Trump's Lies and Disingenuous Claims of Treason

If there is anyone betraying the best interest of the United States, I would argue that it is Donald Trump who is shredding our alliances and violating the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution daily.  Yet like Hitler did with his opponents who recognized him for the threat that he posed to Germany, Trump is wildly claiming the it is U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI that are the traitors.  Trump seemingly views himself as the government in the form of a monarch and thereby any investigation of him and his dirty business dealings is "treason."  While James Comey is hardly among my favorite individuals - his bungling of the Clinton email red herring  helped elect Trump - in a column in the Washington Post he reminds us that facts matter and that Trump's baseless lies need to be confronted.  One can only hope that the media listens and goes after Trump and his minions accordingly. Here are op-ed highlights:

It is tempting for normal people to ignore [Trump] our president when he starts ranting about treason and corruption at the FBI. I understand the temptation. I’m the object of many of his rants, and even I try to ignore him.

But we shouldn’t, because millions of good people believe what a president of the United States says. In normal times, that’s healthy. But not now, when the president is a liar who doesn’t care what damage he does to vital institutions. We must call out his lies that the FBI was corrupt and committed treason, that we spied on the Trump campaign and tried to defeat Donald Trump. We must constantly return to the stubborn facts.

Russia engaged in a massive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Near as I can tell, there is only one U.S. leader who still denies that fact. The FBI saw the attack starting in mid-June 2016, with the first dumping of stolen emails. In late July, when we were hard at work trying to understand the scope of the effort, we learned that one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers knew about the Russian effort seven weeks before we did.

Of course, nobody from the Trump campaign told us this (or about later Russian approaches); we had to learn it, months after the fact, from an allied ambassador.

But when we finally learned of it in late July, what should the FBI have done? Let it go? Go tell the Trump campaign? Tell the press? No. Investigate, to see what the facts were. We didn’t know what was true. Maybe there was nothing to it, or maybe Americans were actively conspiring with the Russians. To find out, the FBI would live up to its name and investigate. . . . If there was something to it, we didn’t want to let corrupt Americans know we were onto them. So, we kept it secret. That’s how the FBI approaches all counterintelligence cases.

And there’s the first problem with Trump’s whole “treason” narrative. If we were “deep state” Clinton loyalists bent on stopping him, why would we keep it secret? Why wouldn’t the much-maligned FBI supervisor Peter Strzok — the alleged kingpin of the “treasonous” plot to stop Trump — tell anyone? He was one of the very few people who knew what we were investigating.

We didn’t “spy” on anyone’s campaign. We investigated to see whether it was true that Americans associated with the campaign had taken the Russians up on any offer of help. By late October, the investigators thought they had probable cause to get a federal court order to conduct electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page. Page was no longer with the campaign, but there was reason to believe he was acting as an agent of the Russian government.

There is a reason the non-fringe media doesn’t spend much time on this “treason” and “corruption” business. The conspiracy theory makes no sense. The FBI wasn’t out to get Donald Trump. It also wasn’t out to get Hillary Clinton. It was out to do its best to investigate serious matters while walking through a vicious political minefield.

But go ahead, investigate the investigators, if you must. When those investigations are over, you will find the work was done appropriately and focused only on discerning the truth of very serious allegations. There was no corruption. There was no treason. There was no attempted coup. Those are lies, and dumb lies at that. There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances.

Sadly, Attorney General William Barr is acting more like the consigliere to a Mafia crime boss than attorney general of the United States.  Rather than protect the American people and the justice system, his sole allegiance appears to be to Trump. 

Kathleen Parker: What Is Trump Hiding?

