Andras Gollner exposes Trump in “The Budapest Bridge”

The following article in The Hungarian Free Press by Andras Gollner in two parts,  “The Budapest Bridge: Hungary’s Role in the Collusion Between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Secret Service” and “The Budapest Bridge Part 2″, provides missing links on the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy.   Gollner’s information fits the Trump modus operandi; he cites early Trump New Yorker friend, Arthur J. Finkelstein, a fellow Roy Cohn associate, as instrumental in the behind the scenes shenanigans of electoral manipulation.  Finkelstein, with Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, constitute a key Trump base of loyalists with links back to Cohn.   Gollner even provides a possible role for Trump’s office Nazi Sebastian Gorka.   Gollner introduces his articles as follows:

“Our investigation has uncovered ‘the smoking gun’ about the relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services. It shows that the connection between the Russian secret services and the Trump campaign is not a direct one. It did not run through the Russian embassy in the US or through the spies that have been expelled by Obama. It did not run through New York City or Moscow, or in conversations between campaign staff and the Russian ambassador to the US. It ran through Budapest, which is the European Headquarters of Putin’s FSB. Budapest was the ‘bridge’ between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret service.

Some of our evidence is well known. It is known, for example, that the Russians and the Trump campaign had identical strategic interests. They both wanted to position Hillary Clinton as a ‘crooked and untrustworthy’ candidate. What has not been known, up to now is, that the unacknowledged architect of this grand strategy was the notoriously secretive Arthur J. Finkelstein, a long time New York associate of Donald Trump, going back to the Roy Cohen days.

Finkelstein is perhaps the most bitter opponent of Hillary Clinton amongst a small circle of pro-Republican campaign gurus, and a frequent flyer to many of the capitals where Putin is seen as a hero. Finkelstein introduced Paul Manafort years ago to Putin’s pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs, who use their corporate hats, to advance Putin’s fortunes abroad.  Finkelstein also had a big hand in Manafort’s addition to the Trump team. Finkelstein has also served as chief political strategist for the past 10 years, to Putin’s most loyal follower in the Western alliance – the Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán. Finkie, as Orbán is fond to call him, also works for some of the most notorious autocrats of the former Soviet Republics, and always indirectly, so his pay-masters can’t be easily identified – a skill that he passed on to Trump’s ex-campaign chairman, Manafort.

As Steven Bannon confessed to the Hollywood Reporter, after the elections, polling and visceral messaging, a Finkelstein specialty, played a critical part in the Trump campaign.  It is not a coincidence, that the campaign’s senior pollster was Tony Fabrizio, who learned his craft on Finkelstein’s knees. Virtually the entire top tier of the Trump campaign, including Roger Ailes and Roger Stone, have close personal ties to the man, who is known worldwide, as ‘The Merchant of Venom’.”

Gollner names names and suggests further avenues of investigation.   All of this fits well with other information developed on Trump, such as that on the Azerbaijan Trump hotel detailed in Adam Davidson’s New Yorker article “Trump’s Worst Deal.”  We need an independent prosecutor to follow up this line of evidence along with the other indicia of collusion.

The article sets out a brief bio of Gollner as follows:   “András B. Göllner split his time between Budapest and Montreal from 1990 until 2010, as a senior political-economic advisor, on governmental transparency. He organized the current Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán’s first visit to Canada, and learned, through close personal contact, about many of his corrupt practices. He conducted the first and only study (financed by USAID) that looked inside the operations of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, which today, works arm in arm with Russia’s secret services. He is an internationally recognized expert on Central European politics, has a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics, published 3 books, and dozens of articles, in such well known English language media as The LA Times, The Huffington Post, The National Post, or the Montreal Gazette, to name just a few. He is a regular contributor to the Hungarian Free Press. His current status is Professor Emeritus, at Montreal’s Concordia University.”

Concordia is a prominent Canadian university with an international reputation, particularly in business.  A brief google of Gollner shows that he has been active in efforts against a slide of the Hungarian state toward despotism.

We’re the Cops of the World, Boys!

