Lindsey Graham's Queer Predicament

"Lady G" with Trump.

Over the weekend I wrote about the latest round in the long running story about South Carolina's closeted U.S. Senator, Lindsey Graham - or "Lady G' or "Lady Graham" as the story has exploded across the twitter sphere.  In my post, I argued that the hypocrisy of closeted elected officials who support anti-gay policies and parties make them targets for "outing" and proper subjects of mainstream media investigation.  Sadly, many in the mainstream media are squeamish about the issue just as they use false equivalency as an excuse for not calling out politicians - think Donald Trump - for the liars that they are.  In a column Michelangelo Signorile makes the further argument that closeted politicians need to be outed because if they will lie about something so core as their sexual orientation, they will lie about many other things.  In Grahams case, I would argue that it also sets him up for blackmail by the crime boss in chief in the White House. Yes, Graham is terrified of the GOP base in his home state, but I suspect that he's even more afraid of whatever information Trump has on him. That fear makes him only too willing to sell out both his constituent and the nation.  Here are column highlights:

Let’s begin with Aaron Schock, while I have your attention.

First elected in 2008, he’s the disgraced, former Republican congressman from Illinois who stood against LGBTQ rights — including voting against “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, and coming out against marriage equality — though it was an open secret in Washington and in queer circles that he was gay throughout that entire time. There was discussion that he was gay even before the White House picnic in 2010 and the photo of him in white pants, teal belt and pink gingham shirt that went viral, but he’d denied it in 2004 in an interview.

Schock was allowed to present himself in the media as a bachelor whose college friends had all married while he was too busy in politics — but who would presumably marry when the right woman came along.

And yet, the open secret persisted. Schock denied he was gay again when I asked him on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012 for a response to those who believe he is gay and that he had voted against his own people.

Schock resigned in 2015 after a report about his Downton Abbey-inspired office set off a chain of investigations about his lavish lifestyle using taxpayer dollars and campaign funds. He was eventually indicted on 24 counts ( though, with a good lawyer, he struck an outrageous sweetheart deal in which all charges were dropped if he paid back the IRS and his campaign).

Then, this past March, Schock finally came out as gay, after living it up as a private citizen for some time, visiting gay vacation destinations and party spots, enjoying the very liberation that he worked with our enemies to try to destroy.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, too, has been discussed as gay for years, with those on both the left and the right hinting at it or saying it outright. He, too, has denied he is gay, most recently in 2018.

And yet, the discussion persists — as it did with Schock — and over the weekend, as reported by Towleroad, Twitter lit up with claims that an army of sex workers may be coming forward to speak out about Graham having hired them in the past, after gay adult film actor Sean Harding tweeted on Friday that it was time to reveal the truth about a “homophobic Republican Senator who is no better than Trump,” whom he referred to as “LG.” Harding claimed “every sex worker [he] know[s] has been hired by this man.”

“LadyG and “LadyGraham” — the alleged nicknames used by the sex workers — were soon trending, and tweets went viral that came from people claiming they had evidence, some of them claiming it was first hand. Harding, overwhelmed with inquiries, eventually set his Twitter feed to private, and on Sunday he tweeted:

Due to death threats against me and my family — and having my mom call me pleading to make it stop I will no longer be commenting on the LG story here. I know one individual has spoken to two prestigious media outlets with evidence but I'm not sure when that story will break.

It would be nice to think that mainstream media — or as Harding put it, “prestigious media outlets” — are finally getting it right, though I’ve learned not to hold my breath.

The closet, for powerful politicians, becomes a sort of practice run at the art of deception on a grander scale. And when you will sell out your own kind, there’s really no telling how low you will go.

Had journalists at mainstream outlets with vast resources, legal teams and researchers, been pursuing Schock for the hypocrisy of his anti-LGBTQ votes — and revealed that he was gay, with clear-cut evidence — it wouldn’t only have likely stopped an anti-gay hypocrite; it would likely have brought down a man who was spending campaign and taxpayer dollars to live in grand style and luxuriously travel around the world.

Back in 2006 when Mike Rogers, the founder of the site Blogactive — which exposed a slew of hypocritical, closeted gay politicians — revealed with detailed sources that Idaho GOP senator Larry Craig was gay, much of the mainstream media wouldn’t go near it.

They refused to follow up or track down the story further. It wasn’t until nine months later when “wide-stance” Craig was arrested for trying to have sex in an airport men’s room in Minneapolis that the mainstream media was all over it. Craig was then forced to resign, and the hypocrisy of the anti-LGBTQ Republican Party was on display.

But like Schock’s criminal activity, Craig’s arrest is the only thing that brought him down. If not for that action, involving criminal charges and thus a public record, he might still be in office, still railing against LGBTQ people. For much of the mainstream media, exposing a homophobe isn’t worth their time and effort — nor the resources of their newsrooms.

Even now, when the media is taking more seriously the issue of sexual harassment and tracking down stories of assault against women by powerful men, stories they once ignored but rightly now are focusing on — even when a story turns out to lose credibility — they still don’t see the story of the closeted hypocrite as one to investigate and report on.

Let me be clear: I’m not equating sexual harassment and assault with sexual orientation: I’m equating hypocrisy, deception and abuse of power that affects marginalized groups.

Devin Nunes Implicated in Trump Ukraine Effort

Nunes and Parnas.

I have long viewed Rep. Devin Nunes (R) as little better than an agent of Vladimir Putin and someone utterly unfit for office. Like Donald Trump, Nunes uses lies, deceptions and the undermining of political norms to further causes destructive to American democracy and acts like one of Trump's crime syndicate "soldiers." Now, as CNN is reporting, it appears that Nunes was part of the effort to blackmail Ukraine and fabricate dirt on Joe Biden - all of which was/is a criminal conspiracy. Meanwhile, the slimy, amoral Nunes is striving to protect Trump in the ongoing impeachment inquiry.  Nunes needs to be forced from the House Intelligence Committee now investigating improper actions of which he was/is a part.  The GOP increasingly looks to be little more than one large criminal operation. Here are highlights from CNN:  

A lawyer for an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani tells CNN that his client is willing to tell Congress about meetings the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee had in Vienna last year with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss digging up dirt on Joe Biden.

