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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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US Treasury Department officials used a Gmail back channel with the Russian government as the Kremlin sought sensitive financial information on its enemies in America and across the globe, according to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News.
The extraordinary unofficial line of communication arose in the final year of the Obama administration — in the midst of what multiple US intelligence agencies have said was a secret campaign by the Kremlin to interfere in the US election. Russian agents ostensibly trying to track ISIS instead pressed their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens.
Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers.
Russia’s financial crimes agency, whose second-in-command is a former KGB officer and schoolmate of President Vladimir Putin, also asked the Americans for documents on executives from two prominent Jewish groups, the Anti-Defamation League and the National Council of Jewish Women, as well as Kremlin opponents living abroad in London and Kiev.
In an astonishing departure from protocol, documents show that at the same time the requests were being made, Treasury officials were using their government email accounts to send messages back and forth with a network of private Hotmail and Gmail accounts set up by the Russians, rather than communicating through the secure network usually used to exchange information with other countries.
Analysts at an elite agency within Treasury first warned supervisors in 2016 that the Russians were “manipulating the system” to conduct “fishing expeditions.” And they raised fears that the Treasury’s internal systems could be compromised by viruses contained in emails from the unofficial Russian accounts. But staff continued using the Gmail back channel into 2017, despite repeated internal warnings that Russia could be trawling for sensitive financial records — including Social Security and bank account numbers — to spy on, endanger, or recruit targets in the West.
The Treasury Department refused to tell BuzzFeed News why its officials were communicating with unofficial Gmail accounts at the same time that Russia was sending the suspicious requests, or to say whether it eventually turned over any documents in response. Nor would officials answer any other specific questions about the matter.
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This is turning into an enormous scandal. Ethics officials told Whitaker they would recommend recusal, so he set up a different group of officials (probably political appointees, but unclear) to make a different recommendation.
We are now https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mueller-seeks-roger-stones-testimony-to-house-intelligence-panel-suggesting-special-counsel-is-near-end-of-probe-of-trump-adviser/2018/12/19/ac5c3ee6-0226-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html?utm_term=.4260c01a06ed (learning that the special counsel is seeking a transcript) of longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone’s testimony to Congress, to determine whether he concealed advance knowledge of a public dump of Democratic emails stolen by Russia. This could help determine whether people around President Trump conspired with Russian electoral sabotage or create an incentive for Stone to cooperate — meaning the case is inexorably advancing.
Meanwhile, the Senate https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-signals-it-might-accept-a-short-term-spending-bill-to-avert-shutdown/2018/12/19/63148a02-0395-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html?utm_term=.7659849c3a6c (just voted to keep the government open) into February, but without the $5 billion in border-wall money Trump craves. The House is expected to follow suit. It’s unclear whether Trump will go along, but this makes it more likely that he’ll fold, at least for now.
These two developments provide a hint as to what will likely happen next year: Trump’s mounting legal travails and his increasingly unhinged demands for victories like the wall — ones that will thrill his #MAGAhatter base and no one else — may well grow more tightly intertwined as narrative lines. As the former leads Trump to increasingly fall back on his base for support, he’ll need the latter to keep his voters energized, which means keeping them persuaded he’s “winning.”
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Trumpism sits on a shrinking island of public support. Ron Brownstein recently surveyed multiple polls and noted that the wall — a grand symbol of Trump’s immigration narrative and agenda — is overwhelmingly unpopular among precisely the voter groups that moved away from Republicans to fuel the big Democratic victory. As Brownstein concluded, Trump’s continued push for the wall has left the GOP in the precarious position of “trying to extract greater advantage from groups that are shrinking.”
Trump has left little doubt that this will continue in to next year. And there’s a deep irony to this. If ongoing probes bear fruit, Trump will double down on his immigration demands to keep his base in line. Republicans will cast that as the pro-rule of law stance. In reality, support for the investigations revealing the true depths of Trump’s corruption and lawlessness, and resistance to his cruel and arbitrary immigration policies, will constitute the true rule of law positions.
