As Russiagate Probe Expands, Mike Pence Hires A Lawyer

Christofascist zealot - and liar? - Mike Pence

As a crisis management seemingly engulfs the White House, Vice President Mike Pence who has claimed ignorance on virtually every issue even though he headed Der Trumpenführer transition team, has reportedly now hired his own private legal counsel.  To date, Pence's feigned ignorance has indicated that he either was utterly incompetent - e.g., he knew nothing of Trum BFF Mike Flynn's ties to Russia and foreign paymasters - or was lying.  Given the Christofascist belief that lying is fine so long as it furthers the Christofascists' agenda, my money is on lying as opposed to incompetence and pretend ignorance.   This is in complete accord with my experience of over 20 years where no one lies more often or more deceitfully that the godly right wing Christians.  As Pence is lawyering up, Der Trumpenführer continues to run his big mouth and ignores the reality that he has created the majority of his own problems.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post. 

A heightened sense of unease gripped the White House on Thursday, as President Trump lashed out at reports that he’s under scrutiny over whether he obstructed justice, aides repeatedly deflected questions about the probe and Vice President Pence acknowledged hiring a private lawyer to handle fallout from investigations into Russian election meddling.

Pence’s decision to hire Richard Cullen, a Richmond-based lawyer who previously served as a U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, came less than a month after Trump hired his own private lawyer.

The hiring of Cullen, whom an aide said Pence was paying for himself, was made public a day after The Washington Post reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is widening his investigation to examine whether the president attempted to obstruct justice.

A defiant Trump at multiple points Thursday expressed his frustration with reports about that development, tweeting that he is the subject of “the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history,” and one that he said is being led by “some very bad and conflicted people.”

Trump, who only a day earlier had called for a more civil tone in Washington after a shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Va., fired off several more tweets in the afternoon voicing disbelief that he was under scrutiny . . . .

Before the day ended, the White House was hit with the latest in a cascade of headlines relating to the Russian probe: a Post story reporting that Mueller is investigating the finances and business dealings of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-law and adviser.

“The legal jeopardy increases by the day,” said one informal Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss conversations with White House aides more freely. “If you’re a White House staffer, you’re trying to do your best to keep your head low and do your job.”

At the White House on Thursday, aides sought to portray a sense of normalcy, staging an elaborate event to promote a Trump job-training initiative, while simultaneously going into lockdown mode regarding Mueller’s probe.

As Trump’s No. 2 and as head of the transition team, Pence has increasingly found himself drawn into the widening Russia investigation.

Pence — along with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Kushner, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and White House Counsel Donald McGahn — was one of the small group of senior advisers the president consulted as he mulled his decision to fire Comey, which is now a focus of Mueller’s investigation.

He also was entangled in the events leading up to the dismissal of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, who originally [purportedly] misled Pence about his contact with Russian officials — incorrect claims that Pence himself then repeated publicly.

The vice president was [purportedly] kept in the dark for nearly two weeks about Flynn’s misstatements, before learning the truth in a Post report. Trump ultimately fired Flynn for misleading the vice president. 

There were also news reports that Flynn’s attorneys had alerted Trump’s transition team, which Pence led, that Flynn was under federal investigation for his secret ties to the Turkish government as a paid lobbyist — a claim the White House disputes. And aides to Pence, who was running the transition team, said the vice president was [supposedly] never informed of Flynn’s overseas work with Turkey, either.

In the meantime, the Republican National Committee appears to be girding for a fight.

“Talking points” sent Wednesday night to Trump allies provided a road map for trying to undercut the significance of the latest revelation related to possible obstruction of justice. . . . The RNC also encouraged Trump allies to decry the “inexcusable, outrageous and illegal” leaks on which it said the story was based and to argue that there is a double standard at work.

As noted before, Pence's claims of ignorance have about the same level of veracity as those of Sargent Schultz in the old TV show, "Hogan's Heroes"  No slight intended toward sex workers, but Trump, Pence and their sycophants make the tawdriest of whores look down right virtuous. And lest it be forgotten, 81% of evangelical Christians backed the Trump/Pence ticket. 

