Post date • MONDAY, MAY 1
In the span of one weekend, a man who usurped the office of the president of the United States with the assistance of this nation’s most powerful and venomous enemy . . . has himself attacked the structure of our Senate and our House of Representatives because their rules are archaic and they inconvenience him; has himself dismissed the two-party system because he believes it is “obstructionist”; has himself attacked the constitutionally protected freedom of the press because the media has repeatedly caught him lying; has himself let his chief of staff confirm that he may try to eradicate those freedoms of speech and yours.
In sum, this man has himself so endangered the freedoms and the liberties of this country that if anyone does not understand that they and you and I and every individual in this country, and everything we love, and everything for which every American soldier has ever fought, all of it, is under attack, right now, by this crypto-fascist Trump—if they do not see that their freedoms hang by a thread, they are sheep headed to the slaughter—or collaborators leading the rest of us there—
For the sake of Trump.
“‘The failing New York Times has disgraced the media world,’” Jon Karl of ABC said, reading Trump’s tweet from March 30. “‘Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?’” To Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, Mr. Karl continued, “That would require, as I understand it, a constitutional amendment. Is he really going to pursue that? Is that something he wants to pursue?”
And Priebus answered, “I think it’s something that we’ve looked at. And how that gets executed or whether that goes anywhere is a different story. But when you have articles out there that have no basis or fact and we’re sitting here on 24/7 cable companies writing stories about constant contacts with Russia and all these other matters that have no basis at all . . .”
Here Mr. Karl interrupted, to refocus Priebus on whether or not Trump should be able to sue The New York Times. Priebus replied: “And I already answered the question. I said this is something that is being looked at.”
Wrong goddamned answer. The correct answer is that freedom of speech is the purpose of the United States of America. And every time this country’s government has tried to alter that fact, or has ignored it in the slightest, it has met with disaster. The correct answer is that constitutional change to limit free speech would not just be a step on a slippery slope, but would be putting the entire nation in an eighteen-wheeler and driving it full-speed down that slippery slope. The correct answer is never. Never!
Do not be sidetracked by Priebus’s milquetoast disclaimer about “whether that goes anywhere.” Do not be reassured that, at its worst, this so-called government would only attack the news media. Do not “settle down” because a constitutional amendment is the longest of long shots; this is about the threat, the chilling effect, as much as the execution. Priebus started by saying, “It’s something that we’ve looked at,” and then upgraded the threat to the present tense by saying, “This is something that is being looked at.”
For the sake of Trump.
If—as Trump first suggested more than fourteen months ago—“We’re going to open up those libel laws”—it would not be The New York Times or ABC News that would be the victims; it would be you. The New York Times and ABC News and the like could, even in those nightmare scenarios, be able to defend themselves legally—at least for a time.
Would you?
If the libel laws were “opened up”—if writing or publishing a story the government found was merely inaccurate now subjected the writer or publisher to a libel lawsuit, with financial damages—or worse—exactly who would be a writer or a publisher? Would writing a blog post be writing or publishing? Would sending a tweet be writing or publishing? Would speaking at a protest be writing or publishing? Armed with changed libel laws, Trump’s target would be you. What he would stop would not be a newspaper article or a cable news story that his supporters would never read, nor see, nor believe even if they were forced to do so. What he would stop would be dissent. What he would create—what his attacks on the media on Twitter, and at that white nationalist circle jerk in Pennsylvania Saturday night; what that little rat Priebus was getting at—was invoking fear inside you, a hesitation before you protested or spoke out or wrote or tweeted or posted a comment. That moment in which you ask yourself, “Is this going to get me sued?”
It has worked for Trump all his life. Family members, ex-wives, business contacts, customers, the suckers of Trump University. Lawsuit after lawsuit. The blight of financial ruin if you violated the nondisclosure clause. That is how Trump has gotten away with nearly every crooked deal and every broken contract and every threat to the middle wife that nobody talks about anymore, because if she says anything, she and her Trump child get cut off or sued. That’s what Trump and his minions like Priebus want for America.
Before you criticize—even if every fact is on your side—they want an America in which a voice inside your head screams: Remember that the government could sue you for libel, and keep you in court, with lawyers, for years, indefinitely—and even if you prevailed, the government could ruin your life, erase your savings, destroy your family, and that’s if you win.
And as you envision that nightmare, something else not to be missed in the snarling little throwaway comment by Trump’s toady Mr. Priebus: what was the first example he gave, of what kind of free speech needs to be erased? You know, for the sake of Trump?
Which topic just happened to come up when phrases like “change libel laws” and “constitutional amendment” were invoked? The first story to which the Trump brand of fascism turns, the first story about which they want to criminalize dissent, is the Trump connection to the Russians. And that just happens to come up as Trump invites the murderous strongman of the Philippines, this pig Duterte, to the White House. Duterte, who said last year, “Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch.”
Coincidences, no doubt.
“You look at the rules of the Senate, even the rules of the House,” Trump said on Fox on Saturday. “It’s really a bad thing for the country, in my opinion. They’re archaic rules. And maybe at some point we’re going to have to take those rules on, because, for the good of the nation, things are going to have to be different. You can’t go through a process like this. It’s not fair. It forces you to make bad decisions.”
And now we change the rules of the House and the Senate. Because they don’t move fast enough for the sake of Trump. Because the bureaucratic delay—built into our system by the Founding Fathers to prevent despots or foreigners from changing our way of life overnight—is keeping Trump from changing our way of life overnight.
Oh, and that two-party system, the right of the opposition to exist? That has to be changed, too, for the sake of Trump. “I also learned, and this is very sad, because we have a country that we have to take care of,” he said on CBS. “The Democrats have been totally obstructionist. Chuck Schumer has turned out to be a bad leader. He’s a bad leader for the country. And the Democrats are extremely obstructionist. All they do is obstruct . . . and you know what that’s hurting? It’s hurting the country.”
Change the House and Senate rules for the sake of Trump.
Get rid of the rights of the Senate minority—even if they represent the rights of the majority of voters in the last election—for the sake of Trump.
Instill the fear that to speak or write or tweet or ask, “What is this with Russia?” will get you sued for libel—for the sake of Trump.
This man, already, as of 102 days in office, the worst president in the history of the United States, already the symbol of betrayal and treachery and the willingness to whore himself out to whichever foreign nation will give him a “win”—in the media or at the ballot box—this pitiful excuse for a man is a thug bent on destroying the freedoms of this country as we know them, and, God damn it, we are not going to let him do it.
Post date • TUESDAY, MAY 2
On Russia, Trump appears to be running out of excuses. He may also be running out of time. He is not, however, running out of panic.
Two developments this week underscore that. The first involves one of those excuses, and . . . you guys are kidding, right? General Michael Flynn, who campaigned for Trump, who spoke at Trump’s convention, who guided the formation of Trump’s policy on Russia, who was briefing the Russian ambassador while on Trump’s transition team, who Kellyanne Conway said still had Trump’s full confidence as of four p.m. on February 13, who resigned as Trump’s national security adviser at ten p.m. on February 13, who is—in the best-case scenario—guilty only of lying to Trump’s vice president, who has offered to testify, somewhere, presumably against Trump, in exchange for immunity . . . He’s Obama’s fault.
Uh-huh.
“I just heard where General Flynn got his clearance from the Obama administration,” Trump told CBS. “When he went to Russia, it was 2015 and he was on the Obama clearance. When General Flynn came to us, as you now know, he already had the highest clearance you can have.”
Go on.
“They’re so devastated because this only came up two days ago . . . I watched one of your other competitors and they were devastated by this news, because you know what? That kills them. That’s the end of that subject.”
And then there was a ruling. And the ruling said Flynn wasn’t my fault. And the ruling also said he was Obama’s fault. And so you can’t ever talk about Russia again. Because the ruling is final. It’s a ruling. And China ate my homework.
What are you, six?
Trump—Mr. Business, Mr. Extreme Vetting, Mr. Full Confidence in Flynn—has just admitted that when he brought Flynn on, he and his entire team, his government-in-waiting, had no idea whether or not Flynn had the necessary national security clearance to become national security adviser. Although he knows Flynn traveled to Russia in 2015, on the payroll of Kremlin propagandists, to sit alongside Vladimir Putin, at the same table with Jill Stein, and he knows that Flynn was director of national intelligence until Obama fired him, he seems to think the idea that Flynn had gotten security clearance while Obama was president means that anything Flynn did after Obama fired him is somehow Obama’s fault.
Trump also believes—literally believes—that the fact that Flynn worked for the government while Obama was president somehow ends the story of the growing evidence of his campaign’s connections to the Russian interference with the 2016 election. “That . . . kills . . . them,” he said. “That’s the end of that subject.”
And this remarkable overconfidence dovetails with the sudden return to Trump’s early campaign pledge to change the Constitution so he can sue anybody who writes a news story he doesn’t like. When his henchman Reince Priebus went on ABC’s This Week, the first story Priebus used as an example of media irresponsibility—the only story Priebus used as an example of media irresponsibility—was that same saga of the Trump campaign and Russia.
I would leave it to John Dean or a historian to analyze the twelve stages of a massive political cover-up. But somewhere in them there has to be this succession of emotions: first comes utter panic at some development that might not be publicly visible, followed by a complete rationalization that you had managed to blame an outside party for it and were now and forever free, followed, in turn, by a public declaration that the subject was now closed.
