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.

Trump's Damaging Trump Tower Admission

I have noted before how Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, is a defense attorney's worse nightmare. He runs his mouth incessantly - changing his lies each time he opens his mouth - and will not listen to advisers, and believes that he is smarter than anyone else (much as Hitler viewed himself as smarter than his top generals).  As a result, Trump has had great difficulty in securing top legal talent and has found himself at times represented solely by Rudy Giuliani - who was kicked out of his own top tier firm because of his representation of Trump - and Jay Sekulow whose main career path has been representing extreme right wing Christian causes and ties to Pat Robertson.  Now, in a tweet Sunday morning, Trump has seemingly admitted that the June, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower was aimed at conspiring with Russian and accepting things of value from foreign nationals - all things that violate federal election laws and raise frightening national security concerns.  Here are excerpts from a piece in The Atlantic:

In an attempt to defend his son Donald Trump Jr. on Sunday, President Donald Trump may instead have incriminated him—and himself.

Responding to a Washington Post report that he is increasingly concerned about his eldest son’s legal exposure, [Trump] the president denied that claim in a tweet Sunday morning: Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics - and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!

Both Trump and Trump Jr. have at times in the past denied that the purpose of the June 9, 2016, meeting was to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but [Trump] the president has now flatly acknowledged it. Despite the limitations of the medium, [Trump] the president packed a great deal of potential trouble into less than 280 characters.

First, he seems to proceed from the assumption that by declaring the purpose legal, that makes it so, when in fact the acknowledgement points to the ways the meeting may have broken federal laws.

Second, by contradicting his earlier claims, the president again underscores his prior dishonesty. This is not just a matter of public trust: The changing accounts also get at accusations that the president obstructed justice.

Finally, the tweet is riddled with internal contradictions. If the president is unconcerned about his son, why is he tweeting angrily about the story? And if what happened was entirely legal, why is he so quick to deny that he knew about the meeting?
When The New York Times first reported on the existence of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, in July of last year, Trump Jr. issued a statement insisting it had been focused only on Russian adoptions. Faced with emails that showed Trump Jr. had been told to expect dirt on Clinton, he was forced to concede that that was not true.

Sunday’s tweet is the most direct statement yet that the purpose of the June 2016 meeting was to get damaging information from Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has deep ties to the Kremlin. Trump Jr. had also been told in an email ahead of the meeting that the government of President Vladimir Putin supported his father’s candidacy. But declaring the meeting legal does not make it so. Over the last week, the president and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have focused on the claim that “collusion” with the Russians, or anyone else, is not a crime per se.

That may be true, but as Bob Bauer explains in Lawfare, accepting anything of value from Russians could easily fall afoul of laws that ban accepting electoral assistance from foreign nationals.

[Trump] has tweeted out an apparent admission that his son intended to break campaign-finance laws.

Sunday’s tweet connects with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice, too. Roughly three weeks after the Times initially revealed the June 2016 meeting, the Post reported that the president had dictated his son’s initial, false denial while flying home from Europe on Air Force One. That lie has created a cascading series of problems.

His flip-flop raises further questions about whether he intended to misdirect investigators.

More broadly, the president’s repeated dishonesty about the June 2016 meeting undermines the credibility of every statement he makes about the meeting. Although the president and his son—the latter under penalty of perjury—have both said that Trump Sr. only learned of the June 2016 meeting last year, Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen last week claimed that the president was aware of the meeting before it happened. Why should anyone give Trump the benefit of the doubt now?

The implication is that the president wasn’t even honest with his attorneys about his role in dictating the statement. Has Trump withheld any other damaging information from his attorneys? Meanwhile, even as Mueller is reportedly poring over Trump’s Twitter feed as part of the obstruction inquiry, the president continues to provide new fodder. Tweets like Sunday’s seem intended to dig out of a hole, but in practice they threaten to dig deeper.

[Trump's] The president’s admission about the Trump Tower meeting comes at a moment of high tension, even by the standards of this administration.

Trump’s public appearances and utterances give an impression of a man who is increasingly agitated and concerned about the Mueller inquiry. And for good reason: Several of Trump’s legal troubles are converging at the moment. The trial of Paul Manafort continues this week in northern Virginia.

Cohen’s legal troubles threaten Trump as well. The former aide has not been charged with any crimes, but he’s embroiled in controversy over payments to two women who allegedly had affairs with Trump. Not only has Cohen signaled a willingness to offer damaging information about Trump, but prosecutors in New York have also subpoenaed the longtime Trump Organization moneyman Allen Weisselberg.

