Accusation As Confession

Daddy State Awareness

Rule 1: Every accusation is a confession

Empty Wheel:

WHY DID REBEKAH MERCER AND STEVE BANNON START PREPARING AN ACCUSATION THAT HILLARY HAD CORRUPT TIES WITH RUSSIA STARTING ON MARCH 14, 2016? 

October 30, 2018

Amid a lot of noise regarding the eight month investigation into Roger Stone (including that his assistant Jason Sullivan has been asked for the complete recordings of some conference calls he gave in 2016 and that he has passed two polygraphs that may not be asking the right questions), the WaPo has a detail of real interest. Mueller brought Steve Bannon back in for questioning Friday.

On Friday, Mueller’s team questioned Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief campaign strategist, about alleged claims Stone made privately about WikiLeaks before the group released emails allegedly hacked by Russian operatives, according to people familiar with the session.

I say that’s particularly interesting because of Bannon’s role in a series of events that come as close as anything to hint that Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi not only had advance knowledge that Wikileaks would release John Podesta’s emails, but may have known and planned for what those emails included.

STONE AND CORSI SEEMED TO EXPECT THAT THERE WOULD BE PODESTA EMAILS RELATING TO JOULE

As I noted in these two posts, Stone’s evolving public stories explaining his knowledge of the stolen documents seem to attempt to do three things:

• Provide non-incriminating explanations for any foreknowledge of WikiLeaks — first pointing to Randy Credico and now to James Rosen
• Offer explanations for discussions about Podesta that he may presume Mueller has that took place around August 14
• Shift the focus away from Joule and the remarkable prescience with which the right wing anticipated that WikiLeaks would be able to advance an attack first rolled out on August 1

Basically, over the course of August, several key events happened: Stone first started publicly claiming foreknowledge of what WikiLeaks would drop, tried to launch a counterattack against public reporting on Paul Manafort’s sleazy ties to Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian oligarchs, and then warned that it would soon be John Podesta’s time on the barrel. Those events came amidst two separate oppo research efforts: An early one initiated by Bannon and (Clinton Cash author) Peter Schweizer that accused Hillary of corrupt ties to Russia, largely through John Podesta’s role a company called Joule Unlimited. And then a later one (starting at 39), written by Corsi, trying to impugn Hillary because her campaign manager’s brother was so corrupt he had worked with Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and at Manafort’s instructions not properly declared the work. Stone seems to have wanted to conflate those two efforts, in part to suggest his August 21 tweet (and an August 15 one that may end up being just as interesting) referred to both brothers, not just John, and therefore not the earlier oppo effort.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that We The People will probably never learn more than about a third of the shit that Bob Mueller is digging up.

If the point of the exercise for Putin is to degrade our democratic processes - to strike at the confidence we have to have in order to proceed with "free and fair elections" - then our government has a built-in incentive not to tell us how deeply effective the Russians have been. Because full disclosure runs the risk of doing Putin's work for him.

And along those lines, I think it's worth considering easing up on the Dems a bit, because (as hard to believe as this may be) they're prob'ly smarter than they seem - they know they have to criticize, but they have to do it without helping us think the elections aren't legit, which is what too many of us think already, which is the goal of Cult45 and the GOP and their Russian allies.

It's The Money, Stoopid

Jamie Ross, The Daily Beast:

Arron Banks, the biggest individual donor in British political history and a major source of money behind the Brexit campaign, has been placed under criminal investigation for several suspected offenses that took place during the referendum.

Britain’s election watchdog says there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect that Banks committed several crimes in the run-up to the dramatic vote, and that they suspect he wasn’t the true source of £8 million ($10 million) in loans made to Better for the Country—a company he used to finance the Leave.EU campaign group whose public face was Nigel Farage.

The investigation by the National Crime Agency, which has the expertise to trace illicit cross-border money trails, will seek to find the true source of the money that funded Brexit.

Banks—one of the self-christened “bad boys of Brexit” who met Donald Trump in late 2016 with Farage—has long been a controversial figure with business links to Russia. He is known to have been offered three Russian business deals during the Brexit campaign, including one that gave him the chance to make huge profits from a Russian gold company.


Too much money in politics. 

We have to get back to a decent level of transparency - where we can learn every name associated with every dollar "donated" to every political entity.

A coin-operated political system is inherently corrupt.

Today's Tweet

Follow the thread.

TRUMP: "I've decided to eat babies."

PEOPLE: "He can't eat babies, that's super illegal."