We saw this with Watergate. “I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end,” said Richard Nixon in his 1974 State of the Union address. “One year of Watergate is enough!” The Republicans applauded, and Nixon almost smiled, and—a note to Trump—less than two weeks later, the House voted 410–4 to authorize the Judiciary Committee to investigate impeachment charges against Nixon.
If we are in the “utter panic at some development that might not be publicly visible” stage—what has caused it? Shoes continue to drop at a steady pace. Two of the shoes belong to Sebastian Gorka—reported to be leaving the White House. He was the guy who came up through the Fox News/Breitbart pipeline who showed up at the inaugural ball as an incoming Trump national security aide, wearing what might—or what might not—have been the ceremonial medal of a Hungarian group that was pro-Nazi during World War II. More pertinently, he was one of Trump’s loudest defenders about Russia.
Meanwhile, there is also a Russian shoe. A Russian national named Peter Yuryevich Levashov has been indicted on eight counts in Connecticut for, according to the Justice Department, “alleged operation of the Kelihos botnet—a global network of tens of thousands of infected computers, which he allegedly used to facilitate malicious activities . . .” The former member of the British Parliament Louise Mensch—who beat all of American media by five months to the story that the Justice Department had gotten a FISA Court order relating to Trump’s associates—has now posted, “Sources linked to the intelligence community say it is believed that a Russian hacker of the election, Pyotr Levashov, was paid directly by Boris Epshteyn on behalf of both Trump and the FSB.”
Pyotr Levashov! Why, that’s Peter Levashov’s name!
The FSB is one of the many Russian spy agencies. Epshteyn, who has denied both the allegations and the assertions that he is an FSB agent, is the Russian-born former Trump communications team member who just left the White House.
Mensch also quotes sources who say that the botnet that Levashov operated had a “command and control center” in Trump Tower.
And yes, with Mensch, and the British agent Christopher Steele, of the Steele dossier, and the British newspaper The Guardian leading world coverage of this story—and the BBC reporter Paul Wood, who isn’t far behind—yes, the British just may be your cousin who is just far enough away to see clearly that your girlfriend or boyfriend is no good and you need to get them out of your life immediately.
And then there is a shoe I wouldn’t ordinarily mention.
It is a story from a man named Claude Taylor, who identifies himself on Twitter as a “Veteran of three presidential campaigns, served on White House staff (Clinton).” He tweeted on Friday, “This just in from a source with knowledge of Comey’s investigation. ‘two grand juries have convened and I know that one is almost complete.’” Thin gruel under ordinary circumstances . . .
But Taylor’s seeming bombshell was then retweeted by a man named Rick Wilson, with just one word added: “Same.” Wilson is not just not a Democrat, as Taylor is, he is a former Rudy Giuliani adman and adviser, he dreamed up the awful ad linking Georgia senator Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden in 2002, and he tied then Senator Barack Obama to Reverend Jeremiah Wright in 2007.
Take Wilson and Taylor for whatever you think they are worth, but I am not ready to dismiss them, especially not after Taylor came back on Sunday to describe one of the alleged grand juries as having supposedly focused on violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, RICO racketeering, and the Russians and Trump Tower.
Are there grand juries ready to hand up, hand down, or hand out indictments?
I would not dare claim to know. But I do know what I see: Trump—at escalated levels of panic. Trump—floating a constitutional amendment that would keep us from talking about his Russia problem! Trump at the point of pretending that a not very interesting fact about General Michael Flynn and his security clearance, which Trump should’ve known and anybody who had ever thought about it could probably have guessed, is somehow the final judgment on his Russia problem, that it “kills” those covering his Russia problem, and concludes for all time any discussion of his Russia problem—quoting him again about his Russia problem: “That’s the end of that subject.”
I do not dare to claim to know the whole story of Trump and Russia. But I willingly dare to claim that this is not the end of that subject.
Post date • WEDNESDAY, MAY 3
This is a plea from what’s left of the United States to the rest of the free world, specifically to the news media of the rest of the free world. Please—what happened in Berlin to Ivanka Trump has to happen everywhere any of the Trumps or the secretary of state or the vice president or anybody else connected to this misbegotten, evil man stops long enough to take questions.
Our media has been all but frozen out, replaced by propaganda outlets where nothing, no matter how outlandish or un-American—not even attacks on the very freedom of speech under which they operate—gets a follow-up question. On those few occasions when there is an opportunity to state that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the United States and the free world, our media has largely choked. It asks him questions not designed to be challenging to his fact-free worldview, but designed to be played on television. Or it self-censors, overcome at the crucial moment by desperate, stupid, and ultimately pointless attempts to, as a source at one cable outfit reportedly put it, “focus on Trump voters.”
Last Saturday, Trump compared immigrants to “snakes.” He called the rules of the Senate and the House “archaic.” His chief of staff would, the next morning, propose a constitutional attack on the First Amendment. He invited the murderous strongman of the Philippines to the White House. He held a rally apparently openly attended by white nationalists.
And after all that, this was the headline in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer (right under “Winner of 20 Pulitzer Prizes”): “Touting Progress.” Touting progress? Touting fascism!
We here, the liberal media, Trump’s “Fake News”—we pretend this is just another presidency and just another difference of opinion. Even The New York Times. As Robert Duvall called it in the movie Network, “The holy goddamn New York Times.” The same morning: “Remaking the Presidency, Trump Has Changed, Too. Expanding Power and Shunning Norms, Yet Adapting to Realities, After 100 Days.”
The hell he has! Adapting to what realities? As that newspaper hit the streets, his spokesman was talking about a constitutional libel amendment so that—as Trump put it eleven months before his inauguration—“we can sue them and win lots of money.”
In interviews preceding his hundredth day in office, Trump showed a succession of reporters the county-by-county map of his election—five months after that election—and at least half-seriously suggested to a reporter from The Washington Post that the paper print the map, now, on its front page. Instead of an article asking how crazy anybody who would do such a thing would have to be, this became an anecdote for the Washington Post reporter to joke about much later, on television.
Trump told a Washington Examiner reporter about his admiration for Andrew Jackson and how Jackson “was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’” Jackson left the presidency twenty-eight years before the Civil War started, and in fact had nearly precipitated a civil war thirty-two years before it started. Trump couldn’t have been more wrong about him if he had claimed Jackson rode to his inauguration in an automobile. And yet the American news media continues to treat Donald Trump as just another story, as the wacky neighbor who just happens to have nukes, and it continues to treat the Trump Presidential Crime Family as just another collection of White House relatives.
So again, my plea to the journalists of the world: Do what Miriam Meckel, the editor in-chief of a German business magazine, did. “You’re the first daughter of the United States,” began Ms. Meckel as she moderated a business panel featuring Ivanka Trump, “The German audience is not that familiar with the concept of a First Daughter. I’d like to ask you, what is your role, and who are you representing? Your father as president of the United States? The American people? Or your business?”
Ms. Trump, whose confused-beauty-pageant-contestant-grade stupidity has largely been hidden from the American audience, stumbled through her answer. Incredibly, she then began to laud her father’s treatment of women. “I’m very proud of my father’s advocacy . . . He’s been a tremendous champion of supporting families, and enabling them to thrive . . .”
The crowd began to hiss, boo, and make other verbal equivalents of eye-rolling.
“You hear the reaction from the audience,” moderator Meckel observed. “I need to address one more point. Some attitudes toward women your father has displayed in former times might leave one questioning whether he’s such an empowerer for women . . .” Since Trump’s election, no one in this country has asked a question that pointed or that realistic or that challenging of him or his spawn or his key appointees, and Miriam Meckel asked two of them.
“I’ve certainly heard the criticism from the media,” Ivanka Trump replied, again startled by reality and sounding surprisingly like her father, “that’s been perpetuated.” Miriam Meckel deserves all the Pulitzer Prizes, the Murrow Awards, the Cronkite Awards, the Emmys, the Peabodys, and any other trophy we can hand her. And she and other reporters and editors and just other citizens in Germany or England or France, or those foreign correspondents who are reporting from the United States for the BBC or Agence France-Presse or the Aardvark Daily of Wellington, New Zealand—or anyone who is anywhere that members of this family or this government might not be able to elude the media—you need to keep asking pointed, doubtful, skeptical questions that our reporters are too afraid to ask.
Ask Trump if he’s ever had a CAT scan. Ask Trump if he’s experiencing headaches or blurred vision or hallucinations. Ask Rex Tillerson if he’s worried that evidence continues to mount connecting his boss’s campaign to Russian electoral hacking while his boss has resumed blaming China. Ask UN Ambassador Nikki Haley if it’s a problem that Trump invited Duterte to the White House and congratulated Erdoğan on destroying democracy in Turkey. Ask any of the Trump children why their father has simultaneously enraged North Korea and South Korea and China. Ask them about the Carl Vinson Armada Bluff, and ask them about the conflation of Kim Jong-un with Kim Jong-il, and ask them about the White House education story on Snapchat that misspelled the word “Education,” and ask them about how the First Lady seemingly had to physically nudge Trump to put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. Or take anything from that crazy Associated Press interview where he said off the record that he watched CNN and then said on the record, two minutes later, that he never watched CNN—and ask him! Or that crazy Reuters interview where he admitted that he thought life as president would be easier than being a seventy-year-old con man who inherited his money from his daddy!—and ask him! Or take that crazy rally in Pennsylvania where he called immigrants “snakes,” when his own grandparents were immigrants and his mother was an immigrant and two of his three wives have been immigrants and four of his five kids are the children of an immigrant—and ask him!