The attorney, Joseph A. Bondy, represents Lev Parnas, the recently indicted Soviet-born American who worked with Giuliani to push claims of Democratic corruption in Ukraine. Bondy said that Parnas was told directly by the former Ukrainian official that he met last year in Vienna with Rep. Devin Nunes.
 Nunes is one of President Donald Trump's key allies in Congress and has emerged as a staunch defender of [Trump] the President during the impeachment inquiry, which he has frequently labeled as a "circus." Nunes declined repeated requests for comment.
 Bondy tells CNN that his client and Nunes began communicating around the time of the Vienna trip. Parnas says he worked to put Nunes in touch with Ukrainians who could help Nunes dig up dirt on Biden and Democrats in Ukraine, according to Bondy.
 That information would likely be of great interest to House Democrats given its overlap with the current impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and could put Nunes in a difficult spot.

Bondy tells CNN his client is willing to comply with a Congressional subpoena for documents and testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry in a manner that would allow him to protect his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
 Parnas' claims that Nunes met with Shokin, which has not been previously reported, add further context to a Daily Beast report that Parnas helped arrange meetings and calls in Europe for Nunes last year, citing another Parnas' lawyer, Ed McMahon.
 Those revelations came to a head on Thursday when Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell raised the Daily Beast story publicly during the impeachment hearing. Parnas, who was indicted on federal campaign finance charges last month, worked with Shokin and Giuliani to push a pair of unfounded claims: that Ukrainians interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Democrats, and that Biden was acting corruptly in Ukraine on behalf of his son Hunter, who sat on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.
 "Nunes had told Shokin of the urgent need to launch investigations into Burisma, Joe and Hunter Biden, and any purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election," Bondy told CNN.
 There is no evidence that the Bidens acted inappropriately. Nor is there evidence to support the conspiracy theory that Ukraine worked with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 election.
 Yet these claims have been a key part of the public defense of [Trump] the President put forth by Nunes and other Republicans during the impeachment hearings this month.
 Bondy tells CNN that Parnas is also willing to tell Congress about a series of regular meetings he says he took part in at the Trump International Hotel in Washington that concerned Ukraine. According to Bondy, Parnas became part of what he described as a "team" that met several times a week in a private room at the BLT restaurant on the second floor of the Trump Hotel. In addition to giving the group access to key people in Ukraine who could help their cause, Parnas translated their conversations, Bondy said. In the weeks since his arrest, Parnas has become disenchanted with Trump and Giuliani, according to Bondy as well as other sources who spoke to CNN. Parnas, these sources say, was particularly upset when Trump denied knowing him the day after Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were arrested in October. . . . "He believes he has put himself out there for [Trump] the President and now he's been completely hung out to dry," a person close to Parnas told CNN. On Thursday, Bondy promoted the hashtag #LetLevSpeak on Twitter in response to a number of questions about whether Parnas would testify in front of Congress. Bondy tweeted directly at Republican California Rep. Kevin McCarthy Thursday night after McCarthy accused Schiff of blocking important witnesses from testifying, saying "I don't agree with your premise, but please, if you mean what you say, call my client, Lev Parnas. #LetLevSpeak."

The False Equivalency of "Outing" Lindsey Graham and the "Lavender Scare"

A piece in Politico tries, in my view, to falsely equate those who are insinuate or flat out state that Senator Lindsey Graham is a closeted gay - I've called him the Palmetto Queen myself - with those who hunted down and "outed" and fired gays back during the so-called "Lavender Scare" of the 1950's.  Society of today is far different than six decades ago, not the least because thanks to Lawrence v. Texas handed down in 2003, same sex relationships no longer carry the potential of a felony conviction.  Then of course, there is the legality of same sex marriage - something the far right wants to reverse despite public support - spousal benefits for same sex couples, the ability to file joint tax returns, and even full adoption rights for same sex couples in some states.  In short, outside of Christofascist circles and GOP politicians who prostitute themselves to them, the social stigma (or lack thereof) and legal jeopardy of being gay nowadays is in no way comparable to the 1950's and 1960's.  Thus, saying those speculating on which team Graham plays for are no better than J. Edgar Hoover - himself a closeted gay - is simply is simply not true.  That said, the piece does look at the ugly history of government persecution of gays.  Here are article highlights:

In March 1953, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover prepared a secret report for Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff. The document concerned Charles “Chip” Bohlen, whom Eisenhower had nominated to succeed George F. Kennan as ambassador to the Soviet Union. A career diplomat, Bohlen had served as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interpreter at the 1945 Yalta Conference, where the Allied powers ceded control of postwar Eastern Europe to Soviet Premier Josef Stalin. Bohlen’s involvement at Yalta made him suspect in the eyes of some Republicans, led by Senator Joe McCarthy, who tried to paint him as not only soft on the Soviets but also gay.

Washington at the time was in the grips not only of the Red Scare, but a more destructive (and less-remembered) “Lavender Scare.” In the popular imagination, communist disloyalty was intertwined with sexual immorality; communists were more likely to be “sexual deviants” and vice-versa. “I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual,” Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry had warned in 1950. “But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.”

Bohlen, (who was, in fact, straight) was eventually confirmed as ambassador to the Soviet Union, and went on to have a long and distinguished Foreign Service career. He was later immortalized as one of the postwar “Wise Men” of American diplomacy.

Moral disgust was not the only consideration that made being gay a disqualifying trait for government service at the time; gays, it was widely believed, were also uniquely vulnerable to blackmail. So reprehensible was being gay, the thinking went, that a gay person would rather betray his country than risk exposure of his shameful secret.