For Trump to even address the threat to his “wonderful son” is an unusual show of vulnerability for a man who tries to project unstinting strength. Yet whenever he has tried to shield Trump Jr., it has only caused grief. The statement [Trump] the president dictated aboard Air Force One has become a piece of the obstruction investigation, while Sunday’s tweet could incriminate Trump Jr. It’s said that a man who represents himself has a fool for a client. A son who allows Donald Trump to be his advocate may be in even worse shape.

Michael Cohen: Trump Knew in Advance of 2016 Trump Tower Meeting

I truly hope that Michael Cohen, Trump's long time "fixer" has a good security detail. If I were him, I be worried about possible Russian assassins and/or a hit team hired by Donald Trump. What must be driving Trump to distraction is that many of the potential charges Cohen is facing are crimes under New York State law - crimes for which Trump cannot pardon Cohen as a "payoff" for continued silence.   While Cohen has not yet "flipped," it increasingly looks like that will be the final result. Obviously, if Cohen can document that Trump pre-approved the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian agents, it would (i) document that Trump's past denials have been lies, and (ii) bolster Robert Mueller's case that Trump illegally colluded with Russia with a goal of damaging Hillary Clinton to Trump's advantage. Indeed, instead of "lock her up," the chant should be "lock Trump up."  Here are excerpts from CNN:

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, claims that then-candidate Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower in which Russians were expected to offer his campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton, sources with knowledge tell CNN. Cohen is willing to make that assertion to special counsel Robert Mueller, the sources said.

Cohen's claim would contradict repeated denials by Trump, Donald Trump Jr., their lawyers and other administration officials who have said that the President knew nothing about the Trump Tower meeting until he was approached about it by The New York Times in July 2017. Cohen alleges that he was present, along with several others, when Trump was informed of the Russians' offer by Trump Jr. By Cohen's account, Trump approved going ahead with the meeting with the Russians, according to sources. [T]hese sources said Cohen does not have evidence, such as audio recordings, to corroborate his claim, but he is willing to attest to his account.

Even if Cohen doesn't have audio tapes, he can name those who were present and then they will have to decide if committing perjury is worth saving Trump's very large and nasty ass. 

Collusion With Russia Happened

The Hill recently reported that 59% of Americans do not believe that the Mueller investigation has revealed any crimes.  In light of the over a dozen indictments handed down and multiple guilty pleas that have occurred, that percentage is shocking.  Obviously, far too many Americans are too lazy and/or stupid and bigoted to keep themselves politically informed - it baffles me how men in particular can talk about sports teams yet know nothing about activities in Congress or the General Assembly.  Add to this laziness/idiocy the constant bellowing of Der Trumpenführer that no collusion occurred despite facts to the contrary that resonates all too well with his base that eats up every racist taunt Trump throws out or the Christofascists thrilled by every anti-LGBT action taken by the Trump/Pence regime.  Indeed, a piece in The Atlantic lays out why Trump's claims of "no collusion" are lies, just like so much of what comes out of his braying mouth.   Here are article highlights:

Trump aides colluded with foreign governments.  This is a simple, straightforward statement, and by this point, it ought to be an uncontroversial one. There’s ample evidence on many fronts, from legal documents to reliable reporting. . . . . it  . . . . mean that attempts to dismiss the Russia investigation as a witch hunt that lacks any evidence are not merely disingenuous—they’re simply wrong.

What do we mean by collusion? As the Columbia Journalism Review explored last year, there are a range of meanings, but a clean synthesis would be a secret compact or conspiracy with an illegal or deceitful aim. The examples of such cooperation, between Trump aides and agents of foreign governments, abound. So far, three people have pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about it. The unresolved question, at this stage of the investigation, is not whether such cooperation was attempted; it’s how successful it proved, how large an impact it actually had, who was involved, and whether they broke any laws.

There is, most prominently, the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, where Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer they believed had damaging information to offer about Hillary Clinton. In another meeting in August 2016, also at Trump Tower, former Blackwater chief Erik Prince (the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos) brought together an Israeli social-media specialist and an emissary who said the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi wanted to aid the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos carried on conversations with at least two people he believed had substantial connections to the Russian government. Roger Stone, an on-again, off-again Trump adviser, exchanged messages with the hacker Guccifer 2.0, a Russian intelligence agent who released emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee.

