Bibi Is In Big Trouble, Con't

Facing overwhelming evidence of bribery and corruption, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is rolling the dice on April early elections in order to cement power and to dare Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to indict him during the campaign so that Netanyahu can "prove" the attacks against him are political in nature.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday called early elections for April, setting the stage for a three-month campaign clouded by a series of corruption investigations against the long-serving Israeli leader.

Riding high in the polls, Netanyahu appears all but certain to win a fourth consecutive term and a place in history as the country’s longest-serving prime minister. Those bright prospects, however, could be derailed by a looming decision by the country’s attorney general on whether to file charges against Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, facing the possibility of bribery and breach of trust charges in three different cases, made scant mention of these investigations at a gathering of his Likud Party as he announced plans for what is expected to be an April 9 vote.

Appearing loose and confident, he listed his government’s accomplishments in office and said he hoped his current religious, nationalistic coalition would be the “core” of Israel’s next government as well.

“We will ask the voters for a clear mandate to continue leading the state of Israel our way,” he said to applause from party members.

Netanyahu, who also served a term in the late 1990s, has been prime minister for the past decade.

His supporters point to a humming, high-tech economy, his handling of security issues, particularly countering the threat of Iranian influence in the region, and his gains on the diplomatic stage, including a close alliance with President Donald Trump that has paid important dividends.

Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and his withdrawal from the international nuclear deal were both welcomed by Netanyahu. The Israeli leader also has quietly forged ties with Sunni Arab states, further sidelining the Palestinians, who have severed ties with the U.S. because they believe Trump is biased against them.

The White House still has not released a long-awaited peace plan, and Monday’s announcement could further delay its release.

But critics say these gains have come at a deep price to Israel’s democratic ideals. Netanyahu’s hard-line government has promoted a series of laws that critics say are aimed at muzzling liberal critics and sidelining the minority Arab population. They point to wide gaps between rich and poor and high cost of living, and say that by neglecting the Palestinian issue and continuing to build settlements in the West Bank, the country is on the path to becoming an apartheid-like binational state.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak called the election “the most fateful” since the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

“If we all act properly, on April 10 we will part with Netanyahu,” he said on Hahadashot TV. “The state of Israel will get on a different path instead of this nationalist, racist, dark vision.”

I have to admit it's a good plan.  Even if Netanyahu is indicted soon, he can simply stall until elections and remain in office, and if he wins even with charges against him,  he maintains control and can tie up the case against him, maybe indefinitely.

No, the only way to get rid of Netanyahu now is for him to lose in April, and I don't think that will happen.

We'll see.

The Trump Slump

I've been warning that Donald Trump's merry band of dumbasses would eventually tank the economy, and it looks like we're well into that scenario now with the major markets down 15% or more just this month on top of a continuing government shutdown, not to mention the live grenade of pulling out of Syria and firing Defense Secretary Mattis.

Now Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin is trying to clean up the mess by very loudly yelling through a bullhorn that the economy is perfectly fine, which as you can imagine is having the completely opposite effect on Wall Street.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin startled financial analysts, bankers and economists on Sunday by issuing an unusual statement declaring that the nation’s six largest banks had ample credit to extend to American businesses and households.

Mnuchin made the statement on Twitter after calling the leaders of the six banks, seeking to address an issue that had attracted little concern ahead of the treasury secretary’s tweet.

The statement came hours before Asian markets were set to open and following a sharp sell-off that made last week the worst for U.S. markets in a decade. President Trump has been furious at the sell-off, and efforts by Mnuchin to inspire confidence in the market have so far failed.

Several analysts said Sunday night that his outreach to the banks and subsequent statement were likely to backfire and drive even more concern.

“Panic feeds panic and this looks like panic in the administration,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton. “Suggesting you might know something that no one else is worried about creates more unease.”

There are many components in the economy and financial markets, and they don’t always move in tandem. For example, a sliding stock market does not necessarily mean there are problems in the banking system, and there can be problems in the banking system that aren’t reflected in the stock market’s performance.

In Mnuchin’s statement, which was posted while he was vacationing in Mexico for the holidays, the Treasury chief said the executives told him “they have ample liquidity available for lending to consumer, business markets, and all other market operations." Mnuchin said the executives added “that they have not experienced any clearance or margin issues and that the markets continue to function properly.”

