Trump enters the stage

HERE WE GO
Get Ready for Mueller’s Phase Two: The Middle East Connection
Erin Banco
12.13.18 5:00 AM ET
EXCLUSIVE
Caminero/The Daily Beast
Over the past year, the indictments, convictions, and guilty pleas have largely been connected, in one way or another, to Russia. But now, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office is preparing to reveal to the public a different side of his investigation. In court filings that are set to drop in early 2019, prosecutors will begin to unveil Middle Eastern countries’ attempts to influence American politics, three sources familiar with this side of the probe told The Daily Beast.

In other words, the “Russia investigation” is set to go global.

While one part of the Mueller team has indicted Russian spies and troll-masters, another cadre has been spending its time focusing on how Middle Eastern countries pushed cash to Washington politicos in an attempt to sway policy under President Trump’s administration. Various witnesses affiliated with the Trump campaign have been questioned about their conversations with deeply connected individuals from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, according to people familiar with the probe. Topics in those meetings ranged from the use of social-media manipulation to help install Trump in the White House to the overthrow of the regime in Iran.

Now, according to those same sources, the Special Counsel’s Office is ready to outline what cooperating witnesses have told them about foreigners’ plans to help Trump win the presidency. Two sources with knowledge of the probe said Mueller’s team has for months discussed the possibility of issuing new charges on this side of the investigation.

“If this is going to be unveiled, this would be like the surfacing of the submarine but on the other plank which we haven’t seen,” said Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney. “I guess what Mueller has to date has turned out to be pretty rich and detailed and more than we anticipated. This could turn out to be a rich part of the overall story.”

“If this is going to be unveiled, this would be like the surfacing of the submarine but on the other plank which we haven’t seen”
— Harry Litman, former U.S. Attorney

The switch in focus comes as Mueller winds down cooperation with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who participated in 19 interviews with the special counsel’s team. In often-heavily redacted court documents made public over the last two weeks, the Special Counsel’s Office hinted at ways in which Flynn helped with its investigation into links between Trumpworld figures and the Russian government.

But Flynn was also involved in conversations with representatives and influential individuals from other foreign governments, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel—encounters The Daily Beast has reported over the last several months. Flynn’s cooperation with Mueller could bring new details about the scope of the special counsel’s probe into how individuals from those countries offered not only to help Trump win the presidential election, but also how they sought to influence foreign policy in the early days of the administration.

Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, said it is unclear if Mueller’s team will unveil nefarious foreign activity beyond what normally occurs in Washington.

“Many of these characters involved are somewhat unsavory,” he added. “But governments deal with all kinds of people all the time. It might be possible to question the wisdom of some of these connections, but not really possible to impugn the right of a government to deal with shadowy dealers in influence and access.”

Still, the Special Counsel’s Office has taken a keen interest this year in practices that were once considered business-as-usual in Washington. Republican operative Sam Patten pleaded guilty to the rarer-than-rare charge of “causing foreign money to be paid to the 2016-17 Presidential Inaugural Committee.” Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Flynn were both charged with not disclosing parts of their businesses under the Foreign Agents Registration Act—the first indictments of this nature in more than half a century.

It’s unclear exactly how, if at all, this side of Mueller’s probe overlaps with his mandate from the Department of Justice to investigate links and coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign.

Mueller also has the jurisdiction to “investigate and prosecute federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, the special counsel’s investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses,” according to the code.

“For something like this to happen, Mueller would have needed to get approval from [Deputy Attorney General Rod] Rosenstein for this,” Litman said. “It’s not really in the original grant of jurisdiction and it appears then that he made his case to Rosenstein some time ago and that Rosenstein agreed

Mueller’s office has been investigating several meetings attended by George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman and emissary to the UAE. Nader helped arrange the now-infamous meeting between Trump associate and Blackwater founder Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of one of Russia’s sovereign wealth funds—and he also acted somewhat as a go-between with representatives from Gulf state governments, at least one well-connected Israeli, and the Trump team.

Although Nader has been cooperating with the Special Counsel’s Office since March, it is still unclear what evidence he has offered prosecutors during interviews.

In one August 2016 meeting, first reported by The New York Times and later confirmed by The Daily Beast, Nader told the room that the crown princes of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE were eager to help Trump win the election. Also ready to lend his services was Joel Zamel, a self-styled Mark Zuckerberg of the national-security world with deep ties to Israeli intelligence. Zamel had already been in close contact with the Trump team because one of his companies, Psy Group, had drawn up a plan to use social-media manipulation to help Trump clinch the Republican nomination. The company sent former senior campaign aide Rick Gates that proposal.

But the connections between Trumpworld and Psy Group in 2016 were more extensive than previously reported, as The Daily Beast noted in November. Former employees said there were at least two other individuals who reached out to the firm during the campaign, both representing themselves as members of Trump’s inner circle.

Over the past year, Mueller’s team has interviewed a host of employees from Psy Group because of its connection to the Trump camp. Several former employees said the firm never went forward with its plan to help Trump, but others disputed that claim.

Zamel, through his lawyer, has also said publicly that he cooperated with the Special Counsel’s Office. His lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story. The Special Counsel’s Office declined to comment. Nader’s lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Zamel remained close to the Trump team throughout the election and into the transition. Part of the reason? He had an easy in. He had been introduced to Nader years earlier by John Hannah, a former aide to Dick Cheney who now works as a senior counselor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a right-leaning think tank. Hannah has also been in the sights of the Special Counsel’s Office.

Zamel popped back into the mix in the transition period after the election and further offered services, this time for crafting a plan for regime change in Iran. The Daily Beast was the first to report the meeting, which included Nader, Flynn, and a Saudi general, Ahmed al-Assiri. During this time, Nader was also promoting a plan to carry out economic sabotage against Tehran. The meeting appears to be part of Saudi and Emirati efforts to lobby the incoming Trump administration against Qatar and Iran, their top regional competitors. The New York Times reported this year that Nader worked with Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy to urge the White House to take an aggressive stance against the two countries.

NEO
Top Cheney Aide in Mueller’s Sights as Probe Expands
Erin Banco,
Betsy Woodruff

Mueller has also probed Nader’s role in the January 2017 Seychelles meeting between Prince and Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. In his House testimony, Prince said the meeting was a chance encounter and the two met to talk about trade and mineral wealth. But prosecutors this year received evidence that showed the meeting was premeditated. Communications reviewed by The Daily Beast reflect that narrative.

A memo shows the two spoke about a range of topics, including peace between Ukraine and Russia, military operations in Syria, investment in the Midwest, and nuclear weapons. Although RDIF is under U.S. sanctions, it was and is still legal for U.S. individuals to meet with Dmitriev, and, in some circumstances, do business with the fund.

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are hoping to take another shot at questioning Prince next year—part of the new Congress’ effort to investigate the Trump administration. Prince told The Daily Beast this summer that he was cooperating with the Special Counsel’s Office, but it is not clear to what extent. His previous lawyer, Victoria Toensing, is no longer representing him.

Now all of the above, in spite of overwhelming democratic desire for him to fail, my feeling is, without the flair of desire, we are obliged to fall.

We must not accede to the illusion that without the species of style, we are doomed into the pits of boring mediocrity, I’d accept the return to the capital of desired approach into the cradle of near mythical elegance of soul to the drudgery of bored in comeradship without the lord.

New evidence suggesting that President Donald Trump directed his onetime fixer Michael Cohen to break campaign finance laws could constitute an impeachable offense, Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York told CNN’s Jack Tapper Sunday.

Nadler is the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which drafts articles of impeachment.

“They would be impeachable offenses,” Nadler said. “Whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question. But, certainly, they would be impeachable offenses, because, even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.”

Nadler went on to say that the outgoing Republican majority in Congress effectively shielded the president from legal exposure, but that the new Democratic majority would not do so. From his new perch as Judiciary chair, Nadler is expected to investigate the administration on a range of topics.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a charging memo recommending a “substantial” prison sentence for Cohen on Friday. The document alleges that Cohen executed a $130,000 hush payment to Stephanie Clifford, who appears in adult films under the name “Stormy Daniels,” at Trump’s direction.

Prosecutors and election law experts have suggested the payment amounts to an “in kind” campaign contribution which should have been reported to federal officials.

Clifford has since sued Cohen to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement she signed in exchange for the settlement. As Tapper noted in Sunday’s segment, prosecutors have not yet publicly established that Cohen was working at Trump’s behest.

The White House maintained the president’s innocence in a pair of statements late Friday, while Trump himself tweeted that Friday’s filing “totally clears the president.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Nadler said he does not agree with Department of Justice guidelines, which provide that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Those guidelines govern the special counsel’s investigation, though federal courts have never explored the issue in earnest.

Nancy Pelosi Announces Democrat Plan to Go After Trump’s Tax Returns
The Supreme Court could ultimately decide that question and related issues that the Mueller inquiry has raised, like whether Trump must comply with a subpoena.

Nadler Floats Impeachment, Says New Mueller Revelations Could Justify Removing Trump

By Daily Caller
Kevin Daley on December 9, 2018

New evidence suggesting that President Donald Trump directed his onetime fixer Michael Cohen to break campaign finance laws could constitute an impeachable offense, Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York told CNN’s Jack Tapper Sunday.

Nadler is the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which drafts articles of impeachment.

“They would be impeachable offenses,” Nadler said. “Whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question. But, certainly, they would be impeachable offenses, because, even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.”

Nadler went on to say that the outgoing Republican majority in Congress effectively shielded the president from legal exposure, but that the new Democratic majority would not do so. From his new perch as Judiciary chair, Nadler is expected to investigate the administration on a range of topics.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a charging memo recommending a “substantial” prison sentence for Cohen on Friday. The document alleges that Cohen executed a $130,000 hush payment to Stephanie Clifford, who appears in adult films under the name “Stormy Daniels,” at Trump’s direction.

Prosecutors and election law experts have suggested the payment amounts to an “in kind” campaign contribution which should have been reported to federal officials.

Clifford has since sued Cohen to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement she signed in exchange for the settlement. As Tapper noted in Sunday’s segment, prosecutors have not yet publicly established that Cohen was working at Trump’s behest.

The White House maintained the president’s innocence in a pair of statements late Friday, while Trump himself tweeted that Friday’s filing “totally clears the president.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Nadler said he does not agree with Department of Justice guidelines, which provide that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Those guidelines govern the special counsel’s investigation, though federal courts have never explored the issue in earnest.

Nancy Pelosi Announces Democrat Plan to Go After Trump’s Tax Returns
The Supreme Court could ultimately decide that question and related issues that the Mueller inquiry has raised, like whether Trump must comply with a subpoena.


“He directed me to make the payments”: Cohen says Trump instructed illegal hush money payments
Michael Cohen sat down for an interview on ABC after being sentenced to three years in prison.
By Emily Stewart on December 14, 2018 9:10 am

Michael Cohen exits a federal court after a sentencing hearing in December 2018. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer who once said he would take a bullet for the president, would like you to know he’s sorry now that he’s been sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to multiple crimes.

Cohen spoke with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for an interview aired on Good Morning America on Friday. He said he followed a “bad path” out of loyalty to Trump and that he would “not be the villain” of Trump’s story.

Cohen on Wednesday pleaded guilty to tax and bank fraud charges related to his taxi medallion business, lying to Congress about discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow, and campaign finance violations by way of hush money payments to two women who alleged they had affairs with Trump. He has cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and has engaged in what prosecutors in the Southern District of New York described as “selective cooperation” in an effort to reduce his sentence.

Cohen has been on an ongoing apology tour of sorts since coming under legal scrutiny after the FBI raided his home, office, and hotel room in April, and Friday’s interview was a continuation of that. He denied Trump’s claims that Cohen has set out to embarrass the president of the United States.

“It is absolutely not true,” Cohen said.

He emphasized that much of what he did was at the direction of the president, saying that “nothing at the Trump Organization was ever done unless it was run through Mr. Trump.”

Cohen arranged a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from speaking out about her alleged affair with Trump prior to the election, and helped arrange a settlement with National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc. in August 2016 to keep Playboy model Karen McDougal from speaking out about her alleged affair with the president.

“He directed me to make the payments. He directed me to become involved in these matters,” Cohen said.

Of Trump’s denials, he said, “I don’t think there’s anybody who believes that.” He also said that Trump “of course” knew the payments were wrong and that he was “very concerned” about how news of the affairs would affect the 2016 election.

“He knows the truth. I know the truth. Others know the truth,” Cohen told Stephanopoulos. “And here is the truth: People of the United States of America, people of the world, don’t believe what he is saying. The man doesn’t tell the truth. And it is sad that I should take responsibility for his dirty deeds.”

He lamented giving “loyalty to someone who truthfully does not deserve loyalty.”

Don’t feel too sorry for Michael Cohen
Cohen was for years a fierce attack dog for Trump. He once said he would “take a bullet” for the president and was one of his most loyal defenders.

He’s since changed his tune, dropping the loyalty act and instead casting himself as a tragic figure who is deeply sorry for his misdeeds.

Instead of talking about his fealty to Trump, he now talks about his family and the country. He launched a GoFundMe crowdfunding page to help pay his legal bills. Prior to the midterm elections, Cohen, the former Republican National Committee deputy finance chair, encouraged people to go out and vote (against Trump).

While it appears as though Cohen has given helpful evidence to prosecutors in the Mueller investigation and at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), it’s not as though he’s doing so just out of the goodness of his heart. He got caught for multiple crimes, and if he hadn’t, who knows what would have happened.

Cohen on GMA said he’s “done with lying” and “being loyal to President Trump,” saying that his loyalty instead “belongs to my wife, my daughter, my son, and this country.”

Stephanopoulos asked why anyone should believe him — which, given Cohen’s track record, seems fair.

“Because the special counsel stated emphatically that the information that I gave to them is credible and helpful,” Cohen replied. “There’s a substantial amount of information that they possessed that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth.”

© 2018 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

XFrequent Trump critic George Conway ripped the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Friday for saying alleged violations of campaign finance law were not a “big crime” because nobody was killed or robbed.

Conway, whose critiques of Trump have made him a social media star given his marriage to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, altered the presidential oath to include Giuliani’s claim in his tweet.

“‘I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, except where nobody gets killed or robbed,’” Conway tweeted.

Manafort plea agreement brought this out:


Exclusive: Paul Manafort advised White House on how to attack and discredit investigation of President Trump
We now have details as to how the indicted former campaign manager worked with the president to undermine federal law enforcement.
By Murray Waas on December 14, 2018 11:15 am

Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, exits the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse, Feb. 28, 2018 in Washington, DC. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Part of
The Vox guide to Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation
Paul Manafort, who served as the manager for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, provided advice to the president and senior White House officials on the FBI’s Russia investigation during the earliest days of the Trump administration. He gave guidance on how to undermine and discredit the FBI’s inquiry into whether the president, his campaign aides, and family members conspired with the Russian Federation and its intelligence services to covertly defeat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, according to government records and interviews with individuals familiar with the matter. Manafort himself was under criminal investigation by the FBI during this same time, a fact then known to the White House.

Last Friday, special counsel Robert Mueller alleged in court filings that Manafort told “multiple discernible lies” to FBI agents and prosecutors, in violation of the cooperation agreement between Manafort and the special counsel’s office. Among those, Mueller charged, were lies by Manafort to investigators that he had not been in contact with anyone in the White House.

“After signing the plea agreement, Manafort stated he had no direct or indirect communications with anyone in the administration while they were in the administration,” the special counsel said in a court pleading, “and that he never asked anyone to try and communicate a message to anyone in the administration on any subject.” Citing text messages, Manafort’s electronic records, and witness interviews, the special counsel wrote: “The evidence demonstrates that Manafort lied about his contacts.”

Those contacts continued after Trump and his associates knew that Manafort was under investigation by the FBI; after he was indicted by two federal grand juries on more than two dozen felony counts of money laundering, bank fraud, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice; and after having been convicted by a federal jury of 10 of those felonies while awaiting trial on other charges. And now we have learned, thanks to reports from the New York Times and filings in federal court by the special counsel, that those contacts continued even after Manafort became a cooperating witness against the president. The court filings, however, did not disclose any information regarding the subjects of the contacts between Manafort and the White House.

Manafort advised administration officials in the spring and summer of 2017 on how to politically undermine the FBI and Mueller investigation in three ways, according to government records and interviews with three people with knowledge of the contacts. He also gave them advice on how some of the witnesses against both him and the president might be discredited. In short, Manafort and Trump were working together to discredit the investigators as well as potential witnesses.

Manafort urged the president to attack the FBI
First, Manafort advised the president and his political surrogates to more aggressively and directly attack the FBI and other elements of the federal law enforcement apparatus investigating his administration. The goal of Manafort’s advice was to “delegitimize” the investigation itself, one person familiar with the advice explained to me. Manafort wanted nothing less than to “declare a public relations war on the FBI,” this same person said. Another goal was to discredit then-FBI Director James Comey and other senior FBI officials — as it had become increasingly likely they would be witnesses against the president.

Trump later did just that, but it’s unclear what role, if any, Manafort’s advice played in the president deciding to go on the attack. Other, more influential advisers made similar recommendations to Trump. And Trump likely did not need to hear that advice from Manafort or anyone else. As first lady Melania Trump once said of her husband: “As you may know by now, when you attack him he will punch back 10 times harder.”

