Last Call For Nixon In The Bunker

Donald Trump isn't talking to paintings yet, but as Gabe Sherman of Vanity Fair tells us, he's decided that the problem is everyone in the White House who isn't him, and it's time to take out the trash.

With the departures of Hope Hicks and Gary Cohn, the Trump presidency is entering a new phase—one in which Trump is feeling liberated to act on his impulses. “Trump is in command. He’s been in the job more than a year now. He knows how the levers of power work. He doesn’t give a fuck,” the Republican said. Trump’s decision to circumvent the policy process and impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum reflects his emboldened desire to follow his impulses and defy his advisers. “It was like a fuck-you to Kelly,” a Trump friend said. “Trump is red-hot about Kelly trying to control him.” 

According to five Republicans close to the White House, Trump has diagnosed the problem as having the wrong team around him and is looking to replace his senior staff in the coming weeks. “Trump is going for a clean reset, but he needs to do it in a way that’s systemic so it doesn’t look like it’s chaos,” one Republican said. 

Sources said that the first officials to go will be Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom Trump has clashed with for months. On Tuesday, Trump met with John Bolton in the Oval Office. When he plans to visit Mar-a-Lago this weekend, Trump is expected to interview more candidates for both positions, according to two sources. “He’s going for a clean slate,” one source said. Cohn had been lobbying to replace Kelly as chief, two sources said, and quit when he didn’t get the job. “Trump laughed at Gary when he brought it up,” one outside adviser to the White House said. (The White House declined to comment.) 

Next on the departure list are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Trump remains fiercely loyal to his family, but various distractions have eroded their efficacy within the administration. Both have been sidelined without top-secret security clearances by Kelly, and sources expect them to be leaving at some point in the near future. One scenario being discussed is that Kushner would return to New York to oversee Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign with his ally Brad Parscale, who was hand-selected by the Trump family. One Trump friend referred to it as a “soft landing.” Ivanka will likely stay on longer, perhaps through the summer, before decamping home to New York to enroll the children in a Manhattan private school. Both are presumed to remain in close contact with Trump, who often places significant value on the opinions expressed outside his administration, anyway.

I'll believe it when I see it, but if Trump has decided he can now do whatever he wants to and will no longer even pretend to listen to anyone but himself, the chances that he fails catastrophically are extremely high.  Good news for Democrats in November, bad news for America and everyone living there. 

If this is all true, then we're already seeing "nothing to lose" Trump in action with North Korea and trade tariffs, and at this point if Trump figures he takes a big enough gamble he can avoid the Mueller axe by making a big enough move to win everyone over and save the GOP, who will then be so grateful to him that they will end the investigations.

The reality is that Trump will come ever closer to making a fatal miscalculation that could pretty much wreck everything.  If he's listening to people like John Bolton's Mustache, we're all in for a world of hurt.

We'll see.

Soccer It To Me, Cincy, Con't

The saga of FC Cincinnati's new stadium needed to secure its place as an MLS expansion team got very interesting this week as Ohio's existing MLS team, the Columbus Crew, is looking for the exits to send the team to Austin but is running headlong into the Modell Law.

Columbus Crew SC majority owner Anthony Precourt's focus is now zeroed in on one site for a Major League Soccerstadium in Austin, Texas. 

Precourt, CEO of Precourt Sports Venture, wants to move the team to Austin and announced Thursday afternoon he would focus his efforts on Austin-owned McKalla Place. 

The site is nowhere near downtown Austin, where Precourt said he wanted a stadium. He has asked for a Downtown stadium in Columbus, too, having said Mapfre Stadium north of Columbus is too far away. 

While the site selection is good news for Austin soccer fans, it is yet another blow to #SaveTheCrew efforts to keep the team in Columbus, where Precourt's company and Major League Soccer are being sued to keep the team from moving. 

On Wednesday, Precourt and MLS officials issued a statement saying they were disappointed in the city of Columbus and the state for filing a suit on Monday to keep the Crew SC from moving to Austin. The city and state are citing the "Art Modell Law," which was named for the then-Browns owner who relocated the NFL team to Baltimore in 1996. 

The law says that owners whose teams use tax-supported facilities and accept financial assistance from the state are prohibited from moving to another city unless they give at least six months' notice and give individuals who live in the area an opportunity to purchase the team. 

On Thursday, Precourt said he is still interested in having his team "integrate into the heart and soul of the Austin community." 

"We’ve heard the concerns about a possible site for a stadium," Precourt said. "Soccer is inclusive and celebratory, so we want to shift the focus onto the long-term benefits of a location that works for everybody."

This is the real reason MLS is putting its expansion plans on hold for now, they want to know where the Crew will end up.  If the Crew leave Columbus and Cincy is passed over, MLS is going to lose a lot of loyal fans in a hurry in arguably one of the best areas in the country for soccer.

Meanwhile, FC Cincinnati's new stadium may not actually be in Ohio at all.

Northern Kentucky business and government leaders will schmooze with FC Cincinnati representatives Friday afternoon an in effort to woo the soccer team's new stadium.

Cleared land for the yet-to-start Ovation development next to the confluence of the Ohio and Licking Rivers in Newport is a possible location to build a stadium. The property has a clear view of Downtown Cincinnati. 

FC Cincinnati's president and general manager Jeff Berding and Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce president Brent Cooper will spend the afternoon touring nonprofits in Covington and Newport, according to a chamber release. 

Berding and Cooper will be joined by Eric Rose of Newport Aquarium, Newport Mayor Jerry Peluso, Hofbrauhaus Newport co-owner and Fort Thomas Mayor Eric Haas, MeetNKY convention and visitors bureau's Eric Summe, and Alex Perkins and Gaby Batshoun of Global Business Solutions.

The NKY Chamber is tripping over itself to get FC Cincinnati to agree to a deal that'll put the stadium in Newport by the levee.  The current plan to put the stadium in the West End is getting a lot of pushback from residents, and rightfully so.

We'll see where all this goes, but it may be a long time before this one gets sorted out.  If you had hopes for FC Cincinnati to join MLS before 2021 or 2022 at the earliest, I wouldn't go printing the t-shirts just yet.

Donny's Pyongyang Adventure

The North Korean regime has been trying to invite a US president to Pyongyang for direct talks for two decades now in order to prove to the world that its nuclear program is powerful enough to bring even the leader of the free world to its doorstep to negotiate as the regime's equal on North Korea's terms.  

Clinton, Dubya, and Obama all passed on such an obvious diplomatic trap that would accomplish nothing but upside for the Kim regime and establish a new diplomatic paradigm that the world should be coming to Pyongyang directly at its whim.

