Lazy Saturday Reads: G20 Disaster

Good Afternoon!!

Yesterday Trump finally got to meet with the big boss, the man who put him in the White House. As we expected, he was thrilled and overwhelmed with joy when the big moment finally came.

But what does Putin really think of Trump? His facial expression in this photo is revealing.

https://twitter.com/Rschooley/status/883712581600296960

From what I can tell, Trump brought up the Russian interference in our election by indicating that “the American people” (according to Tillerson) are concerned about it, not that Trump himself cares a whit. Then when Putin denied any involvement, Trump basically said okay, let’s just pretend it never happened and make sure Putin gets everything he’s been wishing for.

A couple of reactions, the first from a foreign policy and Russia expert and the second from an ultra-conservative journalist.

Molly McKew at Politico: Trump Handed Putin a Stunning Victory. “From his speech in Poland to his two-hour summit in Hamburg, the president seemed determined to promote Russia’s dark and illiberal view of the world.”

President Donald Trump needed to accomplish two things this week during his visits to Poland and the G-20 Summit in Hamburg. First, he needed to reassure America’s allies that he was committed to collective defense and the core set of values and principles that bind us together. Second, he needed to demonstrate that he understands that the greatest threat to that alliance, those values, and our security is the Kremlin.

Trump delivered neither of these. In very concrete terms, through speech and action, the president signaled a willingness to align the United States with Vladimir Putin’s worldview, and took steps to advance this realignment. He endorsed, nearly in its totality, the narrative the Russian leader has worked so meticulously to construct.

The readout of Trump’s lengthy meeting with Putin included several key points. First, the United States will “move on” from election hacking issues with no accountability or consequences for Russia; in fact, the U.S. will form a “framework” with Russia to cooperate on cybersecurity issues, evaluating weaknesses and assessing potential responses jointly. Second, the two presidents agreed not to meddle in “each other’s” domestic affairs—equating American activities to promote democracy with Russian aggression aimed at undermining it, in an incalculable PR victory for the Kremlin. Third, the announced, limited cease-fire in Syria will be a new basis for cooperation between the U.S. and Russia; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went so far as to say that the Russian approach in Syria—yielding mass civilian casualties, catastrophic displacement, untold destruction and erased borders—may be “more right” than that of the United States.

Each of these points represents a significant victory for Putin. Each of them will weaken U.S. tools for defending its interests and security from the country that defines itself as America’s “primary adversary.” Trump has ceded the battle space—physical, virtual, moral—to the Kremlin. And the president is going to tell us this is a “win.”

Trump in Poland

About Trump’s awful speech in Poland McKew writes:

Trump’s unusual speech in Warsaw earlier in the week foreshadowed this catastrophic outcome, despite some analysts’ wishful thinking to the contrary. The initial reaction to the speech was far more positive than to his previous attempt at NATO. After all, the president seemed to challenge Russia, acknowledge the importance of the alliance’s commitment to mutual defense, and mount a defense of Western democracies and values.

But this assessment missed the forest for the trees—and the fact that its intended audience was Russia, not Europe. In reality, Trump attacked NATO and the EU, the twin pillars of the post-World War II transatlantic architecture, again demonstrating he has no interest in being the leader of the free world, but rather its critic in chief.

Then there’s this piece from The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes: Trump Caves to Putin. What  president Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin tells us about the future of Russian-American affairs.

If Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s readout of Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin is a preview of the Trump administration’s approach to Russia, it’s going to be a rough three and a half years. In a diplomatic depantsing that will have repercussions far beyond Russia, Tillerson’s comments did more to further Russia’s interests than Russian propaganda outlets could have possibly hoped to accomplish themselves.

Tillerson told reporters that Trump and Putin “acknowledged the challenges of cyber threats and interference in the democratic processes of the United States and other countries.” Well then.

Vladimir Putin acknowledged generic “challenges” of unspecified “cyber threats” related to U.S. elections and those in other countries? Who cares? What Putin wouldn’t acknowledge was far more important: The Russians were the source of the cyber threats.

Tillerson reported that after the two men had a “robust and lengthy exchange on the subject,” Putin “denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past.” Putin’s denials are false, of course, and the offenses are grave. Russia’s election meddling is part of a longer pattern of provocation largely ignored by the Obama administration and now tolerated by Trump. But the president apparently didn’t want to let reality intrude on his desire for better relations (he began his meeting by telling Putin that he was “honored” to meet him) and Tillerson didn’t seem to care. “So, more work to be done on that regard,” Tillerson said, dismissively.

