Big Orange Whale goes to the G20 casino… Trump will give Russians what they want because they’ve been taking things off the table…calling people back like ... the diplomat who used military pension payments to disguise money transfers in the US, the ambassador using various Trumpists as cut-outs.
What will the vigorish be, and how will Trump personally profit as those side deals linger in the background ($500bn to Exxon/Mobil because Tillerson, etc) … and because G20 free trade except Brexit!
Even if he gives them back their compounds where they did their surveillance on the US IC, what does the US get in return, because Trump makes such great deals that are largely fictive (see US-Saudi arms package and the subsequent shift in their royal leadership plus the Qatari boycott).
More interesting will be the capital flows through the “laundromat” side of the economy that will accompany such diplomatic activity. Also all the oligarch air traffic in/out of Germany should be interesting during the G-20.
Donald Trump has told White House aides to come up with possible concessions to offer as bargaining chips in his planned meeting next week with Vladimir Putin, according to two former officials familiar with the preparations.
National security council staff have been tasked with proposing “deliverables” for the first Trump-Putin encounter, including the return of two diplomatic compounds Russians were ordered to vacate by the Obama administration in response to Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election, the former officials said. It is not clear what Putin would be asked to give in return.
There is strong resistance in the NSC and state department to one-sided concessions aimed simply at improving the tone of US-Russian relations.
There is also opposition within the administration to Trump’s preference for a formal bilateral meeting with Putin at the G20 summit in Germany, as first reported by the Associated Press.
Some officials argue the meeting should be a brief and informal “pull-aside” at the two-day summit, which starts next Friday in Hamburg, in view of the fact that Trump is under multi-pronged investigations into his campaign’s relationship with Moscow. The sceptics also argue there has been no let-up in Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, which was the trigger for the bulk of the sanctions.
Trump seems to have thought being president was a performance, like the fantasy role he played on “The Apprentice.” There’s a lot more to it than just holding photo-ops sitting behind a desk announcing something that you haven’t read and don’t really understand. So far he hasn’t shown any evidence whatever that he’s up to the task.
And then there’s the claim that a now dead GOP functionary’s comment that he was contacting Russian hackers in concert with Mike Flynn means #TrumpRussia collusion. We’re still in the early days so even if the late Peter W. Smith might be a way to connect Flynn to Biglygate via the hunt for HRC’s emails, it is actually some old news unless the evidence has significance. Smith’s position in his January website post is a benign, partisan defense of Russian non-involvement and a defense of WikiLeaks.
A Trump campaign official said that Mr. Smith didn’t work for the campaign, and that if Mr. Flynn coordinated with him in any way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual.
WSJ’s publishing it does give it more weight, but the RWNJs have already relegated Smith to Vince Foster / Seth Rich CT status where the tin-foil hat crowd thinks NASA is running a child slave ring on Mars.
Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.
In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.
“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” said Eric York, a computer-security expert from Atlanta who searched hacker forums on Mr. Smith’s behalf for people who might have access to the emails.