TRUMP, on TV, eating babies, not even cooking them first: "People are saying that I really am the best baby-eater, folks."

NYT: "Trump Vs. Babies: The Rhetoric On Both Sides Must Stop"

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) October 30, 2018

What He Promised

Don't get sucked into an argument with this bullshit: "He's doing what he promised to do".

Robert Reich is 10 feet tall.

Bad Optics

No, the title of this post doesn't refer to what the asshole ammosexual said as he was gearing up to kill Jews in Pittsburgh last Saturday.

I'm talking about the bad optics of having to wonder "Which of the myriad scandals, by which cabinet member?"

The combinations and permutations are practically infinite.

MSNBC:
(BTW, I think the lede oughta begin with: "It's kinda hard to believe it's not every day, but...")

It’s not every day that a federal cabinet secretary is referred to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation, though as the Washington Post reported, that’s precisely what happened yesterday to one of Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet members.

The Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General has referred one of its probes into the conduct of Secretary Ryan Zinke to the Justice Department for further investigation, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.

Deputy Inspector General Mary L. Kendall, who is serving as acting inspector general, is conducting at least three probes that involve Zinke. These include his involvement in a Montana land deal and the decision not to grant two tribes approval to operate a casino in Connecticut. The individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly, did not specify which inquiry had been referred to the Justice Department.

It’s probably premature to say that Zinke is now under criminal investigation, but the agency’s inspector general has apparently determined that the cabinet secretary may have committed criminal acts. An IG isn’t empowered to do criminal investigations, which is why the matter has been sent to Justice.

The article added that a senior White House official said the investigation is apparently looking into whether the secretary “used his office to help himself.”

If we ever get around to pursuing even a representative sample of the shit being perpetrated by Cult45, DoJ will be busy with it for decades.

Vox Finally Gets It

Tengrain over at Mock Paper Scissors said it: "Vox owes Driftglass a drink".

One of the greatest achievements in political propaganda is illustrated by the willingness of Americans to shrug and say "Oh well - they're both fucked up - it's an evil duopoly - why bother..."

There's too much money in politics and too much CO2 in the air.

Concentrate on those two issues, and the world starts to get better.

Today's Today

click it

Arnold Writes A Speech

Arnold Schwarzenegger tries to school 45*

What We're Paying For

A typical work day for a US president is 10 or 12 hours, which means he makes about $125 per hour, and he earns every penny.

45* puts in about 3 hours a day, which means he's pulling down close to $500 per hour.

The guy might as well be Calvin Coolidge for all the time he doesn't spend doing the job he was hired to do.

Bess Levin, Vanity Fair:

Back in January, Axios obtained an inside look at Donald Trump’s schedule, revealing that the president of the United States was doing far less work than in the early days of his term, and demanding large blocks of “Executive Time,” a euphemism created by Chief of Staff John Kelly so that White House aides didn’t have to write dick around on Twitter and shout at the TV on official documents. Now, nine months later, Politico has revisited Trump’s schedule, and it turns out that the most powerful person in the world is somehow doing even less work every day than he was earlier this year. Moreover, when Trump does deign to do his job, it’s mostly in the form of signing ceremonies and shouting at aides to craft policy around something he saw on Fox & Friends.

Last Tuesday’s schedule, for instance, reportedly included a whopping nine hours of “Executive Time,” or triple the time that was allotted for actual work. Trump’s first commitment of the day came at 1 P.M., and while he had a 30-minute call with C.E.O.s here and a quick briefing and dinner with senior military leaders there, the rest of the day consisted of doing whatever the hell he wanted, sometimes for stretches as long as two hours and 45 minutes. (What he wanted, apparently, was to trash Puerto Rico’s elected officials and tweet clips of himself fear-mongering about immigrants.) And while Tuesday included more free time than any other day that week, it was in no way an outlier:

A bulk of the president’s time last week was spent traveling to and from political rallies and campaigning on behalf of Republican candidates ahead of next Tuesday’s midterm elections. On Wednesday, which began with an 11:30 A.M. meeting with John Kelly, Trump delivered brief remarks on the opioid crisis and sat for a media interview before departing for an evening rally in Wisconsin. The rest of his day, according to his schedule, was open.

Last week’s schedules are remarkably light on policy discussions. The president spent a little more than two hours of his week in policy briefings, according to the schedules, and he was scheduled to receive the President’s Daily Brief on just two of the five days reviewed.

Today's GIF

Dead Leaf Butterfly - cuz Evolution, bitches.