Fast-forward over six decades to the present, and the same smear tactics are being employed, again in service of a dubious narrative involving supposed corruption of presumed gay people by a hostile foreign power. Except this time, the inquisitionists are not reactionary Republicans, but supposedly enlightened progressives.

Jon Cooper, chairman of a Democratic Super PAC which purports to be “the nation’s largest grassroots Resistance organization,” tweeted that “a Republican” had told him “he doubts [Graham] is kowtowing to Trump (and indirectly Putin) because he’s being blackmailed over his sexual orientation (an open secret) or even financial corruption. Rather, he thinks it probably involves some pretty serious sexual kink.” And that same day, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle speculated, “It could be that Donald Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.”

Last January, after Graham had positive words for Trump following a meeting with senators at the White House, comedian Chelsea Handler tweeted the following missive to her 8.3 million followers: “Hey, @LindseyGrahamSC what kind of #$%&-sucking video do they have on you for you 2 be acting like this? Wouldn’t coming out be more honorable?” She followed that up in October with, “If you’re wondering why Republicans took a sick day today, it’s probably because it’s #NationalComingOutDay. . . . And this week, the Washington Blade, the capital’s LGBT newspaper, put Graham’s smiling mug on the cover of its “50 Most Eligible Bachelors” issue.

[O]f all the Americans who did betray their country by committing espionage for a foreign power, there is not a single example of a gay person blackmailed into doing so. A 1991 study found that in the 117 spy cases discovered since World War II, only six involved gays, and in none of these was sexual orientation a deciding factor. That same year, asked about the impending outing of his spokesman, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney referred to the blackmail rationale as “an old chestnut” used to bar gay people unfairly from serving in sensitive government positions. To claim today, baselessly, that a closeted gay person is being blackmailed into working against his country, retroactively validates the Cold War persecution of gays, who could be denied security clearances until a 1995 Executive Order by Bill Clinton reversed Eisenhower’s mandate.

The sad irony is that the only informing some gay men and women did during this time was under duress from their own government, which pressured them into identifying fellow gay people so that they, too, could be purged.

In one of the few cases where the Soviets did try to blackmail a closeted gay man, their plans backfired. When the virulently anti-communist newspaper columnist Joe Alsop visited Moscow on a reporting trip in 1957, the KGB lured him into a honey trap with an attractive young agent and took photographs of the ensuing sexual encounter. Confronting Alsop with the dirty pictures, the KGB men demanded that he work on their behalf back in Washington. Yet rather than cower and do the Soviets’ bidding, Alsop archly asked for copies of the photos depicting him in flagrante delicto, hurried straight to the U.S. Embassy and revealed everything that had happened, including his history of gay experiences. Over the rest of his long career, despite knowing that the Soviets could have exposed him at any moment (and they tried), Alsop not only never softened his strident anti-communist views, he became even more assertive in espousing them.

It seems never to have entered the fevered imaginations of Graham’s antagonists that the reason he has changed his tune about Trump is not to protect the secret of his scandalous peccadilloes, but because of something even grubbier: politics. Graham is, after all, a Republican from a deep red state where Trump is popular with the people Graham needs to win re-election. But such quotidian explanations do not suit our increasingly conspiratorial times. . . . By stooping to gay baiting, the McCarthyism of the “Resistance” has come full circle.

Trump's Hostage Attempt Is Going Miserably Wrong

Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, latest effort to cause Democrats to surrender to his narcissistic will has been to offer temporary relief to so-called Dreamers while seeking funding for his permanent wall - a wall that Chinese history tells us would be futile (for Fox News viewers, I'm referring to the spectacular failure of the Great Wall of China to keep invaders out).  The self described great negotiator can't negotiate himself out of a wet paper bag and seemingly is hell bent to put his incompetence and petulance on worldwide view.  Meanwhile real families and a growing number of businesses are feeling very real economic pain as Trump continues his temper tantrum.  A column in The Atlantic by long time conservative and former Republican David Frum predicts that Trump will have no choice but to surrender in the near term.  Even his support among his racist base is slipping.  Here are column excerpts:

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8. He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Having failed to convince the public, Trump is now trying Exit Two. This idea is even more harebrained than the last, if that is even possible. Instead of appealing in prime time to the whole nation, Trump on Saturday afternoon advanced a detailed set of proposals intended to shift a critical mass of backbench Democrats to break with their leadership and deal directly with him. You don’t need to do much more than articulate the idea out loud to appreciate its utter unrealism.

The Democratic majority is newly elected and highly cohesive. Why on earth would any appreciable number of Democrats break away from their leadership to do business as individuals with a president none of them trusts about an issue none of them thinks should be negotiable: reopening the government? They will not do it, and it should have been obviously predictable from the start that they would not do it. Trump could not even get moderate Democrats to come have lunch with him at the White House this week.

Fox News, and talk radio, and MAGA Twitter will rant enjoyably about how mean it is for Democrats to reject Trump’s latest self-help scheme. That will be nice for the president to hear. But Fox News, and talk radio, and MAGA Twitter cannot protect him from the real-world consequences of the shutdown he forced. They cannot erase the video showing Trump proudly talking about how he would be the one to do it. They cannot sustain his poll numbers among the large majority of America that is non-Fox, non-MAGA.

The shutdown was a demand for unconditional surrender. Unfortunately for him, [Trump] the president lacks the political realism to recognize that he doesn’t have the clout to impose that surrender. He’s the one who will now have to climb down, and very soon, probably within days. The end of a hostage taking is not a surrender. But it will surely feel that way to the hostage taker—and deservedly, too.

Putin Summit: Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart — Or His Handler?

