Heightened contradictions and creative destruction continue in the Trump WH and its bit players.
The next shoe(s) to drop in #TrumpRussia will include Mueller’s conversations with staff people like Priebus, McGahn, Hicks, Raffel, Burnham, and others, making clearer the corroboration of specific obstruction of justice charges, even as Roger Stone lied to Congress.
Meanwhile, the team of special counsel Robert Mueller, leading a separate investigation into the Kremlin’s activities, have contacted and taken evidence from a number of figures named in the (Steele) dossier, including one, The Independent has learned, who has been providing important information.
Concerted attempts were made to dismiss Mr Steele’s report as fantasy when news of its existence broke at the beginning of the year by Mr Trump, his supporters and right wing media outlets in the US and UK.
Since then, however, many of his claims have proved to be true. There is now rivalry between(sic) three ongoing inquiries into Mr Trump – by former FBI director Mr Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee – to get Mr Steele to testify.
Mr Steele, however, has decided not to travel to the US and is also disinclined, for the time being, to be interviewed by Trump investigators elsewhere…
[...]
Andrew Weissmann, the federal prosecutor who “turned” Mr Sater during the fraud investigation, is now on Mr Mueller’s team. Mr Sater is helping federal authorities in a Kazakh money laundering scheme in which some of the money was supposedly laundered through a Trump property. The claims of Mr Trump being the Muscovian Candidate for the US Presidency, raised by Mr Steele, continue to grow and reverberate.
www.independent.co.uk/...
“Roger Stone, a long-time advisor to Mr Trump, said this week that (Paul) Manafort had confirmed to him that he expects to be indicted.”
The investigation into Stone’s role in potential Russian collusion hinges in part on two tweets he sent out in late August and October which seemed to predict that John Podesta’s emails would be hacked and released via Wikileaks – which, according to US intelligence, has worked in concert with Russian hackers.
Stone claims that his two tweets were referring not to the impending release of emails but rather the “Podesta brothers’ business activities in Russia.” But when examined closely Stone’s alibi quickly falls apart, since virtually none of the deals he mentions have anything to do with John Podesta at all.
It is inconceivable that any previous president would have gotten into such a war of words with a dictator.
John F. Kennedy said, “Ich bin ein Berliner”; he did not call Nikita Khrushchev a “short, fat peasant.”
Ronald Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”; he did not label Mikhail Gorbachev “Red Spot.”
Those presidents knew that any confrontation with a nuclear-armed state had to be handled with the greatest delicacy, lest a miscalculation lead to Armageddon.
Trump shows no such awareness. Given that he does not read books, he would be well advised to tune into the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick PBS series on the Vietnam War to see what can happen when the U.S. acts too aggressively and thereby stumbles into a ruinous war.
In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson committed himself to defending South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. At the same time, he authorized a covert campaign known as OPLAN 34A to send South Vietnamese commandos on raids into the North supported by the U.S. military. Johnson had no idea that in so doing he would be goading North Vietnam into a war with the United States. But that is just what happened.
This does explain why even in his disastrous Alabama speech, he regretted supporting McConnell’s choice, Luther Strange, who lost yesterday’s Senate runoff to Roy Moore of the reds and yellows.
In the months since she took her White House role, public information about the companies importing Ivanka Trump goods to the U.S. has become harder to find. Information that once routinely appeared in private trade tracking data has vanished, leaving the identities of companies involved in 90 percent of shipments unknown. Even less is known about her manufacturers. Trump’s brand, which is still owned by the first daughter and presidential adviser, declined to disclose the information.
The deepening secrecy means it’s unclear who Ivanka Trump’s company is doing business with in China, even as she and her husband, Jared Kushner, have emerged as important conduits for top Chinese officials in Washington. The lack of disclosure makes it difficult to understand whether foreign governments could use business ties with her brand to try to influence the White House — and whether her company stands to profit from foreign government subsidies that can destroy American jobs. Such questions are especially pronounced in China, where state-owned and state-subsidized companies dominate large swaths of commercial activity.
Drag Name: Charlamaine Intervention
Thursday, Sep 28, 2017 · 7:03:11 PM +00:00
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annieli
Mark Summers has it right:
Even now, any tweet from Donald Trump draws an instant response from thousands of clearly automated accounts (many of them out to score in the lucrative “selling cheap merch to Trump supporters” market). The presence of those accounts, and Twitter’s unwillingness or inability to police the vast numbers of fake accounts, means that every Twitter user is part of a kind of an ugly, ongoing Turing test, where they are daily bombarded by stories and opinions meant to steer their thinking, sourced from automated sites.