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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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By the top of the second page of the first memo former FBI director James Comey wrote to memorialize his conversations with President Trump, prostitutes are mentioned. Sex workers are a running theme in https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/04/19/what-the-comey-memos-say/?utm_term=.58c2db19763a (the seven memos) released on Thursday evening, a function of their prominent role in the dossier of unproven allegations involving the president’s 2016 campaign and the president’s apparent insistence on raising the subject on most of the occasions in which he and Comey spoke.
One particular discussion of the subject, though, is important for non-titillating reasons.
In a memo dated Feb. 8, 2017, written after an informal Oval Office meeting between Trump and himself, Comey writes:
“The President said ‘the hookers thing’ is nonsense but that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin had told him ‘we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.’ He did not say when Putin had told him this and I don’t recall [REDACTED].”
As is often the case with redactions, the missing section in this quote raises a lot of possibilities. But the point on which we should focus is the point onto which Comey also latched: When, exactly, did Trump and Putin have this conversation about sex workers?
This is important because Trump’s admitted communications with Putin were limited. While he at one point claimed to have had a number of interactions with the Russian president, when it became apparent during the campaign that clear links to Putin might cast doubt on his loyalties, Trump quickly — and believably — backed away from any claimed relationship. If Trump and Putin had more conversations than are known, it adds significant credibility to the idea that the Russian government and the Trump campaign might have had high-level, coordinated contacts.
Do you rock yourself to sleep at night with soothing thoughts of climate mitigation? We don’t have to switch to solar power. We can stick with beautiful coal, and mitigate! Maybe houses on stilts wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe a dike here and there. We can move our houses, if need be, or have the tornadoes move them for us! Munchkinland had lots of flowers, and one street was paved with gold!
Great. So, okay, mitigate this. Strap on your scuba tanks, and fix the Great Barrier Reef, much of which is https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/04/18/global-warming-has-changed-the-great-barrier-reef-forever-scientists-say/?utm_term=.160353bb6275 (now dying or dead). Or maybe you would prefer to move it someplace where it will be happier. Maybe off the coast of Munchkinland.
Or maybe your idea of mitigation is simply getting used to doing without. Although it must be said, you can’t seem to get used to the idea of doing without coal. So okay, we keep the coal. Who needs coral reefs, anyway, or their stupid fish? The forest that just burned down? Charcoal isn’t so bad. Sort of like coal! The community that just flooded out? Didn’t you ever hear of building an ark? Maybe we can’t get ALL the species on one boat the way Noah did, but who needs all those species, anyway? Canaries in the coal mine? We can do without those. A sixth mass extinction will clear some needed space for the endless mass migrations of people whose nations have collapsed due to drought and crop failure, or pounding, incessant rains and flooding. Why, look at Puerto Rico! It has recovered to the point where it even has electricity some days!
Mitigation is the equivalent of living with plywood sheets screwed over your windows, water dripping into buckets, no, you’re mopping up the water, no, you’re wading through the water on your way up to sit on the roof to look for rescuers. Except the rescuers moved inland some time ago to forage for non-extinct species. The idea of mitigation is the idea of surrender. To sacrifice one reef, another species, an ecosystem, a nation, and the best and most beautiful sustaining parts of our home planet. Permanently.
If this is your idea of how to handle the problem of climate change, all I can say is that you are probably a member of Congress. In other words, a Munchkin.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and longtime friend of President Trump, will join the president’s legal team in an effort to “quickly” resolve the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference and possible ties to Trump associates.
Mr. Trump will also bring on Jane Serene Raskin and Martin R. Raskin, former federal prosecutors based in Florida, according to Mr. Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow. Mr. Giuliani is himself a former federal prosecutor.
“The president said: ‘Rudy is great. He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country,’” Mr. Sekulow said in a statement.
The three new lawyers give Mr. Trump a broader legal stable to rely on as he faces not just the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, but the threat of an investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan into the president’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen. Federal agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office and hotel room last week.
Mr. Trump has a difficult time retaining top-flight lawyers as the inquiries have increasingly unsettled him, and he has angrily chafed against his lawyers’ legal strategies.
Mr. Trump and his associates believe the issues in New York pose a far greater challenge to the president than even Mr. Mueller’s investigation. They do not know what was taken from Mr. Cohen’s office, and it is not clear what exactly investigators are looking into. But the fact that the authorities were able to get a federal judge to give them permission to raid Mr. Cohen’s office and residences has led Mr. Trump and his associates to believe the government possesses some evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Cohen.
In hiring Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump has turned to someone who is a reliable, loyal surrogate and an attack dog on television. Mr. Giuliani is a former top official at the Justice Department and served as the United States attorney in Manhattan. But at age 73 he is no longer known as a powerhouse white-collar litigator and in recent years has been more active as a worldwide consultant.