A very lengthy piece in New York Magazine reviews a scenario that I personally suspect is true: a Russian intelligence asset currently occupies the White House and the Republican Party, more concerned about their Party's successes, have willingly turned a blind eye to the nightmare befalling the country. Trump has long operated outside the law and engaged in behavior that would make him a perfect candidate for blackmail.  Moreover, given his arrogance and narcissism, he always believes he is smarter than everyone else.  He likely has met his match in Vladimir Putin, a former KBG spymaster, who may well have maneuvered Trump to exactly where Putin wants him so that Trump can single-handedly destroy the 70 year old western alliance.  It is a long piece, but take the time to read the entire piece.  It will leave you very afraid.  Here are excerpts:

The unfolding of the Russia scandal has been like walking into a dark cavern. Every step reveals that the cave runs deeper than we thought, and after each one, as we wonder how far it goes, our imaginations are circumscribed by the steps we have already taken. The cavern might go just a little farther, we presume, but probably not much farther. And since trying to discern the size and shape of the scandal is an exercise in uncertainty, we focus our attention on the most likely outcome, which is that the story goes a little deeper than what we have already discovered. Say, that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort told their candidate about the meeting they held at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer after they were promised dirt on Hillary Clinton; and that Trump and Kushner have some shady Russian investments; and that some of Trump’s advisers made some promises about lifting sanctions.

But what if that’s wrong? What if we’re still standing closer to the mouth of the cave than the end?

What is missing from our imagination is the unlikely but possible outcome on the other end: that this is all much worse than we suspect. After all, treating a small probability as if it were nonexistent is the very error much of the news media made in covering the presidential horse race. And while the body of publicly available information about the Russia scandal is already extensive, the way it has been delivered — scoop after scoop of discrete nuggets of information — has been disorienting and difficult to follow. What would it look like if it were reassembled into a single narrative, one that distinguished between fact and speculation but didn’t myopically focus on the most certain conclusions?

One of the oddities of the Russia scandal is that many of the most exotic and sinister theories have come from people within government and especially within the intelligence field.

The first intimations that Trump might harbor a dark secret originated among America’s European allies, which, being situated closer to Russia, have had more experience fending off its nefarious encroachments. In 2015, Western European intelligence agencies began picking up evidence of communications between the Russian government and people in Donald Trump’s orbit. In April 2016, one of the Baltic states shared with then–CIA director John Brennan an audio recording of Russians discussing funneling money to the Trump campaign. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of the U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief Brennan on intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The contents of these communications have not been disclosed, but what Brennan learned obviously unsettled him profoundly. In congressional testimony on Russian election interference last year, Brennan hinted that some Americans might have betrayed their country. “Individuals who go along a treasonous path,” he warned, “do not even realize they’re along that path until it gets to be a bit too late.” In an interview this year, he put it more bluntly: “I think [Trump] is afraid of the president of Russia. The Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult.”

Suppose we are currently making the same mistake we made at the outset of this drama — suppose the dark crevices of the Russia scandal run not just a little deeper but a lot deeper. If that’s true, we are in the midst of a scandal unprecedented in American history, a subversion of the integrity of the presidency. It would mean the Cold War that Americans had long considered won has dissolved into the bizarre spectacle of Reagan’s party’s abetting the hijacking of American government by a former KGB agent. It would mean that when Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in on the president and his inner circle, possibly beginning this summer, Trump may not merely rail on Twitter but provoke a constitutional crisis.

And it would mean the Russia scandal began far earlier than conventionally understood and ended later — indeed, is still happening. As Trump arranges to meet face-to-face and privately with Vladimir Putin later this month, the collusion between the two men metastasizing from a dark accusation into an open alliance, it would be dangerous not to consider the possibility that the summit is less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.

It is often said that Donald Trump has had the same nationalistic, zero-sum worldview forever. But that isn’t exactly true. Yes, his racism and mendacity have been evident since his youth, but those who have traced the evolution of his hypernationalism all settle on one year in particular: 1987. . . . .[Trump] has believed for 30 years that these alliance commitments are a drain on our finite national treasure,” a White House official told the Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin. Tom Wright, another scholar who has delved into Trump’s history, reached the same conclusion. “1987 is Trump’s breakout year.

The other important event from that year is that Trump visited Moscow.

During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged.

Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto.

Trump’s letter avoided the question of whom the U.S. was protecting those countries from. The primary answer, of course, was the Soviet Union. After World War II, the U.S. had created a liberal international order and underwritten its safety by maintaining the world’s strongest military. A central goal of Soviet, and later Russian, foreign policy was to split the U.S. from its allies.

[I]t seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely. How do you even think about the small but real chance — 10 percent? 20 percent? — that the president of the United States has been covertly influenced or personally compromised by a hostile foreign power for decades?

Russian intelligence gains influence in foreign countries by operating subtly and patiently. It exerts different gradations of leverage over different kinds of people, and uses a basic tool kit of blackmail that involves the exploitation of greed, stupidity, ego, and sexual appetite. All of which are traits Trump has in abundance.

Throughout his career, Trump has always felt comfortable operating at or beyond the ethical boundaries that constrain typical businesses. . . . The combination of a penchant for compromising behavior, a willingness to work closely with criminals, and a desire to protect aspects of his privacy makes him the ideal blackmail target.

It is not difficult to imagine that Russia quickly had something on Trump, from either exploits during his 1987 visit or any subsequent embarrassing behavior KGB assets might have uncovered. But the other leverage Russia enjoyed over Trump for at least 15 years is indisputable — in fact, his family has admitted to it multiple times. After a series of financial reversals and his brazen abuse of bankruptcy laws, Trump found it impossible to borrow from American banks and grew heavily reliant on unconventional sources of capital. Russian cash proved his salvation.

