s “uncertainty about our commitment” to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; his trade policy; and his lack of seriousness about Russian meddling in American elections. “This constant minimizing of Putin and his agenda—very problematic.” 

Those were his toughest words for Trump. I was surprised how much he was soft-selling his well-known disagreements with the man on foreign policy, especially Trump’s retreat from defending our democratic allies. I asked him if the American president was still the leader of the free world. He paused for five seconds before telling me, “America First is one or two things. It’s an understanding that we’re a unique country and it’s about burden sharing,” he said. “You gotta remember, he won. I think when the president talks of how other countries are taking advantage of us, we’re fighting their wars, we’re spending too much for their defense, that resonates with people.” He never did answer the question.

Earlier this year, Graham made the case that if Trump fired Mueller, “it would be the end of President Trump’s presidency.” I asked if he still believed that about Mueller. He let out a deep sigh. “He’s done such a number on this guy, I don’t know,” he said, referring to Trump’s attacks on Mueller’s credibility. 

Leonard Lance, a congressman from New Jersey, was one Republican, albeit a moderate, who volunteered a red line: “Personal collusion by Trump with the Russians during the campaign.” But if Republicans keep the House and the Senate this fall, Trump will have a political fortress protecting him in Washington. That prospect has led a few anti-Trump Republicans, like Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, to openly support a Democratic takeover of Congress. In their minds, there is no red line for the GOP. I came to the same conclusion after my hours of interviews. 

Conservative Trump critics fear becoming the next Sanford and stay quiet—what Flake and others call the “don’t poke the bear” mind-set. Meanwhile, many of the moderate anti-Trump Republicans are leaving office. Congressman Ryan Costello, a Republican from Pennsylvania who decided to quit (redistricting gave him a bluer constituency), said, “If I were running for reelection, every single time that I saw on the TV screen that the president was going to hold another rally, I’d be like, ‘Oh, fuck!’ Because he’s going to say fifty things that aren’t accurate.”

They're leaving rather than opposing him, or stopping him, or attacking him.  They are retiring in near-record numbers.  They know they're done in November.  They're going to let the Democrats deal with him, because the GOP doesn't have the courage, and because nearly 90% of Republican voters love Trump anyway.

And so it goes.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump is blaming past administrations for America's "never been worse" relationship with Russia ahead of today's summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
• European Council President Donald Tusk is again calling on the US, China, and Russia to rein in any potential trade wars ahead of EU-China trade talks this week.
• UK PM Theresa May faces an angry British parliament Monday as several tough votes are expected on Brexit proceedings today, a loss by May's party could spell the end of her government.
• France's 4-2 win over Croatia in the World Cup finals Sunday is seen as a victory for French immigrants, but may not have much of an economic impact on the country's finances.
• A new British Royal Society study finds open office floor plans actually hurt productivity and face-to-face communication among co-workers compared to traditional cubicle office setups.

Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Miami Beach cops stop what looks like an attempted criminal arson terrorism event here in a age of the American neo-Nazi.

A resident at a Miami Beach condo was angry after learning he was about to be evicted so he planned to burn down the building and had one group, in particular, targeted, police say. 

Along with gasoline and some of the materials he planned to use to fan the flames, detectives found artifacts with swastikas and books of Nazi ideology inside his apartment. 

Miami Beach police said their quick action responding to a tip stopped a condo complex on Collins Avenue from going up in flames Thursday afternoon. 

“We are confident the work of our detectives prevented an imminent crisis at 5601 Collins Ave.,” police said Friday morning after the arrest of Walter Edward Stolper on a charge of attempted arson in the first degree. 

Police say Stolper, 72, was angry over being served eviction papers and had expressed anger and aggression toward other residents at the condominium on several occasions.
On Thursday, police say Stolper told witness Luis Diaz that he was “going to burn down the building with all the f------ Jews,” according to the arrest report. 

According to the affidavit, Diaz said Stolper told him he was going to fill plastic containers with gasoline, pour the fuel down the building’s main line, and ignite the gas. Stolper told Diaz that he purchased two electrical fans “to fan the flames and cause maximum amount of damage.” 

Diaz also told police Stolper bought padlocks and painted them red and told him he had intended to place the locks on the condo’s fire hoses to prevent the fire department from putting out the fire. 