Manafort also advised a senior administration official, through an intermediary, to attack the Justice Department, the FBI, and Obama administration officials for seeking court-authorized warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to eavesdrop on Manafort and a second campaign aide to Trump, Carter Page, as part of counterintelligence and criminal investigations into whether Manafort, Page, and others had conspired with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

FISA warrants are granted only when the court is presented with sufficient evidence that the person who would be the target of surveillance may be acting on behalf of a foreign power, and the legal threshold to obtain such a warrant is high. The Foreign Intelligence Service Court allowed for the electronic surveillance of Manafort prior to, and subsequent to, his role in the Trump campaign.

Trump alleged that then-President Barack Obama authorized the wiretapping of him and his campaign aides as part of an “illegal” scheme to engage in political espionage. Such allegations have since become central to the president’s attacks on the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Mueller investigation — even though Trump and his allies have yet to produce any evidence to show that any of this is true.

As part of these efforts, Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill — most notably, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the outgoing chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — made public sensitive classified information that endangered the lives of intelligence sources and interfered with ongoing criminal investigations. In May 2018, the Justice Department wrote to Nunes warning that information he was about to make public would “risk severe consequences, including potential loss of human lives, damage to relationships with valued international partners, compromise of ongoing criminal investigations and interference with intelligence activities.” Nunes released much of the information anyway. Trump himself ordered the declassification of other intelligence information that law enforcement and intelligence officials warned would do similar damage.

Attacking the use of FISA warrants had no effect on the outcome of Manafort’s criminal case. But a person with firsthand knowledge of Manafort’s thinking — and that of Manafort’s defense team — told me they believed discrediting the FISA process and, more broadly, the federal criminal investigation of him and other Trump campaign aides would make it more politically feasible for Trump to pardon Manafort.

Manafort urged the president to attack the DNC
Second, Manafort counseled the White House to allege — albeit with no evidence to back up said charges — that the pro-Western Ukrainian government had colluded with the Democratic National Committee to try to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 presidential election. A source with direct knowledge of the matter told me that the White House adopted Manafort’s recommendation in the summer of 2017 to specifically target Alexandra Chalupa, a political strategist and consultant for the DNC, for allegedly working with Ukrainian officials to hurt Trump’s candidacy. Despite a torrent of allegations, no evidence has surfaced that Chalupa or the DNC did anything wrong.

Acting on Manafort’s advice, on July 10, 2017, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders encouraged reporters to investigate how “the Democrat National Committee coordinated opposition research directly with the Ukrainian Embassy.” That same week, Fox News’s Sean Hannity amplified the allegations evening after evening on his show. Likewise, Republicans on Capitol Hill called for investigations of the “Ukrainian matter.” On July 25, 2017, Trump tweeted: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign – ‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G.”

On August 9, 2017, Matthew Whitaker (now the acting attorney general) and a conservative advocacy group he then headed, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), formally asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate the DNC’s dealings with Chalupa. The complaint was largely based on scant evidence and erroneous information; the FEC has given no indication since that it will investigate the matter further.

Even though the allegations had no factual basis to prove anything improper, they were effective propaganda. The White House made its claims shortly after the first public disclosures that Donald Trump Jr. had hosted a Trump Tower meeting between a self-described intermediary for the Russian Federation and himself, Jared Kushner, and Manafort, in which the Russians promised “dirt” on Clinton. The White House was attempting to draw a parallel between its meetings with foreigners and the DNC’s via Chalupa.

But the comparison has always been a facile one, and the White House and its surrogates have not been able to prove any wrongdoing by their counterparts. The Russian Federation — an adversary of the United States — engaged in a covert intelligence effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort agreed to a meeting with individuals they were told were associated with the Russian government to obtain “dirt” on Clinton. Don Jr. in particular was acting on behalf of his father and his presidential campaign. It is illegal for a political campaign to accept any help from a foreign individual, foreign entity, or former government, and illegal not to disclose it; that is, in part, one of the reasons the Trump Tower meeting has also been a focus of special counsel Mueller’s investigation.

Chalupa looked into Manafort’s role as an adviser to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych — who wanted to cut ties with the European Union and become more closely aligned with Russia — and set out to sound the alarm. At one point, she even organized a protest in Manafort’s hometown of New Britain, Connecticut, in which protesters held up signs saying, “Putin, hands off the US election.” But those endeavors were unrelated to her work for the Democratic National Committee, where she had been the co-chair of the DNC’s affiliate the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Council during the 2016 presidential election.

When Chalupa brought up Manafort with anyone at the DNC, they were largely disinterested, and in July 2016, she left her part-time consulting role at the DNC to work full time on her human rights advocacy. The DNC and the Clinton campaign have said that they were uninvolved with her efforts, and no evidence has surfaced to contradict that claim.

Manafort urged the president to attack Clinton and the Steele dossier
Third, in early 2017, Manafort provided the White House specific information on how Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign had sponsored research into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. More specifically, Manafort provided information to the White House as to how to discredit the so-called Steele dossier, a report written by Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk for the British intelligence agency MI6, about alleged ties that Trump and his associates had to Russia. (Manafort provided background to the White House’s attorneys about specific allegations and information in the dossier that he said was suspect.)

Manafort also recommended that Trump play up the fact that the work had been commissioned by a private investigation firm hired by the Clinton campaign, according to a former administration official familiar with the effort.

Manafort’s contacts with the White House continued even after his cooperation with Mueller. Without telling prosecutors, Manafort’s defense attorneys were secretly providing details of their client’s cooperation with the special counsel to the president’s legal team, in an apparent effort by Manafort to undermine the investigation or perhaps win a pardon from Trump. In the process, Manafort may have thus helped Trump tailor his answers to questions recently provided to the special counsel’s office.

Harry Litman, a former US attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, has since commented: “The open pipeline between cooperator and suspect Trump may have been not on only extraordinary but also criminal. … What purpose other than an attempt to ‘influence, obstruct, or impede’ the investigation of the president can be discerned from Manafort’s service as a double agent? And on the Trump side, the communications emit a strong scent of illegal witness tampering.”

In short, in trying to cover up and maneuver for a pardon, Manafort and others may have committed even more crimes. Each “discernible lie” Manafort told is a potential new felony charge of lying to federal investigators, perjury, obstruction of justice, or combination thereof. Of obvious interest to the special counsel is whether others, most notably White House officials, conspired with Manafort to lie, mislead investigators, and possibly obstruct justice, and what, specifically, the president of the United States knew about all of this.

© 2018 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Fox News

OPINIONPublished December 14, 2018 Last Update 10 hrs ago
Gregg Jarrett: Michael Flynn is innocent, wrongly prosecuted by Mueller to hurt Trump
Gregg Jarrett By Gregg Jarrett | Fox News

If you want a textbook example of wrongful prosecution of a man who should never have been charged with a crime, just look at the case of retired Army Lt. Gen. and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

New documents released Friday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller make it clear that Flynn is a victim of an overzealous team of prosecutors absolutely desperate to show that President Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.

The new court filings provide yet more proof that Mueller will stop at almost nothing and run over anyone who gets in his way as he tries to build a case against the president after 19 months of his anti-Trump crusade.

Mueller doesn’t really care about Flynn. He wants to use Flynn to destroy Donald Trump.

Plain and simple, the information made public Friday shows that the FBI lied to Flynn to ensnare him in the crime of making a false statement, even though Flynn did not lie.

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The new documents show without a doubt that Flynn never should have been prosecuted. They show that even the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn about his contacts with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak concluded Flynn was telling the truth. But Flynn’s statements about those contacts later became the basis of the charge against him of lying to the FBI.

Plain and simple, the information made public Friday shows that the FBI lied to Flynn to ensnare him in the crime of making a false statement, even though Flynn did not lie.

During the transition as President-elect Trump prepared to take office, Flynn was the designated national security adviser for the incoming president. As a legitimate part of his job, he had conversations with Ambassador Kislyak. These discussions were perfectly legal.

The Obama administration secretly recorded the phone calls, illegally unmasked Flynn’s name, and then illegally leaked the information to the media. This gave Director James Comey’s FBI a vacuous excuse to contact Flynn to set a trap.

Comey and his top deputy, Andrew McCabe, put the scheme in motion on January 24, 2017, just after Trump became president. Comey admitted in an interview this week that he violated FBI protocols by deliberately taking advantage of a presidential administration that was only four days old and not fully organized.

McCabe telephoned Flynn at the White House and lied to the Trump adviser, telling Flynn he wanted to talk about the “significant media coverage” of the leaked story.

McCabe pushed Flynn not to have a lawyer present and lulled Flynn into believing the meeting would be just an informal discussion of no legal consequence. McCabe and the agents agreed in advance not to tell Flynn the truth – that they had in their hands a transcript of the secretly recorded Kislyak conversation.

Flynn’s recollection of the conversation did not perfectly match the transcript. But that, by itself, is not enough under the law to charge someone with “knowingly and willfully” falsifying a material fact. Besides, the interviewing agents determined that Flynn was not being deceptive and did not lie. That should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t.

Although Acting Attorney General Sally Yates “was not happy” about Comey’s scheme, she didn’t stop it. Instead, she joined in and marched over to the White House and engineered the firing of Flynn as national security adviser.

The plain truth is that if Mueller had been forced to prove his case in court against Flynn on a charge of lying to FBI, Mueller would have lost.

The new court filings make clear that Mueller’s mission has gone from prosecution to persecution – and Flynn has become “collateral damage” in what amounts to an out-of-control effort to overturn the decision of the American people to elect Donald Trump as our president.

Why did Flynn plead guilty if he didn’t commit a crime?

As I wrote in my book, “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump,” Flynn pleaded guilty not because he lied, but because Mueller crushed him financially and threatened to take legal action against the retired Army general’s son. Flynn had to spend so much on defense attorneys that he was forced to sell his home, and Mueller’s prosecution made it impossible for Flynn to find employment.

Flynn has devoted his adult life to serving the United States, spending 33 years in the Army before taking the position of national security adviser for President Trump. He played a key role in developing our nation’s counterterrorism strategy and dismantling terrorist networks in Iraq and Afghanistan and rose to become director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Flynn’s reward for his decades of dedicated service? Being caught in the equivalent of a perjury trap set by the FBI, pressured to plead guilty to a felony charge of making false statements to the FBI when he was actually an innocent man, and now facing sentencing Tuesday. This is an enormous miscarriage of justice.

Even Mueller recognizes that Flynn does not deserve a long prison term. A sentencing memo Mueller filed in U.S. District Court in Washington earlier this month for Flynn recommends little or no prison time for the retired general.

And as I wrote in a column for Fox News published Dec. 5, the sentencing memo “isn’t a ‘smoking gun’ showing President Trump colluded with Russians to win the 2016 presidential election or did anything else illegal. In fact, the memo isn’t even a squirt gun. In terms of President Trump’s conduct, it amounts to nothing of any significance.”

The documents released Friday – some heavily redacted – were made public because U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered prosecutors to turn over the government’s files dealing with the FBI’s questioning of Flynn that led to the charge against him of lying to the FBI.

The judge ordered the files to be submitted to his court after attorneys for Flynn said the FBI discouraged Flynn from bringing a lawyer to the interview and said the FBI failed to advise him that he could be charged with a crime for making false statements. Those claims by Flynn’s lawyers are true, the new documents show.

The new material included notes taken by then-FBI Deputy Director McCabe after talking with Flynn to arrange for Flynn to be interview by the FBI.

Now that he has the new information, will Judge Sullivan want to know why Mueller charged Flynn with lying if the only witnesses (the FBI agents) determined he was not?

The judge may also want to ask Flynn if he pleaded guilty to a crime he did not commit. Was he coerced? Did the feds threaten to prosecute his son? Were there financial reasons that caused him to plead?

In addition, Judge Sullivan could ask Mueller’s team if they gave Flynn’s lawyers what is known as “exculpatory” evidence showing that the FBI concluded Flynn was telling the truth. Under law, they are required to do so.

The bottom line is that the only wrongful or illegal conduct involving Michael Flynn was the conduct of the FBI and the anti-Trump zealots that make up Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors.

An innocent man and a patriot who spent his life defending our country has seen his reputation ruined, has been destroyed financially, and now faces sentencing for a crime he didn’t commit.

This is the kind of thing that happens in corrupt Third World dictatorships. It is not what should happen in the United States of America. Michael Flynn is the victim of a grave injustice and Robert Mueller, James Comey and everyone else involved in framing Flynn should be ashamed of themselves for their actions against him.

Gregg Jarrett joined FOX News Channel (FNC) in 2002 and is based in New York.

Now this is equally believable, as far as it goes to put a counterweight reason to those who are politically inclined to want to believe in this explanation.Some would argue that this is nothing but politics as usual, however this is different in that key concepts are being undermined revolving around Constitutional foundations, as the very basis for the intended formation of the country are being challenged, on an open court, that is itself is under challenge.

Democratic institutions are beginning to besubmerged between their causa suit, their utility and and functional expediency, brought into being by the coming of the new programmed artificial intelligence.

Particularly, conservative values are at stake here, in defining the brave new world nationally and internationally, where there does not appear to be a difference in the intended outcome, but only the means and ways of getting there, because of what is becoming appearent by now: the significant modus operans .

The world as it should be, to preserve past ideals stretching backwards with
a reactionary force , which does offer preset designs, of accumulated political wisdom, even within the idea that the frailty and misguidance of the player(s) is diminished in importance by the magnitude of the accruing of emphasis of what basic values should consist of, as a counterbalance to the idea that the ages of historical necessity are over.

This could arguably lead to a phase, where reverse arguably, the necessity of what now, has famously coined as collusion could be described and destined.

On the flip side:

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His worst nightmare: Trump’s life under a legal microscope
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 11:47 AM EST, Sat December 15, 2018

Washington (CNN) Weeks of devastating legal revelations have left Donald Trump’s political career clouded by criminality and his life, presidency and business empire under assault by relentless prosecutors on multiple fronts.

Days of court filings, flipped witnesses, damaging disclosures and sentencing hearings over the last month have delivered blows that appear to expose Trump and key associates to deep legal and political jeopardy.

But the head-spinning volume of material being churned out by special counsel Robert Mueller and other jurisdictions often also blurs the bigger picture of a presidency beset by a span of scandal that is staggering in its breadth.

Simply put, Trump’s campaign, transition, inaugural committee and presidency are now under active criminal investigation. His business – the Trump Organization – and his defunct charity – The Trump Foundation are also under investigation (the charity investigation is a civil one). His college – Trump University – has already been deemed a fraud.

The President himself has been indirectly fingered by New York prosecutors overseen by his own Justice Department of directing criminal attempts to subvert campaign finance laws.

Then there is a civil lawsuit brought by Democratic-led states rooted in claims that Trump’s refusal to fully disengage from his businesses means he is using his position to profit from deals in his hotel chain that contravene the Constitution.

The many layers of investigation are about to get even more comprehensive, with multiple committees in the new Democratic House launching oversight into Trump’s personal finances, political operation and White House next year.

Many of those who chose to align themselves with Trump have meanwhile fallen foul of the law, sometimes for offenses unrelated to the President but which have offered prosecutors a window into his own conduct.

His former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is in jail. His former attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen is headed behind bars next year. His deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates is now a confessed felon. George Papadopoulos, a former member of his foreign policy advisory board, just got out of jail after flipping. His former national security adviser Michael Flynn may only avoid prison after turning on his former boss.

Questions continue to swirl around Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone among other things about what he knew when about Wikileaks email dumps. And people even closer to Trump, such as his son Don Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner, cannot be sure they are in the clear although all, including the President, profess innocence and downplay Mueller’s investigation.

Yet Mueller’s success in securing plea deals from the likes of Flynn, Gates and Cohen is adding to the President’s apparent legal peril.

In one of the more surreal twists of the Trump presidency, there is a conversation going in Washington about how Trump might have to win re-election to outrun a statute of limitations on campaign finance allegations.

This trail of dishonesty and deceit is evident even before Mueller has delivered what could ultimately be his most explosive findings – whether he has found evidence that the President’s campaign cooperated with Russia and whether he obstructed justice in the firing of former FBI chief James Comey and a bid to thwart Mueller.

A scandal-ridden presidency
Michael Cohen sentenced to three years in prison after admitting he covered up Trump’s ‘dirty deeds’
A full assessment of the depth of Trump’s political and legal predicament may only become clear next year. But the President has already expressed concern, according to CNN reporting, that he could be impeached.

But even if all the investigations stopped now and he was cleared of all wrongdoing, Trump would still be remembered for presiding over one of the most scandal-ridden presidencies of modern history.

Trump and his supporters maintain that there is no smoking gun and that the President’s problems all stem from rogue prosecutors from the “deep state” that has always hated Trump. The President’s cheerleaders on conservative channels meanwhile take up his cry that the democratic will of voters is at risk of being besmirched by a “fake news” media that is hostile towards him.

“Nobody but for me would be looked at like this. Nobody,” Trump said in a Fox News interview this week, referring to claims he told Cohen to pay off women who claimed affairs with him to avoid hurting his campaign.

Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted to CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Thursday that Trump’s presumed foes in the media were willfully ignoring his arguments that he did not break the law.

“It’s important and credible to the rest of the country, except for the people so blinded by their hatred toward him or their wishful thinking that he won’t be President if they just close their eyes and click their heels three times,” she said. “Get over it.”

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is offering the defense that Cohen should not be believed because he is a convicted liar.

Yet, the growing pile of evidence from Mueller and other prosecutors is rendering the denials of culpability from Trump and his supporters less credible.