One person close to Mr. Trump said the Raskins will be the longer-term and more durable additions to the team. Mr. Giuliani, by contrast, is coming on board as a short-timer not only to appear on television but also to see if he can use his decades-long ties with Mr. Mueller to re-establish a working relationship with the special counsel’s team. The relationship between the president’s lawyers and Mr. Mueller’s team blew up after agents raided Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Giuliani’s main focus will be on bringing an end to Mr. Mueller’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice and links between his campaign and Russia. As part of those efforts, Mr. Giuliani will take the lead dealing with Mr. Mueller’s office on an interview with Mr. Trump. The president and his lawyers do not believe Mr. Trump has any real legal exposure but are wary of the interview.
If you did not know better, you’d think House Republicans were trying to sink President Trump.
We had the fake “unmasking” scandal, including a clandestine visit to the White House by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). It turned out to be a dud, revealing that Nunes was a dull-witted cohort of the president.
Then came the Nunes memos. Hey, we’ll create a scandal by pretending that the Justice Department and the FBI lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the origins of the Steele dossier! Democrats would never fill in the blanks to show that is false or that the Carter Page FISA warrant did not launch the Russia investigation! Wrong and wrong.
Then came the dopiest idea of all — threaten to subpoena the James B. Comey memos and then charge Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein with contempt when he refuses. Did it dawn on them that he would hand them over and that they would match almost identically with everything Comey has said or written? Apparently not. This crowd has blown itself up more times than Wile E. Coyote.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and House Intelligence Committee Chair Nunes, for reasons known only to them, thought the memos’ release would be helpful to Trump. Wrong. The Comey memos released to the House and immediately leaked contain, it is fair to say, not a single helpful fact for Trump.
To the contrary, Comey’s attention to detail and perspicacity bolster his own credibility. It is all there — the president’s rambling monologues, obsession with the alleged “pee tape,” attempts to lean on Comey to let Michael Flynn off the hook, demands for loyalty and so on. The only “surprises” — the claim that Vladimir Putin told Trump personally that Russia has the most beautiful hookers, Trump’s frustration with Flynn for not making certain his first call to a foreign leader was …. drumroll, please … Putin — reinforce the image of a narcissistic, attention-challenged president who really has no clue how to conduct himself. Trump’s repeated denial that he used prostitutes, or denial that he even spent the night in Russia (an assertion contradicted by his former bodyguard Keith Schiller), suggests what worries him the most.
Samuel Johnson once stood talking with James Boswell about a theory expressed by a certain Bishop Berkeley that the external world was made up entirely of representations. There was no reality, only beliefs. Disgusted, Johnson said: “I refute it thus!”—and aimed a kick at a nearby boulder.
The point being: You can believe what you want, but if you ignore the rocks, you’ll badly hurt your toe. The Republican world would do well to take this story to heart.
It’s another familiar story that conservatives have built themselves a closed information system. The system generates and repeats agreed fictions, and people are rewarded according to their ability to internalize, repeat, and embellish these fictions.
The system has revved itself into hyper-activity in the Trump years. And no Trump-era fiction has been more profoundly internalized and repeated within the closed conservative information system than the fiction that Trump is the victim of a plot by the FBI. This particular fiction is exceedingly complicated. Its details shift from day to day. It is most often repeated not as a coherent statement of checkable facts, but as an outraged sequence of bullet points: Fusion GPS! Deep State! The Democrats are the real colluders!
Even on its own terms, the story does not make sense. Within the closed information system, it is simultaneously believed—for example—both that former FBI Director James Comey deserved to be fired for his unfairness to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and also that Comey cannot be trusted because of his flagrant bias in favor of the Clinton’s presidential campaign. But the whole point of a closed information system is that the things are not believed because they make sense. Things are believed because the closed information system has ratified and repeated them.
In some times and places, closed information systems are backed with coercive power. President Trump obviously hankers for that power. But as yet, that power is lacking within the American system. The closed conservative information system is binding only for those who agree to submit to it.
Which has created this problem for Trump and his political allies. ...
Jeremiahflex
Well-known Member
I always tell people about this story. Minorities have hated Trump long before he ran for Potus
For years, a joke among Trump Tower employees was that the boss was like Manhattan’s First Avenue, where the traffic only goes one way.
That one-sidedness has always been at the heart of President Trump’s relationship with his longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who has said he would “take a bullet” for Mr. Trump. For years Mr. Trump treated Mr. Cohen poorly, with gratuitous insults, dismissive statements and, at least twice, threats of being fired, according to interviews with a half-dozen people familiar with their relationship.
“Donald goes out of his way to treat him like garbage,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s informal and longest-serving political adviser, who, along with Mr. Cohen, was one of five people originally surrounding the president when he was considering a presidential campaign before 2016.
Now, for the first time, the traffic may be going Mr. Cohen’s way. Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers have become resigned to the strong possibility that Mr. Cohen, who has a wife and two children and faces the prospect of devastating legal fees, if not criminal charges, could end up cooperating with federal officials who are investigating him for activity that could relate, at least in part, to work he did for Mr. Trump.
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