Trump Is Poised to Embroil America in New Wars

Anyone who has truly followed Donald Trump's career over the years will note one thing: the lives of others means nothing to the man and all that matters is satiating Trump's overweening ego.  Previously, Trump - Der Trumpenführer as I prefer to call him since he embodies some of the most dangerous elements of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini - has stated that only some "major event" will unify America in the wake of his divisive campaign.  What could such a major event involve?  In his latest piece in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan suggests that Trump will ignite new wars in the hopes of rallying the country behind him. In making his argument, Sullivan cites Plato's Republic which traces the decline of a republic into a tyranny - a historical work likely unknown to Trump and certainly unknown to most of his white supremacist and Christian extremist supporters - which aptly notes that throughout history would be tyrants have used war and foreign adventures to rally domestic support in the face of principled resistance.  Her are article highlights: 

Every now and again, when I find myself buried in the latest blizzard of invariably disturbing news emanating from the Trump White House, I go back and remind myself of the core narrative. I read Plato’s Republic again, the prism through which I first raised the alarm about Donald Trump’s emergence. The prism is essentially how a late-stage democracy, dripping with decadence and corruption, with elites dedicated primarily to enriching themselves, and a people well past any kind of civic virtue, morphs so easily into tyranny. This is the second phase of tyranny, after the more benign settling-in: the purge. Any constraints that had been in place to moderate the tyrant’s whims are set aside; no advice that counters his own gut impulses can be tolerated. And so, over the last couple of weeks, we have seen the president fire Rex Tillerson and Andrew McCabe, two individuals who simply couldn’t capitulate to the demand that they obey only Trump, rather than the country as well. And so Tillerson has been replaced by a fawning toady, Mike Pompeo, a man whose hatred of Islam is only matched by his sympathy for waterboarders. Pompeo has been replaced in turn by a war criminal, who authorized brutal torture and illegally destroyed the evidence, Gina Haspel. Whatever else we know about Haspel, we know she follows orders. And then last night, we saw McMaster fall on his sword, replaced by John Bolton, an unrepentant architect of the most disastrous war since Vietnam, a fanatical advocate for regime change in Iran, an anti-Muslim extremist, and a believer in the use of military force as if it were a religion. And this, of course, is also part of the second phase for Plato’s tyrant: war. “As his first step, he is always setting some war in motion, so that people will be in need of a leader,” Plato explains. In fact, “it’s necessary for a tyrant always to be stirring up war.”

And everything we know about Trump’s character tells us that war is probably the only aspect of foreign relations he intuitively understands. He cannot exist as an equal party in an international system. He has to dominate other countries the way he does other human beings. And, when you look back, you see this has been obvious all along. On trade, he has long been rhetorically at war with our closest neighbors and trading partners, and now he has unveiled the contours of a major trade war with China; we already have a renewed and deeper presence in Afghanistan; and we have long been supporting the Saudi monarchy’s proxy and inhumane war with Iran in Yemen.

The real possibility of a nuclear conflict with North Korea is getting more real by the day (can you imagine Bolton’s counsel for the Kim Jong-un meeting?); and with Bolton in place, the groundwork for ending the Iran nuclear deal is also finally complete. And what’s noticeable in all this is the irrelevance of the Senate. They refuse to reclaim their treaty-making powers with respect to trade (they could end Trump’s China shenanigans overnight); they have abdicated any influence on foreign policy and war just as they have done nothing to protect the special counsel. They are just like the Roman Senate as the republic collapsed. The forms survive; there is nothing of substance behind them.

When the U.S. detonates the Iran Nuclear Accord, the European alliance, in so far as it still staggers onward, will reach crisis point; and the Iranian regime will likely accelerate its nuclear weapons program. They’d be crazy not to. At which point, the path to war starts (or rather is very hard to stop). Kushner is the key figure here, I suspect. His support for the Israeli hard right (he doesn’t just support the West Bank settlements, he funds them) and his very cozy relationship with the new Saudi prince/dictator both point in one direction: war with Iran. Getting the Americans to launch such a war is Jerusalem’s and Riyadh’s wet dream – which is why the reports of the Crown Prince’s boasting about Kushner being “in his pocket” are far from implausible.