No major world leader would be blockheaded enough to give the North Koreans exactly what they wanted: proof that their nuclear program is absolutely justified as a tool to get America and the western world to the table and assure to the rest of the planet that a nuclear program is exactly what your tinpot dictatorship needs in order to get respect on the global stage.

So guess what goddamn idiot Donald Trump announced he was going to do this spring.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has invited President Trump to meet for negotiations over its nuclear program, an audacious diplomatic overture that would bring together two strong-willed, idiosyncratic leaders who have traded threats of war.

The White House said that Mr. Trump had accepted the invitation, and Chung Eui-yong, a South Korean official who conveyed it, told reporters that the president would meet with Mr. Kim within two months.

“He expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible,” Mr. Chung said at the White House on Thursday evening after meeting the president. Mr. Trump, he said, agreed to “meet Kim Jong-un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”

The president expressed his optimism about the meeting in a post on Twitter, saying that Mr. Kim had “talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze.”

“Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time,” Mr. Trump added. “Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!”

Mr. Chung, whose talks with Mr. Kim on Monday in Pyongyang resulted in the invitation, noted that the North Korean leader said he understood that joint military exercises with the United States and South Korea would go ahead as scheduled after the end of the Paralympic Games this month.

For Mr. Trump, a meeting with Mr. Kim, a leader he has threatened with “fire and fury” and has derided as “Little Rocket Man,” is a breathtaking gamble. No sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader, and Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly vowed that he would not commit the error of his predecessors by being drawn into a protracted negotiation in which North Korea extracted concessions from the United States but held on to key elements of its nuclear program.

Meeting Mr. Kim now, rather than at the end of a negotiation when the United States would presumably have extracted concessions from North Korea, is an enormous gesture by the president. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim share a penchant for bold, dramatic moves, and their personal participation in a negotiation could take it in unexpected directions.

Sure, those "unexpected directions" include "going completely off the rails with a nuclear adversary". The rank amateurism and sheer stupidity of the agreement cannot be overstated, as Ankit Panda explains.

For Kim, a meeting with Trump will be an unalloyed propaganda victory. Trump will assuredly not “achieve permanent denuclearization,” despite what he told Chung. Instead, Kim will be given the opportunity to stage-manage a photo-op with a U.S. president. The costs of a freeze in nuclear and ballistic missile testing for the next two months are relatively minor for North Korea compared to the benefits of a meeting with Trump.

In a normal world, too, there could be a serious opportunity in direct leader-level talks between the United States and North Korea, but Trump is far from a normal president. The United States is woefully lacking in subject matter expertise on the Korean Peninsula at the highest levels of government, with the State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy, Joseph Yun, having just stepped down last week and the post of ambassador to Seoul still vacant. Trump has the intelligence community behind him, but it’s doubtful that he’s capable of being successfully briefed.

A face-to-face meeting with Kim would require Trump to exercise cautious, measured engagement. He’d have to hear out what the North Korean leader has to say and know where the red lines lie. North Korea’s long-term play on the Korean Peninsula is to “decouple” the United States and South Korea.

During his campaign for the presidency, Trump showed more interest in sitting down for a “hamburger” with Kim than he did in the alliance with South Korea, complaining about the costs of maintaining a forward-based military presence there. Those instincts still live within Trump and are ripe for exploitation by North Korea, which has had plenty of time to study him.

Trump has shown time and again a deep misunderstanding of the basic rules of statecraft (as well as economics, physics, and pretty damn well near everything else.)  The odds of him getting rolled by Kim like a drunk bum at an Staten Island policemen's ball are approaching 199%.  Disaster doesn't begin to cover it.

But, much like the GOP tax bill, the dismantling of Obamacare, and the new trade war ignited by Trump's steel and Aluminum tariffs, the effects of this catastrophe won't be fully felt until it's far too late for the next person in the White House to even begin to clean it up.

StupidiNews!

• Mississippi GOP Gov. Phil Bryant is expected to sign a Republican bill to prevent women from getting abortions after just 15 weeks of pregnancy, a major court challenge is expected.
• The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has been selected to hear the consolidated legal challenges to the FCC ending "net neutrality" regulations, 22 states are suing the Trump regime over the move.
• Republicans in Pennsylvania will head to court today to block the congressional redistricting map created by the state Supreme Court after the current map was found to be unconstitutional.
• The Obamas could be heading to Netflix as the former president and first lady are in talks with the streaming giant to produce original shows. 
• Oakland, California is looking at ways to tax ride-share services like Uber and Lyft with a per-ride fee to help pay for infrastructure and road repairs.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Republicans are trying to motivate their voters in Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district' special election the way they always do nationally, complain about everything and use fear of scary liberals and playing the victim card in order to get people to turn out, especially if they expect to lose the race.

Tuesday’s special election, which is being held in a district President Donald Trump won by 20 percentage points, has emerged as the latest testing ground of whether Republicans are headed for a midterm bloodbath. A loss would be wholly embarrassing, many Republicans privately acknowledge, given that it would take place in a state that Trump made a cornerstone of his 2016 victory. And the themes that the GOP has highlighted in the special election — namely tax cuts and opposition to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are the centerpieces of the party’s 2018 campaign plan. 

But as election day grows closer, the national GOP is increasingly pinning the blame on Saccone. In interviews with nearly two dozen administration officials, senior House Republicans and top party strategists, Saccone was nearly universally panned as a deeply underwhelming candidate who leaned excessively on the national party to execute a massive, multimillion-dollar rescue effort. It was complete with visits from the president, vice president and several Cabinet members. 

They describe a candidate who largely ignored pleas to raise the money he needed, who blindsided the White House and the national party with his choice of a political strategist, and whose amateur-style social media feed included low-quality videos of him at a local bar and yukking it up with Santa. To make matters worse, Saccone is up against a Democratic rival the party could hardly have engineered had it tried: Conor Lamb, an Ivy League-educated 33-year-old Marine veteran and former federal prosecutor. 

Lamb has used a nearly $4 million war chest to cast himself as independent of his party, airing slickly produced TV ads underscoring his aversion to Pelosi and his fondness for shooting machine guns. He has a campaign staff of 16 full-time employees, compared with just four for Saccone. 

“Candidate quality matters, and when one candidate outraises the other 5-to-1, that creates real challenges for outside groups trying to win a race,” said Corry Bliss, who oversees the principal House GOP-aligned super PAC, which has conducted an expansive TV and field deployment effort aimed at pushing Saccone over the top.

Now, I know why this story was written ahead of Tuesday's contest, if Saccone loses, the story establishes clearly that the blame is on him and him alone, he's a bad candidate, the GOP itself is "fine".  You know, just like Roy Moore's loss in Alabama.