Set aside as yet unproven allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. The available facts are deeply troubling. Russia waged a persistent, hostile campaign against the United States in an effort to affect the outcome of the election – or at least influence perceptions of it. And the current administration doesn’t seem to care.

Let’s face it. Trump is a traitor. This is getting really dangerous for our country and the world. There has to be some way we can get rid of him before he completely hands our government over to Russian oligarchs.

Breaking just now from the Washington Post: Putin says he thinks Trump ‘agreed’ with assurances that Russia did not interfere in U.S. elections.

HAMBURG — Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on Saturday said that he assured President Trump that Moscow had not interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and that it appeared to him that Trump had agreed with his assurances.

“It seemed to me that he took it into account, and agreed” Putin told reporters on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg. The Russian president added “you should ask him.

Russia’s foreign minister’s on Friday had said that Trump had “accepted” Putin’s assurances that Moscow did not run a hacking and disinformation campaign to help Trump’s campaign.

Putin Saturday said that Trump “asked many questions” about Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The Russian leader said he had repeated Moscow’s stance that “there was no basis to believe that Russia” interfered in the elections.

“I feel as though my answers satisfied him,” Putin said.

Unbelievable! How can the Republicans continue to go along with this?

“14 words”

But let’s get back to that speech Trump gave in Warsaw. The entire thing was a dog whistle to white supremacists, painting the fight against terrorism as a war of “civilizations.”

Independence Day Reads

Jefferson’s Monticello West Front with Fish Pond

Good Afternoon!!

On this Independence Day, I’m going to begin with a story that reflects America’s complex and troubling history.

NBC News: Historians Uncover Slave Quarters of Sally Hemings at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Archaeologists have excavated an area of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello mansion that has astounded even the most experienced social scientists: The living quarters of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who, historians believe, gave birth to six of Jefferson’s children.

“This discovery gives us a sense of how enslaved people were living. Some of Sally’s children may have been born in this room,” said Gardiner Hallock, director of restoration for Jefferson’s mountaintop plantation, standing on a red-dirt floor inside a dusty rubble-stone room built in 1809. “It’s important because it shows Sally as a human being — a mother, daughter, and sister — and brings out the relationships in her life.”

Hemings’ living quarters was adjacent to Jefferson’s bedroom but she remains something of an enigma: there are only four known descriptions of her. Enslaved blacksmith Isaac Granger Jefferson recalled that Hemings was “mighty near white . . . very handsome, long straight hair down her back.”

Her room — 14 feet, 8 inches wide and 13 feet long — went unnoticed for decades. The space was converted into a men’s bathroom in 1941, considered by some as the final insult to Hemings’ legacy.

This room, part of the South Dependency of Monticello is going to be restored as the residence of Sally Hemings. Norm Shafer / The Washington Post/Getty Images

A little more:

Fraser Neiman, director of archeology at Monticello, said Hemings’ quarters revealed the original brick hearth and fireplace, the brick structure for a stove and the original Brisbane Timber Floors from the early 1800s.

“This room is a real connection to the past,” Neiman said. “We are uncovering and discovering and we’re finding many, many artifacts.”

The Mountaintop Project is a multi-year, $35-million effort to restore Monticello as Jefferson knew it, and to tell the stories of the people — enslaved and free — who lived and worked on the 5,000-acre Virginia plantation.

In an effort to bring transparency to the grounds’ difficult past, there are tours that focus solely on the experiences of the enslaved people who lived and labored there, as well as a Hemings Family tour.

Monticello unveiled the restoration of Mulberry Row in 2015, which includes the re-creation of two slave-related buildings, the “storehouse for iron” and the Hemings cabin. In May 2015, more than 100 descendants of enslaved families participated in a tree-planting ceremony to commemorate the new buildings.

Hemings’ room is now being restored so people can see it. This is a lengthy, fascinating article with lots of photos. Please check it out if you can.

Trump may be about to encounter his first real foreign policy crisis. Does anyone believe he’s capable of handling it? The Washington Post reports: North Korea: Missile soared 1,741 miles high, marking successful test of ICBM.