Don't Buy Mike Pence's Claims of Innocence

There are many things to find disgusting and reprehensible in the Trump/Pence, not the least of which is Mike Pence who, in his own way is just as dangerous as Der Trumpenführer.  Pence, like Trump, is a pathological liar, except Pence, like most Christofascists, sees lying to protect himself and to advance his theocratic agenda.  Now, Pence is lying to try to convince Americans that he has known nothing of the scandals roiling the flounder Trump regime.  To believe this, however, one has to accept the fact that Pence, as head of the transition team, is utterly incompetent and near brain dead. The truth, of course, is that Pence knows what's going on and is simply trying to save his extremist ass.  It must be remembered that Pence jumped at the vice presidential slot because he was facing likely defeat if he ran for re-election in Indiana's gubernatorial race.  Thus, Pence is a loser and a liar who claims to be a "godly Christian" even though he hitched his future on a thrice married, narcissistic liar who brags about sexual harassing/molesting women.  An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at Pence's lies.  Here are excerpts:

Mike Pence would like you to know that Mike Pence is not involved in any of this. At least that appears to be the message coming from Pence’s allies, and perhaps the vice president himself, as the Trump White House reels from a series of interlocking scandals that threaten all manner of political peril, even potentially an impeachment or resignation that could make Pence the president of the United States.

All of a sudden we’re seeing a wave of articles in which anonymous sources close to Pence tell reporters that he’s completely out of the loop, to use the phrase that then-Vice President George H.W. Bush uttered so memorably when claiming his innocence in the Iran-Contra scandal. But can we believe it?

Nobody tells him anything! How can he possibly have any culpability for administration wrongdoing when he’s barely involved in any of this running-the-government stuff? Sources close to Pence would also like you to know that “Pence was not consulted about the decision to bring on Flynn as the national security adviser in November.” I barely know the guy, I tell ya.

You’ll recall that Flynn was supposedly fired because he told Pence that he didn’t discuss the potential easing of sanctions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak when he and the ambassador talked multiple times during the campaign, a lie that Pence then repeated to the press. This affront to Pence’s honor was so profound that President Trump had no choice but to give Flynn the boot. 

Flynn was paid half a million dollars to lobby on behalf of Turkey while he was advising the Trump campaign, and in January, on the advice of his lawyer, he retroactively registered as the agent of a foreign government. Though Flynn informed the Trump transition’s legal team of this fact, Pence says that no one told him, despite the fact that he was in charge of the transition.

Pence claimed in March to have just found out about Flynn’s work for Turkey. Yet Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent Pence a letter on Nov. 18 going into considerable detail about Flynn’s Turkey connection. As of yesterday, Pence was standing by his assertion that he only learned about it in March.

As leader of the transition, it was Pence’s job to make sure that things such as appointing a national security adviser with troubling ties to foreign governments didn’t happen. So his defense in the Flynn matter comes down to: I was doing a terrible job leading the transition and had no idea what was going on.

That then brings us to the matter of FBI Director James B. Comey’s firing. . . . . We quickly learned, however, that Trump intended to fire Comey all along. Trump said so in an interview with NBC, and Rosenstein confirmed it to senators yesterday when he told them that he was instructed to write the memo after being told that Comey would be fired.

So the initial White House line was a lie, which was only corrected once Trump blurted out the truth. Did Pence know? . . . . if you parse Pence’s words carefully enough, you can come up with an interpretation in which he was being technically accurate despite giving an intentionally misleading impression.

Anyone who has gone to work in this administration risks being tainted with its excesses, its incompetence and its corruption. No one is more at risk than Pence, who plainly harbors presidential ambitions of his own — and might even become president without having to run for the job. So the steady narrative coming from Pence associates —  that he has nothing to do with the parade of horrors issuing from the administration — could be an attempt to inoculate him for some later date when he has to stand before the voters on his own. Sure, I was there, he may say, but I really wasn’t involved with that catastrophe.

If Pence thinks that argument is going to fly, he’s got another thing coming.

Trump's First, Alarming week as President Elect

I may hurt the feelings of some, but I don't know how any sane and rational person could think that Donald Trump is fit to occupy the White House.  His first week as president elect is already confirming the idiocy of anyone who voted for the man.   His transition team is marked by chaos, cronyism, and settling for the least qualified since so many reputable individuals fear staining their reputations and perhaps selling their souls should they join a Trump administration.  The head of an alt-right, racist, misogynistic "news" outlet is senior counselor to the president and an open contempt for the free press has been again revealed.   As has been consistently the case, New York based media where Trump is best known has led the way in excoriating the man's dangerous failings and narcissistic egomania.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at Trump's first week of incompetent misrule before he has even taken the oath of office.  Here are excerpts: 

It’s been one week since an unusually subdued Donald Trump gave his victory speech in Manhattan. “For those who have chosen not to support me in the past—of which there were a few people,” Trump said, eliciting laughter from the crowd of ecstatic supporters wearing red Make America Great Again hats, “I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.” After running a campaign defined more by whom and what he opposed, Trump’s remarks were out of character and welcome.

