Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

Sotosyn otfm

re Watergate, Jon Schwarz on the Senate's 1973-style leverage:

There is currently no permanent deputy attorney general, just Acting Attorney General Dana Boente, a former U.S. Attorney who stepped in after Sally Yates, an Obama appointee, was fired. However, Donald Trump’s nominee, U.S. Attorney for Maryland Rod Rosenstein, will undergo confirmation hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee this month.

And those Judiciary Committee members can now ask Rosenstein to commit to naming a special prosecutor before voting whether to send his nomination to the full Senate....

There is direct historical precedence for this. In 1973, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, President Nixon nominated Elliot Richardson, then his secretary of defense, to be attorney general. Judiciary Committee members demanded that Richardson commit to appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Nixon. In fact, they went even further: Richardson was pressured to name who specifically he would appoint before the vote was held, and then both Richardson and his choice — one-time Solicitor General Archibald Cox — were questioned by the committee about the degree of independence Cox would have to pursue the investigation.

Only then did the committee vote to confirm Richardson, in May 1973. And once in office, he did appoint Cox. Richardson only served until that October, when he resigned in the famous “Saturday Night Massacre” rather than follow orders from Nixon to fire Cox, who had subpoenaed White House audio recordings. Solicitor General Robert Bork ended up in charge, and fired Cox.

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/sessionss-recusal-gives-senators-powerful-leverage-to-demand-russia-special-prosecutor/

Hayes used every reporter instinct in his body to suppress laughter.

just befuddled as to why page would even do that insane interview unless someone had a gun to his head

Idk man. It's weird.

We've been a laughing stock since January 1981. I'm not sure why we should care about an image when we keep electing morons and finks.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

reiterating that this is OTMFM, speaking as someone who was 14 in January 1981

like, the first thing that happened in my family was that Reagan killed CETA, which destroyed the budget of the NGO my stepfather worked for. it was personal, and still is.

Xpost Morbs, that was @Trump.

koch brothers' father makes his fortune in RUSSIA laying stalin's oil pipelines, ayn rand comes from RUSSIA to rot the brains of white men who think libertarianism is more legit than FDR, putin of RUSSIA has his friends overpay for bankrupt donnie's properties. i'm beginning to see a pattern

what a country

koch brothers' father makes his fortune in RUSSIA laying stalin's oil pipelines, ayn rand comes from RUSSIA to rot the brains of white men who think libertarianism is more legit than FDR, putin of RUSSIA has his friends overpay for bankrupt donnie's properties. i'm beginning to see a pattern

― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, March 2, 2017

how does it feel
to be in looooove

has this been linked yet:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-sessions-used-political-funds-for-republican-convention-expenses-1488509301

don't think so, damn

can anybody un-paywall that

here's a truncated version:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sessions-used-his-political-funds-for-rnc-trip-where-he-talked-to-russian-ambassador-2017-03-02

so this is obv a new development cos I couldn't find anything else on it, but uhhh I am going to take a sleep aid now cos I can't pull an all night again......

guessing the press decided to let them perjure themselves further before dropping? most of this seems to come from campaign records .......

the narrative that he was speaking in his capacity as a Senator was like a piece of chewing gum holding a shoe together even prior to this

u should go to sleep but here is a good breakdown of the timelines around Session's 2nd meeting w/the spymaster:

https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/837405299833176066

If the WSJ turns on the Trump administration and starts to join the media pigpile, maybe that other Murdoch bastion, FOX News, will stop licking Trump's toes and do a bit of honest reporting, too. Maybe. One may hope at least.

also J.D. Gordon and Carter Page now also reported meeting with russians? and one of flynn's meetings happened at trump towers?

from that Twitter:

And (here it is), on the same day that #Sessions met w/Kislyak, Russia suddenly became optimistic about building good relations w/the US, 8/

this whole Russia thing is like almost being caught cheating on your wife and thinking you got away with it only to have her keep coming back home to check up on you every few hours and moving the mistress to a new hiding spot each time

what

that's a weird analogy.

i have 0% doubt that trump made a deal w/ putin to ease sanctions / improve relationships in exchange for help defeating hillary. not only is the evidence just overwhelming at this point but as conspiracy theories go it's extremely believable. you'd have to think even moderately well of trump to believe he wouldn't make such a deal.

he's also probably dumb enough to have thought at the time that it was no big deal to do that

if you look very closely you'll be able to see the exact moment when trump supporters go from "this is a baseless conspiracy theory" to "of course trump made a deal with putin to help defeat hillary - that was just savvy."

It's like we're living in a real-life version of a Columbo episode. Can't wait to see that pumpkin-headed dimwit's expression when they finally say, "Looks like you're free to go, Mr. Trump. Just one more question, though..."

xps - as things now stand, there's probably about 35% of Americans who'd agree it was no big deal to cut a deal with Putin before the election and let Putin use his intelligence service to help swing the election. bcz, you know, they'll figure the right guy won, so where's the harm?

or that it was hillary and obama who set-up trump with putin

"if we had to turn to Vladimir to save America from the clutches of Lying HIllary, it's a deal with the devil we had to make"

i mean putin would obviously checks a lot of 'great leader' boxes for some american conservatives.

Amazingly, he probably easily could have gotten away with all this, if he wasnt so brazen and idiotic about it all. Not to mention the fact that he associates with the dumbest fuckers on the planet. Remember Guiliani, Roger Stone, and his own sons not-so-subtly hinting that Hillarys emails were about to get leaked?

shirtless, rides horses, murders journalists

It's incredibly ridiculous that these things didn't surface before election day. So many people asleep at the wheel.

Like frogbs said, these aren't exactly masterminds we're dealing with.

go tell 'em how to do their jobs treesh

idk this all worked out pretty well for the media don't you think? blockbuster ratings during the election and now blockbuster ratings after the election.

So many people asleep at the wheel.

I hear there was an enormous oppo dump that was JUST THIS CLOSE to coming out in time.

Come on, it did eventually come out, and it turns out so many people were just inexplicably sitting on it for months/ Hell, it took McCain to bring it public!

It's really quite remarkable. With every passing day - with every passing hour! - the Russia hole gets deeper and deeper, the conflicts and conspiracies get more and more convoluted. It's just nuts how much bad shit is hanging over so many people in his circle.

You're all way more trusting in institutions and process than me to believe that this will bring down Trump in any meaningful way - if Sessions goes, there's always another Republican ghoul waiting in the wings to gut voting rights, the House is never going to abandon him even if a few Senators grew spines or felt scared of re-election.

insane The Americans ad on the NYT just now - it subtly grew and slowly morphed the text of the main page into Russian, flashed, then said "THE AMERICANS new season etc"

in the context of what has been happening that was a bit disturbing

Trump sure does lash out a lot, according to CNN.

Come on, it did eventually come out, and it turns out so many people were just inexplicably sitting on it for months/ Hell, it took McCain to bring it public!

They have explained why they were sitting on it. They couldn't prove any of it was true - and, for the most part, still can't. Had the oppo dump been 'Flynn discussed sanctions' and 'Sessions met with the Russian ambassador but nobody knows what they talked about' - both of which were known to the intelligence services but not journalists - that would have been released.

Idk Old Lunch. Seems like the most fortunate outcome in a general sense, for the Russians, is chaos in America. Always has been, always will be. And chaos is all ensuing. America is the laughing stock of the world right now. It's a spectacular fall from grace, one the world hasn't seen before - if that's too rich then at least a tumble into complete idiodicy for all people living right now. Trumps unpredictability may be a nuisance, but the sheer brain baking stupidity of having a complete tool as president of the USA is a priceless gift to nearly every country, and especially Russia.

There are lots of benefits to Russia however this turns out and a lot of Russian analysts have said it's a mistake to assume Putin ever expected a positive relationship with Trump. Russia benefits internationally from having an incompetent and distracted president. Putin benefits domestically from the idea that US elections a) are a sham (which, I suspect, could be why there was such a heavy emphasis on the process being 'rigged' against Sanders if Russia did leak the emails) and b) secondary to the exercise of power (which is the argument via a visa a 'deep state plot' against Trump. The idea is that critics who hold up the US as a democratic model to aspire to are undermined both by the flawed processes and the farcical outcome.

Another absolutely key benefit domestically has been the ability to point to the fevered reaction to any rumoured contact with Russia or Russians. The message coming through in the media again and again is - 'these people hate us so much that any business, any attempt to talk constructively or any relationship- even with US citizens of Russian origi -n is deemed grounds for attack'.

What would hurt, though, is if Trump tanks the economy or the value of the USD.

the narrative that he was speaking in his capacity as a Senator was like a piece of chewing gum holding a shoe together even prior to this

unless he has a pic of him wearing his Senate beanie w/ propeller on it in the meeting.

They have explained why they were sitting on it. They couldn't prove any of it was true - and, for the most part, still can't. Had the oppo dump been 'Flynn discussed sanctions' and 'Sessions met with the Russian ambassador but nobody knows what they talked about' - both of which were known to the intelligence services but not journalists - that would have been released.

Obviously that stuff about Flynn and Sessions was less essential 9 months ago, when the dossier apparently started circulating and before they had been nominated to anything. What it does sound like the dossier achieved is that a lot of these people/acts are being investigated by the FBI, and increasingly by other parties as well. We wouldn't have learned virtually anything about anything had this stuff not all leaked via the investigative press. And since the stuff has leaked, at least some of the material in the dossier has been verified, to degrees, and with each new big leak it seems we have learned that there are several investigations still in progress. Plus, Steele's credibility has, if anything, actually gone up with the news that no less than the FBI was paying him heed.

Long story short: had the dossier not leaked we might know virtually nothing about the Russia connections, and there would likely have been much less of an impetus to investigate further. Had the dossier leaked last summer, or last fall, maybe it would have been just as unprovable at the time, but maybe much of it would have been proven, or investigations launched, before this idiot became president, not after. Dossier didn't have to be 100% verified, it just needed to be credible enough to push things forward. Because it didn't even take the dossier directly to take down Flynn or possibly take down Sessions, it just partly took the cloud of suspicion the dossier farted into the White House. And until the claims in the dossier are proven false, from the question of blackmail (which is what started the Flynn takedown) to the criminality of a rogue's gallery of Trump people like Page, Manafort and Cohen (is that Felix Sater guy in there, too?), all these targets remain in the crosshair (speaking of which, how many Russians connected with the dossier have been killed/arrested now? 4? 5? More?), and minus the cloak of classified there is mounting public and congressional pressure to dig deeper.

OK, not long story short, but so far this whole mess is going to take several Robert Caro books to unravel.

idk this all worked out pretty well for the media don't you think? blockbuster ratings during the election and now blockbuster ratings after the election.

― Mordy, Thursday, March 2, 2017 11:41 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

most sane thing anybody has said in any of these politics threads in a year

Yeah, and subscriptions to the Post and Times up, too! And um Vanity Fair.

https://m.popkey.co/3b708c/76bRe.gif

Long story short: had the dossier not leaked we might know virtually nothing about the Russia connections, and there would likely have been much less of an impetus to investigate further.

The dossier was published after the investigation into hacking had concluded that Russia was responsible, sanctions were imposed, Manafort had resigned, dozens and dozens of articles claiming connections between Trump and Russia had been published and the FBI was wiretapping individuals. Leaks would have continued in relation to the actual intel (like Flynn's phone call) regardless. Throwing a whole load of other claims, many of which are either inaccurate or implausible into the mix might have added pressure on the White House but gets us no closer to knowing what actually happened.

Had the dossier leaked last summer, or last fall, maybe it would have been just as unprovable at the time, but maybe much of it would have been proven, or investigations launched, before this idiot became president, not after. Dossier didn't have to be 100% verified, it just needed to be credible enough to push things forward.

The argument seems to be that journalists who spent months trying unsuccessfully to make the pieces of a story-of-a-lifetime fit and felt that it was too weak to publish - because they knew bits were untrue or impossible to verify - should have thrown ethics / credibility out of the window and published anyway as it might have swung the election. We know the intelligence services were investigating at the time, it's not like they thought 'eh, as long as the public doesn't know about the MASSIVE FOREIGN PLOT TO TAKE OVER THE US then we'll just let it slide'.

In

In all seriousness, I don't think we are at a place where we can safely make that assumption. We have no idea what the FBI is investigating, was investigating, or why they were investigating it, because of evidence and indicators, or because of pressure. But there is no doubt that Flynn would still be there in the administration without leaks, and Sessions would still be the acting attorney general during these investigations.

Just seems like the voters should have been made aware that this guy was being investigated for collaborating with a foreign power to hack his opponent's campaign. Whether it was leakers who should have done this or if media organizations should have spilled what they knew before their stories were Pulitzer-ready, idk, but whatever damage those types of actions would have done to the integrity of our democracy pales in comparison to the tragedy of Trump's inauguration.