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker - who may or may not identify as a Republican any longer - has a column in the Washington Post that reviews what we do know so far about the Russiagate investigation and reaches the logical conclusion that Trump is definitely hiding something.  The big question, of course, is what is it?  But the old adage that if you do not have something to hide, then people normally do not act as if they do, much less try to impede investigations that will turn up nothing if one is innocent.  Despite Trump's claims that there was no collusion with Russia, the fact is that since he lies on average 5 or 6 times a day to the American public, a majority of Americas now are at a point where they simply do not believe anything that the man says since the odds are high that he's lying. Add this constant dishonesty to what we know and the only safe take away is as Parker concludes: he is hiding something. Here are column excerpts:

Conspiracies. Secret societies. Witch hunts.  During the past year, we’ve heard reference to all of the above to explain away any suggestion of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 presidential election.

There are lots of other dots in this constellation of rumor and innuendo, as well as documented facts and events that can be easily corroborated. Objectively, it is neither conjecture nor conspiracy to observe that the president strikes a defensive pose every time a well-sourced article reveals something that could seem incriminating. Indeed, he has become Clintonesque, reflexively dodging and covering up, whether he needs to or not.

Thus, the question is whether Trump is hiding something, an obvious inference, or whether his observably narcissistic personality means he can’t tolerate even the suggestion that he may be at fault. The narcissist’s first instinct is always to blame others. Combined with his excessive need for admiration, another narcissistic trait, it is conceivable that Trump punches back as a function of a personality disorder.  Whatever the verdict, either possibility inspires shivers.

These are the facts thus far:

First, Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey in May — after, according to Comey, Trump asked him for loyalty and to drop the probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, whose three-week tenure ended upon revelations that he lied about conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Flynn subsequently pleaded guilty to lying in exchange for his cooperation with the Russia investigation. . . . this episode is factual.

Trump also asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into possible collusion. But Sessions did recuse himself for sound reasons and, for a brief spell, became a target of Trump’s Twitter feed.

Then Trump began pressuring Sessions to fire acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, tweeting that McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, had received $700,000 from the Clintons for her 2015 run for a Virginia state Senate seat. His implication was that McCabe couldn’t possibly be objective if his wife was supported by the Clinton machine. Life teaches us that untrustworthy people or people lacking personal integrity always suspect that others are the same.   The truth is, Jill McCabe received about $500,000 from a political action committee affiliated with then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. 

Then, a few days ago, reports surfaced that Trump in June ordered the firing of Mueller. When White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn threatened to quit rather than carry out the command, the president backed off. Meanwhile, we also learned that Mueller wants to interview Trump about Flynn, Comey and the president’s outreach to several top Republicans to quickly end the Senate Intelligence Committee’s own investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion in the election.

[Y]ou’d be a damned fool not to conclude that Donald Trump has something to hid
 

Does Mueller Have Evidence to Confirm an Obstruction Charge Against Trump?

A new piece in the New York Times would seem to indicate that the noose is tightening around Donald Trump's neck in terms of being guilty of obstruction of justice as a result of his efforts to kill the FBI Russiagate investigation.  The evidence appears to include James Comey's contemporaneous notes, hand written notes of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, and evidence that Trump pressured his White Counsel to lobby Jeff Sessions - who himself had lied about his Russia contacts - not to recuse himself from the Russiagate investigation.  This news combined with the revelations of Michael Wolff's new book makes one wonder how much longer Congressional Republicans keep their heads up their asses and refuse to act to protect the nation and remove Trump from office.  Yes, I am fearful of what a Mike Pence presidency could mean - the man is a religious fanatic and a liar - but I suspect he would not trigger a nuclear war because of his obsession with his penis size and the need to satiate his narcissism.   Here are article highlights (read the entire piece):

President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election. . . . . White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him.

The lobbying of Mr. Sessions is one of several previously unreported episodes that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has learned about as he investigates whether Mr. Trump obstructed the F.B.I.’s Russia inquiry. Among the other episodes, Mr. Trump described the Russia investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated” in a letter that he intended to send to the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, but that White House aides stopped him from sending. Mr. Mueller has also substantiated claims that Mr. Comey made in a series of memos describing troubling interactions with the president before he was fired in May. The special counsel has received handwritten notes from Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, showing that Mr. Trump talked to Mr. Priebus about how he had called Mr. Comey to urge him to say publicly that he was not under investigation. The president’s determination to fire Mr. Comey even led one White House lawyer to take the extraordinary step of misleading Mr. Trump about whether he had the authority to remove him.