As more damaging details emerge, Trump is indulging in his habitual practice of abandoning a position that has become untenable and constructing a new reality that better suits him.

Once for instance, Trump denied that he knew about hush payments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, he says he didn’t tell Cohen to break the law.

“As a lawyer, Michael has great liability to me!” Trump tweeted on Thursday.

But the narrative that Cohen is a liar so Trump is in the clear ignores crucial details of Mueller’s filings.

Corroboration
The special counsel has made clear in court documents that he has corroboration for claims by his cooperating witness Cohen. The President’s fixer also said as much on Friday.

“There is a substantial amount of information that they possessed that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth,” Cohen said in an interview with ABC News.

Trump’s repeated mantra of “no collusion” with the Russians is also looking increasingly threadbare. There were multiple contacts between Trump’s associates and Russians during the campaign and transition – at least 16 according to CNN’s reporting.

And many of those associates have since lied about the interactions, giving the impression that they are trying to cover something up.

The President’s claims that he had nothing to do with Russia have been undermined by revelations in the Cohen case that he was pursuing a potentially lucrative deal to build a luxury tower in Moscow until deep into a campaign that was simultaneously the target of a meddling effort by the Kremlin’s spies.

And Mueller is clearly probing whether there is a nexus between Trump’s business ventures and Russia’s election interference.

In a sentencing memo earlier this month, he wrote that the Trump Tower project “occurred at a time of sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the US presidential election.”

It is, of course, possible that all of these Trump associates were operating outside the knowledge of the President. Statements in documents filed by Mueller and other jurisdictions are prosecutorial in nature and may not reveal mitigating circumstances that Trump could use in his defense

It is unclear at this point whether the US attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York would be able to prove that Trump knowingly asked Cohen to break campaign finance laws.

But the idea that Trump knew nothing – about Russia attempts to infiltrate his campaign, about hush payments or other key aspects of cases in which is involved – appears unlikely, given his omnipotent role in his inner circle.

And he has already proven to have lied, if Mueller is to be believed, about key aspects of the Russia investigation and his interaction with Cohen.

Still, many legal experts believe that if wrongdoing is found, the President is immune from prosecution owing to his unique constitutional position.

If his only transgression does turn out to be on campaign finance, it seems unlikely that Democrats in the House will risk an impeachment process based on charges that may fall short of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

So far, Trump’s firewall of Republican support in the Senate, where any subsequent impeachment trial would take place is standing firm.

Whether that would start crumbling should Mueller produce a damning report that causes a fracturing of Trump’s political power base as an election approaches in 2020 remains untested.

While much has been learned about the President’s legal exposure in recent days, the true extent of his liability remains to be seen.

For now, however, it’s clear: the President’s legal and political position is far more perilous than it was weeks ago and he has reason to be worried about a flurry of investigations that are digging deep into his private, personal, business and political life.

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So much:

The Trump Impeachment
Business ConflictsUncategorized
Jacking up rents illegally and pocketing the profits: yet another scam by a sleaze named Trump
By Dartagnan / Daily Kos (12/15/2018) - December 15, 2018279

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CBC News / YouTube Trump on Kavanaugh vote delay for…
CBC News / YouTube
Donald Trump should never have been allowed to view the White House lawn from any vantage point except a television set hooked up for the inmates in the common room of a state penitentiary. According to the New York Times, before he engaged in defrauding investors through his Trump University scam, before his habitual, pre-Declaration of Bankruptcy stiffing of his employees and contractors , even before his off-camera antics harassing or sleeping with various women and paying them for their silence, the current Occupant of the Oval Office was engaged in ripping off the tenants of properties owned by his father, and pocketing the profits.

They were collateral damage as Donald J. Trump and his siblings dodged inheritance taxes and gained control of their father’s fortune: thousands of renters in an empire of unassuming red-brick buildings scattered across Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

The Times investigation of the latest in Trump’s seemingly bottomless history of perpetrating frauds and scams to bilk people out of their money details Trump’s jacking up the rents of thousands of middle-class residents who had the misfortune to live in one of the Trump-family owned apartment residences during the 1990s. Many of these properties had been financed by Fred Trump through low-cost government loans and were therefore subject to rent regulation.

But the residents of these thousands of apartments, many of whom were retirees living on a fixed income, suddenly began to see inexplicable rises in their regulated rents.

As it turned out, a hidden scam lurked behind the mysterious increases. In October, a New York Times investigation into the origins of Mr. Trump’s wealth revealed, among its findings, that the future president and his siblings set up a phony business to pad the cost of nearly everything their father, the legendary builder Fred C. Trump, purchased for his buildings. The Trump children split that extra money.

The “padded costs” translated into higher rents imposed on these tenants, as the younger Donald and his partners could point to the increased costs of maintaining them. Except the costs were phony—Trump and his family continued to negotiate for “everything from roofs to window cleaner,” according to the Times report. The costs were inflated through a sham organization ostensibly created (on paper alone) as a “purchasing agent” for Fred Trump’s properties, and it was owned by Donald Trump, his siblings, and a cousin. The “purchasing agent,” called “All County Building Supply and Maintenance,” (or “All County BS,” for short?), would issue checks to vendors servicing Trump’s buildings but would receive reimbursement from Fred Trump’s apartments with a 20-50% markup. The “markup,” which actually represented a tax-free “gift” to Trump and his cohorts, was then used to justify gouging apartment dwellers in Trump’s buildings with higher rents.

These fraudulently jacked up rents amounted to an increase of 30-60$ per month on a yearly basis, which many renters could doubtless afford. But as the Times points out, the “padded invoices still affect the rent, as the increase has compounded over the years:”

The padded invoices have been baked into the base rent used to calculate the annual percentage increase approved by the city. The sum total of the rent overcharges cannot be calculated from available records. As a way to appreciate the scope of the impact, a onetime $10 increase in 1995 on all the 8,000 apartments involved would put the total overpaid by tenants at more than $33 million to date, an analysis of approved rent increases shows.

All of these profits inured to Donald Trump and his family. The renters who were overcharged, like all victims of Trump’s schemes, were left holding the bag. Some are suing, but their rights are limited by both the statute of limitations and limitations on damages, as well as the fact that many of the properties have since been sold, with the Trump family moving on to bigger and better scams.

Michael Grinthal, supervising lawyer with the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit legal services and advocacy group, said that the current owners would be held responsible for any damages, but that those owners could have a claim against the president and his siblings.

“If I was talking to those tenants right now, I’d say: ‘Do it. Go,’” Mr. Grinthal said. “This case should be fought.”

Meanwhile Donald Trump is heading out on his 16 day vacation to Mar-a-Lago, where he can spend some quiet time figuring out other ways to rip people off.

An external reaction to an increasing rate of devaluation of internal systemic structural decomposition, is to forge more coherent external recomposition. At critical points , damage controls can be set up, again with increasing uncertainty, so as to most.clearly best simulated conflict turn into real conflict .
The simulations need to be increasingly verified by icreasing scrutiny, whereby such scrutiny will degrade the system into more and more instability, setting up a stage of.near indifference between inner and outer pressure.

This is the process leading to dictatorships, and ultimately wars.

More finally schematized differential info feed, leads to more reified acceptance of such. The whole cyber war may result in the opposite which may be foreseen.

Rudy

Fox News’ Chris Wallace Tears Into Rudy Giuliani: ‘I’m Asking You For The Truth, Sir’
“We’re talking about something that doesn’t matter,” Giuliani claimed about Trump’s alleged hush money payments.
By Hayley Miller
12/16/2018 01:00 PM ET
|

Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday pleaded with President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to simply tell the truth during a wide-ranging, contentious interview.

The former New York City mayor danced around Wallace’s questions on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and whether Trump had been truthful about hush money payments made to women who say they’ve had affairs with the president.

“Did the president know about the hush money payments or not?” Wallace asked Giuliani, referring to payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Federal prosecutors say the payments violated campaign finance laws.

Whether it happened or it didn’t happen, it’s not illegal.
Rudy Giuliani on hush money payments
In typical Giuliani fashion, the attorney appeared to contradict himself several times about whether Trump directed his former personal attorney Michael Cohen to make the payments. Cohen has told federal prosecutors Trump knew about the payments and told him to make them.

“We’re talking about something that doesn’t matter,” Giuliani said. “Whether it happened or it didn’t happen, it’s not illegal.”

Wallace interrupted, “You’re moving shells around on me. Either it happened or it didn’t happen.” But Giuliani defended himself by claiming, “That’s what lawyers do all the time.”

“I’m asking you for the truth, sir,” said Wallace, visibly frustrated by the circular exchange.

.@RudyGiuliani on if President Trump will sit down for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller: “good luck

“Good luck,” Giuliani said of Mueller’s team. “After what they did to Flynn ― the way they trapped him into perjury. … They’re a joke. Over my dead body.”

Earlier Sunday, Giuliani appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” where he bashed Cohen over his statements to federal prosecutors. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison last week after pleading guilty to lying to Congress and violating campaign finance laws at Trump’s direction.

“Pathetic,” Giuliani told ABC of Cohen. “The man is pathetic

trump was on a desperate tear yesterday, thinking that he could twitter his way out of the impending indictments for his criminal enterprise. Among his many tweets was one attacking Michael Cohen as a “Rat”.

The tweet caught the attention of many legal analysts and those experienced in the methods of the mob and they responded brutally and accurately on twitter. The word “rat” is used by mobsters against members who tell the truth to law enforcement. And many pointed out that the tweet is a tacit admission of guilt by trump.

Flynn: is this a crucial moment?

Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser who began cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation about a year ago, will be sentenced Tuesday for lying to the FBI.

Flynn’s appearance in D.C. federal court before U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan will be viewed as a key milestone in an investigation that has plodded along for 19 months amidst high public intrigue and increasing vitriol from the president.

It is arguably the most highly anticipated sentencing yet in Mueller’s investigation and comes on the heels of the three-year sentence handed down to Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen for a slew of federal charges that sprung from details uncovered by Mueller’s sprawling probe.

Flynn is unlikely to be sentenced to significant prison time. Citing his “substantial assistance” in ongoing investigations, Mueller recommended a lenient sentence for Flynn and has not asked for any jail time.

Very briefly, failing to unify through a failure of ideal systemic structural, institutional and practical methods of running society, there does not appear to evolve any other way of finding a functional exit, other then re-pressing sources of information with their derivatives.

Bit the big question revolves around the ability to discern intentional manifestations of the very predictable social consequences of no social understanding of the hyperbolic effect that cyber-space will certainly have on society.

This may become an inviolate issue facing society on the whole.

The early Kantianism cannot so easily mesh a eurocentric conflict (French/German) with the conceptual US pragmatic -utilitarian processes which determine , and must determine
the course which is certain to demand them.

The stage set , the players all reading carefully scripted. Parts, the war of nerves this old hat, to prepare for the brave new world, but again a fissure to occur to usher in the miracle that no one would have expected , nothing but nothing here which has not happened before Pontius washing jamds.
The darkness lidts the veil of its seventh fold, the sepulchre is well guarded.

Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein lamented on CNN Tuesday morning that the President of the United States acts more like a “common grifter” and a “con man” than anything else.

“I looked up the definition of grifter the other day in the dictionary, and it seems to suit Donald Trump perfectly in terms of the way he has conducted himself all his life, but including, astonishingly enough, in his presidency,” Bernstein said.

CARL BERNSTEIN: We’ve never seen a President of the United States who actually acts more in some ways like a common grifter. I looked up the definition of grifter the other day in the dictionary, and it seems to suit Donald Trump perfectly in terms of the way he has conducted himself all his life, but including, astonishingly enough, in his presidency.

The idea of being a grifter while at the same time being President of the United States, a flim-flam artist, a con man, someone who lies, somebody who uses instruments at his command to obtain and do things that are untoward and underhanded.

Andrew Napolitano

Putin warns the threat of nuclear war should not be underestimated
Holly Ellyatt | @HollyEllyatt
Published 4 Hours Ago Updated 2 Hours Ago
CNBC.com
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that the threat of a nuclear war should not be discounted and criticized the U.S.’ move to withdraw from an international nuclear treaty.
Speaking at his annual media press conference, Putin was asked by one journalist to assess the threat of nuclear war or a third world war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the threat of a nuclear war should not be discounted and criticized the U.S.’ move to withdraw from an international nuclear treaty.

Speaking at his annual media press conference, Putin was asked by one journalist to assess the threat of nuclear war or a third world war.

“The danger of the situation is being downplayed,” Putin told the audience of over 1,000 journalists at his year-end question and answer session.

“It now seems to be impossible, something without crucial importance, but at the same time if something like this would happen this would lead to the collapse of the entire civilization and maybe our planet. So this is an important question,” he said via a translator.

“Unfortunately, we have this trend to underestimate the current situation. There are dangers, there are risks in our day-to-day lives. What are those risks? First and foremost, the collapse of the international system of arms control, of moving away from an arms race,” he said.

Speaking at his annual news conference, Putin said it was hard to predict what the consequences would be of a U.S. withdrawal from the landmark Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987. He also stated that an escalation of tensions that could lead to war should not be allowed to happen.

“Now they’re making another step and they are withdrawing from the INF treaty so what’s going to come out of that? It’s hard to imagine what will come next,” he said.

Putin’s comments come after President Donald Trump said in October that he will withdraw the U.S. from the long-standing “Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty,” or INF treaty, citing Russian violations of the deal. Trump says that Russia has violated the arms agreement by building and fielding the banned weapons “for many years.” Russia has denied it is in violation of the deal.

The 1987 treaty prohibits Russia and the U.S. from possessing, producing or test-flying a ground-launched cruise missile having a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers or “to possess or produce launchers of such missiles.”

WATCH: The Trump-Russia ties hiding in plain sight

Economic progress
Putin started the press conference Thursday morning by outlining Russia’s economic statistics and forecasts for the coming year.

Growth is estimated to have reached 1.8 percent in 2018, he said, and industrial output is estimated to have grown 3 percent in this year. He said inflation was at an “acceptable level” (it stood at 3.8 percent, as of November) and that decreasing unemployment was encouraging and would stand at 4.8 percent in 2018.

“For the first time since 2011, we see a budget surplus and this is going to be around 2.1 percent of (gross domestic product),” he added.

Putin’s annual media question and answer session comes at an challenging time for the economy.

Several key Russian sectors are subject to Western sanctions including the banking, infrastructure, oil and military industries. Sanctions were imposed after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and role in a pro-Russian uprising in east Ukraine. There are restrictions on numerous individuals and entities alleged to have links to the government.

The major oil exporter has also had a torrid time with volatile oil prices over the last year. A barrel of Brent crude cost around $67 in January. But the price zig-zagged throughout the spring and summer and reached around $85 in October, before falling to its current level of $55. Russia formed a close relationship with fellow oil producer, and OPEC leader, Saudi Arabia, to stabilize prices by cutting production.

Amid fears of a drop in global supply both producers agreed to pump more oil in summer. In early December, that decision was reversed with the alliance deciding to cut again. Despite Russia’s reliance on oil exports for much of its growth, Putin once again stressed the need for structural reforms and diversification when asked by one journalist why growth was not higher.

“We cannot provide for the necessary rate of economic growth unless we change the structure of our economy,” he said.

Putin’s annual press conference is largely seen as a way for the Kremlin to show it is transparent and accountable but the level of questioning is not usually overtly critical on Putin.

Trump’s pick for attorney general warns Mueller’s obstruction inquiry ‘fatally misconceived’ in memo to DOJ
By Ariane de Vogue and Laura Jarrett, CNN
Updated 9:29 AM EST, Thu December 20, 2018

(CNN) Former Attorney General William “Bill” Barr, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, reached a decisive and controversial conclusion that Trump’s interactions with ex-FBI Director James Comey would not constitute obstruction of justice, according to a copy of a newly released June 2018 memo to senior Justice officials.

The fact that Barr weighed in on such a sensitive issue and would be poised to oversee special counsel Robert Mueller’s work, if confirmed as attorney general, will undoubtedly now thrust his nomination into greater controversy. Barr discussed the memo with Trump and told him it would likely come up during his Senate confirmation, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN.

Barr has not shied away from defending Trump’s firing of Comey, but the June 8 memo – first reported by The Wall Street Journal and provided to lawmakers late Wednesday – offers a detailed analysis of one of the most consequential episodes of Trump’s presidency, concluding that while he’s “in the dark about many facts,” Mueller’s obstruction inquiry was “fatally misconceived.” Barr adds that Trump asking Comey to let go of the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn and later firing Comey were within his powers as head of the executive branch.

“Mueller should not be able to demand that the President submit to an interrogation about alleged obstruction,” Barr wrote. “If embraced by the Department, this theory would have potentially disastrous implications, not just for the Presidency, but for the Executive branch as a whole and the Department in particular.”

The full repercussions of the President’s behavior toward Comey are yet to be resolved, as the matter is still under investigation by Mueller.

Barr’s memo to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, who leads the Office of Legal Counsel, was unsolicited, according to a Justice Department official. The official said Barr had “no non-public information about the Special Counsel’s investigation when preparing the memorandum (and still has none),” which he wrote as a “former official” when he was a law firm partner and private citizen. At the time, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was still in office, but his job security was always less than rock-solid, as the President regularly lambasted him for stepping aside from the Russia investigation.

“I have admired Bill Barr for decades, and I believe that he will be an outstanding Attorney General,” Rosenstein said in a statement Wednesday night. “Many people offer unsolicited advice, directly or through the news media, about legal issues they believe are pending before the Department of Justice. At no time did former Attorney General Barr seek or receive from me any non-public information regarding any ongoing investigation, including the Special Counsel investigation. His memo has had no impact on the investigation.”