This leaves out plenty of other examples of peculiar but less fleshed-out stories, including Trump campaign aide Carter Page’s mysterious trips to Russia and Hungary; fired National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s post-election discussions with Russia; and Jared Kushner’s reported attempt to establish a “back channel” to allow the Trump transition team to communicate with Russia outside of standard channels. There may be other examples that are not yet known to the public.

In June 2016, for example, publicist Rob Goldstone wrote to Donald Trump Jr.:

The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump—helped along by Aras and Emin.

Trump Jr. infamously replied, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Yet despite the evidence, and despite people like Steve Bannon acknowledging it, the question of whether or not collusion occurred persists well past its expiration date, lingering like a flat-earth theory. That there is still a debate is a testament to [Trump's] the president’s persistence in saying that no collusion occurred loudly and repeatedly, and in his strongest supporters’ willingness to believe him and take up the banner.

Giuliani, who joined Trump’s legal team about a month ago, is taking a different line of argument: instead of denying that the Trump campaign colluded, saying it simply doesn’t matter because that didn’t break the law.

This is all actually a replay of last summer’s arguments. The emails that Trump Jr. released about the June 2016 meeting made clear that the Trump campaign was perfectly willing to collude, and was in fact frustrated that Veselnitskaya couldn’t deliver the goods Goldstone had implied.

[T]here were a couple of flaws with the claim. First, it wasn’t clear that everyone would react that way. Former campaign staffers of both parties expressed shock that the Trump team had gone forward with the meeting, bringing up concrete examples where campaigns had gone to law enforcement in less egregious circumstances. Furthermore, although there is no crime of “collusion” per se, it is quite possible that a campaign-finance law could have been violated. Despite what Giuliani says about the source of the information not mattering, foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to campaigns, and opposition research could represent an in-kind contribution.

This week, Trump is in a tizzy over the revelation that there was an informant passing information to the FBI about the ties between some Trump campaign staffers and Russia.Trump contends that there was no collusion, and that his campaign was being spied upon by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department for political reasons. The accusation of political spying has no evidence to back it up.

If there was no collusion, and not even any evidence of collusion, it would be strange and disturbing for the FBI to be interested in what was going on inside the Trump campaign.

Yet we know that isn’t the case, because there was collusion. There was the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, the August 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Papadopoulos’s contacts (which triggered the FBI’s investigation) and more. . . . . it gives a plausible reason why the FBI was interested in the Trump campaign.

There are many questions about Russian interference in the 2016 election that remain unanswered. Whether there was collusion between Trump aides and foreign governments is not one of them.

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. 

Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier

Republicans have gone to great lengths to attack and slander Christopher Steele, the former MI-6 agent for British Intelligence, who prepared a rough dossier that would indicate that Republicans at all levels have supported and continue to support a possible - in my view, most likely - traitor to the United States very susceptible to blackmail by Putin's Russia.  Devin Nunes and his fictional memorandum is perhaps the most egregious example of Republican efforts to resort to any means to protect the foul leader of their party, but Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley have shown their debasement as well through their referral of  Steele’s name to the Department of Justice, for a possible criminal investigation.  Grassley's motives are less clear, but Graham is viewed by many as having his own secrets that make him susceptible to blackmail by Trump or others - it's not without reason that I refer to Graham as the Palmetto Queen.  A very long must read piece in the New Yorker looks at Steele and his history and credentials and underscores that Steele is reputable and long considered totally reliable by U.S. intelligence agencies and strongly suggests to me, Trump's Republican defenders and sycophants are not motivated by what is in the best interests of America.  With the Stormy Daniels scandal growing, there is ever more reason to believe that the more salacious portions of Steele's dossier might well be true.  As Senator Diane Feinstein has noted, nothing in the dossier todate has been refuted as false.  Here are article excerpts (there is much more that deserves a full read):  