Like many a slow slide into the muck, it’s difficult to finger when the US totally lost its moral compass.  You might argue that we never had one – it has certainly been erratic – but when Iraq invaded Kuwait and George H. W. Bush decided that the invasion could not stand, he gathered the support of other enraged allies.  The US led coalition that removed Iraq from Kuwait did so pursuant to a United Nations mandate.  So let’s take as a baseline the fact that Bush obtained a sort of legitimacy before taking military action.

Over the last week, the US has escalated its presence in the sovereign state of Syria with a retaliatory attack on a Syrian airfield after a media report and horrific pictures of a gas attack targeting Syrian civilians.  While NBC journalist Brian Williams fawned over the American use of tomahawk missiles, I was left wondering “why this attack?”,  “why now?”, and “based on what authority?”

Here are a few further questions:

Since the Syrian regime is supported by Russia and defended by Russian weapons, was Trump flirting with WWW III  or was the raid staged with Putin’s permission?

Why couldn’t this particular action wait for independent verification of the gas attack and presentation of the matter to the UN and the International Court?

On what logical basis, and pursuant to what authority, is the US violating Syrian sovereignty in the first place?  If the basis is that the Syrian regime is repugnant and violates human rights, does that repugnance differ significantly from the repression of human rights in US ally Saudi Arabia?

Was the raid staged without prior notice or consultation by Trump to show that he did not need to consult before using military force?

Was the raid staged to shore up his image as a strong leader?

Was the raid staged to distract from his collusion with Putin to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election?

Can we expect more of the same from Mr. Trump?

Is the strike force moving toward the Korean Peninsula intended to provoke a North Korean response?  Does Trump intend to strike North Korea in any case?

Yeah, I know.  It’s nothing new.  They cheered Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan hill for democracy.  How did that work out?  And the Spanish didn’t have nuclear weapons.  Here’s Phil Ochs, “Cops of the World“.   It seems to fit with the Trump administration.   If you don’t know about Phil Ochs, you can’t learn younger.

Going All the Way

No one has said it, but we should  investigate whether voting machines were hacked in the recent election to change the vote count and flip the election.  Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointedly tells us that 25% of the voting machines can be hacked without a trace.  See my blog Hacking Voting Machines.  Maybe we should pay attention.  Here’s a scenario:

Since speculation is fun, let’s say there are billions, perhaps, trillions of dollars at stake in the election.  And let’s hypothesize that you are a billionaire TV celebrity, a gambler who has made his fortune rubbing elbows with organized crime, and you have access to a rogue nation-state with highly developed cyber-warfare capabilities, and  access to the ear of a right-wing hedge-fund billionaire who made his fortune using computer algorithms to game future behavior in the stock market and who is now dabbling in computer algorithms in politics.  What would you do if you are willing to stop at nothing?

For a start, you use the traditional political tactics against your opponent.  Stir up misogyny.  Find an incident you can blame on her.  Smear her with Benghazi and use of a private email server.  Exploit the xenophobia of the alt-right.  Rouse the rabble.

But you also have these computer resources – wouldn’t it be interesting to exploit the internet.   Use the new resources like Breitbart  and Facebook to target misinformation to the right people?   Maybe you could hack your opponent’s emails.   “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

Now it’s coming down to the wire – the polls say you are behind by that crucial bit – you won’t be able to pull it off.  But wait, there’s an Electoral College that allows you to win without the popular vote.  And you have computers to find the electoral votes you need.  If only you could find a few more popular votes.  And lo and behold, your computer experts tell you they can hack the voting machines themselves – a few more votes here, a few more votes there, they don’t even leave a paper trail.  What do you think?  You are not a loser.  Are you going to give it a shot?

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s Off to Jail They Go

Perhaps, like me, you spent too much time yesterday wondering if the “firing” of Steve Bannon from the National Security Council was meaningful news.  Was Bannon really in disfavor, or did Bannon orchestrate his removal to address the criticism, or orchestrate it as a diversion?  Or perhaps, his leaving really signaled that major foreign policy decisions, including those affecting security, were taking place in the White House.  Why should Bannon waste time at the Council meetings?  Pay him now or pay him later.  I’ll tell you what – it doesn’t mean squat.  It’s not where the action is, one way or the other.