Barr’s memo is sure to draw significant scrutiny now from Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill already troubled by his past comments on the special counsel’s investigation.

Barr previously wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post entitled, “Trump made the right call on Comey,” criticizing the former FBI director for flouting longstanding Justice Department protocols when he announced in July 2016 that he wouldn’t recommend charges against Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified info during her time as secretary of state, usurping the role of the attorney general at the time.

“I think it is quite understandable that the administration would not want an FBI director who did not recognize established limits on his powers,” he wrote.

Later, Barr called the special counsel’s obstruction of justice inquiry “asinine” in a June 2017 interview with the Hill.

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Note: Barr’s reasoning is as full of.holes as the under lying issue of collusion.

How can it be argued at the same time that the president as a person is at fault, hence, he is tarnishing the office while using a reverse argument that any abrogation of the power of the presidency will be forever tarnished?

I do realize that Saint Anselm’s ontological argument is arguably relevant, but Trump is nowhere close to an ideal statesman such as Marcus Aurelius, for example.

On such high plateau that is the minded argument that it fails. It is totally fallacious.

Mattis quits, says his views aren’t ‘aligned’ with Trump’s
By Jeremy Diamond and Barbara Starr, CNN
Updated 6:22 PM EST, Thu December 20, 2018

article video
Washington (CNN) Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned Thursday on the heels of President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw troops from Syria, citing irreconcilable policy differences in a move that took Washington by surprise.

“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,” Mattis wrote in his letter to the President.

Mattis’ resignation letter amounts to a rebuke of several of Trump’s foreign policy views, with the outgoing defense secretary touting the importance of US alliances and of being “unambiguous” in approaching adversaries like Russia and China. It is devoid of any praise for the President.

In Syria withdrawal, Trump discards advice from allies and officials
In Syria withdrawal, Trump discards advice from allies and officials

The news emerged at a chaotic moment in Trump’s presidency: The US government is teetering on the edge of a government shutdown, the Trump administration is about to face the hot light of Democratic investigations and the President is grappling with the fallout of a series of firings and resignations. Trump, seeking to downplay the news, stepped out in front of the resignation, spinning Mattis’ resignation as a retirement.

Mattis did not explicitly cite his opposition to the President’s planned withdrawal of US troops in Syria – which caught US allies off guard – but the retired four-star general was privately adamant in urging Trump against the pullback.

It was just the latest issue on which Mattis has sought to position himself as a bulwark against some of the President’s rashest decisions, but his relationship with the President has grown increasingly fractured in recent months and Mattis’ efforts to deter Trump on key issues less influential.

In his letter, Mattis pointedly stated that the strength of the US depends in part on the strength of its alliances around the globe, many of which have become notably frayed under Trump.

“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. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies,” he added.

How it happened
Mattis met with Trump one-on-one in the Oval Office, a senior White House official told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Mattis told Trump he was going to be leaving and offered his resignation letter.

“They had differences on some issues,” the official said, but couldn’t say if it was over Syria. “Just over the course of the last couple of months,” this person added.

Trump first announced Mattis’ departure in a tweet.

“General Jim Mattis will be retiring, with distinction, at the end of February, after having served my Administration as Secretary of Defense for the past two years,” Trump tweeted.

Trump touted the “tremendous progress” that has been made during Mattis’ tenure at the helm of the Defense Department and thanked Mattis for his service.

Trump said a successor “will be named shortly.”

Mattis and the President’s other top national security advisers opposed Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria.

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And reactions, including bipartisan republicans:

Shaken, saddened, scared: Washington erupts over Mattis resignation
By Nicole Gaouette, CNN
Updated 11:34 PM EST, Thu December 20, 2018

Washington (CNN) Shaken, disappointed, saddened and scared – those were just some of the reactions in a bipartisan outpouring of shock and concern as lawmakers reacted Thursday to the news that Defense Secretary James Mattis had resigned over President Donald Trump’s policy decisions.

“Just read Gen. Mattis resignation letter,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “It makes it abundantly clear that we are headed towards a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation, damage our alliances & empower our adversaries.”

“This chaos,” Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich said on Twitter, “both foreign and domestic, is putting America in danger and must stop immediately.”

RELATED: Mattis quits, says his views aren’t ‘aligned’ with Trump’s

At the Pentagon, military officers and civilian officials expressed dismay at the news, but the overriding sentiment was shock. “People are stunned,” CNN’s Ryan Browne reported.

‘The wheels may be coming off’
“This is scary,” tweeted Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Secretary Mattis has been an island of stability amidst the chaos of the Trump administration.”

News of Mattis’ resignation broke as Trump faced an imminent government shutdown, the Dow had plunged more than 1,200 points since Monday and the President was being blasted for foreign policy decisions. On Wednesday, Trump had announced that the US will pull its troops from Syria because “we have defeated ISIS,” and earlier Thursday, CNN’s Jake Tapper reported that officials throughout the administration were bracing themselves for Trump to make an announcement about the US presence in Afghanistan.

US military ordered to begin planning to withdraw about half the troops in Afghanistan
“The wheels may be coming off,” said a conservative House Republican who supports Trump, commenting on the news about Mattis’ departure at the end of February.

Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal said that “the kind of leadership that causes a dedicated patriot like Jim Mattis to leave should give pause to every American.”

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta simply sounded furious. “The last damn thing we need is more chaos and crisis,” Panetta told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

“This is a President who operates somehow by his gut instinct and how he reads the politics of the moment,” Panetta said.

“He enjoys chaos” because he believes it brings him more attention, “but a steady diet of chaos creates hell for the American people,” Panetta continued. “We need a president who is going to make the right decisions and provide stability for this country.”

‘Straw that broke the camel’s back’
Mattis said in his resignation letter to Trump that “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.”

The letter capped months of tension over policy disagreements and amounted to a rebuke of several of Trump’s foreign policy views. The defense secretary stressed the importance of US alliances and of being “unambiguous” in approaching adversaries like Russia and China. It did not contain a whiff of praise for the President.

Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat who’s the incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he believes the President’s decision on Syria was “the straw that broke the camel’s back” for Mattis.

“He couldn’t just go along with it,” Engel said. “How can you continue to work for an administration whose foreign policy is not something that you believe? … How can you keep working for a boss whose policies you don’t believe in?”

Others called, directly and indirectly, for oversight and possibly intervention.

Warner tweeted that “as we’ve seen with the President’s haphazard approach to Syria, our national defense is too important to be subjected to the President’s erratic whims.”

Rubio tweeted, “I hope we who have supported this administrations initiatives over the last two years can persuade the President to choose a different direction. But we must also fulfill our constitutional duty to conduct oversight over the policies of the executive branch.”

Sen. Ben Sasse said it was a “sad day” for America.

“General Mattis was giving advice the President needs to hear,” the Nebraska Republican said in a statement. “Mattis rightly believes that Russia and China are clear adversaries and that we are at war with jihadists across the globe who plot to kill Americans at home. Isolationism is a weak strategy that will harm Americans and America’s allies. Radical Islamic jihadists are still at war with us, and no ISIS is not gone.”

House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry said he was “disappointed” that Mattis is leaving, though he said he wants to write out his thoughts before elaborating.

Asked if he has any interest in the job, the Texas Republican jumped into an elevator and said he “scoffed” at the notion.

Thornberry’s replacement, the incoming chairman of Armed Services, Rep. Adam Smith, said the news of Mattis’ resignation is “very disappointing.”

“He will be missed,” the Washington state Democrat said.

‘There is chaos now’
“I’m sad. I’m shaken by it. I had so much respect for him,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told CNN. Like many, the California Democrat expressed discomfort at Trump’s erratic and impulsive leadership style. Mattis had been a “comfort to many of us as a voice of stability in the Trump administration,” Pelosi told reporters later.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Mattis “one of the few symbols” of “strength and stability” in the administration. “There is chaos now,” he said.

“This week was one of the most chaotic weeks we’ve ever seen in American government,” the New York Democrat added.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, headlining a town hall in Iowa on Thursday, responded to the news by suggesting that it is now only Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller making decisions together.

“I at least had some peace in knowing there were adults in the room, and now (chief of staff John) Kelly and Mattis are gone,” the California Democrat said, calling the prospect of decisions by Miller and Trump “terrifying.”

He added: “Some of the best hope for order at the White House, those people are leaving.”

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, sometimes seen as a possible candidate for defense secretary, tweeted that he’d learned of the news “with great sadness.”

Graham, a strong Trump supporter who nonetheless opposes the President’s decision to pull out of Syria, continued: “Mattis is a combination of intellect and integrity. He has been in the fight against radical Islam for decades and provided sound and ethical military advice to President Trump.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said late Thursday, in strong comments by his standards: “I believe it’s essential that the United States maintain and strengthen the post-World War II alliances that have been carefully built by leaders in both parties. We must also maintain a clear-eyed understanding of our friends and foes, and recognize that nations like Russia are among the latter. So I was sorry to learn that Secretary Mattis, who shares those clear principles, will soon depart the administration.”

“But I am particularly distressed that he is resigning due to sharp differences with the president on these and other key aspects of America’s global leadership,” the Kentucky Republican said in a statement, “It is regrettable that the president must now choose a new Secretary of Defense. But I urge him to select a leader who shares Secretary Mattis’s understanding of these vital principles and his total commitment to America’s servicemembers.”

CNN’s Manu Raju, Kaitlan Collins, Jim Acosta, Jim Sciutto, Jeremy Herb, Dan Merica and Phil Mattingly contributed to this report
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Can anyone feel a strange drift, that’s beginning to show above and beyond politics? If not, then there really is something about the state of mass . denial . The undertow is getting more violent. Lets see how this theatre turns completely absurd.

Example:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, issued a strong statement following the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis, saying he is “particularly distressed that he is resigning due to sharp differences with the president on these and other key aspects of America’s global leadership.”

Trump lashes out at Whittaker:

Trump lashed out at Whitaker after explosive Cohen revelations
By Laura Jarrett and Pamela Brown, CNN
Updated 8:38 PM EST, Fri December 21, 2018

Washington (CNN) 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.

Whitaker and William “Bill” Barr, Trump’s nominee to replace Sessions, are facing increased scrutiny this week for their criticisms of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling. Whitaker refused to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller probe. And a memo from Barr came to light in which he wrote that Trump’s decision to fire former FBI director James Comey did not amount to obstruction.

Trump has already shown a willingness to use the Justice Department to settle political scores. As CNN previously reported, the President questioned Whitaker about the progression of the investigation against Hillary Clinton when Whitaker was Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff.

“It seems very clear that the only reason that Matt Whitaker was ever appointed to this role was specifically to oversee the Mueller investigation,” Mueller biographer Garrett Graff said on Friday in an interview on CNN’s Newsroom.

With Sessions, Trump ranted publicly about how he did nothing to curtail the Mueller investigation. Sessions had recused himself from oversight because of his role on the Trump campaign.

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now,” the President tweeted in August.

The Justice Department declined to comment on any discussions between Whitaker and the President.

The President’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, could not confirm the conversations with Whitaker but said the President views the SDNY prosecutors as out of control. “The president and his lawyers are upset about the professional prosecutors in the Southern District of New York going after a non-crime and the innuendo the president was involved,” Giuliani said in a statement to CNN Friday.

One source close to Whitaker pushed back on the notion that the Cohen situation caused tension between the two, emphasizing that Whitaker and the President have a “great relationship.”

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Now here is a pitch toward the right:

Fox News

OPINIONPublished December 22, 2018 Last Update 13 hrs ago
Andrew C. McCarthy: What you need to know about the Barr memo and Mueller’s obstruction investigation
Andrew McCarthy By Andrew McCarthy | Fox News

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In his capacity as a former U.S. attorney general, William P. Barr, President Bush’s nominee to resume that position, wrote an unsolicited memorandum to top Justice Department officials expressing concerns about the obstruction aspect of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. As I’ve explained at National Review, the Barr memo is a brilliant piece of legal craftsmanship, thoughtfully outlining the damage Mueller’s theory of obstruction – to the extent it is publicly known – could do to the administration of justice and the institution of the presidency.

Barr’s memo was addressed to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Assistant Attorney General Steve Engel, who heads up DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel.

In it, Barr acknowledges that he is not privy to the non-public facts of Mueller’s probe has uncovered. He does not prejudge Mueller’s conclusions or question the legitimacy of his investigation. Indeed, he posits that what Mueller finds on the issue of suspected (but unproven) Trump campaign “collusion” with Russia could be critical to the question whether there could be a legitimate obstruction.

Moreover, Barr does not doubt that a president theoretically could be guilty of obstruction. Citing the Nixon and Clinton precedents, Barr observes that a president who engaged in obstructive conduct as that term has always been understood in American jurisprudence and Justice Department practice – corrupt actions to tamper with witnesses and physical evidence – could certainly be cited for obstruction.

The issue addressed in the memo is Mueller’s expansive theory of obstruction. As Barr understands it, based on public reporting, the special counsel assumes the president’s lawful exercise of his constitutional prerogatives – e.g., to fire subordinate executive officials, to issue pardons, or to weigh in on the merits of an investigation – could be grounds for an obstruction charge if a prosecutor assessed the action to be improperly motivated.

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As Barr correctly points out, this interpretation of the law would not only impair the president’s capacity to carry out his Article II duties. It would apply to every subordinate executive official, including Justice Department prosecutors. They would face potential prosecution based on charging decisions they make, the strategic manner in which they guide investigations, the tactics they choose to use or forbear from using, as well as personnel and management decisions.

Moreover, Barr makes an incisive point about cohesion in a free, self-determining society. If a Justice Department investigation is going to be responsible for removing a democratically-elected president, then it must be over a clear, egregious crime. A prosecution based on an aggressive, dubious theory of obstruction, particularly if no underlying “collusion” crime can be proved, would leave much of the nation believing the political class was arbitrarily seeking to oust a president not to its liking.

Coverage of the memo is likely to reignite public debate over Special Counsel Mueller’s request that President Trump submit to an interview. In the memo, which is dated June 8, 2018, Barr argued that “Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the President submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction.” Of course, in the months since the memo was sent to the Justice Department, the president’s lawyers negotiated an agreement with Mueller’s prosecutors, pursuant to which the president provided written answers to various questions, mainly about the “collusion” aspect of the investigation.

Barr’s position on this point is entirely correct. As I’ve contended for months (based on nearly 20 years’ experience as a Justice Department prosecutor), a prosecutor does not get to subpoena the president just because it might be interesting. The president’s duties are unparalleled in their centrality to American governance. Consequently, the Justice Department normally would not permit a prosecutor to divert the president from those duties and attempt to compel him to answer questions in the absence of: (a) a serious crime in which the president is clearly implicated, and (b) the existence of critical evidence or testimony that the prosecutor can only get from the president – i.e., no other source is available.

To argue, as some do, that this puts the president above the law is nonsense. What it means is that a prosecutor does have the power to issue a grand jury subpoena to the president, but only after we’ve balanced competing public interests: the vital interest in enabling the president to tend to his responsibilities, and the important interest in providing essential evidence in the investigation of a serious crime. We do not spare the president, but we heed his weighty duties. The same reasoning undergirds the Justice Department’s long-held guidance that a sitting president may not be indicted – no one is saying a president can never be indicted; we simply do not want the president dealing with criminal process while he is responsible for national security and the execution of the laws.

This is obvious to people when an issue arises about whether a journalist or an attorney should be subpoenaed. Unlike the president, journalists do not have a legally recognized privilege to withhold information; attorneys do have such a privilege, but like executive privilege, it is not absolute – there are important exceptions. In the Justice Department, a prosecutor may not issue a subpoena to a journalist or lawyer as if he or she were just like any other potentially relevant witness. Main Justice instead enforces a rigorous process in which the prosecutor must demonstrate that the evidence is critical to an investigation and there is no other viable source for it. And even upon that showing, the Justice Department would not permit a subpoena to issue if it appeared, under the circumstances, that the constitutional and public interests at stake were not adequately protected.

The presidency is entitled to no less deference. Again, this is not to say that the president should never be subpoenaed in an obstruction investigation – we know from our history that this is not the case. It is to say that the existence of a clear, serious crime in which the president is implicated must be a prerequisite.

Former Attorney General Barr’s memo is an impressive piece of legal craftsmanship. It is not an attack on the Mueller investigation. It is a plea that the Mueller investigation be conducted within the bounds of constitutional law, congressional intent, and venerable Justice Department guidance.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. @andrewcmccarthy

Latest resignation :

BBC News
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US envoy Brett McGurk quits over Trump Syria pullout
22 December 2018 US & Canada
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Image copyright AFP Brett McGurk in Syria in 2017
Image caption Mr McGurk (L) had previously said the US should retain a presence in Syria
A top US official in the fight against the Islamic State group has quit over President Trump’s decision to pull troops from Syria, reports say.

Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat IS, brought his departure forward from February.

Before Mr Trump’s announcement he had insisted that the US would continue working against IS in Syria.

It follows the resignation of Defence Secretary Jim Mattis on Thursday.

Gen Mattis had also opposed withdrawing troops from Syria as well as reducing the US presence in Afghanistan.

Trump rewrites US Syria policy
After the caliphate: Has IS been defeated?
Who are the Kurds?
Mr McGurk is an experienced diplomat who was appointed to his current role in 2015 under the Obama administration.