A resident at the Collins condo, Viannette Justino, told police Stolper had recently been served with eviction papers, but it is not clear why the association wanted him removed.
When Miami Beach officers Raymond Diaz (no relation), Sergio Campos and Fulgencio Medina arrived at the condo at about 5:45 p.m. they saw Stolper in the parking garage moving two plastic containers using a shopping cart. According to the affidavit, police smelled gasoline coming from the shopping cart and Stolper’s car. 

Justino told police that several residents “could smell a strong odor of gasoline in the hallways and elevators.” 

Police found eight plastic containers filled with gasoline in the garbage chute dumpster that had been tossed down the chute. Gasoline had also been poured down the chute from the 15th floor, police said. 

Officers said the gas-filled containers in the dumpster matched the gas-filled containers Stolper had with him in the garage. 

Detectives interviewed Stolper inside his apartment and he gave consent to search the unit, police said. There, police found the two black electrical fans, along with the swastikas and Nazi books. 

“I bought the gas to make a small barbecue,” Stolper told detectives, the arrest report said.

He was just having a cookout for the Jewish community, guys.  As Trump says, these are very fine people.

Trump Cards, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Long Read: Saving The Internet From Itself

The man who created the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has lived long enough to see his creation responsible for the rise of the dark era of the nexus of tech, politics, misinformation and racism that is America today.  Now he's trying to do something to fix it.

For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears the consummate academic—communicating rapidly, in a clipped London accent, occasionally skipping over words and eliding sentences as he stammers to convey a thought. His soliloquy was a mixture of excitement with traces of melancholy. Nearly three decades earlier, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. On this morning, he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it.

At 63, Berners-Lee has thus far had a career more or less divided into two phases. In the first, he attended Oxford; worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN); and then, in 1989, came up with the idea that eventually became the Web. Initially, Berners-Lee’s innovation was intended to help scientists share data across a then obscure platform called the Internet, a version of which the U.S. government had been using since the 1960s. But owing to his decision to release the source code for free—to make the Web an open and democratic platform for all—his brainchild quickly took on a life of its own. Berners-Lee’s life changed irrevocably, too. He would be named one of the 20th century’s most important figures by Time, receive the Turing Award (named after the famed code breaker) for achievements in the computer sciences, and be honored at the Olympics. He has been knighted by the Queen. “He is the Martin Luther King of our new digital world,” says Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. (Berners-Lee is a former member of the foundation’s board of trustees.)

Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it. While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation. His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.

For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, as he recalled his reaction to the Web’s recent abuses, Berners-Lee quieted; he was virtually sorrowful. “Actually, physically—my mind and body were in a different state.” Then he went on to recount, at a staccato pace, and in elliptical passages, the pain in watching his creation so distorted.

This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new platform, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in 2009 to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future. Sometime this November, he estimates, half the world’s population—close to 4 billion people—will be connected online, sharing everything from résumés to political views to DNA information. As billions more come online, they will feed trillions of additional bits of information into the Web, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever.

“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places,” he told me. The increasing centralization of the Web, he says, has “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”

His invention was weaponized and used against hundreds of millions of people.  It will be used against billions more in the future unless it can be contained.  But there's no real movement to do so.  The 2016 US elections proved beyond a doubt what the power of the web can do.  Nobody is going to give up that power voluntarily unless it is taken from them by people who demand they relinquish it.

Suddenly Not So Feinstein

California Dem Sen. Dianne Feinstein has been in office for 24 years now and is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.  She’s gotten a lot of crap for civil liberties issues from the hard left in her home state, but she’s been able to weather the storm for some time now.  Until tonight, that is, as the California Democratic Party just officially endorsed her primary opponent.

The California Democratic Party on Saturday endorsed U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s challenger, highlighting the moderate lawmaker’s political disconnect with liberal activists in her home state.

The nod provides Kevin de León with a boost of momentum for his long-shot bid to unseat the 26-year-incumbent. After finishing second and 32 points behind Feinstein in the June primary, de León spent months calling more than 300 members of the party’s executive board to earn their support.

His work paid off Saturday when 65 percent of the voting members endorsed him over Feinstein at a gathering in Oakland. Feinstein had asked board members not to endorse either candidate. 

“We want the party to be focused on the competitive congressional races,” said Bill Carrick, Feinstein’s longtime political advisor. “We don’t want them having to figure out whether they are going to do a slate mailer with the guy who got 12 percent.” 

Feinstein’s call for “party unity” was echoed by several others within the party, including a half-dozen Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives that the veteran senator held a fundraiser for this week. Feinstein’s team sent out a campaign email Saturday afternoon touting her endorsements from Democratic heavyweights Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi.

