It's a Breakdown. Go Ahead And Give It To Me...

A good sign of how incompetent a Cabinet Secretary is doing at the job is the high number of resignations of key persons from that Department. Just yesterday, Secretary of Defense Idiocy Pete Hegseth got a vote of no confidence with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll jumping the figurative ship (while Navy crews are literally jumping).

A worse sign of how bad it's going within a department is when leaks get out to the media. That's often coming from underlings unable to resign but desperate to cleave an exit route for themselves before the ship sinks everybody. How else to explain the release of rather classified internal briefs to the Washington Post this weekend, detailing how most of the military commanders Hegseth hasn't fired yet are issuing "non-concurrances" in opposition to Hegseth's ongoing mismanagement of unwanted wars.

Mark Hertling over at The Bulwark provides some context:

The Post reported Sunday that several of America’s senior military commanders have warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that continuing the current pace and scale of operations against Iran risks weakening the military’s ability to respond to crises elsewhere. The warnings appeared in the highly classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book.

The most eye-catching part of the Post story was that several senior commanders registered “non-concurs” with continuing some deployments. That sounds dramatic because it is—not because non-concurs are unusual in this process, but because of what they tell us about the condition of the force after six months of war.

The Book is essentially an operational and strategic assessment of how America’s military forces are allocated around the world. The people who assemble it are the staff for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many sections with different responsibilities contribute: Logisticians assess the ability to move and sustain forces, strategists consider the effect on global commitments and other contingency plans, and the services and combatant commands then assess what providing or losing a particular capability means to their overall missions. The operations directorate takes all this expertise into account and prepares the Book for the chairman, who then reviews it and gives it to the secretary of defense.

The Book doesn’t just concern itself with infantry divisions, fighter squadrons, and aircraft carriers. Modern military operations depend as much on intelligence platforms, air-defense units, military police, engineers, communications specialists, medical units, transportation companies, postal detachments, and even organizations responsible for showers and laundry. Those units aren’t glamorous, but commanders can’t fight without them. Every one of those capabilities must come from somewhere. That’s why the Book is ultimately about risk...

I saw this firsthand when I served on the Joint Staff as the J7, which at the time oversaw contingency planning. We were routinely asked to assess what satisfying one combatant commander’s request would do to another’s war plans. It didn’t matter if it was an armored division, an aircraft carrier, or a single aircraft: If someone wanted it, it usually meant someone else didn’t want to give it up.

When I was in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went through these Books weekly during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, questioning units and even numbers of personnel being deployed. The discussions were often painful for the Joint Staff briefers. But his purpose was straightforward: understand the consequences before deciding...

If there's anything we've seen from trump and from his lackeys like Hegseth, those two have no understanding of anything. /headdesk

This isn’t just Pentagon competition among commanders who want more forces. The reported non-concurs are occurring after months of munitions expenditure, extended deployments, deferred maintenance, and the movement of scarce capabilities from around the world to the Middle East. The Book is doing precisely what it was designed to do: expose tradeoffs to the secretary before he makes another decision.

It is also why the leak itself is so serious.

The Book is highly classified because, taken together, its contents provide an X-ray of American military readiness. It tells senior leaders not only where forces are, but where commanders believe they are short, which capabilities are being stretched, what war plans are accepting additional risk, and where the United States might have difficulty responding to a future crisis. That’s invaluable information for America’s adversaries.

But for the Secretary of Defense, it should be something else: a warning. The Book exists to identify risks before they become vulnerabilities—and the secretary’s job is not merely to read those warnings, but to act on them.

Hegseth can't. And won't.

The Secretary of Defense Pandering can't act on the warnings because they go against the fantasy narrative his boss trump has spun: Not only about the war on Iran, but also the overall fantasy that the United States is great under his leadership. Anyone in TrumpWorld who ruins that narrative gets exiled to the 2:00 am infomercial slots on the Newsmax channel.

Hegseth won't act on the warnings because of his own rage and frustration dealing with a military chain of command he views as "woke" or unmanly. This is a guy who's highest military rank was a major in the National Guard, obsessing over a "Warrior" ethos that remains at odds with the armed forces' focus on professionalism. Half of what he's doing to the military right now is expressing that rage towards generals and admirals he now "outranks", clearing out anyone who doesn't buy into that Warrior Code - or doesn't fix his racist/sexist world-view - he's trying to infuse into the troops at the detriment of morale and discipline. 

