The Muscovite Candidate

[Lord Jim]

And the awfulness just keeps getting awfuller...

'Absurd, crazy': Trump discussed allowing Putin to interrogate US ambassador

The White House has declined to rule out accepting a Russian proposal for the questioning in the United States of Americans, including former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, sought by the Kremlin for “illegal activities”.

The proposal arose at Monday’s summit between the US president Donald Trump and the Russian president Vladimir Putin, and any decision by Washington to assist with an adversary’s prosecution of former government employees overseas would be a stunning shift in US policy, especially as it could violate the international legal principle of diplomatic immunity.

“The president is going to meet with his team and we’ll let you know when we have an announcement on that,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told a news briefing. Sanders added that Trump “said it was an interesting idea ... He wants to work with his team and determine if there is any validity that would be helpful to the process”.

Sanders’s comments prompted outrage in the US, including from McFaul, a vocal Putin critic.

It comes after Putin suggested at the Helsinki summit that he would let US investigators be present for questioning of 12 Russian intelligence officers charged last Friday on allegations they carried out cyber attacks to interfere in the 2016 US election if Russians could do the same in America for people connected to money manager Bill Browder, a one-time investor in Russia. Browder has said he helped expose corruption in Russia.

Putin accused Browder of making campaign contributions to Trump’s election rival Hillary Clinton with money he earned in Russia on which he did not pay taxes. Putin said US intelligence officers helped Browder. [Now we can see why this would be so appealing to Trump; another made-up crackpot Obama/Clinton "deep state conspiracy" to try to deflect attention from Russiagate]

On Wednesday, the Russian prosecutor general’s office listed Americans it wants to question for “illegal activities”, including McFaul, who was US ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration and is now at Stanford University in California.

US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert called the Russian allegations “absolutely absurd”.

“The prosecutor general in Russia is well aware that the United States has rejected Russian allegations in this regard,” Nauert told a briefing.

McFaul told Reuters he has contacted Stanford lawyers. He denied Russia’s accusations and expressed deep concern that the White House failed to defend him.

“It’s crazy and should be called crazy and outrageous, not just by me, but by the US government,” McFaul said.

McFaul said the White House, by considering the request, was “assigning moral equivalence between a legitimate indictment of Russian intelligence officers ... to a cockamamie fantasy (from Moscow) with no basis in reality”.[uh, yep...]

The suggestion that the US would hand over a former ambassador to Russia caused deep disquiet in Washington.

Senior Democrat Adam Schiff said McFaul’s freedom was “not up for negotiation”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... ael-mcfaul

[Econoline]

[Guinevere]

It gets even worse than that LJ - Trump may have burned US and Israeli intelligence operatives in an effort to continue sucking off Putin:

From @Eorden (CNN reporter Erica Orden on Twitter)

weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/worl ... ling-.html

Within 9 months of that briefing 9 high profile Russians, dead.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/24/euro ... index.html

Washington (CNN) Nine high-profile Russians, including several high-profile diplomats, have died over the nine months since the US presidential election on November 8.

Among the recent deaths were six Russian diplomats. Some of the deaths appeared natural and governments have ruled out foul play.

In some cases, though, questions remain. That's either because the facts have changed over time, details are hard to come by, or the deaths are still under investigation.

The pieces are coming together and the noose is tightening around his neck.

[Lord Jim]

The pieces are coming together and the noose is tightening around his neck.

And the tighter it gets, the more desperate and reckless he becomes...

truly very dangerous times for our country...

[Burning Petard]

Additional pleasure for me (a long time member of the NRA) is the arrest of Maria Butina. She may have made Wayne LaPierre and the NRA a tool of Putin. She did participate in the same room with POTUS at National Prayer Breakfasts (with about four thousand other people)

snailgate

[Scooter]

[BoSoxGal]

[Lord Jim]

[Lord Jim]

This must have the Republicans on The Hill absolutely thrilled:

Putin invite sends Washington into Russian twilight zone

(CNN)It was a jaw-dropping moment that embodied the utterly unfathomable, logic-defying and increasingly troubling twilight zone into which Washington has plunged since the Helsinki summit.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was onstage at a security forum in Aspen, Colorado, when he was told by NBC's Andrea Mitchell that the White House had announced on Twitter that President Donald Trump had invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit in the fall.