In July 2013, Trump visited Moscow again. If the Russians did not have a back-channel relationship or compromising file on Trump 30 years ago, they very likely obtained one then. Former FBI director James Comey recounts in his book that Trump was obsessed with reports that he had been recorded in a hotel room watching prostitutes urinate on a bed that Barack Obama had once slept in. Trump, Comey wrote, “argued that it could not be true because he had not stayed overnight in Moscow but had only used the hotel room to change his clothes.” The journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn have reconstructed Trump’s trip to Moscow and established that he did in fact stay overnight.

There has never been much doubt about Russia’s motive to engineer a caper like this. Russian intelligence has a documented and long-standing practice of gathering compromising intelligence on visiting dignitaries. The use of prostitutes and the bugging of hotel rooms are standard. The skepticism has instead focused on both the source of the allegations, former British-intelligence official turned private investigator Christopher Steele, and Trump himself.

While the president’s character has never been exactly deemed above reproach, some doubts have lingered about whether he would really hire prostitutes to defile a bed merely because Obama had slept there and whether a tape of such a thing would truly shame him.

These questions have been answered in the affirmative. Trump’s payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels and other women proves that he holds his sexual privacy dear. And the obsessive hatred of Obama that grew out of Trump’s humiliation at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner has blossomed into a perverse and often self-destructive mania. People both inside and outside the administration report that Trump will ultimately pick whatever option he believes is the negation of Obama’s legacy. “He will ask: ‘Did Obama approve this?’ And if the answer is affirmative, he will say: ‘We don’t,’ ” a European diplomat told BuzzFeed News.

It’s not necessary to believe that Putin always knew he might install Trump in the Oval Office to find the following situation highly plausible: Sometime in 2015, the Russian president recognized that he had, in one of his unknown number of intelligence files, an inroad into American presidential politics. The Republican nominees from 2008 and 2012 had both run on a hawkish position against Russia (Mitt Romney had called the country America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe”). Now, on the fringes of the GOP primaries, there was a candidate opening up what was, from Putin’s standpoint, a much-needed flank against not just Obama but his former secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her aggressive position against Russia. . . . Then Trump captured the nomination and his value increased exponentially.  At that point, it would have been strange if Russia didn’t help Trump.

This much was clear in March 2016: The person who managed the campaign of a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine was now also managing the campaign of a pro-Russian candidate in the United States. And Trump’s campaign certainly looked like the same play Putin had run many times before: Trump inflamed internal ethnic division, assailed the corruption of the elite, attacked Western allies while calling for cooperation with Russia, and sowed distrust in the fairness of the vote count. And in addition to deploying social-media bots and trolls, Russia apparently spent directly to help elect Trump. The FBI is investigating Alexander Torshin, a Russian banker who built ties to Republicans and allegedly funneled campaign funds to the National Rifle Association, which spent three times as much to help Trump as it had on behalf of Romney four years earlier.

And if you’re Putin, embarking upon a coveted summit with the most Russophilic president since World War II, who is taking a crowbar to the alliance of your enemies, why wouldn’t you help him in 2018 and 2020? Ever since the fall of 2016, when Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell privately turned down an Obama-administration proposal for a bipartisan warning to Russia not to interfere in the election, the underlying dynamic has been set: Most Republicans would rather win an election with Putin’s help than lose one without it.

Again, read the entire piece.  It is VERY disturbing because what it lays out is all to plausible.

Allies Fear Trump Could Go Postal and Fire Mueller

Two things continue to strike me as the shock waves continue from yesterday's FBI raid on Donald Trump consigliere, Michael Cohen.  First, if Trump is completely innocent of collusion with Russia or other crimes, why is he acting increasingly obsessed with closing down Robert Mueller's investigation and acting as if he has cataclysmic secrets and misdeeds he is trying to hide?  Second, if Trump is in fact guilty of crimes or collusion, why did it never seemingly occur to him that once he occupied the White House, eventually all of his dirty linen would eventually come out?  Personally, I suspect that Trump is likely guilty of any number of crimes, treason perhaps being one of them.  Trump's increasingly desperate behavior and attacks on the nation's legal and criminal justice systems only add to my gut feeling in this regard.  Now, as two piece in Vanity Fair - one here and one here - report, fearful that Michael Cohen might be "flipped," Trump may be edging closer to firing Mueller, Rod Rosenstein and/or Jeff Sessions, thereby igniting a constitutional crisis.  Here are excerpts from both pieces:

It was supposed to be the most somber and impressive of presidential moments, a gathering of the national security team at the White House to discuss military options to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb that killed at least 60 people, including children. But as the meeting began, Donald Trump was more enraged by a crossed red line much closer to home: the F.B.I.’s raid on his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen.

There have been times during Robert Mueller’s investigation—Mueller’s subpoenaing of Trump business records, for instance—when White House advisers worried Trump seemed on the verge of triggering a constitutional crisis by firing Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The stunning Cohen raid is another one of these moments. “He’s sitting there bitching and moaning. He’s brooding and doesn’t have a plan,” a Republican close to the White House said last night. “I could see him having a total meltdown and saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m firing all of them,’” a Trump friend told me. “This is very dry tinder. If someone strikes a match to it, you could see it catching fire,” added a former official.

In the past, Trump’s impulses could be tempered by the calming presence of loyal aides like Hope Hicks and longtime security chief Keith Schiller. But both Hicks and Schiller are gone, leaving Trump to operate largely unchecked. His legal team remains leaderless following the resignation of Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd . . . .

The second piece looks at why Trump's desperation level is growing:

The implications, for Cohen and for Trump, are potentially explosive. “I suppose you could say that it is Trump’s moment of truth,” Bob Bauer, the former Obama White House general counsel, told me. “It is the red line he always seemed to draw in his bitter complaints about the Mueller investigation—now here we are. Cohen would not be a subject or target that Trump would wish to have flipped against him.” Legal experts agree this is a major development. “It’s an enormously aggressive move for any prosecutor to make, particularly given Cohen’s client,” said Sol Wisenberg, a deputy special prosecutor during the Starr investigation. Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general under Obama, described it as “very bad news” for Cohen. “D.O.J. only raids once they have concluded that lesser options—like cooperation—aren’t working and that there is a risk that evidence may be destroyed,” he said.

