Showing posts with label Trump Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trump Russia. Show all posts

Sunday, July 12, 2020

Follow The Money - Updated

I've never believed Donald is as rich as he claims to be. I do believe that if the truth about his finances ever comes out, it will be clear that he's a serious criminal and has been for years. Today this thread from Adam Davidson caught my eye:





















I think Donald's money will be getting more attention and not in a good way. Stay tuned.

Update on August 5. More about Donald's monetary adventures in Scotland, from an article at Mother Jones:

In 2006, Donald Trump purchased a 1,400-acre swath of the old Menie Estate in Aberdeenshire, a rambling property situated on Scotland’s rugged and remote northeastern coast. Trump pledged to develop a world-class golf resort replete with luxury villas there, and he vowed to revitalize the region with more than a billion dollars of investment. Though not an obvious location for a glitzy development—the area is mostly known for its offshore oil industry, and it rains more than a third of the year—Aberdeenshire was to be the beachhead of the mogul’s ambitious plan to insert his family name among the storied golf courses of Scotland, the birthplace of the sport, and attain for his brand the kind of old-world prestige that had eluded Trump in the United States.

The development seemed particularly important to Trump, whose mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis, a far-flung island in the Outer Hebrides. And it was unlike anything he had undertaken before. He often licenses his name to projects financed by others. And the self-proclaimed “king of debt” typically takes out large loans to finance the ventures he does bankroll. In this case, Trump’s company proceeded with the development on its own. And it says it paid for everything in cash.

Such was also the case for Turnberry, the historic golf resort, an hour south of Glasgow, that Trump purchased in 2014 for $60 million. His large expenditures in Scotland were notable because they came during a rocky financial stretch for Trump. The year before purchasing the Aberdeenshire estate, he was ousted as CEO of his thrice-bankrupted casino business; in 2008, he defaulted on a large Deutsche Bank loan tied to a development in Chicago.

Like other Trump wagers, his Scottish gamble has so far not worked out. Both resorts are bleeding millions annually. Meanwhile, he and his company have spent years viciously skirmishing with various locals and government agencies that resisted Trump’s plans to build luxury housing on the fringes of the resorts, which the Trump Organization seems to view as vital to profitability.

If business was lackluster before, it’s dismal now that the coronavirus pandemic has all but halted the Scottish golf season, at least as far as international travelers are concerned. To make matters worse, as Trump’s hospitality empire grapples with the fallout of COVID-19, it also faces a series of maturing debts, loans amounting to nearly a half-billion dollars, which need to be paid down or refinanced over the next four years.

Recently, a new—and perhaps bigger—threat to Trump has emerged in Scotland. Scottish lawmakers are pushing to peer into Trump’s finances using an anti-money-­laundering statute typically employed against kleptocrats, oligarchs, and crime kingpins. Their question: Where did the hundreds of millions Trump poured into his Scottish courses actually come from?

Early promotional materials for Aberdeenshire carried what purported to be the Trump clan’s baronial crest—three lions under an armored fist brandishing a spear and surrounded by a flourish of red and white feathers.

It was, no surprise, a fake. Trump had cribbed the coat of arms from Joseph Edward Davies, whose wife had built Mar-a-Lago and who had legitimately been granted the crest in the 1930s. He had made only one minor change, erasing the Davies family motto of “integritas” (integrity) and replacing it with “Trump.” He had used the doctored crest for years to peddle all sorts of products—from ties to beach towels—and it was plastered across his US properties.

But that didn’t fly in Scotland.

For centuries the country has had an office devoted to making sure people do not claim someone else’s family name. And after it determined Trump was indeed displaying a stolen coat of arms, he was barred from using it. The episode foretold Trump’s subsequent misadventures in Scotland, a country particularly resistant to his brand of flimflam.

In Aberdeenshire, Trump initially won over locals with his plans for a sprawling upscale golf community containing multiple courses ringed by tastefully designed homes. He vowed to bring 6,000 jobs to the area. But fierce opposition formed when Trump revealed his plans to build the first course atopenvironmentally sensitive sand dunes. In late 2007, local planners rejected Trump’s proposal, but after Scotland’s then–First Minister Alex Salmond met with Trump, the Scottish government stepped in to overrule the local authorities. Construction proceeded. But when Salmond refused to block a planned offshore wind farm in view of Trump’s course, Trump went ballistic. He wrote Salmond a series of bizarre letters in which he insisted that if Salmond allowed the wind farm, he would destroy any chance of Scottish independence, and “your economy will become a third world wasteland that global investors will avoid.”