All of these developments, I bet, have reached a new intensity because of Robert Mueller’s cumulative legal cornering of Trump, especially the special counsel’s recent crossing the line into the finances of the Trump Organization. At that point, I suspect Trump realized he was more vulnerable than he previously believed, and went on full offense everywhere. I was long a skeptic of Trump’s alleged conspiracy with Russia in 2016, but every single development in the last few months keeps pointing in the same direction — and it isn’t Trump’s exoneration.

Yesterday, we discovered that Guccifer 2.0, Roger Stone’s online pen pal, is actually a Russian agent. Trump’s initial refusal to say — even through his spokeswoman — that Russia is clearly responsible for the release of a nerve agent in a country which is one of our closest allies was simply staggering. As is his continued refusal to confront seriously the threat Putin clearly poses to democratic elections in the West. The extraordinary leak of the warning from his national security team not to congratulate Putin during the recent call is yet another sign, it seems to me, that even those working closest to the president want to alert the world about the threat to our national security that is coming from the Oval Office itself.

Part of me, of course, has long worried and hoped that my assessment of Trump as truly the tyrant of Plato’s imagination is melodramatic overkill. I’m given to excitability, even catastrophism. I’ve been wrong before. And there are many ways in which American life still seems the same.

We still hold elections — even if the president asserts that they are all rigged against him. In November, we have a chance to use the ballot box to save this country, and there are some signs that a wave is building. The courts still have some independence and feistiness; the media is still free, if now accompanied by a full-bore state propaganda channel.

But I worry that the more Trump is opposed and even cornered — especially if he loses the House this fall — the more dangerous he will become. If Mueller really does have the goods, and if the Democrats storm back into congressional power, then Trump may well lash out to protect himself at all costs. We know he has no concern for the collateral damage his self-advancement has long caused in his private and public life. We know he has contempt for and boundless ignorance of liberal democracy. We know he is capable of anything — of immense cruelty and callousness, of petty revenge and reckless rhetoric, of sudden impulses and a quick temper. We also know he is commander-in-chief, who may soon need the greatest distraction of all.

War is coming. And there will be nothing and no one to stop him.
   

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

More Monday Male Beauty

Cambridge Analytica Sent Foreigners to Advise GOP Campaigns

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix.

Things would seem to be getting worse and worse for the Republican Party as more and more information comes to light about the role that Cambridge Analytic played in Republican campaigns even before the 2016 presidential election.  Specifically, foreigners were involved in advising Republican campaigns in a number of congressional campaigns  across the country even though such activity was illegal.  It's all part of the GOP agenda to win no matter what be it through disenfranchising those perceived to be pro-Democrat to outright flouting the law. The obvious take away is that if this happened in 2014, it is pretty safe to assume that it happened in spades in 2016.  Just as tellingly, Steve Bannon and his ultra-right wing financiers were involved in the 2014 effort.  Note that John Bolton's name also comes up.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this new development.  Here are highlights:

Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by U.S. laws limiting foreign involvement in elections. Wylie, who emerged this month as a whistleblower, provided The Washington Post with documents that describe a program across several U.S. states to win campaigns for Republicans using psychological profiling to reach voters with individually tailored messages. The documents include previously unreported details about the program, which was called “Project Ripon” for the Wisconsin town where the Republican Party was born in 1854. Those [election law] restrictions were explained in a 10-page memo prepared in July 2014 by a New York attorney, Laurence Levy, for Cambridge Analytica’s leadership at the time, including President Rebekah Mercer, Vice President Stephen K. Bannon and chief executive Alexander Nix. The memo said that foreign nationals could serve in minor roles — for example as “functionaries” handling data — but could not involve themselves in significant campaign decisions or provide high-level analysis or strategy. Many of those employees and contractors were involved in helping to decide what voters to target with political messages and what messages to deliver to them, the former workers said. Their tasks ran the gamut of campaign work, including “managing media relations” as well as fundraising, planning events, and providing “communications strategy” and “talking points, speeches [and] debate prep,” according to a document touting the firm’s 2014 work. “Its dirty little secret was that there was no one American involved in it, that it was a de facto foreign agent, working on an American election,” Wylie said.

Two other former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear that they may have violated U.S. law in their campaign work, said concerns about the legality of Cambridge Analytica’s work in the United States were a regular subject of employee conversations at the company, especially after the 2014 vote.