But if Saccone survives, it will be because national Republicans -- and Trump's campaign stop on Saturday -- saved him.  Heads Trump is off the hook for "sad loser" Saccone's loss, tails, Trump is a genius for rescuing his campaign.

Now, you don't do this unless there's a good chance that you're going to lose, it's too cynical and self-defeating otherwise.  But this is a district that Trump won by 20 points less than 18 months ago.  There's no way it should be close at all.

Trump's already lost, and he knows it.

Could The WV Teachers' Strike Come To KY?

West Virginia teachers across the state shut down schools for over a week and earned a 5% raise from state legislators as teachers in the state are among the nation's lowest-paid.  Now as GOP Gov Matt Bevin and Republicans in Kentucky's General Assembly put teachers here in a vice with a new pension bill that will wreck state employees' health care plans and make steep cuts to teacher pay and benefits, Kentucky teachers are looking next door for inspiration.

Teachers in eight Kentucky counties will hold “walk-in” rallies Thursday morning to protest a Senate bill that cuts teacher retirement benefits in an effort to fix Kentucky’s ailing pension systems. 

“Promises were made to us by the commonwealth, and those promises need to be kept by the commonwealth,” said Erin Grace, a teacher at Rockcastle County High School and the president of Rockcastle County Education Association. “We need, as a state, to treat funding for our schools, the services our kids need and the people who devote their working lives to providing those services as a top priority, not as a burden.” 

Teachers and other school employees will gather outside 28 schools, then walk into the building while voicing their opposition to Senate Bill 1 in Clark, Franklin, Garrard, Lincoln, Montgomery, Rockcastle and Woodford counties and Danville Independent School District. Montgomery County teachers will also hold rallies after school. 

“I hope they walk in every day and teach our kids,” said House Speaker Pro Tempore David Osborne, R-Prospect. 

The joke of course is that Kentucky state lawmakers like Dave Osborne are only in session for 90 days every two years.  Humor, we have it here in the Bluegrass.

The rallies come amid a national movement for teachers. In West Virginia, teachers in all 55 counties went on a strike last month that lasted for more than week before the legislature approved a 5 percent pay increase for public employees. Teachers in Oklahoma have said they are considering a strike over teacher pay and school funding as well. 

When asked if he was worried about the prospect of a teachers strike Wednesday, Gov. Matt Bevin said any opposition to the pension bill was “ill-informed.” 

“The reality is, I’m saving the pension system,” Bevin said. “If they are upset about it, it’s either they are ill-informed or willfully blind…I think the vast majority of teachers are none of the above. They are very aware of the fact that they want the pension. Their leadership has their reason for fomenting things. God bless them. But I’m still going to save the pension whether they like it or not.”

We have to burn down the state employees' pension system in order to save it.  I think it's going to take a statewide strike in order to get Bevin and Osborne to do much of anything.

I wonder who's going to save Bevin's job in 2019 though?

We may have to burn it down in order to save it, you know.

Russian to Judgment, Con't

Three developments overnight in the ongoing Trump/Russia investigation, the first is a follow-up to yesterday's story involving a secret meeting in the Seychelles between Blackwater founder Erik Prince, brother to now Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Russian investors, brokered by a UAE adviser to Moscow named George Nader.  

Turns out that Robert Mueller knows all about that meeting because Nader is cooperating with Mueller's team, and that means there was far more to this January 2017 meeting than just a friendly chat.  We now know what that additional info is and what Nader is providing: it was a secret attempt at a backchannel between Trump and Putin and Nader was a witness to it all.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has gathered evidence that a secret meeting in Seychelles just before the inauguration of Donald Trump was an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin — apparently contradicting statements made to lawmakers by one of its participants, according to people familiar with the matter.

In January 2017, Erik Prince, the founder of the private security company Blackwater, met with a Russian official close to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and later described the meeting to congressional investigators as a chance encounter that was not a planned discussion of U.S.-Russia relations.

A witness cooperating with Mueller has told investigators the meeting was set up in advance so that a representative of the Trump transition could meet with an emissary from Moscow to discuss future relations between the countries, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

George Nader, a Lebanese American businessman who helped organize and attended the Seychelles meeting, has testified on the matter before a grand jury gathering evidence about discussions between the Trump transition team and emissaries of the Kremlin, as part of Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.

Nader began cooperating with Mueller after he arrived at Dulles International Airport in mid-January and was stopped, served with a subpoena and questioned by the FBI, these people said. He has met numerous times with investigators. 

Last year, Prince told lawmakers — and the news media — that his Seychelles meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian government-controlled wealth fund, was an unplanned, unimportant encounter that came about by chance because he happened to be at a luxury hotel in the Indian Ocean island nation with officials from the United Arab Emirates.
In his statements, Prince has specifically denied reporting by The Washington Post that said the Seychelles meeting, which took place about a week before Trump’s inauguration, was described by U.S., European and Arab officials as part of an effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming administration.

It also means that Prince lied to Congress straight up about the meeting when he testified.  Perjury is the kind of thing that puts you in federal prison.  Remember, Republicans impeached and attempted to remove Bill Clinton from office over his perjury.  We'll see what happens to Prince, but at this point, assume Robert Mueller has a nice box for him to live in for a while.

Speaking of testimony to Congress, we now know more about what outgoing White House Communications Director Hope Hicks had to say to Congress herself last week, and it too is a major development: the women who arguably had the closest working relationship with Trump and the classified data he had access to testified that she had her email hacked.

A day before she resigned as White House communications director, Hope Hicks told the House Intelligence Committee last week that one of her email accounts was hacked, according to people who were present for her testimony in the panel's Russia probe.

Under relatively routine questioning from Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., about her correspondence, Hicks indicated that she could no longer access two accounts: one she used as a member of President Donald Trump's campaign team and the other a personal account, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the closed meeting of the Intelligence Committee was supposed to remain private.

Hicks, who portrayed herself as not savvy in matters of technology, told lawmakers that one of the accounts was hacked, according to two sources who were in the room. It is unclear if Hicks was referring to the campaign or the personal account.

Her assertion of a hack raises the questions of who might have compromised her account, as well as when, why and what information could have been obtained. But there was no indication from any of the sources that those questions were pursued by the committee, which had limited leverage over Hicks because she was appearing voluntarily and was not under a subpoena for her testimony or records.

It is standard practice for lawmakers to ask witnesses about phone numbers and email accounts. But it is uncommon, according to people familiar with the committee process, for a witness to tell lawmakers that he or she no longer has access to past accounts.

Of course Hicks's email would be a prime target for spies.  Someone sure has access to it that should not, but then again that's kind of a running theme with this regime, isn't it?