North Korea on Tuesday claimed it had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, a potential milestone in its campaign to develop a nuclear-tipped weapon capable of hitting the mainland United States.

In a special announcement on state television, North Korea said it launched a Hwasong-14 missile that flew about 579 miles, reaching an altitude of 1,741 miles. The U.S. military said it was in the air for 37 minutes, a duration that signals a significant improvement in North Korea’s technology, experts said.

A photograph released by North Korea’s official news agency on Tuesday that is said to show the intercontinental ballistic missile being launched. Credit KCNA, via European Pressphoto Agency

South Korean and Japanese authorities are now looking into whether it was indeed an ICBM; U.S. Pacific Command’s first statement on the test called it an intermediate range missile.

Whatever the missile’s classification, Tuesday’s news will renew questions about the development of weapons that Trump, as president-elect, vowed to stop. It also looks set to put North Korea back at the top of the president’s agenda, most immediately at Group of 20 meetings in Germany this week.

So far, Trump’s only visible response has been to post a series of idiotic tweets yesterday.

As news of the test broke, but before North Korea claimed it was an ICBM, Trump took to Twitter, calling out North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and appearing to once again urge China to do more to pressure him.

“North Korea has just launched another missile. Does this guy have anything better to do with his life?” Trump wrote.

“Hard to believe that South Korea and Japan will put up with this much longer,” he continued. “Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all.”

I wonder if Trump knows that Japan doesn’t even have an army? He seems to be suggesting getting involved in another war. He probably doesn’t know he’s doing that either. What a clusterf*ck!

The Independent argues that Trump may have to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un: If Trump wants to avoid a missile crisis, he may have to invite Kim Jong Un to the White House.

Taking away the customary hyperbole what we saw, say international analysts, was a missile reaching an altitude of 1,741 miles and flying 580 miles before crashing into the sea. This would have reached Alaska, but no other part of the continental US. It could, however, also hit American military bases and forces in a wide arc in the Pacific.

Looking at the pace of development and pattern of the tests, one can conclude that North Korea would be able to produce a missile with a longer range in the not too distant future. It remains unclear whether Pyongyang can mount a nuclear warhead on the missile. But US officials acknowledge that this too is likely to happen.

The question is what can the US and the international community do to stop Kim Jong-Un acquiring a nuclear arsenal with ICBMs? The answer is that options are quite limited. There has been some tough talk from Washington about carrying out military strikes. But that is a highly risky path. Targets would not be easy to track down and hit while retaliation would put the South Korean capital, Seoul, nor far from the border, directly in the firing line. The numbers of casualties are likely to be massive.

General James Mattis, the US Defence Secretary, has warned “If this goes to a military solution, it is going to be tragic on an unbelievable scale. So our effort is to work with the UN, work with China, work with Japan, work with South Korea to find a way out of the situation.” ….

A photograph released by the North Korean news agency showing Kim Jong-un reacting after the launch. Credit KCNA, via Reuters

Will Trump agree to negotiate directly with North Korea’s leader?

During his presidential election campaign Trump had stated that he would be prepared to receive Kim Jong-Un in Washington and “ have hamburgers with him…What the hell is wrong with speaking? And you know what? It’s called opening a dialogue”.

Trump was derided across the American political spectrum, but North Korea’s state media praised him as “a very wise politician”. Now, with the military option seemingly off the table, and economic sanctions having little impact, Trump may well find that “hamburger diplomacy” is the way to fulfil his pledge that North Korea will not have nuclear missiles which can hit America.

At the end of the week, Trump will head to the G20 Summit in Germany. NBC News:

President Donald Trump’s second foray on the world stage will include navigating a much-anticipated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and a potentially chilly reception from European leaders over his recent decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

The stakes for Trump are especially high as he travels to the aya center in peru, beginning Friday to discuss critical issues of counter-terrorism, the civil war in Syria, and trade, among other topics, with his European counterparts. In his meeting with Putin, Trump will have to work to confront and deter Russia, but also find ways to work together on issues like Syria and combating ISIS, experts said.