The Susan Rice “story” is a diversion too.  I’m amazed that Trump can float the crap impugning Rice in the media and they run with it.  Did Rice unmask?  Did Obama bug?  Crap.  There’s nothing there and I’m not buying anyway.

The real action is on the Trump-Russia collusion story.  They’d squelch it if they could, they are panicked like it’s a five alarm fire.  But the story is not going to stop because, as I’ve been saying all along, Trump really did it.  In fact, during the campaign, Trump was proud of how smart he was to collude with the Russians; he was daring us to call him on it when he called on Russia to release Clinton’s hacked emails.

But in this case, Trump miscalculated – this story is the sorcerer’s apprentice.    The story won’t die, it can’t be fogged.  Unlike Trump, Trump’s assistants were not  schooled by Roy Cohn in the black arts.   They don’t know how to lie like a sociopath.  His cronies like Flynn and Sessions resign and recuse – they get caught in their lies and perjury.   We know from their smoke that there’s fire.  And Trump has been so deep in organized crime, with Manafort and Stone, and years of money-laundering and deals with Russian oligarch thugs that, once the investigative journalists get the scent, the truth can no longer be hidden.

I shared the following post, courtesy of Michael Mut, on Facebook yesterday:

“I don’t know – it’s hard for me to see any #TrumpRussia ties…
except for the Flynn thing
and the Manafort thing
and the Tillerson thing
and the Sessions thing
and the Kushner thing
and the Carter Page thing
and the Roger Stone thing
and the Felix Sater thing
and the Boris Ephsteyn thing
and the Rosneft thing
and the Gazprom thing
and the Sergey Gorkov banker thing
and the Azerbajain thing
and the “I love Putin” thing
and the Donald Trump, Jr. thing
and the Sergey Kislyak thing
and the Russian Affiliated Interests thing
and the Russian Business Interests thing
and the Emoluments Clause thing
and the Alex Schnaider thing
and the hack of the DNC thing
and the Guccifer 2.0 thing
and the Mike Pence “I don’t know anything” thing
and the Russians mysteriously dying thing
and Trump’s public request to Russia to hack Hillary’s email thing
and the Trump house sale for $100 million at the bottom of the housing bust to the Russian fertilizer king thing
and the Russian fertilizer king’s plane showing up in Concord, NC during Trump rally campaign thing
and the Nunes sudden flight to the White House in the night thing
and the Nunes personal investments in the Russian winery thing
and the Cyprus bank thing
and Trump not releasing his tax returns thing
and the Republican Party’s rejection of an amendment to require Trump to show his taxes thing
and the election hacking thing
and the GOP platform change to the Ukraine thing
and the Steele Dossier thing
and the Leninist Bannon thing
and the Sally Yates can’t testify thing
and the intelligence community’s investigative reports thing
and Trump’s reassurance that the Russian connection is all “fake news” thing
and Spicer’s Russian Dressing “nothing’s wrong” thing
so there’s probably nothing there
since the swamp has been drained, these people would never lie
probably why Nunes cancels the investigation meetings
all of this must be normal
just a bunch of separate dots with no connection.”

I don’t know if the post originated with Michael Mut, or with some unknown wit.  And the post leaves out the Erik Prince thing and other threads.  I don’t care.  It makes the point.  We  know the truth about the Trump conspiracy.  Trump and the gang are in it up to their necks, guilty of treason.  In an earlier age, they would swing.  They should spend their remaining lives in jail.  If House and Senate Republicans refuse to act, we need to hold them accountable too.  They are enabling traitors.

The Perfect Storm

William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp describes how Hitler’s rise in Nazi Germany was enabled by his alliance with Germany’s “military-industrial complex” (the Krupps)  and Germany’s conservative Junker class.  Each party perceived it could use the other two to further its goals.  Arguably Hitler came out on top, but the alliance was necessary to get him there.