And that brings us to story number three, information that certain people should and should not have access to, as we discover that Donald Trump absolutely likes to grill Mueller's witnesses about what they've told Mueller, which is, you know, indicative of obstruction of justice.

The special counsel in the Russia investigation has learned of two conversations in recent months in which President Trump asked key witnesses about matters they discussed with investigators, according to three people familiar with the encounters.

In one episode, the president told an aide that the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, should issue a statement denying a New York Times article in January. The article said Mr. McGahn told investigators that the president once asked him to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. McGahn never released a statement and later had to remind the president that he had indeed asked Mr. McGahn to see that Mr. Mueller was dismissed, the people said.

In the other episode, Mr. Trump asked his former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, how his interview had gone with the special counsel’s investigators and whether they had been “nice,” according to two people familiar with the discussion.

The episodes demonstrate that even as the special counsel investigation appears to be intensifying, the president has ignored his lawyers’ advice to avoid doing anything publicly or privately that could create the appearance of interfering with it.

The White House did not respond to several requests for comment. Mr. Priebus and Mr. McGahn declined to comment through their lawyer, William A. Burck.

Remember that Don McGahn is still at the White House as legal counsel, while Reince is long-gone as White House Chief of Staff, but the point is openly asking witnesses what they told the feds about the thing you're being investigated for is such a mind-bogglingly stupid thing to do that it should be illegal because it is.

Just so.  Stay tuned guys, the sheer velocity of these new leaks along with the confirmation of leaks from previous stories means things are reaching a critical mass.

StupidiNews!

• A second nor'easter in less than a week is pounding New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, bringing more snow and ice just as residents were getting back power from last week's storm.
• The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does prohibit job discrimination against transgender employees.
• Donald Trump will meet with video game industry executives to discuss what the game makers can do about violent games and children and what Trump believes is a link to mass shootings.
• Health insurance giant Cigna will buy prescription plan provider Express Scripts for $67 billion after a similar buyout attempt last year by Aetna was killed over anti-trust concerns.
• Republicans in Congress are introducing legislation to end state net neutrality laws and allow paid data "fast lanes" nationally after Washington State recently passed a state net neutrality law.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

So remember back in June when CNN fired three journalists over a retracted article that stated that a Russian investment fund with ties to Trumpies was being investigated?  The CNN reporters were fired over not having solid information, but Trump screamed FAKE NEWS for weeks:

An internal investigation by CNN management found that some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published, people briefed on the results of the investigation said. 

The story, which reported that Congress was investigating a "Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials," cited a single anonymous source. 

These types of stories are typically reviewed by several departments within CNN -- including fact-checkers, journalism standards experts and lawyers -- before publication.
This breakdown in editorial workflow disturbed the CNN executives who learned about it. 

In a staff meeting Monday afternoon, investigative unit members were told that the retraction did not mean the facts of the story were necessarily wrong. Rather, it meant that "the story wasn't solid enough to publish as-is," one of the people briefed on the investigation said. 

The reporting about the Russian investment fund and Trump officials was not relayed on CNN's television channels, but it was published on the web and shared on social media.

Fast forward to this week, where the New York Times does get the CNN story correct and gives a whole lot more to add.

An adviser to the United Arab Emirates with ties to current and former aides to President Trump is cooperating with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and gave testimony last week to a grand jury, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

Mr. Mueller appears to be examining the influence of foreign money on Mr. Trump’s political activities and has asked witnesses about the possibility that the adviser, George Nader, funneled money from the Emirates to the president’s political efforts. It is illegal for foreign entities to contribute to campaigns or for Americans to knowingly accept foreign money for political races.

Mr. Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who advises Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the effective ruler of the Emirates, also attended a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles that Mr. Mueller’s investigators have examined. The meeting, convened by the crown prince, brought together a Russian investor close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump’s team during the presidential transition, according to three people familiar with the meeting. 

Mr. Nader’s cooperation in the special counsel’s investigation could prompt new legal risks for the Trump administration, and Mr. Nader’s presence at the Seychelles meeting appears to connect him to the primary focus of Mr. Mueller’s investigation: examining Russian interference during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Mr. Nader represented the crown prince in the three-way conversation in the Seychelles, at a hotel overlooking in the Indian Ocean, in the days before Mr. Trump took office. At the meeting, Emirati officials believed Mr. Prince was speaking for the Trump transition team, and a Russian fund manager, Kirill Dmitriev, represented Mr. Putin, according to several people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Nader, who grew close later to several advisers in the Trump White House, had once worked as a consultant to Blackwater, a private security firm now known as Academi. Mr. Nader introduced his former employer to the Russian.

Hey look, it's our old friend Erik Prince, Blackwater founder and brother of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos!  If  the Times story seems familiar, that's because it should be. The CNN story that got retracted was really the other half of last year's Washington Post story from April on Prince attending this secret early January 2016 meeting with the Russians in the Seychelles.

Now we know who the UAE's broker was, George Nader...and he's cooperating with Mueller over possibly extremely illegal foreign campaign contributions to Trump. Kudos to the New York Times for putting these together.

Prince runs as a fixer for this meeting where money flows to Trump, and his sister ends up in Trump's cabinet.  Oh, and Prince gets access to the Pentagon to sell his latest mercenary war scheme just as the drums of war start up for North Korea.

Now imagine what Mueller's team knows about Nader, Prince, and DeVos, folks.  If Nader is getting a deal to talk to Mueller, the information he has is valuable to his investigation.  That means it's high-level stuff, like say, the Russians sending money to Trump's campaign through the UAE, and expecting things in return.

You know, like conspiracy to collude with Moscow.

Somebody should remind Erik (and all the Trumpies for that matter) that Moscow ties up its loose ends with loose lips rather abruptly.

A former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned by a nerve agent in England this week, the British authorities said on Wednesday, heightening suspicions that the episode was an assassination attempt by a national government, amid rampant speculation that Russia was responsible. 

The development forces the British government to confront the possibility that once again, an attack on British soil was carried out by the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, which Western intelligence officials say has, with alarming frequency, ordered the killing of people who have crossed it. 

In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian agent who was harshly critical of Mr. Putin, was fatally poisoned in London with a rare radioactive metal; in 2016, an official inquiry concluded that he was murdered by Russian operatives, probably with Mr. Putin’s approval. 

“This is being treated as a major incident involving attempted murder by administration of a nerve agent,” said Mark Rowley, Britain’s chief police official for counterterrorism and international security.

Stay tuned.

No Sanctuary In The Trump Era

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has threatened to take legal action against sanctuary policies and the state and local governments that have them almost since day one of the Trump regime, and this week he made good on that promise as the DoJ is now suing California over its sanctuary state laws.

The lawsuit targets three state laws that interfere with federal immigration enforcement and violate the Constitution, according to the complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Sacramento.

