August 21, 2020--Miss Moscow

Earlier this week the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a nearly 1,000 page bipartisan report about Trump's involvement with the Russians, including details of the ways in which he, his campaign, and members of his administration colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election. 

The repot included information and hints about Trump's sexual escapades in Moscow during the 2013 Miss Universe contest.

Is there any possibility that former KGB colonel, Vladimir Putin, does not have all sorts of documentary evidence about these liaisons? Video and audio tapes, photographs, and taped testimony about what Trump was up to?

As I have been suggesting for years, these goods the Russians have on Trump may be at the heart of his political corruption and support of Putin and his regime.

Below are the opening paragraphs of Michael Schmidt's New York Times article about the report: 

Two decades before he ran for president, Donald J. Trump traveled to Russia, where he scouted properties, was wined and dined and, of greatest significance to Senate intelligence investigators, met a woman who was a former Miss Moscow. 

A Trump associate, Robert Curran, who was interviewed by the Senate investigators, said he believed Mr. Trump may have had a romantic relationship with the woman. On the same trip, another Trump associate, Leon D. Black, told investigators that he and Mr. Trump “might have been in a strip club together.” Another witness said that Mr. Trump may have been with other women in Moscow and later brought them along to a meeting with the mayor. 

Mr. Trump was married to Marla Maples at the time. 

June 15, 2017--Jeff Sessions Takes the 5th

Well, not exactly. He didn't take the literal 5th Amendment against self-incrimination, but, for all intents and purposes, during his testimony in the Senate on Tuesday, he did a version of that.

When pressed by Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee to respond to questions about any conversations he may have had with President Trump about Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election, he said that to respond to private conversations with the president would for him, as Attorney General, be "inappropriate."

In effect, he assigned "executive privilege" to himself without calling it that.

This in itself was inappropriate as it is only the president who can claim executive privilege. And, as in the past, if a president does that--Trump thus far hasn't--the Supreme Court has ruled that it is not mentioned in the Constitution and is not an absolute power of the presidency. It does come close to that when national security is at stake. But it cannot be casually invoked when there is a criminal investigation underway. This was a key ruling during Watergate when Nixon resisted turning over his taped conversations to the special prosecutor.

With presumptuousness, the Attorney General, acknowledging that only presidents can invoke executive privilege, also said that he is "protecting the right of the president to assert it if he chooses." He's protecting the president's presidential right! That's not just presumptuousness, that's also chutzpah.

A criminal investigation may not be underway (yet) involving the Attorney General or the president; but if Sessions was not going to answer questions about conversations with the president, it is still not for him on his own initiative to assert a form of executive privilege.

Having said that, why am I suggesting that what Sessions did is analogous to taking the 5th?

Because it ended that line of inquiry as invoking the 5th Amendment does when someone who may or may not be the target of a criminal investigation refuses to answer questions that he or she claims might be incriminating.

Moving on from the technical, why then did Sessions refuse to answer questions of this kind?

If he did not have any conversations with the president about Russian involvement in our election, there would be no need to wall off any testimony about conversations that did not take place. One only builds a wall when there is something to contain and protect.

So, when asked if he had any such conversations, rather that saying it is inappropriate for him to talk about them, since they never happened (so he claimed), all he needed to do was say--

"We never had any conversations of this kind."

His not doing so makes one wonder about at least a couple of things--

He may be lying in an effort to protect himself and the president.

If he is attempting to do this he would not be the first Attorney General to do so. Nixon's first AG, John Mitchell, wound up in jail for his various roles in Watergate, from the initiation to the coverup.

Then, Sessions' conversations with President Trump about Russian involvement, if these in fact occurred, likely happened with more than the two of them alone in the Oval Office.

If so, this means, as special counsel Robert Mueller (who Trump already appears to be itching to fire) interrogates Trump campaign aides and current senior White House staff who were active in the campaign and had various levels of involvement with Russia, if one of more of them fears they are going to be prosecuted and if convicted spend years in jail, some, again as with Watergate, would surely look to make a deal with Mueller by throwing those above them in the chain of command under the bus. This would bring prosecutorial scrutiny up the hierarchy, all the way to the president.

As scrutiny works its way upward, just before getting to Trump, it would sweep in Sessions. Thus, Sessions does not want lying to Congress while under oath to be on the list of serious charges he may be facing six or ten months from now. For him, things are already bad enough.

Do I hear drip, drip, drip?

December 11, 2014--Torture

Regarding the Senate Intelligence Committee's report about the C.I.A. and its use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," this from Peter Baker of the New York Times--

The C.I.A. maintains that the brutal interrogation techniques it used on terrorism subjects a decade ago worked. The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that they did not. And on that, at least, President Obama is not taking sides. 

Even as Mr. Obama repeated his belief that the techniques constituted torture and betrayed American values, he declined to address the fundamental question raised by the report: . . . Did they produce meaningful intelligence to stop terrorist attacks, or did the C.I.A. mislead the [Bush] White House and the public about their effectiveness.

My view, controversial among liberals, is that this is in fact the fundamental question--does torture work?  

Not who said what to whom or informed or misinformed the White House and the public because if torture does lead to actionable intelligence that could save American lives--like knowing in advance about the 9/11 attacks--we should be having a very different discussion.

That discussion should be about, must be about, what techniques work and how to use them going forward in a way that, though ugly and brutal, is both justified and applied as humanely as possible. 

But even if there is no "humanely as possible" that should not thwart the use of these techniques. Confronting the brutal and ugly methods of the other side, the enemy, an enemy not playing by any recognizable set of rules, may mean that to defend ourselves against terrorist acts we too may need to employ the ugly. As indeed we are and have been doing from our origins as a country until this very day, often, frequently unacknowledged or publicly monitored. Like authorizing bombing raids and drone attacks that we know will kill children--"collateral damage."

And that discussion needs to be lead by an engaged President, not one, like Obama, who, as Baker reports, continues not to want to become deeply involved in daunting issues of contradictory complexity. In his White House the buck doesn't appear to stop with him. At times I even wonder if there is a buck.

If torture works, and though I doubt it does, we still need to boldly ask and answer that question because what would one prefer--not to torture someone who could tell us in advance of an about-to-occur attack on American or on our bases, troops, or citizens overseas; or should we authorize the use of effective techniques, no matter how loathsome, to forestall that.

To answer this authoritatively is way above my pay grade, likely yours as well; but how should we respond to this impossible question?