"Say that again," Coats said, doing a double take and laughing in disbelief at the absurdity of the latest episode in the Russia saga. Once he had collected himself, he added: "Okaaaay. ... That's going to be special."

It was a comic twist that exemplified the way Trump has tipped American foreign policy and presidential convention on its head since his controversial summit with Putin on Monday, in which he was deeply deferential to the Russian leader and lashed out at his own country.

The barely believable events of recent days are provoking rising debate in Washington and in the media over whether Russia does indeed have some incriminating intelligence it is holding over the President's head that is influencing his behavior toward Putin. There has so far been no publicly available evidence to support that case.

But Steve Hall, a former CIA station chief in Moscow, issued a chilling warning on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" on Thursday -- which if it is borne out would have unfathomable political consequences.

"Before the Helsinki summit, I was not prepared to go to the darkest corner in the room and say there is kompromat -- there is compromising information -- on Donald Trump," Hall said.

"After ... I saw Donald Trump treat (Putin) in a fashion that is just inexplicable, the only conclusion that I can come to is ... I think there is information and data out there that implies there is indeed compromising information that Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump. Why else would he treat him that way?"

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/20/politics ... index.html

Let's see, he's going to shut down the government over funding for his wall at the end of September and then have Vladimir Putin show up at the White House for another kissy fanny session right before the midterms...

Maybe The Donald is trying to Make The Democratic Party Great Again...

[ex-khobar Andy]

We need to update the A Lincoln meme:

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Bottom line: you can fool enough of the people enough of the time.

[Lord Jim]

Personally I hope Trump does follow through on this...(Maybe he could also request that Putin be allowed to give a speech before a joint session of congress, and take him out with him on the campaign trail...)

Though I'm sure Ryan and McConnell will be frantically trying to talk him out of it....

The feckless Congressional Republicans who have rolled over and played dead for Il Boobce deserve this; couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys...

[BoSoxGal]

There’s my answer to the question in the other thread.

I don’t understand why anybody doubts that Putin has kompromat on Trump; it isn’t pee tapes, either. Trump is a major money launderer for the Russian oligarchy and has been for years. When US banks stopped lending to him, he started getting cash from Russia, just like Eric said publicly years ago. Trump used to leverage massive debt in his real estate business, and in recent years he buys failing golf courses for multimillions CASH and then dumps multimillions more CASH into improving them, while on the books they lose money year after year. He buys residential properties in Florida for multimillions CASH and sells them a few years later at major markup to RUSSIAN buyers. This is just the stuff that is publicly accessible and which Rachel Maddow and others have been reporting for many months; imagine what’s in the tax returns.

The GOP is led by a made man who is consigliere to the biggest mob boss the world has ever known.

[Big RR]

He doesn't have the intelligence to be consigliere; he's more like the stooge/patsy or, at best, the bag man.

and maybe, as the investigations close in, he'll be the victim of a hit to silence him; stranger things have happened.

[BoSoxGal]

Yeah after I posted that I thought the same thing - he’s too stupid to be consigliere.

As to the hit - we can only hope!

[Big RR]

Yeah, but if histry repeats itself, then we'll have Trump airports, Cape Trump, and Trump on the half dollar; even so, it's a small price to pay.

[RayThom]

... Bottom line: you can fool enough of the people enough of the time.

He may not be Lincoln but this has the right sentiment:

[Econoline]

[Econoline]

From Politico:

• When I wrote, back in February, that I was skeptical that President Donald Trump would ever be proved to have secretly colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election in his favor, I mistyped.
  
  What I meant to write was that I wasn’t skeptical.

Link to the whole essay:

• • Why I’m No Longer a Russiagate Skeptic

[Scooter]

Canada cuts out middleman in US trade war by negotiating directly with Putin

MOSCOW – The Canadian government has relocated its NAFTA trade negotiations to Russia, a diplomatic maneuver that will eliminate US President Donald Trump as a middleman.