Mnuchin telling everyone there are no banking liquidity problems when the problem is confidence in Trump's collapsing regime is a bit like trying to assure a jumbo jet full of nervous flyers that all the parachutes are in working order, when if you've flown on a commercial airliner ever, you know damn well there's never parachutes on the plane.

Also, the number three engine just caught fire.

Today is going to be an interesting day.

[EDIT] Dow closed down 600 points in shortened Christmas Eve trading.  Now off 4000 points for the month of December.

This is 2008 all over again.

(Mad) Dog Gone, Jim Con't

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis tendered his resignation last week effective February 28 in response to Donald Trump's Syria pullout cave to Putin, Erdogan, and Assad, and Trump's capitulation to Turkey, Syria, and ultimately Russia was far worse than originally thought.

The Dec. 14 call came a day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu agreed to have the two presidents discuss Erdogan’s threats to launch a military operation against U.S.-backed Kurdish rebels in northeast Syria, where American forces are based. The NSC then set up the call.

Pompeo, Mattis and other members of the national security team prepared a list of talking points for Trump to tell Erdogan to back off, the officials said.

But the officials said Trump, who had previously accepted such advice and convinced the Turkish leader not to attack the Kurds and put U.S. troops at risk, ignored the script. Instead, the president sided with Erdogan.

In the following days, Trump remained unmoved by those scrambling to convince him to reverse or at least delay the decision to give the military and Kurdish forces time to prepare for an orderly withdrawal.

“The talking points were very firm,” said one of the officials, explaining that Trump was advised to clearly oppose a Turkish incursion into northern Syria and suggest the U.S. and Turkey work together to address security concerns. “Everybody said push back and try to offer (Turkey) something that’s a small win, possibly holding territory on the border, something like that.”

Erdogan, though, quickly put Trump on the defensive, reminding him that he had repeatedly said the only reason for U.S. troops to be in Syria was to defeat the Islamic State and that the group had been 99 percent defeated. “Why are you still there?” the second official said Erdogan asked Trump, telling him that the Turks could deal with the remaining IS militants.

With Erdogan on the line, Trump asked national security adviser John Bolton, who was listening in, why American troops remained in Syria if what the Turkish president was saying was true, according to the officials. Erdogan’s point, Bolton was forced to admit, had been backed up by Mattis, Pompeo, U.S. special envoy for Syria Jim Jeffrey and special envoy for the anti-ISIS coalition Brett McGurk, who have said that IS retains only 1 percent of its territory, the officials said.

Bolton stressed, however, that the entire national security team agreed that victory over IS had to be enduring, which means more than taking away its territory.

Trump was not dissuaded, according to the officials, who said the president quickly capitulated by pledging to withdraw, shocking both Bolton and Erdogan.

Caught off guard, Erdogan cautioned Trump against a hasty withdrawal, according to one official. While Turkey has made incursions into Syria in the past, it does not have the necessary forces mobilized on the border to move in and hold the large swaths of northeastern Syria where U.S. troops are positioned, the official said.

The call ended with Trump repeating to Erdogan that the U.S. would pull out, but offering no specifics on how it would be done, the officials said.

 And now it appears that the media pointing out that Mattis's resignation letter was an indictment of Trump's ridiculous foreign policy means the General will now be terminated on January 1 instead.

President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that Defense Secretary James Mattis will depart the Pentagon by January 1, a date earlier than anticipated, and will appoint Patrick Shanahan — the agency’s number 2 official — as acting Secretary.

The president’s announcement, made via Twitter, comes days after Mattis stunned Washington by announcing his resignation, prompted by what the former marine said were policy differences with Trump. Amid tensions with Mattis, the president sent shock waves through the global security establishment by announcing troop drawdowns in both Syria and Afghanistan, moves that Mattis was said to oppose.

So Mattis will be out on New Year's Day, all to cover up the fact that Trump has given Vladimir Putin the biggest Christmas present he could have possibly wanted.

It's almost like he's having a fire sale before new management arrives.

It's Mueller Time In The Supreme Court

The sealed grand jury ruling that has prompted mystery after mystery in the Mueller probe has now reached the US Supreme Court.

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A new legal filing appears to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene for the first time in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election.

The document, which is under seal, stems from a Dec. 18 federal appeals court ruling that required an unidentified company, owned by an unidentified foreign country, to turn over information to a grand jury.

