Tag Archives: house

The New Yorker’s Next Cover Says Everything You Need to Know About Trump and Russia

by RaquelZ868662379 Posted on February 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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While Republicans continue to duck calls to investigate President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the New Yorker is putting the issue front and center of its next cover with a brilliant illustration:

The scathing cover will accompany an investigation featured in the next issue that explores Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence on the presidential election, and the frightening return of a Cold War the United States is at risk of losing. The issue comes in the wake of a bombshell report on Thursday that cited White House officials requesting the FBI dispute evidence Trump aides communicated with Russian officials during the election. According to CNN, the FBI rejected that request.

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The New Yorker’s Next Cover Says Everything You Need to Know About Trump and Russia

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Reince Priebus Asked the FBI to Assure Reporters There Was Nothing to the Russia Story. They Refused.

by KathieV68qwr Posted on February 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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Last week the New York Times reported that members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff “had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election. The White House vigorously denies this, and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus went on TV to knock down the story. That’s fine. But it turns out Priebus did more than that. According to CNN, Priebus asked the FBI to tell reporters that there was nothing to the story:

The discussions between the White House and the bureau began with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe1 and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on the sidelines of a separate White House meeting the day after the stories were published, according to a U.S. law enforcement official.

….A White House official said that Priebus later reached out again to McCabe and to FBI Director James Comey asking for the FBI to at least talk to reporters on background to dispute the stories.2 A law enforcement official says McCabe didn’t discuss aspects of the case but wouldn’t say exactly what McCabe told Priebus.

Comey rejected the request for the FBI to comment on the stories, according to sources, because the alleged communications between Trump associates and Russians known to US intelligence are the subject of an ongoing investigation.

I wonder if anyone in the Trump White House even understands how inappropriate this is? They might not. Partly it’s because they’re so inexperienced, and partly it’s because they’ve all been marinating in the Trump worldview that you’re a chump if you let delicate moral sensibilities get in the way of hitting back against your enemies. They might well believe that asking the FBI to talk to reporters is no different than asking the press secretary to talk to reporters.

If this is true, it’s no excuse. I’m just curious. If Priebus knew this was wrong, it’s hard to believe that he would have pressed the bureau multiple times, even knowing that it was almost certain to leak eventually.

In other words, at best they’re muttonheads. At worst they’re casually corrupt. Take your pick.

1In case that name sounds familiar, it’s the same Andrew McCabe who was supposedly at the center of one of the dumbest “Hillary scandal” stories ever written outside of the fever swamps.3 Long story short, McCabe’s wife is a Democrat. ZOMG!

2This is especially rich since Reibus whined just a few days ago about reporters using anonymous sources. “Put names on a piece of paper and print it,” he said on Face the Nation. “If people aren’t willing to put their name next to a quote, then the quote shouldn’t be listed.”

3Speaking of which, can you even imagine the epic meltdown we’d be enduring from Republicans right now if Hillary Clinton had done anything like this?

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Reince Priebus Asked the FBI to Assure Reporters There Was Nothing to the Russia Story. They Refused.

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Can We Believe Anything That Comes Out of the White House Press Office?

by XiomaraElisha Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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Behold our White House press office at work:

Sunday: White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders tells reporters that President Trump “played a couple of holes” today.

Monday: Pro golfer Rory McIlroy says he played 18 holes with Trump. “He probably shot around 80. He’s a decent player for a guy in his 70’s!”

Monday evening: The White House releases a new statement: “He intended to play a few holes and decided to play longer.”

Obviously this doesn’t matter in any cosmic sense. Who cares how much golf Trump plays? But it’s yet another indication that the White House press operation will blithely lie about anything. Is there really any point to having a press office these days?

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Can We Believe Anything That Comes Out of the White House Press Office?

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The Hero of Tal Afar Gets the Last Laugh

by Scot37529285 Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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I can still remember a decade ago, when Col. H.R. McMaster, the hero of Tal Afar and genius of counterinsurgency, had been passed over for the second time for promotion to brigadier general. Did we ever find out who had it in for him? Probably not. In any case, he eventually got his star, and then another, and then another, and now he’s got an office in the White House:

President Trump appointed Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster as his new national security adviser on Monday, picking a widely respected military strategist known for challenging conventional thinking and helping to turn around the Iraq war in its darkest days.