The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this episode.

Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice. Regardless of whether Mr. Mueller believes there is enough evidence to make a case against the president, Mr. Trump’s belief that his attorney general should protect him provides an important window into how he governs. Presidents have had close relationships with their attorneys general, but Mr. Trump’s obsession with loyalty is particularly unusual, especially given the Justice Department’s investigation into him and his associates.

What is Trump So Desperate to Cover Up?

The vast majority of statements made by Donald Tump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, have been documented to be untrue or, simply put, lies.   A similar pattern has emerged with much of his regime, be it Mike Pence lying and claiming that he had been mislead by Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland lying to Congress and, of course the very real likelihood that Jared Kushner has lied to both the FBI and congressional committees.  Over and over gain the lies have a nexus to the Trump campaign/transition team's contacts with Russia.  The question becomes, as in the caption of this post and a column in the Washington Post raise, what is Trump and his minion so desperate to cover up?  To many, the answer seems increasingly obvious: collusion with Russia, violations of campaign laws, and perhaps even treason, despite Trump's newest chilling claim that as president he is above the law.  Here are excerpts from the Post column:

We know that President Trump and his campaign either colluded with the Russian effort to undermine U.S. democracy or tried mightily to do so. We know that Trump has apparently obstructed justice to try to halt investigation into what happened. What we don’t know is whether Congress, in the end, will do its sworn duty to protect the Constitution.

We also don’t know what else special counsel Robert S. Mueller III might have discovered, especially about the Trump family’s international financial dealings. Or what Mueller might be learning from Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with investigators. Or how far Trump, who is increasingly frantic, might yet go to squash the Mueller probe.

It is true that there is no federal statute against “collusion.” But a specific law is not necessary for citizens and their representatives in Congress to make a judgment: Is it acceptable for a presidential candidate and officials of his campaign to encourage an adversarial foreign power’s efforts to meddle in the U.S. election process — and then seek to reward that foreign power by easing sanctions? Yes or no?

I’m not interested in carrying water for the Democratic Party, which should have been able to beat Trump, who was manifestly unqualified and unfit, no matter what the Russians did. But what we have learned thus far is truly shocking.

In July 2016, Trump issued a public plea: “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” 

Previously, according to U.S. intelligence officials, state-sponsored Russian hackers had obtained thousands of private emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and the material was being released in a manner clearly intended to damage the Clinton campaign.

We now know that in June 2016, three of the most important figures in the Trump campaign — Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort — had eagerly met with a Kremlin-tied lawyer who promised to share damaging information the Russian government had on Clinton. We also know that in April, another go-between had promised Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos “thousands of emails” containing “dirt” on Clinton.
We know that in the last days of the campaign, Russian cyberwarriors targeted the social media accounts of potential Trump voters in key states. We don’t yet know how they aimed their propaganda so accurately.

We have learned, however, that after the election, the Trump transition team actively undermined sanctions that President Barack Obama had imposed on Russia for its election interference. 

And we know that members of the Trump campaign’s inner circle consistently failed to disclose their meetings with Russian officials and emissaries. There is a pattern of behavior here. It may or may not be illegal, but it is certainly shocking and unacceptable.

As for obstruction of justice, Trump tweeted Saturday that “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI.” This indicates the president knew Flynn had committed a crime before meeting with FBI director James B. Comey and, according to Comey, instructing him to drop the Flynn investigation. Trump later fired Comey, telling NBC’s Lester Holt that the reason was the Russia probe. Trump has reportedly hectored other administration officials and members of Congress to stop investigating the Russia connection.

With Flynn now cooperating, Mueller’s investigation enters a new phase. But let’s not lose sight of the big picture. Ask yourself a common-sense question: If nothing wrong happened with Russia during the campaign, why is Trump so desperate to cover it up?