And he must do this mindful of the increased scrutiny over his administration’s relationship with Moscow and an FBI investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

Meanwhile, European leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in May said the U.S. could no longer be relied on as an ally, are prepped for tough talks on trade and climate change.”The G20 agenda is set for some uncomfortable conversations,” Charles Kupchan, a Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow, told NBC News. “It will be dominated by climate change, by free trade, by immigration, and these are issues where Trump is — more or less — alone.”

Trump with Kris Kobach during the transition.

The other big story today is Kris Kobach’s commission dedicated to finding more ways to suppress Democratic votes. As everyone knows by now, Kobach sent out a letter to all 50 Secretaries of State demanding detailed information on every American voter, including voter “history,” felony convictions, and Social Security numbers. Charles Stewart III at Politico: What Is Kris Kobach Up To?

The form of the voter list request suggests Kobach is hoping to build a national voter registration list—a massive database consisting of every voter in the United States and their voting history over the past 10 years. The letter didn’t state this as the reason, but the consensus within the election administration community is that Kobach wants to conduct a huge data-matching project, to see how many noncitizens have voted in recent elections and to see how many people have voted twice in the same election.

These assumptions are based on Kobach’s reputation for his dogged determination that double-voting and noncitizen voting be eradicated in Kansas. He also has been an indefatigable advocate of the interstate crosscheck program, a Kansas-based program that facilitates the cross-state matching of voter lists. During the presidential transition, Kobach was photographed walking into a meeting with Donald Trump with talking points under his arm that revealed plans to “stop aliens from voting.”

If Kobach’s goal was to create a super crosscheck program, he would have been disappointed, even if every state had complied. His letter requests data that are ill-suited for accurate matching. Not only are the matching methods that are likely to be employed poorly suited to producing accurate results, the Department of Homeland Security immigration dataset, which might provide some information about the presence of noncitizens on voter rolls, can’t be searched by name.

Therefore, the data requested by the commission will leave unsatisfied anyone who has a serious interest in how much double-voting or noncitizen voting there actually is in the United States. Most likely, the results of low-quality matches using the voter files that do arrive will significantly overstate the amount of double voting and voting by noncitizens. If a poor match occurs, the list maintenance programs of the states will be unfairly impugned, lowering the confidence of voters for no good reason. This is why no one I have talked to who runs elections, Democrat or Republican, is happy with Kobach’s request.

Much more at the link. A couple more articles on this topic to check out:

CNN: Forty-one states have refused Kobach’s request for voter information.

The Baltimore Sun: Maryland official resigns from Trump voter fraud panel.

That’s all I have. What stories are you following today?

 

Lazy Saturday Reads: Trump Collusion Coming into Focus

Fourth of July by Pat Mathews

Good Afternoon!!

It has taken me a long time to get started this morning, because there is a massive amount of news–despite the fact that we are entering a longer-than-usual long weekend.

The fallout from the feud between Trump and NBC’s Morning Joe co-hosts is still coming. But before I get to that, here’s the latest scoop from Benjamin Wittes’s Lawfare blog. This is a follow-up to the Wall Street Journal’s stories about a Trump supporter who attempted to work with Russian hackers to release personal email that Hillary Clinton had deleted from her private server. (Sadly, I can’t read the full articles because of the WSJ paywall.)

The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians, by Matt Tait

I read the Wall Street Journal’s article yesterday on attempts by a GOP operative to recover missing Hillary Clinton emails with more than usual interest. I was involved in the events that reporter Shane Harris described, and I was an unnamed source for the initial story. What’s more, I was named in, and provided the documents to Harris that formed the basis of, this evening’s follow-up story, which reported that “A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort”:

Officials identified in the document include Steve Bannon, now chief strategist for President Donald Trump; Kellyanne Conway, former campaign manager and now White House counselor; Sam Clovis, a policy adviser to the Trump campaign and now a senior adviser at the Agriculture Department; and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who was a campaign adviser and briefly was national security adviser in the Trump administration.

The Fourth of July 1916, by Childe Hassam

I’m writing this piece in the spirit of Benjamin Wittes’s account of his interactions with James Comey immediately following the New York Times story for which he acted as a source. The goal is to provide a fuller accounting of experiences which were thoroughly bizarre and which I did not fully understand until I read the Journal’s account of the episode yesterday. Indeed, I still do not fully understand the events I am going to describe, both what they reflected then or what they mean in retrospect. But I can lay out what happened, facts from which readers and investigators can draw their own conclusions.

