Occupy Democrats on April 25 published a piece in which it quoted Carl Bernstein (one of the people who exposed the Watergate coverup) as saying that the continuing behavior of such figures as Michael Flynn and the repeated denials by administration figures of any contact with Russia smell of coverup:
There is serious belief in the FBI, in the Congressional committees in the House and the Senate, that there is an active cover-up going on, involving trying to keep investigators from finding out what happened in terms of the Trump Campaign, and what happened in their associations with Russians.
The active cover-up attempts by administration figures amount to impeachable offenses, more so in many cases than the acts covered up. Remember that Bill Clinton was impeached for supposedly lying (“it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is”) about a consensual affair (adultery is no longer illegal and is thus not a “high crime or misdemeanor”, although it is a capital offense for a politician’s career– a fate that Clinton averted by the skin of his teeth. The fact that he only had a couple of years left in office and that a Republican fanatic, a mole in the White House, engineered the whole affair with Monica and saved the evidence– the infamous “blue dress”– helped him.)
The Syrian nerve gas attack provided Don the Con with a perfect opportunity to launch a few missiles, mostly for domestic consumption, that made it appear as if he had gone counter to Russian interests in Syria. It is not likely that Vladimir really cared about a Syrian air force base, as shown by the fact that he did finally meet with US State Department head Rex Tillerson in Moscow not long after the cruise missile attack. (Compare this with the government of Mexico, which cancelled meetings with US representatives after Don the Con made more inflammatory remarks and threats.)
Flynn and several other figures in the administration denied relatively innocuous contacts with Russians that later turned out to be real. Flynn may have broken the law related to registration of foreign agents. Supposedly Flynn informed his superiors that he would be visiting Moscow in 2015 and was debriefed afterwards, but he forgot to mention the payments he received from the Russian government and never registered as a foreign agent– until last week, around the time he offered to testify in exchange for immunity. Don the Con himself has thrown cold water on the rumors of Russian collusion and has pursued the leakers of documents that corroborate the rumors. If he had nothing to hide, he should not be so strenuous about denying it.
The White House has refused to release documents requested by the Senate committee related to Flynn’s foreign contacts while he was national security adviser for three weeks. Spokesman Sean Spicer dismissed the request for detailed records as “outlandish.”
There is concrete evidence of a secret back channel (a dedicated computer server in Trump Tower that communicated by email with Alfa) between Trump and the Russian bank Alfa, the one favored by modern Russian oligarchs. There are individuals hired by the Trump campaign such as Carter Page, who was an unindicted co-conspirator in a Russian espionage case. Then there is the direct effort by Don the Con to soften the Republican platform on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And then there are the discussions that Michael Flynn had with Ambassador Kislyach about reducing the sanctions on Russia after the new administration came to power. Finally, there is the Exxon deal with Russian oil interests that will provide them with new technology; Exxon has already applied for a waiver on the sanctions voted by Congress after Ukraine. The Exxon deal is reported to be worth $500 billion to $1 trillion in profits.
There is also concrete evidence that the Russians have been cultivating Don the Con since at least 2007, around the time Don started making somewhat hyperbolic statements lauding Vladimir and his government. A perfect opportunity for the Russians to gather kompromat (compromising intelligence for blackmail) occurred when Don the Con hosted a beauty pageant in Moscow in 2013. That was when Don the Con reportedly paid two prostitutes to urinate on a bed that the Clintons had slept in– a contention backed by eyewitnesses on the hotel staff.
If that were not enough, there are rumors of a 19.5% stake in Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, being transferred to certain US parties.
Clearly, Don the Con is preparing to make a number of policy changes that would greatly benefit the Russian government– but why? Because Vladimir is a friend of Don the Con? Or because the Russians have loaned Don the Con so much money that they have leverage over his presidential actions?
Today’s New York Times reports that Don the Con has removed his demand for specific funding for his wall on the Mexican border. With estimates of costs ranging from $21 billion to more than $70 billion, Don the Con has decided that discretion is the better part of valor and announced that wall funding can wait until next fiscal year. Nevertheless, increased funding for assorted technological advances in border security will be included.
