Thursday Reads: Russia News and Natural Disasters
Posted: September 21, 2017 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Climate change, Donald Trump, Hurricane Maria, Konstantin Kilimnik, Mexico earthquake, Oleg Deripaska, Paul Manafort, Puerto Rico, Robert Mueller, Russia investigation, science, Sean Spicer, Vladimir Putin 33 Comments
Goldie Hawn reading a newspaper
Good Morning!!
Naegeli court reporters investigation is getting closer and closer to Trump. Here are the stories that broke just last night, with brief excerpts:
The New York Times: Mueller Seeks White House Documents Related to Trump’s Actions as President.
In recent weeks, Mr. Mueller’s office sent a document to the White House that detailed 13 areas in which investigators are seeking information. Since then, administration lawyers have been scouring White House emails and asking officials whether they have other documents or notes that may pertain to Mr. Mueller’s requests.
One of the requests is about a meeting Mr. Trump had in May with Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, was fired. That day, Mr. Trump met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, along with other Russian officials. The New York Times reported that in the meeting Mr. Trump had said that firing Mr. Comey relieved “great pressure” on him.
Mr. Mueller has also requested documents about the circumstances of the firing of Michael T. Flynn, who was Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. Additionally, the special counsel has asked for documents about how the White House responded to questions from The Times about a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. That meeting was set up by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son,Th to get derogatory information from Russians about Hillary Clinton.
Jane Fonda
The Washington Post: Manafort offered to give Russian billionaire ‘private briefings’ on 2016 campaign.
Less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.
“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, portions of which were read to The Washington Post along with other Manafort correspondence from that time.
Interesting Twitter posts on this subject:
Isn’t that fascinating? Trump and Putin are obviously still collaborating.
One more from the NYT last night: Manafort Working on Kurdish Referendum Opposed by U.S.
Paul J. Manafort, the former campaign chairman for President Trump who is at the center of investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, is working for allies of the leader of Iraq’s Kurdish region to help administer and promote a referendum on Kurdish independence from Iraq.
The United States opposes the referendum, but Mr. Manafort has carved out a long and lucrative career advising foreign clients whose interests have occasionally diverged from American foreign policy. And he has continued soliciting international business even as his past international work has become a focus of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump and his associates, including possible collusion between them to influence the presidential election.
In fact, the work for the Kurdish group appears to have been initiated this summer around the time that federal authorities working for Mr. Mueller raided Mr. Manafort’s home in Virginia and informed him that they planned to indict him.
Catherine Deneuve
Manafort is in serious trouble. It’s hard to believe he’s still refusing to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation. It also looks like Trump is royally f**cked at least in terms of obstruction of justice, thanks to his own loose lips in the Lester Holt interview and his chummy Oval Office meeting with the Russians.
More Russia-related stories from this morning:
Politico: Manafort used Trump campaign account to email Ukrainian operative.
Former Donald Trump aide Paul Manafort used his presidential campaign email account to correspond with a Ukrainian political operative with suspected Russian ties, according to people familiar with the correspondence.
Manafort sent emails to seek repayment for previous work he did in Ukraine and to discuss potential new opportunities in the country, even as he chaired Trump’s presidential campaign, these people said….
In the emails to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort protégé who has previously been reported to have suspected ties to Russian intelligence, the longtime GOP operative made clear his significant sway in Trump’s campaign, one of the people familiar with the communications said. He and Kilimnik also met in the United States while Manafort worked for the Trump campaign, which he chaired until an August 2016 shake-up.
Mike Allen at Axios: Another potential Mueller honey pot: Spicer’s notebooks.
- One source familiar with the matter said that the records were just to help him do his job.
- “Sean documented everything,” the source said.
- That surprised some officials of previous White Houses, who said that because of past investigations, they intentionally took as few notes as possible when they worked in the West Wing.
Allen texted Spicer about this story and Spicer flipped out, telling Allen to stop contacting him or he would “report to the appropriate authorities.” What authorities? Spicer thinks it’s illegal to text another private citizen–Allen says he has been on friendly terms with Spicer for “more than a dozen years.”
Marlon Brando
Axios also has a terrific timeline of Manfort’s activities beginning in 2006: How the Russia probe closed in on Paul Manafort.
Former U.S. Attorney Harry Littman at the LA Times: Trump will fire Robert Mueller eventually. What will happen next?
Here’s predicting flat out that yes, at some point Trump will try to oust Mueller.
