Why do I get the feeling this will not end well.
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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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Collusion
In “The View From Flyover Country,” Sarah Kendzior examines the struggles of disenfranchised, overworked, and underpaid Americans.
When the results of the 2016 presidential election were confirmed seventeen months ago, political polls, the vast majority of journalists and news outlets, and conventional wisdom in America were proved wrong. But Sarah Kendzior, a journalist based in St. Louis, told me she “did think Trump would win.” With a Ph.D. in anthropology and an M.A. in Central Eurasian studies, she had been studying authoritarianism in Central Asia and noticed troubling links between the forces that had brought these regimes into power in other parts of the world and what was happening in America — how Trump, against expectations, was rising to power.
Trump’s mission to control the press and persecute minorities, his secrecy when it came to personal finances, and his bravado were “standard characteristics of dictatorship,” she wrote in the Diplomat. And in countries with huge economic inequalities, as Kendzior believed America should be viewed, these kinds of leaders were rising to power.
Kendzior’s new collection, The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America, includes essays published between 2012 and 2014 for Al Jazeera, with a new introduction and epilogue. It’s a call to arms, highlighting the struggles of disenfranchised, overworked, and underpaid Americans, and urging our elected officials to recognize and address the inequalities that have become even more pronounced since when she originally wrote the essays.
Michael Cohen once bragged that he would take a bullet for his client, Donald Trump. “I’m the guy who protects the president and the family,” he insisted. More recently, Cohen offered that he would “rather jump out of a building than turn on Donald Trump,” even after the president spurned his desire for a big White House job.
Perhaps wanting to test these claims, Trump opened fire on Cohen on Fox & Friends this week and then shoved him out of a high window in Trump Tower, where this scandal keeps returning.
“He’s a great guy,” the president said as he proceeded to disassociate himself from the man who has slaved away as his fixer since 2007, cleaning up business and personal messes left behind, who teamed with Russian-American convicted felon and businessman Felix Sater to try to swing a Trump Tower Moscow deal, who is named as one of his power brokers in the Steele Dossier, who has made ugly threats to Trump’s adversaries, and who is now the subject of an FBI investigation into wire fraud, money laundering and campaign-finance violations. Just a few weeks ago, Trump http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sns-bc-us-trump-porn-star-20180405-story.html reporters’ questions about the $130,000 Cohen paid to adult film actor Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 election, by saying, “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney.” Now, as Trump explained to the Fox & Friends hosts, he viewed Cohen primarily as a businessman, and the president Trump averred, “I have nothing to do with his business.” But…but…but…wasn’t Cohen Trump’s personal attorney? “He has a percentage of my overall legal work—a tiny, tiny little fraction,” the president responded to the stunned Fox & Friends hosts.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is investigating Cohen, instantly leaped on Trump’s comment, setting fire to Cohen’s bullet-riddled and crushed body. The U.S. Attorney filed a letterwith the judge in the Cohen case noting that if the famed fixer only did a “tiny, tiny, little fraction” of legal work for Trump, then not much of the Trump-related evidence seized by the FBI from Cohen could be privileged under lawyer/client confidentiality. Trump’s TV blabbing was stupid beyond stupid because it will help open to investigators’ eyes not just Cohen’s potentially scuzzy business dealings, both here and in Ukraine, but the president’s scuzziest deals from the past decade. The more the feds learn about Cohen, the more they’ll be able to lean on him in hopes of getting him to flip on the president.
Poor, poor, pitiful Cohen—gun-shot, shattered and smoking—also pleaded the Fifth Amendment this week in the Stormy Daniels lawsuit, which she filed to liberate herself from the non-disclosure agreement she signed over her 2006 one-night stand with Trump. It doesn’t look good, for Cohen, but it’s his right and will save him from saying anything the U.S. Attorney could use against him in a potential criminal case. ...
Democrats have published a response to the House Intelligence Committee report on the Trump/Russia nexus, released Friday by the committee's Republican majority. The minority report offers new details – and unanswered questions – about the role of the NRA as a conduit between Russia and the Trump campaign, raising fresh questions about then-Senator Jeff Sessions' knowledge of Russian outreach.
The Democratic report affirms and amplifies the findings of https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/russian-campaign-to-infiltrate-nra-elect-trump-w518587. In particular, the Democrats strongly suggest that Putin ally Alexander Torshin was running an op through the NRA: "The Kremlin-linked individual" – Torshin – "appears to have used the group" – the NRA – "to befriend and establish a backchannel to senior Trump campaign associates through their mutual affinity for firearms," the Democrats write, "a strategy consistent with Russian tradecraft." (Torshin, a lifetime NRA member, was recently https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/russia-sanctions-nra-trump-w518832 by the Treasury Department and can no longer travel to the United States.)
The Democratic report also publishes a full excerpt of an infamous May 2016 email from Paul Erickson to the Trump campaign. (Previously, this email had only been reported in snippets by the New York Times.) Erickson is an NRA- and GOP operative who repeatedly visited a Torshin-backed gun-rights group in Moscow. He later started a mysterious business with Torshin's protege, Maria Butina, in South Dakota.