Ironically, estimates of illegal border crossings have shown a 75 percent drop since Don the Con won the Electoral College by a narrow margin. Apparently Mexicans are less interested in emigrating to the US under a Don the Con government administration. Perhaps a wall will not be necessary if Don the Con makes living in the US unattractive enough.
It is not unlikely that Don the Con has gotten his way on some other, unspecified aspect of the budget. Subsidies paid to make health insurance affordable for six million people are apparently safe after the Democrats refused an offer to bargain over them; Don the Con apparently has no leverage over them. Payments to extend health insurance for disabled coal miners are also likely to be granted.
In an unrelated development, former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said in an interview that Republicans think the economy is booming since the election, while Democrats see a looming recession on the horizon. Neither partisan assessment is particularly accurate.
Kakistocracy or Kleptocracy?
The State Department put up a travelog-style description of Mar-a-Lago, Don the Con’s privately owned weekend retreat in Florida, on its ShareAmerica website a couple of weeks ago, but the page was taken down today. There has been unwelcome publicity about the conflict of interest involved in advertising a 114-room mansion and golf course, for which Don the Con recently doubled the membership fee (from $100K to $200K).
Last week, records of the money donated by businesses and individuals to Don the Con to put on his inauguration festival were released. More than $107 million was raised, with billionaire Sheldon Adelson giving $5 million. Businesses were capped at $1 million each, and ATT, Pfizer, several coal companies, and many others donated the maximum. Don the Con has turned around and granted favors to these businesses and individuals, from gutting the EPA to repealing rules against dumping coal waste in streams. There is no doubt Donald is offering pay-to-play to all comers.
According to today’s Guardian, the budget bill that must be passed by April 28 to keep the US government running is threatened by Don the Con’s insistence that it include funding for a wall on our border with Mexico. White House sources were uncertain whether Don the Con would sign a budget bill unless it includes money for his wall.
The border wall has become an obsession with Don the Con, and he is in such a hurry to build it that he can’t wait for Mexico to come around and provide the funding. He is insisting that the wall be built with American funds, claiming that he will figure out later how to make Mexico pay. US government estimates put the cost of the wall at $21 billion, but some say it could cost as much as $75 billion.
Don the Con still claims that a wall will prevent drug smuggling and the entrance of members of the notorious Central American gang MS 13. Never mind that Mexican drug smugglers are sophisticated enough to send drugs in by airplane or boat, or even to tunnel under the border routinely. Never mind that gang members can easily fly in on six-month tourist visas and then overstay their visas– the method used by half of all illegal aliens. Never mind all that.
A “big, beautiful wall” will reward Don the Con’s cronies who are into concrete. As a matter of fact, Don the Con’s New York construction connections run to mafia contractors who control the concrete business. That is why his favorite building, Trump Tower, is built with concrete instead of the structural steel recommended by architects.
So far, none of Don the Con’s much vaunted campaign promises not supported by an overwhelming majority of Republican lawmakers has come true. We shall see if the opposition to the wall by Republican border-state legislators will trip up another of Don the Con’s promises.
The Kakistocracy Pays Off Russia
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had been with Exxon for years before he was picked for this job in January, had been supervising a deal with Russia that was in the works when sanctions were applied against certain Russian officials in 2014 in retaliation for the annexation of the Crimea. This deal is estimated to be worth some $500 billion or more, but it was put on hold by the sanctions. Exxon has applied to the Treasury Department for a waiver to the sanctions in order to continue the deal, according to the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
The deal would help to prop up Vladimir Putin’s government, which has been in financial trouble since the price of oil dropped dramatically with the advent of fracking and other advanced drilling techniques. With this oil money, Putin could invest more in his military without crimping his overall budget. The financial bite of the sanctions would be undermined, which is almost as good as having the sanctions lifted completely. The negative publicity surrounding the lifting of sanctions could be avoided by approving Exxon’s waiver request.
The Kakistocracy Gains a Foothold in China
The Guardian has reported that, on the day Chinese President Xi Jinping met with President Don the Con and his daughter Ivanka, she gained preliminary approval for three new trademarks in China. Ivanka markets products like jewellry and handbags under her own trademarks, and she has applied for over three dozen trademarks in China. The approval will make it easier and more profitable for her to market her products in China, an emerging luxury market. Business conditions for foreign firms are notoriously difficult in China, and Ivanka’s move into the territory will be greatly eased by her relationship with the kakistocrat-in-chief. The opportunities for corrupt self-dealing are boundless in the new administration.