As the probe advances, the likelihood increases that Mueller will uncover evidence of a serious offense by Trump. With the recent search of former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s home, Mueller has shown his willingness to follow the money trail aggressively. (The latest reports suggest that Mueller’s team is planning to indict Manafort for possible tax and financial crimes.) And Mueller has begun to negotiate interviews with up to a dozen White House aides as well as former White House officials. Trump likely fears that Mueller will zero in on something sleazy or criminal whose revelation could cripple his presidency. Each turn of the screw of the Mueller investigation — and there will be many — increases the pressure on Trump to act preemptively.
The odds also seem great that the erratic, power-consumed and thin-skinned Trump, who every week launches a new Twitter attack on a real or imagined enemy, will be unable to stay his hand month after month as the Mueller investigation unfolds. Like the fabled scorpion who stings the frog even though it dooms him, Trump, being Trump, won’t be able to endure domination by Mueller over the long term. Of course, Trump likely fails to appreciate that it is not Mueller personally, but the law, that is asserting its dominance.
Let’s say Trump snaps.
Angelina Jolie
To fire Mueller, Trump would need to order Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein to remove him. But Rosenstein, a career prosecutor with a strong dedication to the values of the Department of Justice, would likely resign his office rather than comply with the order, as would the department’s third-ranking official, Rachel Brand.
Eventually Trump, moving down the hierarchy, would find someone willing to fire Mueller (as Nixon found Robert Bork, the then-solicitor general, to fire Archibald Cox).
From there, Mueller could launch a legal challenge to the ouster (potentially with the support of the Department of Justice). It’s by no means clear that Mueller, an ex-Marine of legendary rectitude, would choose to sue. Assuming he did, though, he would need to overcome a series of constitutional arguments by the president’s lawyers that any restrictions on the president’s ability to terminate him would impinge on presidential power under Article II.
Click on the link to read the rest.
The natural disasters continue as Hurricane Maria devastates Puerto Rico and moves on the fresh destruction and Mexico City struggles to recover from the recent earthquake.
NBC News: Hurricane Maria Leaves Puerto Rico Facing Months Without Power.
Millions of people across Puerto Rico woke up Thursday to a grim new reality.
Hurricane Maria, the most powerful storm to hit the U.S. territory in almost a century, ravaged the island, demolishing homes and knocking out all electricity. It could take half a year to restore power to the nearly 3.5 million people who live there.
The eye of the storm moved offshore overnight, but the danger remained Thursday: Intense flooding was reported, particularly in San Juan, where many residential streets looked like rushing rivers.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz said the devastation in the capital city was unlike any she had ever seen.
“The San Juan that we knew yesterday is no longer there,” Cruz told MSNBC. “We’re looking at 4 to 6 months without electricity.”
Elizabeth Taylor
The Washington Post: Mexico anxiously awaits the fate of a 12-year-old schoolgirl after deadly earthquake.
MEXICO CITY — A sprawling earthquake recovery effort spanning several states turned intensely personal Thursday as Mexicans were riveted by an effort to save a 12-year-old girl who was pinned in the rubble of her elementary school.
The drama played out live late Wednesday and early Thursday on the major news channels here, with television cameras tracking every movement of the Mexican marines and others who sought to rescue the girl now known as “Frida Sofia.” Under a soft rain, the work was delicate and painstaking, relying on thermal cameras and other technology to try to locate and remove young children trapped for more than 30 hours after their school collapsed on Tuesday afternoon.
At one dramatic point in Wednesday night’s broadcast, Televisa reporter Danielle Dithurbide learned from the marine admiral leading the recovery effort that Frida Sofia — which may not be her real name — was able to tell rescuers that five other students were possibly trapped with her. It was unclear whether they were alive.
I’ll end with this from Grist, via Mother Jones: This Is the Hurricane Season Scientists Tried to Warn Us About.
There is evidence that we are emerging from an era of messy meteorological data, where we were blind to warming seas strengthening hurricanes because the really damaging ones were rare. If that’s true, weather historians may look to this year as the beginning of a frightening new phase of superstorms.
About 85 percent of all damage done by hurricanes is attributable to “major” storms—those stronger than Category 3, so roughly one-quarter of all storms. While relatively infrequent, they are by far the most destructive—a Category-5 cyclone has 500 times the power of a Category 1. Globally, major hurricanes have become slightly more common in recent decades, even as overall numbers have held steady.
Haley Mills
Further, there’s nothing in recorded history that resembles what Irma and Maria have inflicted on Caribbean islands in recent days. Since Sept. 6, the two hurricanes have made six separate landfalls at Category-5 strength. Before this month, just 18 such landfalls had happened in the previous 165 years (and never more than three in a single year). Clearly there’s something happening here—and there’s a developing consensus among scientists about what factors are responsible.