A friend in Washington, D.C., was calling with bad news: two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, had just referred Steele’s name to the Department of Justice, for a possible criminal investigation. They were accusing Steele—the author of a secret dossier that helped trigger the current federal investigation into President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia—of having lied to the very F.B.I. officers he’d alerted about his findings. The details of the criminal referral were classified, so Steele could not know the nature of the allegations, let alone rebut them, but they had something to do with his having misled the Bureau about contacts that he’d had with the press. For nearly thirty years, Steele had worked as a close ally of the United States, and he couldn’t imagine why anyone would believe that he had been deceptive. But lying to an F.B.I. officer is a felony, an offense that can be punished by up to five years in prison. The dossier painted a damning picture of collusion between Trump and Russia, suggesting that his campaign had “accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” It also alleged that Russian officials had been “cultivating” Trump as an asset for five years, and had obtained leverage over him, in part by recording videos of him while he engaged in compromising sexual acts, including consorting with Moscow prostitutes who, at his request, urinated on a bed. Steele had spent more than twenty years in M.I.6, most of it focussing on Russia. For three years, in the nineties, he spied in Moscow under diplomatic cover. Between 2006 and 2009, he ran the service’s Russia desk, at its headquarters, in London. He was fluent in Russian, and widely considered to be an expert on the country. He’d also advised on nation-building in Iraq. As a British citizen, however, he was not especially knowledgeable about American politics. Peter Fritsch, a co-founder at Fusion who has worked closely with Steele, said of him, “He’s a career public-service officer, and in England civil servants haven’t been drawn into politics in quite the same way they have here. He’s a little naïve about the public square.” A longtime friend of Steele’s pointed out to me that Steele was in a singularly unenviable predicament. The dossier had infuriated both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump by divulging allegedly corrupt dealings between them. “You’ve got oligarchs running both superpowers,” the friend said. “And, incredibly, they both hate this same guy.” . . . . Legal experts soon assured Steele that the criminal referral was merely a political stunt. Nevertheless, it marked a tense new phase in the investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. It was not the first time that a congressional investigation had been used as a tool for destroying someone’s reputation. Whenever a scandal hit Washington, opponents used subpoenas, classified evidence, and theatrical public hearings to spread innuendo, confusion, and lies. Senators Grassley and Graham declined to be interviewed for this article . . .
 Democratic members of the committee, who had not been consulted by Republicans about the criminal referral against Steele, were enraged. The California senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking minority member on the committee, declared that the Republicans’ goals were “undermining the F.B.I. and Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation” and “deflecting attention” from it. Feinstein said that the criminal referral provided no evidence that Steele had lied, and, she added, “not a single revelation in the Steele dossier has been refuted.”

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, is a former prosecutor who also serves on the Judiciary Committee. “To impeach Steele’s dossier is to impeach Mueller’s investigation,” he told me. “It’s to recast the focus back on Hillary.” The Republicans’ aim, he believed, was to “create a false narrative saying this is all a political witch hunt.”

Steele’s lawyers have advised him not to speak publicly about the controversy, and, because he is a former intelligence officer, much of his life must remain secret. His accusers know this, and, as Senator Whitehouse explained, “they are using selective declassification as a tactic—they use declassified information to tell their side, and then the rebuttal is classified.” Both the criminal referral and Nunes’s report used secret evidence to malign Steele while providing no means for his defenders to respond without breaching national-security secrets. But interviews with Steele’s friends, colleagues, and business associates tell a very different story about how a British citizen became enmeshed in one of America’s most consequential political battles. Steele worked out of the British Embassy for M.I.6, under diplomatic cover. His years in Moscow, 1990 to 1993, were among the most dramatic in Russian history, a period that included the collapse of the Communist Party; nationalist uprisings in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Baltic states; and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin gained ultimate power in Russia, and a moment of democratic promise faded as the K.G.B.—now called the F.S.B.—reasserted its influence, oligarchs snapped up state assets, and nationalist political forces began to emerge. Vladimir Putin, a K.G.B. operative returning from East Germany, reinvented himself in the shadowy world of St. Petersburg politics. Steele’s already dim view of the Kremlin darkened in November, 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian K.G.B. officer and a Putin critic who had been recruited by M.I.6, suffered an agonizing death in a London hospital, after drinking a cup of tea poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. Moscow had evidently sanctioned a brazen murder in his own country. Steele was put in charge of M.I.6’s investigation. Authorities initially planned to indict one suspect in the murder, but Steele’s investigative work persuaded them to indict a second suspect as well. Nine years later, the U.K.’s official inquiry report was finally released, and it confirmed Steele’s view: the murder was an operation by the F.S.B., and it was “probably approved” by Vladimir Putin. The British Secret Intelligence Service is highly regarded by the United States, particularly for its ability to harvest information from face-to-face sources, rather than from signals intelligence, such as electronic surveillance, as the U.S. often does. British and American intelligence services work closely together, and, while Steele was at M.I.6, British intelligence was often included in the U.S. President’s daily-briefing reports. In 2008, Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, visited the U.K., and Steele briefed him on Russian developments. The following year, President Obama visited the U.K., and was briefed on a report that Steele had written about Russia. Steve Hall, a former chief of the C.I.A.’s Central Eurasia Division, which includes Russia, the former Soviet states, and the Balkans, told me, “M.I.6 is second only perhaps to the U.S. in its ability to collect intelligence from Russia.” He added, “We’ve always coördinated closely with them because they did such a great job. Steele has not been to Russia, or visited any former Soviet states, since 2009. Unlike some of his former M.I.6 colleagues, he has not been declared persona non grata by Putin’s regime, but, in 2012, an Orbis informant quoted an F.S.B. agent describing him as “an enemy of Mother Russia.” Steele concluded that it would be difficult for him to work in the country unnoticed. The firm guards the identities of its sources, but it’s clear that many Russian contacts can be interviewed elsewhere, and London is the center of the post-Soviet Russian diaspora.