Ask him! For God’s sake, ask him. Because the media of this country is too terrified of being accused of not being balanced to come out and state the obvious: that emotionally, the president is not at all balanced! And that while all of our lives depend on whether he gets less crazy or more crazy, apparently it is no longer worth the risk to American reporters to ask just how crazy he is at this moment!
Post date • THURSDAY, MAY 4
The well-dressed man in the neatly trimmed beard was one of the last of the 558 people to testify to the commission. He had been chosen by his colleagues to represent them all, and none of them disavowed what he said—nor ever would. His colleagues had been willing to paralyze the nation, to not just affect at least 10 percent of the economy but to, at best, inconvenience and, at worst, literally threaten the lives of virtually all of its citizens. No matter what entreaties had been made to them—no matter what evidence of inhumanity had been presented, no matter the pleas and protestations, no matter the “moving spectacle of horrors,” as one of their opponents termed it—they would not listen. They had a mandate to protect what their side believed.
And their side had the money. And then the well-dressed man in the neatly trimmed beard said something that you can still find in the history books today. Of the victims of the inhumanity he and his moneyed colleagues were inflicting, he testified, “These men don’t suffer! Why, hell, half of them don’t even speak English.”
The man was named George F. Baer, and he was the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. His testimony was to the first real public hearing about the hellish, murderous virtual slavery facing the coal miners of this nation, called the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission.
This was in the year 1903. In Pennsylvania. The miners worked ten hours a day, six days a week, for which they would be paid $2.75 an hour. The boys who worked in the mines made thirteen cents per hour. And George F. Baer was—as were all the moneyed men of the coal and railroad industries—defending this. Baer had become their spokesman because a letter he had written had leaked and been published. “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men of property to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country . . .”
This made him a hero.
He would defend the millionaires who sent boys of twelve and eleven and ten and nine and eight years old to straddle a conveyor on which traveled the shale their fathers were sending up from the pits half a mile below the surface. They literally broke up the oversize pieces. Or, if they did it wrong, the oversize pieces would break them up and, as the commission heard, could easily take off a boy’s hand or arm or leg. For thirteen cents an hour.
“These men don’t suffer! Why, hell, half of them don’t even speak English.”
I have been thinking a lot lately of George F. Baer and the other demons of the 1902 coal strike. I hope there is a hell solely for people like them. They exist in all generations, their view of man’s duty to other men twisted and perverted and unimaginable to nearly all of us—and roundly cheered by the sadistic and the money-obsessed and the comfortable. They exist today. They are the people like Donald Trump. And Paul Ryan. And the others involved in the repeal of the often ineffective, far-from-finished first step toward establishing the absolute and inalienable right of every man woman and child in this country to have their health minimally protected through the intervention of the government, that first step they have derisively called Obamacare.
Trump and his ilk look at the transplant recipients who gained new life under it, and will now have no means of paying for the drugs to keep themselves alive, and they shrug and congratulate themselves on tax cuts for themselves. Trump and his ilk look at the special-needs kids who will have no insurance and see only “liberal tears.” Trump and his ilk will look at the as-yet-uncountable number of poor people who will die because of the greed of the rich, and they will celebrate what they actually believe is a victory. These men don’t suffer! Why, hell, half of them don’t even vote Republican.
George F. Baer died 103 years and one month ago, and I hope he’s still suffering somewhere. All that he knew—the railroad industry and the coal industry that used to dominate this nation—it’s all gone. Without the government, there would be no train service in this country. And coal mining is an afterthought, no matter Trump’s false promises. And child labor is, in retrospect, impossible to believe. But man’s inhumanity to man lives on, in Donald Trump. And Paul Ryan. And in every other so-called human being who voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Be heartbroken. Be terrified. Be angry. But mostly, be vengeful—quietly, persistently, permanently vengeful. To Trump and Ryan and every man and woman who voted for this medieval act, this barbarism: we know your names, we will destroy your careers, we will make you suffer, and—like George F. Baer and the mine owners—if any of the religions are correct, future generations will comfort themselves and move forward driven in part by the comfort of knowing that you, Paul Ryan, and you, Donald Trump, will burn in hell.
Post date • MONDAY, MAY 8
Sally Yates, American hero.
A little oversimplistic. And in some respects, damning the American government with faint praise. Because all she has testified to the Senate that she did, that she said, that happened to her, used to be the minimum standard for public servants in this country, but now, in the era of Trump, she stands out like a champion. You are the goddamned president of the goddamned United States and your acting attorney general tells your White House counsel that your national security adviser “essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians” and “you don’t want [him] to be in a position where the Russians have leverage over him”—and you . . . fire the acting attorney general? Not the national security adviser. You fire the acting attorney general? The person warning you that a man charged with giving you arguably the most important advice in the world—what to do to keep this nation secure from international threat—is ripe for blackmailing by this country’s primary national enemy. A person of extreme importance in our White House, who can influence you, who could influence you on behalf of the Russians—and you fire her and keep him?
Which are you? An idiot? Or a traitor?
What Sally Yates testified to; what Jim Clapper testified to; the pathetic redirections and sad obfuscations of Chuck Grassley and John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and the other Republican Trumpian lapdogs desperate to change the subject, desperate to talk about “unmasking”—the Trump-Russia equivalent of saying that the true victim of Watergate was Richard Nixon, because those audiotapes of him betraying democracy made him sound bad, because people got to hear him swearing all those expletives deleted—all that was important.
But the meat of that Senate committee hearing was the timeline . . . the cynical, disloyal, amoral timeline. November 10: President Obama warns Trump not to make Flynn his national security adviser. NBC reports Trump explains that he thinks Obama is kidding. January 26: Acting Attorney General Yates warns the White House that National Security Adviser Flynn has been compromised by the Russians, does so in order that the White House can take action. January 27: Yates goes back and repeats to White House Counsel McGahn that Flynn’s been compromised, could be blackmailed by the Russians, has lied to other White House officials; that the Russians know about the conversations with Flynn. January 30: Trump fires Yates, claiming he is doing so because she would not defend his Muslim ban in court. January 31: Trump does not fire Flynn. February 1: Trump still does not fire Flynn. February 2: same. February 3: same. The fourth. The fifth. The sixth. Seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth: the same. February 13: The Washington Post breaks the story of the Yates warning that Flynn has been compromised by the Russians and the Russians could be blackmailing the man who tells the president how to preserve our country from destruction by a foreign power, and only then is Flynn forced out.
If the Post had not broken the story, how long would Flynn have remained in this White House? Iago, pouring whatever lies the Russians might be blackmailing him into telling into the ears of Trump. Even if Trump is somehow innocent of everything implied and inferred about collusion with Russia, he is not innocent of choosing a Russian stooge, a Russian vessel like Flynn, and defending him to the last, even to the point of veiled threats. Like the one just hours before that hearing began: Trump tweeted, “Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel.”
As Congressman Ted Lieu of California noted, there is a law—18 U.S. Code 1512—which defines “intimidation” of a witness to “influence” testimony in an “official proceeding” as a federal crime, the perpetrator of which “shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.” Trump chose Michael Flynn, a blackmailing victim waiting to happen, over Sally Yates, an honest American public servant, on January 26, and he has chosen Flynn and smeared Yates every day since. And today he adds intimidation—possibly criminal intimidation—to the list.
Once again: if The Washington Post had not broken the story, how long would Flynn have remained on the job? He’d still be there now, wouldn’t he?
Potentially being blackmailed by the Russians. To influence the president.
It is treachery of the highest order, and no matter who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer, our country is not safe in the hands of these idiots, and Trump and all of them must go, and must go now.
Post date • TUESDAY, MAY 9
Follow the money.
Follow, say, a hundred million dollars as it reportedly went from Russia to Trump in 2014.
“Follow the money” is the most famous line in political history, said by Deep Throat to Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men. And of course, Deep Throat never said it. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t true, then or now. Then it was true—as we investigated a corrupt president’s attempt to subvert the two-party system, but he was dumb enough to leave a paper trail of endorsed checks. Now it is true—as we investigate precisely how much Russia and Donald Trump may have subverted our 2016 election exactly six months ago, and he and his son were perhaps dumb enough to leave a verbal record of how Russians allegedly gave them a hundred million dollars.
Follow. The. Money.
James Dodson is a golf writer. An expert. The coauthor of Arnold Palmer’s autobiography. And over the weekend he was featured on the regular sports segment on the Boston Public Radio station WBUR, where he recounted being invited to play golf with Trump at Trump’s new club in Charlotte, North Carolina, three years ago, in 2014, to play with Trump and Eric Trump, and to immediately not just wonder how Trump was financing all his golf courses, when the world of golf never really recovered from the 2008 recession, but to ask him how: “When I first met him I asked him how he was—you know, this is the journalist in me—I said, ‘What are you using to pay for these courses?’ And he just sort of tossed off that he had access to a hundred million dollars.”