There have been only 33 Category 5 storms in the Atlantic since hurricane records began in 1851. Twenty-three of them have formed since 1961; 11 in only the last 14 years. Part of that uptick comes from better weather monitoring equipment, like satellites that help us spot hurricanes before they make landfall. But even since we developed satellite technology, there’s been a measurable increase in major storms.
The strongest hurricanes require an exceptionally warm ocean to intensify, and with water temperatures currently near record highs in the Caribbean, it’s providing conditions ripe for Category 5s. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, since 1970, the oceans have retained more than 90 percent of the excess energy generated from global warming. That’s a lot of extra fuel for stronger storms.
Read the rest at Mother Jones.
So . . . what else is happening? What stories are you following today?
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
grayslady
mablue2
JJ Lopez aka Minkoff Minx
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Bernie Sanders supporter runs fake news and conspiracy site.
Hollywood Reporter: L.A. Alt-Media Agitator (Not Breitbart) Clashes With Google, Snopes.
WWBD—WHAT WOULD BERNIE DO?
The Republican National Committee Is Weaponizing Bernie Sanders’ Single-Payer Plan
Talking points put together by the committee don’t pitch their party’s bill so much as warn of another.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-republican-national-committee-is-weaponize-bernie-sanders-single-payer-plan
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Baryshnikov is another hero of mine. Well said.
Mine too, (aside from being a helluva dancer). He did a powerful and wonderful ad for Hillary last year.
I remember that! blub
Today is the 79th anniversary of the worst hurricane ever to hit New England. From the Globe:
BB – sorry late to the party again. Gum surgery blew my day yesterday.
Thank you for the link to the Mother Jones article. I had no idea Maria went from Cat 1 to Cat 5 in less than 24 hours. That is mind-boggling.
History Channel had a documentary on this; available on YouTube. Just like the 1900 Galveston storm – the forecast was badly botched so no one was prepared. In both cases, apparently only one forecaster was warning everyone and no one listened to them.
This is from back in July but it’s a good reminder of the all the trails left in Trump Towers and given Manafort is liking being encouraged to spill the beans. Plus, all those prosecuters who do money laundering. This is likely to lead to NY state charges too.
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/report-russian-mob-money-helped-build-trump-business-empire-1002228291948
A stunning report in The New Republic alleges that, whether Donald Trump knew it or not, for decades he made a large portion of his personal fortune from Russian mobsters & oligarchs
and Craig Under’s investigative piece is here: https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate
That should’ve given Mueller and Team a clear map and I wonder if that’s some of where this is leading.
“whether he knew it or not”
Hahahaha!
He’s always bragging what a great judge of people he is. He even once said he could spot mobsters – he had “radar” or something like that. I say, takes one to know one.
Thanks for the photos BB! So nice to see them! Great read too!!!
Thanks!
Elizabeth Taylor – Personification of beauty, from baby girl to old lady.
Some people like Audrey Hepburn, Some like Grace Kelly. I think Liz is the embodiment of Hollywood Glamour and Natural Beauty at the same time. 🙂
IMHO.
She was a very cool person too.
I would agree with that. For all her advantages she had lots of adversity, which she overcame. I did not know her of course, but from the outside looking in she was fierce and indomitable.
I say this as a joke, but it is literally true. I used to love to leaf through the old LIFE and Photoplsy magazines at my grandmothers house, so while other kids my age were reading, “Dick and Jane run,” I was reading “Liz and Dick reconcile!”
ROFL – Ron my sister used to read Photoplay an all those in the store up the road. I loved those magazines, too!
I love my mom for too many reasons to count, but one reason was her policy that if I came across a word that I did not know, like reconcile, she would help me look it up rather than tell me the definition. 🙂 I was probably too grown for my age, but I learned a lot.
Ron, my mom did that too! Also she was fond of telling us “use your intuition,” when we came to her with problems about something. She’d say, “What could you use instead?” Sometimes it annoyed me, but she was smart to use those problems as a way to encourage us to think more creatively.
I love COOL moms. And I don’t mean permissive best friend moms. I means moms like ours.
Sophia Loren
Also, too – Rita Hayworth.
Gina Lollobrigida and Deborah Paget. Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. Class, class, class.
go read the string of replies from Ben Wikler from Move in … ammunition and wonky, nerdy data goodness!!!
Ouch – not one kind word there for Graham-Cassidy in reply.
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Gotta say that Kim Jong Un makes a number of valid points there about the dotard Trump and his threats.
“he is surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire…” Spot on!
The comments….some people admitted they had to look up “dotard.” I guess nobody reads Shakespeare these days.
I do Luna.
I remember when my sil didn’t believe me when I told her that a petard “as in hoist on his own petard” was a kind of bomb
“dotard” — good word, aptly applied to Mr. Trump
Dough-Tard?: Rich and impaired.
LOL!