A week later, those words seem hollow. The first sign that our easily distracted President-elect remained unchanged from the campaign came on Thursday. For twenty-four hours, Trump had shown some restraint. His victory speech raised hopes that, despite the evidence of his behavior on the campaign trail, he might be capable of magnanimity.

Just after 9 P.M., back in Trump Tower, the President-elect tweeted about his frustrations with protesters and the news media: “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

Some saw the tweet as self-pitying and pathetic. Others saw it as a frightening attack on the First Amendment by the man who will soon swear to defend the Constitution. Either way, as his first substantive public comment since his election, it was widely rebuked.

On Friday, the purge began, when Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, was fired as chairman of the transition and Mike Pence was installed in his place. During the campaign, Christie, perhaps the most unpopular governor in America and Trump’s most embarrassingly sycophantic supporter, was appointed to head the transition. . . . Then the Trump campaign team, led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, began a takeover of the team run by Christie, who, when he was a U.S. Attorney, sent Kushner’s father, Charles, to jail for tax evasion and witness tampering.

Christie became a vice-chair of the transition, along with a group of top Trump advisers who seemed to be in line for Cabinet positions: Ben Carson, whose spokesman said he actually did not want to serve in the Trump Administration because Carson believed himself to be unqualified, even though he had run for President; the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is seventy-three years old and resigned from Congress in late 1998; Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was “forced out” of the Pentagon in 2014, and, when he’s not dining with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, spends some of his time as an analyst on RT, a TV channel funded by the Russian government; the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is seventy-two and, since leaving the mayoralty, has spent his time as a foreign lobbyist

The rest of the transition team was stacked with Trump loyalists, donors, and family members. Four of the sixteen spots were filled by three of Trump’s adult children—Eric, Donald, and Ivanka—and Kushner, his son-in-law. These are the same people Trump promised would be running his business empire, which has interests around the world and could benefit enormously by influencing government policy and staff appointments.

The [Wall Street] Journal led with the fact that Trump wanted to retain two of the most popular parts of the Affordable Care Act: the regulations on insurance companies that require them to allow children to remain on their parents’ plans until the age of twenty-six, and a provision that requires insurers to accept new customers without regard to preëxisting medical conditions. This is classic Trump: he is for any policy that is popular, and he made no effort to explain how he would retain these regulations without maintaining the individual mandate, which was the insurance industry’s price for accepting the new regulations when the legislation was negotiated.

In the same interview, Trump articulated a new Syria policy . . . . A careful reading of the logic behind this policy is that President-elect Trump accepts that American foreign policy should be guided by Russia.

That same day, Trump announced his top two White House advisers. I’ve written about the disturbing background of his new chief strategist and senior counselor, Steve Bannon, who ran a Web site, Breitbart, that helped mainstream the neo-white-nationalist movement known as the alt-right. Reince Priebus was named the incoming chief of staff; his lack of an association with a racist movement made him seem palatable by comparison.

On Sunday, Trump woke up and attacked the press: . . . . All three of these tweets were false. The Times said that subscriptions were up by four times more than normal since the election. There was no letter “apologizing” to subscribers. The paper sent an e-mail noting, “After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?” Finally, the Times had written that Trump “suggested” more countries, specifically South Korea and Japan, should acquire nuclear weapons if the United States withdrew from protecting them—and he did say that.

Later that evening, Trump’s interview with “60 Minutes,” recorded on Friday, aired, . . . . There was no appeal to the rule of law. Instead, Trump talked the way an autocrat talks and suggested that the Justice Department was simply a tool to be used against opponents, unless he felt like sparing them based on his mood and if he believes his potential targets are “good people.” This is terrifying.

On Tuesday, the purge of the Christie-ites from the transition team was completed with Rogers’s ouster, and Trump reportedly asked that Kushner, a thirty-five-year-old with no national-security or government experience, be allowed to have a security clearance giving him access to classified information.

As of Wednesday morning, Trump has given two interviews—the ones to the Journal and “60 Minutes”—and has spoken in public twice, at his victory speech, early Wednesday morning, and at his Oval Office meeting with Obama, on Thursday. His transition office has issued half a dozen press releases, and he has made several important personnel and policy decisions. He has tweeted twenty-three times. Seven days may not be enough time to fully assess any new leader, especially in the case of Trump, whose first week was marked by seeming chaos in his efforts to put together an Administration. But what we’ve learned so far about the least-experienced President-elect in history is as troubling and ominous as his critics have feared. The Greeks have a word for the emerging Trump Administration: kakistocracy. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as a “government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.” Webster’s is simpler: “government by the worst people.”