You’ll have to go to Lawfare to read the whole thing, but here’s another excerpt:

My role in these events began last spring, when I spent a great deal of time studying the series of Freedom of Information disclosures by the State Department of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and posting the parts I found most interesting—especially those relevant to computer security—on my public Twitter account. I was doing this not because I am some particular foe of Clinton’s—I’m not—but because like everyone else, I assumed she was likely to become the next President of the United States, and I believed her emails might provide some insight into key cybersecurity and national security issues once she was elected in November.

A while later, on June 14, the Washington Post reported on a hack of the DNC ostensibly by Russian intelligence. When material from this hack began appearing online, courtesy of the “Guccifer 2” online persona, I turned my attention to looking at these stolen documents. This time, my purpose was to try and understand who broke into the DNC, and why.

A few weeks later, right around the time the DNC emails were dumped by Wikileaks—and curiously, around the same time Trump called for the Russians to get Hillary Clinton’s missing emails—I was contacted out the blue by a man named Peter Smith, who had seen my work going through these emails. Smith implied that he was a well-connected Republican political operative.

Tait says that he tried to warn Smith that he might be helping the Russian government interfere with the U.S. election, but Smith didn’t seem to care. I doubt the Trump crime family cared either. It turns out that Smith, who is now deceased, was heavily involved in GOP ratfucking operations for decades, including the efforts to bring down Bill Clinton. The author of this article is on Twitter as @pwnallthethings. Now go read the rest.

On the Morning Joe front, you’ve probably heard by now that Jared Kushner is the one who transmitted Trump’s threat about a negative story in the Wall Street Journal to Joe Scarborough. Gabe Sherman wrote about it yesterday and New York Magazine: What Really Happened Between Donald Trump, the Hosts of Morning Joe, and the National Enquirer.

NYC in Fourth of July Independence Day, by Ylli Haruni

This morning in a Washington Post op-ed, Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski disclosed that White House officials offered to spike an Enquirer story about their romance if the pair apologized to Trump for the show’s critical coverage. In recent months, Scarborough and Brzezinski have questioned Trump’s mental state and fitness for office. They elaborated on the op-ed on MSNBC this morning. Morning Joe regular Donny Deutsch said it was “blackmail” for Trump to use a hit-piece in the Enquirer to extract an apology from media critics. Trump then tweeted a quasi-confirmation of the behind-the-scenes conversations, saying that Scarborough called to enlist his help to kill the story. Scarborough called Trump’s version a “lie,” tweeting that he never spoke to the president.

According to three sources familiar with the private conversations, what happened was this: After the inauguration, Morning Joe’s coverage of Trump turned sharply negative. “This presidency is fake and failed,” Brzezinski said on March 6, for example. Around this time, Scarborough and Brzezinski found out the Enquirer was preparing a story about their affair. While Scarborough and Brzezinski’s relationship had been gossiped about in media circles for some time, it was not yet public, and the tabloid was going to report that they had left their spouses to be together.

In mid-April, Scarborough texted with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner about the pending Enquirer story. Kushner told Scarborough that he would need to personally apologize to Trump in exchange for getting Enquirerowner David Pecker to stop the story. (A spokesperson for Kushner declined to comment.) Scarborough says he refused, and the Enquirer published the story in print on June 5, headlined “Morning Joe Sleazy Cheating Scandal!”

Fireworks painting, by Michael Creese

The Morning Joe co-hosts decided to talk about the episode a day after Trump inaccurately tweeted that Brzezinski attended a New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” (A photo from that evening backs up Scarborough and Brzezinski’s denial of this.) While the Enquirer denies that Trump encouraged Pecker to investigate the MSNBC hosts, Trump himself has pushed the story publicly. Last August, he tweeted, “Some day, when things calm down, I’ll tell the real story of@JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!”

And get this, Kushner is also tight with the National Enquirer and he once tried to buy the supermarket tabloid!

Three years ago, Kushner and his brother-in-law, Joe Meyer, tried with Enquirer publisher David Pecker to buy the tabloid’s owner, American Media Inc., people familiar with that bid said. The deal ultimately fell through because of weak advertising revenue at the time, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter was private.