Similar dynamics have been at work in Trump’s rise to power.  See my blog at The Tripartite Coalition.  To get elected, Trump, Manafort, Stone, and Flynn – the shady dealers – allied (1) with Steve Bannon and the Robert Mercer forces, and (2) with the Republican establishment, which is enthralled to the conservative corporate and military industrial complex and led by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.  Trump, Manafort, Stone, and Flynn brought long-standing contacts with Putin and the Russian oligarchy to the party.   The Russians were key because of their access to resources to hack Democratic emails and disseminate misinformation.  The evidence of collusion, given the timeline of contacts, is self-evident.  See Hannah Levintova’s Mother Jones timeline.  Ryan and McConnell provided the legitimacy and political base  and ideological support necessary to run.  So what did Bannon and Mercer supply?

 Jane Mayer in her New Yorker  article “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency” exposes Robert Mercer as the force behind Bannon and Breitbart.  Her article also describes how Mercer made his millions as an innovative computer programmer who figured out how to use computer algorithms to game the stock market.  In essence, he figured out that, for short-term trades, he could use computers to crunch massive amounts of data to understand where the market would go next – getting a significant advantage over other market investors.  Just like the casino house in a gambling operation, he used his computers to create a “house” edge by being able to predict future behavior.  Mercer understood that what worked in the stock market could also be used to analyse behavior in politics.   He brought that expertise to at least one company, Cambridge Analytics, for use in advancing his right-wing political goals.

From all appearances, the Mercer analytics were used to maximize the benefit of the Russian and Breitbart disinformation campaign.  In an election determined by approximately 70,000 votes in three key states, that alliance almost certainly tipped the election in Trump’s favor.   See this article by Bill Palmer, “FBI now investigating Breitbart and InfoWars as part of its probe into Donald Trump and Russia.”  Here’s Palmer,  “Just hours after FBI Director James Comey confirmed on live national television today that his agency is actively investigating Russia and the Donald Trump campaign for their roles in rigging the 2016 election, it turns out the probe is even wider than acknowledged. McClatchy is now confirming that the FBI is also investigating the actions of two far right news outlets with direct ties to the Trump administration, as part of its Trump-Russia probe.

Part of the Russian government’s strategy for rigging the election involved using automated internet bots to spread pro-Trump news stories from sites like Breitbart and InfoWars in rapid fashion, helping those stories artificially go viral on social media, and giving Donald Trump a boost in the process.”

As has been well established, Breitbart was funded by Robert Mercer and led by Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Finally, we have the further circumstantial evidence that Trump, himself, personally amplified the effect of the misinformation campaign by publicly asserting, repeating, and insisting on the truth of various allegations.  See this article by Aaron Rupar  at ThinkProgress:  “Former FBI agent details how Trump and Russia team up to weaponize fake news“.

As Rupar notes:  “During the first public Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about Russia’s meddling in the presidential election on Thursday, former FBI special agent Clint Watts explained how Russia and the Trump campaign team up to weaponize fake news.

Asked by Rep. James Lankford (R-OK) about why Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to make more of an effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election than in years past, Watts, who is now a a fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, said, ‘the answer is very simple and it’s what nobody is really saying in this room.’

‘Which is, part of the reason active measures have worked in this U.S. election is because the Commander-in-Chief [Trump] has used Russian active measures at times, against his opponents,’ Watts continued.”    Watts goes on to detail two specific circumstances.

It has been evident for some time that Trump successfully used a  campaign of innuendo, smears, and misinformation to steal the 2016 election.  The degree to which his election was further enabled by the perfect storm of Russian collusion and the computer expertise of Robert Mercer to  leverage the disinformation campaign is now coming into focus.  Given that the collusion was illegal and covert, it is reasonable to anticipate that substantially more activity will come to light as law enforcement investigates and as those who are culpable face subpoenas and are required to testify under oath.  This reddit link “magicsonar comments” contains some of the anonymous research and speculation that deserves mainstream attention.

