A Timeline of Trump Campaign's Contacts with Russia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence

Drip, drip, drip.  Perhaps it is still a little too premature, but I am starting to have a sense of déjà vu to the bad old Watergate days.  As was the case then, the question increasingly is "what did the president know and when did he know it."  With former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn's resignation not even 24 hours old, now the New York Times has broken the story that Trump campaign aides and associates had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence during the period that Russian hackers were breaking U.S. law and hacking DNC computers in order to throw the presidential campaign to Trump.  If these stories continue to unfold as they seem to be headed, my gut feeling that Trump is a possible traitor will be increasingly substantiated.  An independent investigation is urgently needed.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time that they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.
[T]he intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.
The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the Russian government outside of the intelligence services, the officials said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.
The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Russia and Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the D.N.C. hack, according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.Two days after the election in November, Sergei A. Ryabkov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, said that “there were contacts” during the campaign between Russian officials and Mr. Trump’s team.
“Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” Mr. Ryabkov said in an interview with the Russian Interfax news agency.
The Trump transition team denied Mr. Ryabkov’s statement. “This is not accurate,” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said at the time.
The F.B.I. has closely examined at least three other people close to Mr. Trump, although it is unclear if their calls were intercepted. They are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign; Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative; and Mr. Flynn.As part of the inquiry, the F.B.I. is also trying to assess the credibility of information contained in a dossier that was given to the bureau last year by a former British intelligence operative. The dossier contained a raft of salacious allegations about connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and the Russian government. It also included unsubstantiated claims that the Russians had embarrassing videos that could be used to blackmail Mr. Trump.The F.B.I. investigation is proceeding at the same time that separate investigations into Russian interference in the election are gaining momentum on Capitol Hill. Those investigations, by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, are examining not only the Russian hacking but also any contacts that Mr. Trump’s team had with Russian officials during the campaign.
On Tuesday, top Republican lawmakers said that Mr. Flynn should be one focus of the investigation, and that he should be called to testify before Congress. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said that the news surrounding Mr. Flynn in recent days underscored “how many questions still remain unanswered to the American people more than three months after Election Day, including who was aware of what, and when.”
Mr. Warner said that Mr. Flynn’s resignation would not stop the committee “from continuing to investigate General Flynn, or any other campaign official who may have had inappropriate and improper contacts with Russian officials prior to the election.” 

Sunday Morning Reflections - and Sadness for America

A group of us went to see the movie "Jackie" last evening.  The movie was very well done and I can now understand the talk about Natalie Portman perhaps receiving an Academy Award nomination.  Being of an age where I remember first hand watching the news and TV coverage after the fateful day in Dallas in 1963, the movie brought back some of the emotions from that time.  But it also had me constantly thinking "what the Hell has happened to America"  that a crude, narcissistic bully and demagogue like Donald Trump will soon be the resident at the White House.   John F. Kennedy certainly had his faults, but he challenge America to be its best and seemingly cared about making things better for all Americans.  In contrast, with Trump we have a would be authoritarian leader who won office by appealing to hatred and bigotry and who through his cabinet nominees seems poised to erase the progress in equality that has occurred over the years since 1963. 

The reality this morning is that racist, homophobes and those who would destroy public education and the social safety net are ascendant.  This Friday, a would be fascist who cares nothing about upholding and protecting the U.S. Constitution will be sworn into the presidency.  Worse yet, there are serious reasons to believe that Trump is either subject to Russian blackmail or colluded with a hostile foreign power to win the 2016 presidential election. Compounding the nightmare, Congressional Republicans for the most part are seeking to turn a blind eye to possible treason and seek to wage war on average Americans, literally pursuing policies that will lead to premature deaths of many, many Americans. 