During last year’s campaign, the Enquirer, more typically associated with stories on badly behaving celebrities and reports of extraterrestrials, endorsed Trump and headlined alleged scandals in attacks on his opponents. Trump’s praise for the Enquirer — saying at one point that it deserved journalism’s Pulitzer Prize — was frequent and he welcomed Pecker’s support.

Can anyone doubt that Trump either planted and/or applauded those Enquirer stories during the campaign?

This morning Trump was apparently still obsessing about Joe and Mika and he posted another tweet.

The Guardian: ‘Dumb as a rock Mika’: Donald Trump back on attack against Morning Joe hosts.

Fourth of July 1819 Philadelphia, by John Lewis Krimmel

Donald Trump aimed a series of tweets at familiar targets on Saturday, complaining about the media and so-called voter fraud but saving his most direct fire for MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, the subjects of a fierce controversy over online bullying, sexism and accusations of White House blackmail.

The president sent his tweets from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he was spending the Fourth of July holiday. He began with best wishes to Canada on its national holiday but ended – at least for the time being – with another attack on the hosts of Morning Joe.

“Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses,” Trump wrote. “Too bad!”

Jonathan Chait pulls together the latest Trump Russia news in two pieces at New York Magazine. Excerpts:

From Yesterday, Stop Assuming Trump Is Innocent of Russian Collusion.

One of the oddities of the investigation into Donald Trump’s relations with Russia is the degree to which he has largely enjoyed a presumption of innocence in the court of public opinion. David Brooks, who has hardly taken a sympathetic line on the administration, wrote recently, “it is striking how little evidence there is that any underlying crime occurred — that there was any actual collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians.” Mike Allen observed, “if Trump had kept Comey and stopped obsessing about his investigation, his legal troubles might have blown over: No evidence of collusion has emerged.”

The Boston Tea Party

That line of defense is likely to disappear now that The Wall Street Journalhas reported that Peter Smith, a Republican opposition researcher who said he was working for Michael Flynn, colluded with Russian hackers to try to obtain stolen emails from Hillary Clinton. The Journal reports that Smith referred to conversations with Flynn in emails with associates, and that U.S. intelligence has evidence of “Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.” The Trump defense does not inspire a lot of confidence. “A Trump campaign official said that Mr. Smith didn’t work for the campaign,” reports the Journal, “and that if Mr. Flynn coordinated with him in any way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual.” Obtaining hacked information from Russia for the campaign as a campaign staffer versus doing it as a private individual is a distinction without much difference.

Of course, the notion that there was no evidence of collusion before the Journal report has always been based on a tight definition of what constitutes evidence. It requires assuming that Trump’s on-camera request for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails during the campaign was a joke and that his confidante Roger Stone obtained advance knowledge of the timing of the WikiLeaks publication without any contact from Russia.

And this morning, a summary of what we now know from the WSJ and the Lawfare article I quoted from a the beginning of this post: Now We Have a Roadmap to the Trump Campaign’s Collusion with Russia.

Frederick Douglass Speaking

I’ll end with a thoughtful piece from the New Yorker by David Remnick: American Dignity on the Fourth of July. “Reading Frederick Douglass’s Independence Day address from 1852 may ease the despair caused by listening to the President.”

More than three-quarters of a century after the delegates of the Second Continental Congress voted to quit the Kingdom of Great Britain and declared that “all men are created equal,” Frederick Douglass stepped up to the lectern at Corinthian Hall, in Rochester, New York, and, in an Independence Day address to the Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, made manifest the darkest ironies embedded in American history and in the national self-regard.

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass asked:

I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

The dissection of American reality, in all its complexity, is essential to political progress, and yet it rarely goes unpunished. One reason that the Republican right and its attendant media loathed Barack Obama is that his public rhetoric, while far more buoyant with post-civil-rights-era uplift than Douglass’s, was also an affront to reactionary pieties. Even as Obama tried to win votes, he did not paper over the duality of the American condition: its idealism and its injustices; its heroism in the fight against Fascism and its bloody misadventures before and after. His idea of a patriotic song was “America the Beautiful”—not in its sentimental ballpark versions but the way that Ray Charles sang it, as a blues, capturing the “fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top.”

Now we have a president who embodies many of the evils the “founding fathers” sought to protect America from. I have to believe we can defeat him and move past him as the nation did with slavery. But as with slavery, those evil impulses are still president the the human character and we must be eternally vigilant in opposing them and always aware that, though we’ve made progress, we have not yet overcome the results of the founding of our country on the backs of human beings who were labeled “different.”