Specifically, the statutes at issue restrict state and local law enforcement entities, as well as private employers, from sharing information about undocumented immigrants with federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Justice Department said in the lawsuit.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is scheduled to visit Sacramento Wednesday, and Homeland Security officials have threatened for months to take punitive action against the largest U.S. state over its refusal to help ramp up deportations. Just last week, a top administration official accused the mayor of Oakland, one of California’s largest cities, of sabotaging a federal raid targeting undocumented
immigrants after she issued a public warning about the enforcement action.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra -- named individually as a defendant in the lawsuit -- said local police will continue to work “in concert” with federal agents on issues related to drug enforcement and sex trafficking, but the Trump administration remains misguided in its attempts to encumber enforcement of California laws aimed at protecting its undocumented residents.

“We’re in the business of public safety, not deportation, and we’ll continue to uphold all of the laws, including AB450 and SB54,” he said at a press briefing in San Francisco shortly after the case was made public. “Our track record so far with this administration in court has been pretty good. We’ve proven that California is doing things the way it should, and also proven that it’s the Trump administration that has acted outside of the law.”

Sessions plans to discuss the lawsuit during a speech he is scheduled to give on Wednesday at a law enforcement conference in Sacramento.

“The Department of Justice and the Trump administration are going to fight these unjust, unfair and unconstitutional policies that have been imposed,” Sessions wrote in his prepared remarks. “We are fighting to make your jobs safer and to help you reduce crime in America.”

It's been an ugly fight so far, with Sessions threatening to withhold billions in federal funding from sanctuary cities generating a court fight that's still ongoing, the Trump regime broadly threatening to move ICE agents out of the state while trying to turn ICE and the Boder Patrol into intelligence agencies, and Oakland's mayor informing the city's residents of a major ICE raid in the city last month.

I remain convinced that the goal here is a major Supreme Court ruling that gives the Trump regime broad search and deportation powers that would certainly be used, and one that hamstrings states from protecting the undocumented at all.  Federal courts have long said that states cannot be compelled to enforce federal laws, so that's going to strike out, I hope.  (Remember Medicaid expansion being shot down by the Roberts Court for that reason?)

But such a massive deportation machine may go into action anyway once the detention and arrest infrastructure is built, and new facilities and new ICE and Border Patrol agents are being pressed into service as we speak.  Trump may not be able to make states comply which is why he wants a large enough federal force to make that a moot point.  Alarm bells should be ringing off the walls here.

It won't be long now before such an attempt is made.

Trump's Tariff-ic Economic Damage

The Trump Tarriffs are going to wreck the economy and the GOP knows it.  Now we have a ballpark figure of the carnage to start: Trump's proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum would cost the economy nearly 150,000 jobs as a starter.

A new economic analysis of President Trump's proposed trade tariffs on steel and aluminum appears to paint a grim picture of the consequences -- some 146,000 jobs lost, according to a recent analysis.

released a report Monday predicting that there will be a net loss of thousands of jobs if the proposed tariffs on aluminum and steel are applied on imports from all countries.
The move to impose tariffs has drawn fire from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who suggested that there has to be a "smarter way" to combat steel and aluminum dumping by countries like China. 

A report put out by the Trade Partnership, which is also a consulting firm that does research on international trade, predicts that while there will be an increase in aluminum- and steel-based jobs in the U.S. because of increased demand; that jump would be far smaller than the number of jobs that would be lost in other sectors as a result of the increased cost of working with steel and aluminum. 

The Trade Partnership puts the number of jobs expected to be gained at 33,464 and the jobs lost at 179,334, resulting in the net loss of 145,870 jobs. 

In summary, the report states that more than five jobs would be lost for every one job gained.

And nearly all those losses would be in the construction, distribution and business sectors.  Automakers would also lose thousands of jobs, along with fabricated metals and the beverage industry.

Keep in mind these numbers don't count the effects of retaliation from America's trade partners, either.  If Canada, Mexico, China and the EU decide to retaliate in a full-scale trade war, those tens of thousands of job losses become hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

It will be a guaranteed disaster.  That's why Trump's chief economic adviser Gary Cohn has hung it up and is out.

Gary D. Cohn, President Trump’s top economic adviser, said on Tuesday that he would resign, becoming the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the Trump administration.

White House officials insisted that there was no single factor behind the departure of Mr. Cohn, who heads the National Economic Council. But his decision to leave came as he seemed poised to lose an internal struggle over Mr. Trump’s plan to impose large tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Mr. Cohn had warned last week that he might resign if Mr. Trump followed through with the tariffs, which Mr. Cohn had lobbied against internally.

“Gary has been my chief economic adviser and did a superb job in driving our agenda, helping to deliver historic tax cuts and reforms and unleashing the American economy once again,” Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times. “He is a rare talent, and I thank him for his dedicated service to the American people.”

Mr. Cohn is expected to leave in the coming weeks. He will join a string of recent departures by senior White House officials, including Mr. Trump’s communications director and a powerful staff secretary.

Yet the departure of Mr. Cohn, a free-trade-oriented Democrat who fended off a number of nationalist-minded policies during his year in the Trump administration, could have a ripple effect on the president’s economic decisions and on the financial industry.

It leaves Mr. Trump surrounded primarily by advisers with strong protectionist views who advocate the types of aggressive trade measures, like tariffs, that Mr. Trump campaigned on but that Mr. Cohn fought inside the White House. Mr. Cohn was viewed by Republican lawmakers as the steady hand who could prevent Mr. Trump from engaging in activities that could trigger a trade war.

Even the mere threat, last August, that Mr. Cohn might leave sent the financial markets tumbling. On Tuesday, Mr. Cohn’s announcement rattled markets, and trading in futures pointed to a decline in the United States stock market when it opened on Wednesday.

GOP lawmakers in Congress, already facing a midterm bloodbath, now fear all-out extermination.

Warning of economic fallout, congressional Republicans and industry groups pressed President Donald Trump on Tuesday to narrow his plan for across-the-board tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum. They said the White House appeared to be open to changes that might soften the impact.

House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin called for a "more surgical approach" that would help avert a potentially dangerous trade war. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said there was concern Trump's plan could lead to such disruptive turmoil.

"We are urging caution," McConnell said.

Trump said Monday that he wouldn't back down from his pledge to impose tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum, and a White House official said Tuesday that Trump's "mind is made up" about those penalties. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

But Republican Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, who opposes the tariffs, said after meeting Tuesday with White House chief of staff John Kelly that the administration was willing to consider his views. "Absolutely. There's an openness now," Perdue said.

"I think there's been a step back," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. "I don't think he's reconsidering, but I think he's trying to figure out what his best step is forward."