The dispute is believed to be tied to Mueller’s probe, although public information about the case doesn’t mention him or the investigation. Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible obstruction by President Donald Trump.

The grand jury dispute has been shrouded in mystery, in part because officials closed an entire floor of a federal courthouse in Washington during arguments on Dec. 7. Politico linked the case to Mueller in October, citing a conversation overheard by a reporter in the court clerk’s office.

The appeals court order described the company only as a “corporation” owned by “Country A.” The three-judge panel rejected contentions that a federal sovereign-immunity law shielded the company from having to comply.

The new filing asks Chief Justice John Roberts to temporarily block that ruling. The Supreme Court’s online docket includes the number of the appeals court case but doesn’t say who submitted the application.

So, who is the corporation in "Country A"? Vox's Andrew Prokop has a few ideas:

If this is in fact Mueller’s grand jury we’re talking about, it certainly is intriguing that they want information from a corporation owned by a foreign country.

Considering what’s been reported about Mueller’s focus so far, there appear to be two particularly likely possibilities here: 

A Russian company: For obvious reasons, this could be a state-owned Russian company. The Steele dossier made various uncorroborated claims about planned payoffs to Trump associates involving the oil company Rosneft. Trump transition adviser Erik Prince met the manager of a Russian sovereign wealth fund in Seychelles. There have been claims that the bank VTB was involved in the Trump Tower Moscow talks, and the chair of a different bank, VEB, met with Jared Kushner during the transition. (None of these companies have been accused of wrongdoing in connection with the Mueller probe.) 

A Gulf state company: Many reports this year have made clear Mueller is scrutinizing money trails and influence operations from Gulf states — the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are said to have come under scrutiny. It’s unclear why exactly Mueller has focused on this, and no charges have been brought on the topic just yet.

Intriguingly, the Daily Beast’s Erin Banco recently reported that Mueller is soon expected to issue “court filings” on two intriguing topics: “Middle Eastern countries’ attempts to influenceAmerican politics,” and “Trump associates’ conversations about sanctions relief” for Russia. Perhaps this sealed appeal is related to either topic.

We don't know.  But whoever it is, they are now turning to the US Supreme Court in order to avoid handing evidence over to Mueller.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

News that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone today, but yes, the Russians were helping Green Party 2016 candidate Dr. Jill Stein in order to help Donald Trump, and it worked.

Two days before the 2016 presidential election, an Instagram account called @woke_blacks posted a message in support of long-shot Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

“The excuse that a lost Black vote for Hillary is a Trump win is bs,” it read. “It could be late, but y’all might want to support Jill Stein instead.”

According to a report commissioned by the Senate, the account was a fake, part of the Russian campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

The report was one of two that leaked this week saying the Russian effort to disrupt the election specifically targeted black voters and harnessed America’s top social media platforms. But the reports contained another finding that was largely overlooked — the Russians also focused on boosting Stein’s candidacy through social media posts like the one from @woke_blacks.
Building support for Stein was one of a “roster of themes” the Moscow-sanctioned internet trolls “turned to repeatedly” in their effort to disrupt the election, according to a research team led by the New Knowledge cybersecurity firm. The researchers also found that the campaign to bolster Stein gained in intensity in the final days of the presidential campaign and largely targeted African-American voters.

The reports, prepared by separate groups of cyber experts, add to the growing body of evidence that the Russians worked to boost the Stein campaign as part of the effort to siphon support away from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and tilt the election to Trump.

An NBC News analysis found that Russians working under the direction of the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based firm run by a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, tweeted the phrase “Jill Stein” over 1,000 times around the time of the election.

The posts were often accompanied by variations of the same hashtag, “Grow a spine and vote Jill Stein.”

“This hasn’t gotten enough attention,” said Andrew Weiss, a Russian expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to Moscow’s efforts to promote Stein.

“The fact that the Russian propaganda apparatus helped create awareness and support for her candidacy and promoted her candidacy is critical to our understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“The Russians played this extremely adroitly,” Weiss added.

Never forget that Jill Stein's vote totals in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were higher than the difference that Trump won by in those states.  Those votes made Trump the winner in the Electoral College.  The Russians knew just where to hit and when in order to maximize this advantage to help Trump, and it gave him the Oval Office.