In early December he told reporters: “We want to stay on the ground and make sure that stability can be maintained in these areas.”

He went on to say: “It would be reckless if we were just to say, well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now. I think anyone who’s looked at a conflict like this would agree with that.”

What did McGurk say about his resignation?
In his resignation letter, seen by AP news agency, Mr McGurk said that IS militants in Syria were on the run but not yet defeated . He said that withdrawing US forces from Syria would create the conditions that gave rise to IS.

In an email to staff quoted by the New York Times, he said Mr Trump’s decision to pull out troops “came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy”. It “left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered”, he said.

“I ultimately concluded I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity ,” he went on to say.

What does Trump say?
Mr Trump announced his decision to withdraw some 2,000 US troops from Syria on Wednesday, asserting that IS had been defeated.

He has not yet reacted to Mr McGurk’s resignation.

But on Saturday he continued to insist that the decision to pull out was the right one and that, now that IS was defeated on the ground, other players could take care of the situation.

However, important allies including senior Republicans and foreign powers have disputed the claim and say the move could lead to a resurgence of IS.

A Kurdish-led alliance, the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) has also warned that IS could recover.

US troops have helped rid much of Syria’s north-east of the jihadist group, but pockets of fighters remain.

A recent US report said there were still as many as 14,000 IS militants in Syria and even more in neighbouring Iraq.

What is the US presence in Syria?
US ground troops first became involved in Syria in Autumn 2015 when then President Barack Obama sent in a small number of special forces to train and advise local Kurdish fighters who were fighting IS.

The US did this reluctantly after several attempts at arming anti-IS groups had descended into chaos.

Over the intervening years the numbers of US troops in Syria increased, standing today at some 2,000, though some estimates place the number perhaps even higher.

A network of bases and airstrips has been established in an arc across the north-eastern part of the country.

The US has also been part of an international coalition conducting air strikes against IS and other militants.

Copyright © 2018 BBC. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Former CIA Director John Brennan (2013-2017) said Wednesday on Morning Joe that President Trump is acting like a cornered animal and acting out any way he can. Brennan said Trump is mean-spirited, dishonest and lacks integrity. (Full interview at bottom.)

Brennan warned of a ‘wag the dog’ situation where Trump may try to cause a distraction from controversies he is facing such as military action in North Korea or something in Iran. Brennan said Trump could do something domestically such as fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or special counsel Robert Mueller. Brennan warned if Trump did that he would “bring the country to the brink of crisis.”

“I think you have concerns on the international front as well as on the domestic front,” Brennan said on MSNBC. “On the international front, I’m hoping we’re not going to see a wag the dog scenario whereby he is going to try to distract the attention here domestically and politically on him and engage in some type of international initiative that is going to really put our nation at risk. Military action against North Korea, maybe doing something vis-a-vis Iran, tearing up the Iranian nuclear agreement and provoking and pushing for some type of confrontation in the Gulf.”

A serious comment on a real possibility.

Another recent comment:

Most of us have heard of the term “the tail is wagging the dog.” In common usage, the phrase refers to a situation where the unimportant part of something becomes too important and controls the entire thing.

In politics, the process has come to refer to a situation where a politician creates an issue of perceived importance to divert attention away from more serious matters. Our current president is a master of using the technique. He uses inappropriate tweets and public statements that attract the attention of the media while he is engaging in other actions that more significantly affect the county. “Wag the Dog” was the title of a movie released 20 years ago about a president who was up for reelection and facing internal scandals in his administration and wagged the dog by creating a war which drew the public’s attention away from the problems in his presidency.

It appears that President Donald Trump may be trying to take the technique of wagging the dog to a more dangerous level. He has done everything in his power to provoke North Korea’s unstable leader into taking military action that would justify the United States to go to war with North Korea, thus drawing attention away from a domestic agenda that appears to be aimed at creating and preserving an American aristocracy for decades to come.

Trump’s most recent move of announcing his intention to relocate the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem appears to be another effort to wag the dog by creating an increase in terroristic actions around the world aimed at the United States. We live in a world where terrorism is a constant threat. Trump knows that moving the American Embassy is a controversial matter that will inflame fundamentalist terrorists throughout the world and will provoke acts of terror aimed at our government and corporate interests worldwide and domestically.

This will no doubt be used to justify further military intervention by the United States throughout the world to combat terrorism. The truth is that we will never defeat terrorism militarily. The only way to defeat terrorism is to treat the problems of poverty, inequality and bigotry that ferment its existence. All war is dehumanizing. The recent incident in Niger where an American military unit was ambushed by terrorists is typical of what we can expect if we begin to engage in further military involvement with terrorists.

that will better their lives, but more importantly to recognize that he is willing to use the blood of their children to maintain an agenda that will only benefit the upper 1 percent.

William Fleischaker is a Joplin attorney.

that will better their lives, but more importantly to recognize that he is willing to use the blood of their children to maintain an agenda that will only benefit the upper 1 percent.

Blackwater redux

The Trump Impeachment
UncategorizedWorldview
“We are coming” The Viceroy of Afghanistan may return as Trump could privatize that war.
By annieli / Daily Kos (12/23/2018) - December 23, 2018241

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Trump’s desire to withdraw half of the current US forces from Afghanistan immediately makes mistakes similar to his reckless Syrian force withdrawal.

Trump’s wagging the dog may only ever be about wagging, as the nation gets sent to a farm upstate.

Erik Prince thinks the same mission can be done cheaper, reminding us about Rumsfeld’s attempt to invade Iraq on the cheap. It’ll only cost the equivalent of what Trump wants from Congress for this wall (this time). According to the NY Times, Prince proposed to send private contractors to Afghanistan instead of U.S. troops, and have the entire operation overseen by a “viceroy.”

Who wouldn’t want that? Because underwhelming your enemy is always a good strategy.

Privatizing certain wars with mercenaries also brings the potential of greater conflicts in wider theaters of operation and perhaps the spread of terrorism that comes from having smaller footprints for military forces and smaller networks of allies. In the Afghan case, reducing US forces might have a greater impact on the training role essential to make the Afghan army more effective. And then there’s serving the Russians’ interest in crippling NATO.

militarytimes.com/
Blackwater took out a full-page ad in the latest edition of Recoil magazine with the message: “We are coming,” the Military Times reported on Friday. The ad comes a day after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced he would resign from his post and word emerged that President Trump will draw down troops in Afghanistan.
Former founder Erik Prince sold the company in 2010, but has maintained communications with Trump and reportedly pressed him to employ private contractors in Afghanistan, where the U.S. is said to be preparing to withdraw nearly 7,000 troops.

Prince — who has also been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into whether Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election — does not have any known relations to the Constellis Group, the new name put on the company after it was purchased by Apollo Holdings Group. The firm reportedly shelved plans earlier this year to try to sell the Constellis Group.

washingtonexaminer.com/

Leah McElrath
@leahmcelrath
Is the war in Afghanistan — and possibly elsewhere ― about to be fully privatized?

Blackwater — the disgraced defense contractor founded by Erik Prince — published a full-page ad in a 2019 magazine in all black with a simple message:
“We are coming.”https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-military/2018/12/21/mattis-is-out-and-blackwater-is-back-we-are-coming/

1,932
5:57 PM - Dec 22, 2018
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Mattis is out, and Blackwater is back: ‘We are coming’
Mattis’ resignation may revive plans to privatize the Afghanistan war.

marinecorpstimes.com
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Leah McElrath
@leahmcelrath
· 15h
Replying to @leahmcelrath
This is all predictable.

The many self-identified leftists espousing support for U.S. troop withdrawals as supposedly contributing to “ending” the respective conflicts are going to have a rough wake up call as this plays out into 2019.

Sigh.

Leah McElrath
@leahmcelrath
Cool. Cool.

In 2019, Blackwater will arrive and war crimes will begin in earnest. More generations of Afghans will become radicalized.

Taliban’s happy now.
War crimes for profit are imminent.

Everything is cool.twitter.com/nbcnews/status/1076681825974710273

NBC News
:heavy_check_mark:
@NBCNews
Taliban greets Pentagon’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan with cries of victory. nbcnews.to/2CvDd9R

678

NBC News
:heavy_check_mark:
@NBCNews
Taliban greets Pentagon’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan with cries of victory. nbcnews.to/2CvDd9R

360
7:32 PM - Dec 22, 2018
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Taliban greet Trump withdrawal news with cries of victory
“The 17-year long struggle and sacrifices of thousands of our people finally yielded fruit,” said a senior commander in Helmand.

nbcnews.com

“The 17-year-long struggle and sacrifices of thousands of our people finally yielded fruit,” said a senior Taliban commander from Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

“We proved it to the entire world that we defeated the self-proclaimed world’s lone super power.”
“We are close to our destination,” added the commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the group’s leadership had prohibited members from talking to the media about current events. He added that all field commanders had also been told to intensify training efforts to capture four strategic provinces in the run up to the next round of talks between the U.S. and Taliban, which are expected in January.

In 2017, Afghanistan overtook Iraq to become the deadliest country for terrorism, with one-quarter of all such deaths worldwide happening there. And the number of civilians killed in the country reached a record in the first half of this year, with a surge in suicide attacks claimed by the Islamic State group, according to the United Nations.

Despite years of fighting, only around 65 percent of the Afghan population lives in areas under government control.

The bills of goods sold by neoliberal privatization: outsourcing security always works, because rent-a-cops don’t have constitutional responsibilities, and they cost less.

Even if the US shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, national security is not like defending a shopping mall.

(September) Blackwater founder Erik Prince thinks the time is right to try a new approach in Afghanistan, one that he says will reduce war spending to a sliver of its current levels, get most troops home and eliminate Pakistan’s influence on U.S. policy there: Let him run it.

In an exclusive interview with Military Times, Prince shared new details about his proposed force and why he believes a small footprint of private military contractors and even smaller footprint of U.S. special operators may be able to accomplish what hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and NATO forces over the last 17 years could not.

Prince first presented the idea as President Donald Trump took office last year, hoping that the president’s long-stated opposition to keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan would open the door to a privatized presence.

militarytimes.com/

6 DAYS AGO Open in Who Shared Wrong byline?
Opinion | The Crisis of Good Intentions
By William McGurn
wsj.com — Almost everywhere you turn these days, someone is claiming that capitalism is facing an existential crisis. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old who will soon be a congresswoman from New York, declares that our “no-holds-barred Wild West hypercapitalism” is on the way out.

His argument centers the balancing act by asserting the overall more poignant fact, that he thinks is the fault of Greenpeace inspired environmentalists, who politically dictate issues that could easily be solved by reversing their economic outlooks. True or false , or wrongly or mistakenly compiled?

Opinion, The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, Dec 7
William Mc’Gurn

In the same edition Walter Russel Mead argues :

Voters Rebel in Europe’s Big Three
Walter Russell Mead

The past week has seen the leaders of the three most important European states fighting for their political lives. In London, Prime Minister Theresa May struggles to hold power as opinion in Parliament moves against her Brexit agreement. In Paris, a firestorm of public rage has humbled President Emmanuel Macron and forced him into an undignified retreat before street protests he previously vowed to ignore. Even Berlin experienced its share of political drama as Chancellor Angela Merkel officially stepped down under pressure as leader of the Christian Democratic Union. Her preferred successor was able to eke out only a narrow win over anti-Merkel challengers.

The turbulence in these countries, pillars of European and indeed world order, isn’t just about particular leaders. Their entire political systems have come under strain. In the U.K., even before the Brexit referendum, the rise of the Scottish National Party and Jeremy Corbyn’s victory over the moderate wing of the Labour Party had already transformed the political system. In France, Mr. Macron came to power as the existing party system imploded. In Germany, the antiestablishment Left and Alternative for Germany parties have been steadily gaining strength as centrist parties falter in the polls.

…Does all this international wrangling smell of the era of great denial by prime minister Chamberlain, in his Peace of Our Time message? Are there various loopholes ignored as presumptive positions are flaunted into a increasingly neglected arena?
These conservative tactics lay down a tilted balance hanging on a hook of undetermined plausible future scenario.

But hasn’t this always been the case ?

Carl Bernstein on Mattis’ resignation
“What the Mattis letter has done, in a monumental way, is to push Republicans into making some real judgments,” Carl Bernstein says. He says some of them have privately concluded that President Trump is “unfit.” He says journalists need to be questioning GOP lawmakers about this subject.

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Chief Justice pauses contempt order for mystery company in Mueller investigation
By Kevin Bohn and Katelyn Polantz, CNN
Updated 8:49 PM EST, Sun December 23, 2018

(CNN) Chief Justice John Roberts on Sunday issued a temporary pause on an order holding an unnamed, foreign government-owned company in contempt over a mystery court case related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The order puts on hold the contempt citation issued by a DC federal judge against the company related to a grand jury subpoena it received, but only long enough for the justices to decide whether they want to intervene in the case.

Mystery company involved in Mueller investigation appeals to Supreme Court
Mystery company involved in Mueller investigation appeals to Supreme Court
The company asked the Supreme Court to intervene after a federal appeals court ruling that ordered the company to comply with the subpoena, which required it to turn over “information” about its commercial activity in a criminal investigation. The Supreme Court action also paused fines the company was facing for every day of noncompliance.

The pause lasts until the court has time to review a response from the government due on or before December 31.

The request to the Supreme Court is the latest twist in the secret case, much of which is under seal and has made its way through the federal court system with uncommon speed.

This is the first known legal challenge apparently related to Mueller’s investigation to make its way to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court could separately be asked to hear an appeal of the case.

“So far as we know, the Court has never had a sealed argument before all nine justices,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “They can keep parts of the record and briefing sealed, and often do, such as in cases implicating trade secrets. But there’s no procedure in the court’s rules for having the whole case briefed, argued and decided under seal. The only times I’m aware of in which parties tried it, the court denied certiorari,” or the review of the case.

The company’s challenge of the subpoena appears to have begun in September. In its ruling this past week, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia offered few clues about the company and its country of origin or what Mueller’s team sought.

In one short passage in the three-page decision, the judges describe how they had learned confidentially from prosecutors that they had “reasonable probability” the records requested involved actions that took place outside of the United States but directly affected the US. Even the company was not informed of what prosecutors had on the issue, because revealing it to the company would have violated the secrecy of the grand jury investigation, the judges said.

The range of possibilities on the identity of the company is vast. The company could be anything from a sovereign-owned bank to a state-backed technology or information company. Those types of corporate entities have been frequent recipients of requests for information in Mueller’s investigation.

And though Mueller’s work focused on the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, prosecutors have said and CNN has reported that the Mueller team looked at actions related to Turkish, Ukrainian and other foreign government interests.

Mueller previously indicted three Russian companies and 25 Russians for their alleged contributions to a social media propaganda scheme meant to influence American voters and to the hack of the Democratic Party. The special counsel and other Justice Department units continue to pursue several investigations related to Mueller’s core mission.

Another challenge of a Mueller subpoena, from Roger Stone associate Andrew Miller, began at the trial level months before the anonymous company’s action apparently began. Miller’s case is now before the DC Circuit as well but has not yet been decided by the judges. His case became public after his attorneys publicly spoke about his intention to challenge Mueller and the subpoena.

The company in the Supreme Court challenge has stayed secret—as has the grand jury proceeding it’s related to. And both the company, prosecutors and the circuit court took pains to keep the identities of those involved in the case under wraps. An entire floor of the DC federal courthouse was locked down by security on the morning of the company’s appeal argument, so that the lawyers entering and leaving the courtroom would not be seen.

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This judicial action to pause a sealed argument has never before been before the court.

It may bring to a forefront review of aattending to talents , whereby the cohesion of the court itself can be assessed.

The seal issue may overcome certain judicial bias. It may develop into a kind of centerpiece of judicial autonomy.

Trump rants while ‘all alone’ in White House on Christmas Eve
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 5:34 PM EST, Mon December 24, 2018

article video
(CNN) It’s Christmas in America: The President is home alone in the White House, ranting at his foes inside and outside; an administration lurching deeper into crisis; stock markets are in free fall and the government is paralyzed by a partial shutdown.

Donald Trump is spending the festive season as he did much of the year, sparking chaos and raising concerns in the capital and around the world about his impulsive behavior and boiling with frustration as he barges right up to the limits on his power.

Mnuchin's attempts to calm the markets have opposite effect, leave bank CEOs 'totally baffled'
Mnuchin’s attempts to calm the markets have opposite effect, leave bank CEOs ‘totally baffled’
One reason for his fury: A favorite barometer of his own success has been stripped away by days of savage losses on the markets. In a shortened Christmas Eve session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled more than 600 points after a bizarre attempt by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Sunday to calm investors by consulting with the CEOs of top banks backfired. Losses were compounded by another of Trump’s Twitter attacks on the Federal Reserve – following revelations that he has asked if he can legally fire the independent central bank’s chairman, Jerome Powell.

The Dow fell 2.91% and the S&P 500 dipped 2.71% in the biggest Christmas Eve declines in the two indices’ history. The slump came after the stocks last week had their worst week since the Great Recession a decade ago, and the last time the market fell so far in December was in 1931, during the Great Depression.

Trump turns to Twitter while “all alone” in the White House
While many Americans gathered with their families and with his vacation to the “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago iced by the shutdown, the President spent the day at the White House blasting critics – including Democrats who have refused his demands for $5 billion in funding for his border wall in a standoff that shuttered the government at midnight on Friday.