At a hearing in 2012, a member of the Scottish Parliament asked Trump, who appeared in person, for evidence that the turbines would damage Scottish tourism.

“Well, first of all, I am the evidence. I’m more of an expert than the people you’d like me to hire…I am considered a world-class expert in tourism,” Trump declared without missing a beat, as the room broke out in laughter and audience members rolled their eyes.

Trump eventually sued the Scottish government but lost so resoundingly that in 2019 he was ordered to pay its legal fees. The wind farm had been completed the previous year.

Meanwhile, Trump became embroiled in petty disputes with his neighbors in Aberdeenshire. At first, these were the type of NIMBY contretemps that are to be expected when a large development is proposed in a small community. But with Trump, whose business credo is “get even with people,” things quickly escalated.

The Menie Estate had been sold off in parcels over the years, requiring him to purchase it piece by piece. But a group of homeowners whose properties formed small enclaves amid the larger estate defied Trump’s entreaties to sell.

David Milne was one of them. In 1992, he purchased a decommissioned coast guard watch station on the property. It was government-owned, Milne says, and “dead cheap.”

“It was an empty, cold industrial building,” Milne recalls, describing how he wandered through the structure, eventu­ally making his way to a tower with a panoramic view of the North Sea. “I came upstairs and got into what is now my office and looked out at the view and it was just a case of, ‘Wow! Yes, I’m having this!’ And the deal was done. I put down my roots and never moved. There’s literally my blood, sweat, and tears in this building in various walls. Heartaches, heartbreaks, success, pain, and triumph. I’m proud of this building, proud of this house.”

Perched on a hillock overlooking what would become the 18th hole, Milne’s home stood dead in the center of Trump’s vision of a pristine golf course for elite jet-setters. “I want to get rid of that house,” Trump declared during a visit to his course in 2010, adding, “We’re trying to build the greatest course in the world. This house is ugly.”

Milne and his wife rejected Trump’s purchase offer, which Milne describes as laughably low. Trump raised his price slightly and attempted to sweeten the deal by offering Milne, who rarely golfs, a lifetime membership at the club and access to its spa. After the Milnes rebuffed that offer, Trump’s lawyer asked local authorities to take their home—and those of others who refused to sell—by compulsory purchase (the UK version of eminent domain). Milne and several other neighbors fought off the attempt. He contends Trump then tried to harass them out of their properties.

Construction work severed Milne’s water and phone lines. Milne says the Trump Organization also encircled his property with trees to block his view, attempted to construct a giant berm hemming him in, and threatened to knock down his garage for allegedly being built over the property line (it wasn’t). Ultimately, Trump’s company erected a fence around the Milnes’ property—then billed the couple for the work.

Milne tossed the bill and has delighted in telling the story ever since—especially since Trump made his famous campaign pledge in 2016 to “build a great, great wall on our southern border” and make Mexico pay for it. The Milnes now fly a Mexican flag (next to the Saltire, the Scottish flag) outside their home, within view of the Trump clubhouse.

Trump’s heated squabbles with Milne and other neighbors had a sideshow quality—bizarre, ham-handed, and often self-defeating—but there was something stranger still about the amounts of cash he has dumped into Aberdeenshire and Turnberry.

He spent nearly $13 million purchasing the land for the Aberdeenshire course, and as much as $50 million developing the property. All, apparently, in cash. According to Trump, after purchasing Turnberry in 2014 for $60 million from a holding company owned by the government of Dubai, he dished out as much as $200 million rehabbing the venerable property.

Neither has ever turned a profit. Turnberry, considered one of the top Scottish courses, has seen its golf business decline. When it opened in 2012, Aberdeenshire was touted as a technically interesting and highly challenging course, but it has struggled to attract crowds. Milne says that over the last few years he’s found it so sleepy it rarely bothers him.

“To be quite honest, it’s not a major issue to me,” he says. “The car park is very rarely more than half full.”

The size of Trump’s wealth is a source of great debate, but two things are fairly well known—the period between 2006 and 2014 included some of his lowest points, financially speaking, and even in the best of times, the amount he splurged in Scotland would be a ton of cash for him to have on hand, let alone spend so freely. And Trump made these Scottish investments amid a $400 million cash spending spree, documented by the Washington Post, in which he also purchased a golf club in Ireland, five courses in the United States, and several pricy homes.

The New Yorker estimated that Trump would have spent half his available cash on the purchase of Turnberry alone, concluding there wasn’t “enough money coming into Trump’s known business to cover the massive outlay he spent” renovating the property.