The movie "Jackie" ends with the vision of the Kennedy White House as "Camelot" - an image Jackie Kennedy sought to plant and maintain.  Now, with Donald J. Trump soon to be the titular president - I will NEVER recognize or respect him as such - it feels as King Arthur has been slain by Mordred or akin to Rome being sacked by the Visigoths.  I have little faith in American intelligence services to take down Trump  - and hopefully Pence too if he was complicit in Trump's dealing with Putin - as needs to be done.  It seems that our only hope may be that Britain's MI-6 or other allied intelligence services get the goods on Trump and release the information to the foreign media.  My faith in the American media that gives false equivalence to the reprehensible and untruths to do the job that the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Darkness is descending on America and it must be resisted.   

James Comey is Running Out of Excuses

Comey - Trump and Putin's accomplice?

If Donald Trump did collaborate with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 presidential election, it increasingly looks like they had an accomplice" FBI director James Comey who broke long time precedent and floated a letter against Hillary Clinton just eleven days before  election day.  The letter turned out to have no basis - something likely known by Comey.  Meanwhile he was sitting on explosive information about Trump's possible collusion with Putin and the likelihood that Putin had information with which to blackmail Trump once he was in office.  If Comey wasn't an actual Russian agent, he surely gave a major assist to Putin plans to put his puppet in the White House.  As a column in the Washington Post notes, Comey is about of excuses for his actions harming Clinton while protecting Trump.  Here are column highlights:

The rash of stories on Donald Trump and Russia published Tuesday leave many questions unanswered. The allegations, as sensational as some are and as damning as others are, are just that: allegations. Intelligence agencies (not to mention countless news outlets) have sought to verify them for months now, with little or no success. Though it might be nice to imagine Trump’s presidency collapsing before it’s even begun, the fact remains that we know little more now than we did last week about Trump’s ties to Russia and whether Vladimir Putin’s government has compromising information on the president-elect. There is one thing we do know, though: FBI Director James Comey’s intervention in the election last October — controversial at the time — looks completely indefensible now.

A few hours before the explosive CNN and BuzzFeed reports landed on Tuesday, Comey was at a Senate intelligence committee hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked the director whether the FBI has “investigated these reported relationships [between the Trump campaign and Russia]?” Comey replied, “I would never comment on investigations … in an open forum like this.” When Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) pressed Comey on the same question later in the hearing, he repeated that “especially in a public forum, we never confirm or deny a pending investigation.” (King dryly replied, “The irony of your making that statement here, I cannot avoid.”)

So Comey understands that the FBI weighing in publicly on open investigations, when charges are still being proved, is unwise. Doing so puts those being investigated at the mercy of innuendo and rumor. Yet Comey ditched this rule when he notified Congress 11 days before the election that the FBI was looking into whether there were previously unrevealed emails from Hillary Clinton on a laptop belonging to her aide’s estranged husband. (It should also be noted that this followed months of anti-Clinton leaks from Rudy Giuliani’s friends in the FBI’s New York field office.)

Worse, the search warrant for the emails unsealed in December shows that, as The Post reported at the time, investigators “had no new evidence of actual wrongdoing” on Clinton’s part. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported Tuesday that the FBI thought the allegations of ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia credible enough that they sought a wiretap on four members of Trump’s team.

[W]hile Comey stayed silent about new accusations against Trump, he piped up about a big nothing-burger against Clinton.

Despite a second letter later clearing Clinton (again) of wrongdoing, the blow Comey’s letter struck against Clinton’s poll numbers is obvious, . . .

Comey’s behavior remains inexcusable. It is a shocking and disturbing double standard: staying silent on allegations against one candidate despite reams of new information, while reviving allegations against another candidate despite absolutely no new information.

It is unlikely that a Trump administration will punish Comey for this mistake. History, however, will not judge him so kindly.