“I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security,” Trump wrote in what may have been a tongue in cheek tone in his 10th tweet of the day.

Melania Trump closes 2018 with fewer personal woes, but a difficult public perception
Trump was due to be rejoined for Christmas Day by first lady Melania Trump, who had already decamped to Florida before the shutdown took hold.

The President also lashed out Brett McGurk, his special envoy for eradicating ISIS, who followed Defense Secretary James Mattis by resigning in protest at Trump’s hurriedly announced Syria withdrawal. He hit out at “Little Bob Corker,” the outgoing Tennessee senator who has criticized him over Syria and the shutdown. He also insisted he did like allies – but said many took advantage of the US "both in ‘Military Protection and Trade…’ "

A senior administration official told CNN’s Jim Sciutto that national security decision-making has “basically stopped working” and decisions are “made on a whim on phone calls.” The official added the Syria withdrawal was “a complete reversal” and it was done “without deliberation, no consideration of risks.”

American allies and partners are “shocked and totally bewildered” and the Syrian Democratic Forces “don’t believe this is happening,” the official said.

It all added up to a feeling of a White House that is hurtling out of control and a President who is becoming increasingly emotional and vexed at a time when he faces mounting legal and political pressure from special counsel Robert Mueller. He is also days away from a new era of punishing Democratic oversight when the new Congress convenes in early January.

The loss of Mattis – who was seen around the world as a check on Trump’s erratic national security decision-making – has raised anxiety about his presidency to previously unmatched levels.

Of course, many Trump supporters voted for disruption and to rattle the Washington establishment when they sent him to the White House so are likely to be less concerned than Washington insiders about the febrile Christmas mood.

After the shock of Mattis’ resignation, some see a different narrative
But the President’s irascible temper is also detracting from his top achievements at the end of the year, including low unemployment and a strong economy despite market turmoil. The passage of a groundbreaking criminal justice bill has also been overshadowed and there is little talk about his most enduring legacy win – the new majority he and the Senate GOP engineered on the Supreme Court.

The President seemed to have his loyal base in mind by engineering a shutdown drama that appears to have no easy exits, but allows him to make a political stand cheered on by the conservative media.

“AMERICA IS RESPECTED AGAIN!” he tweeted at one point on Monday, likely with those voters in mind.

“Hunker down like a jackass in a hailstorm”
But the frenetic Christmas Eve spectacle was stunning even by the President’s standards, and prompted the two top Democratic leaders, the likely House speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, to issue a joint statement.

“It’s Christmas Eve and President Trump is plunging the country into chaos. The stock market is tanking and the president is waging a personal war on the Federal Reserve – after he just fired the Secretary of Defense,” the statement said.

As the shutdown lumbered through its third day, with no end in sight, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas arrived to gavel in the chamber for a pro-forma session that only exemplified the lack of action between the White House and Democrats towards a resolution. He resorted to quoting the earthy wisdom of a former Senate majority leader and President to capture the sense of futility and political dislocation.

“LBJ said sometimes you just have to hunker down like a jackass in a hailstorm and just take it. That’s about where we are,” he said.

But in one sign that the festive spirit can triumph over Washington’s humbug, the National Parks Service announced the reopening of the National Christmas Tree, thanks to support from the National Park Foundation – a group of philanthropic organizations and donors.

National Christmas Tree site reopens during shutdown
The popular Yuletide tourist spot had been closed after a man tried to climb the tree and damaged it. The government shutdown then prevented the National Park Service from reopening it.

The shutdown is the third this year and has sent hundreds of thousands of federal employees home for Christmas unsure about their upcoming paychecks.

At the same time, the stock market is careening south with much of the blame being put on the confusion coming from Washington.

Mnunchin has had to reassure investors Trump won’t fire Powell and left major bank CEOs “totally baffled” with a weekend call asking them about the state of their businesses. More criticism from Trump toward the Fed sent markets reeling Monday, as the Dow closed down 653 points before shutting up shop early for Christmas Eve.

Mnuchin’s intervention was just the latest development that sparked uncertainty in the days running up to the holiday.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has cancerous nodules removed from lung
A surprise announcement that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent surgery for cancerous growths on her lung added to the frenetic mood in Washington, as the Supreme Court dealt a blow to Trump by knocking back his new restrictions on asylum seekers who cross the southern border.

And more mystery is brewing in the highest court in the land after Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused an order holding an unnamed, foreign-government owned company in contempt over a court case related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

It all adds up to a Christmas that is feeling less and less merry and bright on Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street.

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UPFRONT ABOUT BEING A GRINCH
THE SLATEST
Trump Is Reportedly Considering Firing Mnuchin Over Stock Market Woes
By DANIEL POLITI

DEC 25, 201810:17 AM
President Donald Trump speaks after a bilateral meeting as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin looks on in New York on September 24, 2018.
President Donald Trump speaks after a bilateral meeting as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin looks on in New York on September 24, 2018.
NICHOLAS KAMM/Getty Images
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin could become the latest White House official to get the boot. President Donald Trump has been souring on Mnuchin for some time now and the continued decline in the stock markets could be the final straw, reports Bloomberg. One source told Bloomberg that the president has considered firing Mnuchin while another said that whether he stays on or not will depend in large part on what happens to the markets.

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If Trump was already not so happy with his Treasury secretary, what he did before Christmas Eve surely didn’t help things. Mnuchin rattled nervous markets over the weekend when he put out a statement saying the heads of the country’s six largest banks had told him they had “ample liquidity” to keep lending. Considering that was never seen as a serious concern many saw it either as a huge blunder or a sign that the government knows something the rest of the world doesn’t. He then held a call Monday with members of the President’s Working Group on financial markets, which also raised concern that the problems in the economy could be deeper than many thought.

That, in addition to Trump’s continued anger at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, combined to push the market even lower to the steepest Christmas Eve losses in decades. The Dow Jones industrial average, for example, plunged 653 points, or just under 3 percent in the shortened trading day. The benchmark S&P 500, meanwhile, dropped 2.7 percent.

As markets decline, “the president will continue looking for a scapegoat,” notes Bloomberg. Mnuchin and Mick Mulvaney, the incoming White House chief of staff, said the president knows he can’t fire Powell. That means Trump may be looking for someone else to take the blame. And if he looks toward Mnuchin there won’t be many in the White House who will stand up for him. “There are plenty of people inside the White House who are not fans of Mnuchin who are happy to throw him under the bus,” Stephen Myrow, managing partner at Beacon Policy Advisors in Washington and a former Treasury official, tells Bloomberg. “Up ’til now, he’s been protected by the fact that Trump liked him and he’s been a loyalist.”

Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company.
All contents © 2018 The Slate Group LLC. All rights reserved.

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Trump says no end to shutdown until border barrier funded, plans January visit to new section of wall
By Kevin Liptak, CNN
Updated 11:24 AM EST, Tue December 25, 2018

(CNN) President Donald Trump said Tuesday the government won’t reopen until funding is secured for his border barrier, and he plans to go to the border in January to visit a new stretch of wall.

“I can’t tell you when the government is going to be open. I can tell you it’s not going to be open until we have a wall, a fence, whatever they would like to call it,” Trump said in the Oval Office after a Christmas call with US troops.

Negotiations between congressional Democrats and the Trump administration over the President’s demands for a border wall have so far not yielded an agreement, and the shutdown will continue until at least Thursday, when the Senate returns to Washington. Both sides seem entrenched in their opposing stances and it’s possible parts of the government could remain closed until the new Congress is seated in the first week of January, when Democrats will take control of the House.

Trump repeated a claim made a day earlier – without explanation – that he’d recently approved 115 miles worth of border barrier. The White House hasn’t provided any further details about the claim, which Trump first made on Twitter on Christmas Eve.

He said he would go to the new stretch of the wall in January.

“It’s going to be built, hopefully rapidly,” he said. “I’m going there at the end of January for the start of construction. That’s a big stretch.”

“We’re almost having a groundbreaking, it’s such a big section,” he said. “It’s probably the biggest section we’ll get out.”

Trump has previously visited wall prototypes near the border.

During a brief question-and-answer session with reporters, Trump also said he continues to have confidence in Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, despite the December downturn in the stock market. He also warned Democrats that oversight of his administration would amount to “presidential harassment.”

Trump also claimed, without evidence, that federal employees on furlough or working without pay understand his demand for a border wall – and support him in his mission.

“I think they understand what’s happening,” he said. “They want border security. The people of this country want border security.”

“It’s not a question of me,” he continued. “I would rather not be doing shutdowns. I’ve been at the White House. I love the White House, but I wasn’t able to be with my family. I thought it would be wrong for me to be with my family, my family is in Florida, Palm Beach, and I just didn’t want to go down and be there when other people are hurting.”

Trump was presumably referring to his adult children; his wife, Melania Trump, returned to the White House on Monday to spend the holiday with her husband.

Trump said many federal workers have told him to hold out for wall funding, though the President didn’t provide names or positions of those workers.

“But many of those workers have said to me and communicated, stay out until you get the funding for the wall. These federal workers want the wall. The only one that doesn’t want the wall are the Democrats, because they don’t mind open borders, but open borders mean massive amounts of crime,” he said.

This story has been updated

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Who would have thought that with the hoopla surrounding the demise of the Soviet Union, and the world-harangue of total all inclusive World inclusive capitalism, such could augment the cyber-political collusion:

RUSSIA BEGINS TESTING NUCLEAR WEAPON THAT CAN TRAVEL UNDERWATER AND ‘NOTHING’ CAN STOP IT, REPORT SAYS

If one were to try to assess what has gone down in the first half of this administration, the so called ‘collusion’, can be encapsulated by .another conflation .

The fact is becoming clearer, that the Republican agenda is becoming more of a focal point , diminishing Trump’s significance in the definitive attempt to form a credible international position , changing the US role from the predominant post WW2 era.

Much of the power behind the overwhelming overwhelming superiority of the U.S. 50 years ago, has waned , do to the increasing autonomy which the former Brit colonial system has engendered, losing the defacto control that has remained since the abrogarion by Great Britain of Her Imperial designs lasting hundreds of years.

The U.S. can not tale on the burden of being the policeman of the world any longer, even if other States would like that role to continue, and Trumpism is right in that surmise, as well as cutting into the unfair trade practices of partners taking advantage of that unbalance, not to mention out and out cheating by non partners and former enemies.

Human rights have recessed as focal points by which policy is impacted as well, and uneven distribution of the common wealth of the world has been put on a hold , by which previously favored national interests must be able to absorb the severe hardships which such change becomes unacceptable , as caged by indexes based on the rate of change of crime, social welfare, public health needs can no longer be funded, based on inequality created by the choice between guns and butter.

The 50 some years of relative balance in the world has not changed downward linearly but increasingly taking on hyperbolic affirmations of Marxian prediction.

That a re-emergence of planned social matrix has reappeared is due to the vacuum left by a failed ideology, ironic , as expected to see and interpret ideology as a dual relationship , whwre degrees of overlap between them determined the prejorotive
and the majorative balance.

The judicial issues become constitutional, reducing these under lying planetary issues strictly internal politically signified prescriptions of the
dynamic issues facing the world today, still harbor the U.S. the mover and shaker it still is clamoring to be, as before. This is short sighted and a presumption impossible impossible to sustain economically.

As a consequence of the above considerations , the alleged sins of Trumpism are becoming more of a rationalization to fill in the difference between social and political understanding of the need for a ‘collusion’ which transcends personalities, such as that of the President.

In fact, Trump is being used in this respect to over come such differences.
There is vast fear that Trump himself may not be in a position to appreciate any or most perimeters, and create a situation which significantly reduces the chances that accidental lack of oversight may fail, and some indications are surfacing here and there, like the abrupt firing of the Secretary of Defense, however this also may indicate a formation of a wider Republican understanding of the state of the world, then a personal assessment assessment more likely to be found on Trump’s dislike of people he needs to work with.

The Trump Impeachment
UncategorizedUnfit To Lead
Christmas Meltdown Shows Mentally Unfit President.
By KeithDB / Daily Kos (12/26/2018) - December 26, 2018517

For a President who in his first year waged a faux war so he could declare victory in the non-existent war against Christmas, Trump turned Grinch this year, and unlike the “real” Grinch he never got better. His crazy tweets sent the stock market plummeting, he challenged the innocence of a 7-year-old, and concluded with a bizarre “Christmas message” hate rant involving James Comey. What the pattern all shows is a mentally ill man unfit to serve in the office.

To create some context, the Christmas season was not going well for Trump. The sentencing hearings for Michael Cohen and General Flynn were disasters for the President, with both implicating the President in potential criminal wrongdoing. Trump’s Foundation agreed to close under state supervision due to its misdeeds. The government shut down as Trump refused to accept any budget deal without $5 billion in wall funding. Trump’s Secretary of Defense resigned with a blistering letter attacking Trump for insulting our allies while helping our enemies. That resignation followed the early resignation of Trump’s Chief of Staff.

Even the stock market, something Trump once pointed to as proof of his economic success, was having a quite bad December. A week before Christmas, Trump took to Twitter to plead to the Federal Reserve that it does not raise rates.

Donald J. Trump

The Federal Reserve promptly ignored the President and raised rates anyway. News reports announced that Trump was demanding to know if he could fire Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell. Trump’s threats to attack the apolitical Federal Reserve rattled the markets further, sending them plummeting.

Trump’s Christmas Eve Grinch Attack On the Stock Market

Unsurprisingly, the markets opened Christmas Eve down, but began to recover — after all, it’s Christmas. Then Trump tweeted. With the markets down out of fear Trump would attack the independence of the Federal Reserve, Trump tried to solve the problem by attacking the independence of the Federal Reserve.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump
The only problem our economy has is the Fed. They don’t have a feel for the Market, they don’t understand necessary Trade Wars or Strong Dollars or even Democrat Shutdowns over Borders. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch - he can’t putt!

The market turned sharply down, closing the day about 650 points lower. This nearly 3% one day drop was the worst Christmas Eve fall in the markets since . . . EVER! Yes, worse than any Christmas Eve drop in even the Great Depression, or the Great Recession in 2008. It wasn’t even close. The market had never closed more than 1% down on Christmas Eve. Trump managed to triple the Christmas Eve market Grinch record.

President Grinch Challenges a Seven Year Old On Santa

Attempting to appear more normal — and human — Trump and Melania took calls from children calling into a hotline to get updates on NORAD’s tracking of Santa’s sleigh. As Presidential duties go, it would seem almost impossible to screw this one up. You talk to kids, bedazzled by the President taking their call. You smile for the cameras and laugh as you ask what they want for Christmas and whether they have been good. Yep, this is kissing babies easy, impossible to screw that up. Unless you are a Trump. Trump challenged a seven-year-old girl’s belief in Santa.

“Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”

said the Scroogely Grinch. I don’t know how to respond other to ask, who does this? What kind of sick man, taking calls of this nature, says that sort of thing to a seven-year-old?

The good news is the President did no real harm. The little girl involved, saying she never heard the word “marginal” before, still believes in Santa.

A Christmas “poor me” In My Mansion

Trump took to Twitter a lot on Christmas Eve, with somewhere around 20 tweets. Most were not exactly happy holiday greetings or even the customary effort to wish the best for those one does not get along with. Rather, Trump seemed determined to engage more in the parody holiday Festivus traditional “airing of grievances.” Here’s a sampling.

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
Virtually every Democrat we are dealing with today strongly supported a Border Wall or Fence. It was only when I made it an important part of my campaign, because people and drugs were pouring into our Country unchecked, that they turned against it. Desperately needed!

6:31 AM - Dec 24, 2018

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
To those few Senators who think I don’t like or appreciate being allied with other countries, they are wrong, I DO. What I don’t like, however, is when many of these same countries take advantage of their friendship with the United States, both in Military Protection and Trade…

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
…We are substantially subsidizing the Militaries of many VERY rich countries all over the world, while at the same time these countries take total advantage of the U.S., and our TAXPAYERS, on Trade. General Mattis did not see this as a problem. I DO, and it is being fix

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
For all of the sympathizers out there of Brett McGurk remember, he was the Obama appointee who was responsible for loading up airplanes with 1.8 Billion Dollars in CASH & sending it to Iran as part of the horrific Iran Nuclear Deal (now terminated) approved by Little Bob Corker.

7:23 AM - Dec 24, 2018

The President concluded saying “poor me” to America, literally.

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security. At some point the Democrats not wanting to make a deal will cost our Country more money than the Border Wall we are all talking about. Crazy!

9:32 AM - Dec 24, 2018

Mr. President, if you find being in that house such a hardship, there are many who would love to see you leave it.

A Christmas Day Hate Message

But even the Scrooge and The Grinch, while having bad Christmas Eves, reformed and found the true spirit of Christmas on Christmas Day. Not so President Trump. Trump found coal in his stocking, though perhaps he would regard that as a good thing. So Trump summoned reporters to the Oval Office for a bizarre “Christmas message” presenting himself as the victim of Democrats. The tirade included a hating rant about Former FBI Director James Comey. Trump the declared it a “disgrace, what’s happening in our country,” before grudgingly offering an “other than that, a very Merry Christmas.”

“Take Comey. Everybody hated Comey, they thought he did a horrible job. The Democrats hated him. They were calling for his resignation, Literally the day before I fired him, they were saying he should be fired. As soon as I fired him, they said, ‘Oh, what did you fire him for? That was a terrible thing to do.’ It’s a disgrace, what’s happening in our country. But other than that, I wish everybody a very merry Christmas.”