….General McMaster had the aura of disruption that Mr. Trump has valued in several cabinet secretaries, said a senior administration official who insisted on anonymity to describe internal deliberations. Another candidate, Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen, the superintendent of West Point, impressed Mr. Trump as being “from central casting,” the official said. But the president wanted him to stay at West Point, which he reveres.

I see that Trump is using his usual keen management insights to choose the folks responsible for running our country. Luckily, he somehow decided that the guy from central casting ought to stay at West Point, and accidentally chose McMaster. This is probably a pretty good selection, so I guess we should all be grateful regardless of how we got there.

I wonder what McMaster thinks of K.T. McFarland? That seems to be a key prerequisite for NSA these days. I sure hope they get along, since I assume McFarland will have no problem using her personal connection with Trump to complain about McMaster behind his back if she doesn’t like what he’s doing.

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The Hero of Tal Afar Gets the Last Laugh

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NBC News: Putin Still Trying to Figure Out Trump’s Brain

by DeidreBarreto Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Bill Neely of NBC News reports on Vladimir Putin’s efforts to understand the psyche of America’s reality-show president:

A dossier on Donald Trump’s psychological makeup is being prepared for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Among its preliminary conclusions is that the new American leader is a risk-taker who can be naïve, according to a senior Kremlin adviser.

….Former Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Fedorov told NBC News…”Very serious preparatory work is going on in the Kremlin, including a paper — seven pages — describing a psychological portrait of Trump, especially based on this last two to three months, and the last weeks.”

….Putin’s government is growing increasingly concerned about Trump’s battles in Washington, according to Fedorov and former lawmaker Sergei Markov, who remains well-connected at the Kremlin. Fedorov added that Trump’s “constant battle with the mass media” was “worrying us.” The U.S. president “is dancing on thin ice,” he said. “It’s a risky game.”

A former prime minister under Putin said the Kremlin is taking no pleasure at Trump’s struggles. “Absolutely not — not laughing,” Mikhail Kasyanov said. “The situation is very serious and the whole of Putin’s team, they are nervous.” Many in the Kremlin believe hardliners in America — in Congress and the military — want to sabotage the president and his plans for better ties with Russia.

From Putin’s point of view, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Trump can’t control himself. Putin could literally publish his dossier on his Facebook page and it wouldn’t matter. Just as he did in the debates, when Hillary Clinton baited him in the most obvious ways, Trump will respond to provocations the way he always responds.

That’s also the bad news, of course: Trump can’t control himself. He lives in a delusionary world where everything is going great and the White House is a finely tuned machine. This divorce from reality is likely to become ever more cavernous as time goes on, and there’s no telling how long it will be until this produces a disaster of some kind. Eventually it’s going to become clear that trying to run the US government the same way he ran his business—Trump acting as the showman/marketing genius, while professional managers keep the gears turning—isn’t producing any results here in consensus reality. And then the whole delusionary edifice will come tumbling down.

But when? Next week? Next year? Whenever the economy turns down? There’s no telling. Putin better keep that dossier constantly updated.

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NBC News: Putin Still Trying to Figure Out Trump’s Brain

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Trump Pals Have a Plan For Lifting Sanctions on Russia

by IlanaOtt24 Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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The president’s friends have a proposal for him:

A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.

Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

….Mr. Cohen said Mr. Sater had given him the written proposal in a sealed envelope. When Mr. Cohen met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in early February, he said, he left the proposal in Mr. Flynn’s office. Mr. Cohen said he was waiting for a response when Mr. Flynn was forced from his post. Now Mr. Cohen, Mr. Sater and Mr. Artemenko are hoping a new national security adviser will take up their cause. On Friday the president wrote on Twitter that he had four new candidates for the job.