The barrier to convincing a judge to approve a search warrant would be even higher in a case involving a sitting president. More significant, a judge would require evidence of potential illegal behavior between Trump and Cohen before approving the seizure of any communications involving both of them. “If the warrant specifically authorized the seizure of attorney-client communications, the government would have had to convince a federal magistrate that the crime-fraud exception was in play,” Wisenberg added. . . . . if the client is attempting to use the lawyer, or the lawyer is volunteering to be a part of an ongoing crime, there is no attorney-client privilege.” [O]utsourcing the raid could mean “there is some aspect to what is in Cohen’s office that is outside of Mueller’s jurisdiction,” he added. If the latter is true, Wisenberg noted, “Then it is no longer part of Mueller’s case.” That logic is unlikely to soothe Trump, who is reportedly itching to fire Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller. Still, it provides the special counsel with at least one degree of separation from the initial raid. “To criticize Mueller misses the mark,” Wisenberg continued. “It was wise of Rosenstein to assign the case to another office to take the heat off of Mueller.”

It also establishes a protective barrier between Mueller and one of the seedier Trump scandals. “It is wise that Mueller and Rosenstein avoided the fatal mistake of Ken Starr when he decided to expand his jurisdiction to the Monica Lewinsky matter, a tawdry subject, but not highly serious to the welfare and security of the American people,” William Jeffress, a white-collar defense attorney who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case, told me. “There are several possible crimes that might have been committed by the circumstances of the hush money, but these are appropriately investigated by a U.S. attorney, not by special counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference in the election.”

Will Cohen flip? “You just need to break one weak link to do it,” Hall said. But don’t expect new indictments too soon. “I think that things are going to sound like they are slowing down for a little bit because all of this information has to be pulled, digested, analyzed, inputted into a bigger picture,” he cautioned. “Nixon didn’t resign because of the Ellsberg Papers, but that led to the Watergate break-in, that led to the cover-up, and Nixon’s resignation was tied directly to the cover-up . . . So, to me, as things heat up, the next big thing will be a shift from things like ‘What was the Russian involvement in the campaign?’ to ‘Has the cover-up begun and where is it?’” 

The Stormy Daniels Scandal Gets Serious

Alleged Trump mistress Stormy Daniels.

Ironically, most of Donald Trump's problems are self-made and the growing scandal swirling around porn star Stormy Daniels' affair with Trump is a perfect example.  Like so many other of the Trump/Pence regime scandals, this scandal - which would upset evangelical Christians if they actually stood for what they claim - stems directly from Trump's belief that he can do whatever he wants.  A wife and small infant at home, who cares.  Ditto for possible conspiracies with Russia.  Ditto for the stream of daily lies.  The law and common morality simply mean nothing to the man.  Now, the Stormy Daniels scandal seems to be gaining steam and more and more questions grow about possible illegalities that may surround the $130,000 in hush money paid to Danils under a bizarre agreement that seemingly did not use either Daniels' or Trump's names.  A column in the New York Times looks at the mounting scandal which, if Republicans were consistent with the feigned outrage over the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, ought to be resulting in outrage.  Here are column highlights:

In January we learned, thanks to The Wall Street Journal, that Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Donald Trump, arranged a $130,000 hush money payment to the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. The payment was to stop Daniels from speaking out about an alleged affair she’d had with Trump shortly after Melania Trump, his third wife, gave birth to their son, Barron.

With any previous president the story would have been explosive, but with this one, it felt relatively minor. The real scandal, it seemed, was that there was no scandal, because no one expects any better of Trump. The religious right was willing to give him a “mulligan,” in the words of Tony Perkins, president of the [hate group] Family Research Council. Liberals rolled their eyes at right-wing hypocrisy, but ranked the affair fairly low on the list of Trump outrages.

But Daniels — whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — is a clever capitalist who’s been determined to force the story of her relationship with Trump into the public eye. She has parlayed her new notoriety into a series of strip-club appearances, including two in South Florida on Friday and Saturday. More significantly, her lawyer has filed a lawsuit arguing that the nondisclosure agreement she signed is null and void because Trump himself never signed it. The suit, ingeniously, has given Daniels’s lawyer a pretext to make that agreement public.

[F]or all its sordid details, it isn’t really a sex scandal. It’s a campaign finance scandal, a transparency scandal and potentially part of an ongoing national security scandal. It’s salacious and absurd, but we should take it seriously. Trump’s team certainly seems to; Cohen recently obtained a temporary restraining order to silence Daniels.

Let’s start with the campaign finance piece. On Jan. 22, the nonpartisan government watchdog group Common Cause filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice claiming that the $130,000 payment to Daniels constituted an in-kind contribution to Trump’s presidential campaign, in violation of federal campaign law.

[T]he release of the NDA makes clear that Trump himself was a party to the agreement. If Trump authorized the $130,000 payment, it’s harder to explain away his campaign’s failure to disclose it, as required by law.                               He calls it the “Al Capone problem.” The Daniels NDA refers repeatedly to “property” that she agreed to turn over to Trump, including video images, still images, emails and text messages. Eisen argues that Trump was required to report ownership of this property, as well as any obligations he might have had to reimburse Cohen for the $130,000, in his federal financial disclosure forms. . . . . “Imagine what she could get if she has texts or images. Imagine the millions she could command! So there’s this incredibly valuable agreement, and the L.L.C., Essential Consultants, which Trump now appears to be a beneficiary of. That’s an asset.” But it’s an asset Trump didn’t reveal.

Finally, the Daniels story is germane to the overriding scandal of the Trump administration, the one involving Trump’s relationship with Russia. Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy who compiled an infamous dossier of opposition research on Trump, wrote that Russia could blackmail Trump with evidence of his “sexual perversion.” Nothing we know of Daniels confirms the dossier’s outré claims about what such perversion entailed. The NDA does, however, show that Trump was susceptible to blackmail. 