I’ll have more links in the comments. Please share your own recommended reads and enjoy the Fourth of July weekend.

Thursday Reads: Horrible Trump News with Puppies on the Side

6 Running Havanese puppies of 9 weeks!

Good Morning!!

I’m going with puppy images today, because this post is kind of distasteful. I needed to cheer myself up since they make me happy because I love dogs and I take really good care of the ones I have with the best food and a list of the top probiotics for dogs.

Many of the people surrounding Trump, including VP Mike Pence, have hired top Washington lawyers; but Trump was unable to get any top law firms to defend him and he had to fall back on the usual shysters and grifters he has used in the past. Now two of those guys are in trouble. I posted about Jay Sekulow on Tuesday. The Guardian reported that Sekulow had

…approved plans to push poor and jobless people to donate money to his Christian nonprofit, which since 2000 has steered more than $60m to Sekulow, his family and their businesses.

Telemarketers for the nonprofit, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism (Case), were instructed in contracts signed by Sekulow to urge people who pleaded poverty or said they were out of work to dig deep for a “sacrificial gift”.

“I can certainly understand how that would make it difficult for you to share a gift like that right now,” they told retirees who said they were on fixed incomes and had “no extra money” – before asking if they could spare “even $20 within the next three weeks”.

In addition to using tens of millions of dollars in donations to pay Sekulow, his wife, his sons, his brother, his sister-in-law, his niece and nephew and their firms, Case has also been used to provide a series of unusual loans and property deals to the Sekulow family when they could just got credit cards loans to get the money, since is easy to learn more here.

Now Seculow is being investigated by Attorney Generals in New York and North Carolina.

Josh Stein, the attorney general of North Carolina, and Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, said on Wednesday they would be examining the operations of Jay Sekulow’s group Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism (Case).

Stein said in a statement: “The reports I’ve read are troubling. My office is looking into this matter.”

Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for Schneiderman, said in an email: “We’re reviewing their filings.”

The Democratic state law enforcement officials acted following the disclosure that Case and an affiliate have since 2000 paid more than $60m in compensation and contracts to Sekulow, his relatives and companies where they hold senior roles.

Nonprofits are forbidden by law from giving excess benefits to the people responsible for running them. Case’s board is dominated by Sekulow and his family. The group is registered with state authorities to operate and raise funds in 39 states plus Washington DC, according to its last available IRS filing. It is closely entwined with American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), another Sekulow nonprofit.

This morning the Guardian also reported that Trump’s personal attorney Mark Kasowitz may have serious conflicts of interest in defending Trump in the Russia investigation.

The lawyer privately advising Donald Trump on the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election is head of a law firm that was involved in the sale of a prestigious piece of New York real estate to Jared Kushner, the US president’s son-in-law, in a deal that could fall under the spotlight of the same inquiry.

Marc Kasowitz, a member of the New York bar who has represented Trump in his business dealings for 15 years, was brought on board by the president last month to provide personal legal advice relating to the Russian inquiry now being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller. The appointment has placed Kasowitz at the center of the legal maelstrom over the investigation into potential collusion between Russia and elements of Trump’s presidential campaign.

An investigation by the Guardian has found that Kasowitz’s law firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres, legally represented the owners of the former New York Times building in Times Square, Manhattan, in a 2015 deal in which part of the property was sold to Kushner for $296m.

The Washington Post has reported that a subsequent loan of $285m from Deutsche Bank to Kushner Companies, relating to the purchase of the building, could fall under the remit of the Mueller investigation given Deutsche Bank’s scandal-riven reputation. The involvement of Kasowitz’s firm as a key legal player in the initial sale adds a further possible twist as the special counsel’s inquiry gathers momentum.

Questions have already been raised about possible conflicts of interest between the lawyer’s role as Trump’s private attorney in the Russian inquiry and his work for various other clients, among them Russia’s largest bank OJSC Sberbank, which he represents in a corporate dispute lodged in US federal court. The Guardian asked Kasowitz, via his spokesman, to respond to the potential conflict of interest relating to his firm’s role as attorney on the sale of the Times Square building to Kushner but he did not respond.

There’s much more to read at the link.