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told lawmakers Trump was trying to balance protections for beleaguered steel and aluminum producers while "making sure that we don't do undue harm to the economy."

"We are not looking to get into trade wars. We are looking to make sure that U.S. companies can compete fairly around the world," Mnuchin said at a House hearing. 

Trump has been keenly aware of how the tariffs may play in a March 13 special House election in western Pennsylvania, part of the nation's steel belt, White House officials have said. The president is headlining a Saturday rally in support of Rick Saccone, who is battling Democrat Conor Lamb in the Republican-leaning district.

This is the key to Trump's "sudden" tarriff announcement.  Somebody convinced him this would save Republican Rick Saccone in PA-18, who has now fallen behind Democrat Conor Lamb in the polls with the election just a week away.  Republicans in Congress are in full-blown panic mode over this tariff announcement.  It could win them the PA-18 race, but would cost them dozens of other races in November and they know it.

Trump's Saturday announcement is going to be big either way.

StupidiNews!

• Stormy Daniels, the porn star who has claimed she had an affair with Donald Trump and was paid hush money to cover it up, is suing Trump over violating their non-disclosure agreement.
• West Virginia teachers have ended their nine-day wildcat strike as the state legislature approved a bill giving a five percent pay raise to all state employees.
• Florida state lawmakers will vote today on gun safety legislation in the wake of last month's deadly Parkland school shooting.
• Democratic party turnout in yesterday's Texas primaries was strong as El Paso Congressman Beto O'Rourke will take on GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in November.
• The underwater exploration company headed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has located the wreck of the USS Lexington, the US aircraft carrier sunk by the Japanese in WW II.

Last Call For Kellyanne's Con Job

The DoJ wants to have a few words with White House mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway for violations of the Hatch Act for using her position at the White House to advocate for America's favorite child molester, failed Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway violated the Hatch Act on two occasions, the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) informed the Trump administration Tuesday. 

Appearing in her official capacity, Conway endorsed and advocated against political candidates, the watchdog said, referring its findings to President Trump "for appropriate disciplinary action." 

The violations occurred during two television appearances in 2017, one on Fox News's "Fox & Friends," and one on CNN's "New Day."

“While the Hatch Act allows federal employees to express their views about candidates and political issues as private citizens, it restricts employees from using their official government positions for partisan political purposes, including by trying to influence partisan elections,” OSC says in its report.

“Ms. Conway’s statements during the 'Fox & Friends' and 'New Day' interviews impermissibly mixed official government business with political views about candidates in the Alabama special election for U.S. Senate."

The report goes on to state that Conway received "significant training" on the Hatch Act and possible violations. OSC says it gave Conway, a former GOP pollster who served as Trump's campaign manager, the opportunity to respond as part of its report, but she did not.

If you think this particular White House gives a damn about the law, you'd be wrong.

The White House rejected the report’s findings, saying “Conway did not advocate for or against the election of any particular candidate” in a statement provided to reporters. 

“In fact, Kellyanne’s statements actually show her intention and desire to comply with the Hatch Act — as she twice declined to respond to the host’s specific invitation to encourage Alabamans to vote for the Republican,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gildley said.

And so no disciplinary action will be taken against Conway, and she will continue to represent the Oval Office.

Nothing will happen, because nobody cares.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Yesterday I talked about grand jury leaks from Mueller-land, and the mystery of who Mueller was probing for all communications between November 2015 and now.  Today we're still on the topic of Mueller and grand juries, but this time we're talking about our first real public refusal to submit to a subpoena by a Trump aide, in this case, former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg.

Former Trump aide Sam Nunberg said Monday that he has been subpoenaed to appear in front of a federal grand jury investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 but that he will refuse to go. 

In an interview with The Washington Post, Nunberg said he was asked to come to Washington to appear before the grand jury on Friday. He also provided The Washington Post a copy of his two-page grand jury subpoena seeking documents related to President Trump and nine other people, including emails, correspondence, invoices, telephone logs, calendars and “records of any kind.” 

Nunberg forwarded an email from the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III seeking his appearance in front of the panel on Friday. 

Among those the subpoena requests information about are departing White House communications director Hope Hicks, former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and adviser Roger Stone. 

Nunberg said he does not plan to comply with the subpoena, including either testimony or providing documents.

“Let him arrest me,” Nunberg said. “Mr. Mueller should understand I am not going in on Friday.”

Remember what I said yesterday about the mystery witness that Mueller subpoenaed not being Donald Trump Jr. because there was no way that he would keep his mouth shut about it?  Turns out I was right about that logic, I just had the wrong person.  Looks like Nunberg was the mystery witness target...or at least one of them.  His circumstances in this Washington Post story and the Axios subpoena leak story from Monday match up.

If you need a reminder of who this guy is, he's the Roger Stone protege who was fired by Trump's campaign in August 2015 after making racist statements on Facebook.  If you'll recall, the Mueller subpoena leak specified all communication between the mystery witness and the ten Trump regime folks, including Trump and Stone, since November 2015, that would have been months after Nunberg was fired.

This also means that it would make perfect sense now for Nunberg to be the leaker to Axios in the first place, and that smells of Roger Stone being involved.  The question is why.

Nunberg apparently met with Mueller last month, too.

So that sets up an interesting situation.  Refusal to comply with a federal grand jury subpoena is the kind of thing that makes you cool your heels in prison for a while.

Does Mueller call Nunberg's bluff, knowing that the Trump regime is waiting for a very public martyr?  Can he not call Nunberg out on this?

Things just got really interesting round these parts, especially as Nunberg then called into nearly a half-dozen cable TV news shows to plead his case, and it became performance art of the highest degree before he started backtracking and whined he was eventually going to give in to Mueller, maybe, sorta, kinda.

Meanwhile, the Daily Beast is reporting that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen received leaked info directly from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.

On Dec. 19, 2017, a former staffer for Sen. John McCain named David Kramer testified before the House intelligence committee behind closed doors. He’d played a role in bringing the salacious and unverified Steele dossier to the FBI’s attention, and members peppered him with questions about it. 

Then something unusual happened. 

The following, based on conversations with multiple sources familiar with the matter, illuminates the extraordinary breakdown of trust between committee investigators and the witnesses they call. It also suggests that some people working on the committee investigation may be trying to covertly assist one of the president’s closest allies—when the president’s inner circle is ostensibly a focus of their probe. 

A few days after Kramer’s testimony, his lawyer, Larry Robbins, got a strange call. The call was from Stephen Ryan, a lawyer who represents Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen. Cohen is facing scrutiny from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional investigators regarding potential coordination between Trump’s team and the Kremlin. He featured prominently in the Steele dossier—the document that Kramer handled—and is currently suing Buzzfeed for publishing it. 