And the mystery deepens. Martyn McLaughlin, a Glasgow-based reporter for the Scotsman newspaper, discovered that in 2008 Trump approached a Scottish bank asking for a $63 million loan to buy and renovate a historic hotel near Edinburgh, overlooking the final hole of St. Andrews, the most famous golf course in the world. The terms he proposed were so ludicrously favorable to him that bank executives concluded Trump was asking for a “free loan,” and doing business with the developer was “too risky.” Meanwhile, Trump was touting his “very strong” cash position and his representatives were telling the Scottish public that he had more than $1 billion available to spend in their country. (The Trump Organization did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

This February, a group of Scottish Parliament members began making the case that Scotland should use an investigative tool under UK law called an Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO) to scrutinize Trump’s transactions. It can’t be wielded against just anyone; it’s designed to make inquiries into the finances of “politically exposed persons” suspected of money laundering. It has been invoked several times in London; for example, examining how the wife of a jailed ex–Azerbaijani government official had managed to afford a 16 million-pound shopping spree at Harrods.

Patrick Harvie, a Scottish Parliament member and co-leader of Scotland’s Green Party, has led the campaign for a UWO against Trump. “This is not someone who inspires confidence in sound finances and sound business,” he says. “The fact that there are many allegations floating around that the US authorities have investigated, whether it’s in relation to Russia or his political dealings domestically—you don’t have to sniff the air very long to see there’s something that smells.”

Harvie cited a report by Avaaz, a global nonprofit activist group, that has been key to the campaign. It highlights Trump’s assoc­iation with people scrutinized by US law enforcement for illicit financial transactions, including Paul Manafort, his campaign chair who was convicted of tax and bank fraud, and Michael Cohen, who was sent to prison for campaign finance crimes committed on Trump’s behalf.

“Without more information from Mr. Trump, there is reasonable doubt that his income during the time of Turnberry’s purchase and renovation would have been sufficient to cover all of these expenditures,” the report concludes.

McLaughlin puts it in simpler terms. “The abiding mystery is why Mr. Trump and his companies seem to relish in spending exorbitant amounts of money and losing exorbitant amounts of money here,” he says. “Given all the difficulties the Trump Organization has had, why is it so determined to throw more money at it?”

One theory is that Trump hoped to own a course that hosts a “major”—one of the top-tier professional golf tournaments each year. Turnberry used to regularly host the British Open, but it hasn’t since Trump took over. “He desperately wants a major. That was the big idea,” says sports writer Rick Reilly, who has golfed with Trump and in 2019 published the book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.

Indeed, the New York Times reported this summer that in 2018 Woody Johnson, a Trump donor who was appointed as US ambassador to the United Kingdom, told several colleagues that the president had asked him to make inquiries with the British government about steering the British Open to Turnberry. According to the Times, Johnson did raise the question with the Scottish secretary of state, against the advice of career diplomats; nothing came of it.

Reilly says Trump ruined any chance of getting the British Open with his racist and sexist conduct. “Of all the people in the world that aren’t going to put up with a fool, it’s the Scots,” he says. “They’re just such a no-nonsense people and they see him for what he is: He’s a big blowhard con man who is trying to tell them what they know isn’t true.”

Trump’s alleged entreaty to his UK ambassador is not the first time his administration has been accused of taking action to boost Turnberry’s lackluster business. Last year, Politico reported that Air Force flight crews stopping for overnight layovers in Scotland were being sent to Turnberry’s hotel—a luxury establishment close to an hour away from the airport—even though cheaper lodging was available nearby. The Air Force, which spent nearly $184,000 at Turnberry, denied any wrongdoing.

If Trump’s Scottish ventures seemed ill-fated before, things are about to get much worse. In 2018, the most recent year for which numbers are available, both courses lost more than $15 million combined. And that was a good year. A golf industry expert familiar with Trump’s operations says he expects that 2020 revenues at Turnberry and Aberdeenshire will be down 80 to 90 percent from 2018.

Gordon Dalgleish, president of PerryGolf, which organizes golf tours for well-heeled clients in the British Isles, says the pandemic has brought Irish and Scottish golf tourism to a standstill. At many of the iconic Scottish courses, including Trump’s, “well north of 50 percent” of the patrons are wealthy Americans. “If you sat in the lobby at Turnberry, you’d hear a lot of American accents,” he says.