Orbis often performs anti-corruption investigations for clients attempting internal reviews, and helps hedge funds and other financial companies perform due diligence or obtain strategic information. One Orbis client who agreed to talk to me, a Western businessman with interests in Russia and Ukraine, described Steele to me as “very efficient, very professional, and very credible.” He said that his company had successfully cross-checked Steele’s research with other people, adding, “I don’t know anyone who’s been critical of his work. His reports are very good. It’s an absolute no-brainer that he’s just a political target. They’re trying to shoot the messenger.”

Two of his earliest cases at Orbis involved investigating international crime rings whose leaders, coincidentally, were based in New York’s Trump Tower.

Steele’s first client after leaving M.I.6 was England’s Football Association, which hoped to host the World Cup in 2018, but suspected dirty dealings by the governing body, fifa. England lost out in its bid to Russia, and Steele determined that the Kremlin had rigged the process with bribes. According to Ken Bensinger’s “Red Card,” an upcoming book about the scandal, “one of Steele’s best sources” informed him that the Deputy Prime Minister, Igor Sechin—now the C.E.O. of the Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft—is suspected of having travelled to Qatar “to swap World Cup votes.”

In 2011, Steele contacted an American agent he’d met who headed the Bureau’s division for serious crimes in Eurasia. Steele introduced him to his sources, who proved essential to the ensuing investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department indicted fourteen people in connection with a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes and kickbacks. One of them was Chuck Blazer, a top fifa official who had embezzled a fortune from the organization and became an informant for the F.B.I. Blazer had an eighteen-thousand-dollar-per-month apartment in Trump Tower, a few floors down from Trump’s residence. Several years ago, the F.B.I. hired Steele to help crack an international gambling and money-laundering ring purportedly run by a suspected Russian organized-crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The syndicate was based in an apartment in Trump Tower. Eventually, federal officials indicted more than thirty co-conspirators for financial crimes. . . . . “It was as if all criminal roads led to Trump Tower,” Steele told friends. [O]n several occasions Orbis had warned authorities about major security threats. Three years ago, a trusted Middle Eastern source told Orbis that a group of isis militants were using the flow of refugees from Syria to infiltrate Europe. Orbis shared the information with associates who relayed the intelligence to German security officials. Several months later, when a concert hall in Paris, the Bataclan, was attacked by terrorists, Burrows and Steele felt remorse at not having notified French authorities as well. When Steele took his suspicions about Trump to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016, it was in keeping with Orbis protocol, rather than a politically driven aberration. [In April, 2016, Steele] finished a secret investigation, which he called Project Charlemagne, for a private client. It involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany—along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and “opaque financial support” given to favored politicians in the form of bank loans, gifts, and other kinds of support. The report discusses the Kremlin’s entanglement with the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen. (Le Pen and Berlusconi deny having had such ties.) It also suggests that Russian aid was likely given to lesser-known right-wing nationalists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The Kremlin’s long-term aim, the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to “destroy” the E.U., . . . . Mark Medish, a former director of Russian affairs at the National Security Council, told me that “if Steele had not shared his findings, he might have been accused of dereliction or a coverup.” He added, “It takes courage to deliver bad news, particularly when the stakes are so high.” And Senator Whitehouse described Steele’s actions as akin to warning the F.B.I. about a “physical detonation of some sort,” noting, “If it had gone off, and he or the F.B.I. had ignored it, heads would roll.”