And yes, the Russians were behind it.  Period.  They helped Trump steal the election.

Let's not forget this.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Trump's acting Attorney General, Matt Whitaker, was installed to "save" Trump from the twin threats of both Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation, and from the Southern District of New York investigation.  Whitaker so far has done neither, and that has not made his boss happy at all.

President Donald Trump has at least twice in the past few weeks vented to his acting attorney general, angered by federal prosecutors who referenced the President's actions in crimes his former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. 

Trump was frustrated, the sources said, that prosecutors Matt Whitaker oversees filed charges that made Trump look bad. None of the sources suggested that the President directed Whitaker to stop the investigation, but rather lashed out at what he felt was an unfair situation. 

The first known instance took place when Trump made his displeasure clear to acting attorney general Matt Whitaker after Cohen pleaded guilty November 29 to lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow. Whitaker had only been on the job a few weeks following Trump's firing of Jeff Sessions. 

Over a week later, Trump again voiced his anger at Whitaker after prosecutors in Manhattan officially implicated the President in a hush-money scheme to buy the silence of women around the 2016 campaign -- something Trump fiercely maintains isn't an illegal campaign contribution. Pointing to articles he said supported his position, Trump pressed Whitaker on why more wasn't being done to control prosecutors in New York who brought the charges in the first place, suggesting they were going rogue. 

The previously unreported discussions between Trump and Whitaker described by multiple sources familiar with the matter underscore the extent to which the President firmly believes the attorney general of the United States should serve as his personal protector. The episodes also offer a glimpse into the unsettling dynamic of a sitting president talking to his attorney general about investigations he's potentially implicated in.

This is the most serious interference yet by Trump.  He's all but asking Whitaker to interfere in not one but two investigations and end them.  Whitaker can't remain in the position, and Bill Barr can't be confirmed for his views on ending the Mueller probe too.

The obstruction of justice in in plain sight.

Shutdown Meltdown

Bit of a break to recharge the batteries here as the year ends, so light posting until the new year.  Don't worry, I'll have my regular prediction scorecard and New Year's predictions up, and if anything major happens I'll weigh in.

Right now though, the federal government is shut down, so who knows?

Last Call For Scrooged At Christmas

As a shutdown looms tonight after House Republicans adjourned without a deal, the Trump regime has decided that if Republicans won't take food out of the mouths of families and continue turning America into a Dickensian workhouse nightmare, than by God they will.  Work for your supper, peasant!

The Trump administration unveiled a plan Thursday to force hundreds of thousands more Americans to hold jobs if they want to keep receiving food stamps, pursuing through executive powers what it could not achieve in Congress.

The country’s food assistance program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, already requires most adults without dependents to work if they collect food stamps for more than three months in a three-year period. But USDA regulations allow states to waive the requirement in areas with unemployment rates that are at least 20 percent greater than the national rate.

The USDA is now proposing that states could waive the requirement only in areas where unemployment is above 7 percent. The current national unemployment rate stands at 3.7 percent.

Approximately 2.8 million able-bodied recipients without children or an ailing person in their care were not working in 2016, according to the USDA’s latest numbers. Roughly 755,000 live in areas that stand to lose the waivers.

The Trump administration unveiled a plan Thursday to force hundreds of thousands more Americans to hold jobs if they want to keep receiving food stamps, pursuing through executive powers what it could not achieve in Congress.

The country’s food assistance program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, already requires most adults without dependents to work if they collect food stamps for more than three months in a three-year period. But USDA regulations allow states to waive the requirement in areas with unemployment rates that are at least 20 percent greater than the national rate.

The USDA is now proposing that states could waive the requirement only in areas where unemployment is above 7 percent. The current national unemployment rate stands at 3.7 percent.

Approximately 2.8 million able-bodied recipients without children or an ailing person in their care were not working in 2016, according to the USDA’s latest numbers. Roughly 755,000 live in areas that stand to lose the waivers.

You can either starve and be unemployed, or work and make too much money to be on SNAP, but either way it's not the Trump regime's problem.  Dead Americans don't consumer resources, you know.  We're already to the point where tens of millions of Americans are buying food at dollar stores because there are no grocery stores where they live, canned foods that are less healthy and actually more expensive than grocery stores, because that's all they can afford on a $7.25 an hour job.