In summary,  Trump’s election was illegitimate.  He should be investigated and removed from office and the election nullified.

Collusion in Plain Sight

For those of you following the Trump-Russia collusion story, Hannah Levintova of Mother Jones has prepared a revealing timeline .  See “The Long, Twisted, and Bizarre History of the Trump-Russia Scandal“.  The various Trump loyalists continue to insinuate, nothwithstanding Michael Flynn’s request for immunity in exchange for testimony, that there is no “there” there.  What seems more plausible is that this torturous timeline – implicating most of Trump’s confidants – is just the tip of an iceberg of treasonous acts.

For more on Flynn, see the article in The Guardian  by Luke Harding, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, and Nick Hopkins,  “Michael Flynn: new evidence spy chiefs had concerns about Russian ties”.    Flynn, like Trump, Manafort, and Page, was deeply entwined with Russian dealings.  The Guardian article has him associating with a Russian-British graduate student, Svetlana Lokhova, noting “[a] historian and a leading expert on Soviet espionage, Lokhova has claimed to have unique access to previously classified Soviet-era material in Moscow.”

Finally, there is this article by Paul Wood of the BBC, “Trump Russia dossier key claim ‘verified’” concerning efforts to validate former British agent Christopher Steele’s dossier – which purports to be a roadmap to the Trump-Russia collusion.  The article is focused on verification of one of the prime alleged facts,  Here’s an excerpt from Wood: “Steele’s “dossier”, as the material came to be known, contains a number of highly contested claims.

At one point he wrote: ‘A leading Russian diplomat, Mikhail KULAGIN, had been withdrawn from Washington at short notice because Moscow feared his heavy involvement in the US presidential election operation… would be exposed in the media there.’

There was no diplomat called Kulagin in the Russian embassy; there was a Kalugin.

One of Trump’s allies, Roger Stone, said to me of Steele, scornfully: ‘If 007 wants to be taken seriously, he ought to learn how to spell.’

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Kalugin was head of the embassy’s economics section.”

Wood’s article focuses on the fact that Kalugin’s status as a Russian spy was now affirmed – giving further credence to other dossier claims.  Here’s the dossier claim that caught my attention:

“In early December, the whole thing [Steele’s dossier], 35 pages, was sent to Senator John McCain, who pressed the FBI director to investigate exhaustively.

The following month, the intelligence agencies briefed both then-President Barack Obama and Trump about the dossier – and the entire contents were published by Buzzfeed.

In the report, Steele spoke of an ‘established operational liaison between the TRUMP team and the Kremlin… an intelligence exchange had been running between them for at least 8 years.'”

At this point, Steele’s allegations remain just that – unproven allegations, albeit of a credible source.  On the other hand, I find that they resonate.

 

Trump in Azerbaijan – Adam Davidson’s Follow Up

I blogged earlier about Adam Davidson’s revelations in The New Yorker concerning Trump’s partnering with the organized-crime Mammadov family in a Trump Hotel project in Azerbaijan.    See Evidence Trump Violated The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.    As I’ve noted elsewhere (See Donald Trump and Organized Crime), Trump has made of business of working shoulder to shoulder with organized-crime .  His mentor was the red-baiting lawyer for Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, who also represented New York crime families before being ultimately disbarred.  There’s every reason to believe Trump has sought out the business opportunities in these seedy environments and highly unlikely that his involvement with the Mammadovs was undertaken naively.  Even were that the case, however, federal law now requires that such partnerships only be entered into after “due diligence” to ensure the absence of criminal ties.  It is thus puzzling that Davidson’s report has received so little mainstream attention.  The heart of that matter is that Trump, violated federal law by partnering in a business in which he received money obtained by corrupt practices – a violation for which other businessmen are now in jail.