Russia's Unprecedented Election Tamper to Aid Trump

Personally, I find it frightening that most Republicans seem to care nothing about the fact that a hostile foreign government aided and abetted their party's presidential candidate.  Not that many years ago, members of the GOP would have been screaming the word "treason" about anyone who worked with or benefited from Russian espionage.  Sadly, that day is gone and it appears that both Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, and GOP slime ball, Mitch McConnell will do all they can to block a meaningful investigation of Russia's election tampering and/or retaliation against Russia.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the disturbing situation and the failures on various fronts to have addressed the treat - and possible treason - before the election last month.  Here are article highlights:

Well before the White House or U.S. intelligence agencies publicly blamed the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, two members of Congress did. Back in September, Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, released a statement accusing Russian intelligence agencies of hacking Democratic Party institutions. “Americans will not stand for any foreign government trying to influence our election,” they declared. “We hope all Americans will stand together and reject the Russian effort.”

Ultimately, however, many Americans did just the opposite: They stood still and they stood apart. Over 40 percent of Americans now say they’re not especially bothered by reports of hackers working with the Russian government to influence the U.S. election; most Democrats say they’re bothered by the interference, while most Republicans say they aren’t. . . . . Not long after a foreign government’s attempt to alter American politics, America had seemingly moved on to other matters.

Schiff is refusing to move on. The future of liberal democracy in the United States and around the world is at stake, he told me, and the U.S. government is rapidly running out of time to respond to the threat (Schiff says he has no confidence that Trump will punish Russia over its role in the election). In Trump’s denial of Russian meddling, Schiff sees a “president-elect who cannot accept any facts that diminish any of his achievements, no matter how well-established the facts are.” But Schiff is also critical of Obama, whose “excess of caution” ended up “inviting too much Russian interference.” And he’s critical of his own party. “Democrats failed to persuade the American people why they should care” about Russia’s intervention, he said.

Adam Schiff: I do agree with the assessment that the combination of cyber hacking, dumping of information, dumping of potentially forged information in the future, the propagation of fake-news stories—all of these “active measures” by Russia to interfere in our elections, to interfere in European elections—is a game-changer. It is of phenomenal importance and it’s a grave danger to the country. It’s a grave danger to liberal democracy, period. We’ve seen a creeping authoritarianism around the world, and this has been enabled by the cyber revolution. What we saw the Russians do in our presidential election was just utterly unprecedented in its scope and in its impact.

What made this so unique was the Russian willingness to dump this information in a way to damage one of the candidates, Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton, and in so doing help another candidate, Donald Trump. What made it so powerful was that we had the unusual specter of a major party and its nominee giving the Russians deniability. In any other election in modern U.S. history, had Russia been interfering in the political process in a way that benefitted one candidate, you would have had both candidates repudiating it. . . . But here you had, in Donald Trump, someone who was willing, on the one hand, to egg on the Russians to hack more, but on the other to give them deniability—a feat of both mental and rhetorical gymnastics that few could pull off. But he did.

[The cyber campaign] clearly had an impact [on the election]. Whether it was decisive or not we’ll never know. In a close election, any fact can be decisive. But there’s no refuting the Russian involvement in our elections. And that ought to be alarming to every American regardless of its impact.

In the context of the Russian cyber hacking, what it meant was that people’s party identity was so firmly entrenched that Republicans didn’t care enough about Russian hacking as long as it was helping their candidate. Even now you’ve seen Republican attitudes toward Russia change because of the expediency of who their new party leader is. And that’s largely, I think, influenced by core GOP hostility to Democrats.

The two most disturbing things I’ve seen since the election by the president-elect were, first, his claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted; otherwise he would have won the popular vote. That’s pure fiction. For someone who is about to be our president to publish that falsity is alarming. What followed close on the heels of that was the unwillingness to accept that the Russians had meddled in a way that helped him. And so he has to deny the underlying facts.

Both of those things tell me this is a president-elect who cannot accept any facts that diminish any of his achievements, no matter how well-established the facts are. That worries me a great deal for when he becomes president. Does that mean that he is going to ignore intelligence that contradicts his personal views because [it’s] less beneficial to him? That is a very dangerous trait to have in a commander in chief.