Anita Narayana, a board member from Aliso Viejo, did not endorse either candidate.

She pointed to Feinstein’s overwhelming victory in June and said she’s cautious of the party falling out of step with voters. “I’m really concerned about the integrity of the party,” Narayana, 32, said. “When we have had races where Democratic endorsed candidates don’t win, that’s really bad. I want the endorsement to mean something.”

This is a spectacular self-own right now, considering what’s going on in the Senate Intelligence Committee and given the upcoming Kavanaugh Supreme Court fight.  Feinstein already won the Dem nomination in the primary last month.

But a message had to be sent, and that message is “The most populous state in the nation and the largest state Democratic Party in the nation needs to get its act together, because the petulant toddlers are apparently in charge of both major parties in the Golden State.”

Nice going guys, this is the 100% absolute perfect time to refight a lost primary battle from a month ago.  Good job.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

I think it's now becoming apparent just how completely compromised by the Russians that Donald Trump and the GOP are at this point.  Yes, it's true that at this point, no Americans have been indicted yet as far as the Clinton/DNC/DCCC hacks go, and that no evidence or indictments based on Trump campaign collusion with the Russians involved in these hacks has been released.  

The operative word here of course is "yet".  That part is coming.  Whether or not the Trump counterattack against Rosenstein and Mueller will happen before we find that information out, I don't know.  I do know that the survival of the republic may depend on which one happens first. The Daily Beast's David Rothkopf:

This is an extraordinary moment. It is without equal not only in American history but in modern history. A hostile foreign power intervened in our election to help elect a man president who has since actively served their interests and has defended them at every turn.

Trump may deny collusion. But given that this the attack continues, denying it is collusion, distracting from it is collusion, obstructing the investigation of it is collusion — because all these things enable it to go on.

That the president is abetted in his aid for the Russians — again, in the midst of this ongoing attack — by the leadership of the Republican Party makes the situation all the more extraordinary and dangerous. As they seek to undermine the investigation, they serve Russia as directly as if they were officers of the GRU. Some now reportedly seek to impeach Rosenstein on trumped up charges. To attack one of the leaders of our national defense as we are being attacked and to do so to benefit our foreign adversary is textbook treason.

That is strong language. But consider this: If we updated our definitions of war to include cyberwar, then aiding a foreign power engaged in such a war against us would certainly meet the Constitutional definition: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

When only semantics protect our president and our ruling party from the harsh sentences treason demands, we need to recognize the severity of the situation. But more importantly, we need to recognize one of the most important implications of yesterday:

that while we who watch or chat on cable news have lost the plot here, while GOP makes it about personal attacks on FBI officers, while the President makes it about him, while many of us make it about partisan politics, Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein have kept their eye on the ball.

They recognize as does Coats and as do the leaders of our intelligence community and as does every law enforcement and national security expert with whom I have spoken that this is, above all and most urgently, is a national security crisis for the United States.

Again, the painstaking details in the indictments prove that Mueller has the goods.  This is not a fishing expedition.  This is not a witch hunt.  This is a crisis, and there is no other objective conclusion to make at this point based on Trump's own actions other than that the leader of the free world is fully compromised by a hostile foreign power, and that foreign power is managing him much like an employee would be managed. Marcy Wheeler:

It is my opinion that Russia manages Trump with both carrots — in the form of election year assistance and promises of graft — and sticks — in this case, in the form of grave damage to US security and to innocent people around the world.

And Trump is poised to head into a meeting with Vladimir Putin on Monday — showing no embarrassment about the proof laid out yesterday that without Putin, Trump wouldn’t have won the election — to discuss (among other things) a deal on Syria.

Meanwhile, Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, says the lights are blinking red like they were in advance of 9/11.

Rather than doing the things to prepare for an attack, Trump has virtually stood down, firing his very competent cyber czar and providing no order to take more assertive steps to prepare for an attack. 

Trump is compromised.  The GOP is compromised.  As such, America is compromised.  We are wide open for a massive attack against our interests.  The timing of the release of this info, happening the Friday before a Monday Trump meeting with the man behind the plan to compromise our country, is not an accident.  It is absolutely a warning from our law enforcement and intelligence community.  The Lawfare team reminds us that the DNC/Clinton/DCCC hacks were the reason James Comey was fired:

This is the investigation Comey confirmed on March 20, 2017, when he told Congress, “I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”

This was also the investigation that multiple congressional committees have spent more than a year seeking to discredit—most recently Thursday, when two House panels hauled the former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Department, Peter Strzok, a career FBI agent who worked on the Russia probe, up to Capitol Hill for 10 hours of public, televised, abusive conspiracy theorizing. When the president of the United States derides the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt,” and when congressional Republicans scream at FBI agents, this is the investigation they are trying to harass out of existence.

