Oh brother, oh brother.
John Dowd — the guy who claimed he wrote the tweet which suggested Trump knew Flynn had lied to the FBI but he just didn’t care, who potentially broke campaign finance laws by donating more than is legally permissible to the Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign by going $300 above the limit. who just recently praised Jeff Sessions for firing Andrew McCabe and suggested Rod Rosenstein should follow his lead and fire Robert Mueller — has just quit as Trump’s lead defense attorney reportedly because The Donald won't take his advice, so after asking 4 other attorney’s who all turned him down — including Ted Olsen and Clinton impeachment attorney Emmet Flood— Trump has hired Joe diGenova’s wife Victoria Toensing who happens to already represent a Uranium One conspiracy theorist and wants to have Meuller investigated by yet another Special Counsel because he was FBI Director when that deal was approved even though he — like Clinton — had nothing to do with it.
So there’s all that and then this: Trump announced he’s dumping McMaster as National Security advisor to be replaced by John Freaking Bolton.
My brightest memory of Victoria Toensing is when she was testifying before Congress on the Valerie Plame matter and she matter—of—factly proclaimed that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act didn’t apply to Plame because she claimed she hadn’t left the country in the the last two years on a covert mission — as is required in the act, which she had helped draft. So basically she wasn’t a covert agent, nobody in the White House leaked anything, nobody saw anything, nobody can prove anything.
Henry Waxman here points out that CIA Director General Hayden specifically told him Plame was a covert agent.
The entire reason that the CIA made a criminal referral to the FBI and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was assigned to investigate this matter in the first place was because Valeria Plame was covered under the IIPA, otherwise — why the fuck bring it up at all? Why make the criminal referral?
“Oh we’re the CIA but we don’t know where are agents are or where the fuck they’ve been over the past two years — DUH!”
Toensing here basically claimed to know whether a Secret Freaking Agent had gone overseas or not in the appropriate time frame as if she knows the Secret Shit that Secret Freaking Agents do — when they’re trying to be FUCKING Secretive.
So this is the legal brilliance that Trump has just added to his team. Wonderful.
And then there’s John Bolton who’s entire attitude is that we need to bomb Iran to destroy their Nuclear capability and we need to do a Nuclear First Strike against North Korea — because that’s just a fabulous idea.
Trump announced Thursday on Twitter that Bolton is replacing H.R. McMaster,effective April 9. A hawk on North Korea and Iran, Bolton wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal in late February titled, "The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First," and in January told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo that "talking to North Koreans is a waste of time." Bolton has been highly critical of former President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, and in 2015 wrote an op-ed for The New York Times that stated a United States or Israeli airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities would be a good thing. "Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed," he wrote. "Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran's opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran."
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump said he was against the Iraq War, which Bolton pushed. Under Bush, Bolton was undersecretary of state for arms control, and argued that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. His staff also wrote a speech that Cuba had an active biological weapons program, and when the State Department's lead bioweapons analyst refused to sign off on this false claim, Bolton screamed at him, Vox reports. That wasn't an isolated incident — several people who worked with Bolton have accused him of yelling at and threatening those who disagreed with him.
He’s been known to chase people who disagreed with him down the hallway!
My best friend since college, Melody Townsel, was stationed in Kyrgyzstan on a US AID project. During her stay there, she became embroiled in a controversy in which the oh-so-diplomatic John Bolton was a key player. She described the incident in a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee members (who have thus far responded with a yawn), and I wanted to share it with a larger audience.
Here's a small taste:
"Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel -- throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and, generally, behaving like a madman."
So yeah, he’a charmer. And that Trump has forced to get rid of his favorite wife beating asshole, Bolton should be right up his alley.
Also he’a also Putinista as shown in this recent video of him praising Vlad the Impaler and his links to the NRA.
Bolton also has ties to Russia. In 2013, as NPR reports, Bolton saluted “a new era of Freedom for the Russian people” under Putin in a video made for The Right to Bear Arms, a Russian gun-rights group launched by Putin ally Alexander Torshin.
“This right has assured Americans of their freedom to engage in two critical acts of survival: the gathering of food and the protection of their families by all appropriate means,” Bolton says. “Our right bear arms does not detail what types of arms those may be, an important point that allows for both the evolution of technology and the evolution of responses to threats not then or yet imagined.”
So that’s just peachy ain’t it?
Friday, Mar 23, 2018 · 9:04:06 AM +00:00
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Frank Vyan Walton
Here’s more from Maddow on this McLawyer Shyster diGenova which talks about his failed history of a Federal Prosecutor all the way to time when he claimed Secret Service was stalking him over the Lewinsky Scandal. He’s a WINGBAT of the lowest order.