He’s doing long-term damage both to the intelligence community that risks its neck to provide a lot of these insights and analysis, but also to his own success as president and the country’s success, because there’ll be a national-security crisis at some point.

[I]t doesn’t take a rocket scientist or secret sources of information to recognize that in Secretary Clinton, [the Russians] had a candidate who they thought would be standing up to Russia, hostile to Russia, someone who’d been critical of their flawed elections in 2011. And in Donald Trump they had someone who was admiring of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, dismissive of NATO, and willing to potentially repeal sanctions [against Russia over its military intervention in Ukraine]. The Russians had every reason to prefer Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

Is Donald Trump a Traitor?

A piece in Salon looks at a question that has troubled me for some time but which has intensified since the Electoral College abandoned the intent of the Founding Fathers and certified Donald Trump's election despite his near 3 million vote loss in the popular vote.  The question?  Is Donald Trump - and by extension, many Republicans - Mitch McConnell certainly fits the description - traitors?  The answer in the piece, with which I have to concur is, yes, Donald Trump is a traitor. Worse yet, he and his Republican co-conspirators want to dismantle much of America's political tradition and  real Americans, by which I don't mean chest beating conservatives who constantly proclaim their patriotism, ought to be terrified. Given that Vladimir Putin aided and abetted Trump's election and also serves as Trump model for ruling, things once considered unthinkable may well soon begin to become reality. I truly fear the future that may lie ahead for my children and grand children.  Here are article excerpts:

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Donald Trump urged a foreign power, Russia, to interfere in the American election in order to undermine his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Russia complied. The American intelligence community, including the CIA and FBI, has reached a “strong consensus” that the Russians interfered with the presidential election in order to help Donald Trump win.

It has also been reported that Russian president Vladimir Putin personally directed this espionage operation. So serious was Russian interference in the American presidential election that the Obama administration warned Putin that it was tantamount to “armed conflict.”

Republican leaders in Congress were briefed on Russia’s interference in the presidential election and how it was targeted at elevating Trump and hurting Clinton. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans chose to block any public discussion of these findings. In what could be construed as a quid pro quo, McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, has been selected by President-elect Trump for a cabinet position in his administration.

Donald Trump’s flirtations with Russia and Vladimir Trump are part of a broader pattern of reckless and irresponsible behavior. Trump has numerous conflicts of financial interest that would appear to violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. His sons, Eric and Donald Jr., were involved in a scheme (since withdrawn) that looked a lot like an attempt to sell access to his administration through million-dollar “charity” donations. Trump has threatened to violate the First Amendment by suppressing freedom of the press, has encouraged violence against Hillary Clinton and those he deemed his enemies, has suggested he would not respect the outcome of the election if he lost, and has promoted people widely regarded as white supremacists or white nationalists to senior positions in his administration. Donald Trump has also selected key advisers and cabinet level officials who have close personal and financial relationships with Russian leaders in banking, finance and government.

The sum total of these facts leads to a very troubling conclusion.

President-elect Donald Trump is a traitor. As suggested by Harvard University professor John Shattuck in the Boston Globe, Trump’s actions may approach the legal definition of treason as defined by United States federal law.

Members of the Republican Party who knew about Russia’s efforts to interfere with the presidential election and chose to suppress or block such information, for fear of hurting their candidate’s chances, are also traitors.

In light of Russia’s interference with the presidential election, Republicans and others who voted for and support Donald Trump are also traitors, at least to the degree that they do not now work against and denounce him.

Reconciling Donald Trump’s traitorous behavior with how Republicans and conservatives view themselves as the party of “patriotism” and “national security” is a puzzle. . . . The Republican claim that theirs is the party of national security and that they are better than Democrats at “keeping America safe” is also gutted by the legacy of 9/11 and George W. Bush’s imperial misadventures in the Middle East, which taken together constitute one of the greatest foreign policy failures in the history of the country.