Leaking this information - that the upper ranks of the US military are at odds with their civilian (inept) bosses - is a major red flag: There is chaos instead of organization in one of the most important departments of our federal government; and there is a good chance the lower ranks of our armed forces are going to mutiny in some form or another when - not if - Hegseth and trump push them too far.

The Great Russian Skedaddle

I love that word, 'skedaddle.' A silly-sounding word but with purpose. An SAT word you study in high school. Three syllables long with just the right rhythm. Ske-dad-dle.

Skedaddle: (intransitive verb) to leave immediately : RUN AWAY, SCRAM : especially, to flee in a panic.

I've been thinking about the word 'skedaddle' ever since Russia's dictator - finally coming to terms with the massive loss of troops in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine - pushed his puppet government into passing laws allowing him to start up draft/conscription of at least three-hundred thousand men to restock his invasion force. Via Greg Myre at NPR:

Despite this track record, Putin's latest gamble may be his biggest yet. In the face of battlefield setbacks, the Russian leader has doubled down. Russia will mobilize 300,000 additional troops — a number larger than the original invasion force — and Moscow also appears poised to annex Ukrainian territory under its control...

Putin's move addressed growing criticism from pro-war Russian nationalists at home, who say Russia is in danger of losing because it hasn't unleashed its full fighting force.

Yet Putin called it a "partial mobilization," and continues to call the conflict a "special military operation." This appears to be a nod toward Russians who have misgivings about the military adventure in Ukraine...

Even with his blatant control of Russian media, Putin seems to fear calling for a massive conscription effort because internal tensions - aggravated by decades of corruption - would trigger nationwide protests.

Well... even the partial mobilization triggered those protests. To Charles Maynes also at NPR:

Russian President Vladimir Putin's order to mobilize more troops to bolster his struggling military campaign in Ukraine has been rippling across Russia, as the military swiftly drafts new recruits and signs of discontent appear to spread.

Putin announced the decision Wednesday, framing it as a "partial mobilization" that he insisted affects only a small percentage of Russians with a background in military service.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered an immediate call-up of 300,000 additional troops — even as multiple news reports suggested the real number could be three times as many.

The Kremlin has tasked regional governors with overseeing the draft and stiffened penalties for refusal of service or desertion to 10 years in prison...

Despite government assurances only those with military service background will be drafted, multiple reports are emerging of draft papers being sent to people with no prior military experience...

Avtozak Live, a volunteer human rights monitoring group, reported as many as nine arson attacks had been carried out on military recruitment centers or government buildings across Russia.

Rights advocates say police detained more than 1,300 people in protests that erupted in dozens of Russian cities following Putin's address — with crowds yelling "No to war!" and "Putin to the trenches!..."

Anti-war activists have called for additional protests against mobilization over the weekend.

And when Putin gave the announcement that he was looking for a few 300,000 men to 'volunteer' as cannon fodder fertilizer for Ukrainian sunflowers, a noticeable number of Russian men in the designated victim demographics - anyone 18 and older with a pulse - seem to have made the collective decision to skedaddle (mmm, love that word) for the Canadian and Mexican wait this isn't 1965 Russian borders. Maynes' coverage also noted what's happening at various checkpoints:

Amid uncertainty over the scope of the draft, news reports and social media posts showed long lines of cars backed up on Russia's border crossings with Finland and Georgia, to the west, and Kazakhstan and Mongolia to the south.

Tickets for flights out of Russia to countries with visa-free travel — such as Armenia and Turkey — are either sold out or have soared in price...

To mix it up a little, here's Pjotr Sauer and Dan Sabbagh at The Guardian:

Long lines of vehicles continue to form at Russia’s border crossings on the second full day of Vladimir Putin’s military mobilisation, with some men waiting over 24 hours as western leaders disagree over whether Europe should welcome those fleeing the call-up to fight in Ukraine.

The Russian president’s decision to announce the first mobilisation since the second world war has led to a rush among men of military age to leave the country, likely sparking a new, possibly unprecedented brain drain in the coming days and weeks.