Don the Con, the Kakistocrat in Chief
Donald J. Trump has accumulated a lot of epithets, many of them centered around the color orange or his resemblance to an orangutang, a jackal, or other deplorable or outrageous animals. Donald himself has made a practice of using epithets for many people, from “Crooked Hillary” to “Lyin’ Ted”; he has insulted many more people with adjectives such as “failing” and “sad.”
The most important aspects of a good epithet for Donald are relevance, brevity, and insult value. “The Con” is descriptive because Donald is a con man, it is brief, and it rhymes. I propose that we should refer to “Don the Con” as much as possible.
“Kakistocracy” is, by the way, a government by the worst of men. That certainly applies to Don the Con, who has already been violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution and an express contract with the General Services Administration (GSA) since the day of his inauguration. (This refers to the Old Post Office, an historic building on which his company has a 60-year lease to operate a hotel; the contract he signed explicitly bars anyone with a government job from the lease. Naturally, after he was inaugurated, he appointed a new head for the GSA, and the contract was interpreted in a way that was favorable to him.)
Don the Con’s latest outrage, and little reported on, is to make secret ethics waivers for some of his appointees to allow them to work on areas that would be considered conflicts of interest. Since they are secret, we have no way of knowing which conflicts of interest that appear have already been waived by Don the Con. In addition, he has made the White House visitor logs secret “for national security and privacy reasons.” Naturally certain individuals would prefer that we not know that they have visited with Don the Con.
Never lose sight of the fact that while Don the Con is entertaining us with his outrageous corruption, he is infiltrating the Administration with ideological people who change or eliminate many aspects of government to fit their extreme views. Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch is only the most obvious of these nefarious individuals. In particular, large parts of the scientific work of agencies like NOAA, the Interior Department, and NIH are being altered or eliminated to avoid conflicts with extreme anti-scientific views held by alt-right conservatives. The destruction of scientific agencies is perhaps the worst crime of this administration, and it goes on largely in secret; by the time Don the Con is thrown out, decades of scientific work will have been lost and the general public will never know.
We must also avoid over-reacting; writing on Twitter that “Donald Trump must hang” does no good and may invite a visit from the Secret Service.
The Same Two Almond Trees
Here’s a bizarre thought: what if Putin told al-Assad to drop “just one” sarin bomb to give Donald an excuse to loudly berate the Russians and attack a Syrian air base (with minimal casualties)– all to distract the American public from the news that Carter Page had been the subject of a warrant for surveillance because of his Russia ties? In private, Vladimir could tell Secretary of State Tillerson that everything is really OK– just keep up the great job you are doing of dismantling the American government. After all, what could be better for the Russians than an America destabilized by poor government services to its neediest people? This is just what Donald is doing, exacerbating income and wealth inequality and freeing the police and the border patrol to abuse disfavored people– all of which leads to a less stable society, less able to counter the threat from a foreign enemy.
British intelligence agencies passed routine “sigint” (signals intelligence, e.g. tapped phones) on Trump associates’ unusual contacts with Russian agents who were under surveillance because of their activities, starting in late 2015, to American intelligence agencies. American agencies were described as “asleep” at the time in relation to Donald’s collusion with Russian “active measures” (disinformation including fake news stories, releasing hacked emails, etc.) that Vladimir Putin intended to attempt to sway the election against Hillary.
A story in today’s Guardian describes the intelligence that British agencies received as the fruit of routine surveillance of known Russian agents, but the British were so concerned about the connections to Donald’s campaign that they pointed this out to American intelligence agencies. Those agencies failed to make the connection until July 2016, when they requested a warrant for surveillance of Carter Page, a close aide to Donald.
In fact, Donald has been a subject of Russian cultivation since at least 2007, when he publicly lauded Vladimir as “doing a great job.” Now Russia has tested the limits of Donald’s friendship by authorizing al-Assad’s use of sarin on rebel civilians. It remains to be seen how far Donald will go in opposing Russia’s moves in what has become the Second Cold War.
(the photo above is the view to the east from the location of the two almond trees)