Trump voters and other American conservatives have been subjected to a several decades-long disinformation and propaganda campaign, led by Fox News and the broader right-wing news-entertainment media. This has created an alternate reality that exists separate and apart from the empirical, fact-based world. . . . . As a group, in many regards American voters are not very sophisticated. They also do not have a schema for consistently and logically understanding and processing complex political events and issues.

Since at least the Cold War, Republicans and their media have savaged Democrats, liberals and progressives as “weak.” The are not “real Americans”; they are “cowards” or “sissies,” “Commies” or “traitors.” If Russia and Vladimir Putin had interfered to aid a Democratic candidate, it would be presented by Republicans as final proof that Democrats are fundamentally disloyal to America.

But because Donald Trump is a white male conservative his loyalty and patriotism are viewed by many Americans as a given. This is a manifestation of white male privilege in action and an example of how racism can damage the safety and security of the United States.

During the age of Obama, the Republican Party completed its devolution into a radical and revanchist organization that aimed to overthrow the standing norms and consensus politics that have governed the United States since at least World War II. Trump and the Republicans are now following through on this in ways heretofore unimaginable. They have chosen partisanship over patriotism in their support of the authoritarian Trump and his apparent foreign sponsor, Vladimir Putin. The Russians wanted to undermine and damage one of America’s most sacred democratic institutions. Donald Trump and his party aided and abetted them.

 As I have said before, be afraid.  Very, very afraid.

The GOP Didn't Care About Russia's Effort to Derail Democracy

Tomorrow the Electoral College will vote and, short of a miracle, instead of protecting the nation from a dangerous and unqualified demagogue as intended by the Founding Father, it will probably certify Donald Trump's election and send America down the road to the death of democracy.  All empires end over time and often their demise comes from both forces inside and outside of their border (News bulletin to Christofascists: Christianity, not homosexuality, played a major role in the fall of the western Roman Empire).  Such will be the death of the American republic, with the outside forces being Putin's Russia and the inside forces being the angry whites who backed a demagogic authoritarian and destroy the country rather than lose their white privilege, the only thing that much of the white trash element (not all of whom are economically desperate) has had to allow itself to feel superior.  What is most frightening is that the GOP, the Republican Party, that political got the nation through the cataclysm of the Civil War, cared nothing about the Russian intervention.  Yes, there will be huffing and puffing and posturing, and much pretense of patriotism, but when it mattered, the GOP cared only about winning. A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at this sickening reality:  

The [Obama] administration did a huge amount over the course of the fall to alert the public, alert the world was happening. They finally went so far as to issue a public consensus judgment of the entire US intelligence community about Russian tampering in the election.

This was loud. Everybody heard about it. It was widely reported. It certainly didn't get the same volume or intensity of attention as Hillary Clinton's emails. But the President can't control press coverage. The key issue was that political partisanship by and large kept Republicans from caring. The dynamics of the presidential contest were more important than foreign meddling or sabotage.

This may sound like a harsh judgment but it is demonstrably true. Not only did President-Elect Trump know about the charges. (Indeed, it is very likely his intelligence briefings included more detailed information than we in the public have even today.) He frequently discussed them and encouraged the tampering.

Yesterday, Monica Crowley, another typically Trumpian Fox News extremist, got an appointment to the Trump National Security Council. Soon enough someone found a Tweet in which she either joked about or encouraged (depends on your interpretation) Putin getting more documents to unearth about the Clinton campaign.

One of the weirdest things about the entire cycle was that Wikileaks went from being the scourge of GOP national security hawks and the national security establishment to being the toast of American conservatives.

Perhaps you have doubts about whether Russia was really behind the hacks. But the US government made abundantly clear who it believed was behind them. The notifications went far beyond leaks or interviews. They did a public and formal pronouncement! That almost never happens. The simple matter is this: Everybody knew this. But there was no making Trump, his supporters or most critically establishment Republicans or elected officials care.