It is, therefore, fitting that this indictment comes less than one day after the astonishing display House Republicans put on in the Strzok hearing. If Mueller had been trying to remind the public of what the investigation is really about and what the stakes are in it, if he had been trying to make a public statement in response to the Strzok hearing, he could not have timed this action better.

But, to be clear, Mueller was not trying to make a press statement. We know that not merely because that’s not the way Mueller operates but also because Rosenstein said specifically at his press conference that he had briefed the president on the matter before Trump left town—days before the Strzok hearing yet also mere days before Trump has a scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The timing of the indictment given the upcoming Helsinki summit is a powerful show of strength by federal law enforcement. Let’s presume that Mueller did not time this indictment to precede the summit by way of embarrassing Trump on the international stage. It is enough to note that he also did not hold off on the indictment for a few days by way of sparing Trump embarrassment—and that Rosenstein did not force him to. Indeed, Rosenstein said at his press conference that it is “important for the president to know what information was uncovered because he has to make very important decisions for the country” and therefore “he needs to know what evidence there is of foreign election interference.” But of course Rosenstein and Mueller did not just let Trump know. They also let the world know, which has the effect—intended or not—of boxing in the president as he meets with an adversary national leader.

Put less delicately: Rosenstein has informed the president, and the world, before Trump talks to Putin one-on-one that his own Justice Department is prepared to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, in public, using admissible evidence, that the president of the Russian Federation has been lying to Trump about Russian non-involvement in the 2016 election hacking.

The White House's response to this is to blame Obama and to insist that the meeting with Putin will go forward anyway. Let that sink in.

Again, Robert Mueller is warning the world that he is ready to make a criminal conspiracy case against a dozen Russian GRU agents.  The only real question is who else will be named as co-conspirators in the future.

In other words, which Americans helped the Russians do this to us.

The Disaster In Puerto Rico Continues

The government's own report on FEMA's obscenely bad response in Puerto Rico is brutal, and it proves just how inept the Trump regime handled the aftermath of Hurricane Maria ten months ago.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency experienced personnel shortages, was caught with a critical lack of aid supplies, had trouble coordinating logistics and found itself struggling to do the work of the territorial government while responding to Hurricane Maria’s devastation in Puerto Rico last September, according to an official after-action report released late Thursday.

Despite repeated Trump administration efforts to play down federal failures in responding to a humanitarian crisis on the island territory, the new report is a public acknowledgment of systemic failures during what was one of the most destructive hurricane seasons — and costliest disaster responses — in the nation’s history.

[Read the FEMA after-action report]

It shows that responses to Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida taxed the agency and left it understaffed and out of position for the catastrophe that unfolded in Puerto Rico, where millions of U.S. citizens suffered through widespread communication blackouts, massive infrastructure failures and lengthy power outages.

FEMA officials said Thursday that the responses to back-to-back mainland hurricanes sapped federal disaster resources and left an extraordinarily short window to prepare and build up for Maria. Once Maria hit, they said, they had difficulties with logistics and had a hard time coordinating with local officials in Puerto Rico, who were themselves victims of the storm.

The sobering report runs counter to the White House narrative that President Trump presented at the time, when he praised FEMA’s performance and characterized the devastation on the island as not being “a real catastrophe like Katrina.”

The three major hurricanes that made landfall on U.S. soil — along with wildfires and other natural disasters — ravaged the country and its territories in 2017, affecting nearly 50 million Americans and U.S. nationals spread across the South, West and Caribbean. The disasters cost nearly $300 billion, according to FEMA estimates. 

It was a critical failure across the board, one that cost thousands of lives.  It should have ended the Trump regime as US citizens were killed by government malpractice, but then again, America itself isn't exactly working for the people these days, and especially not for the people of Puerto Rico. 

Someone's head has to roll for this, and increasingly it looks like the political fallout will land on the heads of politicians in San Juan and not Washington as suddenly the DoJ is very interested in the island's government finances.

A mayor and two former government officials in Puerto Rico face public corruption charges in separate cases that involve a total of $8 million in federal and local funds, authorities said Thursday. The suspects are the mayor of the southwest town of Sabana Grande and the former directors of finance for the northern town of Toa Baja, which has struggled to pay its employees amid an 11-year recession.