But remember, Republicans refuse to raise the minimum wage, they want to throw millions off food stamps and Obamacare and everything else so you can experience the dignity of poverty.

Merry Christmas.  Work or starve.

The Green New Deal Goes Blue On Blue

Vox climate reporter David Roberts does an outstanding job of explaining the Green New Deal to folks in this piece and frankly it's ambitious, necessary, if not vital to put America back together again after Donald Trump.

But it'll never happen, mainly because Green New Deal proponents are too worried about making conservative purple and red state Dems extinct rather than removing the real impediment to fixing climate, the GOP, dooming the Dems to permanent minority party status, particularly in the US Senate.

Earlier this month, a revealing spat broke out on Twitter. David Sirota, a left-leaning journalist who once worked for Bernie Sanders, announcedthat he had uncovered something while mining campaign-finance data: “Beto O’Rourke is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress.” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress and a former domestic-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, pushed back. “Oh look,” she tweeted, “A supporter of Bernie Sanders attacking a Democrat. This is seriously dangerous.”

The dispute escalated three days later when The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig wrote a column declaring that she “can’t get excited about Beto O’Rourke” as a presidential candidate, because, among other things, he lacks a “well-attested antipathy toward Wall Street, oil and gas.” To which Tanden replied, “Bruenig’s piece in the Post on Beto is just the latest attack by a supporter of Senator Sanders.” Then, on December 10, the journal Sludge, which investigates money in politics, defended Sirota’s charge and noted that the Center for American Progress itself “has in the past accepted donations from multiple fossil fuel companies.”

On one level, the fight over O’Rourke is a fight over the legacy of Obama. The Obama veterans championing O’Rourke compare his “inspiration, aspiration, and authenticity” (in the words of Obama’s former campaign manager Jim Messina) to the 44th president’s. In a recent essay titled “The Case for Beto O’Rourke,” the former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer declared that “the whole conversation around Beto has been eerily familiar to me, because these are the exact arguments people made to me when I told them I was considering working for Barack Obama 10 years ago.”

O’Rourke’s critics turn the analogy on its head. “Beto is a lot like Obama, true,” Bruenig acknowledges, but “it’s perhaps time for left-leaning Democrats to realize that may not be a good thing.” A recent Jacobin article called O’Rourke “Obama redux: an attractive, progressive-sounding, comforting figure” before declaring that Obama redux “would be disastrous,” given the former president’s policies on immigration, Wall Street, and war.

But the argument is about more than Obama. The people criticizing O’Rourke for taking fossil-fuel money don’t want to just prevent the Democratic Party from modeling its next presidential candidate on its last president. They want to overturn a model that has long dominated the party. Since the mid-20th century, Democrats have generally treated corporations as legitimate participants in the political process. Today, for the first time since the dawn of the Cold War, a powerful faction within the party wants to treat them as ideological adversaries instead.

In other words, we're having the same exact party-splitting argument that we had in 2016, one that gave us Donald Trump due to enough third-party rodent coitus to allow him to win the electoral college while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million.

Worse, we're once again seeing a party-wide purity test that would not only eliminate 95% of 2020 candidates for President, but eliminate the vast majority of sitting Democrats in Congress.

I don't know where we're headed, but so far any positive outcome from the Green New Deal has already been hijacked by the Purity Police and is already being used against Democrats.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

In a move that shouldn't surprise anyone at this point, Trump regime Attorney General pick William Barr basically auditioned for the job last summer with a secret 20-page memo justifying the firing of Robert Mueller.

William Barr, President Trump’s choice for attorney general, sent an unsolicited memo earlier this year to the Justice Department that excoriated special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into potential obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump, saying it is based on a “fatally misconceived” theory that would cause lasting damage to the presidency and the executive branch.

The 20-page document, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, provides the first in-depth look at Mr. Barr’s views on the special counsel’s Russia investigation, which he would likely oversee if confirmed.

In the memo, Mr. Barr wrote he sent it as a “former official” who hoped his “views may be useful.” He wrote he was concerned about the part of Mr. Mueller’s probe that, according to news reports in the Journal and elsewhere, has explored whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice in asking then-FBI director James Comey to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russia, and by later firing Mr. Comey.

Mr. Barr’s memo, dated June 8 and sent to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, argues that, based on the facts as he understands them, the president was acting well within his executive-branch authority.