The other question to ask is this: will Congressional Republicans who are now supporting a man accused of sexual misconduct against minors for the U.S. Senate fulfill their duties and act to remove Trump - and Pence - from office or will they in effect, participate in the overthrow the U.S. Constitution.

Mueller Focusing on DOJ Role in Comey Firing

While Roy Moore's much younger wife has been saying that Donald Trump should be thanking her teenage girl loving husband for distracting the media from coverage about Russia, the reality is that the legitimate media is still paying close attention to Robert Mueller's relentless investigation that seems to be moving closer and closer to Der Trumpenführer himself.  A case in point, a piece in New York Magazine that looks at Mueller's focus on the Department of Justice involvement in the firing of James Comey.  Another in Politico looks at Mueller's possible closing in on Michael Flynn who could conceivable be flipped to aid the investigation of Trump himself.  First these highlights from the New York Magazine piece:

Just before firing James Comey, President Trump reportedly drafted a multi-page letter in which he laid out his issues with the FBI director. According to the Washington Post, Trump expressed the he was upset that Comey wouldn’t publicly deny that the FBI’s Russia probe wasn’t focused on him personally.

Now the special counsel’s team is requesting documents that make it sound a lot like they’re looking into whether Trump himself obstructed justice by firing Comey, in addition to all the Russia contacts former campaign officials can’t quite remember.

ABC News reported that in the last month, Mueller’s team requested Justice Department emails and other documents related to the firing of Comey, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from all investigations related to the Russia matter. Muller already sought White House documents related to the FBI director’s dismissal, but this would be the first time he’s directed a records request to the Justice Department – the department in charge of his entire probe. That would include discussions between Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who laid out the reasons Comey should go, and their contacts with the White House.

This, coupled with a recent report that Mueller was preparing to interview Trump’s communications director, Hope Hicks, led some to conclude that the probe is reaching a pivotal moment. . . . . Anytime you can get someone who is the right-hand person or who’s been around the primary target of an investigation, under oath, answering detailed questions, means you’ve progressed very far along in the investigation,” Adam Goldberg, a former Clinton White House lawyer, told Politico.

Sources close to Muller suggested there’s still much work to be done, and legal experts said they expect the probe could last through 2018, and maybe even longer. They note that the trials of two of the three people charged so far, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates, won’t start for months.

“I don’t think there’s any reason to believe this is almost over,” said Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor turned George Washington University law professor. “Based not just on what we’ve seen but also what we know about white-collar investigations generally, this seems to me like it is just getting started.”

As for the Politico piece, here are excerpts:

What appear to be obscure details in a court filing against Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, may actually provide clues about what’s next for another target in the special counsel’s Russia investigation: former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates were charged late last month with a variety of crimes, including violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA, even though such a charge is rare.

“While criminal charges under FARA are not often brought,” the prosecutors wrote in the passage about why Manafort and Gates were charged with violating the statute, “the facts set forth in the indictment indicate the gravity of the violation at issue based on the dollar volume of earning from the violation, its longevity, its maintenance through creation of a sham entity designed to evade FARA’s requirements, and its continuation through lies to the FARA unit.”

Jeff Cramer, a former federal prosecutor, said: “It’s odd language to have in there. This language could be a precursor to explain any future FARA violation charge, especially Flynn. If Flynn didn’t exist, you wouldn’t need that language in there. … You wouldn’t have to go through a lot of the machinations.”

Flynn’s work could meet part of the Manafort standard that refers to a “sham entity” fronting for a foreign government. . . . Given the criteria set out in the Manafort filing, many lawyers say they expect that if Mueller moves against Flynn, it will involve more sensational charges than simply failing to file a lobbying registration — a charge that jurors might regard as technical even if it survived scrutiny from a judge.

One eye-popping potential charge against Flynn that any juror could readily understand is kidnapping. Reports in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere last week said Flynn attended meetings in September and November in which there was discussion of removing a Turkish dissident, Fethullah Gulen, from the United States, perhaps by force.