Witnesses on the border with Georgia, a popular route used by Russians to leave the country, said that some men resorted to using bicycles and scooters to skip the miles-long queue of traffic jams.

Footage from the scene circulating on social media appears to confirm these reports.

“I have been waiting in my car since Thursday afternoon,” said Anton, who declined to give his surname fearing it might complicate his travel. “Everyone is worried that the border will be closed by the time we get anywhere close to it,” he added...

For context, here's a map of Russia detailing the borders Russia has across Eastern Europe and much of Asia:

Wait, this is RISK. This is probably how Putin's generals are 
strategizing their war effort. No wonder they're losing, you can
NEVER hold Ukraine in a game of RISK. You should take
Australia first.

Okay wait let's refer to the Guardian's more accurate map.

Russia is a looooooong country - it spans 11 time zones! - so
there's a lot of borders that Russians can flee across...

Every Russian guy sober enough to understand how fucked the war in Ukraine has become are fleeing in a panic. In short, this is a Skedaddle.

Putin is doubling down on making this conscription (don't call it a mobilization like it's a good thing, this is forced military servitude) because Ukraine's recent success shredded much of the ground forces he had there and he needs as many bodies as possible to hold onto whatever he can claim. As mentioned earlier, Putin is also forcing the occupied regions of southern Ukraine - the Donbas in particular - to "vote" on a rigged "annexation" so that Russia can claim to the world that it's Ukraine invading Russia, even though most other nations would never recognize such a brazenly illegal move.

Putin is relying on the one last resource he can utilize in his war to conquer Ukraine: Manpower. Russia's overall population at 143 million is 100 million more than Ukraine's (43 million), and just on simple numbers in a slogfest Russia should be able to outlast Ukraine to conquer a bloodied landscape.

But in his desperation, Putin is overvaluing quantity over quality of armies. By all reports, Russia's armed forces are poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly supplied... and everything that's happened since this February has proven how poor Russia's performance has been in a straight-up fight with an army that can fight back. While Putin is emphasizing in conscripting men with previous military experience, there's no guarantee those men have good enough experience in the first place, and there's no sign of them having the discipline and motivation to perform any better than the first wave of troops Putin sent in. Most military experts in the West argue that Putin needs to train his conscripts, which would take months... and Putin doesn't have months at this rate. He will send raw untrained victims to the front lines and hope to Zerg Rush Ukrainian forces by sheer attrition.

And while Putin can bring up 300,000 new bodies - if his "recruiters" can shanghai enough of them - or even a MILLION troops to continue his war, there's every sign that Russia has run low on any weapons and supplies those troops can use. Russia is deep into negotiations with China and North Korea to buy up any ammo they can use. That would still take massive logistics efforts to move all of that from the eastern end of things to the western front of Ukraine... and this war has demonstrated Russia is terrible at logistics. He is basically throwing more lives into the wood chipper of doom here, with no other goal than to hope Ukraine runs out of bodies first.

One last thing to consider how this conscription effort hurts Russia. Not just the brain drain of the best and brightest skedaddling for their lives, because they're the smartest ones to understand that fleeing is the best option: Putin is pulling away manpower that Russia relies on in their economy back home. He's taking menial workers, construction workers, office workers, anybody who couldn't run fast enough or who had reasons - likely family - to stay behind. He's disrupting the lives of millions of homefront Russians by doing this, and he's risking their anger if his war of attrition lingers ever onward.

Putin's running out of time, so he's stealing from Russia's very population thinking it will buy himself more time at everyone else's expense.

I warned before about Putin becoming more hated than feared. Disrupting the lives and livelihoods of millions of Russians is how you become more hated. This draft isn't saving Putin's time, it's hurrying his demise.

This is not going to end well for Putin or for Russia. We can only wait and pray that saner heads ensure the end is not in nuclear fire.

In the meantime, here's the soothing sounds of Christopher Cross and Michael MacDonald singing the one song on every Russian's playlist:

Dreading The Oncoming Storm

Update: Thank you again Batocchio for linking this blog through Crooks & Liars Mike's Blog Round-Up! Good luck everybody... 

I've probably left enough clues on this blog by now that I live in Florida, have been ever since my family moved down here when I was seven. I've also left enough clues that I'm really hating the growing realization that this state leans too far conservative on political issues, and I'm stuck here surrounded by coal-rolling Bible-thumping MAGA morans.