[E]mployees worried the company was giving its foreign employees potentially inaccurate immigration documents to provide upon entering the United States, showing that they were not there to work when they had arrived for the purpose of advising campaigns. “We knew that everything was not above board, but we weren’t too concerned about it,” said one of the former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spent several months in the United States working on Republican campaigns. “It was the Wild West. That’s certainly how they carried on in 2014.” Cambridge Analytica, whose offices were raided over the weekend by British authorities, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing but did not reply to requests for comment from The Washington Post for this story. Project Ripon was described by Wylie and other workers as an ambitious effort in which Cambridge Analytica would advise American campaigns on how to use data to find “hidden Republicans.” Ripon also was the name of an online campaign management tool designed for the effort and described in a company brochure produced in London that was subtitled, “WINNING BACK AMERICA.” Company documents obtained by The Post show the U.S. program involved a staff of 41 employees and contractors, and spent $7.5 million between April and July 2014. Cambridge Analytica documents show it advised a congressional candidate in Oregon, state legislative candidates in Colorado and, on behalf of the North Carolina Republican Party, the winning campaign for Sen. Thom Tillis. The company, which asserted that Republican candidates won most of the races it worked on in 2014, also provided independent support for candidates in Arkansas, New Hampshire and North Carolina through a super PAC controlled by former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who was named last week by Trump to be national security adviser. Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer at Akerman LLP, said the accounts of Wylie and the other former Cambridge Analytica workers raises legal concerns. “If Mr. Wylie's allegations are true, the Justice Department could prosecute Cambridge Analytica and its managers for knowing and willful violations of the prohibition on foreign national contributions.” “It would be a problem for a U.S. super PAC — or any other domestic political actor — to have foreign nationals involved in running a political operation, including making decisions on strategy, targeting and expenditures for that political entity,” he said. “If foreigners were involved in the senior levels of decision-making for a political organization, that would be a violation of federal law.” The former Cambridge Analytica workers did not provide information about what transpired in 2016, when the company did work for Cruz and Trump.

The plot just keeps on continuing to thicken.   A piece in The Guardian has details on what may have transpired in 2016 here. 

The Stormy Daniels Interview Should Scare Republicans

I, like I suspect many, I watched the 60 Minutes interview of Stormy Daniels last evening.  My take away?  Donald Trump is an adulterous pig.   In my view, a very unattractive adulterous pig.  Perhaps my favorite part of the interview was this:

Anderson Cooper: You were 27, he was 60. Were you physically attracted to him?

Stormy Daniels: No.

Anderson Cooper: Not at all?

Stormy Daniels: No.

I suspect that this exchange will most enrage Der Trumpenführer since it dismisses his delusional attractive image of himself.   

On a more serious note, what the Daniels interview may do is further alienate women voters - a demographic with whom Trump does poorly - by reminding them of Trump and the GOP's anti-women agenda.  With the 2018 mid terms a little more than seven months away, the last thing Republicans need is more alienation of women voters or, in the alternative, energized women voters out for retribution.  A piece in CNN looks at why Republicans should be worried.  Here are excerpts:

But one way that the Daniels story could have a very real political effect is in its ability to further energize the women's vote, especially that of white college-educated females. From the start of his presidency, Trump has had a gender problem. Hillary Clinton won 54% of the women's vote. The first mass protest against his presidency, the Women's March on January 21, 2017, drew hundreds of thousands of women from all over the country.
 The president has done nothing to allay the concerns that he is a sexist-in-chief who is dismissive of any policies that aim to achieve gender equity and who is prone to espousing the kind of "locker room talk," as he called it, that was on display in the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape that emerged during the election. While many Americans had been hopeful that Clinton's candidacy would signal a historic milestone in the fight for gender quality, the story turned out differently. The victory of Trump felt to many women like a huge step backward. In the period that has his followed his election, many women voters have only become more determined to reverse the damage that his victory caused. The #Metoo movement pushed the issue of sexual harassment to the front and center of our national conversation. Activists brought down numerous leading figures in key industries and have created immense pressure to transform the rules and norms of workplace behavior. The anger among women in the electorate could be decisive in the midterm elections. With a record-breaking number of female candidates running for office, many women are clearly determined to shake up Washington. If women voters who oppose President Trump turn out in large numbers, they can provide the key to electing a Democratic-controlled House and Senate. Ronald Brownstein has noted that 62% of college-educated women are planning to vote for Democrats in November. According to an NBC News/Wall Street poll, the president's favorability rating among college-educated white women has fallen from 32% to 27%. And the Republicans only receive positive marks from 23% of this pool. In the special elections in Virginia, Alabama, and Pennsylvania, the Republicans performed poorly with women voters. And [Trump's] the president's numbers have also fallen among blue-collar white women who were important to his victory last November. In RealClear Politics, David Brady and Brett Parker recently recounted how weak the enthusiasm is for his presidency among female voters, and the widening gender gap between the parties. Donald Trump has represented, both symbolically and in terms of the policy agenda, a reactionary presidency toward the feminist movement that has pushed the country toward greater gender equality. The daily tumult in the White House and Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation create woes for Trump. But the decisive factor that could put real institutional brakes on this [Trump] President may well turn out to be the women's vote.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