Indeed, Daniels isn’t the only woman who was allegedly paid off after an encounter with Trump. . . . . Steve Bannon told “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff that another Trump lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, “took care” of “a hundred women” during the campaign.  “It all kind of fits together in a way,” Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, said of the Daniels scandal and the Russia one. “It’s really blackmail over sex.”

Ultimately, the details of Trump’s relationship with Daniels will likely come out. . . . Should Daniels prevail in court, we might learn interesting information about the president. Among other things, the NDA forbids her from discussing Trump’s “alleged children” or “paternity information.” But the scandal will lie less in the details of Trump’s degeneracy than in the steps he and his lawyers took to cover it up. “This is early days yet in the unfolding of this scandal,” said Eisen. Like Trump himself, it’s preposterous, but it’s not going away.

I hope Daniels is successful in getting the story out.  I have no desire to see images of a naked Trump cavorting with Daniels - the very though is repulsive and vomit worthy - but I do want all of this rubbed in the faces of the evangelical Christians who threw away morality when they voted for Trump and Republicans only too willing to prostitute them self to Trump and the hideous GOP party base.  I suspect that the only person laughing about all of this is Vladimir Putin who likely has more sexual escapade bombshells in his possession.  As for Melania, I feel sorry for her, but she should have known what she was getting herself into given Trumps adulterous past. 

Kushner Companies Received Loans After White House Meetings

I actual had thought that I knew what I would be writing about in this post as I headed to mork yesterday morning. But then numerous things happened throughout the day.  Trump made statements that likely gave the NRA a stroke, Hope Hicks resigned as White House communications director after admitted she had told "white lies" for Trump, Walmart has stated it will not sell rifles to those under age 21, and then the bombshell that Jared "Prince Jared" Kushner's companies received hundreds of millions of loans following Kushner's meetings with individuals and businesses in his capacity as a senior White House official.  So much for Der Trumpenführer's claims that his family members have not benefited from his occupancy of the the White House.  And this after reports that four (4) different foreign countries viewed Kushner as particularly vulnerable to manipulation - think bribes and/or blackmail - which is why he was unable to get top secret security clearance. Here are excerpts from the Washington Post on Kushner's vulnerability:

Officials in at least four countries have privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports on the matter. 

Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico, the current and former officials said. 

It is unclear if any of those countries acted on the discussions, but Kushner’s contacts with certain foreign government officials have raised concerns inside the White House and are a reason he has been unable to obtain a permanent security clearance, the officials said.

And that was before today's revelations about the unusual loans made to Kushner companies in the wake of meetings at the White House.  Here are highlights from the breaking news piece in the New York Times:

Early last year, a private equity billionaire started paying regular visits to the White House.  Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo Global Management, was advising Trump administration officials on infrastructure policy. During that period, he met on multiple occasions with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, said three people familiar with the meetings. Among other things, the two men discussed a possible White House job for Mr. Harris.

The job never materialized, but in November, Apollo lent $184 million to Mr. Kushner’s family real estate firm, Kushner Companies. The loan was to refinance the mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper.

Even by the standards of Apollo, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, the previously unreported transaction with the Kushners was a big deal: It was triple the size of the average property loan made by Apollo’s real estate lending arm, securities filings show.

It was one of the largest loans Kushner Companies received last year. An even larger loan came from Citigroup, which lent the firm and one of its partners $325 million to help finance a group of office buildings in Brooklyn.

There is little precedent for a top White House official meeting with executives of companies as they contemplate sizable loans to his business, say government ethics experts.

“This is exactly why senior government officials, for as long back as I have any experience, don’t maintain any active outside business interests,” said Don Fox, the former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics during the Obama administration and, before that, a lawyer for the Air Force and Navy during Republican and Democratic administrations. “The appearance of conflicts of interest is simply too great.”

The White House referred questions to Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, who did not dispute that the meetings between Mr. Kushner and the executives took place. This blurring of lines is now a potential liability for Mr. Kushner, who recently lost his top-secret security clearance amid worries from some United States officials that foreign governments might try to gain influence with the White House by doing business with Mr. Kushner.

Investigators working for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election, have asked questions about Mr. Kushner’s interactions with potential investors from overseas, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Kushner’s firm has sought investments from the Chinese insurer Anbang and from the former prime minister of Qatar.

Mr. Kushner resigned as chief executive of Kushner Companies when he joined the White House last January, and he sold a small portion of his stake in the company to a trust controlled by his mother.

But he retained the vast majority of his interest in Kushner Companies. His real estate holdings and other investments are worth as much as $761 million, according to government ethics filings. They are likely worth much more, because that estimate has his firm’s debt subtracted from the value of his holdings.

Public filings show that Mr. Kushner still owns part of the company that received the Apollo loan. The loan was used to refinance a Chicago skyscraper that is the Midwest headquarters for AT&T. Mr. Kushner also still holds a stake in the entity that owns the Brooklyn buildings and received the loan from Citigroup. Mr. Fox, the ethics expert, said Mr. Kushner risked violating the regulations in his meetings with Citigroup and Apollo executives. All of the executives who met with Mr. Kushner have lots to gain or lose in Washington.

Apollo has sought ways to benefit from the White House’s possible infrastructure plan. And its executives, including Mr. Harris, had tens of millions of dollars personally at stake in the tax overhaul that was making its way through Washington last year.

Citigroup, one of the country’s largest banks, is heavily regulated by federal agencies and, like other financial companies, is trying to get the government to relax its oversight of the industry.

Shortly after Kushner Companies received the loan from Apollo, the private equity firm emerged as a beneficiary of the tax cut package that the White House championed. Mr. Trump backed down from his earlier pledge to close a loophole that permits private equity managers to pay taxes on the bulk of their income at rates that are roughly half of ordinary income tax rates. The tax law left the loophole largely intact.