Imagine being the President and talking about hating someone on Christmas Day.

When you listen to that, one thing should stand out. These are not the Christmas words of a mentally well man. It’s not cute or funny that the President of the United States is mentally ill.

The Trump Impeachment
UncategorizedUnfit To Lead
The New York Times Reveals How Cadet Bone Spurs Got His Military Deferment

We all know by now the sad story of the White House Squatter’s bones spurs, and how this terrible disability led to exemptions from military service. What we didn’t know, until the New York Times revealed today, that Fred “Old Man” Trump bought these bone spurs from a Podiatrist tenant in Queens.

For 50 years, the details of how the exemption came about, and who made the diagnosis, have remained a mystery, with Mr. Trump himself saying during the presidential campaign that he could not recall who had signed off on the medical documentation.

Now a possible explanation has emerged about the documentation. It involves a foot doctor in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, and a suggestion that the diagnosis was granted as a courtesy to the elder Mr. Trump.

As Woody Guthrie sang, Old Man Trump was a horrible, overcharging, racist landlord. But, for this podiatrist, Dr. Larry Braunstein, who rented a small store front office from him, was able to get services other tenants were unable to receive.

“I know it was a favor,” said one daughter, Dr. Elysa Braunstein, 56, who along with her sister, Sharon Kessel, 53, shared the family’s account for the first time publicly when contacted by The New York Times.

Elysa Braunstein said the implication from her father was that Mr. Trump did not have a disqualifying foot ailment. “But did he examine him? I don’t know,” she said…

“What he got was access to Fred Trump,” Elysa Braunstein said. “If there was anything wrong in the building, my dad would call and Trump would take care of it immediately. That was the small favor that he got.”

Well, who needs examinations? Just ask Dr. Harold Bornstein. There was another “diagnosis” from a different doctor who was — surprise! — another tenant.

There was some involvement by a second podiatrist, Dr. Manny Weinstein. Dr. Weinstein, who died in 1995, lived in two apartments in Brooklyn owned by Fred Trump; city directories show he moved into the first during the year Donald Trump received his exemption.

Does this surprise anyone? Daddy Trump took care of his boy.

An investigation by The Times in October showed the extent to which Fred Trump had assisted his son over the years, despite Donald Trump’s insistence to the contrary. The investigation revealed that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, including the equivalent of $200,000 a year by age 3.

Is there nothing about this man that isn’t a total fraud? No there is not.

inzane
His experience in ‘fraud’ is unprecedented. He has lots of practice and enough cohorts either paid off or threatened. Anybody who writes that off as “just his quirks, but we have a ‘strong economy” (sorry, does not work anymore) is as big or a bigger Jack Ass than he is.

Note: As personality politics tries to disengage from a strictly referential structure focusing on the President, even Republican Senators distancing themselves from referentiality to a cult of personality, identity politics , resulting from an extension toward the political base, is becoming more pronounced. This is a necessary act, serving as damage control, looking toward the next political milestone, two years hence.

As the lines are beginning to draw more closely around party political planning and expectations, the weight of Congressional expectations are beginning to outweigh even the Presidential run in 2020.

The identity political landscape between elitist and sexist demarcation also are tilting internal over external international interests. To note: key players, including big money Republican contributors are seen as modifying and even holding their expected affiliations in terms of time-lines of pronounced plans , in many cases firefighting their shirt term commitments, toward more long term wait and see attitudes.

The recent more then usual turbulence in the markets is hedging them to do so.

youtu.be/lvaHGzN_P6Q

Scaramucchi on Trump’s strategy to win in 2020.

The president’s posturing on the government shutdown over the funding of the border wall is comparable to three-card monte, where we cannot believe our eyes (and ears). He campaigned on the claim that Mexico would pay for the wall. Recently, he proclaimed that he would “own” the shutdown. Now he’s trying to shift the blame to the Democrats despite Republican control of the House and Senate. It seems to me that the Democrats are simply holding him accountable for his campaign representation that the wall would not be paid for with U.S. dollars.
Washington Post

TheHill
ADMINISTRATION
December 27, 2018 - 03:42 PM EST
The Memo: Trump puts isolationism at center stage

BY NIALL STANAGE
TWEET SHARE EMAIL

President Trump’s embrace of isolationism has been a hallmark of his presidency.

It is now at the center of a foreign policy that will remove troops from Syria and cut the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in half.

The president’s “America first” instincts and his willingness to make public his differences with military commanders differentiate him from recent presidents and from many members of his own party.

During his visit with American troops stationed in Iraq on Wednesday, he emphasized his distrust of his own generals - who he characterized as repeatedly asking for more time to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

It was an unusual message for a commander in chief to give during an inaugural visit to troops in a combat zone after nearly two years in office.

"They said again, recently, ‘Can we have more time?’ " Trump said of his generals.

"I said, ‘Nope. You can’t have any more time. You’ve had enough time. We’ve knocked them out,’ " Trump told the soldiers in Iraq, according to pool reports.

The choice of words was particularly notable given two resignations in the last week that have rocked the Pentagon: Defense Secretary James Mattis and the administration’s special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk.

Mattis resigned in a letter that laid bare his differences with Trump over foreign policy, and that led to sighs of worry from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

McGurk’s departure came as a direct response to Trump’s decision to remove all troops from Syria, which the president justified in a Dec. 19 tweet that said ISIS had been defeated in the country.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” he wrote in an assessment that is not shared by Mattis, McGurk or allies like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Trump went on to complain in his remarks in Iraq that other nations should be sharing the burden of U.S. military adventures, a theme that he had also sounded when speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Christmas Day.

In the Oval Office, he noted, “Right now, we are the policeman of the world and we’re paying for it. And we can be the policeman of the world, but other countries have to help us.”

Trump’s distrust of multilateralism is long-standing. It permeates his views on trade and environmental policy as well as military matters.

But it is particularly striking on matters of armed intervention. In one GOP presidential debate early in his 2016 run, Trump called the Iraq War “a big fat mistake” and accused the administration of then-President George W. Bush of having “lied” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Last August, while announcing - with obvious reluctance - that he would send another 4,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Trump took pains to point out that the U.S. “is not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.”

Trump loyalists point to the fact that he was elected in part as a disruptive force. His isolationist instincts were no secret; they were encapsulated in his “America First” slogan. Even as the battles over his foreign policies play out, the government is partially shut down over Trump’s demands that Congress fund a wall on the Mexican border.

The president’s allies say his instincts are broadly in line with an American public that has grown weary of the bloody conflicts that have consumed much of the past two decades. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began 17 years ago.

Yet Trump’s moves have alarmed plenty of Republicans, as well as Democrats, who fear that he could create new dangers.

Some fear an Islamic State resurgence once the U.S. leaves Syria, but others point to more nebulous risks. An abdication of the American willingness to be the “policeman of the world” creates a vacuum that global rivals such as China and Russia would be all too eager to fill, they say.

Mattis made a version of this argument in his resignation letter.

“While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies,” Mattis wrote.

The Defense secretary added: “It is clear that China and Russia … want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model … to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.”

Mattis’s resignation and the media coverage that focused on his differences with Trump appears to have sparked further fury on the president’s part.

Although Mattis originally intended to stay in his post until the end of February, Trump announced that he would in fact replace him at the end of the year with an acting Defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan.

Trump also complained on Twitter that Mattis had failed to see any problems with, as the president characterized it, the U.S. “substantially subsidizing the Militaries of many VERY rich countries all over the world, while at the same time these countries take total advantage of the U.S., and our TAXPAYERS, on Trade.”

Many Republicans are disconcerted by the president’s withdrawal from Syria, arguing that it could leave the door open for an ISIS resurgence just when it appeared that the radical organization was all but vanquished.

Graham called that decision a “disaster” and a “stain on the honor of the United States.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called it “a major blunder.”

But Trump is not for turning back.

“We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven’t even heard about,” he told reporters who traveled with him to Iraq. “Frankly, it’s ridiculous.”

Trump threatens to close ‘Southern Border entirely’ if Dems don’t fund wall
Key players in new fight over Trump tax returns

Poll: More Americans blame Trump for shutdown than Democrats
White House steps up shutdown blame game.

Identity Politics

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The Harvard Crimson

Why I Don’t Support Identity Politics Anymore
By Michelle I. Gao, Crimson Opinion Writer
January 24, 2018

I used to believe in identity politics because it told me: You and your experience matter. Your identity gives you authority. Your beliefs can’t be invalidated because your identity can’t be invalidated. This logical leap was empowering to take.

In the case of race, non-white people decided that their non-whiteness enabled them to speak with authority on topics of race. White people could only participate when they admitted that they were less worthy of speaking.

This kind of identity politics failed me when I went home. At the dinner table, I was ready to proselytize why we Asians, as people of color, needed to fight institutionalized racism and support minority movements like Black Lives Matter. I was armed with my experiences and the rhetoric of how America was built on a history of racism and white superiority.

But it was like I ran into a brick wall. The problem wasn’t that my parents didn’t know these things. They simply didn’t care much about them. They emphasized their own lived experiences as Asians instead—immigrating to America in the 1980s and creating new lives in a time of arguably more open racism than that of today. They didn’t have any reason to oppose whiteness and support black-led movements. White people weren’t any more racist to them than black people. The trajectories that other immigrants led proved that America was a land of opportunity, even for minorities.

Under the rules of identity politics, arguing with my parents about race became essentially impossible. I could never make progress if I kept staking my correctness on being Asian and my experiences living with that identity. My parents, who had the same marginalized identity, could do the same thing. We’d be at a standstill. Admitting that our beliefs were wrong would mean essentially yielding our identity, and nobody was willing to give that up.

I realized that I had lowered the standard of conversation by opening with appeals to our race. I was not giving reasons why we should act; I was merely arguing that external factors obligated us to act. But arguments following the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” make for halfhearted allyship at best.

The best solution was to deemphasize identity altogether. Appealing to my parents on the basis of race was unnecessary to the discussions I wanted to have. I wanted to make them care about what I saw as unjust killings of innocent people and unjust verdicts freeing culpable cops. But police brutality, at its core, is not about race. Why is it wrong for a police officer to shoot a man reaching for his wallet in his own car and then go free, for example? As Columbia professor Mark Lilla argues in his book “The Once and Future Liberal,” those acts are wrong because the victim is another citizen, another human. Humans do not deserve to be deprived of the benefit of the doubt and killed for ordinary acts. Similarly, humans deserve to be held accountable for their misdoings and wronging of others.

This kind of rhetoric would be a much more effective strategy for groups like Black Lives Matter, which need widespread support to effect change. It’s tragic that, though the statement “black lives matter” is so obviously valid, after several years, most Americans still don’t support the movement. But that’s because its most vocal members have made everything about race—citing their race as the reason why everyone must listen to them, instead of trying to convince people why they must be listened to. They make as many sweeping generalizations about race—who can speak, who can ask questions, who can understand, who must try to understand but will never understand anyway—as they accuse others of making. So, they shouldn’t be surprised when, instead of effecting change, they are now mired in cultural wars—the product of dissenters turning identity politics against them.

Identity politics makes people feel better about themselves at the expense of productive discourse. A person’s lived experience should never be invalidated. But no identity makes the beliefs that someone derives from their lived experience automatically more correct. This is not just a logical fallacy that should be avoided on principle. In practice, it is actually a hindrance to persuading others. In a time of such polarization, identity politics makes us close ranks with the like-minded when we need to reach out.

Michelle I. Gao ’21, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Weld Hall.

Copyright © 2018 The Harvard Crimson, Inc.

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Open Future
Can liberal democracies survive identity politics?
A book excerpt and interview with Francis Fukuyama, author of “Identity”

Open Future

Sep 30th 2018 | by A.L.
Almost two decades ago Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the victory of liberal democracy. Today he’s seeing the system shattered in large part by identity politics—the subject of his latest book.

Identity politics describes when people adopt political positions based on their ethnicity, race, sexuality or religion rather than on broader policies. Though it started on the left, it has been more potent on the right: it fueled Donald Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

How did it become one of the most powerful forces in contemporary politics? The Economist asked Mr Fukuyama about the ascent of identity politics and how societies can regain a sense of unity. The interview is followed by an excerpt from the book.


The Economist: Identity has always been a part of politics. Why is there suddenly so much talk about identity politics now?

Mr Fukuyama: Over the past decade, the main axis of politics in Europe and North America has been shifting. During most of the 20th century, the main divisions were based on economic issues surrounding how much the state should intervene to promote equality, versus how much freedom to permit to individuals and the private sector. Today politics increasingly centers around assertions of identity. There has been a widespread populist revolt against globalization, based partly on its unequal economic consequences, but also on the threats to traditional national identities arising from high levels of migration.

The Brexit leave voters were often willing to suffer bad economic consequences to their decision because they felt that protecting traditional British identity was more important to them. The populist nationalist regimes in Hungary feels it has more in common with Putin’s Russia than it does with liberal Germany, despite the ideological divide that used to separate it from the former Soviet Union. Many working class voters that used to support left-wing parties in Europe and the US have switched allegiance to new populist insurgents on identity grounds.

The Economist: You write in your book that “The rise of the therapeutic model midwifed the birth of modern identity politics.” What do you mean by that?

Mr Fukuyama: The modern concept of identity is built around self-esteem—that is, the idea that we have hidden selves that are undervalued by other people, leading to feelings of anger, resentment, and invisibility. By the mid-20th century, it was less priests and ministers to whom people turned for solace, but to psychiatrists seeking to raise people’s self-esteem. This therapeutic mission spread throughout society, to schools, universities, hospitals, and the social services offered by the state itself.

This therapeutic turn coincided with the great social movements of the 1960s, which increasingly saw low self-esteem linked to the marginalization of African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and the like. The fights that we have today over issues of race, gender, gender orientation, and the like, are often more over offended dignity than over material resources.

The Economist: Are liberal democracy (with its focus on individual liberties) and identity politics (with its focus on group rights) compatible?

Mr Fukuyama: It depends on the nature of the groups in question. Independence movements like those in Scotland, Quebec, and Catalonia may lead to the separation of a region and its emergence of a separate sovereign state, but the successor states will likely be liberal democracies protecting individual rights. In these cases democracy per se is not threatened, though the procedures that lead to separation must be democratic.

On the other hand, some cultural groups can themselves violate individual rights, as when a Muslim family in the West forces their daughter to marry someone she doesn’t want to, or doesn’t let her work. In such cases, the group right improperly (in my opinion) undermines the individual right. Liberal democracies have no choice but to take the side of individuals over groups if they are to remain true to their principles.

The Economist: You write that a “creedal national identity […] needs to be strongly reemphasized and defended from attacks by both the left and the right”. What is a “creedal national identity” and what would it look like in practise?

Mr Fukuyama: A creedal national identity is one based on a creed or idea, rather than on biology. An example of the latter is Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who has said that Hungarian national identity is based on Hungarian ethnicity. That is an exclusionary identity that makes no room for citizens who live in Hungary but are not Hungarian.

France and the United States, by contrast, had by the late 20th century developed creedal identities. In the French case it is the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity coming out of the French Revolution; one could become a French citizen if one was loyal to those ideals, regardless of race or ethnicity. The same for the United States, where following the Civil War we had come so see American identity as loyalty to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the principle of equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence.

In my view, contemporary liberal democracies that have become de facto multicultural must develop creedal, as opposed to blood-based national identities if they are to survive as democracies.

The Economist: Have identity politics pushed some voters away from progressive politics? And if so, how can their votes be won back without diminishing the plight of minorities?

Mr Fukuyama: At the core of Trump’s support were working-class white voters who felt the Democratic Party had become a party of minorities and professional women that no longer took their concerns, like job loss from outsourcing, seriously. The same can be said for European working class voters who deserted the left over the latter’s support for multiculturalism. It should be perfectly possible to win these voters back, based on an appeal to broad economic status rather than narrower support from a collection of special interest groups.

Inequality should be addressed by social policies like Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which provided health care to all people regardless of preexisting conditions, regards of race, gender, disability status, and the like. And it is important from progressives not to let patriotism become the exclusive property of the right, or to let justifiable sympathy for refugees morph into a disregard for enforcement of existing immigration laws.


Excerpt from “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2018), by Francis Fukuyama:

But perhaps one of the great drivers of the new American nationalism that sent Donald Trump into the White House (and Britain out of the European Union) has been the perception of invisibility. Two recent studies of conservative voters in Wisconsin and Louisiana by Katherine Cramer and Arlie Hochschild, respectively, point to similar resentments. The overwhelmingly rural voters who supported Republican governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin explained that the elites in the capital, Madison, and in big cities outside the state simply did not understand them or pay attention to their problems. According to one of Cramer’s interlocutors, Washington, D.C., “is a country unto itself…They haven’t got a clue what the rest

of the nation is up to, they’re so absorbed in studying their own belly button.” Similarly, a Tea Party voter in rural Louisiana commented, “A lot of liberal commentators look down on people like me. We can’t say the N-word. We wouldn’t want to; it’s demeaning. So why do liberal commentators feel so free to use the R- word [redneck]?”

The resentful citizens fearing loss of middle-class status point an accusatory finger upward to the elites, to whom they are invisible, but also downward toward the poor, whom they feel are undeserving and being unfairly favored.

According to Cramer, “resentment toward fellow citizens is front and center. People understand their circumstances as the fault of guilty and less deserving people, not as the product of broad social, economic, and political forces.” Hochschild presents a metaphor of ordinary people patiently waiting on a long line to get through a door labeled the american dream, and seeing other people suddenly cut in line ahead of them—African-Americans, women, immigrants—aided by those same elites who ignore them. “You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel—invisible man and feel seen as—moving forward. But through no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are slipping backward.”