Pence Secretly Drafted Trump’s Latest Transgender Ban

Hate group leader Tony Perkins with Trump and Pence

As much as I despise Donald Trump and view him as a clear and present danger to America, in some way Mike Pence presents an even more insidious danger.   Pence - like Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli and some other virulently anti-gay Republicans - is a religious fanatic and will go to any lengths to quell his inner demons.  One of his main demons concerns homosexuality due to, in my belief, the fact that he, like Santorum and Cuccinelli, is a self-loathing closeted gay who somehow thinks that make life a living hell for other LGBT individuals makes amends for his own secret lusts.  (Pence also spent his early years as a Catholic, which I know first hand screws one up unbelievably if you are LGBT).  The only positive thing Pence did is not have seven children like Santorum and Cuccinelli did as they tried to convince the world - and most importantly themselves - that they aren't really gay.  Thus, it is no surprise to learn that Pence along with a group of professional gay-haters  was behind Der Trumpenführer's latest anti-transgender military ban.  Among this cabal was hate group leader Tony Perkins, in my view one of the most dishonest individuals on the planet.  A piece in Think Progress looks at this latest attack which is based on the usual Christofascist lies.  Here are excerpts:

Then President Trump announced a new ban on transgender people serving in the military late Friday, it was somewhat of a surprise — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had reportedly recommended in February that Trump allow transgender people to serve. It turns out that Vice President Pence and some of the country’s most prominent anti-LGBTQ activists had a role in reversing the outcome, which explains why the report explaining the decision is rife with anti-trans junk science.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reported Friday night that, according to multiple sources, Pence played “a leading role” in creating the report, along with Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, which has been dubbed “Trump’s favorite think tank,” and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC), an anti-LGBTQ hate group.  Both Heritage and FRC praised the report Friday. According to Stern’s reporting, it was true that Mattis favored allowing transgender military service, but Pence “effectively overruled” him.

A separate source independently confirmed to ThinkProgress Saturday that Pence was involved, characterizing him as forming his own ad hoc “working group,” including Anderson and Perkins, separate from the panel of experts Mattis had assembled.

Mattis’ original document is not currently publicly available, but it was widely reported that Mattis favored an inclusive approach that resembled what had originally been proposed by Defense Secretary Ash Carter under President Obama in 2016. [T]he report features numerous anti-trans talking points that FRC and other anti-LGBTQ groups have used in various campaigns favoring discrimination against transgender people. It also attempts to distort the research on transgender health in ways that directly parallel Anderson’s recently released book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. One of the most obvious biases in the new report is an emphasis on concerns about how transgender people in the military might somehow infringe on the privacy of other soldiers — particularly women. These are the same arguments Perkins, Anderson, and others have made in justifying overturning LGBTQ protections in Houston or defending North Carolina’s HB2, a law that mandated discrimination against transgender people.

According to the report, transgender people would violate other troops’ privacy simply by sharing a space with them . . . . Not so subtly, the report concludes that unit cohesion will deteriorate if the anti-transgender prejudices of other service members are not catered to.