Trump supporters, GOP elites, a substantial portion of the US electorate simply didn't care about what Russia was doing because they believed it hurt Hillary Clinton.

Having said all this, it is important to repeat what I think was also clear at the time. The vast majority, I would say basically all of what the Russians found, was pedestrian and inconsequential. I would say that it had a small to marginal effect on the outcome. But it was an extremely close election that can be enough to make the difference. Can you imagine the emails within the RNC as Trump went from being the scourge and mortal enemy to man of destiny? But having close to all of one side's private communication dribbled out into the public realm and fluffed up by a credulous press was obviously damaging.

Let's not make fools of ourselves again. For most of the Fall the US government was on the record about who was behind the disruption campaign. It was discussed widely in the press. The vast majority of Republicans simply didn't care.

Some will not like it, but in my mind, being a Trump supporter and a Republican is now more or less synonymous with being a traitor guilty of undermining the U.S. Constitution.  The vast majority of Americans who did not vote for Trump need to begin treating Trump voters accordingly. 

CIA Assessment: Russia Sought to Help Trump Win

One of the sad and frightening ironies is that many in rural America who seemingly have less intelligence than Sarah Palin, the idiot of Wasilla, and who view themselves as "real Americans" allowed themselves to be played by a former KGB operative who now sees himself as Russia's new tsar.  As the New York Times and other real news outlets report, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have concluded "that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump."  That Vladimir Putin sought to see Donald Trump elected ought to have been a blaring clarion to anyone rational that Trump is toxic to both the best interest of America and to the survival of democracy itself.  At an LGBT holiday party last evening in Williamsburg heavily populated by LGBT activists, professionals and academics from William & Mary University, the shock at the stupidity/idiocy of Trump voters was a common theme - along with much discussion of how to form a resistance to Trumpism and the coming onslaught against LGBT rights and civil rights in general.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials. . . . Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks. 

“We now have high confidence that they hacked the D.N.C. and the R.N.C., and conspicuously released no documents” from the Republican organization, one senior administration official said, referring to the Russians.

It is unclear how many files were stolen from the Republican committee; in some cases, investigators never get a clear picture. It is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.

The Russians were as surprised as everyone else at Mr. Trump’s victory, intelligence officials said. Had Mrs. Clinton won, they believe, emails stolen from the Democratic committee and from senior members of her campaign could have been used to undercut her legitimacy. The intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia tried to help Mr. Trump was first reported by The Washington Post.

In briefings to the White House and Congress, intelligence officials, including those from the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, have identified individual Russian officials they believe were responsible. Intelligence officials and private cybersecurity companies believe that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by two different Russian cyberunits. One, called “Cozy Bear” or “A.P.T. 29” by some Western security experts, is believed to have spent months inside the D.N.C. computer network, as well as other government and political institutions, but never made public any of the documents it took. (A.P.T. stands for “Advanced Persistent Threat,” which usually describes a sophisticated state-sponsored cyberintruder.)

The other, the G.R.U.-controlled unit known as “Fancy Bear,” or “A.P.T. 28,” is believed to have created two outlets on the internet, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, to make Democratic documents public. Many of the documents were also provided to WikiLeaks, which released them over many weeks before the Nov. 8 election.

Salon pick up on the disturbing story line.  Note how many Republicans seem only too willing to allow a foreign enemy to interfere with our election results so long as their party is the beneficiary. Here are more highlights:

The Washington Post today reported that the CIA now is sure of Russia’s deliberate efforts to help elect Donald Trump as president of the United States. According to the story, “Agency briefers told the senators it was now ‘quite clear’ that electing Trump was Russia’s goal.”

In a report by the Washington Post, officials are named who say they have information related to those connected to the Russian government — the same persons who provided Wikileaks emails that were hacked from the DNC and John Podesta.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

According to several officials, [Senator Mitch] McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

 

Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands.