Ryan told Robbins he reached out because someone from the House told him that Robbins’ client, Kramer, had information about the Steele dossier that could help Cohen.

Robbins declined to help. Ryan then asked Robbins not to tell the House intelligence committee about their conversation. 

Robbins told the committee anyway. CNN reported in February that Robbins wrote a letter to the committee complaining about leaks to another client’s lawyer. The Daily Beast can now confirm that this letter was regarding Stephen Ryan and Michael Cohen.

Seems the Steele dossier is true enough to have Trump's lawyer try to intimidate witnesses about it, huh?  And let's not forget Cohen is up to his neck in the Russia side of this, too.

Stay tuned.

Bye-Bye Bibi, Con't

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington for the annual AIPAC conference after meeting with Donald Trump on Monday, but he can't escape the corruption and bribery investigation he's facing back home as calls for his resignation are now louder than ever after Netanyahu was implicated in a third investigation last month.  Now one of his closest confidants is turning states' evidence on him to avoid prosecution.

Nir Hefetz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "spin doctor" and confidant, will hand over recordings of Netanyahu and his wife Sara as part of a deal with police to turn state's evidence in the bribery case involving the Bezeq telecom giant and the Walla news site. 

Netanyahu, currently in the U.S. for AIPAC and a meeting with Trump, received the news at the Blair House, where he is a guest of the White House. 

In return for testifying against Netanyahu, Hefetz will not stand trial, face prison time or be fined. While he testifies, he will be housed at an isolated installation. 

According to assessments regarding the deal, Hefetz will also give information regarding the other cases against the prime minister and his wife. 

Hefetz is the third Netanyahu confidant to turn against the prime minister in the ongoing corruption cases. Hefetz is suspected of receiving bribes and obstructing justice as part of what is called Case 4000. He is also a key figure in 1270, and is second fiddle in Case 2000. 

In Case 4000, Hefetz liaised between the Netanyahu couple and the Walla news website, owned by Bezeq. Hefetz arranged for flattering items on the couple and censorship of less flattering items, Haaretz's Gidi Weitz reported. 

In Case 1270, Hefetz allegedly served as the prime minister's confidant who sought to elucidate how Judge Hila Gerstl felt about closing a case against Sara Netanyahu. Allegedly a trial balloon was floated, hinting to Gerstl that she would be promoted to Israel's next attorney-general if she closed the case down. Hefetz claims that it all boiled down to idle chatter and hadn't been coordinated with the prime minister and his wife. 

In Case 2000, Hefetz had involvement on both sides of the coin. He was head of public relations for Netanyahu, before which he served as senior editor in the Yedioth Ahronoth group, owned by Arnon Mozes. In 2009, Mozes is suspected of agreeing to provide sweetheart coverage of Netanyahu, who in turn allegedly promised to get the rival (free) newspaper Israel Hayom to stop printing a weekend edition, which stood to hugely benefit Yedioth. 

Channel 10 reports that Hefetz will be providing information on other cases – some of which the public hasn't even heard of yet.

Seems like prosecutors have plenty to go on to ring Bibi up, and Hefetz is just one of the main courses on the menu.  Whether a vote of no confidence is coming, Netanyahu resigns, or he calls early elections, I don't see how he survives the year as leader of the government.

I wish I could say the same for Trump, but we have a long way to go in that fight.

StupidiNews!

• Senate Appropriations Chair Republican Thad Cochran of Mississippi is retiring on April 1 citing health concerns, an interim senator will be appointed by GOP Gov.  Phil Bryant.
• Yesterday's March 5th deadline for action on DACA recipients has passed without action as Donald Trump's order rescinding protections for Dreamers has been put on hold by the courts.
• Voters in Texas head to the polls for statewide primaries today, where early voting favors Democrats but Republicans remain confident that they will win in November.
• North Korea has announced a summit with South Korea at the end of April, Pyongyang says it is open to ending its nuclear weapons program if the safety of the Kim regime is guaranteed. 
• A federal judge has ordered former pharmaceutical executive and hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli to forfeit more than $7 million in assets, including a Picasso and a Wu-Tang Clan album.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

Jane Mayer's profile of Steele dossier author Christopher Steele is a hell of a read, worthy of your time, but the real news is that Mayer dug up something that has direct implications for the 2018 Senate races: one of Steele's claims is that the Russians flat out told Trump to sink former GOP presidential candidate, Massachusetts governor and current Utah Senate candidate Mitt Romney as his Secretary of State.

In the spring of 2017, after eight weeks in hiding, Steele gave a brief statement to the media, announcing his intention of getting back to work. On the advice of his lawyers, he hasn’t spoken publicly since. But Steele talked at length with Mueller’s investigators in September. It isn’t known what they discussed, but, given the seriousness with which Steele views the subject, those who know him suspect that he shared many of his sources, and much else, with the Mueller team. 

One subject that Steele is believed to have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy—and an incoming President. 

As fantastical as the memo sounds, subsequent events could be said to support it. In a humiliating public spectacle, Trump dangled the post before Romney until early December, then rejected him. There are plenty of domestic political reasons that Trump may have turned against Romney. Trump loyalists, for instance, noted Romney’s public opposition to Trump during the campaign. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump aide, has suggested that Trump was vengefully tormenting Romney, and had never seriously considered him. (Romney declined to comment. The White House said that he was never a first choice for the role and declined to comment about any communications that the Trump team may have had with Russia on the subject.) In any case, on December 13, 2016, Trump gave Rex Tillerson, the C.E.O. of ExxonMobil, the job. The choice was a surprise to most, and a happy one in Moscow, because Tillerson’s business ties with the Kremlin were long-standing and warm. (In 2011, he brokered a historic partnership between ExxonMobil and Rosneft.) After the election, Congress imposed additional sanctions on Russia, in retaliation for its interference, but Trump and Tillerson have resisted enacting them.

Now, I'm not sure how accurate this is, but maybe Robert Mueller does.  Maybe this is all a ploy to make sure Trump goes after Romney in the 2018 Utah Senate race, maybe it's not.  But it makes sense, and it would be just another log on the pyre of Trump's administration when Mueller shows up to light the fire.

The biggest tell that this is legitimate is Trump's actions.  He's refused to implement sanctions overwhelmingly passed by Congress and he's tried to outright revers Obama-era sanctions, he hasn't ordered US Cyber Command to protect the country's internet infrastructure, and the biggest tell we found out this weekend: Trump has spent exactly $0 of $120 million allocated to State Department to counter Russian influence.

As Russia’s virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy. 

As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center — which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign — speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts. 