“[U]nit cohesion” is the same hollow argument that was previously used to defend “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), a law that prohibited lesbian, gay, and bisexual people from serving openly in the military. Such warnings even included near-identical concerns about shared shower use. Following DADT’s repeal, a study showed that LGB inclusion had no negative impact on military morale, despite similar warnings. Nowhere does the report even mention that every major medical organization in the U.S. has arrived at a consensus that transgender people should be affirmed in their gender identities and supported in their transitions. The American Medical Association has even explicitly expressed support for lifting the military’s ban on transgender service. The report likewise makes no mention of the widely-used standards of care developed by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), which recognize the benefits of affirmative care.

As has become inevitable in just about every attempt to justify anti-trans discrimination (including Anderson’s book), the study also wildly distorts studies about the suicidality of transgender people.

The report essentially manufactures doubt about the health outcomes of transgender people to justify the very kind of discrimination that is the most significant factor for trans people’s negative experiences.

But as the report largely reflects the views of Pence, a longtime opponent of LGBTQ equality, and some of the top anti-LGBTQ activists in the country, it’s easy to see how it arrived at such discriminatory conclusions.

It is very difficult to lie more than Tony Perkins who, like Trump, should be assumed to be lying if his lips are moving. 

More Sunday Male Beauty

March for Our Lives - Republicans Are Not Getting the Message

UPDATED:  Per The Hill, this batshitery from Rick Santorum:

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) suggested that students should take CPR classes and take steps to prepare for active shooter situations instead of holding protests calling for new gun laws.

By some estimates, the turn out for yesterday's "March for Our Lives" in Washington, D.C., was the largest protest march ever in the city's history (the crowd's certainly dwarfed the turn out for Der Trumpenführer's low attendance inauguration).  And that doesn't count those who turned out at sister marches in other major cities.  Having been a teen in the 1960's and college student in the early 1970's I identify with the idealism of the Parkland students and those they have inspired.  Things can change if enough pressure is applied, especially at the ballot box.  My generation saw the Vietnam War ended and Nixon removed from the White House. This new generation of youth have that advantage of the Internet and social media that allows them to organize and apply pressure in ways my generation only dreamed of.  What's interesting is watching the reactions of those most in the pocket of the gun lobby.  Most Republicans have remained silent and others have attacked the student activists.  The NRA increased its ad buys 600% since the Parkland massacre as noted by the Chicago Tribune:

Within four days, though, the NRA had returned in force, increasing its advertising aggressively on Facebook, and spending so widely and indiscriminately that its ads on YouTube showed up on videos for school-age kids. According to a previously unpublished review by Pathmatics, a company that scrapes data from online ads, the NRA spent more than six times as much on digital ads after the Parkland shooting than it did in the weeks before it. Its average daily spending in the 24 days before Parkland was $11,300, according to Pathmatics. In the 24 days after its silent period, that average jumped to $47,300.

Disgustingly, NRATV has mocked the students and shown, in my view, the growing depravity and moral bankruptcy of "conservatives" in general.  This from the Washington Post:

The latest attack came from Colion Noir, a host on NRATV who took to the airwaves on the eve of the Parkland teens-led March on Washington, telling them: “No one would know your names” if a student gunman hadn’t stormed into their school and killed three staff members and 14 students. . . . . Colion Noir is a pseudonym for Collins Iyare Idehen Jr., a lawyer and gun rights activist from Houston who has nearly 650,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Fox News, it typical form, has lied and mislead its gullible viewers on the positions of the activist students and, as noted before, helped spread the false meme that they were hired actors.  Anything rather than face the reality that people are fed up with what falsely styled "conservatives" and Republicans are doing to the country. 

I sincerely hope that Millennials and those attaining voting age in time for the 2018 midterm elections will take the message of the Parkland activists and register to vote and get out to the polls and take out their anger on pro-gun candidates.  Here's a look at that message: 

During today’s March For Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., one of the Parkland students who has become an outspoken advocate for gun control spoke. And he used the speech to warn pro-gun politicians that the voters are coming for them.

Cameron Kasky began his address by telling the hundreds of thousands gathered “welcome to the revolution.” Stating that he’s been asked if he believes that “any change is going to come” following the tragic Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, he told the crowd to “look around” because “we are the change.”

“We must educate ourselves and start conversations that keep our country moving forward, and we will,” Kasky exclaimed to cheers. “We hereby promise to fix the broken system we’ve been forced into and create a better world for the generations to come. Don’t worry, we’ve got this.”

