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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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That is, it’s not just that Roger Stone did what Roger Stone always does, cheat, in really cynical ways.
It’s also that Stone’s efforts closely paralleled those of Russian intelligence operatives, as they worked hard to get Trump elected.
And that curious parallel raises the stakes for Stone on this election.
That’s because, as of April, there were court filings targeting Roger Stone that invoked conspiracy and Foreign Agent charges that remained substantially redacted, presumably because the investigation was ongoing. The most recent BuzzFeed FOIA release (which leaves unredacted or redacts under privacy claims materials that in past releases were redacted for ongoing investigations) seems to reflect that any ongoing investigation has been finished or killed by Billy Barr. That’s not surprising, given that Barr’s intervention in Stone’s sentencing led the four prosecutors who had been working the case to resign. But it also means that if Trump is replaced by someone unwilling to save him from prison time, lapsed investigations (with statutes of limitation that extend at least until 2021) might become active again.
Roger Stone has already shown a willingness to sell out this country to get his friend Donald Trump elected. And since 2016, he has grown closer to sanctioned white supremacist groups sowing violence. Now, his freedom likely depends on finding a way to help Trump eke out another win. And Roger the rat-fucker has been training to thwart democracy his entire adult life.
It wasn’t as if the United States was unready. A 324-page study in October 2019 found that America was the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic — but it didn’t imagine that the United States would fumble testing, data collection, contact tracing, communications and just about every other facet of managing a novel virus.
“The administration made every single mistake you could possibly make,” Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who early in his career helped eradicate smallpox, told me.
“We could have beaten it back,” Brilliant said. “We could have prevented the horror story we have now.”
Jeffrey Shaman, a public health expert at Columbia University, calculated that if each county in the United States had acted just two weeks earlier to order lockdowns or other control measures, then more than 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths could have been avoided through early May.
Shaman told me that his team didn’t model even earlier interventions, in January or February, but that he believes it would have been plausible for the United States to enjoy the Covid-19 mortality rate of South Korea. That would mean almost a 99 percent reduction in mortality.
Linsey Marr, an expert on disease transmission at Virginia Tech, isn’t sure that we could have achieved South Korean or (somewhat higher) Japanese levels of mortality, because both of those countries have more of a tradition of mask-wearing. But she does believe that we could have perhaps achieved German levels (meaning an 80 percent reduction in deaths).
“We would have saved a lot of lives,” she said. “Kids would be going back to school.”
Natalie Dean, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of Florida, said she is troubled by a public fatigue, a desensitization to a death toll that has continued to pile up recently at the rate of about 1,000 a day.
Trump still hasn’t embraced the basic step public health officials sought more than a century ago during the 1918 pandemic of encouraging mask-wearing. Instead, he seems to have surrendered to the virus at least until a vaccine is available — while encouraging delusions among his supporters.
“There’s no Covid,” an unmasked man attending a Trump rally the other day told CNN. “It’s a fake pandemic.”
When a pandemic response has become so politicized, when leadership is so absent, when health messaging is so muddled, when science is so marginalized, it’s easier to understand how the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic could have lost 190,000 citizens to the virus.
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In October of 2006, the FBI released an intelligence assessment titled, “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” Though the document—culled from FBI investigations and open sources—was heavily redacted, it reached a number of disturbing conclusions.
The assessment revealed that white supremacists “have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement communities”; that many of these white-supremacist infiltrators are known as “ghost skins” who “avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend in”; and that the KKK have longstanding “ties to local law enforcement.” These firm ties between white supremacists and law enforcement persist to this day.
Last year, Reveal published an investigative series exposing the police’s proclivity for Facebook hate groups and racist memes, and in late August, former FBI agent Michael German compiled an exhaustive report detailing the prevalence of “racism, white supremacy, and far-right militancy in law enforcement” and the federal government’s non-existent response to it.
Links between white supremacists and law enforcement have been thrown into sharper relief in recent months following the killing of George Floyd, and numerous instances of curiously chummy behavior between police and far-right militiamen during the ensuing protests for Black lives.
Frank Meeink, once one of the most prominent neo-Nazis in the U.S.—and the inspiration for the character Derek Vinyard, played by Edward Norton in the 1998 film American History X—thinks he knows why.
“I know that there are neo-Nazis who I used to run with who are now cops,” he tells The Daily Beast. “And that’s just in my crew. Imagine how many neo-Nazis and white nationalists have been becoming cops? Three of the people in my crew alone became cops.”
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