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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse



Last month, President Trump visited Saudi Arabia and his administration announced that he had concluded a $110 billion arms deal with the kingdom. Only problem is that there is no deal. It’s fake news.

I’ve spoken to contacts in the defense business and on the Hill, and all of them say the same thing: There is no $110 billion deal. Instead, there are a bunch of letters of interest or intent, but not contracts. Many are offers that the defense industry thinks the Saudis will be interested in someday. So far nothing has been notified to the Senate for review. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arms sales wing of the Pentagon, calls them “intended sales.” None of the deals identified so far are new, all began in the Obama administration.

...

Moreover, it’s unlikely that the Saudis could pay for a $110 billion deal any longer, due to low oil prices and the two-plus years old war in Yemen. President Obama sold the kingdom $112 billion in weapons over eight years, most of which was a single, huge deal in 2012 negotiated by then-Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. To get that deal through Congressional approval, Gates also negotiated a deal with Israel to compensate the Israelis and preserve their qualitative edge over their Arab neighbors. With the fall in oil prices, the Saudis have struggled to meet their payments since.

You will know the Trump deal is real when Israel begins to ask for a package to keep the Israeli Defense Forces’ qualitative edge preserved. What is coming soon is a billion-dollars deal for more munitions for the war in Yemen. The Royal Saudi Air Force needs more munitions to continue the air bombardment of the Arab world’s poorest country.

Finally, just as the arms deal is not what it was advertised, so is the much-hyped united Muslim campaign against terrorism. Instead, the Gulf states have turned on one of their own [Qatar].
 


The Arab states of the Persian Gulf are in the grips of an unprecedented regional crisis. In Monday's early hours, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt released coordinated statements, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/four-arab-nations-sever-diplomatic-ties-with-qatar-exposing-rift-in-region/2017/06/05/15ad2284-49b4-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?utm_term=.5877889ffdbf (announcing a diplomatic break) with the tiny-yet-wealthy peninsular nation of Qatar. They cut air, sea and land links and ordered Qatari officials and nationals stationed in their countries to return home.

Qatar, with just over 300,000 citizens, has played an outsize role on the world stage because of its great wealth of oil and natural gas. Global oil prices wobbled Monday as both sides dug in their heels. Already, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/06/05/qatar-could-face-a-food-crisis-in-spat-with-arab-neighbors/?tid=pm_world_pop&utm_term=.b18f30aed0fe (as my colleagues reported), panic over a Saudi blockade of Qatar's only land border saw supermarket shelves in Doha cleaned out by spooked residents.

The move is https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/four-arab-nations-sever-diplomatic-ties-with-qatar-exposing-rift-in-region/2017/06/05/15ad2284-49b4-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?utm_term=.efa44a49b6e0 (a reflection of long-running frustrations) with the Qataris, who the Saudis and Emiratis claim are supporting terrorist groups as well as being far too cordial with Iran, their regional archrival. A complicated and uncertain state of affairs is playing out, with far-reaching stakes — Qatar, after all, is home to a crucial forward base for U.S. Central Command. Here's our attempt at a quick primer on what you need to know.
 
Comey is already a proven lier and sellout in many eyes. His testimony is just a distraction IMO, because his words don't carry a lot of weight anymore. It will be interesting to see if the MSM can make more of it than that. Sometimes they get lucky.

The funny thing is whatever one believes about Putin's involvement in US politics in the last election, he is certainly involving himself now - openly. And the MSM has begun quoting him regularly.

The Democrats had been taught to hate Putin long before Trump ran for president. The Republicans not so much, so his words may carry more weight than Comey's with them, especially if he says what they want to hear. Watch his speeches; he IS saying what they want to hear. If this continues long enough, Putin may end up with real influence over what Americans see and believe.
 


Top lawyers with at least four major law firms rebuffed White House overtures to represent President Trump in the Russia investigations, in part over concerns that the president would be unwilling to listen to their advice, according to five sources familiar with discussions about the matter.

Before Kasowitz was retained, however, some of the biggest law firms and their best-known attorneys turned down overtures when they were sounded out by White House officials to see if they would be willing to represent the president, the sources said.

Among them, sources said, were some of the most high-profile names in the legal profession, including Brendan Sullivan of Williams & Connolly; Ted Olson of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Paul Clement and Mark Filip of Kirkland & Ellis; and Robert Giuffra of Sullivan & Cromwell.

The lawyers and their firms cited a variety of factors in choosing not to take on the president as a client. Some, like Brendan Sullivan, said they had upcoming trials or existing commitments that would make it impossible for them to devote the necessary time and resources to Trump’s defense.

Others mentioned potential conflicts with clients of their firms, such as financial institutions that have already received subpoenas relating to potential money-laundering issues that are part of the investigation.

But a consistent theme, the sources said, was the concern about whether the president would accept the advice of his lawyers and refrain from public statements and tweets that have consistently undercut his position.

“The concerns were, ‘The guy won’t pay and he won’t listen,’” said one lawyer close to the White House who is familiar with some of the discussions between the firms and the administration, as well as deliberations within the firms themselves.
 


Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University who writes extensively on authoritarianism and Italian fascism, told me that a discernible trait of authoritarian and autocratic rulers is ongoing “frustration” with the “inability to make others do their bidding” and with “institutional and bureaucratic procedures and checks and balances.”

“Trump doesn’t respect democratic procedure and finds it to be something that gets in his way,” Ben-Ghiat said. “The blaming of others is very typical of autocrats, because they have difficulty listening to a reality that doesn’t coincide with their version of it. It’s part of the authoritarian temperament to blame others when things aren’t working.”

Trump expects independent officials “to behave according to personal loyalty, as opposed to following the rules,” added Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University who wrote “https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Twenty-Lessons-Twentieth-Century/dp/0804190119 (On Tyranny),” a book of lessons from the 20th Century. “For Trump, that is how the world is supposed to work. Trump doesn’t understand that in the world there might truly be laws and rules that constrain a leader.”

Snyder noted that authoritarian tendencies often go hand in hand with impatience at such constraints. “You have to have morality and a set of institutions that escape the normal balance of administrative practice,” Snyder said. “You have to be able to lie all the time. You have to have people around you who tell you how wonderful you are all the time. You have to have institutions which don’t follow the law and instead follow some kind of law of loyalty.”

It seems obvious that early worries about an unbound authoritarian Trump — fears that our institutions would not hold up or that Trump would bulldoze them — now look overblown. But nonetheless, echoes of these traits do appear present.
 
Everything we know about the Mueller probe so far
Everything we know about the Mueller probe so far

Special counsel Robert Mueller is assembling a prosecution team with decades of experience going after everything from Watergate to the Mafia to Enron as he digs in for a lengthy probe into possible collusion between Russia and President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

His first appointments — tapping longtime law-firm partner James Quarles and Andrew Weissmann, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud unit — were the opening moves in a politically red-hot criminal case that has upended the opening months of the Trump White House.

Mueller is expected to take an expansive view of his role. He inherited a spate of existing federal probes covering figures including the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner, and former campaign hands Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Carter Page.

Mueller brings a wealth of national security experience from his time leading the FBI in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Veteran prosecutors say he has assembled a potent team whose members have backgrounds handling cases involving politicians, mobsters and others — and who know how to work potential witnesses if it helps them land bigger fish.
 
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