Now Davidson has followed up in The New Yorker on his initial report in SENATORS ASK FOR AN INVESTIGATION INTO TRUMP DEALINGS IN AZERBAIJAN.  Here’s Davidson,  “The ranking Democratic members of the Senate’s Foreign Relations, Banking, and Judiciary committees have written a joint letter to several Trump Administration officials asking them to address the possibility that the Trump Organization violated several laws in its dealings in Azerbaijan. ”  He continues, “The letter, by Senators Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, Dianne Feinstein, of California, and Ben Cardin, of Maryland, was sent to the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the F.B.I. director, James Comey. The senators wrote, ‘It appears that the lack of due diligence by the Trump Organization described in the article exposed President Trump and his organization to notoriously corrupt Azerbaijani oligarchs, and may also have exposed the Trump Organization to the IRGC’—the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. ‘Even though the Trump Organization appears to have withdrawn from the Baku Tower deal, serious questions remain unanswered about the Trump Organization’s potential criminal liability.'”

Trump’s attorney denies that Trump faces any criminal exposure and the controlling Republicans have yet to respond.  But here is what is interesting.  If you read Davidson, the prima facie case of a violation of The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act looks strong and the details of the transactions would be available for investigation.  Unlike the issues involving Russian collusion over the hacking and efforts to undermine the election, the Azerbaijan case has a paper trail to investigate.  Trump can be asked to show that he undertook required due diligence.  The money trails can be followed.  The case for impeachment based on collusion is growing by the day and Trump is flagrantly violating conflict of interest rules and the Emoluments Clause in public view.   And now, here is a case that shows verifiable entanglement with organized crime and which cannot be fogged away.  Failure to follow up and investigate would be another crime.

Investigating Trump

The Mayflower Hotel

When Richard Nixon was investigated for his role in Watergate, the underlying story was relatively straight-forward.  A group of Republican operatives was caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex.  The gist of the investigation was whether Nixon was somehow involved.  Basically, there was one act and an ensuing cover up.  No one got confused trying to understand which particular malfeasance was being talked about.

Trumpgate is much more complex because the actions that are being unveiled are substantially more wide ranging.  Here’s my list for keeping track:

The Trump-Russia Scandal:  US intelligence has confirmed that Russian operatives actively undermined the integrity of the 2016 election, among other acts releasing hacked emails and misinformation intended to damage the Clinton campaign.  Numerous Trump aides were in contact with Russian officials during this period and many of the contacts were initially denied.  Several theories have arisen as to what was going on, including the possibility of direct collusion between Trump and Putin to swing the election, the possibility of an oil deal underlying such cooperation, and the possibility that Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence.

Here are a couple recent pieces addressing where that stands.  Jefferson Morley article posted on Salon,  “5 key questions about the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation“.  Read the Morley piece for five areas he would like investigated.

See also Seth Abramson’s Twitter threads.  Following these threads is a bit more work – Abramson hasn’t yet collected it together, or if he has I didn’t find it.  Still, the threads are compelling and raise questions concerning  whether a deal for oil was cut at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, and concerning the Christopher Steele dossier.

Secondly, Was there a Domestic Manipulation of the Election?  Did Trump operatives work with a faction in the FBI New York office to manipulate intelligence information?  Again, see Abramson, in The Huffington Post,   “The Domestic Conspiracy That Gave Trump The Election Is In Plain Sight.”

Here’s Abramson’s lead: “Information presently public and available confirms that Erik Prince, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump conspired to intimidate FBI Director James Comey into interfering in, and thus directly affecting, the 2016 presidential election. This conspiracy was made possible with the assistance of officers in the New York Police Department and agents within the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. All of the major actors in the conspiracy have already confessed to its particulars either in word or in deed; moreover, all of the major actors have publicly exhibited consciousness of guilt after the fact. This assessment has already been the subject of articles in news outlets on both sides of the political spectrum, but has not yet received substantial investigation by major media.”