Donald Trump had “access to” a hundred million dollars, for what James Dodson knew was one of the diciest investments in the world? Luxury golf courses? Three years ago? That wasn’t all of it. Dodson says he was paired with Eric Trump for the first nine holes. “So when I got in the cart with Eric, as we were setting off, I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks—because of the recession, the Great Recession—have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.’”
You still have time to make your guess—and grab your popcorn.
“And this is what he said. He said, ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’” Donald Trump boasting to a golf writer that he alone had “access” to $100 million to invest in golf courses, and Eric Trump explaining that “we have all the funding we need out of Russia” and “we just go there all the time.”
And you and I are listening to the ground and sniffing the wind for evidence that the reported possible Trump-Russia grand jury met in the Eastern District of Virginia today. And we are parsing the new testimony of the former acting attorney general, who tried to warn Trump about the treachery of General Michael Flynn. And we are sifting through the claim that there are anywhere from twenty-eight to forty-two names on the FBI Trump-Russia target list. And while we’re expending all that energy, between them, Donald and his son Moron Twin Number 2 may have told a golf writer at a Trump golf course (my God, it’s always him and some goddamned golf course) that as of three years ago, the Russians gave them a hundred million dollars.
Follow the money. I mean, at minimum, if this is true, Eric Trump makes his father out to be a liar. February 7, Trump tweets, “I don’t know Putin, have no deals in Russia . . .” Is this the part where we take him seriously but not literally?
That he thinks of a Russian-funded golf course in Charlotte not as a “deal in Russia” but as a “deal in North Carolina”?
In addition to all the non-mainstream-media coverage of what Comey is doing behind the scenes, and how many FISA warrants were granted last year, and what’s up with the Russian company Alfa-Bank and its disputed links to computers inside Trump Tower . . . there is just as much media coverage of this labyrinth of financial connections between Trump and Russia. Like the old (but true) cliché goes, they didn’t send Al Capone to jail for killing people—they sent him to jail for cheating on his tax returns. And oh, by the way, a respected golf writer says Donald Trump and Eric Trump told him three years ago that the Russians gave them a hundred million dollars. Which might have inspired this in a Sunday-morning tweet: “When will the Fake Media ask about the Dems dealings with Russia & why the DNC wouldn’t allow the FBI to check their server or investigate?”
On January 9, I noted that Trump could not leave the subject of Russia alone, and I predicted that it would—sooner or later—destroy him. A week ago, he said that the so-what news about Michael Flynn getting security clearance while Obama was president had “devastated” everybody questioning Trump’s ties to the Russians, “because you know what? That kills them. That’s the end of that subject.” Less than three days later, while attacking FBI Director Comey on Twitter, he added, “The phony Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats . . .”
He cannot leave Russia alone. It will destroy him. It is destroying him.
And it will be especially delightful if it destroys him on, or because of, one of his goddamned golf courses.
Follow the money.
“Deep Throat,” by the way, never said that to Bob Woodward.
Bill Goldman said it. Wrote it, actually. Bill Goldman wrote the film adaptation of All the President’s Men, and everything else from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to The Stepford Wives to The Princess Bride. And I know him—he lives about ten blocks from me, and he’s got one twelve-foot-high apartment wall full of political books, and the most famous line in political history isn’t in any of them, because the guy who wrote it is sitting there! And it’s still true. Follow the hundred million dollars in Russian golf money!
And you know what would really help Trump now? If he had some way of proving the James Dodson story wasn’t true, or was misinterpreted, or if a hundred million was a drop in his golf ball bucket, or if it really was just golf money and the guys who gave it to him weren’t Putin spies and if he didn’t agree to sell out our country for a hundred million. You know—if only there was some tax record or tax data or, I don’t know, tax return he could release to clear his good name and stop people from connecting a hundred million in Russian golf money to, you know, treason. But alas, I guess his tax returns from 2014 are still under audit, so we have no way of seeing them, so he can’t clear himself, so we’ll just have to assume the worst and that the hundred million is the tip of the iceberg and if Trump doesn’t do what Putin wants, Putin will take a lot more than a hundred million dollars from him.
Follow the money.
Oh, and one last word: Fore!
Post date • WEDNESDAY, MAY 10
Donald Trump has declared war on the legal system, moved to overrule the spirit of the Constitution, and enacted a coup against the ideals of the United States of America. And at this hour, one of two things is, already and irretrievably, under way: either the end of Trump or the end of American democracy—because both cannot continue—because, simply: You cannot fire the man who is investigating you. It is axiomatic, it is simple, it is eternal, it is proven: You cannot fire the man who is investigating you.
Even the dumb people will understand what you are trying to get away with. No matter what excuse you provide. No matter who you get to agree with you. No matter what you think it will accomplish for you. No matter what you think it will protect you from. No matter if you are the president of the United States and the man you have fired may be guilty of something: You cannot fire the man who is investigating you.
To do so is to inherit the wind. To do so is to immediately, and irreversibly, take whatever problems you face, whatever investigations you have to suffer, whatever crimes you may or may not have already committed, and to magnify them by a number so large it almost cannot be counted: You cannot fire the man who is investigating you.
It is, by itself, a cover-up. Not just part of an already extant cover-up. Not another drop in a bucket of corruption and dishonesty. It’s an entirely new bucket. Donald Trump fired the man who was investigating him. That, by itself, without further explanation, without further evidence—that alone immediately is a cover-up. Donald Trump should be impeached, today, for this one act. No Russian collusion needs to be proved. No financial records need to be assayed. No Michael Flynn, no Carter Page, no Paul Manafort, no Ambassador Kislyak, no Steele dossier, no Trump tapes, no Eric Trump tapes, no Pence tapes, no hacking, no sanity hearing, no hundred million golf course dollars from Russia, no last-minute Comey requests for a larger Russian investigation budget.
You cannot fire the man who is investigating you.
Trump is effectively guilty today of an impeachable offense, and if enough of the Republican members of the House and the Senate are anything other than political whores and the fully owned lickspittles of corporations and other special interests, Trump will be impeached. Within two hours of Trump’s strategically inexplicable blunder, Republican congressman Justin Amash of Michigan tweeted: “My staff and I are reviewing legislation to establish an independent commission on Russia. The second paragraph of this letter is bizarre.”
Amash was referring to this, in Trump’s dismissal notice to James Comey: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur . . .” “Bizarre” is an understatement; it is suicidal. Trump simply says, “I am not under investigation.” He never mentions under investigation for what. And there is no evidence that Comey ever told him anything of the sort—or that Comey made a distinction to him between an investigation of his campaign and him personally.
James Comey testified last week that the FBI is coordinating with two prosecutors, one at the Department of Justice and one who is the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, in their investigations of possible collusion between Trump’s campaign team and the Russian government. The non-mainstream observer Claude Taylor had claimed that there was already a Trump-Russia grand jury sitting near Washington, and CNN reported last night that indeed there was a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, and it had issued subpoenas to associates of Michael Flynn “in recent weeks.”
It is fair to assume that some part of this news was what got Comey fired. And whether or not, in his hazy grasp of reality, Trump really thought he could somehow put the Russian toothpaste back in the FBI tube, he clearly thought—CNN reported this Tuesday night—that there would be no political blowback. Trump’s ham-handed, falsely lighthearted tweets Wednesday morning about “when things calm down” and how “Republican and Democrat alike” will be thanking him confirm this. His next round of tweets—criticizing the Vietnam service controversy of a senator, without remembering that this would also invoke his own five deferments from Vietnam—confirmed the mixture of rage and panic that had been reported earlier, that he had raged over how much television coverage Comey was getting, and he had been screaming at television coverage of his Russian scandal and Comey’s refusal to make it all disappear. At minimum, somebody told this unstable president—or he told himself—that any fallout would be less damaging to him than letting Comey proceed. This is not true, because of the simplicity of the only takeaway from this naked power grab:
You cannot fire the man who is investigating you.
So we have a Tuesday Night Massacre for our time. And for those of you who always wondered what it felt like to live through Watergate, welcome. That catch in the throat, that intake of breath that doesn’t go all the way through, that repeated sensation that the future of democracy in this country rests on the events not of an administration, nor a year, nor a month, but on those of the next few weeks—that’s what October 20, 1973, felt like. Richard Nixon had been able to get a new attorney general approved by the Democratic Senate only when that attorney general, Elliot Richardson, swore to name a special Watergate prosecutor. On Saturday, October 20, 1973, Nixon decided that prosecutor, Archibald Cox, had to be fired. The attorney general wouldn’t do it, and resigned. The deputy attorney general wouldn’t do it; Nixon fired him. The third man at the Justice Department, the solicitor general—he fired Cox.
When the sun rose that beautiful Saturday morning, Nixon may have had enough political capital, enough House and Senate support, enough public approval, to survive. When the sun rose the next morning, most of that was gone. Politically, he was a dead man walking. Because you cannot fire the man who is investigating you.
Republican Representatives Amash, Comstock of Virginia, Curbelo of Florida, and Senators Burr, Corker, Flake, and McCain had, by breakfast, made correct and patriotic responses to the crisis. Nevertheless, it may require still more evil from Trump to shake the remaining disloyal or disbelieving Republican political whores loose from the tree. But if the Comey firing doesn’t do it, Trump will provide that evil, and even the Republicans will abandon him. But will they abandon him in time? You cannot fire the man who is investigating you, because the next man will now also have to investigate you for that.
“Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men,” read the entirety of Archie Cox’s statement after Nixon fired him in 1973, “is now for Congress, and ultimately the American people.”
Post date • THURSDAY, MAY 11
I appeal to the intelligence agencies and the governments of what is left of the free world—to them as entities, entireties, as bureaucracies making official decisions, and to the individuals who make decisions of conscience, to GCHQ and MI6 in the UK, to the BND in Germany, the DGSE in France, the ASIS in Australia, and even to the GRU in Russia, where they must already be profoundly aware that they have not merely helped put an amoral cynic in power here, but an uncontrollable one, whose madness is genuine and whose usefulness even to them is over.
To all of them, and to the world’s journalists, I make this plea: We, the citizens of the United States of America, are the victims of a coup. We need your leaks, your information, your intelligence, your recordings, your videos, your conscience. The civilian government and the military of the United States of America are no longer in the hands of the people, nor in the control of any responsible individuals on whom you can rely. The first step toward compromising our FBI occurred Tuesday with the unilateral firing of its director by the president, prompted by the attorney general, both of whom are—or were, at least in theory, possibly to be—under investigation by the FBI as led by that director.
Our CIA is run by one of that president’s political appointees. The first national security adviser was fired and may have been a Russian stooge. The second national security adviser has reportedly been yelled at by the president because he had the temerity to disagree with him. Our State Department is in the hands of useless amateurs. Our United Nations mission is bereft of power and uninformed. And the White House is run by a cabal of an amoral family syndicate that has spent its first three months slapping a dollar sign on anything that stood still long enough. A cabal with, at its head, a man with seemingly no interest in our laws, in our rights, in our Constitution, and with a brain that appears to not work properly.
Through our own negligence, the resentments and stupidities of millions of us, and the boundless greed of our elite class, our democracy has all but slipped away from us. It hangs today by a thread, and those who could protect it and restore it and fight for it, even at this late date—the Republican politicians whose voices today could force Trump out of office tomorrow—they are all but silent. Owned by special interests and silenced by a power that exceeds even whatever dedication to freedom they once had, all but a few of them fall back into platitudes about the leader of the country firing the head of the FBI and precipitating a constitutional crisis in order to shut down the investigation of his possible high crimes and misdemeanors. Our majority party impotently wrings its hands about “timing” and how “troubled” they are, and then they go back to calculating how they will most easily get reelected—with whose money; by whose instructions.
We, the citizens of the United States of America, are the victims of a coup. For months we have heard that your organizations have damning evidence against Donald John Trump. Whatever evidence you may have, you cannot conceal it any longer. Whatever we in this country are to you now, wherever you are now, you know that this nation has been a savior to you at some point in the past, and that our stability and our freedom and a government controlling this country that is at least sane are your surest guarantees of a prosperous future—indeed, perhaps your surest guarantees of any future at all. Now: We. Need. Your. Help.
Whatever there is, on Trump: reveal it. Issue it officially if you can; leak it if you cannot. If your directors and your governments want you to wait, look to the last days here and ask yourselves—plumb your consciences—if there is any time left to wait. Give it to a reporter, give it to an American friend, put it on the internet, leave it outside somebody’s back door. There is no time left for protocols and estimations of long-term impacts and tradecraft.
A dictator-in-training has betrayed our Constitution, and nevertheless survived two nights in office. The dictatorship he may want—the dictatorship he may feel is the natural extension of his past life, the dictatorship he may believe he has earned—has gone, in this week, from crawling to taking its first few tentative steps. What you have, we need, and we need it now.
And to the intelligence community of this country: your patriotic duty is clear. In many respects, in the months since the election, you have provided your greatest service in our history. A democracy that has lost its political way staggers down the street like a drunk and lurches toward the gutter, yet you have walked a virtually bipartisan straight line, and have followed your rules, and the rules of the civilians—and yet the evildoers still exist, regardless.
The greatest threat to the freedoms of this nation that this nation has ever faced—the Trump administration—the Trump junta—is playing by no rules. They just offed the FBI director and let him find out about it by reading a TV news crawl in the back of the room in which he was addressing his Los Angeles office.
They have no rules. For now, the rest of us, who only want our democracy back, we can have no rules, either. We will take the risk of reestablishing the rules later. What you in the FBI, in the CIA, in the Justice Department have on Trump, we need now. Because by tomorrow it may disappear, and your ability to do anything with it may disappear as well. Some of us on the outside have tried the best we could to prevent this day, others less so—now it doesn’t matter who did how much, when. You, in the FBI, the CIA, the other intelligence agencies, the Justice Department—you must be the patriots now. You, in the “Five Eyes,” in the PSIA in Japan, in the outfits too secret to have their names known to us, you must become, for the moment, Americans. We need what you have, and we need it now, and we need it made public.
It is more than just the fate of this sloppy country that is at risk. For all our faults, for good or bad, we cannot be left as a fascist, rogue state and an enemy of freedom and international comity. The fate of all freedoms may rest in your hands and your willingness to not merely hint, but show what you know.
If we go under, you are next.
The freedom you save will be your own.
Post date • MONDAY, MAY 15
And so we conclude a week that began with the Trump-Russia scandal as a complicated, labyrinthine, bizarre international tangle of questions about computer hacking and money laundering and collusion, but ended with the Trump-Russia scandal as a simple, straightforward, traditional American, easy-to-digest set of questions about obstruction of justice and witness intimidation and presidential cover-ups. “Trump and Russia” is no longer about Trump and Russia. He could be as pure as the driven snow about Russia. He and he alone has made the Trump-and-Russia story about covering up the Trump-and-Russia story.
In articles of impeachment—and, if he leaves or is removed from office, perhaps in criminal prosecution afterwards—Trump could theoretically wind up being accused of eighteen separate counts of six separate crimes in just the past week.
Working backwards: Friday’s tweet—“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” That could be prosecuted as a blackmail threat to a private citizen. That tweet could be interpreted as intimidation of a possible witness in an official proceeding—18 U.S. Code 1512—which carries a sentence of up to twenty years. That’s two possible crimes in the Trump-Russia Cover-up.
Plus—the reference to “tapes”? In the District of Columbia, there’s nothing illegal about taping your own conversation. But as Richard Nixon learned, to his chagrin, a president doesn’t own the recording. If Trump destroys the recording—or can’t prove he was just lying in the tweet and it never existed—that could be a charge of destruction of government property. And the third of the three articles of impeachment against Nixon in 1974 was entirely about the president’s refusal to turn over secret White House tapes that Congress had subpoenaed. His handling of evidence—the tapes—was believed to fit the Constitution’s definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
So—one tweet—four possible charges.
The day before, Thursday the eleventh, came the New York Times report that Trump had brought Comey to the White House for dinner on January 27. That was when Trump reportedly asked if he was being investigated, and asked Comey for his loyalty. That loyalty pledge, Trump has only partly denied, and his adviser Kellyanne Conway has endorsed. As the Harvard professor and scholar of constitutional law Laurence Tribe noted, “That is clearly, on its face, obstruction of justice. What it really means is ‘Can I count on you not to make me a target of this investigation?’ That’s clearly an impermissible question.” So there’s a fifth potential charge: obstruction of justice in the possible investigation of Donald J. Trump.
But here’s a sixth. That dinner was the day after the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, first warned the White House that Michael Flynn had been compromised by Russia. So was Trump also trying to get Comey to obstruct justice for the sake of Flynn?
It’s more of a stretch, but here’s a seventh. Could Trump be charged with trying to get a threat or warning to Yates to lay off Flynn, via Comey? And a can of worms Trump opened that might be bigger even than whether or not he has recorded White House conversations. When the report came that he had reportedly asked Comey to, in essence, swear loyalty, another question bubbled up: Did Trump ask anybody else to do that? Each time he asked someone who may have been involved in the investigation, it could be another count of obstruction of justice. And, just as important—did anybody say yes? Because once somebody else says yes, you could then have a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Just one of each here charge, and there are already nine counts in the Trump-Russia Cover-up—just against Trump.
And we’re still not done with Thursday the eleventh.
Trump’s interview with NBC that evening, in which it almost seemed as if he had deliberately unraveled the stonewall defense his staff had used for forty-eight hours—insisting Comey’s firing had nothing to do with Russia, and happened only because the attorney general and the deputy attorney general recommended it: “Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey . . . and in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.’” Not only could this be yet another obstruction-of-justice charge, our tenth charge of the Trump-Russia Cover-up, but you could go out on a limb and accuse anybody in Trump’s administration—Trump included—who advanced the claims that it was about Comey’s competence, or the Hillary Clinton emails, or the recommendations of others, of obstructing justice again if they knowingly lied about why Comey was fired, essentially obstructing justice about obstructing justice! So that’s an eleventh charge. And a conspiracy to do that—with Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Vice President Pence, and Trump all involved in that original story—conspiracy makes twelve.
Moving back to Wednesday, May 10, there’s a thirteenth possible charge. McClatchy news quoted White House sources who say that when Attorney General Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, went to see Trump two days earlier to complain about Comey, Trump had asked them to write the letter that he had originally cited as the cause for firing Comey. That’s now another possible tentacle of conspiracy in the Trump-Russia Cover-up Case: Trump asking the Department of Justice to give him a weapon with which to fire the head of the FBI.
The day before, Tuesday the ninth, had the most obvious of the possible charges, number fourteen: Comey’s firing itself. You can’t fire the criminal investigator investigating you for possible criminality, in the middle of his criminal investigation. It’s obstruction of justice, and, as a reminder, the first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon was a string of obstructions of justice. As Obama’s presidential ethics czar, Norm Eisen, tweeted, “Newly revealed demand for loyalty was the obstruction—firing was consummation of the threat.” Legally, the loyalty demand and the firing could be viewed as separate events.
But there’s still one more. On Monday the eighth, before her dramatic testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Trump tweeted about the once acting attorney general. “Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel.” Well, we are back where we started: just like Friday with Comey, Monday with Yates, Trump may have violated Section 18 U.S. Code 1512—intimidating a witness in an official proceeding, and maybe intimidating a whistle-blower and a private citizen.
Seventeen possible charges, for Trump, in the theoretical articles of impeachment pertaining to the Trump-Russia Cover-up Case. There’s one each for possible destruction of government property and in the hypothetical, possible refusal to turn over subpoenaed evidence. Two for intimidating witnesses, two for threatening private citizens, two for threatening whistle-blowers, one for threatening the acting attorney general. Maybe two more for separate conspiracies to commit obstruction of justice. And perhaps seven for obstruction of justice.
It’s staggering, but it may still be burying the lede: As he started to compose his tweet about Sally Yates on the eighth, Trump faced terrifying and solemn accusations about Russia. But they were also complicated, confusing ones. Frankly, how many Americans know what Alfa-Bank is? How many might not be certain if Carter Page is a guy or a document? What can cause even well-informed citizens to check out faster than a bunch of Russians all named Sergey? Donald Trump has eliminated his own benefit of the confusion. The Trump-Russia Cover-up Case is now about threatening people and firing people and pressuring people to keep them from investigating you and your colleagues. The most immediate threat to his presidency is no longer about Russian smoke that not everybody can see and even fewer can trace. It is now about “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, ‘You know, this Russia thing . . .’” It is now about “Ask Sally Yates.” It is now about “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations.” The smoke doesn’t matter anymore.
Who needs Russian smoke, when the White House is on fire?
Post date • TUESDAY, MAY 16
“Across Washington,” wrote Philip Rucker of The Washington Post, “Trump’s allies have been buzzing about the staff’s competence as well as the president’s state of mind. One GOP figure close to the White House mused privately about whether Trump was ‘in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.’”
Ya think?
What you and I have been not debating but quantifying—me for eighteen months—seems finally to have gotten through, even to the occasional Republican: Donald Trump is not well. “Some kind of paranoid delusion” is as good a placeholder as anything else. Trump could have a psychiatric condition. It could be physical. It could be an illness. It could be substance-related. It could be the long-term effects of concussions. This is apart from questions of good and evil. This is about whether the equipment works. “After President Trump accused his predecessor in March of wiretapping him,” wrote The New York Times, “James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, was flabbergasted. The president, Mr. Comey told associates, was ‘outside the realm of normal,’ even ‘crazy.’”
Crazy—another good placeholder.
The point is that only in the past couple of weeks has much of the media-political complex in this country been willing to even hint at what has been perfectly obvious to many of the rest of us: Donald Trump is not well. “Trump has two complaints about Cabinet members,” wrote Mike Allen of Axios. “Either they’re tooting their own horns too much, or they’re insufficiently effusive in praising him as a brilliant diplomat, etc. . . .” “White House and former campaign aides,” reported Politico, “have tried to make sure Trump’s media diet includes regular doses of praise and positive stories to keep his mood up—a tactic honed by staff during the campaign to keep him from tweeting angrily.” So occasionally his staff prints fake Time magazine covers off the internet, or articles torpedoing each other, to give to Trump. This crazy stuff originates from inside Trump’s White House.
Donald Trump is not well.
As a whole, the country has appeared to be unwilling to address this, even as a possibility. It’s understandable. We have gradually grown as a society to understand the nature of mental illness—physically based or otherwise. Even in my childhood, this was a subject of fear and confusion and blame, and now, finally, we are sympathetic. But for fifty years, we have asked our mental health professionals not to diagnose our presidential candidates from afar. Unfortunately, this is like saying that you can’t call it a forest fire unless you work for the National Park Service, at the specific forest, and you’ve been personally singed by the fire.
Our refusal, out of sympathy and fairness, to call “some kind of paranoid delusion” “some kind of paranoid delusion” could destroy this country. The last Quinnipiac poll asked recipients to give a description of Trump, using the first word that came into their heads. Not multiple choice, just “give me the word that best describes him.”
Forty-six different words were given five times or more. The leaders were idiot, incompetent, liar, leader, unqualified, president, strong, businessman, ignorant, and egotistical. Asshole just missed the top ten, tied with stupid. Arrogant, trying (excellent, thoughtful word there, “trying”), bully, business, narcissist, successful, disgusting, great, clown, dishonest, racist, American, bigot, good, money, smart, buffoon, con-man, crazy, different, disaster, rich, despicable, dictator, aggressive, blowhard, decisive, embarrassment, evil, greedy, inexperienced, mental, negotiator, patriotism. Only three words that even hint at psychiatric issues: crazy, mental, and narcissist. Used just a combined 23 times from a total of 527 people.
Trump’s aides spend forty-eight hours violently insisting that Comey’s firing had nothing to do with Russia; he gives an interview and says of course he was thinking about Russia, destroying the argument, and the aides. He hints at a secret taping system in the White House—something even Richard Nixon hid for more than four years. He uses the phrase “priming the pump” about the economy and claims he just made it up, and he asks the interviewer “Do you like it?” even though there’s documentary evidence that “prime the pump” has been used to describe government action to energize an economy since at least 1933, and he thinks he just coined it last week!
But nobody will call him crazy.
That one little quote from The Washington Post might be a harbinger of increased belief among his supporters that Trump is dangerously unstable. “One GOP figure close to the White House mused privately about whether Trump was ‘in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.’” But they can’t admit that. If you supported a candidate, and he was elected president, and it turned out you were wrong and all your opponents were right and he was crazy—would you admit it?
Nevertheless, it might be leaking out over the sides. In the Quinnipiac poll on February 7, 88 percent of Republicans said they approved Trump, and 75 percent said they strongly approved Trump. In the Quinnipiac poll on May 10, 82 percent of Republicans said they approved Trump, but only 63 percent still said they strongly approved Trump. Same thing in an NBC poll: 90 percent Republican approval on February 5, 67 percent strong approval; 88 percent Republican approval on May 11—virtually no change—but just 54 percent strong approval. Two polls in which, in three months, about 20 percent of Trump’s Republican support has sunk from strong approval to just approval.
Maybe the Trump “thing”—his mental health, the chaos of his administration, Russia, whatever—is slowly creeping into the awareness even of the Republicans. They had better figure it out fast, because there is also something new—and I don’t think this has been reported anywhere else—that suggests what happens when you don’t act quickly to check the Trump effect. Until I sold last year, I lived in Trump Palace. Well, “fled” is a better word than “sold.” I took a 10 percent loss to get out, and weeks after I sold last July, the buyer put it back on the market, and he’s finally been able to find a buyer, and he has lost 5 percent.
And this is nothing less than a letter from the owner of the Grand Penthouse, the one at the top, who has been trying to sell for two years. According to the real estate listing, Laurence Weiss has cut his price at Trump Palace by 35 percent, and he has written to his fellow condo owners in the building: “Several realtors say that part of the problem is the Trump name on the building. Just this week a potential buyer dropped out when their teenage daughter refused to live in a Trump building . . . This problem is real and will not go away any time soon. We, the owners, can change the name if 2/3 of us agree . . . Our homes are worth more without the Trump name . . .”
The Grand Penthouse owner is putting his money where Trump’s mouth is. “Since I perceive a direct financial benefit from a name change I am prepared to underwrite the costs of a name change disproportionately. Specifically, I am prepared to spend 10% of the cost of signage changes . . .” He is willing to pay his neighbors to help him take Trump’s name off the building. If there isn’t a metaphor in that for this country, I don’t know my metaphors:
A 10 percent Trump loss, then a 5 percent Trump loss, then a 35 percent Trump loss, then I’ll pay you to get rid of his name.
Or, to go back to The Washington Post: “One GOP figure close to the White House mused privately about whether Trump was ‘in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.’”
Post date • TUESDAY, MAY 23
Barring the unforeseen, Donald Trump is finished.
The unforeseen? Like: some imaginary or inflated threat. National calamity. Terrorism. War. Or another impossible long shot—Trump telling the truth. Otherwise: Something has happened, the finality of which few have noted, that will end—sooner or later—the Trump presidency. It happened in two stages, and when the second stage hit, the smarter Republicans began to at least look to see where the exits were, and some, like Jason Chaffetz and Paul Ryan and Ben Sasse and Mike Pence, edged imperceptibly toward them.
It’s the threat he made against James Comey. About a tape.
Combined with the revelation from one of Comey’s associates. About a memo.