A sum of as much as $15 million was allegedly offered to arrange Gulen’s delivery to the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The alleged kidnapping plot was never carried out, but legal experts said charges could be brought under conspiracy laws if any substantial step was taken toward forcibly snatching the dissident.

If prosecutors cut a plea with Flynn, it’s possible the FARA charge could emerge as a relatively mild offense for him to plead guilty to, although it’s still a felony that carries a potential term of up to five years in prison.

Mike Pence Is Intertwined in the Russia Scandal

Like the ever, in my view, despicable Jeff Sessions, Mike Pence acts sanctimonious and wears his right wing Christian faith on his sleeve.  Yet, like Sessions, Pence seemingly has a big problem when it comes to truth and veracity.  The only other explanation for Pence's constant back tracking on statements - or perhaps lies - is that he is an idiot and has been played like a gullible fool by Der Trumpenführer and his sycophants.   Over the last 20+ years that I have followed Christian "family values" groups, the one thing that is striking is the abandon with which the "godly folks" lie almost constantly.  This is precisely the background from which Pence derives his "Christian beliefs" - a background where lying to further theocratic goals is completely acceptable.  It's as if the Commandment against lying and bearing false witness doesn't exist.  It is in this context that a column in the Washington Post looks at Pence's incredible claims that he knew nothing of the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia.  Here are column highlights:

Vice President Pence is hip-deep in the Russia scandal, his best defense being that he was inattentive or an easily manipulated dunce. His home-state paper, the Indianapolis Star, reports:

Another of Vice President Pence’s past statements came back to bite him this week. This time it had to do with his denial last year that the Trump-Pence campaign had been in contact with WikiLeaks.

Donald Trump Jr. on Monday shared several messages he exchanged during the 2016 campaign with WikiLeaks around the time it was publishing leaked and secret material from Democrats. Those messages were exchanged in the fall, leading up to Trump’s eldest son tweeting out a link to WikiLeaks’ documents on Oct. 14, 2016, the same day Pence was asked by Fox News to respond to suggestions “that your campaign is in cahoots with WikiLeaks.”

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Pence responded. “Here you see the national media chasing after unsubstantial allegations, the allegations that Donald Trump has categorically denied.”

Pence has a trail of inaccurate statements concerning the Trump campaign and Russia, nearly as many as the memory-challenged attorney general.

Consider the hiring of former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn. . . . . Flynn also lied to the vice president about his contacts with Russian officials during the transition, a lie that set in motion Sally Yates’s conversation with the White House general counsel and ultimately resulted in Flynn’s resignation, the opening of the Russia probe and the firing of former FBI director James B. Comey.

When Trump wanted to lean on Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn, he ordered both Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of the Oval Office. Put that down as evidence that Pence was being kept in the dark.

However, Pence reportedly was present at the Oval Office meeting where Trump read the draft memo concerning his decision to fire Comey. That memo apparently was a screed about Comey’s handling of the Russia probe. Pence subsequently related to Congress and the press the phony cover story that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein had cooked up, namely that Comey had improperly handled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Pence denied Comey was fired over the Russia investigation, a position Trump swiftly contradicted in his interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt.

[L]ike now-embattled Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Pence repeatedly denied that the campaign had any contacts with the Russians. Perhaps Pence knew and forgot, perhaps he knew and lied on behalf of the president, or perhaps he was kept in the dark.

At some point, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III almost certainly will want to interview Pence. (Pence’s lawyer reportedly met with Mueller over the summer.) At that point, Pence will need to explain how it was that he never learned in real time about Flynn’s legal problems as an unregistered foreign agent, never knew about campaign or transition contacts with Russians and/or WikiLeaks and didn’t know that Comey was being fired at least in part because of the Russia episode.

[O]ne wonders why he would want to continue serving in an administration that uses him to deceive Congress, the press and the public. At some point, if Pence is an innocent man wrapped up in a web of dishonesty and subterfuge, you’d think he’d get angry, refuse to carry the president’s water and even quit.

In any event, Pence’s political future is dim. If he’s complicit in a coverup, he’s in legal peril. If he’s not, he’s a fool and a pawn, someone far too naive to be entrusted with power.  

 Like Trump, Pence needs to be removed from office.

A Timeline of Trump Campaign's Contacts with Russia

As numerous actual news outlets - this, of course, excludes Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, which increasingly mimics Pravda from  the old days of the Soviet Union, and Breitbart - are reporting, it is becoming increasingly difficult to conclude anything other than that Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, et al, are  lying trough their teeth about dealings between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin's operatives. Yesterday, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe used the word that too many, especially Congressional Republicans who place their party over the country, are afraid to use: treason.  McAuliffe rightly said that, if Americans cooperated with Russia in interfering with the 2016 presidential election, they were nothing less than traitors.  The irony to me is that by appealing to racism and religious extremism, Trump suckered those who see themselves as "real Americans" into electing the stooge of a hostile foreign government.  Putin must still be laughing his ass off.  With the indictments earlier this week revelation that a guilty plea had been copped by a Trump foreign policy adviser, former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough suggests in a Washington Post column that we may be close to learning why Trump has gushed over Putin even as he destroys democratic norms in America,   He also lays out a useful time line of Trump/Russia dealings.  Here are highlights:

I don’t get it, and I never have. Why has President Trump kowtowed to Russian President Vladimir Putin since the beginning of his presidential campaign? I’ve asked this question on the air, and off, to those close to the president and to the president himself. No one has a good answer. The man has insulted everyone from war heroes to the pope, and yet his admiration of the Russian dictator remains intact.

To this day, Trump has been steadfast in his defense of an autocrat who views the Soviet Union’s collapse as a tragedy and the United States as an enemy. Why? Soon I may not have to speculate. This week’s news out of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office suggests that what has long been opaque will soon become clear.

Here’s some of what we know so far. It seems to be enough to make any self-aware president panic.

• June 16, 2015: Trump announces he’s running for president.

• October 2015 to January 2016: Trump lawyer Michael Cohen tries to make a deal with Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

• Dec. 10, 2015: Top Trump ally Michael Flynn is seated beside Putin to celebrate the Kremlin propaganda outlet Russia Today.

• March 21, 2016: Trump tells The Post that Carter Page and George Papadopoulos are key members of his foreign policy team.

• April 26, 2016: Kremlin-connected professor Joseph Mifsud tells Papadopoulos that Moscow has “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”

April 27, 2016: Despite insisting throughout the campaign that they had never met with Russian officials, Trump and Jeff Sessions greet Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at an event at the Mayflower Hotel.

• June 9, 2016: Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Kremlin insider Rinat Akhmetshin to gain information that would allegedly incriminate Clinton and her dealings with Russia. In an email setting up the meeting, Trump Jr. expresses excitement about receiving Russian intelligence about the Democratic nominee.

• July 7, 2016: Manafort offers to provide briefings to a Kremlin-linked Russian billionaire.

• July 18, 2016: Trump campaign members succeed in pressuring Republicans to remove a platform plank in support of providing arms to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression.

• July 27, 2016: Trump makes a direct appeal to the Kremlin during a news conference. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

 Sept. 16, 2016: After admitting that he had been in contactwith WikiLeaks — and later revealing that he had contact with a hacker connected to Russia — Trump associate Roger Stone tells Boston Herald Radio that WikiLeaks will soon “drop a payload of new documents on Hillary on a weekly basis” that will damage the Clinton campaign.

• Oct. 7, 2016: The “Access Hollywood” tape is released. About a half-hour later, WikiLeaks begins to publish Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.

• Dec. 1: Kushner meets with Kislyak in an attempt to create a “channel” for sensitive communications between the transition team and the Russian government, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.

● Dec. 29, 2016: Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn calls Kislyak to discuss sanctions placed on Russia by President Barack Obama.

• Jan. 11: At his first news conference as president-elect, Trump said, “If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks? That’s called an asset, not a liability. Now, I don’t know that I’m gonna get along with Vladimir Putin. I hope I do.” He also tweets, “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

 Feb. 13: Flynn resigns after he reportedly lied to Vice President Pence about his contacts with Kislyak.

• May 9: Trump fires FBI Director James B. Comey.

• May 10: Trump meets in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kislyak, bragging that the firing of “nut job” Comey will ease pressure from the investigation. Trump barred U.S. reporters from the meeting and revealed classified information to the Russian officials.

• May 11: In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump reveals that he had asked Comey whether he was under investigation for alleged ties to Russia.

• June 7: Comey releases a memo recalling his interactions with Trump, who he said asked for an oath of loyalty from him.

• July 7: Trump meets with Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Germany. A second dinner meeting was undisclosed.

• Oct. 5: Papadopoulos pleads guilty to lying to the FBI as part of a cooperation agreement with Mueller.

• Oct. 30: Mueller’s office indicts Manafort and associate Rick Gates on charges of conspiracy against the United States, being an unregistered foreign agent, money laundering, and seven counts of failing to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.

I’m starting to think that the answers to our burning questions about Trump’s strange obsession with Russia are revealing themselves in a slow and painful way for the president and all of his men and women. Will the next big reveal in this reality show spectacle come when one of his closest confidants surprises him in the final episode, not with a rose, but with a wire? The ratings would be yuge. Believe me. Yuge.

And this list of events are only the ones that we know about - I suspect there is much, much more.  I'm sorry, but the "real Americans" are those who want Trump/Pence out of office ASAP.  Those who support this foul regime and seemingly too stupid to grasp that they are being played for fools or so blinded by their racial hatreds that they simply refuse to see what is before their eyes. Neither basis for their support of Der Trumpenführer bodes well for America.

Mueller's Team Met with Trump Russia Dossier Author

While the Senate Intelligence Committee would have the public believe that former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele, author of the sensational dossier on Donald Trump's Russian ties, has been uncooperative, special prosecutor Robert Mueller seems to have had no problem arranging a meeting with Steele in which I for one hope Steele spilled his guts and provided information that will lead to verification of the explosive allegations.  Der Trumpenführer, who knows whether the allegations are in fact true, cannot be happy and it's a good bet that he will unleash more batshitery as a means to distract the media (Trump must be secretly relishing the media's fixation on the Las Vegas tragedy which has lead to far less reporting on Puerto Rico and Russiagate).  Hopefully, CNN's reporting on the Mueller/Steele meeting will get the media back on the trail of possible Trump/Russia collusion.  Here are highlights from CNN:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigators met this past summer with the former British spy whose dossier on alleged Russian efforts to aid the Trump campaign spawned months of investigations that have hobbled the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Information from Christopher Steele, a former MI-6 officer, could help investigators determine whether contacts between people associated with the Trump campaign and suspected Russian operatives broke any laws.
 CNN has learned that the FBI and the US intelligence community last year took the Steele dossier more seriously than the agencies have publicly acknowledged. James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, said in a January 2017 statement that the intelligence community had "not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable." The intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, and the FBI took Steele's research seriously enough that they kept it out of a publicly-released January report on Russian meddling in the election in order to not divulge which parts of the dossier they had corroborated and how.
 This contrasts with attempts by President Donald Trump and some lawmakers to discredit Steele and the memos he produced. . . . In a series of tweets earlier this year, Trump said the memos were written by a "failed spy" who had relied on "totally made-up facts by sleazebag political operatives."

While the most salacious allegations in the dossier haven't been verified, its broad assertion that Russia waged a campaign to interfere in the election is now accepted as fact by the US intelligence community. CNN also reported earlier this year that US investigators have corroborated some aspects of the dossier, specifically that some of the communications among foreign nationals mentioned in the memos did actually take place. A representative for Steele did not respond to a request for comment. The special counsel's office declined to comment. But the intelligence community had bigger concerns, sources tell CNN. The classified version of the report would be disseminated beyond then-President Barack Obama and the President-elect to other officials including members of Congress. And if that report included the dossier allegations, the intelligence community would have to say which parts it had corroborated and how. That would compromise sources and methods, including information shared by foreign intelligence services, intelligence officials believed.
 In the end, the decision was made that the FBI and Comey personally would brief the incoming President on the allegations. That briefing occurred January 6 in a one-on-one conversation following a broader intelligence briefing on Russian meddling provided to then-President-elect Trump and his key staff. Trump later told The New York Times in July that he took Comey's briefing on the dossier to be an attempt to hold it as leverage over the new President.  "In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there," Trump said.  Exactly what Comey feared had come to pass.

My personal thoughts?  I suspect the allegations in the dossier are true.  One need only look at the last 30 or more years of Trump's life to see that he has no qualms about dealing with the Russian mob and underworld figures to further his personal interests.  The man is amoral and his behavior toward women suggests, at least to me, that even the most salacious elements of the dossier could well be true. Trump is simply a foul and horrible person.  When it comes to Trump, believe the worst and you are probably right.   That Trump continues to be embraced by evangelical Christians tells the world all that it needs to know about these equally morally bankrupt individuals. 

Trump v. Mueller - Is A Constitutional Crisis At Hand?

Since being sworn into office Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, has routinely lied and ignored the rule of law and separation of powers as well as the independence of the FBI.  In an interview with the New York Times, Trump made it clear that he wants the FBI to report to him and to be loyal to him personally.  Allegiance to the U.S. Constitution on the part of government officials is nowhere on the radar screen for Trump who seemingly wants the FBI to act in the same manner as Vladimir Putin's intelligence agencies and secret police.  Equally disturbing is Trump's threats toward the Justice Department and special prosecutor, Robert Mueller who is apparently investigating both Donald Trump, Jr., meeting that sought to collude with Russia and many of the Trump financial transactions.  Should Trump attempt to fire Mueller, the parallels with Watergate will be almost complete but for the fact that Trump's possible crimes far exceed those of Richard Nixon during the Watergate era. Frighteningly, I have little faith in Congressional Republicans putting America first over the short term power of the Republican Party.  Here are excerpts from the New York Times on the very troubling interview:  

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election.

Mr. Trump said Mr. Mueller was running an office rife with conflicts of interest and warned investigators against delving into matters too far afield from Russia. Mr. Trump never said he would order the Justice Department to fire Mr. Mueller, nor would he outline circumstances under which he might do so. But he left open the possibility as he expressed deep grievance over an investigation that has taken a political toll in the six months since he took office.

Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”

He said that as far as he knew, he was not under investigation himself, despite reports that Mr. Mueller is looking at whether the president obstructed justice by firing Mr. Comey. Trump left little doubt during the interview that the Russia investigation remained a sore point. His pique at Mr. Sessions, in particular, seemed fresh even months after the attorney general’s recusal. Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy and was rewarded with a key cabinet slot, but has been more distant from the president lately.

“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” he added. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’

The president added a new allegation against Mr. Comey, whose dismissal has become a central issue for critics who said it amounted to an attempt to obstruct the investigation into Russian meddling in the election and any possible collusion with Mr. Trump’s team. . . . Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that he disclosed the details of the dossier to Mr. Trump because he thought that the media would soon be publishing details from it and that Mr. Trump had a right to know what information was out there about him. Mr. Trump was also critical of Mr. Mueller, a longtime former F.B.I. director, reprising some of his past complaints that lawyers in his office contributed money to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. The president also expressed discontent with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a former federal prosecutor from Baltimore. . . . He complained that Mr. Rosenstein had in effect been on both sides when it came to Mr. Comey. The deputy attorney general recommended Mr. Comey be fired but then appointed Mr. Mueller, who may be investigating whether the dismissal was an obstruction of justice.

The take away?  Trump is a vindictive liar and only too willing to tell untruths about others and to throw the nation into a constitutional crisis in a desperate attempt to deflect attention from his own actions and the possible criminal activities of his son, son-in-law, and Trump sycophants.  Be very, very afraid.