July 12, 2107--Smoking Cannon

Some wag said, "It's not a smoking gun, it's a smoking cannon."

He was talking, of course, about the most recent bombshell about Donald Junior's dealings with the Russians. His pathetic attempt to give his daddy a present--the presidency.

Present delivered, but at what an ultimate cost.

Anyone with the last name Trump (or Kushner) needs more than a squadron of lawyers--he needs medication and a get-out-of-jail-free-card.

I'm not sure any of that will help.

Yesterday, when Little Donny was forced to release his e-mail stream about the meeting in June at the Trump Tower, no less, regarding a deal to secure Russian help in getting "dirt" about Hillary ("I love it!" Junior chirped), as of yesterday, a week short of the six-month anniversary of the Trump presidency, was the official beginning of the end of the Don's reign.

The Don is not an inappropriate moniker for him as Trump is more the boss of a political crime family than a credible commander in chief.

What to them is most worrisome (and if you have been following my scribbling on the subject I have said this many times) is the drip, drip, drip fear. In this case that Paul Manafort, who at the time of the meeting was still Trump's campaign manager, Manafort, the playmaker in the dirty dealmaking, who was at the meeting and I'm sure others equally damaging which will soon come to the light of day, will throw Donald Junior and Jared under the bus rather than spend the rest of his adult life in the slammer, while the two boys, tempted like Oedipus to blow the whistle and worse on their father/father-in-law, will have to suck it up and get ready for incarceration.

Unless Daddy pardons them, which I predict he will do within a year as he moves toward resigning.

To see how this is playing in TrumpLand I spent a lot of time last night, late last night, tuned in to talk radio, particularly Red Eye Radio, where the two hosts did their best to chuckle their way through the damning news, making as light of it as possible. To laugh it off, it seemed, was their idea of the best way to trivialize it and make it go away.

But since even they knew that wouldn't work, they turned to the Rush Limbaugh talking-points-of-the-day memo--if all else fails, blame Hillary.

So, I heard a lot again about her server, her e-mails, her own Russian connection (remember the uranium business?), and of course, the chart-topper, Benghazi. Resurrecting Benghazi more than anything else tells you how desperate they are.

As I said, drip, drip, drip.

March 6, 2017--Kool Aid

Anyone who thinks Barack Obama during the last months of his presidency had anything to do with bugging Donald Trump's Trump Tower email server is drinking the Kool Aid. This time with Steve Bannon, his Brietbart News, and talkshow lunatic Mark Levin pouring refills.

That Obama would commit a felony, literally a felony in support of Hillary Clinton's candidacy, when it was universally thought she had a commanding lead, is delusional. Starting with Trump who, dangerously, believes this stuff.

The explanation is a lot simpler--

The coverup being perpetrated by the current president and his flunkies is coming undone. Even poor attorney general Jeff Sessions sold his chief out, deciding on his own, without consulting Trump, to plead recusal when it comes to the Russian connection, basically abandoning the president to twist slowly in the wind as one piece of fabrication after another peels away, leaving Trump and his senior staff vulnerable to further exposure.

What happened is as follows--

As part of their routine monitoring of Russian electronic communications chatter, the NSA or CIA or FBI stumbled on conversations between the Russian ambassador and Trump operatives such as Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, both of whom have longstanding ties to high-level Russians, have been on various Russian payrolls, and as a result are significantly compromised, including, as Flynn finally fessed up, engaged in perhaps illegal discussions before taking office about reducing the sanctions the Obama administration imposed on Russia in retaliation after they were caught red-handed (pun intended) hacking into Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Digging deeper, members of the intelligence community discovered other connections, including, in his own words, Donald Trump, Jr. boasting about all the Russian money "pouring into" various Trump projects. Minimally from black-money laundries such as Wilber Ross' Bank of Cyprus.

With this evidence in hand, including transcripts of these back-channel discussions, it was easy for the FBI (not Obama) to secure FISA-court approval to monitor further conversations between Trump campaign operatives, transition team staff, and various Russian spies. As a result, intelligence officials discovered that the campaign outreach to the Russians and more recently the coverup reached very high into the Trump organization.

So, in the aggregate thus far, we have flunkies such as Flynn and Manafort directly involved in encouraging the Russians to sabotage Clinton's campaign, minimally inappropriately talking with them about what the compromised Trump administration would do after taking office to "compensate" Russia for its help in the campaign, and now of course the massive coverup that likely reaches to Trump himself.