The “Ukranian lawmaker” is a pro-Putin opponent of the current regime in Ukraine. Sater is, um, a guy with an interesting background: “mafia linked,” spent some time in prison, worked as an FBI informant, and spent several years as a close business associate of Donald J. Trump. Oh, and Sater was born in Russia and continues to have lots of contacts there.

And Cohen? Well, he’s the guy who could actually get inside the White House and deliver the letter. You remember Michael Cohen, don’t you?

Every time we turn around, there’s something new linking Trump to Russia. Just a few days ago, FBI Director James Comey briefed the Senate Intelligence committee about the ongoing investigation of Team Trump and its ties to Russia, and all the chatter afterward was about how the senators seemed kind of shaken by what they heard.

Who knows? Maybe it all turns out to be nothing. But there sure is a lot of smoke out there. It’s hard to believe there isn’t a fire too.

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Trump Pals Have a Plan For Lifting Sanctions on Russia

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Trump’s Thin Skin Is Keeping Him From Staffing the Federal Government

by CameronWand Posted on February 19, 2017

Mother Jones

Rex Tillerson’s choice of Elliott Abrams to be his deputy at the State Department was vetoed by the White House. Abrams had once said some bad things about Donald Trump, so he was out. The New York Times reports on what this means:

Mr. Trump remains fixated on the campaign as he applies a loyalty test to some prospective officials….Six of the 15 statutory cabinet secretaries are still awaiting Senate confirmation as Democrats nearly uniformly oppose almost all of the president’s choices.

….It is not just Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson who has no deputy secretary, much less Trump-appointed under secretaries or assistant secretaries. Neither do the heads of the Treasury Department, the Education Department or any of the other cabinet departments. Only three of 15 nominees have been named for deputy secretary positions. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has a deputy only because he kept the one left over from President Barack Obama’s administration.

Yes, Democrats are slow-walking Trump’s cabinet choices. You can decide for yourself if this is justified. But it’s the deputies who often really run things, and Trump has only managed to name three out of 15 candidates. After he interviewed all those cabinet nominees, I guess he got bored.

In other words, it’s not Democrats who are holding up the rest of government. The problem is that Trump has no idea what he’s doing, and his staff is too busy with Trump’s thin skin and chaotic management style to find qualified deputies that are acceptable to him. After the debacle with his National Security Advisor, I imagine this has gotten even harder. You could almost feel qualified conservatives backing away from Trumpland as that shitshow played out.

Trump has always had a pretty small set of people acceptable to him, and now a shrinking number of experienced players are finding Trump acceptable to them. This doesn’t bode well for basic management of government business, let alone the “change for the ages” that he promised last night.

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Trump’s Thin Skin Is Keeping Him From Staffing the Federal Government

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Premiere Episode of Trump Show Disappoints With Sluggish Pacing and Dated Material

by GenevieveVonwill Posted on February 19, 2017

Mother Jones

Today’s episode of the Trump Show was disappointing. It started late, it was only 30 minutes long, and much of it was read off a teleprompter. A few miscellaneous comments:

No tie! Truly, Trump is a man of the people.
The first five minutes is dedicated solely to trashing the media. He says he wants to speak directly to The People without the filter of fake news. “When the media lies, I won’t let them get away with it.”
This is all done in service of a speech carried live and commercial-free by all three cable news channels.
The White House is running “smoothly, very smoothly.”
He wants to bring back mining jobs for “clean, very clean coal.” I’m sensing a rhetorical trend here.
He reprises several of his greatest hits: His Obamacare replacement will provide much better health care at a much lower cost. No more jobs are going to be sent overseas. He’s going to slap a 35 percent tax on goods sent back here. And he still wants a “trillion dollar” infrastructure plan.
Jobs are already “pouring back in” to the country.
“Not one network will show the crowd,” he says at the exact moment the pool camera pulls back to show the crowd.
He says he got the price of Air Force One down by a billion dollars. When did that happen? Let’s google a bit…ah. It’s just your basic Trump bullshit. The CEO of Boeing has agreed to keep the price tag below $4 billion for a project that’s currently estimated to cost between $3.2 billion and $3.7 billion. Nice work, Donald.
He also got the price of the F-35 down by “hundreds of billions” dollars. It’s actually hundreds of millions, but who’s counting? And it was a price reduction that was already in the works before Trump ever got involved.
He says Obama was letting immigrants into the country with “no vetting, no nothing.” This is just a ridiculous lie.

