The Belated Conversion of Former Republicans

While the increase of the number of Never Trumpers has been encouraging to watch, one thing that most of them are not quick to confess is that for far too long, most were apologists for toxic elements of the GOP base and GOP policies aimed at benefiting the few at the expense of the many as symbolized by both the GOP efforts to destroy the Affordable Health Care Act and the Trump/GOP tax cuts that did nothing other than provide a huge windfall to the very wealthy and large corporations while exploding the federal debt in the process.  And then there was the dishonesty and endless lies of the GOP that long preceded the rise of Trump.  The GOP has now become synonymous with lying and not just due to the endless lies emanating from the White House. The current impeachment inquiry has brought the dishonesty of the GOP to the forefront as laid out in a column in the Washington Post by a former Republican conservative who is among the Never Trump ranks.  Here are highlights:

When listening to President Trump and fellow Republicans throw around accusations against Democrats and the media or advance defenses for Trump’s impeachable conduct, there is a better than even chance they are misleading if not downright lying. In some cases, we discover the lies because other individuals are caught lying.

Roger Stone was convicted, among other things, of lying to Congress about his conversations with WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange. He falsely claimed: He had no emails, documents or texts relating to WikiLeaks; he never sought damaging information (i.e., emails) about Hillary Clinton; never contacted WikiLeaks through intermediaries; and never contacted the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks. The last lie — denying contacts with the Trump campaign — raises the question as to whether President Trump lied in responses to Robert S. Mueller II.

At the trial we learned about Stone’s numerous contacts with the campaign: Rick Gates, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, testified Tuesday that Stone began discussing Clinton leaks with the campaign in April 2016 and that from May onward Gates understood Stone to be the campaign’s intermediary with WikiLeaks. By July 2016, Gates testified, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said he was updating Trump and others regularly and directed Gates to keep following up with Stone. After Trump ended one phone call from Stone at the end of that month, Gates testified, the future president said to Gates that “more information would be coming.”

In his written answers, however, Trump claimed he had “no recollection” of conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks nor did he recall knowing Stone had discussed WikiLeaks’s email drops with the campaign. Perhaps Trump’s memory is addled; if not, it appears he lied to Mueller.

Likewise, in the Ukraine matter multiple witnesses gave testimony that suggests that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland has been telling falsehoods under oath. Some he has remedied, . . . However, we now know from at least one other witness that Sondland’s denial that he spoke to the president or to the State Department was false. (He spoke to both.) One wonders if he’ll share a similar fate as Stone, the former Trump confidant who this week was found guilty on charges of lying to Congress, obstruction of justice and witness tampering. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale has documented 45 Trump lies concerning Ukraine . . . . Other Trump lies include his denial that United States military aid was held up, his bizarre accusations that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) was the whistleblower’s source and his unfounded allegations that former vice president Joe Biden “stole” millions of dollars from foreign countries and pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor when Hunter Biden was still under investigation.

House Republicans continually traffic in lies — e.g., Ukraine interfered with our election, Joe Biden’s conduct pressuring removal of a delinquent prosecutor was illegal or corrupt, Trump was concerned about Ukraine’s corruption in general.

On procedure, they’ve lied about the depositions (routinely used in investigations), claiming they violate “due process” or amount to a “Soviet-style” star chamber.

At times, Republicans deliberately ignore evidence in front of their eyes. They seem to have settled on the theory that Trump never communicated to Zelensky that aid was tied to investigations of Biden, Burisma and Trump’s crackpot Ukraine interference conspiracy. Trump, however, raised these items in the phone call. . . . .
 Republicans’ lies are so numerous and obvious that one requires only a minimal amount of fact-checking to see that they lie because they have no truthful factual defenses nor valid constitutional argument. The facts are the facts: Trump conditioned aid to an ally in a war for its sovereignty on production of dirt to smear a political rival. He has refused to allow key witnesses to produce documents or to testify, thereby obstructing Congress. He has sought to intimidate and threaten witnesses including the whistleblower and Marie Yovanovitch, sending out the message you will be targeted and smeared if you provide evidence against him.

As for the Constitution, we know that “bribery,” enumerated as one of the grounds for impeachment in the parlance of the Framers, includes asking for or giving personal favors in exchange for political acts. That is precisely what occurred here. Obstruction and witness intimidation are obviously "high crimes."

House Republicans have become so invested in crackpot theories, bogus procedural complains and constitutional illiteracy that they will never recognize the president’s wrongdoing. They are as incapable of upholding their oath, which requires impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors or bribery, as he is. Both Trump and his House enablers are unfit to serve since personal and political considerations obliterate their ability to detect the truth and thereby to uphold their public obligations.

It remains an open question as to whether Senate Republicans are willing to ignore and distort reality so as to avoid voting to convict a president of their own party. Unfortunately, we find it highly unlikely that more than a few (if that many) would concede that Trump and the right-wing echo chamber that protects him have been spinning a web of lies for nearly three years.

The GOP web of lies goes back much further in time.  It is a shame that the Never Trumpers did not begin speaking out one to two decades ago.  Trump is the culmination of a pattern of lies that has stretched out for years. 

Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals

Not since Richard Nixon has an occupant of the White House proven to have surrounded himself with criminals than Donald Trump.  This, of course, should come as no surprise if one has followed Trump's mob boss like business conduct over the years in New York City and elsewhere where many believe Trump facilitated money laundering by the Russian mob and other undesirables. Criminals tend to surround themselves with other criminals.  With yesterday's conviction on all counts of long time Trump confident Roger Stone, we now have a half dozen convicted criminals who made up part of the Trump/Pence campaign and/or regime.  A piece in Politico looks at Stone's conviction (note the references to Trump lying to Mueller as well): 

A federal jury on Friday found the longtime Republican provocateur guilty on all charges for thwarting a House investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, opening up a political pandora’s box for a president already facing pressure from his conservative base to issue a pardon.

Stone’s fate was sealed after a trial that spanned just over a week, which concluded with unanimous guilty verdicts against Stone on five felony counts of lying to investigators, one count of obstructing a congressional probe and one count of witness tampering.

Friday’s guilty verdicts represent the biggest victory for prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe since former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted on eight felony charges at a trial in Northern Virginia over a year ago. In the courtroom for Stone’s trial, there were ample signs of the case’s origins.

Trump told Mueller’s investigators they spoke from “time to time during the campaign.” Prosecutors introduced evidence collected from phone records during Stone’s trial showing about 60 separate communications between the two men from February to November 2016.

A second piece in New York Magazine looks at Trump's larger circle of criminal associates.  Here are highlights:  

The legal ring surrounding him [Trump] is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and criminality.

Day two of the House impeachment hearings, featuring Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, may have appeared on the surface to focus on a sideshow. Yovanovitch was not directly involved in Trump’s efforts to extort Ukraine for political advantage, the main charge he faces. What her testimony instead accomplished was to put the lie to Trump’s ludicrous defense that he was pursuing an anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine — that his demands that Kiev investigate his rivals were simply about cleaning the country up.

Her testimony was devoted to proving the hypocrisy of Trump’s claim. She testified how she had worked in Ukraine to promote reform, how her efforts to do so alienated corrupt oligarchs there, and how those oligarchs then worked in tandem with Rudy Giuliani to foment a backlash against her. She explained that the fired Ukrainian prosecutor that Trump praised to Ukraine’s president in a July phone call was in fact totally corrupt.

Trump fired Yovanovitch because she stood in the way of the corruption he and his allies were promoting. To the extent corruption motivated Trump’s diplomatic posture in Ukraine, it was that he wanted to encourage more of it.

During Yovanovitch’s testimony, a federal court registered a guilty verdict on all seven counts for Trump’s adviser Roger Stone. Stone’s crimes involved lying and covering up Trump’s awareness of Democratic emails stolen by Russians. Rick Gates, Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, told investigators that he personally witnessed a July 31, 2016, phone call between Trump and Stone shortly after WikiLeaks published a tranche of stolen emails. After hanging up with Stone, Trump announced more information was on its way.

The two figures in his campaign who most directly colluded with Russia, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, both refused to cooperate with Mueller. Whatever they know about Trump’s full collusion with Russia’s campaign hacking will remain secret, probably forever.

And yet, even if he pardons Manafort and Stone, and all his other loyalists, the plain fact will remain that his inner circle is marked by endemic criminality. In addition to his close adviser Stone, his campaign manager (Manafort), his deputy campaign manager (Gates), his lawyer (Michael Cohen), and his national security adviser (Michael Flynn) have all been convicted of felonies. Trump may have persuaded his hard-core base that all these convictions represent a fraudulent witch hunt. But outside the Trump cult, which is not by itself large enough to win the election, being surrounded by criminals is not an admired quality.

In all probability, the parade of charges is probably not over. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is reportedly being investigated for a number of alleged federal crimes, including bribing foreign officials, conspiracy, violating federal campaign-finance laws, and failing to register as a foreign agent. The Wall Street Journal reports today that federal prosecutors are investigating whether Giuliani personally stood to profit from a natural-gas shakedown run by his partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

Parnas and Fruman, two figures linked to the Russian mob who have been arrested, were helping Giuliani run his off-the-books diplomatic work in Ukraine. 

If Rudy himself was involved in the gas shakedown, as the Journal story suggests, it would be an even deeper form of corruption. Trump’s lawyer and personal representative would have sent gangsters to extort Ukraine for Trump’s political gain and his own profit. The false accusations Trump has hurled against Biden are pale versions of the very real crimes Trump’s cronies have tried to carry out.

[T]he full scale of his betrayal is staggering. Trump will probably not become the first president to be impeached and removed from office, but he will go down in history as the most criminal president in American history.

One can only hope that indictments against Giuliani come soon. 

Putin Accomplice Julian Assange Arrested in London

Julian Assange, an ally of Vladimir Putin and seemingly Donald Trump as well has at long last been booted from the Ecuador embassy in London and was promptly arrested and carried away by London Metropolitan police (see the image at the end of this post). Unless one has been living under a rock - or watching only Fox News - it is common knowledge that Assange and his Wikileaks organization was the vehicle through which emails and documents stolen by Russian intelligence officers were released to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump associate Roger Stone remains under federal indictment for lying to Congress about his communications with Assange and Russian intelligence operatives.  The Guardian looks at Assange arrest while the New York Times looks at the larger implications.  First highlights from The Guardian: 

Julian Assange has been arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after the South American country withdrew asylum from the WikiLeaks founder.  Assange had been granted refuge at the embassy while on bail in the UK over sexual assault allegations against him in Sweden.