Regardless of what others might think, it’s clear that Steele believed that his dossier was filled with important intelligence. Otherwise, he would never have subjected it, his firm, and his reputation to the harsh scrutiny of the F.B.I. “I’m impressed that he was willing to share it with the F.B.I.,” Sipher said. “That gives him real credibility to me, the notion that he’d give it to the best intelligence professionals in the world.”

A number of former intelligence officers, however, believe that the [Trump Tower] meeting, which happened soon after Papadopoulos’s encounter with the Australian diplomat, enhances the dossier’s credibility. John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the C.I.A. from 2000 until 2004, told me, “I haven’t formed a final thought, but clearly parts of it are starting to resonate with what we know to be true about the Russians’ willingness to deliver information harmful to Hillary Clinton.”

Read the rest of the piece which lays out an timeline on Trump/Russia interfacing.  My conclusion?  We have a likely traitor in the White House.  Anyone who believes otherwise either has their head in the sand or is becoming complicit in harming the nation. 

Mueller Subpoenas Bannon in the Russia Investigation

The Russiagate investigation took a new turn today as Robert Mueller issued a grand jury subpoena to Steve Bannon even as Bannon was slapped with a subpoena by the House Intelligence Committee when he refused to answer questions during his questioning by the Committee.  Said refusal was purportedly at the direction of the White House.   While the Mueller subpoena suggests that Bannon is not a target in the investigation, it ups the risk to Bannon should he refuse to cooperate or answer questions.   Should he refuse to testify to the grand jury, he would face contempt charges.  Should he lie to the grand jury, he would be guilty of perjury and the consequences could be even worse.   One can only hope that Bannon will decide that it is in his best interest to cooperate and, if need be, throw Trump and others on the White House staff under the bus.  In short, self-preservation should motivate Bannon to "do the right thing" and testify fully.  Here are excerpts from the New York Times on this development:

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, was subpoenaed last week by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to testify before a grand jury as part of the investigation into possible links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

The move marked the first time Mr. Mueller is known to have used a grand jury subpoena to seek information from a member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle. The special counsel’s office has used subpoenas before to seek information on Mr. Trump’s associates and their possible ties to Russia or other foreign governments.

The subpoena could be a negotiating tactic. Mr. Mueller is likely to allow Mr. Bannon to forgo the grand jury appearance if he agrees to instead be questioned by investigators in the less formal setting of the special counsel’s offices about ties between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia and about the president’s conduct in office, according to the person, who would not be named discussing the case.

The subpoena is a sign that Mr. Bannon is not personally the focus of the investigation. Justice Department rules allow prosecutors to subpoena the targets of investigations only in rare circumstances.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bannon testified behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee, which is also investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mr. Bannon did not address reporters before entering the proceeding on Tuesday, and a spokesman for Mr. Mueller and a senior White House lawyer did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Some legal experts said the subpoena could be a sign that the investigation was intensifying, while others said it may simply have been a negotiating tactic to persuade Mr. Bannon to cooperate with the investigation. The experts also said it could be a signal to Mr. Bannon, who has tried to publicly patch up his falling-out with the president, that despite Mr. Trump’s legal threats, Mr. Bannon must be completely forthcoming with investigators.

“By forcing someone to testify through a subpoena, you are providing the witness with cover because they can say, ‘I had no choice — I had to go in and testify about everything I knew,’” said Solomon L. Wisenberg, a prosecutor for the independent counsel that investigated Bill Clinton when he was president.

Significant grand jury activity may undermine the case that White House officials have made for months: that they believe the inquiry is coming to an end and are convinced that the president will be cleared. Mr. Mueller has told Mr. Trump’s lawyers that he will probably want to question the president before the investigation concludes, but no interview has been scheduled.

Mr. Bannon has limited firsthand knowledge about two key issues within Mr. Mueller’s purview — the president’s firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, a decision made without Mr. Bannon present, and the drafting of a misleading statement about the subject of the June 2016 meeting with Russians, in which they promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

But even Mr. Bannon’s secondhand knowledge could be used to draw a contrast with statements from people with firsthand knowledge whom Mr. Mueller has already interviewed. And Mr. Bannon was directly involved in a number of other major moments, including the decision-making around the firing of Michael T. Flynn . . . And Mr. Bannon was the chief executive of the Trump campaign in October 2016 when WikiLeaks began releasing thousands of stolen personal emails from the hacked account of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta.