Meh. I doubt this rally did much for him. Even his most fervent supporters are starting to figure out that Trump isn’t accomplishing a whole lot. Besides, how often can he go back to this well? Is he going to hold a pep rally every month? If he does, he better start coming up with some new material.

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Premiere Episode of Trump Show Disappoints With Sluggish Pacing and Dated Material

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NSC Aide Fired, Now Owes Us Account of Trump Call to Mexico’s President

by BonnyEtter Posted on February 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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Now is the winter of our discontent:

The White House abruptly dismissed a senior National Security Council aide on Friday….The aide, Craig Deare, was serving as the NSC’s senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Earlier in the week, at a private, off-the-record roundtable hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center for a group of about two dozen scholars, Deare harshly criticized the president and his chief strategist Steve Bannon and railed against the dysfunction paralyzing the Trump White House, according to a source familiar with the situation.

He complained in particular that senior national security aides do not have access to the president — and gave a detailed and embarrassing readout of Trump’s call with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto.

I can’t fault Trump for firing Deare. Then again, I also can’t fault Deare for going berserk. Sometimes a marriage just doesn’t work.

However, now that Deare is out of a job, perhaps he’d like to share his detailed and embarrassing readout of that Mexico conversation? My email address is below.

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NSC Aide Fired, Now Owes Us Account of Trump Call to Mexico’s President

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Jam the courts, blow the whistles, shut down the kitchen: Here are The Resistance’s latest strategies

by TereseHeathersha Posted on February 17, 2017

In the aftermath of America’s Most Baffling Press Conference, let’s cut to the chase: People are calling out Trump and his administration in meaningful, productive ways all across the land. Here’s what went down:

Despite unprecedented calls from EPA employees for senators to block his confirmation and a judge’s order to release years of emails with fossil fuel industry figures, Scott Pruitt is now EPA administrator. Are you enraged? Will you be in Boston this weekend? That’s something else to be upset about, but bear with us: Thousands of scientists are in town for the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference. On Feb. 19, scientists and their allies will hold a rally in Copley Square to protest the Trump administration’s anti-science rhetoric and policies.

If you’re trying to reach anyone in the Department of Energy, you might have a tough time of it, because their phone directory was taken offline on Thursday morning. Cool! Anyway, California Rep. Ted Lieu and Virginia Rep. Don Beyer have published a guide for whistleblowers as a show of strength against the Trump administration’s “strapp[ing] a muzzle on federal agencies.” The Union of Concerned Scientists also released a guide to help scientists bring important information to the public discreetly and securely. Environmental science and public health shouldn’t be political, and these guides are a means to protect them.

Earthjustice filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux in a new attempt to block construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, which is already underway. A bit of good news for the anti-pipeline movement: The hearing may be expedited.

On Feb. 16, the American food industry may have looked a little … thin. That’s because immigrants across the United States took the day off to show what an America that operates on deportations and immigration bans would look like. (Spoiler: It doesn’t have a lot of food.) In case you were wondering if Washington would notice (via The New York Times): “The Pentagon warned its employees that a number of its food concessions, including Sbarro’s [sic], Starbucks, and Taco Bell, were closed because immigrant employees had stayed home and that they could expect longer lines at restaurants that were open.”

And in response to an ongoing rash of deportations, a coalition of Mexican lawmakers under the name Monarca is aiming to protect Mexican immigrants by exploiting the U.S. legal system’s greatest weakness: It’s a bureaucratic nightmare that’s already heavily backlogged!

And, ICYMI on Grist:

The movement to divest from Dakota Access is growing fast.
Big name Republicans are taking a carbon tax plan to the White House.

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Jam the courts, blow the whistles, shut down the kitchen: Here are The Resistance’s latest strategies

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