In other words, the nominee for Attorney General is on the record as saying that firing Comey was not obstruction of justice.  It gets worse though.

Mr. Barr argued in the memo that a president can be accused of obstructing justice under the relevant legal provision if he knowingly destroyed evidence or encouraged a witness to lie. But Mr. Trump was lawfully exercising his authority in firing Mr. Comey, he wrote. If prosecutors pursue Mr. Trump over his comments to Mr. Comey about Mr. Flynn, according to the memo, it opens the door for every decision that is alleged to be improperly motivated to be investigated as “potential criminal obstruction.”

“I know you will agree that, if a DOJ investigation is going to take down a democratically-elected President, it is imperative to the health of our system and to our national cohesion that any claim of wrongdoing is solidly based on evidence of a real crime—not a debatable one,” Mr. Barr wrote in the memo. “It is time to travel well-worn paths; not to veer into novel, unsettled or contested areas of the law; and not to indulge the fancies by overly-zealous prosecutors.”

There's no doubt anymore that Barr would not only not recuse himself from oversight of the Mueller probe, but that he would choose to interfere with and limit its scope from day one on the job.

He cannot be confirmed without an ironclad promise to recuse, and that will never happen.

StupidiNews!

• The US government faces a partial shutdown tonight if Republicans and Donald Trump cannot get legislation passed to keep the lights on by midnight.
• British police and even military troops were called in to London's Gatwick Airport after several unmanned commercial drones appeared over runways, canceling hundreds of flights.
• Donald Trump is expected to announce the withdrawal of about half of the remaining 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan, just one day after a complete withdrawal from Syria was announced.
• A US appeals court has reversed a lower court decision barring the Trump regime from deporting Iraqis from the Detroit area, the ACLU is considering what further steps to take.
• Nine months after a lethal crash, ride-share giant Uber is once again testing autonomous drivers in the US, but the test program will be significantly scaled back.

Last Call For (Mad) Dog Gone, Jim

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is out in February, with Trump's surprise move to turn Syria over to Putin and Assad the last straw for the general.

Jim Mattis, the four-star Marine general turned defense secretary, resigned on Thursday in protest of President Trump’s decision to withdraw 2,000 American troops from Syria, where they have been fighting the Islamic State.

Mr. Trump announced the resignation in two tweets Thursday evening, and said Mr. Mattis will leave at the end of February.

Officials said Mr. Mattis went to the White House on Thursday afternoon in a last attempt to convince Mr. Trump to keep American troops in Syria. He was rebuffed, and told the president that he was resigning as a result.

Hours later, the Pentagon released Mr. Mattis’ resignation letter, in which he implicitly criticized his commander in chief. Mr. Mattis said in the letter that he believes that the president deserves a defense secretary who is more in tune with his worldview.

“One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships,” Mr. Mattis wrote.

“Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position,” he wrote.

[Read Mr. Mattis’ resignation letter here.]

His departure leaves the Trump administration without one of the few officials viewed as standing between a mercurial president and global tumult. The president said he would name Mr. Mattis’ replacement shortly.

Mattis's letter makes it clear that he believes Trump has no idea and no business being Commander-in-Chief, the old warhorse understands better than most that diplomacy and alliances are the key to America's place in the world, not tanks and bombers.

Mattis will tender his resignation on February 28, meaning at this point nearly all the major Cabinet players in the Trump regime's first two years are effectively gone in various swirling clouds of failure and scandal: Rex Tillerson at State,  Jeff Sessions at Justice, Ryan Zinke at Interior, David Shulkin at Veterans Affairs,  Tom Price at Health and Human Services, Nikki Haley as UN Ambassador, Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, both Mike Flynn and K.T. McFarland as National Security Advisers, and both Reince Priebus and John Kelly as White House Chiefs of Staff.

Wilbur Ross at Commerce and Kirstjen Nielsen at Homeland Security are hanging on by threads due to growing scandals of their own, and after the performance of the stock markets in the last three weeks, don't be surprised if Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin's head is on the block too.

Still, by my count, that leaves zero adults in the room to keep an eye on Trump now, and the rats can't leave the sinking ship of state quickly enough.