I suspect that Prince Jared ma not be sleeping very well at the moment.

There’s a Good Chance Trump Is Being Blackmailed

In the wake of the Stormy Daniels sex scandal swirling around serial adulterer and self-proclaimed sexual predator Donald Trump, a new story of illicit sex and payoffs has come out, this time involving a former Playboy playmate.  As in the Daniels sexcapade, this latest affair to be revealed,   took place while Trump's youngest child was an infant and steps were taken to payoff Trump's sex partner to guarantee her silence.  All of which makes some wonder: were the sex stories in the Steele dossier true and, if so, is Trump being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin?   One can just imagine Putin reminding Trump of what a sensation the alleged "golden shower" video would be.   A second question, at least in my mind, is when are evangelical Christians going to disavow Trump.   A piece in New York Magazine looks at the question of Trump being blackmailed.  Here are excerpts:

We have no idea if the wildest and most memorable allegation Christopher Steele picked up in his investigation of Donald Trump — that the future president is vulnerable to Russian blackmail related to his paying Russian prostitutes in 2013 — is true. There are two common grounds for skepticism. One is that Trump, who is known both for his affairs and for grabbing women, would pay for sex. The second is that a man so happily associated with infidelity and vice could be blackmailed at all. We now know neither of these objections holds water.

Ronan Farrow’s new story shows that Trump habitually pays for sex. He had an affair with former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, and offered her money after sex, which she turned down. At another point in the story, he offered adult entertainer Jessica Drake $10,000 for “her company.”

Farrow’s reporting also implies, without quite establishing as an absolute certainty, that Trump maintained a system for silencing his sexual partners. A network of sleazy operators, sometimes working in conjunction with National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, Trump’s close friend, would pay off women to prevent their stories from seeing the light of day. 

So, we know Trump habitually pays for sex, and we also know he is willing to pay to keep embarrassing secrets from going public. That is to say, these secrets could be leveraged against him. One of Pecker’s former employees tells Farrow, “In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship, but in fact Pecker has the power — he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.” What else do we know? We know Russia has a decades-old system for gathering compromising sexual secrets on prominent foreign visitors. We also know Trump harbored a burning resentment of President Obama in the wake of Obama’s mocking him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. And many reports of Trump’s decision-making suggest that the strongest consideration in any decision is the chance to defile or destroy something associated with Obama.

Far from being bizarre, imagining Trump paying prostitutes to pee on a bed Obama used as a primitive revenge ritual, and Russians taping the episode, is perfectly consistent with what we know about both parties.  That exact scenario may not have happened. Indeed, sex is not the only kind of secret Trump harbors.

Some of that information is in the hands of his business partners, many of whom are associated with Russia or are unsavory in some other way. All in all, the odds are disconcertingly high that Russia, or somebody, has blackmail leverage over the president of the United States.

Disgusting and frightening as well.  And remember, evangelical Christians who want to dictate what others do in their bedrooms, support this foul and disgusting individual.  They have ZERO moral authority.  Absolutely ZERO! 

Missouri GOP Lawmakers Call On Embattled GOP Governor Amid Sex/Blackmail Scandal

"Family values" GOP Gov. Greitens accused of adultery and revenge porn blackmail

Time and time again over the years this blog has existed, there has been a cavalcade of "family values" Republicans caught in gay sex trysts (or in the case of former Speaker Dennis Hastert, sexual abuse), adultery scandals, and other sexual improprieties.  In the same interval, only a small handful of Democrats, if that number, have been swept up in sex scandals.  Now, the adultery and alleged blackmail scandal swirling around Missouri GOP governor Eric Greitens - he purportedly tied up his mistress naked and photographed her and then told her that he would spread the photos if she ever revealed their affair - is becoming so bad that his fellow Republicans are calling on him to resign from office. At least one episode of physical abuse is alleged to have occurred.  So much for true family values.  Here are highlights from Talking Points Memo:

Four Republican Missouri lawmakers have called for Gov. Eric Greitens (R) to step down over allegations that he attempted to blackmail a woman with whom he carried out a 2015 affair.

Reps. Kathy Conway, Marsha Haefner, Steve Cookson and Nate Walker separately issued statements Tuesday urging Greitens to leave office to avoid dragging his state into a protracted, messy scandal.

Walker’s call for the governor’s resignation is particularly significant since he was one of Greitens’ earliest supporters. . . . Former Missouri GOP chairman Ed Martin also called for Greitens to step down on his talk radio show on AM 1380 Tuesday afternoon, saying “the people deserve better.”

A longtime GOP operative in the state told TPM that, based on his conversations with sources in the State House, he expects the number of Republicans calling for the governor to step down will be “up to 10 trickling in through the day.”

“I think people are believing that there’s more things to come out—that if he did tie her up, the likelihood of another incident or something, in their minds, is higher.”

Greitens is accused of tying the woman to a piece of exercise equipment in the basement of his home and taking a nude photograph of her, then threatening to leak the photo if she went public about the affair.

Greitens acknowledged last week that he engaged in an extramarital affair, but has denied the blackmail and slapping allegations.

“The current scandal is believable given all the other stuff that’s gone on, the way he treats the press, the way he treats other Republican lawmakers,” Dave Robertson, head of the political science department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told TPM.

The Missouri Republican operative told TPM that GOP members of the state’s House of Representatives will meet Tuesday afternoon to discuss next steps, and are leaning towards launching their own investigation into Greitens’ alleged behavior.

City of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner announced last week that she had launched a criminal probe. Al Watkins, an attorney for the woman’s ex-husband, told TPM he’d been contacted by Gardner’s office and the FBI.

Greitens and his wife, Sheena, made a round of calls to GOP lawmakers last week insisting that no further allegations would come out.