Then of course there is what is revealed in the infamous BuzzFeed dossier about Trump and his Russian capers.

This explains the towering rage Trump unleashed on his staff on Friday after Sessions recused himself without even talking with Trump about his intentions. He opted not to take a bullet for the boss and has as a result already outlived his usefulness. Expect him to be exiled and as the drip, drip, drip continues and various members of the Trump team to begin to peel away. I suspect that this will soon include Rex Tillerson who refuses to drink the Kool Air because he doesn't want the coda to his remarkable career to be that he went down with the Trump ship. And, yes, Watergate style, FBI director James Comey to be fired.

February 20, 2017--From Russia With Malice

The one and likely only good thing that Donald Trump as the new president seemed to have had a chance of contributing to stability in the world--an improved relationship with Russia, actually with Vladimir Putin--may no longer be much of a possibility.

Trump alluded to this during Thursday's hallucinatory press conference, saying maybe he won't be able to "get along" with Putin. Of course blaming the changing situation to attacks by the media and the torrent of leaks that have began to detail the many contacts between members of his team and the Russians, possible even intelligence operatives. Carryings-on Putin will want to be able to plausibly deny.

During the campaign a budding bromance seemed to be developing between Trump and Putin. This was widely mocked in progressive circles as naive on Trump's part, that Putin was not only president of an increasingly belligerent Russia but also a thug and murderer. Trump, though, shrugged this off, saying admiring things about Putin (how "strong" and "smart" he is) and telling Bill O'Reilly that we Americans are not so "innocent"--we also kill people, including heads of state.

Trump brushed this aside, claiming, in my view correctly, that it is in our best interest to have working relationships with all foreign leaders, even unhinged tyrants such as Kim Jong-un of North Korea, who he said during the campaign, he would be willing to talk with, meet with if there was the possibility of making advantageous deals to ratchet back their nuclear capabilities.

But now, because of the unravelling of the Trump administration and perhaps Trump himself, on embarrassing public view during the 77-minute press conference, the Russians appear to be backing away from working with him. This may have been accelerated by Trump's off-hand comment about how popular it would make him if he "shot that [Russian spy] ship right out of the water."

Welcome to World War III.

Hopefully Putin doesn't seem ready for that. He has his own $100 billion fortune to protect.

So ex-KGB agent Putin is not taking too kindly to the evolving revelations about the working connections between representatives of his government and members of the Trump team, including Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, both of whom have had lucrative relationships with Russia, including with Putin, who likely played them, softening them up for future use as the Trump insurgency built momentum.

As evidence of this cooling bromance, the Times noted late last week that the Russian news channel, Rossiya 24, which had General Flynn on its payroll, "halted its usually glowing coverage of the American president in an apparent sign of displeasure by the Kremlin." Read, by Putin.

Putin certainly knows all about the Russian collaboration with Trump staff that intensified during the run up to Trump's nomination and the likely coordination between Flynn and Manafort among others and the Russian hackers who helped bring down Hillary Clinton's campaign. One does not have to be conspiratorial-minded to connect these dots. Nothing of this magnitude would have been possible without Putin's full knowledge and sign-off.

And, is it too much of a stretch to assume the same thing is true about Trump, who reportedly was obsessed and directly involved with even the smallest details of his campaign, including the signage?

Further, though it seems like years ago, there is that 35-page dossier which was released just a month ago by BuzzFeed that includes compromising material about Trump's peccadilloes while in Moscow for the 2015 Mss Universe Pageant.

And let us not forget--though it has been barely reported--what Donald Junior had to say back in 2008, nine years ago, about the Trump Organization's financial deals with Russia.

Finally reported by the Washington Post last July at a real estate conference in New York, Don Jr. revealed that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. . . . We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

He may be referring to Russian billionaire oligarchs buying 9-figure penthouses in various Trump towers with laundered cash, but then again, without Trump's tax records, who knows.

Once more using Occam's Razor to connect the dots in an effort to come up with the simplest and best explanation for seemingly disparate and contradictory events, one sees an increasingly compromised and perhaps cornered President Trump, now untethered by Putin who is watching the shredding of the Trump presidency and perhaps elements of American democracy. Also, with the goods on Trump's people and perhaps Trump himself, Putin does not have to do very much to have his way with us or extend his imperial reach beyond Russia's borders in the Middle East and Central Europe.

On the other hand, when desperate people feel cornered, they are often at their most dangerous.