Yesterday several articles described Trump’s pathetic ignorance about health care policy.

Here’s one at The New York Times: On Senate Health Bill, Trump Falters in the Closer’s Role. Even Republicans are fed up with Trump’s ham-handed attempts to force a vote on the Death Care bill even though the votes just aren’t there. A Brief excerpt:

A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange.

Mr. Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications, the staff member added.

Trump has absolutely no idea what he doing and he isn’t interested in learning either. You can read the rest at the link if you haven’t already–it’s long and interesting.

Here’s another description of White House-GOP conflicts at the Washington Post: How the push for a Senate health-care vote fell apart amid GOP tensions. The worst thing Trump did was to approve attack ads against Sen. Dean Heller, who opposes the bill and is one of the most endangered Republican Senators heading into the 2018 midterms.

The Daily Beast has a shorter summary of the health care debacle and Trump’s ignorance: Does Trump Know the First Thing About Health Care? Aide: ‘He Understands Winning.’

On Wednesday morning, the president woke up and then began angrily tweetstorming about his allegedly deep knowledge of the American health care system.

“Some of the Fake News Media likes to say that I am not totally engaged in health care,” Donald Trump tweeted from his personal @realDonaldTrump account. “Wrong, I know the subject well & want victory for U.S.”

The president’s close aides and political advisers, six of whom spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, would beg to differ. Some of them simply laughed at the very suggestion that the president knows much, or even cares, about health care policy in this country….

Multiple senior administration and White House officials all independently described Trump as either detached from or barely interested in the complicated details and tricky politics of subsidies, Obamacare markets and taxes, the Medicaid expansion, and the safety net.

Following the Trump administration’s failure at managing an aggressive, threat-filled push to pass the initial House version of the Obamacare repeal in March, White House officials privately concede that it is actually better for Republicans when the president disengages more from being a policy negotiator.

When asked if the president understood or had a solid grasp on the important facets of the Senate or House incarnations of repeal-and-replace, one official—who who works closely with the president on health-care policy, replied initially with a few moments of light chuckling—before answering “not to my knowledge.”

Politico has a story about Secretary of State Tillerson’s conflicts with Trump: Tillerson blows up at top White House aide.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s frustrations with the White House have been building for months. Last Friday, they exploded.

The normally laconic Texan unloaded on Johnny DeStefano, the head of the presidential personnel office, for torpedoing proposed nominees to senior State Department posts and for questioning his judgment.

Tillerson also complained that the White House was leaking damaging information about him to the news media, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Above all, he made clear that he did not want DeStefano’s office to “have any role in staffing” and “expressed frustration that anybody would know better” than he about who should work in his department — particularly after the president had promised him autonomy to make his own decisions and hires, according to a senior White House aide familiar with the conversation.

It seems Tillerson actually wants to hire experienced diplomats as aides, while Trump wants to install a bunch of political supporters at the State Department.

Last night Trump held a high-dollar fundraiser at his hotel in DC, supposedly for his 2020 reelection campaign. Politico: Trump rips media, mocks Pelosi at closed-door fundraiser.

Speaking for about 30 minutes at the closed-door event, according to two people present, the president continued to bash a favorite target — the media, and, in particular, CNN. Trump derided the network for errors and presented himself as a victim of its reporting, which he described as deeply unfair. At one point, the president turned his fire on one of the network’s liberal commentators, Van Jones.

He was at it again this morning on Twitter, attacking Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and their MSNBC program Morning Joe.

President Donald Trump sent out a crude tweet attacking the hosts of “Morning Joe” on Thursday, claiming co-host Mika Brzezinski was “bleeding from a face-lift” during a recent New Year’s visit to Mar-a-Lago.

In a two-part tweet, the president said he “heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore).” Then went on to hit Brzezinski: “how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came … to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

Trump’s tweets follow a similar one earlier on Thursday morning from White House social media director Dan Scavino Jr., who tweeted from his personal account: “#DumbAsARockMika and lover #JealousJoe are lost, confused & saddened since @POTUS @realDonaldTrump stopped returning their calls! Unhinged.”

Honestly, I feel like throwing up after reading that, hence the puppy pics. I’m so ashamed that this monster is representing the U.S. What a horrible, horrible man.

So . . . what else is happening? Any good news to share?