Mattis was livid over Syria withdrawal, potential Afghanistan withdrawal & being kept out of decisions by John Bolton. He saw POTUS overruling him on joint chiefs of staff chair as humiliation. He disliked Trump's friendliness w/Putin, among other things. https://t.co/t4hqFtRYPz

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) December 21, 2018

At this point, we're off the map.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

A big story from BuzzFeed News today involving Russian meddling in the 2016 election, not only did the Russians want to help Trump win, they wanted to find dirt on Clinton and her supporters so that they lost.

US Treasury Department officials used a Gmail back channel with the Russian government as the Kremlin sought sensitive financial information on its enemies in America and across the globe, according to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

The extraordinary unofficial line of communication arose in the final year of the Obama administration — in the midst of what multiple US intelligence agencies have said was a secret campaign by the Kremlin to interfere in the US election. Russian agents ostensibly trying to track ISIS instead pressed their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens.

Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers.

Russia’s financial crimes agency, whose second-in-command is a former KGB officer and schoolmate of President Vladimir Putin, also asked the Americans for documents on executives from two prominent Jewish groups, the Anti-Defamation League and the National Council of Jewish Women, as well as Kremlin opponents living abroad in London and Kiev.

In an astonishing departure from protocol, documents show that at the same time the requests were being made, Treasury officials were using their government email accounts to send messages back and forth with a network of private Hotmail and Gmail accounts set up by the Russians, rather than communicating through the secure network usually used to exchange information with other countries.

Analysts at an elite agency within Treasury first warned supervisors in 2016 that the Russians were “manipulating the system” to conduct “fishing expeditions.” And they raised fears that the Treasury’s internal systems could be compromised by viruses contained in emails from the unofficial Russian accounts. But staff continued using the Gmail back channel into 2017, despite repeated internal warnings that Russia could be trawling for sensitive financial records — including Social Security and bank account numbers — to spy on, endanger, or recruit targets in the West.
The Treasury Department refused to tell BuzzFeed News why its officials were communicating with unofficial Gmail accounts at the same time that Russia was sending the suspicious requests, or to say whether it eventually turned over any documents in response. Nor would officials answer any other specific questions about the matter.

In a statement, a spokesperson said: “Treasury does not discuss or comment on confidential communications with foreign governments, including to confirm whether or not they have occurred. We have notified our Office of the Inspector General of these allegations."

The details in the story are pretty shocking, multiple whistleblowers who were ignored, evidence that the Treasury Department's international money-laundering watchdog group was completely compromised by the Kremlin's counterpart agency, and that they were using open Gmail channels to send information that Russia wanted on US citizens.

The fact is the Russians had the Treasury Department infiltrated for years and they wanted financial dirt on both Russia and Trump's enemies.

Hell of a thing.

Ol' Saint Barack Is Back

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the nation's capital.

Watch out, Santa: Former president Barack Obama is coming for your sleigh.

With a fluffy red cap and a bulging bag slung over his shoulder, Obama delivered presents (and more than a few gasps) to the young patients at Children’s National hospital in Northwest Washington on Wednesday.

First on Obama’s list was a group of patients 4 and up who were making snowflakes in one of the hospital’s playrooms. After the excitement died down, the former president handed out jigsaw puzzles (which were his grandmother’s favorite, he told the crowd), Hot Wheels sets, remote-control cars, and glittery nail polish, among other goodies collected by Obama and his staffers. Hey, the guy knows his audience.

“I know they will be talking about it for years to come,” said Kurt Newman, chief executive and president of Children’s National Health System. “At such a busy time of year, when no one wants to be in the hospital, his natural warmth lifted the spirits of those kids, their parents and of each staff member he met along the way.”

Obama Claus also dropped by individual patient rooms for one-on-one visits with children and their parents. He gifted one 12-year-old patient who was nervous about heading to high school next year a piece of advice: “Even the cool kids don’t have it all figured out.”

Before leaving, Obama thanked the staff for working during the holidays and recorded a video message to be played on the hospital’s internal TV system for those he wasn’t able to visit during the trip.

Only a handful of the Children’s National staff knew that the president was coming to town, but word spread quickly during the 90-minute visit. By the time he was headed for the door, a crowd had gathered at a nearby nursing station. The group of doctors, residents and nurses cheered for Obama before busting into an impromptu rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”

Meanwhile, the guy who we decided should succeed this man is busy on a 16-day golf vacation in Florida where the walls are closing in around him and his criminal family.

That's America for you.

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