But this past month in June - especially as the Far Right Roberts Court issued their extremist legal decisions on abortion, voting rights, prayer in school, and finishing up with gutting federal regulatory power - that constricting, painful feeling became overwhelming.

I've had conversations in-person with two different people this past week, both of them talking about fleeing for the safety of Blue states and which ones were the easiest to move to (I'm partial to Virginia, but I hope Youngkin is a goddamned aberration up that way and the residents learned they got hoodwinked).

One of my co-workers honestly asked me, "Are we going to have another civil war?"

I once blogged I believed another civil war in the United States was a bad idea, that it was coming from cranks and foreign "experts" who were shilling fantasies over reality. However, ever since trump bullied and lied his way into the White House, with the Far Right media gaslighting and calling for open insurrection, and with more than a third of our nation actually believing his Big Lie of stolen elections I've been reconsidering the insane partisan rift between Far Right and The Rest Of The Nation has become too violent to ever get repaired.

I'm not the only one worried about this. Stephen Marche at the Guardian sees the same divide and believes it's no longer an "If" it's now a question of "When and Where":

Accelerating political violence, like the attack in Buffalo, increasingly blurs the line between the mainstream political conservative movement and outright murderous insanity. The question is no longer whether there will be a civil conflict in the United States. The question is how the sides will divide, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how those strengths and weaknesses will determine the outcome.

The right wing has been imagining a civil war, publicly, since at least the Obama administration. Back in 2016, when it looked like Hillary Clinton would win the election, then Kentucky governor Matt Bevin described the possibility in apocalyptic terms: “The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood. Of who? The tyrants, to be sure. But who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren,” he told supporters at the Values Voter Summit...

The struggle over abortion has already revealed how the divide plays out. Anti-abortion factions control the pseudo-legitimate court system and the poorer states in the Union. Pro-choice factions have responded, first of all, with their superior financial resources. Oregon started the Oregon Reproductive Equity Fund with $15m. New York is establishing a fund to make the state a “safe haven”. California governor Gavin Newsom plans to add $57m to the state budget to deal with out-of-state patients...

Incipient civil conflict in the United States won’t be formal armies struggling for territory. The techniques of both sides are clarifying. Republican officials will use the supreme court, or whatever other political institutions they control, to push their agenda no matter how unpopular with the American people. Meanwhile, their calls for violence, while never direct, create a climate of rage that solidifies into regular physical assaults on their enemies. The technical term for this process is stochastic terrorism; the attack in Buffalo is a textbook example.

The leftwing resistance is more nascent but is also taking shape: if you’re rich and you want to stay living in a democracy, the time has come to pony up. If you’re an engineer, the time has come to organize. The conclusion is not at all determined. Neither side has an absolute advantage. Neither side can win easily. But one fact is clear. The battle has been joined, and it will be fought everywhere...

I've noted before, unlike the first Civil War where the geographic boundaries were distinct, this second Civil War will be more along demographic dividing lines within each state. The Far Right won't likely have states seceding, but will have their governors, their wingnut preachers and pundits, and other regional elected officials rallying their followers into terror attacks on liberal targets (they know they won't survive attacking military forces head on, they'll go after civilian targets like schools and nightclubs and stores like they've already been doing the last 25 years). The Progressives and Center-Left populations will likely take non-violent routes like street protests and calls for strikes, but will come to rely on whatever remains of a Democratic-led federal government responding to the insurrection as they are now (with arrests, court trials, and pleas to sanity).

The results of the coming midterm elections will determine the "where" and "who" this civil war will decide itself. 

If the Democratic Party retains control of both parts of Congress, the Far Right will scream "stolen votes" and declare all Dem results within Red States invalid, throwing elections to Republicans in spite of the voters. This could trigger outright secession efforts in battleground states like Texas, Georgia, or Florida.

If the Republicans flip control of Congress - or gain control of either the House or Senate - the Democrats will point to Republicans' extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression and denounce the unfairness of Republicans' minority rule. It's unlikely the Blue states will call for secession - as it would undermine President Biden's authority and go against the liberal viewpoint of federal powers exceeding the states - but more likely throw as much of the legal system into chaos nationwide as well as interfere with any Republican attempt to impose their wingnut laws on everyone.