As anyone sane who wasn't duped by demagoguery should have know, things likely will not turn out well for America.  Most upsetting is the fact that the injury was self-inflicted and hinged upon the votes of Christofascists and low information, bigoted voters - the last people to be guiding the fate of America.

Trump’s Administration and A Glaring Lack of Expertise

There are many things to be fearful about a Trump presidency (I feel the urge to  be ill just typing the phrase), especially if one is LGBT and has followed the appointment of leading anti-gay extremists to Trump's transition tea.  But one thing that ought to terrify most Americans and which much of the lame main stream media is ignoring as they bloviate about the "smooth transition of power" is the frightening lack of experience and/or lunacy of  likely Trump appointees, particularly in the realm of foreign policy (although in other ways the thought of Ben Carson as Secretary of Education is equally terrifying).  

Driving home I heard part of a discussion on Steele & Ungar on satellite radio with Noah Rothman, editor of Commentary Magazine, that sent a cold chill down my spine.  Trump has been reportedly been maintaining an "enemies list' that notes the name of everyone in the GOP who did not support him.  The list includes the vast majority of GOP foreign policy experts.  The frightening result? Trump appointees will be lacking in experience and expertise and/or will be nut cases picked from groups to which Trump made campaign promises. Here are excerpts from Rothman's piece that I located:

“Everybody who has signed a never-Trump letter or indicated an anti-Trump attitude is not going to get a job. And that’s most of the Republican foreign policy, national security, intelligence, homeland security, and Department of Justice experience.”

This was the assessment of Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior official in George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security. He speculated that President-elect Donald Trump would not lack for top-tier GOP talent to fill high-profile Cabinet slots, but that thousands of positions at lower levels of the administration within the nation’s national security apparatus would be harder to staff.  Without the GOP expert class, the lower ranks of the Trump administration’s will be staffed with novices and political sycophants.

Trump ran explicitly on a message of resentment toward the expert class, whose members, he contended, were responsible for the increasingly dangerous international security environment. They returned the favor: Nearly 200 of Republican foreign policy and national security experts came out publicly against Trump as a candidate who could not be trusted to lead this nation’s armed forces.

Their denunciations of Donald Trump as fundamentally ill-suited to serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces were thorough and compelling. But on Tuesday, they lost the argument. Now that the public has decided, the question is: Can Trump do without them? Doubtless, he and his people think they can. But there are literally thousands of jobs to fill here. Can the administration’s foreign and defense policy be managed without their institutional knowledge and expertise?

Trump has some dubious views when it comes to the conduct of American national affairs abroad. Foremost among them is his conspicuous deference to the geopolitical objectives of Russian President Vladimir Putin—objectives that often conflict with those of the United States. Trump has explicitly flirted with the notion of refusing to come to the aid of America’s NATO allies in the Baltic if they were attacked by Russia (a real and terrifying prospect). Trump has also indicated that he could outsource the job of fighting ISIS in Syria to Moscow, despite the clear evidence that Russia’s chief interest is in preserving the integrity of the Assad regime and the threats it faces from CIA-backed assets. 

Even if he is resistant to their advice, it would be better for him, the country, and the world, if Trump surrounded himself with advisers independent enough to argue that Vladimir Putin’s interests are antithetical to those of the nation he will soon swear to defend.

A sense of morality may prevent these and other skilled professionals in the public policy sector from seeking positions in the next administration. Certainly, Trump and his people are beginning their staffing plans by drawing up a do-not-hire list on which most of these names will appear. 

Trump and the movement he led is one that rejects expertise, as do almost all revolutionary/reactionary movements. But every revolutionary society that does away with its expert class soon finds that the mechanisms they had taken for granted soon cease to function.

There is no such thing as a competent administration without expertise, and the conduct of American military affairs is one area in which the president has almost sole discretion. 

Positions staffed by sycophants and/or those wit no experience or expertise.  Combined this with Russia confirmation that Trump's campaign was communication with Putin's regime throughout the campaign cycle and, to me at least, it is very disturbing.  The irony is, of course, that Trump's supporters back a campaign to "make America great again," but it may well be Russia and China, both of which remember their years of glory, who end up being the beneficiaries of Trump's policies.  Assuming he doesn't quickly get us into a nuclear war.