Read Abramson for the underlying allegations.  I found the information concerning Erik Prince new and interesting.  Abramson notes that “Erik Prince—the founder of Blackwater private security, one of Trump’s biggest donors, a conspiracy theorist who’d previously accused Huma Abedin of being a terrorist in the employ of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a man who blamed Clinton family friend and former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta for outing him as a CIA asset in 2009″ was actively involved in the Clinton disinformation campaign.  Prince, it turns out, is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother.  Consider this excerpt: “It seems clear that Giuliani, who was the top surrogate for the Trump campaign and in near-daily contact with the candidate, acted under orders from Trump, and that Prince either acted under orders from Trump or Steve Bannon—well-known to Prince from their mutual association with, and financial investment in, Breitbart and its ownership, including Robert Mercer—and, moreover, that all those associated with the conspiracy were subsequently rewarded. Erik Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, was named Education Secretary by Trump, despite having no experience for the job other than advocating sporadically for charter schools in Michigan. Prince himself was named a shadow adviser to Trump, even though, by November 8th, the fact that his statements to Breitbart had been part of a domestic disinformation campaign was clear. Prince is so close to Trump that he appears to have been present at the election-night returns-watching party to which Trump invited only close friends and associates…”

Violation of The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  Third, while the questions of Trump’s collusion with Russia and manipulation of the FBI seem to be the most visible areas of investigation, Adam Davidson in The New Yorker, “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal”, presents a strong case that Trump violated The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by partnering with organized crime in a Trump hotel project in Azerbaijan.  I am puzzled that Davidson’s piece has gained so little traction in Congress, given that proof could be reasonably obtained through available paper and money trails.

Violation of the Emoluments Clause.  Even more puzzling is the failure of Congressional members to pursue Trump’s violation of the Emoluments Clause, given that Trump is profiting from a world-wide web of business ventures that create an inevitable tangle of conflicts of interest.  Trump, in public view, benefits every time a foreign entity contracts with a Trump facility.  There was a brief flurry of headlines when China granted Trump valuable patents.  It is difficult to construct an innocent explanation for the Republican leadership ignoring such a direct and visible Constitutional challenge.

 

Slip Sliding Toward War

 

Bombing in Mosul

 

 

 

 

 

 

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy warned yesterday in The Huffington Post that Trump is building up troops for a ground war in Syria.  See  “Trump Is Dragging Us Into Another War… And No One Is Talking About It“.  Here’s Chris:

“Quietly, while Americans have been focused on the ongoing drama over repealing the Affordable Care Act and the new revelations about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Trump has been busy dramatically expanding the American troop presence inside Syria. And virtually no one in Washington has noticed. Americans have a right to know what Trump is planning and whether this will lead to an Iraq-style occupation of Syria for years to come  Without any official notification, Trump sent 500 new American troops into Syria, ostensibly to take part in the upcoming assault on the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa. News reports suggest this deployment may just be the tip of the iceberg, with some saying that the plan is for hundreds more American troops to be added to the fight in the coming weeks. No one actually knows how many troops are inside Syria now, because the administration has largely tried to keep the build-up a secret.”

And yesterday,  The Washington Post ran this article by Missy Ryan and Loveday Morris, “U.S. military acknowledges strike on Mosul site where more than 100 were allegedly killed‘”   This is The Post lead:    “The U.S. military acknowledged for the first time Saturday that it launched an airstrike against the Islamic State in the densely packed Iraqi city of Mosul, where residents say more than 100 people were killed in a single event.  If confirmed, the March 17 incident would mark the greatest loss of civilian life since the United States began strikes on Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria in 2014.”

We don’t need to be rocket scientists to read between the lines.  Trump wants to escalate the conflict in Syria and he is not going to wait to develop consensus, or consult allies, or, for that matter, consider consequences.  His Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon wants a war.  Trump needs a war to distract from his collusion with Russia and his legislative healthcare disaster.  As Chris Murphy warns, we are being brought deeper into war, willy-nilly, and with not a whisper to the press – “the enemy of the people”.