U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez told reporters that the former officials from Toa Baja are accused of using nearly $5 million worth of federal funds to pay the town's public employees and municipal contractors.

"Not only is that illegal, it's immoral," she said.

Officials said former finance director Victor Cruz Quintero deposited some $2.5 million worth of funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development into the town's general and payroll accounts in October 2014.

He also is accused of making similar deposits and transfers of more than $1.75 million in funds from HUD and the Department of Health and Human Services from September 2014 to February 2016.

Toa Baja's former interim finance director, Angel Roberto Santos Garcia, is accused of making similar transactions worth $650,000 using funds from those two federal agencies.

It was not immediately clear if Cruz and Santos had attorneys.

Rodriguez said the investigation into alleged corruption in Toa Baja is ongoing because officials believe other people are involved.

Puerto Rico's finances were a mess long before Hurricanes Maria and Trump killed thousands, and there will have to be a reckoning for it all, but let's not forget that this level of sheer dereliction of duty was monstrous, and wouldn't be tolerated in any US state or by its voters.  In a territory that has no real political representation however, well...

We see how that went.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

As I said on Thursday, the Trump regime now has the pieces in place to make their move on the Mueller investigation with the confirmation of Brian Benczkowski to the DoJ as a possible replacement for current Deupty AG and Mueller boss Rod Rosenstein:

Which mean should Rosenstein be fired, Robert Mueller's boss would almost certainly become Benczkowski, a person with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, somebody already tainted, if not compromised by Russian money laundering, and somebody who worked for Donald Trump's campaign directly. And no, he hasn't said that he would recuse himself should that become the case.

Yesterday's major slew of Russian indictments by Mueller included a number of huge developments.

This is pretty huge, as we now have Mueller flat out saying that a dozen GRU agents raided the Clinton campaign and stole information. The Russians conducted an operation to attack our elections, which is what I told you guys 23 months ago. At the very least Trump should cancel that meeting with Putin and start expelling Russian diplomats like baseballs in a pitching machine. 

We're finally getting to the point where Trump won't be able to let the Mueller probe continue without permanent damage to himself.

Both these events happened within the last several days.  Put them together, especially with the knowledge that Rosenstein briefed Trump on the Friday Russian indictments before Trump left for Europe and you arrive at one conclusion:

The move by the GOP to shut down the Mueller probe has immediately shifted into a new, much more urgent phase.

House conservatives are preparing a new push to oust Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, according to three conservative Capitol Hill sources — putting the finishing touches on an impeachment filing even as Rosenstein announced the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for interfering in the 2016 election. 

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, in fact, had the impeachment document on the floor of the House at the very moment that Rosenstein spoke to reporters and TV cameras Friday. 

Conservative GOP lawmakers have been plotting to remove Rosenstein for weeks, accusing him of slow-walking their probe of FBI agents they’ve accused of bias against President Donald Trump. 

Democrats contend Republicans’ fixation on Rosenstein is really an effort to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller, who reports to Rosenstein and has been making inroads in his investigation of the Russian election interference plot. Mueller’s probe has entangled members of Trump’s inner circle and Trump has increasingly assailed it as a politically motivated “witch hunt” as it’s presented greater danger to him and his allies. 

Conservative sources say they could file the impeachment document as soon as Monday, as Meadows and Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) look to build Republican support in the House. One source cautioned, however, that the timing was still fluid.

I'm not sure how far this will go, it seems almost certain that this will be political cover for Trump to fire Rosenstein and replace him with the newly-installed Benzckowski.  How quickly this will happen, I don't know, but if House Republicans go through with this, expect Trump to make his move as it will be his best chance.

Mueller’s indictments open the door to future collusion and conspiracy charges.  Having read through the indictments there are painstakingly blatant statements that all but guarantee future indictments are coming.  It’s the prosecutorial equivalent of announcing checkmate in eight moves, or an action movie hero announcing his intent to kick the bad guy’s ass is a promise, not a threat.

House Republicans are scared, scared to the point of screamingly obvious interference by the attempted impeachment of Rosenstein being the more preferable option both politically and legally right now then letting the Mueller probe continue.  That should tell you everything that we need to know about possible guilt.

I want to be wrong here, I want this to be a stupid gamble by panicked House Republicans to give away the game and get people to talk Trump down, but Trump isn't in town right now to be talked down, now and is he?  He'll be meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Finland on Monday.