Economic distress is often perceived by individuals not as resource deprivation, but as a loss of identity. Hard work should confer dignity on an individual, but that dignity is not recognized—indeed, it is condemned, and other people who are not willing to play by the rules are given undue advantages. This link between income and status helps to explain why nationalist or religious conservative groups have been more appealing to many people than traditional left-wing ones based on economic class. The nationalist can translate loss of relative economic position into loss of identity and status: you have always been a core member of our great nation, but foreigners, immigrants, and your own elite compatriots have been conspiring to hold you down; your country is no longer your own, and you are not respected in your own land. Similarly, the religious partisan can say something almost identical: You are a member of a great community of believers who have been traduced by nonbelievers; this betrayal has led not just to your impoverishment, but is a crime against God himself. You may be invisible to your fellow citizens, but you are not invisible to God.

This is why immigration has become such a neuralgic issue in many countries around the world. Immigration may or may not be helpful to a national economy: like trade, it is often of benefit in the aggregate, but does not benefit all groups within a society. However, it is almost always seen as a threat to cultural identity, especially when cross-border flows of people are as massive as they have been in recent decades. When economic decline is interpreted as loss of social status, it is easy to see why immigration becomes a proxy for economic change.

Yet this is not a fully satisfactory answer as to why the identity nationalist right has in recent years captured voters who had formerly voted for parties of the left, both in the United States and in Europe. The latter has, after all, traditionally had a better practical answer to the economic dislocations caused by technological change and globalization with its broader social safety net. Moreover, progressives have in the past been able to appeal to communal identity, building it around a shared experience of exploitation and resentment of rich capitalists:

“Workers of the world, unite!” “Stick it to the Man!” In the United States, working- class voters overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party from the New Deal in the 1930s up until the rise of Ronald Reagan; European social democracy was built on a foundation of trade unionism and working-class solidarity.

The problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalized in specific ways. This is part of a larger story about the fate of modern liberalism, in which the principle of universal and equal recognition has mutated into the special recognition of particular groups.


Excerpted from “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment”. Copyright © 2018 by Francis Fukuyama. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. All rights reserved.


HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVESPublished 5 hours ago
House probe of FBI-DOJ’s alleged anti-Trump, pro-Clinton bias hits unceremonious end – with no repor
Rep. Gowdy reacts to Mueller probe filings
House Republicans unceremoniously ended their investigation into the way the FBI and the Department of Justice handled Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and the bias allegations against President Trump.

The House probe was led by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Judiciary Committee and sought to look into allegations that the FBI and the DOJ were biased against Trump during the 2016 presidential election and favored Clinton’s candidacy.

Two Republicans chairing the committees – Reps. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and Robert Goodlatte, R-Va. – said in a letter Friday that the DOJ must appoint a special counsel to investigate the “seemingly disparate treatment” of the investigations into Clinton’s use of private emails and Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.

Rep. Goodlatte: Comey is still playing games with usVideo

The letter came less than a week before the Republicans formally lose control of the House to Democrats, while both Gowdy and Goodlatte are retiring from politics.

The Democrats have long criticized the Republican-led probe as a distraction from Mueller’s Russia investigation, with U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, taunting Republicans for their unceremonious end of the probe.

“This is how the House Republican effort to undermine Mueller by ‘investigating the investigators’ ends. Not with a bang, but with a Friday, buried-in-the-holidays whimper, and one foot out the door,” he wrote in a tweet.

Adam Schiff
:heavy_check_mark:
@RepAdamSchiff
This is how the House Republican effort to undermine Mueller by “investigating the investigators” ends. Not with a bang, but with a Friday, buried-in-the-holidays whimper, and one foot out the door.

Jeremy Herb
:heavy_check_mark:
@jeremyherb
NEW: Gowdy and Goodlatte have sent a letter to AG Whitaker, IG Horowtiz and McConnell summarizing their investigation into FBI/DOJ and concerns about the handling of the Clinton and Trump/Russia probes.

But both Gowdy and Goodlatte reject criticism that their investigation undermined the Mueller probe.

“Contrary to Democrat and media claims, there has been no effort to discredit the work of the special counsel,” they said. “Quite the opposite, whatever product is produced by the special counsel must be trusted by Americans and that requires asking tough but fair questions about investigative techniques both employed and not employed.”

The lawmakers sent the letter to the Justice Department and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., saying that their investigation “revealed troubling facts which exacerbated our initial questions and concerns.” The House investigation didn’t produce a full final report of the panel’s findings.

Strzok texts raise questions about FBI actionsVideo
Republicans say top FBI officials were biased against then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016, pointing to Peter Strzok, the disgraced FBI official who was ousted from Robert Mueller’s team and later from the agency after his anti-Trump text messages with his colleague and lover Lisa Page were revealed.

STRZOK, PAGE AND THE FBI TEXTING SCANDAL EXPLAINED

The pair exchanged more than 50,000 text messages throughout the 2016 presidential election, with many of them expressing anti-Trump sentiments. In one message, Page asked Strzok if Trump could become president, prompting his reply: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Goodlatte and Gowdy also refer to the report by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog earlier this year that claims Strzok’s anti-Trump text messages raise questions about the agency’s bias, while fired FBI Director James Comey repeatedly broke the protocol.

The lawmakers also stress in the letter that the probe into Clinton’s use of emails was too lenient and cleared her of any wrongdoing without sufficient inquiry into the controversy.

The letter urges Congress to continue the investigation, saying that “while Congress does not have the power to appoint a special counsel, Congress does have the power to continue to investigate,” and notes that “the facts uncovered thus far” merit the continuation of the probe.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ©2018 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. All market data delayed 20 minutes.

Note: this pronouncement creates an impression prima facea that the Mueller investigation should also be wrapped up. days before the Dem leadership commences in the House.

Exclusive: Russian Ex-Spy Pressured Manafort Over Debts to an Oligarch

Special Counsel Robert Mueller (right) is allegedly investigating ties between Victor Boyarkin (center), who worked for a Russian oligarch, and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort (left). Boyarkin was captured in a rare photo, posted on Facebook, after a conference near Moscow in April 2018. Photo-illustration by TIME; source images: Manafort: Mandel Ngan—AFP/Getty Images; Boyarkin: Council on Foreign and Defense Policy; Mueller: Saul Loeb—AFP/Getty Images
A TIME investigation reveals a Russian ex-spy was a key link between Paul Manafort and a Putin ally

SIMON SHUSTER / RHODES, GREECE @SHUSTRY
December 29th, 2018
When the U.S. government put out its latest sanctions list on Dec. 19, the man named at the top did not seem especially important. Described in the document as a former Russian intelligence officer, he was accused of handling money and negotiations on behalf of a powerful Russian oligarch. The document did not mention that the man, Victor Boyarkin, had links to the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump.

A months-long investigation by TIME, however, found that Boyarkin, a former arms dealer with a high forehead and a very low profile, was a key link between a senior member of the Trump campaign and a powerful ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his only interview with the media about those connections, Boyarkin told TIME this fall that he was in touch with Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in the heat of the presidential race on behalf of the Russian oligarch. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin says. “And he was offering ways to pay it back.”

The former Russian intelligence officer says he has been approached by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Boyarkin’s response to those investigators? “I told them to go dig a ditch,” he says. Peter Carr, the spokesman for the Special Counsel’s Office, declined to comment. Through his spokesman, Manafort likewise declined to comment on his alleged connections with Boyarkin.

But those connections could be potentially important to the Special Counsel’s inquiry. They would mark some of the clearest evidence of the leverage that powerful Russians had over Trump’s campaign chairman. And they may shed light on why Manafort discussed going right back to work for pro-Russian interests in Eastern Europe after he crashed out of the Trump campaign in August 2016, according to numerous sources in the TIME investigation.

‘Our friend V’
When he joined the campaign in the spring of 2016, Manafort was nearly broke. The veteran political consultant had racked up bills worth millions of dollars in luxury real estate, clothing, cars and antiques. According to allegations contained in court records filed in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands, he was also deeply in debt to Boyarkin’s boss, the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who was demanding money from Manafort over a failed business deal in Ukraine and other ventures.

Boyarkin says it fell to him to collect the debt from Manafort. “I came down on him hard,” he says. But the American proved elusive. In a petition filed in the Cayman Islands in 2014, lawyers for Deripaska, a metals tycoon with close ties to the Kremlin, complain that Manafort and his then-partner had “simply disappeared” with around $19 million of the Russian’s money.

When he reappeared in the headlines around April 2016, Manafort was serving as an unpaid adviser to the Trump campaign. He wanted his long-time patron in Moscow to know all about it.

In a series of emails sent that spring and summer, Manafort tried to offer “private briefings” about the presidential race to Deripaska, apparently, as one of the emails puts it, to “get whole.” Reports in The Atlantic and the Washington Post revealed those emails in the fall of 2017. Among the questions that remained unanswered was the identity of Manafort’s contact in Moscow, the one referred to in one of the emails as “our friend V.”

Even after TIME learned his full name in April, he proved a difficult man to find. His online presence amounted to digital scraps: one photo of him at a conference in Moscow, a few benign quotes in the Russian media from his years selling arms for state-linked companies, and some vague references in U.S. government archives to someone by that name, “Commander Viktor A. Boyarkin,” serving in the 1990s as an assistant naval attaché at the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. – a job sometimes used as cover for intelligence agents.

Only in early October was a TIME reporter able to track Boyarkin down. In the company of a senior Russian diplomat and two young assistants from Moscow, he attended a conference in Greece that was organized by one of Putin’s oldest friends, the former KGB agent and state railway boss Vladimir Yakunin. “How did you find me here,” was the question Boyarkin asked, repeatedly, when confronted about his ties to Manafort during a coffee break at that conference.

Once he agreed to discuss their relationship, it was mostly to confirm the basic facts, often with a curt, “Yes, so what.” (He did not respond to numerous requests for comment after his name appeared on the U.S sanctions list on Dec. 19.)

The outlines of Boyarkin’s career suggest a life spent at the intersection of Russian espionage, diplomacy and the arms trade. Having served at the Russian embassies in the U.S. and Mexico in the 1990s, dealing primarily in military affairs, he says he turned his focus to the arms trade in the early 2000s. His specialty was the export of small and medium-sized warships and other naval vessels that were produced in Soviet-era shipyards across Russia.

This business kept him in touch with military buyers from around the world, including in various parts of Africa. By the late-2000s, he had put this expertise in the service of Deripaska, whose global mining and metals empire often involved making deals with despots in the developing world.

But his range was broader than that. As Boyarkin tells it, his acquaintance with Manafort goes back to around 2006, the year Deripaska asked both of them to help redraw the map of Eastern Europe.

The Montenegro connection
Montenegro, a tiny Balkan nation on the Adriatic Sea, was an important testing ground for Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska. The oligarch had invested heavily in that country, buying control of a vast aluminum smelter in 2005 that accounted for roughly half of Montenegro’s exports and a sixth of its entire economy. The following year, he decided to support the Montenegrins’ drive to become an independent country. That meant breaking away from its more powerful neighbor, Serbia – and convincing the world to recognize Montenegro as an independent state.

To get this done, Deripaska offered the help of several of his advisers, including Manafort. “They were a good team,” says a senior official in Montenegro who was involved in that vote. “They helped get the support we needed from our international partners,” both in Russia and the West, says the official, who spoke to TIME on condition of anonymity. After the people of Montenegro voted by a margin slightly above 55% to declare independence from Serbia in May 2006, all the world’s major powers recognized the results.

Manafort has been open about his role in this campaign. “I have always publicly acknowledged that I worked for Mr. Deripaska and his company,” he said in a statement to reporters in the spring of 2017. “For example, one of the projects involved supporting a referendum in Montenegro that allowed that country to choose membership in the EU, a measure that Russia opposed.”

In fact, Moscow never tried to stop Montenegro’s independence, and Deripaska would not likely have supported it so robustly without approval from the Kremlin. (In 2007, he told the Financial Times, “I don’t separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.”)

“There was never any real resistance from Moscow [to the independence vote],” says the senior official in Montenegro, who was involved in lobbying for Russian support in the years before and after that referendum. The Kremlin, he says, was only too happy to have another potential ally in Eastern Europe – one that was heavily dependent on Russian investments. The arrangement suited Montenegro’s leaders just fine. “Better the Russians come here with suitcases of money than with columns of tanks,” says the official.

But their relationship with Deripaska quickly soured in much the same way it began—over money. After years of disputes over unpaid debts, the Russian billionaire sued Montenegro in 2014 for seizing the aluminum plant he controlled. The country then sped up its plans to join the NATO military alliance and integrate with the West.

The Kremlin wasn’t pleased. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in 2014 it would be “irresponsible” and “even a provocation” for another Balkan state to become a NATO member. According to investigators in Montenegro, Russian agents soon began plotting to unseat the nation’s leaders and install a government more friendly to Moscow. By coincidence, the dispute came to a head in the fall of 2016, at the same time as the U.S. presidential race.

About three weeks before the American elections, the people of Montenegro were due to hold a pivotal vote of their own. Depending on the outcome, the government would either shepherd the country into the NATO alliance the following year, or a new set of leaders would take power, most of whom wanted to change course and develop closer ties with Russia.

According to three sources in this opposition movement, known in Montenegro as the Democratic Front, they were counting on help from an American lobbyist who had worked in their country before – and who happened to be fresh out of a job in Washington. His name was Paul Manafort.

Enter Manafort
Having served for three months as Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, Manafort was forced to resign in mid-August after his links to Russian interests in Ukraine became public. Still deep in debt, he reportedly went around pitching his services as a consultant in the months that followed to a wide variety of foreign leaders, from the Kurds in Iraq to the incoming president of Ecuador.

The TIME investigation found that Manafort was also in contact with politicians from his old stomping ground of Montenegro. Among them was Nebojsa Medojevic, one of the opposition leaders who were then campaigning to unseat the country’s pro-NATO leaders. His ties to Manafort were first reported to TIME by a former associate of Montenegro’s ruling clique, who said the American consultant had met with Medojevic to discuss a possible consulting deal in the fall of 2016.

At first the tip seemed implausible. Why would one of the world’s most prominent political advisers – still fresh from the chairmanship of the Republican presidential campaign – consider working with a group seen as pro-Russian upstarts in a Balkan nation of 600,000 people?

The senior Montenegrin official suggested an answer. “If Manafort got involved here in 2016, it would only be through the Russians,” he said.

At the time, Russian money was indeed flowing into Montenegrin politics. According to the sanctions list posted Dec. 19, Deripaska and Boyarkin were “involved in providing Russian financial support to a Montenegrin political party ahead of Montenegro’s 2016 elections.”

In more than a dozen interviews that TIME conducted this year, officials and political leaders in Montenegro confirmed that Deripaska and one other Russian oligarch bankrolled the pro-Russian opposition in 2016. Two of them said they heard Manafort’s name come up in strategy meetings for that opposition movement.

When asked about Manafort’s role, Medojevic, one of the leaders of this movement, confirmed that he had met with Manafort to discuss a potential partnership in the fall of 2016. He added that the meeting was a disappointment, and that no deal came out of it. In several follow-up conversations, however, he refused to talk about the meeting, saying that his contacts in the West were legitimate and urging reporters not to publish his initial comments.

For Medojevic and the rest of the opposition, the elections in Montenegro did not go smoothly. The day before the vote, a group of men was arrested and charged with plotting to overthrow the government of Montenegro, assassinate its leader and seize power by force – all with abundant help from Moscow. The Montenegrin authorities later charged two agents of Russia’s military intelligence service with masterminding the alleged coup. Several of the leaders of the opposition in that country, including Medojevic, are currently on trial for charges that stem from the alleged coup attempt.

The following year, Montenegro’s parliament overwhelmingly ratified membership in NATO, as pro-Russian demonstrators protested outside. Russia’s foreign ministry said lawmakers were “trampling all democratic norms and principles.” Now, Montenegro is protected by Article 5 of the alliance, which calls for all members to support any state that comes under attack.

This summer, President Trump took issue with that protection. “Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people,” he said, after being asked by Fox News in July if the U.S. should come to Montenegro’s defense. “They are very aggressive people, they may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III.”

Known unknowns
It remains unclear whether Manafort actually provided any services in Montenegro in 2016. His lawyers deny he did any work for any Montenegrin politicians that year. Nor is it clear whether Manafort owes debts to Deripaska and, if so, how much. A court in Virginia convicted Manafort in August on eight charges of bank and tax fraud related to his lobbying work in Ukraine; he is due to be sentenced in February.

Boyarkin, for his part, denies having anything to do with Montenegrin politics. When TIME met him in Greece, he said he had not worked for Deripaska since the end of 2016. The U.S. government differs on that point; the Dec. 19 press release from the Treasury Department said Boyarkin “reports directly to Deripaska and has led business negotiations on Deripaska’s behalf.”

Those negotiations, involving mining deals in Africa and factories in Europe, were of secondary concern to U.S. investigators when they contacted Boyarkin last year, he says. They wanted to know about his links to Manafort, and the “private briefings” he had offered to Boyarkin and his boss. “They asked about all of that, yes,” the operative recalls. Once again, he says he told them to get lost.

—With reporting by Jovo Martinovic/Podgorica, Montenegro and Tessa Berenson/Washingto

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