 

Trump’s transition team dismissed the findings in a statement Friday, claiming, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

          Read the full story at the Washington Post.

America democracy died on November 8, 2016. Sadly, like a patient with an as yet un-diagnosed terminal cancer, most Americans do not grasp what has happened or, in the case of Trump voters, that they have betrayed the nation and done the bidding of enemy agents.  Perhaps instead of wearing their "Make America Great Again" hats they should wear hats that say "American Traitor."  Be very, very afraid.

Donald Trump, Apologist for A Russian Tyrant

Donald Trump's presidential campaign has offered up many bizarre aspects one would never have expected, even from a loose canon such as Trump.  Obviously, declaring war on the GOP establishment and threatening to harm down ticket candidates is something previously unseen.  So again is Trump's bizarre embrace of Vladimir Putin, a former KGBT officer and now dictator of Russian notwithstanding the smoke screen of rigged elections. Trump denies being financially beholden to Putin, yet past news reports suggest that Russian oligarchs - i.e., Putin henchmen and cronies - may be supporting some of Trump's real estate projects. Then there is the unsettling coziness of Trump to Russian hackers.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Trump's strange (and, in my opinion, mental illness fueled) world.  Here are excerpts:

For most of this campaign, Donald Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and his willingness to act as a Kremlin apologist on issues ranging from Syria to the computer hacking of individuals and political parties have been sources of bafflement and dismay. Mr. Trump’s alarming performance at Sunday night’s debate deepened these concerns.

Mr. Trump again denied that the Russians were doing anything to manipulate the presidential election despite powerful evidence to the contrary. And he again laid bare his cockamamie and uninformed view of the bloody civil war in Syria and his refusal to acknowledge Russia’s role in making it worse.

Mr. Trump has no foreign policy experience. He has, however, received two briefings from American intelligence agencies that should have alerted him to the challenges facing the next president but apparently have not. All of which raises unsettling questions about whether the Republican nominee for the most powerful job in the world is Mr. Putin’s poodle, stubbornly naïve, totally clueless or, as some have ominously suggested, protecting undisclosed business interests in Russia.

Though allegations about Russian interference in the election have circulated for some time, the Obama administration on Friday formally accused Russia of stealing and disclosing emails from the Democratic National Committee and other institutions.

“To profess not to know at this point is willful misrepresentation,” one senior United States official told NBC News. Presidents can choose to disregard an intelligence finding, but at this point, why would Mr. Trump feel he has better information or analytical ability than a “high confidence” conclusion by the country’s intelligence professionals? Why would he not want to acknowledge a threat and address it?

It is similarly unacceptable that Mr. Trump refuses to accept Russia’s role in backing Syria’s brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and to condemn the bombings that have killed thousands of civilians in Aleppo and elsewhere. Instead, he ignored the civil war and effectively praised not just Russia but also Mr. Assad and Iran for “killing ISIS,” the Islamic State. Russia, Iran and the Assad forces are, in fact, largely focused on destroying the Syrian rebels opposed to Mr. Assad.

Various dark theories are circulating among experts about why Mr. Trump is so enamored of Mr. Putin . . . . One theory, denied by Mr. Trump and impossible to confirm or rule out because he refuses to release his taxes, is that he has business interests in Russia that he wants to protect or develop in the future.

Andrei Kozyrev, a former Russian foreign minister, told The Times: “I’m sure Putin is trying — and more successfully than many think — to manipulate both the process and one of the candidates. He realizes that Trump will trample American democracy and damage if not destroy America as a pillar of stability and major force able to contain him.”

In the end, it may not matter whether Mr. Trump is being manipulated by Mr. Putin or naïvely accepting Mr. Putin’s twisted views. What does matter is that with each new bizarre utterance he provides further proof of his inability to evaluate credible information and, more broadly, his lack of fitness to further his country’s best interests.