Not this year. In May, Scottish authorities allowed golf clubs to reopen, but under strict guidelines: Clubhouses were shuttered, caddies can work for golfers from just two households a day, and players are barred from congregating on the course before, during, or after play. But the far bigger impediment is that, as of July, the United Kingdom required international travelers to quarantine for two weeks. “It’s pretty hard to sell a one-week trip until there’s no quarantine,” Dalgleish notes.

Last fall, local authorities rejected Trump’s initial proposal to build a golf community at Turnberry, but in July, McLaughlin revealed that the Trump Organization had quietly drawn up plans for an even more ambitious expansion—one that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, Aberdeenshire officials have finally approved Trump’s plan to begin building a second course along with luxury homes and “five-star hotel cottages.” The cost, according to Trump, is almost $200 million.

Dubbed the Trump Estate, promotional materials show rows of quaint dwellings crowded along elaborately landscaped lanes. Homes range in price from about $370,000 for a two-bedroom cottage to $1.6 million for a five-bedroom mansion.

But with revenues so low, the money needed to complete the project—let alone a major development at Turnberry—may be hard for the Trumps to come by. McLaughlin also says he doesn’t understand how luxury homes in an out-of-the-way region of Scotland, known for blustery North Sea winds and offshore oil, make sense.

“Quite how they’ll have a viable business scheme out of that, I’m not sure,” he says. “Who pays hundreds of thousands of pounds for a family villa in the northeast of Scotland that’s got the corrosive brand of Trump attached to it?”

Reilly agrees. “Buying a place there would be like flying to Italy to go to an Olive Garden,” he says. “It’s insane. Who would do that?”

McLaughlin says that at an open house for prospective buyers last winter, the interested parties seemed mostly foreign. “Which raises the question, Who is investing? Who is giving money to the president’s company? It’s the most explicit opportunity to put money into the Trump Organization in return for property.”

Of course, if Trump’s finances continue to suffer, he may have to offload the courses before he builds a single villa. “He’ll have to. It’s a matter of when,” says the golf industry expert. “He doesn’t have the cash flow.”

David Milne says he hasn’t heard from the Trumps in years. But one early evening 11 years ago, at the height of the planning battle over Aberdeenshire, Milne says he heard a knock at his door. He opened it to find Donald Trump Jr. and then–Trump Organization executive George Sorial. They had visited before, Milne says. “They quite often showed up and tried to discuss something. Usually they were told to go away. None of them have ever been over the doorstep.”

That evening, they weren’t there for a discussion; just to deliver a message—or, as Milne understood it, a threat. “Remember, whatever you say and whatever you do, we usually get what we want,” Milne recalled being told.

“Not this time,” he responded. (This is the article in its entirety.)


And what are we to make of this:





Tomorrow is going to be an interesting day.


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Monday, June 29, 2020

A Danger To The National Security Of The United States



The article starts with this:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

These officials' concerns about the calls, and particularly Trump's deference to Putin, take on new resonance with reports the President may have learned in March that Russia had offered the Taliban bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan -- and yet took no action. CNN's sources said there were calls between Putin and Trump about Trump's desire to end the American military presence in Afghanistan but they mentioned no discussion of the supposed Taliban bounties.

By far the greatest number of Trump's telephone discussions with an individual head of state were with Erdogan, who sometimes phoned the White House at least twice a week and was put through directly to the President on standing orders from Trump, according to the sources. Meanwhile, the President regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America's principal allies, especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was "stupid."

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.

In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders. 

... includes this: 

... One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.

The insidious effect of the conversations comes from Trump's tone, his raging outbursts at allies while fawning over authoritarian strongmen, his ignorance of history and lack of preparation as much as it does from the troubling substance, according to the sources. While in office, then- Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats expressed worry to subordinates that Trump's telephone discussions were undermining the coherent conduct of foreign relations and American objectives around the globe, one of CNN's sources said. And in recent weeks, former chief of staff Kelly has mentioned the damaging impact of the President's calls on US national security to several individuals in private.

Two sources compared many of the President's conversations with foreign leaders to Trump's recent press "briefings" on the coronavirus pandemic: free form, fact-deficient stream-of-consciousness ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall pronouncements based on his intuitions, guesswork, the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media misinformation.

In addition to Merkel and May, the sources said, Trump regularly bullied and disparaged other leaders of the western alliance during his phone conversations -- including French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison -- in the same hostile and aggressive way he discussed the coronavirus with some of America's governors.

.. But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as "near-sadistic" by one of the sources and confirmed by others. "Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her 'stupid,' and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians ... He's toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with."