How bad the fighting will get depends on which way the United States military intervenes in all this. While they're not supposed to fight in our own borders against technically our own people, if open secession and/or insurrection takes place, whoever is President can employ the Insurrection Act and call on the armed forces to act then. donald trump wanted to use that law to declare the 2020 election results illegal and the Blue states in rebellion, but the legal experts and military leaders told him no (It's believed if counter-protestors had gone to Capitol Hill to fight against trump's rioters, he could have justified it then. But when it was just his own people committing violence, he couldn't declare them in insurrection and so didn't do it). If Biden is forced by escalation of violence in the streets by the Far Right, he could invoke the Insurrection Act against them, but it will depend on which way the Joint Chiefs and the rest of the military will accept it (there is a possibility that a sizable percentage of personnel are Christianist extremists and could start undermining military effectiveness at the least).

Given the nature of the partisan division - that it's along party lines across every state, and that it's along educational and ethnic and income lines within every state - there really is no safe place in America when (not if) the extremism of the Far Right - either in denial of a Democratic midterm victory or in vindication of a Republican one - triggers a series of violent acts in soft target areas (The Far Left, for all the complaints from conservative pundits about the dangers of Antifa and Black Lives Matters, are not that violent).

There's a storm coming. Stirred up by decades of Far Right Culture War bullshit.

I keep saying this: None of this will end well until Republicans are completely out of power and their wingnut foot soldiers all in jail for the bloodshed they're about to inflict on the rest of us.

Gods help us.

Update 7/27/23: To the nine people following this blog, you probably know I submitted this article with several others to the FWA Royal Palm Literary Awards, and this morning I got word that "Oncoming Storm" reached the Semi-Finalist stage! 
 

The trump Criminal Empire Threatens The Rule of Law

This is how fucked up our federal government is under the misrule of KING trump. Via Jamie Ross at Daily Beast:

The head of the Federal Judges Association has reportedly taken the unprecedented step of calling an emergency meeting to discuss President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr’s intervention in Roger Stone’s sentencing recommendation. U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, who leads the association of around 1,100 life-term federal judges, told USA Today that the issue “could not wait.” She said: “There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about... We’ll talk all this through.”

Rufe’s announcement follows an open letter signed by more than 1,000 former Justice Department employees calling on Barr to resign over the Stone case. Last week, Trump made clear that he was angry about the length of the sentence recommended for his friend Roger Stone, then Barr’s Justice Department withdrew that recommendation. Trump also attacked the judge in the Stone case, Amy Berman Jackson, with unfounded accusations of political bias. The Washington Post reported that the Federal Judges Association has never called an emergency meeting such as the one described by Rufe in the USA Today interview...

This has never happened before.

That is because we've never had a goddamned dictator-wannabe con artist asshole crook in office before. Yes, this is including the likes of Nixon and Harding and Jackson (and if you're so inclined I will include Bill Clinton in that mix).

That is because previous Presidents showed due deference to the independence of the Judiciary, whereas this President Loser of the Popular Vote trump wants every branch and every office of government bowing to him with undeserved fealty.

The amount of concern among other Republican leaders, especially the cowering ass-covering Senators who just gave trump their Stamp of Approval to break every law he wishes, will most likely rise to the level of telling Fox Not-News "Well, we'll write a strongly-worded letter to the White House as soon as we can find a typewriter that still works."

Christ.

Traditionally, the judges in our federal system try to avoid the appearance of partisanship or political bias - even as they pass rulings that have bias, thanks a lot Rehnquist Court for the Bush v. Gore monstrosity - but in this regard they can no longer avoid it. trump and his lackey AG Barr are directly attacking the independence of the third branch of our government, hacking at the checks and balances that are supposed to keep power shared and out of the hands of just one person.

But that's what trump wants, after all. trump has no respect for others unless they're rich and powerful, what he aspires to be (and what he secretly may not be, hence his refusal to ever show his tax returns). trump WANTS all that power, refuses to share it to those he views as lackeys and servants and losers. he chafes against the restrictions of dealing with Congress (even when his fellow Republicans controlled it between 2017-18, he couldn't handle sharing power with them), and he's expressed his disdain for judges before.