If Trump follows through as I believe he will, from that point, all bets are off.

Sounding The Torn-NATO Warning

Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan reminds us as Donald Trump heads to Russia to check in with Vladimir Putin next week that the European Union remains in real trouble, and the NATO alliance is on the brink of fracture and has been for some time.

The transatlantic community was in trouble even before Trump took office. The peaceful, democratic Europe we had come to take for granted in recent decades has been rocked to the core by populist nationalist movements responding to the massive flow of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. For the first time since World War II , a right-wing party holds a substantial share of seats in the German Bundestag. Authoritarianism has replaced democracy, or threatens to, in such major European states as Hungary and Poland, and democratic practices and liberal values are under attack in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. France remains one election away from a right-wing nationalist leadership, and Italy has already taken a big step in that direction. Meanwhile, Britain, which played such a key role in Europe during and after the Cold War, has taken itself out of the picture and has become, globally, a pale shadow of its former self. The possibility that Europe could return to its dark past is greater today than at any time during the Cold War. 

Some of that has to do with the changing attitude of the United States in recent years. It’s little secret that President Barack Obama had no great interest in Europe. Obama, like Trump, spoke of allied “free riders,” and his “pivot” to Asia was widely regarded by Europeans as a pivot away from them. Obama rattled Eastern Europe in his early years by canceling planned missile-defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic as an inducement to Vladimir Putin to embrace a “reset” of relations. In his later years he rattled Western Europe when he did not enforce his famous “red lines” in Syria. Both actions raised doubts about American reliability, and the Obama administration’s refusal to take action in Syria to stem the flow of refugees contributed heavily to the present strain.

Obama was only doing what he thought the American people wanted. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the 2008 financial crisis, left Americans disenchanted with global involvement and receptive to arguments that the alliances and institutions they supported for all those years no longer served their interests. The Obama administration tried to pare back the American role without abandoning the liberal world order, hoping it was more self-sustaining than it turned out to be. But the path was open to a politician willing to exploit Americans’ disenchantment, which is precisely what Trump did in 2016. 

NATO has never been a self-operating machine that simply chugs ahead so long as it is left alone. Like the liberal world order of which it is the core, it requires constant tending, above all by the United States. And because it is a voluntary alliance of democratic peoples, it survives on a foundation of public support. That foundation has been cracking in recent years. This week was an opportunity to shore it up. Instead, Trump took a sledgehammer to it.

NATO's next big test against Russian military aggression, most likely in Estonia and its Baltic NATO member neighbors, may not be its last, but it will certainly be a far different outcome than Russia's invasion and annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine.

Of course the worst-case scenario is that the outcome isn't any different from Crimea: that the NATO Batlic states get new management and both the EU and the US realize that there's no political appetite to actually do anything about it, much like Crimea.

Of course that would be the end of NATO as we know it.

Maybe that's the goal.  It's certainly Putin's goal, at least.  The question these days is "Is it also Trump's goal?"

Evidence is pretty shaky that those aren't aligned.  We'll know more next week, I suspect.

Last Call For The Trump Tax Scam, Con't

The GOP tax cut bill was supposed to put more money in American workers' paychecks and lead to a bright economic future.  Of course, anyone with a half-a-brain would have told you that was complete nonsense and that corporations already making record profits would use that windfall to make themselves richer rather than give a dime to the workers who made it possible, and now the numbers are in that prove not only that corporate America looted all that money at taxpayer expense, but that worker wages in 2018 have actually gone down for most Americans.

Six months after the Tax Cut and Jobs Act became law, there's still little evidence that the average job holder is feeling the benefit.

Worker pay in the second quarter dropped nearly one percent below its first-quarter level, according to the PayScale Index, one measure of worker pay. When accounting for inflation, the drop is even steeper. Year-over-year, rising prices have eaten up still-modest pay gains for many workers, with the result that real wages fell 1.4 percent from the prior year, according to PayScale. The drop was broad, with 80 percent of industries and two-thirds of metro areas affected.

"Now, economic confidence has been good, we're in a strong economy, GDP is growing, but the question has been, where's the paycheck?" said Katie Bardaro, vice president of data analytics at PayScale.

The answer is, largely, in the companies' coffers. Businesses are spending nearly $700 billion on repurchasing their own stock so far this year, according to research from TrimTabs. Corporations set a record in Q2, announcing $433 billion worth of buybacks — nearly doubling the previous record, which was set in Q1.