In “Fire and Fury,” Mr. Bannon was quoted by the author, Michael Wolff, as suggesting that Donald Trump Jr.; the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner; and Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman at the time, were “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for attending the meeting with Russians at Trump Tower. Mr. Bannon said that he believed there was “zero” chance that the younger Mr. Trump did not take them to meet his father, who has said he knew nothing about the meeting.

The president appeared to ease his anger toward Mr. Bannon at the end of last week. People close to Mr. Bannon took the president’s comments as a signal that Mr. Trump was aware that his fired strategist would soon be contacted by investigators.

Mr. Bannon has hired William A. Burck of the Washington office of the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan law firm to represent him in the defamation threats from Mr. Trump and the congressional inquiries.

Eighth Person in Trump, Jr., Meeting Linked to Money Laundering

For years Donald Trump, Sr., has skirted the edge of the law and cut deals with both domestic and Russian mobsters, often in connection with his real estate projects.  The latter have for years provided a means for dirty Russian money to be used to acquire real estate in America - the USA, unlike many other nations has few restrictions on foreigners buying property - which when sold effective launders the money and makes it "clean."  Hence it should be no surprise that the now identified 8th person in the June, 2016, meeting with Trump, Jr., at Trump Tower had ties to money laundering. Literally, with every passing day some new sleazy and/or questionable detail of the meeting unfolds which further underscores the lies that were first used to explain the meeting which sought to collude with Russian operatives.  Here are details from Politico on this new information (Note Senator Mark Warner's pointed comment): 

The eighth attendee at a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between top Trump associates and a politically connected Russian lawyer is a business associate of a top Moscow oligarch and was once the focus of a congressional money-laundering probe.

Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, until now the mysterious eighth person in the room, attended the meeting on behalf of Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate magnate with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a Trump family friend. A lawyer for Agalarov has confirmed Kaveladze’s attendance to other news outlets, though he did not respond to requests for comment from POLITICO.

Business filings list Kaveladze as founder of a company called IBC Group, which shares a New Jersey address — 333 Sylvan Ave. in Englewood Cliffs — with several shell companies connected to Aras Agalarov.

One of those firms is Saffron Property Management, which Agalarov reportedly used to purchase an $11 million condo in Florida last year.

A POLITICO reporter visiting the nondescript office building where all of these companies are based found that the suite linked to Agalarov and Kaveladze was empty, with unopened mail by the door. A sign in the lobby indicated that the suite belonged to IBC and Russian Art Mall, which was founded in 2000 and registered to Emin Agalarov, who is a partner in his father's business.

"They're current on the rent. They're on our rent roll, they're just quiet," said George Sayrafe, who said he has managed the building for 20 years. "I hadn't heard anything. Some tenants bother you, you know what I mean? These people, I haven't seen them in a long time."

Kaveladze’s identity is among many facts about the 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr. has failed to disclose in multiple public statements. And his background may add to the questions members of Congress and investigators have about the meeting, which Trump officials say was brief and inconsequential but which Democrats call evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“I doubt if this individual who had a history of setting up thousands of fake accounts in Delaware was really there to talk about Russian adoptions,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, told reporters on Tuesday.

Kaveladze was named in a round of news stories in November 2000, after the General Accounting Office issued a report on Russian money laundering through U.S. financial institutions.

At the time, Kaveladze was identified in contemporaneous news reports as the originator of thousands of Delaware-based shell corporations.

Through his company, which was at the time called International Business Creations, Kaveladze formed 2,000 corporations for Russian brokers, which helped steer more than $1.4 billion in wire transactions through U.S. banks, according to the congressional inquiry.

The Agalarovs and Kaveladze are represented by Scott Balber, a New York white-collar defense attorney and former legal partner with Abbe Lowell, an attorney handling Russia matters for Kushner. Balber told The Washington Post on Tuesday he got a call this weekend from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office seeking an interview with Kaveladze — an ask that marks the first public signal the special counsel is investigating the Russia meeting.