And now trump is unleashed. he thinks Congress can't touch him now (and with the Senate refusing to hold him accountable, he's right). The only thing standing in his way of Absolute Rule is a court system still holding his business buddies and Russian connections to count for their law-breaking before and during the 2016 elections.

Now trump wants the judges to arbitrarily give him and his buddies Stone, Flynn, Manafort and others a clean break, no more jail time for the sins they've plead out or convicted of, before trump has to resort to the obvious step of pardoning each of them anyway (trump and his lawyers have to understand the risks of pardons - if accepted, you can't claim Fifth Amendment protections from testifying later - so they want the judges to do the dirty work for them).

We are at a critical moment in our nation's history.

One branch of government - the Executive - is at war with another branch - the Judiciary - and the stakes are high. Above all the power of the Constitution itself serving as the Law of this Land.

Gods help us.

P.S. Dear judges, now would be a good time to figure out how to issue Contempt rulings on trump, Barr, Stone, and every other corrupt Republican threatening our legal system. KaiThnxBye

And They're Rounding Up The Families Just Like They Promised (w/ Update)

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for providing a link via Mike's Blog Round Up at Crooksandliars.com

Banner headlines tonight:

Across U.S., anxious families brace for Trump's announced mass immigration raids

trump still wants his grand stage event of rounding up enough Latinos to make his racist fan base happy. But rather than go after the actual street gangs, they're going after the working migrants in our low-income jobs as though that will solve all ills. Separating parents from children, God knows what will happen to the infants and youngest of them.

We're going to have modern-day Gestapo charging through ten major cities to round up a thousand innocent families whose only crime was wanting to be here...

...all the while taking orders from a man who rapes underage girls for fun.

Darkest timeline, everybody.

62 million of you assholes voted for this. Goddamn you.

Added 7/12: Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly: trump Intentionally Inflicts Harm on Refugees as Show of Force.

Apparently the details of how to organize this operation are still in flux, which probably means that it is yet another example of this administration proving the British ambassador correct: they are “dysfunctional, unpredictable, clumsy, inept, and incompetent.” But there are several things that we already know about this plan that should signal alarm.

For example, administration officials admit that there will be “collateral deportations.” What that means is that people on the scene who are assumed to be immigrants might be detained, even though they are not targets of the raids. So if you happen to be in the vicinity and have brown skin, you’re likely to be jailed and possibly deported...

If you can't answer the "Papers Please" request - and as a librarian, I've been stunned over the years to see how many people do not even carry something as no-brainer as their driver's license with them - and have skin darker than Ivanka, you're fucked. Never mind how previous deportations have sent hundreds if not thousands of Honest-to-God-I-Was-Born-In-The-USA citizens were shipped off to Mexico and beyond. Now we're gonna try to do by the millions.

This is not about upholding laws. This is all about the cruelty.

The Long Frustrating Sunday Of Coping With the Shitgibbon

One of the things I hate about this Era of Eternal trumpism (trumpus Horribilis) is how the ongoing scandal that is his damnable corruption makes it IMPOSSIBLE to keep up with a political rant blog like this.

I was going to start out this day writing about the news report that trump's campaign people - through trump ally Erik "Blackwater" Prince - made connections in 2016 with nations Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirate where those foreign powers offered to help trump win the election. Which is, by the by, illegal under 52 US Code.

This is serious stuff. As well as linking trump to even more corruption - the implications of Quid Pro Quos in that under trump's administration both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are getting exactly what they want - there is the likelihood Prince perjured himself before Congress when he was questioned about these type of meetings going on during the campaign. And while Russia's connection to all this - especially the interfering in the election itself - is still a part of the investigation, this revelation shows how eager trump and his people - especially his own son donny junior - were to make any lawbreaking deal they wanted.

But then this tweet from the Shitgibbon himself got out there (via Mock Paper Scissors):

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

As Tengrain himself notes: And game, set, and match: that sounds like Obstruction of Justice right there.

What trump is trying to do is call into question any investigation into the 2016 campaign, convinced that such digging is politically motivated as a revenge plot by Obama (and Hillary). Nevermind the evidence that such investigations began early in 2016 separate from any involvement from Obama's White House. Nevermind the fact that the Department of Justice and the FBI (and other intel agencies) are not motivated by partisan politics and are doing their jobs (which in this case is uncovering financial and political corruption). Read all these tweets collected on Anne Laurie's Balloon Juice article to understand better.