In that context, take a look at Abby Martin’s excellent new podcast on Steve Bannon.  I’ve suggested in previous blogs that Bannon is an existential threat, not just to us but to all humanity.  See Who are Bannon and Trump,   McCarthy, Evola, and The Camp of the Saints,  and Darth Bannon.  Bannon is fascinated by war.  He has publicly proclaimed that we are at war with Islam and will be at war with China in five years.  He is a primary architect of Trump’s Muslim ban.  He wishes to deconstruct our government – that is to say remove the social safety nets, the regulatory system that protects stability in the the economy, and the environmental protections that are necessary to protect the planet.  He is also the vehicle of right-wingnut billionaire Robert Mercer, who is brilliantly exposed by Jane Mayer in  The New Yorker,  in The Reclusive  Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency.   What Abby Martin does that you haven’t seen is given depth to who Bannon really is.

With Trump and Bannon at the helm,  with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell leading Congress, our country is in serious peril.  In the near term, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and thousands more of our own young men may die in Syria and Iraq for no clear or considered policy.  Worse still, Bannon puppet-master Robert Mercer is a “nuclear power” enthusiast who proclaimed that those outside the blast-zone at Hiroshima and Nagasaki received “health benefits”.  Not kidding.  See Jane Mayer’s article cited above.  Defeating the foolish right-wing effort to repeal Obamacare is not nearly enough.  We need to force an investigation and impeachment of Trump now.

The Rise of the Investigative Journalists

The cries over the demise of journalism have proven to be overblown.  While the content of the local dailies is often disappointing, a surprising number of excellent journalists have risen to the challenge posed by Trump.  I have noted several of them in my “related links” site and have referenced many in my blogs over the past several months.  The New Yorker in particular deserves notice for the articles by Jane Mayer – “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency” and by Adam Davidson – “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal”.   Mayer’s article exposes the role of right-wing oligarch Robert Mercer in funding the rise of the alt-right.   Davidson writes about Trump’s partnership with the organized crime Mammadov family in Azerbaijan.  But the fact is that investigative jounalists publishing through numerous sites are making a difference.  Recent articles by Michael Winship, Steve Harper, and others at Bill Moyers’ site Moyers and Company, have been connecting the dots on Trump’s collusion with Russia.  Maggie Haberman just wrote an excellent piece for The New York Times , “Roger Stone, the ‘Trickster’ on Trump’s Side, Is Under F.B.I. Scrutiny“ setting the connections between Roger Stone, Trump, Manafort, and the Russians.  Less known web sites like Slate turn out fine articles.  In “Gutter Trash  Sebastian Gorka’s ties to a group of Nazi collaborators is a new low for Donald Trump’s administration”, Michelle Goldberg helped detail the contacts of Trump aide Sebastian Gorka with the Hungarian-Nazi Vitézi Rend.  See also David Cay Johnston’s May 23, 2016 article in Politico   “Just What Were Donald Trump’s Ties to the Mob?“.

Today, I’d like to cite Michael Tomasky’s article in the April 6 New York Review of Books, “Trump: The Scramble”.   Tomasky does perhaps the best job yet in describing the dynamics of Republican complicity with the non-ideological Trump.  Here’s an excerpt from his analysis of Mitch McConnell:  “McConnell is one thing. He has no policy commitments, beyond his hope that all campaign finance regulation might someday be wiped off the books. He just wants the power of his majority, and if it’s Trump who happens to be the facilitator and guarantor of that power, fine by him.”

And, by contrast, Tomasky on Paul Ryan:  “Ryan is another matter, indeed the opposite: he has many policy commitments. You might think that would give him reason to take stands against Trump, but in fact it is precisely his policy commitments that keep him tethered to Trump. Ryan wants to dismantle the welfare state. So the devil’s bargain he has made, and this is true of many congressional Republicans, is that they will support Trump, let him deport Muslims and crack down on undocumented Latinos, let him depart from party orthodoxy on trade, let him pursue risky and maybe even sinister policies with Vladimir Putin, turn a collective blind eye to the manifold ways in which he dishonors the office, as long as the president signs whatever legislation they bring to his desk that rips the bricks out of the wall of the liberal state. They will hope in the meantime that he doesn’t start World War III or hand state secrets to the Russian FSB.”

This is all good stuff.  Read Tomasky.  Read them all.  The journalists are back.  I’m hoping they bring Trump and his cronies down.