Claims of Trump Sexual Predator Behavior Multiply

As I have noted in Facebook posts and elsewhere, perhaps having daughters of my own and, now, granddaughters, I take claims of sexual abuse of women by powerful figures and the objectification of women seriously.   The irony, of course, is that Donald Trump's manly men supporters and profosseional Christian parasites seem utterly un-phased by Donald Trump's 2005 "hot mic" tape. Who would have thought a gay man would uphold the dignity of women and chivalry, if you will, more so than heterosexual men and "godly Christians."  Tonight, the New York Times, the Palm Beach Post and BuzzFeed are all publishing stories that would demonstrate that the Trump revealed in the 2005 tape is the real Donald Trump.  While the Trump campaign is denying the validity of the claims and threatening lawsuits, I tend to believe the stories of the accusers.  As for the lawsuit threats, if the stories are true, Trump would be insane to file lawsuits given the discovery power that would be gifted to the defendants in the lawsuits.   Here are highlights from the New York Times story:

Donald J. Trump was emphatic in the second presidential debate: Yes, he had boasted about kissing women without permission and grabbing their genitals. But he had never actually done those things, he said.

“No,” he declared under questioning on Sunday evening, “I have not.”

At that moment, sitting at home in Manhattan, Jessica Leeds, 74, felt he was lying to her face. “I wanted to punch the screen,” she said in an interview in her apartment.
More than three decades ago, when she was a traveling businesswoman at a paper company, Ms. Leeds said, she sat beside Mr. Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York. They had never met before.

About 45 minutes after takeoff, she recalled, Mr. Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her.  According to Ms. Leeds, Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt.  “He was like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere.”
She fled to the back of the plane. “It was an assault,” she said.

Ms. Leeds has told the story to at least four people close to her, who also spoke with The New York Times.

Mr. Trump’s claim that his crude words had never turned into actions was similarly infuriating to a woman watching on Sunday night in Ohio: Rachel Crooks.

Ms. Crooks was a 22-year-old receptionist at Bayrock Group, a real estate investment and development company in Trump Tower in Manhattan, when she encountered Mr. Trump outside an elevator in the building one morning in 2005.

Aware that her company did business with Mr. Trump, she turned and introduced herself. They shook hands, but Mr. Trump would not let go, she said. Instead, he began kissing her cheeks. Then, she said, he “kissed me directly on the mouth.” It didn’t feel like an accident, she said. It felt like a violation.

“It was so inappropriate,” Ms. Crooks recalled in an interview. “I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”

In the days since Mr. Trump’s campaign was jolted by a 2005 recording that caught him bragging about pushing himself on women, he has insisted, as have his aides, that it was simply macho bluster. “It’s just words,” he has said repeatedly.

And his hope for salvaging his candidacy rests heavily on whether voters believe that claim.

They should not, say Ms. Leeds and Ms. Crooks, whose stories have never been made public before. And their accounts echo those of other women who have previously come forward, like Temple Taggart, a former Miss Utah, who said that Mr. Trump kissed her on the mouth more than once when she was a 21-year-old pageant contestant.

They said they were sickened by what they heard. “It made me shake,” said Linda Ross, a neighbor and friend who spoke with Ms. Leeds about the interaction about six months ago. Like several of Ms. Leeds’s friends, Ms. Ross encouraged her to tell her story to the news media. Ms. Leeds had resisted until Sunday’s debate, which she watched with Ms. Ross.

When Mr. Trump denied having ever sexually assaulted women, in response to a question from Anderson Cooper of CNN, Ms. Ross said she immediately looked at Ms. Leeds in disbelief. “Now we know he lied straight up,” Ms. Ross recalled saying.

There is more. Read the entire piece.  The Palm Beach Post accounts are similar to those in the Times.   What is more disturbing to me is the BuzzFeed story that recounts Trump's walking in on naked Miss Teen USA contestants, some of whom were a  mere 15 years of age.  Here are highlights:

BuzzFeed has an explosive new story out this morning accusing Donald Trump of walking in on teen beauty queens, one as young as 15, while they were undressed during a Miss Teen USA pageant in 1997.

Mariah Billado, former Miss Vermont Teen USA, allegedly complained to Ivanka about her father’s intrusion, with Ivanka reportedly saying, “Yeah, he does that

These new allegation mirror what Trump told Howard Stern in 2005 when he bragged that he’d go backstage before the show to make sure “everything is good.” From CNN:

“Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that before a show, I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it,” Trump said. “You know, I’m inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good.”

The man is beyond disgusting.  So to are his supporters.  When Hillary Clinton called Trump's supporters as "deporables." she was more accurate than she knew.