As what might happen tomorrow if trump does send his bullying command to Justice, there's a likelihood they will simply defer the request to their Inspector General (IG) office and let the IG investigate trump's claims (which are mostly based on wingnut conspiracy crap spewed via InfoWars and Fox Not-News). It won't defuse the argument - the wingnuts will never accept any finding that doesn't fit their fantasy Narrative - but it will keep this situation from escalating into a larger Constitutional Crisis.

Unless trump uses the "lack of urgency" by the DoJ to start firing people like Deputy AG Rosenstein to get the results he wants, in which case he IS trying to obstruct the investigation and IT WILL BE open warfare.

Even getting into Rudy Giuliani's claim that Mueller is promising to end his investigation by September is so small potatoes that I'm just going to link it here without comment. Except that WHY should we believe Rudy about Mueller's own plans?

So here's to seeing how Monday rolls out.

I don't want the world to end this week. Jewel Staite is coming to Orlando MegaCon this Memorial Day weekend...

fan art by Adam Withers. If he shows up at a comic-con, HIS SH-T'S GOOD GO BUY SOME.

And Like All Bad Liars, trump and His People Are Trying to Erase The Truth

This part of the ongoing investigation into trumpWorld ought to scare the crap out of everybody (via the New Yorker):

...Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.

The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a “suspicious-activity report” filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

The report also refers to two previous suspicious-activity reports, or SARs, that the bank had filed, which documented even larger flows of questionable money into Cohen’s account. Those two reports detail more than three million dollars in additional transactions—triple the amount in the report released last week. Which individuals or corporations were involved remains a mystery. But, according to the official who leaked the report, these SARs were absent from the database maintained by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN. The official, who has spent a career in law enforcement, told me, “I have never seen something pulled off the system... That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” The official added, “That’s why I came forward.”

Consider who has access to that enforcement network, maybe Treasury, maybe Justice Department, maybe the White House. Someone in one of those offices - now under sway of donald trump and anybody else tied to Cohen - was actively scrubbing evidence out of a database nobody should be tampering with in the first place.

Remember the words from All The President's Men - the line itself was never directly spoken by Mark Felt, AKA Deep Throat, but Woodward condensed the warnings from Felt into a coherent phrase - about "Follow the Money." The one constant in every real scandal is the money. In trump's case, it's money coming from his questionable ties to foreign businesses and oligarchs looking to launder money and buy favors.

This is serious criminal shit here, folks.

Whine all you want about whether or not trump got help from Russia to steal the 2016 elections - by the by, HE DID - but you can't hide from the reality that trump and more and more of his fellow Republican toadies are selling themselves and this nation out to corrupt powers on a global scale.

We are so very royally goddamn fucked.

Update (5/19/18): Apparently the disappearance of those two SARs didn't mean they were deleted, they were placed under more restrictive access. This is still troubling as this may be an attempt to hide these documents from investigators. I may have jumped the gun about the possibility of trump's people destroying evidence, but the threat is still there...

What The Wire Means

You gotta pity the poor guys on social media named George Papadopoulos. It may be a rare name in the US, but it's about as common in Greece as John Smith is stateside.

(on the other hand, this guy has a wicked sense of humor about what's happening, and way more integrity and smarts than the Wrong Papadopoulos)

Amidst the pomp and celebration that were the Manafort/Gates indictments, there was a lesser-reported story that Mueller's probe into the trump-Russia collusion of the 2016 elections secured a guilty plea - of lying to federal investigators - from the Wrong Papadopoulos. Thing is, that guilty plea points to Papadopoulos as a key figure tying most of the questionable behavior of the trump campaign into one large tidy conspiracy pot.

Referring to an expert from the Watergate years, via The Raw Story article by Tom Boggioni:

Speaking with host Ali Velshi, attorney Nick Akerman said he had looked at the indictment against Manafort and said that he had no doubt that Trump associate would be found guilty.

“Now this it’s not like a witch hunt where there is nothing,” Akerman began.”Now you have got something that is real...”