In just the first six months of the year, companies took the generous gift that Republican lawmakers gave them at our expense and have spent more than $700 billion on stock buybacks and workers didn't get a penny.  In fact, thanks to higher prices at the pump and the grocery store -- and now thanks to much higher prices coming due to Trump's trade wars with China, the EU, Mexico and Canada -- things are going to get a lot worse for the average American in the second half of the year.

Prices are going to go up, and wages are going down.  But that's what our corporate masters wanted from the GOP, and that's exactly what they got: record profits and by the end of the year it'll be well over a trillion bucks taken out of taxpayer pockets to make corporations even richer.

Of course, that was the whole point of the bill...

It's Mueller Time, Con't

As Donald Trump continues his European trip and will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday in Finland, Special Counsel Robert Mueller just handed him a Siberian-sized diplomatic headache with almost exquisite timing.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking offenses related to the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

The 12, who are members of the GRU, a Russian intelligence agency, are accused of stealing usernames and passwords of volunteers in Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign, including its chairman John Podesta. They also hacked into the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in an operation starting around March 2016.

The charges include conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S., aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to launder money. They are accused of releasing the stolen emails on the web.

The announcement came only three days before President Donald Trump is to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. 

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told reporters Friday that “I briefed President Trump about these allegations earlier this week. The president is fully aware of the department’s actions.”

Now I know that federal prosecutors are, as a rule, rat bastards.  But it's damn funny when they are actually rat bastards towards somebody who deserves to be screwed over by rat bastards.

Rosenstein said two separate Russian units of the GRU intelligence agency stole emails and information from Democrats and then disseminated it via online personas, DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0. He also said there’s no allegation in the indictment that any American was involved in the operation. 

“The object of the conspiracy was to hack into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election," the indictment said. 

The Russians masked their activities by using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to buy servers, register Internet domains and make other payments in the hacking operation, according to the indictment. It said the Russians also funded the operation in part by “mining” Bitcoin. 

With the charges, Mueller’s prosecutors have marked out another Internet pathway they say Russia used to influence the U.S. election. On Feb. 16, his prosecutors charged 13 Russians and three Russian entities they said were part of a broader effort to sow discord among U.S. voters through social media -- which they used to impersonate Americans, coordinate with unwitting U.S. activists and even plan rallies.

Trump told reporters in London Friday that he will “absolutely firmly” ask Putin about the finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that he authorized the campaign of interference. But he added, “I don’t think you’ll have any ‘Gee, I did it, I did it, you got me” confession.

Spoilers: The Russians did it, and Putin ordered it, and both Trump and Putin know it.  They hacked into the DNC and the Clinton campaign with the absolute intent to interfere in the 2016 election.  And Donald Trump and the GOP have regularly stated that they do not want this investigated because they directly benefited from this.

Mueller knows all that too.  This is pretty huge, as we now have Mueller flat out saying that a dozen GRU agents raided the Clinton campaign and stole information.  The Russians conducted an operation to attack our elections, which is what I told you guys 23 months ago.  At the very least Trump should cancel that meeting with Putin and start expelling Russian diplomats like baseballs in a pitching machine.

We're finally getting to the point where Trump won't be able to let the Mueller probe continue without permanent damage to himself.  Ryan Reilly at HuffPo breaks it down as the witch hunt sure has found a lot of actual practicing spellcasters, guys.

Here are the most crucial revelations the 29-page grand jury indictment brings to light.

• Chiefly, the indictment names names. The defendants were part of the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU). GRU units 26165 and 74455, the indictment says, “conducted large-scale cyber operations to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”
• The defendants, according to the indictment, were specifically involved in the effort to hack Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The Russians also “monitored the computers of dozens of [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] and DNC employees.”
• The Russians searched DCCC computers for terms like “hillary,” “cruz,” and “trump” and copied a folder titled “Benghazi Investigations.”
• “DCLeaks” ― a website launched in June 2016 to post hacked emails mostly targeting Democrats ― claimed to be run by “American hacktivists.” It wasn’t. The same computer that ran the DCLeaks Twitter account also managed a Twitter account called @BaltimoreIsWhr that posted images with the hashtag #BlacksAgainstHillary.
• Using the name “Guccifer 2.0,” the Russians told Trump associate Roger Stone ― identified in the indictment as “a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump” ― that it would be their “great pleasure” to help.

Oh and this bit:

• As the journalist Marcy Wheeler points out, the indictment also indicates that Russia had access to the Clinton team’s analytics, which could offer the Russians a guide to targeting voters as part of their effort to hurt Clinton’s campaign.

