Or maybe the metaphor is more like:
"This Trump-Russia thing is a malignant tumor with some very irregular margins. We know we won't get it all because the tendrils have grown wide and deep into a lot of little nooks and crannies. We have to take our time and make sure we get as much of it as possible."
So I guess we can start with the update on Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was indicted for Obstruction last week.
Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker:
Veselnitskaya, of course, is most widely known as the lawyer who met with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower, in June, 2016, after a Trump business partner suggested that she could offer documents that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton. But the reason she was in the United States at the time was for hearings in a case launched by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York against a longtime client of hers, a Russian man named Denis Katsyv.
The details quickly get complicated, but suffice it to say that the investigation against Katsyv was opened in response to a letter filed with prosecutors in New York by Bill Browder, an American-born hedge-fund manager who, in the past decade, has become the chief advocate for sanctions against Russian government officials and other individuals. In 2009, a tax adviser working for Browder, Sergei Magnitsky, testified to Russian investigators that Russian officials had stolen two hundred and thirty million dollars in tax-refund payments. He was arrested and died in pretrial detention, leading Browder to launch a worldwide justice campaign, including lobbying for the passage of U.S. sanctions. In 2012, President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which has sanctioned dozens of Russian officials and which became a particular obsession of Vladimir Putin’s.
Another prong of Browder’s efforts was his letter to prosecutors claiming that Katsyv and his investment company, Prevezon, received a portion of the ill-gotten funds and used them to buy millions of dollars’ worth of Manhattan real estate.
- and -
It's the Russian mob - which is the Russian government - and the Russian money. These things are not separable, and 45* is in bed with all of it.
Sue Halpern, The New Yorker:
On Tuesday, when news broke that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort had shared internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian business associate with ties to Russian intelligence, the through line between the campaign and the Kremlin began to look incontrovertible. The revelation came in an inadvertently unredacted court document, which was filed by Manafort’s lawyers in response to charges made by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, that Manafort had lied to investigators. According to the Times, some—but not all—of the data was already in the public domain. The rest came from the campaign’s own polling operation.
And let's be sure to look at our questions about why so many Repubs are so reluctant to call 45* on his shit.
But, even more significant, it was Paul Manafort who decided to hire Tony Fabrizio as the campaign’s chief pollster. Their friendship dates back to the nineteen-nineties—Fabrizio and Manafort worked together on the Presidential campaign of Bob Dole. Fabrizio also worked for Manafort in Ukraine, earning $278,500 for the same type of work he would later do for Trump—polling and surveying to help elevate Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in the 2012 parliamentary elections. During the same period, Manafort disbursed five hundred and thirty-one thousand dollars to Kilimnik, his translator and fixer in Ukraine, for “professional services.” According to a report in Bloomberg about Manafort’s Ukrainian ventures, Fabrizio is included in e-mail chains with Manafort and Kilimnik.
Fabrizio, a native New Yorker who now lives in Florida, has worked for dozens of Republican candidates, including Mitch McConnell, Joni Ernst, and Rand Paul, and is a senior counsellor at Mercury Public Affairs, which Mueller referred to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, for failing to register as a foreign agent for its lobbying work on behalf of Ukraine. Fabrizio’s company, Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, bills itself as “one of the leading survey research and campaign strategists in the nation.” “We were honored to have the privilege to serve as Chief Pollsters for President Donald J. Trump’s historic upset victory,” the company’s Web site declares, at the top of its home page. But the firm also had the experience of many people who have worked for Trump: for a time, it was reported that Trump stiffed the company three-quarters of a million dollars for its services on the Presidential campaign. If nothing else, Fabrizio was familiar with both principals in this story. (Fabrizio did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
There are many dots that connect without a lot of stretching, and others that seem like they go together, but don't. I want to make sure we're not stampeding ourselves. We don't need to knee-jerk our way into some stupid Purity Quest where we shit on anyone with even the most tenuous connection to the bad guys - assuming we can be at all sure who the bad guys are.
Overall, I think we have to assume the Russians are the bad guys (duh), and qualify that with "Russians expressing an interest in getting involved with American politics".
American politicians need to be made to understand that voters are actually waking up a little; we're pissed off; and we're less likely now to accept some spinny version of the polling data that tells us we're not really pissed off about what we're pissed off about - that somehow we don't know what we're pissed off about, and we need some asshole to tell us what we think.
And not to get too whip-lash-ey, but this whole thing leads right back to Citizens United, and the fact that solving our democracy problems requires us to concentrate on getting those very large piles of dark money out of our political processes.
Because every time we have to go through this kinda shit, money is at the root of it all.
Every. Fucking. Time.
On Tuesday, when news broke that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort had shared internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian business associate with ties to Russian intelligence, the through line between the campaign and the Kremlin began to look incontrovertible. The revelation came in an inadvertently unredacted court document, which was filed by Manafort’s lawyers in response to charges made by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, that Manafort had lied to investigators. According to the Times, some—but not all—of the data was already in the public domain. The rest came from the campaign’s own polling operation.
And let's be sure to look at our questions about why so many Repubs are so reluctant to call 45* on his shit.
But, even more significant, it was Paul Manafort who decided to hire Tony Fabrizio as the campaign’s chief pollster. Their friendship dates back to the nineteen-nineties—Fabrizio and Manafort worked together on the Presidential campaign of Bob Dole. Fabrizio also worked for Manafort in Ukraine, earning $278,500 for the same type of work he would later do for Trump—polling and surveying to help elevate Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in the 2012 parliamentary elections. During the same period, Manafort disbursed five hundred and thirty-one thousand dollars to Kilimnik, his translator and fixer in Ukraine, for “professional services.” According to a report in Bloomberg about Manafort’s Ukrainian ventures, Fabrizio is included in e-mail chains with Manafort and Kilimnik.
Fabrizio, a native New Yorker who now lives in Florida, has worked for dozens of Republican candidates, including Mitch McConnell, Joni Ernst, and Rand Paul, and is a senior counsellor at Mercury Public Affairs, which Mueller referred to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, for failing to register as a foreign agent for its lobbying work on behalf of Ukraine. Fabrizio’s company, Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, bills itself as “one of the leading survey research and campaign strategists in the nation.” “We were honored to have the privilege to serve as Chief Pollsters for President Donald J. Trump’s historic upset victory,” the company’s Web site declares, at the top of its home page. But the firm also had the experience of many people who have worked for Trump: for a time, it was reported that Trump stiffed the company three-quarters of a million dollars for its services on the Presidential campaign. If nothing else, Fabrizio was familiar with both principals in this story. (Fabrizio did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
There are many dots that connect without a lot of stretching, and others that seem like they go together, but don't. I want to make sure we're not stampeding ourselves. We don't need to knee-jerk our way into some stupid Purity Quest where we shit on anyone with even the most tenuous connection to the bad guys - assuming we can be at all sure who the bad guys are.
Overall, I think we have to assume the Russians are the bad guys (duh), and qualify that with "Russians expressing an interest in getting involved with American politics".
American politicians need to be made to understand that voters are actually waking up a little; we're pissed off; and we're less likely now to accept some spinny version of the polling data that tells us we're not really pissed off about what we're pissed off about - that somehow we don't know what we're pissed off about, and we need some asshole to tell us what we think.
And not to get too whip-lash-ey, but this whole thing leads right back to Citizens United, and the fact that solving our democracy problems requires us to concentrate on getting those very large piles of dark money out of our political processes.
Because every time we have to go through this kinda shit, money is at the root of it all.
Every. Fucking. Time.