The delay is just one symptom of the largely passive response to the Russian interference by President Trump, who has made little if any public effort to rally the nation to confront Moscow and defend democratic institutions. More broadly, the funding lag reflects a deep lack of confidence by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson in his department’s ability to execute its historically wide-ranging mission and spend its money wisely. 

Mr. Tillerson has voiced skepticism that the United States is even capable of doing anything to counter the Russian threat.

“If it’s their intention to interfere, they’re going to find ways to do that,” Mr. Tillerson said in an interview last month with Fox News. “And we can take steps we can take, but this is something that once they decide they are going to do it, it’s very difficult to pre-empt it.”

We'll see what happens, but in my mind the depths of the Russian control over Trump is near absolute.  They have him wholesale, and America is in peril.

So Far, Gunmerica Is Still The Same After Parkland

The battle over gun safety continues to play out, but we've reached the point in the proceedings where Congress quietly does nothing and Trump moves on to other things as the election cycle heats up.

Despite the bravery of the Parkland shooting survivors using their voices for change, no legislation is coming at the federal level until a new Congress is sworn in next January, and even then it will take the NRA-GOP suffering dozens of losses in the House and Senate combined to even get a bill on the table.

For now, this fight remains at the state level, and as Sam Thielman at TPM points out, multiple red states are moving ahead with new pro-gun legislation.

Here are five pro-gun bills that have moved forward in state legislatures since the February 14 shooting: 

On February 15, the day after the Parkland shooting, Idaho lawmakers introduced a bill to strengthen the state’s “stand your ground” law to the floor. The measure would expand the definition of justifiable homicide to include not merely defending a shooter’s home but his or her vehicle or place of employment, as well. On Monday, the bill passed the majority-Republican Senate after a vote along party lines. 

A South Dakota bill exempts private schools and churches from a law that made it illegal to carry guns on school grounds. The bill, introduced in January, passed the House on the day of the Parkland shooting, then the Senate on Thursday. 

On Tuesday, the West Virginia House passed, by 85-14, an NRA-backed bill forcing private businesses to allow employees and visitors to keep firearms in cars parked on private property. Twenty-two states have similar “parking lot” laws. West Virginia lawmakers rejected amendments that would have made exceptions for chemical plants and churches. 

In Indiana, Rep. Jim Lucas filed an amendment this week to expand an existing bill aimed at letting Hoosiers take guns into schools and churches. Citing Parkland, Lucas says the bill now needs to be broadened to guarantee a right to carry on all state-owned property. “We just need to eliminate gun-free zones,” Lucas said according to the Indianapolis Star. 

On Wednesday, Tennessee state Rep. Andy Holt, a Republican, introduced a bill to let people carry guns in airports, with a special provision that bars local governments from passing their own gun regulations. It is next scheduled for consideration on Tuesday, March 6. 

And of course, pro-gun lawmakers have also been busy fighting off gun control measures. In Virginia alone, the NRA took a victory lap for having defeated more than 60 restrictions on guns proposed to the general assembly during a single legislative session, including universal background checks, and a law that would have required gun owners to report firearms stolen. The group declared that particular victory six days after Parkland.

Ohio Republicans too are moving forward with a stand your ground bill as I said last week.  The only path to meaningful legislative change is going to be a massive defeat at the polls for NRA-backed candidates in November, folks.

We need to help make that happen.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Axios's Jon Swan gives us something that could be a major leak in the Mueller probe: a list of communications related to a Grand Jury subpoena.

Axios has reviewed a Grand Jury subpoena that Robert Mueller's team sent to a witness last month.

What Mueller is asking for: Mueller is subpoenaing all communications — meaning emails, texts, handwritten notes, etc. — that this witness sent and received regarding the following people:

1. Carter Page
2. Corey Lewandowski
3. Donald J. Trump
4. Hope Hicks
5. Keith Schiller
6. Michael Cohen
7. Paul Manafort
8. Rick Gates
9. Roger Stone
10. Steve Bannon 

The subpoena asks for all communications from November 1, 2015, to the present. Notably, Trump announced his campaign for president five months earlier — on June 16, 2015.

If this is true (and the Mueller probe has been pretty damn good up until now with leaks, so I have some mild doubts) then the question becomes who's the witness, who is the person not on this list who would know everyone else and would have the pull to communicate directly with all these people, including Trump, and was with the Trump campaign since November 2015?

The obvious answer at first glance is former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, but we already know there's a 99.99% chance he's cooperating given the only charge he's facing is lying to the FBI, so Mueller wouldn't need to issue a subpoena as he already has Flynn by the short hairs.  It's most likely not him.

It could in theory be Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but this is a pretty wide-ranging list.  Sessions may be an unapologetic antebellum Southern good-ol'-boy racist, but he isn't personally sloppy enough to leave all this communication around in an e-mail trail, particularly with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.  He doesn't really have a reason to communicate with Schiller (Trump's former bodyguard) or Roger Stone, so it's not Sessions, either.

It could be Donald Trump Jr., he seems like the kind of guy (unlike Sessions) to be this sloppy and he does know all these people and could communicate with them, but if that were true, well, the guy can't keep his mouth shut as he's just like his dad.  We'd know if he had been subpoenaed as he'd be screaming on Twitter about it.  Junior seems unlikely to be the witness here as a result.

So who is it?

My guess is the witness in question is Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.  He's under the most pressure right now from all the events last week.  We know Mueller is concentrating on him as the nexus of the Russian involvement in the 2016 election, the international money laundering, and the resulting obstruction of justice cover-up.  He would definitely have the clout to communicate directly with all ten of the above people, and he definitely would have been involved in the Trump campaign from November 2015 until now.  He fits all the criteria.

But the bigger question is how Mueller would be able to confirm all of Jared's communications with all these people.  You would almost think that the FBI has investigations into all the people on that list that it could use to confirm the witness was indeed providing the information in the subpoena.

That's what really makes me think the witness in question is Kushner.  He's the most important name not on the list, who isn't known to be cooperating, and there's just too much bad news coming out about him now to make me think this isn't an avalanche of pressure designed to get him to play ball.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is meeting with officials from South Korea as Seoul tries to pave the way for high-level talks between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jai-in.
• "The Shape of Water" took Best Picture at last night's Oscars with Guillermo del Toro winning Best Director, Jordan Peele became the first black writer with a screenplay win for "Get Out".
• Sunday's Italian elections have left anti-establishment 5-Star Movement with the most seats in a hung parliament, the far-right anti-migrant Northern League finished second.
• Facing increasing pressure to resign over multiple corruption investigations, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu visits the US Monday to meet with Donald Trump.
• Commercial rocket company SpaceX is expected to make its 50th launch of the Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday, taking just under eight years to accomplish the task.