Five Canadian members of the trade mission to save NAFTA diverted their plane from Washington, DC to Moscow after Trump’s press conference in Finland.

“Rather than negotiate with an erratic and contradictory proxy like Mr. Trump, we’d much prefer to have the ear of someone who has a real pull with the US Administration,” said Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs. “We can end this trade war if we start complimenting the Russian leader on his manliness and ignore how many journalists or opposition leaders he’s killed.”

Freeland added “there was too much on the line to waste our time on an angry marionette show.”

After Russian President Vladimir Putin met his subordinate in Helsinki this week, the Canadian trade delegation is now taking cues from the Russian leader who has tremendous sway in determining US foreign policy as well as electoral outcomes.

“We’re asking Mr. Putin to instruct Mr. Trump to instruct Republicans in Congress to kill Buy American requirements-related bills,” said one unnamed Canadian delegate. “And maybe replace the US Ambassador to Canada with someone who believes in climate change, but we might have to recognize the Crimea as part of Russia.”

In an effort to sway the Russian delegation, Freeland and her team plan on greeting their counterparts with a traditional human rights abuse.

[Lord Jim]

From Econo's "Why I’m No Longer a Russiagate Skeptic" article"

Politically speaking, Trump’s devotion to his pro-Putin line doesn’t make sense. Yes, the GOP base is impressionable, and perhaps Republican voters would accept it if Trump came out and said, “You bet, Russia helped get me elected, and wasn’t that a good thing? We couldn’t let Crooked Hillary win!”

But nobody would say his odd solicitousness toward the Kremlin leader is a political winner, and it certainly causes an unnecessary amount of friction with Republicans in Congress. He’s kept it up at great political cost to himself, and that suggests either that he is possessed by an anomalous level of conviction on this one issue,[ Donald Trump acting out of conviction... that's a good one...] despite his extraordinary malleability on everything else—or that he’s beholden to Putin in some way.

That echos a point I've been making since the campaign, and to me lays out what has always been the strongest proof that Putin must have some thing that he's using as some kind of leverage over Trump...


The fact that on it's face, Trump derives no benefit from his embrace of Putin...

Every other theme of Trump's campaign had some pre-existing constituency that he was clearly trying draw in...

False hope for lost jobs, xenophobia, racism, a generalized anger towards the political establishment, dislike and distrust for Hillary Clinton, a hunger for "something new"...

All of these messages had constituencies, and Trump tailored his candidacy to make himself their messenger. He told people what they wanted to hear, validated and inflamed their fears and resentments to exploit them for political benefit...

It was a completely cynical, dishonest, and morally and intellectually empty strategy, but it was also pretty shrewd...

But there was never any pre-existing "Embrace Vladimir Putin and adopt the policies that hurt the US and help Russia" constituency to appeal to...

And there still isn't any such constituency. I know there have been some polls this week that show that an appalling and profoundly depressing high percentage of people currently calling themselves Republicans approve of his performance in Helsinki, but these aren't people for whom "suck up to Vladimir Putin" is a motivating voting issue.

These are confused and misguided souls who would tell pollsters they approved of anything Trump said or did. (If the "pee-pee tape" proved to be real, you could probably get 70% of those currently claiming to be Republicans to say they now approved of golden shower fetish sex... )

If Trump turned against Putin tomorrow, he wouldn't lose a single vote from these folks. He has no need to dog whistle or throw red meat to some "I love Vladimir Putin" group of followers. (Unlike say, racists, who might stop supporting him if they suspected he was no longer a racist...)

And of course beyond his core constituency, with persuadable independents and Democrats, his Putin/Russia stance is nothing but a pure loser...no benefit for him whatsoever...

And yet he persists...

Since there's no political benefit for him, and we can obviously 100% rule out "a courageous stand based on convictions" (I wasn't even able to type that in reference to Donald Trump without bursting out laughing) then it's time to apply Sherlock's Razor:

"Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth"...