The Metropolitan police said: “He has been taken into custody at a central London police station where he will remain, before being presented before Westminster magistrates court as soon as is possible.  “The MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] had a duty to execute the warrant, on behalf of Westminster magistrates court, and was invited into the embassy by the ambassador, following the Ecuadorian government’s withdrawal of asylum.”

Assange was shouting and gesticulating as he was carried out of the embassy in handcuffs by seven men and put into a waiting Met police van, video footage showed. He appeared to be carrying a book.

Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, said on Twitter: “In a sovereign decision, Ecuador withdrew the asylum status to Julian Assange after his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols.”

The British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, tweeted: “Julian Assange is no hero and no one is above the law. He has hidden from the truth for years. Thank you Ecuador and President Lenín Moreno for your cooperation with the Foreign Office to ensure Assange faces justice.”

Assange claimed that if he was extradited to Sweden he might be arrested by the US and face charges relating to the publication of hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks.

US authorities have never officially confirmed that they have charged Assange, but in November 2018 a mistake in a document filed in an unrelated case hinted that criminal charges might have been prepared in secret.

The piece in the New York Times looks at the wider picture.  Here are excerpts:

The United States Justice Department has filed criminal charges against Mr. Assange, 47, related to the publication of classified documents, a fact that prosecutors accidentally made public in November.  He also faces a charge in a British court of jumping bail, . . .

Mr. Assange is also suspected of aiding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by releasing material stolen from the computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. In July, the Justice Department charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking those computers, and the indictment contends that at least one of them was in contact with WikiLeaks.

During the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails stolen from the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, leading to a series of revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. United States investigators have said that the systems were hacked by Russian agents.

Mr. Assange made no secret of his intent to damage Mrs. Clinton, but he has insisted that he did not get the emails from Russia.

Michael Cohen: Trump Knew Roger Stone Talked with WikiLeaks

As Donald Trump kisses the ass of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, his former consigliore, Michael Cohen prepares to spill his guts before Congressional committees.  Among the expected bombshells: Trump knew of the Roger Stone communications with Wikileaks and that Trump knew of the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Jr. and Russian operatives.  Personally, I have always assumed that Trump was fully aware of all of this. A piece in CNN sums up Cohen's coming testimony this way: Cohen calls Trump a "racist," a "con-man" and a "cheat."  The big issue will be whether Cohen has corroborating documentation and/or whether others will knowledge will stop covering for Trump.  Here are excerpts from the CNN piece:

Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen is prepared to testify that Trump was aware of longtime adviser Roger Stone's efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks in advance of its release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, according to a copy of his public testimony submitted to Congress and obtained by CNN.

In a stunning 20-page statement provided Tuesday night to lawmakers, Cohen details a wide range of allegations against Trump -- from making racist comments about African-Americans to participating during his presidency in an illegal hush-money scheme to keep his alleged extramarital affairs quiet -- as well as suggesting Trump faked a medical condition to get out of serving in the Vietnam War. And Cohen will provide new details saying Trump was engaged in an aggressive pursuit of a major project in Russia in 2016, alleging the [Trump's] President's attorneys edited Cohen's 2017 testimony when he lied to Congress, downplaying the efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

 In short, Cohen calls Trump a "racist," a "conman" and a "cheat." In the testimony, Cohen will allege that, in 2016, he witnessed Trump taking a phone call from Stone, who was on speakerphone.  "Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign," Cohen will say, according to his prepared testimony. Trump responded, according to Cohen: "Wouldn't that be great." Cohen's allegations, if true, would amount to the first time anyone with direct knowledge has said that [Trump] the President had advance knowledge of the WikiLeaks dump of Clinton emails. Cohen also said [Trump's] the President's personal lawyers "reviewed and edited" his 2017 statements when Cohen lied to Congress about the Trump Organization's pursuit of a massive project in Moscow. Cohen's opening statement also suggests that Trump may have been aware in advance of a 2016 meeting set up by Donald Trump Jr. and Russians at Trump Tower -- something that Trump and his eldest son have long denied. Cohen will tell Congress that he witnessed Trump Jr., in June 2016, tell his father: "The meeting is all set." Cohen acknowledges not knowing for sure that Trump's son's comments were in reference to the meeting with Russians. "I also knew that nothing went on in Trump world, especially the campaign, without Mr. Trump's knowledge and approval," Cohen will say. "So I concluded that Don Jr. was referring to that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting about dirt on Hillary." According to a copy of the opening statement he prepares to deliver to the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, Cohen says Trump lied repeatedly about a number of matters -- and made a host of racist statements. [I]n the testimony, Cohen recounts how he was visiting Trump in February 2017 in the White House when the President assured him his reimbursement checks were coming in the mail. He said Trump made 11 payments of $35,000 each to reimburse him in the hush-money scheme, saying he's providing the House panel with a copy of an August 2017 check signed by[Trump] the President from his personal bank account. "The President of the United States thus wrote a personal check for the payment of hush money as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws," Cohen will say.

Get out the pop corn.