...Akerman picked up on the deal that Papadopoulos made with investigators, saying, if Mueller has done his job properly, the former Trump associate has been wearing a wire for months as part of a deal...

“...He’s pled guilty, pled guilty to a felony, lying to the FBI,” Akerman continued. “He’s basically, if you looked through his allocution, you have allocute. They don’t name names, it’s against Justice Department policy to do that. But he refers to campaign officials, other officials — it’s very obvious he has information on lots of people and on top of that, he’s been cooperating since July.

“If I were the prosecutor, and I guarantee you Robert Mueller has done this, he’s had him out there wearing a body wire, playing dial-a-crook on the phone, trying to get recorded conversations to use as evidence against other people,” he asserted. “If I were the other people, and they know who they are in that information, I’d be extremely nervous right now.”

A lot of this depends on the actual timeline, of when Papadopoulos started handing over information and providing sound to whatever conversations were taking place. If Paps had been wearing a wire since early October (when the plea deal was reached), there probably isn't a lot there. But if he'd been wearing a wire since July 2017...

July 2017 is when the story broke on donald jr's meeting at trump Tower back in June 9 2016. The fallout from that revelation - of how invested in working with their Russian partners and Putin associates the trumps were - would certainly have been a major topic of conversation among the members of trump's Inner Circle. If Papadopoulos was present at any of those conversations, it's likely he picked up on various details of what people were doing to hide any compromising info from the investigation (and also what that compromising info could be).

We're dealing with a conspiracy here, people. A group led at the top by a con artist in trump, whose dealings with Russia go all the way back to the 1980s (!) and whose entire circle of family members and handlers are circling the wagons to protect their scams. The problem with proving a conspiracy isn't the numbers or the money: You can trace phone calls and meetings and fund transactions all over the place. Without actual testimony from people - catching them in lies and making them confirm the facts - it's hard to prove criminal actions were part of those transactions.

The way prosecutors break a conspiracy is catching a low level member of it, especially someone whose lies are the easiest to disprove. With that person flipped to the prosecution's side, he/she then has to cooperate by proving there is a conspiracy through the conversations and responses he/she has with the other members. This is where the wire comes in.

If you've watched enough episodes of Law & Order - yes, it's a television show, but in terms of prosecutorial conduct it's accurate - you'd remember this: In a criminal trial where you need a suspect to testify between a group of suspects, the one who flips first (the one with the most to lose) usually gets the best deal. SEE ALSO: The Prisoner's Dilemma.

Mueller - and the intel agencies aiding his investigation - most likely has a good idea what happened with Russia and trump, otherwise the federal investigators who interviewed Papadopoulos wouldn't have confirmed so easily he lied to them. But he still needs testimony, not just from one or two people he got to plead out but with recorded evidence backing established facts... and revealing more troubling facts that would force those higher in the chain of the conspiracy to plead out themselves.

The Papadopoulos wire shows how confident Mueller and his team was that they could secure confirmation of criminal misdeeds. That this information is coming out now while the investigation is ongoing - and while lower rungs of the conspiracy like Manafort and Gates are getting arrested - suggests that Mueller doesn't need Papadopoulos to get more information. He's already got enough out of Paps.

And he's likely got a wire now on someone even closer to trump and his handlers.

If You Had Manafort On Your Dead Pool List, Congrats You Win a Firm Handshake

It's Manafort first out the gates... with his business associate/lobbyist Rick Gates alongside him.

If you hadn't heard of Gates much, he's been under investigation as well, just not as noticed by the media. As the Daily Beast notes, Gates is a serious link to Russia.

As Silverman noted at Balloon Juice, which I linked to earlier, it's clear that Mueller is going first after the stuff he can prove in a court of law without any heavy lifting. Manafort's "questionable" business practices - on the radar since 2012 - makes him an easy target to get... and a likely would-be witness willing to flip on others when a good deal is on the table.

It's not the grand slam a lot of Never trumpers was hoping for - if Mueller had indicted Kushner, Flynn, and donnie junior today as well, I would seriously revoke my No Drinking rule and get smashed on the finest whiskey - but it's a solid base hit. The game is on, muthafuckas, and trump is going to be flailing like the wounded shitgibbon that he is.

With thanks to Betty Cracker for this image link: