Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse



WASHINGTON — The special counsel in the Russia investigation has learned of two conversations in recent months in which President Trump asked key witnesses about matters they discussed with investigators, according to three people familiar with the encounters.

In one episode, the president told an aide that the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, should issue a statement denying a New York Times article in January. The article said Mr. McGahn told investigators that the president once asked him to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. McGahn never released a statement and later had to remind the president that he had indeed asked Mr. McGahn to see that Mr. Mueller was dismissed, the people said.

In the other episode, Mr. Trump asked his former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, how his interview had gone with the special counsel’s investigators and whether they had been “nice,” according to two people familiar with the discussion.

The episodes demonstrate that even as the special counsel investigation appears to be intensifying, the president has ignored his lawyers’ advice to avoid doing anything publicly or privately that could create the appearance of interfering with it.
 


President* Trump is scared. He should be.

According to the subpoena, which was sent to a witness by special counsel Robert Mueller, investigators want emails, text messages, work papers, telephone logs and other documents going back to Nov. 1, 2015, 4½ months after Trump launched his campaign. The witness shared details of the subpoena on condition of anonymity. The news site Axios reported Sunday that a subpoena was sent to a witness last month.

Here’s what all this means. This means that Mueller and his staff have likely concluded now that the entire Trump For President campaign was a corrupt enterprise in one way or another almost since the moment it was first conceived and that the same can be said of the Trump presidency*. It’s the money. It’s the Russians. The whole damn dirty deal is one great writhing ball of poisonous snakes and Mueller seems to be perilously close to untangling it.

The subpoenas go back to 2015 and woe betide anyone, as the nuns used to tell us, who fed any subpoenaed material into the shredder. At least a few of those people on that list have already flipped or likely have announced their intentions privately to do so. All of them except Cohen will have left the White House when Hicks leaves in a few weeks.

The working presumption of the Mueller investigation now is that nobody is clean in all of this. Everybody has something to tell about everybody else. Absent the promise of a presidential* pardon—a promise that is prima facie worthless simply because it comes from this president*—the stampede for the lifeboats is going to be deafening this week.

...

He is looking at the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency* as one massive three-year money-suck, a fundraising mechanism to enrich its inside players and to monetize the political system, and then the presidency, for every last dollar, riyal, or ruble that can be squeezed out of both of those institutions. Mueller is finding corruption everywhere he looks. He is now a fireman in hell.
 


For many of us, mornings have taken on a certain nauseating sameness. We roll out from beneath the blankets and, before the scent of coffee has reached our nostrils, we are checking the news feeds for the latest semi-literate tweet coughed up by the ranting, traitorous squatter occupying the Oval Office.

The rest of the day is spent in a kind of horrified suspension, holding our breath, waiting for whatever outrage will inevitably belch forth from the White House—once a bastion of seriousness and decorum, now ground zero for the demise of western democracy. How many lies will Trump spew today? Which dictators will he suck up to? Will he smear a Gold Star family? Attack a woman who dares to call out his smarmy predations? Unveil a puerile, racist nickname for a Senator or member of his own cabinet?

As much as we loathe it, however sickening it might have become, every day seems all about him, a former game show host and real estate failure, a hawker of rot-gut vodka and bullshit degrees from a fraudulent “University” who once styled himself as “the Donald”. The cable news shows lead with his most recent flatulence, the op-ed pages brim with intimations of doom, late night comedians are having a field day.

He is the president and, thus, bears watching. But we would be mistaken to think that he is truly the center of our universe, a man with a plan, commanding the heights, directing the action.

Virulent as he may be, Donald J. Trump is a symptom not the disease.
 


President Donald Trump last year hailed a multibillion-dollar initiative to create a seamless digital health system for active duty military and the VA that he said would deliver “faster, better, and far better quality care.”

But the military’s $4.3 billion Cerner medical record system has utterly failed to achieve those goals at the first hospitals that went online. Instead, technical glitches and poor training have caused dangerous errors and reduced the number of patients who can be treated, according to interviews with more than 25 military and VA health IT specialists and doctors, including six who work at the four Pacific Northwest military medical facilities that rolled out the software over the last year.

our physicians at Naval Station Bremerton, in the Puget Sound, one of the first hospitals to go online, described an atmosphere so stressful that some clinicians quit because they were terrified they would hurt, or even kill patients. Prescription requests came out wrong at the pharmacy. Physician referrals failed to go through to specialists. Physicians were unsure how to do basic things such as request lab reports.

Doctors complained it could take 10 minutes to get into the system, which then frequently kicked them out. The military’s ponderous cybersecurity system was largely to blame, but doctors were frustrated contractors hadn’t figured out a way to work around the problems, as they had with the previous electronic record system.

“We took a broken system and just broke it completely,” said one doctor, who like most of those interviewed requested anonymity because they lacked military authorization to speak about the project.
 
Top