Mueller Filing Connects Roger Stone To Wikileaks

While Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, has declared a bogus national emergency to improperly secure funding for his border wall to thrill his knuckle-dragging, racist base, it now appears that Trump's real emergency is that special counsel Robert Mueller is close to connecting the dots to document a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.  Loud mouth braggart Roger Stone is, per new court fillings looking more and more like he was the Trump-Russia-Wikileaks go between.  Expect more shrieks of "witch hunt" as Mueller finds more and more witches and draws his noose closer and closer around Trump. The take away is that when Trump asked Russia to "find Hillary's 30,000 emails" during one of the debates, he was in active communication with Russian operatives through Stone and perhaps others.  A piece in The Hill looks at this new development which should shut up some of the blathering talking heads who say that Mueller has found not hints of direct collusion with an enemy power.  Here are excerpts:

Special counsel Robert Mueller said in a new court filing that search warrants have uncovered communications between longtime GOP operative Roger Stone and "Organization 1,” which is widely believed to be WikiLeaks.

Mueller made the disclosure in a filing Friday arguing that Stone’s case is related to the one involving Russian military hackers who are alleged to have breached the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

The communications were uncovered in search warrants executed on accounts in the investigation into Russian hackers, Mueller said.

The hacked emails were given to WikiLeaks, which later released them, in what U.S. intelligence officials say was part of a broader plot by the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Mueller’s prosecutors wrote Friday that in the course of investigating the email hacking “the government obtained and executed dozens of search warrants on various accounts used to facilitate the transfer of stolen documents for release, as well as to discuss the timing and promotion of their release.”

“Several of those search warrants were executed on accounts that contained Stone’s communications with Guccifer 2.0 and with Organization 1,” the filing states.

The special counsel said the search warrants would be produced to Stone’s defense attorneys in discovery and included in a sealed addendum to Friday’s filing.

A longtime friend of President Trump, Stone was indicted in Washington, D.C., late last month for lying to Congress about his communications regarding WikiLeaks, witness tampering and obstructing a congressional investigation. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Stone has said he never directly communicated with WikiLeaks but instead used a backchannel. Stone, who made public statements that appeared to forecast WikiLeaks releases before the 2016 election, has maintained that he had no inside knowledge of the hacked emails before WikiLeaks released them.

They [prosecutors] said that during his [Stone’s] testimony before the House Intelligence Committee he claimed that former New York radio host Randy Credico was his backchannel to the organization. Stone also allegedly testified that he did not ask any other individual to contact the group.

Credico has repeatedly denied being Stone’s source. Emails exchanged between Stone and another individual, believed to be conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, allegedly show Stone had asked Corsi to get in touch with WikiLeaks about any damaging Democratic emails the group might have in its possession.

Last July’s indictment against the Russian hackers cited communications between Guccifer 2.0, who is identified as a Russian GRU officer, and “a person who was in regular contact with senior members” of Trump’s campaign. Stone has acknowledged that he is likely the person referred to in the indictment.

Trump has denied any collusion between his campaign and Moscow and regularly derides the investigation as a “witch hunt.”

Stone’s case is expected to go to trial later this year; prosecutors and his attorneys have asked for extra time to prepare, given the amount of evidence in the case.

On Friday, Jackson issued a gag order restricting Stone and his attorneys from discussing the case publicly.

Mueller’s Real Target in the Roger Stone Arrest

Having worked with the FBI on a couple of cases - I even gave some tutorials of real estate transactions to a couple of special agents and assistant U.S. Attorneys in one case - I know one thing.  The FBI's investigations are incredibly thorough and the goal is to assemble a series of four inch thick evidence note books that back up every aspect of indictments in sequence from start to finish.  To say that copies of email. wire transfer orders and documents that dispel lies and witness untruths are their stock in trade is an understatement. Given this reality, a column in the New York Times looks at what may have been the real target of Robert Mueller's indictment of Roger Stone beyond merely pushing Stone towards cooperating: Stone's cell phone(s), computers and encrypted email messages that may document Trump campaign coordination with Russian intelligence officials,  If Stone's message document such coordination and conspiring, Der Trumpenführer's life may be about to get very interesting and unsettling.  Ditto for perhaps Jared Kushner and others in the Trump inner circle.  Here are column highlights:

For many, Friday’s arrest of Roger Stone, the veteran political trickster and longtime adviser to Donald Trump, was a sign that the special counsel investigation into Russian electoral interference is entering its final phase. Yet there were also several indications that the probe may not be as near its conclusion as many observers assume — and that the true target of Friday’s F.B.I. actions was not Mr. Stone himself, but his electronic devices. 

[F]ederal agents were “seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Mr. Stone’s apartment in Harlem, and his recording studio in South Florida was also raided.” The F.B.I., in other words, was executing search warrants, not just arrest warrants. Even the timing and manner of Mr. Stone’s arrest — at the absolute earliest moment allowed under federal rules of criminal procedure without persuading a judge to authorize an exceptional nighttime raid — suggests a concern with preventing destruction of evidence: Otherwise it would make little sense to send a dozen agents to arrest a man in his 60s before sunrise. Of course, as the indictment also makes clear, the special counsel has already managed to get its hands on plenty of Mr. Stone’s communications by other means — but one seeming exception jumps out. . . . the special counsel is taking pains to establish that Mr. Stone made a habit of moving sensitive conversations to encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp — meaning that, unlike ordinary emails, the messages could not be obtained directly from the service provider. The clear implication is that any truly incriminating communications would have been conducted in encrypted form — and thus could be obtained only directly from Mr. Stone’s own phones and laptops. And while Mr. Stone likely has limited value as a cooperating witness — it’s hard to put someone on the stand after charging them with lying to obstruct justice — the charges against him provide leverage in the event his cooperation is needed to unlock those devices by supplying a cryptographic passphrase.

Of course, Mr. Mueller is likely interested in his communications with Trump campaign officials, but the detailed charges filed against the Russian hackers alleged to have broken into the Democratic National Committee’s servers also show the special counsel’s keen interest in Mr. Stone’s communications with the hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” an identity said to have been used as a front for the Russian intruders.

And if this really is the first time Mr. Mueller’s office is seeing the most sensitive communications from a key figure like Mr. Stone, it’s likely they’ll come away with new leads to follow and new questions to pose to other witnesses.

We may ultimately look back on Mr. Stone’s arrest not as the beginning of the special counsel’s endgame, but the point when the investigation began to really heat up.

Trump Co-Conspirator, Roger Stone Indicted in Mueller Investigation

Trump and Stone - both working for Russia?

If Donald Trump has been having bad days as his approval ratings have plunged to only 34% and 71% of Americans say his wall is not worth the damage of the government shutdown, today is likely far worse with the indictment of Roger Stone, the likely go between between Russian intelligence operatives, Wikileaks, and the Trump campaign, by a federal grand jury.   If there was a conspiracy with Putin's Russia, Stone could be the keystone in bringing the details into view.  And that's without considering what the new investigations of Deutsche Bank and Russian  money laundering to perhaps benefit Trump will reveal.  Stone was arrested by the FBI at 6:00 am this morning at his home.  The New York Times looks at this stunning development in the Russiagate probe (the indictment can be viewed here).  Expect Trump to rant and do something to try to distract media coverage.  Here are article highlights:

Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump who has spent decades plying the dark arts of scandal-mongering and dirty tricks to help influence American political campaigns, was indicted Friday in the special counsel investigation.

Mr. Stone was charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering, according to the special counsel’s office.

Stone, a self-described dirty trickster who began his career as a campaign aide for Richard M. Nixon and has a tattoo of Nixon on his back, has long maintained that he had no connection to Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. He sometimes seemed to taunt American law enforcement agencies, daring them to find hard evidence to link him to the Russian meddling campaign.

[T]he special counsel’s investigators spent months encircling Mr. Stone, renewing scrutiny about his role during the 2016 presidential race. Investigators interviewed former Trump campaign advisers and several of his associates about both about Mr. Stone’s fund-raising during the campaign and his contacts with WikiLeaks, one of the organizations that made thousands of Democratic emails public in the months before the election.

Three senior Trump campaign officials have told Mr. Mueller’s team that Mr. Stone created the impression that he was a conduit for inside information from WikiLeaks, according to people familiar with their witness interviews. One of them told investigators that Mr. Stone not only seemed to predict WikiLeaks’ actions, but also that he took credit afterward for the timing of its disclosures that damaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

In social media posts and numerous interviews before the 2016 election, Mr. Stone indicated that he had advance knowledge that a trove of information damaging to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign might be about to spill into public, and even suggested that he had personally spoken to the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. . . . in the weeks before the election, Mr. Stone was messaging on Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, a pseudonym used by one or more operatives in the Russian intelligence scheme to steal the emails and funnel them to WikiLeaks. The tumultuous relationship between Mr. Stone and Mr. Trump goes back decades, with Mr. Stone acting as an informal adviser to Mr. Trump as he considered running for president several times. When Mr. Trump formally announced during the spring of 2015 that he was running for president, Mr. Stone was one of the first members of the team, but within months, he had a public dispute with Mr. Trump and left the campaign.  The two men have remained close, though, speaking often by telephone.

The GOP Defends and Coddles Violent Far-Right Group

"Proud Boys" in a brawl screaming homophobic slurs.

The latest disingenuous meme - lie might be the better description - being disseminated by Republicans, including Der Trumpenführer, is that Democrats are a violence prone "angry mob."  The only flimsy support for this lie is a few, rare actions by Antifa anarchists, a group that despises Democrats as much as Republicans.  In contrast, the GOP has a vast array of far right groups supporting its racist, homophobic agenda that range from the KKK to right wing militias and neo-Nazi groups (think Charlottesville and the right wing groups on display). Sadly some of the media - and some "friends" who seemingly only get their news from Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and Brietbart - are promoting the dishonest meme.  Instead, they should be focusing on right wing organizations that law enforcement recognizes as a real threat to law and order and the safety of citizens.  A piece in The Daily Beast  at one such group, Proud Boys, a certified hate group,  promoted by Republicans.  Here are excerpts: 

Nine members of the far-right Proud Boys group and three protesters are facing riot and assault charges after a street brawl between them Friday night in New York.

The fight wasn’t a random clash, though: The Proud Boys were in Manhattan thanks to an invite from the Metropolitan Republican Club.

In a speech at the club, which was vandalized before the event, Proud Boys leader Gavin McInnes waved a sword at anti-fascist protesters and celebrated the assassination of a socialist Japanese politician. McInnes, a Vice co-founder, dressed up as the Japanese assassin who killed the politician, complete with glasses that made his eyes into a racist caricature of a Japanese person’s eyes.

It was a bizarre event to host at the GOP’s Manhattan clubhouse, but the Metropolitan Republican Club defended McInnes and the Proud Boys after the brawl. In a statement released Sunday, the club said McInnes’s speech “was certainly not inciting violence.”

The Republican club’s role hosting the event highlights how the Proud Boys have managed to insinuate themselves with mainstream Republicans, even as they increasingly make news for violence.  But the New York Republicans aren’t alone — the Proud Boys have already managed to make their way into other mainstream GOP campaign events and conservative media.

Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart and Devin Nunes have posed for pictures with Proud Boys on the campaign trail. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson posed in a Fox green room with two Proud Boys and Republican operative Roger Stone earlier this year.

Stone has himself taken steps to be initiated into the Proud Boys and made headlines in March when he used the Proud Boys as a security force at the Dorchester Conference, a Republican event in Oregon. By then, the Proud Boys were already notorious in Oregon for a series of bloody Portland brawls. But Dorchester board member and former Oregon legislator Patrick Sheehan defended the Proud Boys’ attendance, telling Willamette Week that Stone “was worried about getting killed … He said he’d been in touch with individual Proud Boys for more than a year, and that he tried talking some out of attending the first Unite the Right rally.“I urged a number of individual proudboys [sic] I know NOT to go to Charlottesville because of the stated views of some of the on-line organizers,” he said.

Fascist skinhead groups have wreaked havoc in the U.S. for decades, but scholars of fascism have noted that those groups pose limited political threats — unless a mainstream political party embraces them.

“The skinheads, for example, would become functional equivalents of Hitler’s SA and Mussolini’s squadristi only if they aroused support instead of revulsion,” historian Robert Paxton writes in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism. “If important elements of the conservative elite begin to cultivate or even tolerate them as weapons against some internal enemy, such as immigrants, we are approaching Stage Two" of what he identifies as fascist insurgency.

The Proud Boys, which have a paramilitary wing, have already proved willing to act as strongmen for Stone, and GOP stalwarts like the Metropolitan Republican Club have already proved willing to host the group.

[A]s clashes between pro-Trump protesters and left-wing “antifa” grabbed headlines in the summer of 2017, McInnes sought to play up violence as a part of the Proud Boy ethos. . . . . McInnes also made a new achievement for Proud Boys: the “fourth degree,” designated for Proud Boys who had endured a “major struggle for the cause.”

Proud Boy rhetoric also grew more belligerent, adopting mottoes like “Fuck around and find out” and “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” Both lines are references to punching out antifa members in self-defense. But Proud Boys have also embraced references and clothing with references to “helicopter rides,” an allusion to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime executing opponents by throwing them out of helicopters.

That attention has drawn even more would-be fighters to Proud Boy events, according to Keegan Hankes, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. At this point, the violence surrounding the Proud Boy has become the group’s “life blood,” according to Hankes.

[V]iolence has erupted outside other, more conventionally Republican events, including a February 2017 event hosted by New York University’s College Republican club. Police arrested 11 people in brawls outside the NYU building. Among them was Proud Boy Salvatore Cipolla, who attacked a journalist who was covering the event. Cipolla attended Unite the Right later that year. During an on-camera interview at Unite the Right, Cipolla identified as a Proud Boy and showed off a Proud Boy tattoo.

Jason Lee Van Dyke, a Proud Boy who also acts as the group’s lawyer said the group has found welcome with a populist, pro-Trump wing of the Republican party.

“I think some Republicans appreciate the Proud Boys because they understand what we actually stand for: love of country, small government, freedom, and fun,” he said. Van Dyke was expelled from his college over a firearms offense after which campus police found an anti-Semitic race war book in his dorm. He was recently charged for allegedly filing a false police report about the theft of his guns.

The rift between Trumpist and traditional conservatives recently engulfed the Metropolitan Republican Club, where McInnes spoke on Friday. In early 2017, the New York Post reported that the club’s “never Trump” leadership was attempting to “purge” the club’s pro-Trump, far-right elements.

That older, anti-Trump faction appears to have lost—at the Metropolitan Republican Club and elsewhere in the U.S., as more extreme-right elements take hold of the GOP.

The Metropolitan Republican Club recently hosted open Islamophobe Pamela Geller. A State of the Union watch party at the club in January descended into alt-right chaos, the Observer reported.

But the Proud Boys’ supporters in the GOP say there’s nothing untoward about the group—at least not more so than mainstream Republicans.

The Ugly American: Trump Lies, Protocol Breaches and Possible Treason

Trump barging in front of Elizabeth II

Years ago when I traveled abroad regularly for business, one of things that often made me cringe were American tourists, a certain percentage of which seem to always display rudeness, boorishness, and a basic contempt for their foreign hosts.  The epitome was when I was in the line to enter the Louvre in Paris and a group of decidedly overweight Mid-Westerners were loudly and continually bitching that the the menu at the McDonald's on the Champs Elysee wasn't just like the one in the backwater they came from.  I made an effort to hide my nationality, hoping I might pass as English, Canadian or even French with luck.  Now, we have Donald Trump, the boor-in-chief proving a nonstop embarrassment to Americans as he engages in constantly lies, snubs Queen Elizabeth - the Brits are faulting her for even meeting with Trump - and trashes the Western order in general.  Deliciously, as Trump's was being greeted by huge protests in London, Robert Mueller drop 12 more indictments of Russian nationals linking Putin's intelligence service to the hacks of the DNC and Clinton email servers.  While no Americans were among those indicted - not yet, anyway - the evidence is building that collusion with a foreign enemy regime did occur.  Trump true to form continues to scream the entire Mueller investigation is a "witch hunt" - a witch hunt that is catching more and more witches. A piece in New York Magazine looks at this bombshell.  Here are highlights: 

On July 27, 2016, Donald Trump denied Russia was the likely culprit in the email hacks, but also announced, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think that you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press.”

In what is possibly an astonishing coincidence, but probably not, that very night, according to the new indictments from the Department of Justice, Russian hackers “attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or about the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign.” Trump asked Russia to hack his opponent, and Russia did “[f]or the first time,” as the indictment says.

Today’s latest, and almost certainly not last, indictments in the Russia scandal concern 12 Russian intelligence figures. . . . The danger for Trump is the implication of collusion scattered throughout the indictments.

The indictment charges that the conspirators “received a request for stolen materials from a candidate for the U.S. Congress,” and “sent the candidate stolen documents.” The Wall Street Journal reported a year ago that “Guccifer 2.0,” one of the Russian hackers, communicated with Florida-based Republican operative Aaron Nevins. Nevins is not named in this indictment, but the revelation that a candidate also communicated with Russian hackers indicates yet another point of contact in a conspiracy that went beyond Trump’s campaign.

The most direct path to the Trump campaign indicated in this indictment runs through Roger Stone. The Republican dirty trickster officially left the Trump campaign in 2015, but remained in regular contact with Trump throughout the campaign.

Stone admittedly engaged in direct communication with one of the indicted Russian agents. The indictment cites Stone’s contact with Guccifer 2.0:

That certainly looks like acting as an accessory to a crime. Stone promises he will “never roll on Trump,” unlike John Dean, who fingered President Nixon for crimes during Watergate. The promise and the analogy both suggest that Stone has evidence of culpability between Trump and Russia.

[The prosecution is building its case step by step, and the absence of formal charges against an individual in any one indictment hardly indicates they are in the clear. President

Little wonder Trump wants to meet with Putin totally alone: he wants no witnesses as he asks his handler what to do as the noose slowly but steadily tightens around him.

May 16, 2018: A Very Bad Day for Trump

Recently I heard political pundits talking about the exhaustion many Americans are experiencing as they try to keep up with the breaking news stories swirling around the Trump/Pence regime and the Russiagate investigation, not to mention the short term news distractions that seemingly are manufactured almost daily by Der Trumpenführer.  Wednesday was a day that saw numerous stories break, none of which portend well for Trump and/or his co-conspirators and sycophants.  The day began with the news that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee released a report finding that Russia had indeed sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.  The story was so damning that even Fox News was forced to report on it no doubt to the shock of Fox viewers who have been constantly told that claims of Russian interference were all false.  Here's a taste:

“Committee staff have spent 14 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft, and analytic work, and we see no reason to dispute the conclusions,” {Senator Richard} Burr said in a statement. “There is no doubt that Russia undertook an unprecedented effort to interfere with our 2016 elections.  . . . [Senator Mark] Warner said, “After a thorough review, our staff concluded that the ICA conclusions were accurate and on point. The Russian effort was extensive, sophisticated, and ordered by President Putin himself for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.”

Next came the release of transcripts by the Senate Judiciary Committee of the testimony of the participants in the infamous Trump Tower meeting, including Trump, Jr., who made utterly ridiculous statements strongly suggesting he was lying.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this debacle for Trump.  Here are excerpts:

[S]everal significant facts emerged. First, notes from Paul Manafort, who was present at the meeting, contain some curious clues including “Offshore — Cyprus” and “Active sponsors of RNC,” presumably meaning the Republican National Committee. This is the first we’ve heard of these meeting topics. It is of course illegal to take foreign assistance for an election campaign (more about that later), but it is noteworthy that the purpose of the meeting (adoptions) according to a White House statement — which Trump Jr. conceded may have included his father’s input — was the last item on Manafort’s list, perhaps an afterthought thrown in after discussions about far more controversial matters  . . .  The notion that no one from the campaign ever met with any Russians to discuss the campaign looks more and more like a lie. Second, Trump Jr. says he cannot remember (!) if he talked to his father after the meeting or the calls to set up the meeting (although there is a record of a four-minute call from a blocked number, followed by a short call with Emin Agalarov, who initiated the meeting). Failing to remember if he talked to his father after a group meeting with Russians strikes one as entirely improbable, but in any event, he says he later talked to Hope Hicks about the meeting, which is the virtually the same as talking to President Trump directly.  Third, this is confirmation of eagerness to receive something of value (dirt on Clinton) from a foreign source. And that’s a big legal problem, according to campaign finance and ethics gurus. “Federal law provides that ‘No person shall knowingly solicit, accept, or receive from a foreign national any contribution or donation,’ ” former White House ethics counsel Norman Eisen tells me. “That is not limited to only cash contributions but also includes in kind ones, such as the opposition research that Don Jr. and through him the Trump campaign solicited in connection with the Trump Tower meeting.” He adds, “As time passes and more information comes out such as the Senate release today, the evidence of collusion (or rather, of the various legal claims that we loosely refer to using that term) becomes stronger and stronger.”  Even though the actions occurred before the election, Trump may find himself in a legal fix. Constitutional scholar and co-author of a new book “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment” Laurence Tribe says, “Under the U.S. criminal code, soliciting a bribe is an independent offense even if the bribe doesn’t come through. And under the federal election code, soliciting prohibited foreign assistance in a U.S. election is an offense even if the assistance isn’t provided. The Trump family’s problems don’t end there, since ‘acts of solicitation’ can become overt acts that form part of a conspiracy to commit another crime.” One final note: Whenever Trump shouts “No collusion,” the response to that should be: “There’s airtight evidence of attempted conspiracy by the highest levels in the Trump campaign to obtain foreign help.” As Bergmann puts it, “According to Donald Trump Jr.’s own testimony, he was disappointed by the meeting because the collusion the Russians were offering wasn’t good enough. So we know the Trump campaign wanted to collude and we know the Russians ran an aggressive campaign to help Trump. Given the mounting evidence it really isn’t a question anymore if they colluded, it’s a question of how deep the collusion went.” No wonder Trump is so freaked out about the Russia investigation.

Then there was the bombshell via New York Magazine that reported that Michael Cohen was gathering large amounts of foreign money that was being passed through to Trump and his family.  Here are highlights from that story:

Last night, the Daily Mail reported a development in the Michael Cohen saga of seismic scale. In a December 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, the British tabloid reports, Cohen asked Ahmed Al-Rumaihi, who runs a $100 billion Qatari investment fund, to send him “millions” which, the story claims, would go “through him to Trump family members.” 

The Daily Mail report deepens the trouble in two crucial ways. First, it extends Cohen’s scheme from domestic corporations (or, in one case, domestic corporations controlled by foreign entities) to direct overseas fundraising. Second, and more ominously, it alleges that Cohen funneled the money to Trump’s family. . . . Now the story suggests he was enriching them, transforming the Cohen bribery story into a Trump bribery story. [T]here is plenty of contextual evidence to support the charge. One is that, after Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti published Trump Tower surveillance video of Al-Rumaihi, he suspiciously denied attending the meeting, only for his firm to admit it later. Another reason is that, multiple reports have linked both Qatar as a source of players in the broader web of shady Trump financial dealings with Russia, and Cohen as a key conduit. So it would fit the pattern for Cohen to be soliciting a bribe from Qatar on behalf of the Trump family. And yet another reason is Trump’s notorious resentment of other people making money off of him. If Cohen used Trump’s election to solicit bribes, it seems highly likely Trump would demand a taste. And then there is another reason to credit this allegation: Direct bribery of Trump is still happening, in plain sight.  Trump has defied all modern precedent by retaining control of his family company while serving as president, allowing interests domestic or foreign to curry favor by enriching him personally.

What’s clearly true is that the usual restraints against such behavior are altogether absent. There is an old phrase that used to be bandied around the media constantly: “the appearance of a conflict of interest.” Officials were held to this standard, which required them to avoid even looking like they might be tempted to allow their personal interest to influence their decisions. And of course, petty corruption often won out even in the face of this putatively strict public ethic. But it had to travel through a wick Roger et of rules guarding against outright corruption.

The Trump family, by contrast, is operating in a rules-free environment. The appearance of a conflict of interest is not even in question. There are proven conflicts everywhere, and the only question is straight-out quid pro quo bribery. The only authority empowered to uncover the alleged bribes is Robert Mueller.

Lastly, as icing on the cake, news broke that subpoenas were delivered late last week to lawyers representing Jason Sullivan, a social media and Twitter specialist Trump sycophant Roger Stone hired to work for an independent political action committee he set up to support Trump.  Reuters has details: 

U.S. Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller has issued two subpoenas to a social media expert who worked for longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone during the 2016 presidential election campaign. The subpoenas suggest that Mueller, who is probing Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, is focusing in part on Stone and whether he might have had advance knowledge of material allegedly hacked by Russian intelligence and sent to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published it.

Stone appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee last September and denied allegations of collusion between the president’s associates and Russia during the election. “I am aware of no evidence whatsoever of collusion by the Russian state or anyone in the Trump campaign,” Stone told reporters at the time.

According to sources familiar with the ongoing investigation, Mueller also has been probing whether anyone associated with the Trump campaign may have helped Assange or the Russians time or target the release of hacked emails and other social media promoting Trump or critical of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Sullivan told Reuters that he heads Cyphoon.com, a social media firm, and “worked on the Trump campaign serving as Chief Strategist directly to Roger J. Stone Jr.” 

Personally, I consider any news that is bad news for Trump on the Russiagate front as wonderful news for America and same, rational America and supporters of the rule of law.  My only fear is what lunatic thing Trump might do as he strives to distract the media and the public from the seemingly tightening noose.