There are only so many ways out for Trump, and only one of them is good, and the others are all proof of lies and impeachable offenses, and the chances that the good one is real are about one in a billion. This registered with Brian Beutler of The New Republic, and I’m indebted to what he wrote on this, because he saw it and I did not. And amid the tsunami of Trump stories in the past week, it was easy to miss. Remember the tweet: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
So Comey reportedly has a series of memos of the conversations, which would document his version of his conversations with Trump. Presumably noting, in real time, Trump asking Comey to discontinue the Michael Flynn investigation (a potential violation of the so-called “Take Care” provision of the Constitution, article 2 section 3), asking Comey to be loyal to him first and, by extension, to the Constitution second (violation of the presidential oath of office), asking Comey when the FBI was going to announce it wasn’t investigating him about Russia (potential obstruction of justice, violations of the White House/Justice Department contacts policy), and Lord knows what else.
It is a one-witness impeachment trial waiting to happen. Either Comey is lying and lying and lying, or Trump’s presidency is already over and we just don’t know whether the Republicans will bury it soon, in hopes of recovering by the midterms, or they will wait for the possibility Democrats will get to do it early in 2019. Comey has that and all that that implies.
And Trump has a tape—maybe.
Option one: Trump’s only hope is that his schoolyard-bully tweet means there is a tape. And it had better be a tape on which every reference to Michael Flynn and Russia and loyalty and the FBI and Comey and his claim that Comey exonerated him—it had better be a tape on which every reference to every single thing is as Trump has publicly claimed it is, and not as Comey has reportedly written it is. Trump can’t be wrong once.
If he’s wrong once and Comey is right once, that brings us option two: one article of impeachment. All you need is one. Ultimately, all that those thousands of hours of Watergate tapes needed to show was Nixon, on June 23, 1972, plotting to stop the FBI investigation of the break-in. Just as all this scandal would need would be, say, Trump talking to Comey about the Flynn case and asking him to “let this go.” That’s if there are tapes and if they produce only one pro-Comey fact. And if it’s more than one? All of them?
That’s option three: Given not just Trump’s hundreds of lies just since assuming office, but his seeming complete disinterest in and unawareness of the difference between lying and telling the truth, the safe guess is that Trump has no idea what would be on the tapes, if they exist, and they are likely to prove him repeatedly violating the law and vindicating Comey, in which case it’s not just impeachment, as in option two, but it would then suggest other impeachable acts and several articles.
Of course, it can still get worse—in option four: There are tapes, but Trump refuses to let anybody listen to them, claiming executive privilege or personal property or whatever he comes up with. At which point he would presumably be in violation of subpoenas from the Justice Department and maybe both houses of Congress, and a very public legal case goes up to the Supreme Court, which heard this exact story forty-odd years ago and voted unanimously against the president.
So he’s humiliated and he still has to go back to face option two or option three.
And still it can get worse, as in option five: Trump claims there were tapes, but he has destroyed them to protect executive privilege and national security. Don’t laugh—several advisers told Nixon to destroy his tapes. His former treasury secretary, John Connally, said he should do it in the Rose Garden with the press looking on. Apart from the fury from Capitol Hill, destroying the tapes might deplete much of his political support. If Comey’s memos accuse Trump of impeachable offenses, and Trump has tapes that he claims clear him, and he destroys those vindicating tapes—how many of even Trump’s voters and, more important, his supporters in Congress, would see the ultimate stupidity of that? You threatened him with the tapes; he’s lying about you; so you destroyed the tapes?
And still it can get worse. Option six: For whatever reason—desperate, last-chance self-protection, or finally listening to better advice, or thinking he can win the world back to his side—Trump announces that there are no tapes and there were no tapes. He now might be guilty of fabricating evidence to aid obstruction of justice. Worse yet, he would have to admit that something he implied . . . was not true. So far Trump has been asked only once about the purported Comey tape, in a Fox interview, and he adamantly refused to comment: “That I can’t talk about,” he said. “I won’t talk about that.” But to have to talk about it? To have to concede that what he has said previously was not entirely correct? Never mind not true—not correct? He’s Trump—when was the last time he admitted that he was not correct? The admission alone might destroy him from within.
And still, there is one last outcome that is worse than all the others. Option seven: Trump for once does the smart thing and comes down from his self-decorated cross of being the most unfairly treated politician in the history of the galaxy and he backs down from his threat and puts his tail between his legs and reveals, quietly or loudly, that there are no tapes—and then somebody else in the administration, some operations guy at the White House who is under oath and who really doesn’t want to go to jail for perjury to protect Trump, testifies somewhere that, no, there are tapes of Trump and Comey, and not just Trump and Comey, but Trump and everybody else from whom he asked loyalty, and everybody he asked to interfere with this investigation or to help him get dirt on this person he fired, and tapes of Trump and the Russians last week, and on and on and on. After all, we didn’t find out about the Nixon tapes from Nixon. We found out about them because a Republican attorney asked a White House operations guy named Alexander Butterfield. Nixon had never been asked if he was taping everybody who came through his office door. Come to think of it, Trump has yet to be asked if he is taping everybody who comes through his office door.
But that’s because we don’t have to ask—we have that stupid tweet he stupidly sent to stupidly threaten Comey to stupidly make himself feel better—and until and unless Trump can prove the tapes vindicate him, or until and unless Trump can prove the tapes don’t exist and never have existed, the Republicans in Congress have to assume that there are tapes, and if tapes could destroy Nixon two years after he won forty-nine out of fifty states, they sure as hell can destroy Trump and take half of the Republicans seeking reelection next year with him!
It was hours after the New York Times story about the Comey memo that Jason Chaffetz tweeted that he was ready to subpoena it, and only hours more until the chair of the House Republican Conference endorsed that, and only hours until Speaker Ryan said he was fine with that, and only hours more until the appointment of Robert Mueller as the Justice Department’s special counsel on Trump and Russia, and only hours after that that Fox couldn’t find any Republican congressmen to come on and defend Trump, and only hours after that that Mike Pence filed the paperwork with the Federal Election Commission for his own PAC, because, sure, it doesn’t look bad that, not four months into a new administration, with the president already running for reelection, the vice president is launching a separate PAC!
The Republicans are not fleeing, and the room is not yet on fire. But if you think all of what we have seen them do since Trump decided to threaten, with secret intelligence and hidden recording devices, a man who is in the secret-intelligence-and-hidden-recording-devices business . . . it all becomes clear.
At 8:26 a.m. on May 12, Trump hit “send.” In terms of his presidency, he might as well have hit “delete.” And, like us, the Republicans now know it is no longer a question of if, but of “Donald Trump better hope that there are no ‘memos’ of our conversations before he starts threatening.” . . . Oh, right, there are!
Post date • WEDNESDAY, MAY 24
So when will the Trump-Russia story break?
When will we know, when will we hear—when, already?! Indictments? Impeachments? Confessions? Trumps fleeing to Elba? I am actually asked these questions even more than I ask them myself. And it has recently occurred to me that, while the Trump-Russia story might indeed be the proverbial iceberg that is 90 percent underwater, what we now see is still immense. There are the gigantic headlines everybody knows: Trump boastfully giving the Russians Israel’s classified intelligence about ISIS; Trump boasting to them that he had “relieved the pressure” by firing James Comey; the Washington Post report that the Trump-Russia investigation has now reached somebody actively serving in the White House; Michael Flynn’s attorney saying his client would take the Fifth in front of the Senate.
But we also know so much more. We know that the fired head of the FBI testified to the House Intelligence Committee that it is investigating, and that it is not investigating if there are links between the Trump campaign and the Russians, but rather it is “investigating the nature of any links” and “whether there was any coordination.” We know that James Comey testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Bureau is coordinating with “two sets of prosecutors: Main Justice, the National Security Division, and the Eastern District of Virginia U.S. Attorney’s Office,” and that there’s reason to believe that this coordination means a U.S. Attorney’s Office might already have a grand jury sitting about the Trump campaign and Russia. According to CNN, we know that a grand jury sitting in that district issued subpoenas to associates of General Michael Flynn for business records. We know that two non-mainstream observers, first Claude Taylor and then the former intel officer John Schindler, said the number of FBI targets in its Trump-Russia probe ranges from about twenty-eight to about forty-two, when Watergate resulted in forty Nixon administration figures or associates jailed or indicted.
We know that Carl Bernstein reported on CNN that the FBI and the Senate and House investigators believe there is an “active cover-up” of Trump and Russia being run by the White House, and that at least the FBI also believes its work is being “impeded” by All the Trump’s Men.
We know that Acting Attorney General Sally Yates warned the White House about National Security Adviser Flynn’s vulnerability to Russian blackmail, and the next day Trump reportedly asked James Comey whether or not he was under investigation about Russia, and he reportedly asked for Comey’s loyalty. We know that Trump promptly fired Yates, and then tweeted about her in such a way that led some to think he may have broken a federal law against witness intimidation.
We know that Trump ultimately fired Comey, and then tweeted about him in such a way that led some to think he may have broken a federal law against witness intimidation.
We know that former director of national intelligence James Clapper said the Russians should consider the firing of Comey another triumph for them. We know that Trump claimed Clapper had cleared him of any collusion with Russia, while Clapper said he never said any such thing.
We know that the White House seems to be trying to throw General Flynn under the bus and portray him as the man who gave the appearance of Russian influence on Trump’s administration even while Trump himself is somehow still claiming Flynn is the victim of Democratic McCarthyism. We know that not only has Flynn offered to testify, possibly against Trump, in exchange for immunity, but that he has hired a lawyer trained in Russian history, who is also an expert in the various laws for foreign agents and lobbyists, and who was one of the last Republican Never-Trumpers still standing. We know that to date, nobody has taken Flynn up on his offer, and in the view of the best analyst you could have on presidential scandals and cover-ups, John Dean, that could only mean prosecutors don’t need Flynn’s testimony, not even if it will nail Trump. We know from CNN and NBC reports that President Obama personally warned Trump not to make Flynn his national security adviser. We know from a Daily Beast report that even after Flynn’s ouster, Trump repeatedly asked White House lawyers whether it was okay for him to again contact Flynn anyway.
We know that the Senate Intelligence Committee has asked for four Trump associates to turn over all of their emails and documents about Russia voluntarily or it will subpoena them, and that Carter Page and Roger Stone have confirmed they’ve been asked, and The New York Times has reported that so, too, have Flynn and Paul Manafort. We know that Manafort’s bank records have reportedly been sought by the Justice Department and that, as reported by NBC, the “Senate Intelligence Committee has requested documents on Trump from Treasury’s money laundering unit.”
We know that Carter Page wrote a nine-page letter to the Senate committee, angrily denying any wrongdoing while noting that the guy U.S. officials believe is a Russian spy, Victor Podobnyy—Page admits to meeting with him in 2013.
We know that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee had to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after putting on this bizarre Kabuki theater thing involving trying to ride to Trump’s rescue with evidence it sure looks like the Trump administration provided to him, and then virtually disappearing from public view. We know that the attorney general had to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation because he stepped in his own borscht by not telling the truth about meeting the Russian ambassador.
We know that the White House initially identified the opinion of the attorney general as one of its reasons for firing FBI Director Comey—and thus the attorney general may have violated his own recusal from all investigations of Trump and Russia. We know that the Trump campaign denied there had been any meetings between campaign officials and Russian ambassador Kislyak—which Kislyak denied, too. And then CNN turned up evidence of him meeting with the attorney general, and with General Flynn and Trump aide J. D. Gordon . . . at the Republican convention.
We know that Trump produced a “certified letter” from a lawyer claiming he’d had no business dealings with Russia in the past decade—oh, wait, that says, “with a few exceptions,” meaning he’s had some business dealings with Russia in the past decade, worth more than a hundred million dollars. We know that the lawyer was the same one from the January news conference with all the folders supposedly full of documents, and that last year her company’s Moscow office actually won an award as Russia’s top law firm.
We know that a prominent golf writer now says that in 2014, Trump boasted of having access to a hundred million dollars in funding for golf courses, and that his son Eric—though he now denies saying this—explained: “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia . . . We just go there all the time.”
We know . . . that one of the men reputed in the Steele dossier to be a key figure in Trump-Russia, an obscure Russian diplomat named Kalugin, was confirmed to be a key figure by U.S. intelligence, according to the BBC. We know that the preelection hacking attempts of voting registration rolls in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and maybe other states was done allegedly by Russians, and was no dry run, but could have been efforts to procure the email addresses of voters so they could be microtargeted by specific campaign advertising—this also according to the BBC.
We know that last month, the British newspaper The Guardian concluded a forty-three-paragraph summary of the Trump-Russia saga with this stunner: “One source suggested the official investigation was making progress. ‘They now have specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion,’ the source said. ‘This is between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material.’”
In short, we know a helluva lot about Trump and Russia. And no matter what they all say, the only person who could look at this 10 percent of the iceberg and say, “There’s nothing there,” and really believe it is Trump himself, and he’s nuts. I don’t know when there are indictments or somebody cracks or somebody cuts a deal, or all three. Could be six hours from now, could be six months; there could be sealed indictments now. But if the Trump-Russia scandal is an iceberg, and the ratio of 10 percent to 90 percent holds, Trump-Russia is an iceberg big enough to sink about two hundred Titanics—and nearly as many Trumps.
Post date • TUESDAY, MAY 30
I call for the immediate arrest of Jared Kushner.
If he should not be suspected of money laundering, racketeering, and influence peddling, then he should be suspected of obstruction of justice and espionage and possibly worse.
There is no other option that can be reasonably entertained.
18 U.S. Code 794. Gathering or delivering defense information to aid foreign government, section A: Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country . . . either directly or indirectly . . . information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life . . .
That is from the Espionage Act.
Arrest. Kushner. Now.
The rest of that statute limits use of the death penalty to the exposure of the identities of American agents or defense plans or communications intelligence.
The Russian ambassador to the United States reportedly told his superiors that on December 1 or 2 of last year, in the building on Fifth Avenue in New York City called Trump Tower, Jared Kushner proposed using Russian communications facilities in a Russian embassy or a Russian consulate to contact the Kremlin directly, to make certain the lawful government of the United States could not prevent, interfere with, or know of those communications.
Arrest. Kushner. Now.
The proposal was so startling, so unprecedented, that even the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, “reportedly was taken aback,” according to The Washington Post. The New York Times printed the Kushner side’s cover story. This was a means by which Kushner could get information from the Russians about Syria. The cover story given to the Associated Press was that this was so that General Michael Flynn could talk directly to Russian military leaders about Syria. Having already twice chosen not to mention his meetings with Russians on the SF 86 forms he swore under oath in order to gain security clearance, Kushner was reportedly himself willing to enter, or willing to have other Trump transition officials enter, diplomatic facilities—which have privileged legal status within the United States—and talk directly to officials of the Russian government.
Even if this Syria Excuse is somehow true, Kushner was still intending to communicate with a foreign nation—a foreign enemy nation—about a second foreign nation: a second foreign enemy nation. And he would not have been asking about the Russians’ assessment of the weather in Syria. This would have pertained to Russian military involvement there and could likely have delivered “either directly or indirectly . . . information relating to the national defense.” The Syria Excuse could still be espionage.
Arrest. Kushner. Now.
If the Syria Excuse is not true, the banking story may be. The Reuters News Agency, quoting “seven current and former U.S. officials,” reported that Kushner had a minimum of three previously undisclosed contacts with Ambassador Kislyak during and after the presidential campaign. It cited one current U.S. law enforcement official in reporting that “FBI investigators are examining whether Russians suggested to Kushner or other Trump aides that relaxing economic sanctions would allow Russian banks to offer financing to people with ties to Trump.” NBC and The New York Times are reporting that Kushner met last December with a Russian banker named Sergey Gorkov, and Gorkov’s bank is the Russian government’s national development bank, and Gorkov graduated from the academy that trains Russian intelligence personnel, and that our intelligence personnel consider Gorkov a “Putin crony.” CNN is reporting that Russian government officials even claimed to have “derogatory” financial information to use against Trump and his staff during the election campaign.
The Banking Story could be money laundering or racketeering and/or influence peddling. It ties together all too cynically with the renewal of EB-5 visas, a renewal stuffed into page 734 of House Resolution 244, signed by Trump on the fifth of May, offering permanent residence in this country to rich foreign investors who put money into things like American real estate projects. It ties together all too cynically with the impression Kushner’s family company left with Chinese investors just two weeks later, that if they bought in to Kushner real estate deals in New Jersey, their immigration process could be expedited. And it further ties together all too cynically with the CBS report that when word spread that the FBI investigation of Trump had expanded from potential electoral collusion to finances and investments, Kushner became a “prominent voice advocating Comey’s firing,” and when it is all tied together, what that “prominent voice” was advocating might reasonably be considered obstruction of justice.
Arrest. Kushner. Now.
And if the Syria Excuse, which could still be espionage, is not true, and if the Banking Story, which could be money laundering or racketeering or influence peddling and obstruction of justice, is not true, what is left? For what other evil purpose did Jared Kushner want a covert, secure means of direct spy-tested communication to the Kremlin? After a presidential campaign in which his father-in-law encouraged Russians to hack into the computers of his electoral opponent, why would Jared Kushner want to go inside the Russian embassy or consulate—the centers of Russian espionage in this country? After an election about which the Russians would boast of their influence, why would Jared Kushner need means to avoid the detection of the government of the United States? After the direct evidence of contact between his father-in-law’s campaign and Ambassador Kislyak throughout 2016, why would Jared Kushner want to keep his contact with the Kremlin secret from the intelligence services of the United States? After the mounting circumstantial evidence of collusion between his father-in-law’s campaign and the government of Russia, what would make Jared Kushner willing to tempt prosecution under the Espionage Act to avoid his contact with Russia becoming known to the president of the United States?
Arrest. Kushner. Now.
Jared Kushner brings us not just into the White House; he brings us both figuratively and literally to the door of the Oval Office. Inside that door, there are people who appear not to understand why they are not permitted to break the law when they think it’s a good idea. Inside that door, there are people for whom running this nation is not a solemn and nearly religious responsibility, but an opportunity for wins and power and financial corruption. Inside that door, there is a man in charge who has never been stopped by rules and never been held accountable when he breaks them.
These people do not believe in the law. These people do not believe in patriotism. These people do not believe in the United States of America. These people—Kushner, his wife, Trump, General Allen, General McMaster, General Flynn, the others—are in their souls, if not under the law, traitors to this country, and no matter which excuse Jared Kushner has for proposing to talk to Russia using secret Russian communications surrounded by Russian spies inside Russian territory, there is but one answer:
Arrest. Kushner. Now.