Kasky went on to state that the people of the country now “see past the lies” and the “corrupt aren’t controlling our story.”

“Politicians either represent the people or get out,” the young student declared. “The people demand a law banning the sale of assault weapons. The people demand that we prohibit the sale of high capacity magazines. The people demand universal background checks. Stand for us or beware. The voters are coming.”

After listing off the names of the victims of the Parkland shooting, Kasky noted that the march isn’t the “climax of this movement — it is the beginning.”

Let us hope this is truly a beginning of real change and the beginning of the end of Trump - who remained silent about the march - and today's GOP.

Trump Campaign To Papadopoulos:Contact Russians; Brits Raid Cambridge Analytica Offices

While Der Trumpenführer, and House Republicans continue to claim the Russiagate investigation  is a "witch hunt," two new developments could well show that claim to be a lie.   First, it now seems that George Papadopoulos - who has copped a guilty plea and is working with Robert Mueller - was told by Trump campaign officials to make contact with the Russians and secured campaign approval before he sought to explore what Russia could do for the campaign.  So much for Trump's claim that Papadopoulos was a glorified coffee boy.  Potentially even more devastating is word the British officials have raided the London offices of Cambridge Analytica and are seizing the company's data base and servers - items that might provide a clear and indisputable link between Russian intelligence officials and the Trump campaign.  Trump in typical form has tried to distract the media - or at least the GOP's Christofascist base - by announcing a new ban on transgender members of the U.S. military.   First this from the Washington Post on Papadopoulos' direction from the Trump campaign:

When a Russian news agency reached out to George Papadopoulos to request an interview shortly before the 2016 election, the young adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump made sure to seek approval from campaign headquarters.

“You should do it,” deputy communications director Bryan Lanza urged Papadopoulos in a September 2016 email,  . . .

The exchange was a sign that Papadopoulos — who pushed the Trump operation to meet with Russian officials — had the campaign’s blessing for some of his foreign outreach.

Since Papadopoulos pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts during the campaign and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump officials have sought to paint the 30-year-old energy consultant as a low-level volunteer whose outreach to Russia was not authorized by the campaign — and in some cases was actively discouraged.

Emails described to The Washington Post, which are among thousands of documents turned over to investigators examining Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, show Papadopoulos had more extensive contact with key Trump campaign and presidential transition officials than has been publicly acknowledged.

Among those who communicated with Papadopoulos were senior campaign figures such as strategist Stephen K. Bannon and adviser Michael Flynn, who corresponded with him about his efforts to broker ties between Trump and top foreign officials, the emails show.

Thomas Breen, an attorney for Papadopoulos, declined to comment. A White House spokesman also declined to comment.

In a tweet after Papadopoulos pleaded guilty, Trump wrote that “few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.” Another Trump campaign staffer dismissed Papadopoulos as a mere “coffee boy” during the campaign.
 At the end of March, Papadopoulos attended a meeting of Trump’s newly named national security advisory group at the candidate’s not-yet-opened hotel in Washington. After introducing himself, the young adviser announced he could organize a meeting between Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and Trump, according to court documents.

That Trump and his circle of sycophants have lied about Papadopoulos'  roll should surprise no one not living under a rock or only watching Fox News.

Adding to the fun is the fact that British authorities, as noted above, raided the London offices of Cambridge Analytica which may have been the go between for Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign.  One can only imagine what goodies that company's data base and computer servers may yield.   Here are highlights from Politico:

U.K. authorities raided Cambridge Analytica’s offices overnight amid an investigation into whether the political consulting firm illegally acquired Facebook data to target voters.

Around 18 investigators were seen entering the company’s London headquarters after obtaining a warrant to search its database and servers Friday night, the Guardian reported. The search lasted seven hours, according to the BBC.

“This is just one part of a larger investigation into the use of personal data and analytics for political purposes,” the Information Commissioner’s Office said late Friday after receiving the warrant. “As you will expect, we will now need to collect, assess and consider the evidence before coming to any conclusions.”

The search is the latest development in a ballooning scandal enveloping both the firm and Facebook. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic are scrutinizing the companies amid accusations that Cambridge Analytica may have used 50 million Facebook users’ data without proper consent to help U.S. President Donald Trump’s election.

Perhaps the Brits will expose what the Congressional Republicans have been working so hard to keep hidden.