The Russians had Hillary's campaign battle plan.  They knew exactly what her campaign team was telling her.  You wanna bet they offered that info to Trump's guys?   Like say, this would be helpful info for formulating an attack on her in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, right?

This one is particularly fun:

• WikiLeaks ― named as “Organization 1” in the indictment ― worked with the Russians to time the release of hacked emails to have the greatest impact on the election. WikiLeaks thought Clinton had only a 25 percent chance of losing to Trump, but evidently thought “conflict between [Vermont Sen.] bernie [Sanders] and hillary” could help.

I told you WikiLeaks was a Russian front this two years ago as well.

But here's the money shot:

• Last but not least, on Aug. 15, 2016, a “candidate for the U.S. Congress” requested stolen documents from the Russians posing as Guccifer 2.0. They obliged, and “sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.” The congressional candidate in question hasn’t been identified.

You can absolutely bet that candidate was a Republican, and that the candidate in question is sweating bullets the size of tank rounds about right now.  I fully expect that candidate won that election in 2016, and is most likely in Congress today.  Now, it's possible that this particular member of Congress is one of the many Republicans who announced their retirement this year, but whoever that person is?

They are done.  That's collusion, guys. And I'm betting this person wasn't alone, either.  I bet there's a lot more people who requested info from the Guccifer 2.0 Russians, including stolen DNC emails. Suddenly that explains why so many Republicans are so hellbent on not investigating this Russian operation.

Stay tuned.  Mueller just opened this biggest can of worms so far in this investigation.

More is on the way.

How Much SUV Could A Woodchuck Chuck...

...if a woodchuck could chuck Paul Ryan's SUV?

Winter in Wisconsin is tough.

So tough, in fact, that living creatures might go searching for shelter in unlikely places.

House Speaker Paul Ryan explained Thursday that a family of woodchucks moved into his Chevy Suburban recently, eating the wiring, and rendering the car useless.

"My car was eaten by animals," Ryan said, to laughs from an audience at an event hosted by the Economic Club of Washington D.C. "It's just dead."

The car was parked at his mother's house in his hometown in Wisconsin, and when she came back from her annual trip to Florida for the winter, it wouldn't start. As a top congressional leader Ryan has a security detail and hasn't been allowed to drive in three years.

"So I towed it into the dealer, they put it up, and they realized that a family of woodchucks lived in the underbody of my Suburban," Ryan said.

Ryan told the story after giving a speech about how he feels Republican policies, like last year's tax overhaul, have helped the economy. He disagreed, however, with President Trump's decisions to impose tariffs on a number of nations, most recently on China.

"The rule book for the global economy of the future is being written right now," Ryan said. "The question is whether the United States will be holding the pen."

Much like Paul Ryan's SUV, the United States has an vicious orange rodent underbody problem.  Besides, the only pens these clowns deserve to get are the federal kind with the decidedly substandard housing options.  For right now, he's too busy running interference for Trump and the rest of the GOP's vast stable of serial sexual abusers.

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday indicated he opposed a congressional ethics probe into fellow Republican Rep. Jim Jordan after numerous former Ohio State University wrestlers alleged the lawmaker ignored reports of sexual misconduct when he was an assistant coach at the school in the 1980s and 1990s.

The House Ethics Committee, Ryan said, "investigates things that members do while they’re here, not things that happened a couple of decades ago when they weren’t in Congress."

Ryan said he called Jordan over the weekend to discuss the allegations, as well as to "check in on" the Ohio Republican following news that his nephew had been killed in a car accident.

"I have always known Jim Jordan to be a man of honesty and a man of integrity," Ryan said during a weekly press conference alongside other GOP House leaders.

The retiring speaker's remarks came after President Barack Obama's ethics czar, Norman Eisen, and another government watchdog filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics calling for a "preliminary inquiry" into whether Jordan's response to the allegations.

"If Rep. Jordan’s recent statements — that he had no knowledge that student wrestlers under his supervision were being sexually abused — are false, his present conduct in connection with this serious matter would fail to 'reflect creditably on the House'" in violation of House rules, their letter to the OCE says.

But Ryan will certainly land on his feet somewhere in the vast Right-wing Noise Machine come 2019.  There's no way a former House Speaker doesn't cash in on K Street or FOX News, and he'll have plenty of money to buy a new SUV or six.

The rest of his former constituents in Wisconsin, well, not so much.