The calls "are so unusual," confirmed a German official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their contents remained secret. The official described Trump's behavior with Merkel in the calls as "very aggressive" and said that the circle of German officials involved in monitoring Merkel's calls with Trump has shrunk: "It's just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic."

... In his phone exchanges with Putin, the sources reported, the President talked mostly about himself, frequently in over-the-top, self-aggrandizing terms: touting his "unprecedented" success in building the US economy; asserting in derisive language how much smarter and "stronger" he is than "the imbeciles" and "weaklings" who came before him in the presidency (especially Obama); reveling in his experience running the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, and obsequiously courting Putin's admiration and approval. Putin "just outplays" him, said a high-level administration official -- comparing the Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to an occasional player of checkers. While Putin "destabilizes the West," said this source, the President of the United States "sits there and thinks he can build himself up enough as a businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect him." (At times, the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like "two guys in a steam bath," a source added.)

... and ends with this:

The common, overwhelming dynamic that characterizes Trump's conversations with both authoritarian dictators and leaders of the world's greatest democracies is his consistent assertion of himself as the defining subject and subtext of the calls -- almost never the United States and its historic place and leadership in the world, according to sources intimately familiar with the calls.

In numerous calls with the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Australia and Canada -- America's closest allies of the past 75 years, the whole postwar era -- Trump typically established a grievance almost as a default or leitmotif of the conversation, whatever the supposed agenda, according to those sources.

"Everything was always personalized, with everybody doing terrible things to rip us off — which meant ripping 'me' — Trump — off. He couldn't -- or wouldn't -- see or focus on the larger picture," said one US official.

The source cited a conspicuously demonstrable instance in which Trump resisted asking Angela Merkel (at the UK's urging) to publicly hold Russia accountable for the so-called 'Salisbury' radioactive poisonings of a former Russian spy and his daughter, in which Putin had denied any Russian involvement despite voluminous evidence to the contrary. "It took a lot of effort" to get Trump to bring up the subject, said one source. Instead of addressing Russia's responsibility for the poisonings and holding it to international account, Trump made the focus of the call -- in personally demeaning terms -- Germany's and Merkel's supposedly deadbeat approach to allied burden-sharing. Eventually, said the sources, as urged by his NSC staff, Trump at last addressed the matter of the poisonings, almost grudgingly.

"With almost every problem, all it takes [in his phone calls] is someone asking him to do something as President on behalf of the United States and he doesn't see it that way; he goes to being ripped off; he's not interested in cooperative issues or working on them together; instead he's deflecting things or pushing real issues off into a corner," said a US official.

"There was no sense of 'Team America' in the conversations," or of the United States as an historic force with certain democratic principles and leadership of the free world, said the official. "The opposite. It was like the United States had disappeared. It was always 'Just me'."

How scary is it to think that this man has been the president of the United States for almost 3 1/2 years? Click here to read the entire article.

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Saturday, June 27, 2020

This May Become A Big Story - Updated

At 9.30 this morning, the Washington Post posted a story online titled "Russian operation targeted coalition troops in Afghanistan, intelligence finds." This is the story in its entirety:

A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan, including U.S. and British troops, in a striking escalation of the Kremlin’s hostility toward the United States, American intelligence has found.

The Russian operation, first reported by the New York Times, has generated an intense debate within the Trump administration about how best to respond to a troubling new tactic by a nation that most U.S. officials regard as a potential foe but that President Trump has frequently embraced as a friend, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive intelligence matter.

The officials said administration leaders learned of reported bounties in recent months from U.S. intelligence agencies, prompting a series of internal discussions including a large interagency meeting that was held in late March. According to one person familiar with the matter, the responses discussed at that meeting included sending a diplomatic communication to relay disapproval and authorizing new sanctions.

Russian involvement in operations targeting Americans, if confirmed, is likely to lead to outrage on Capitol Hill and questions about why the administration has not responded to it.

Spokesmen for the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the CIA declined to comment.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that the story, “illustrates the low intellectual abilities of propagandists from the American intelligence, who instead of inventing something more reliable have to come up with such nonsense... However, what else can be expected from intelligence, which miserably failed the twenty-year war in Afghanistan”

The Taliban denied any involvement.

“We categorically reject the notion of ever planning or carrying out targeted attacks against U.S. or foreign forces at the behest of foreign intelligence or for the sake of collecting bounty,” said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid in a statement, “and we also reject receiving material support from foreign intelligence because such undertakings are harmful for the sovereign decision-making of any country and movement.”

It was not immediately clear whether the militants approached by Russia as part of the initiative had succeeded in killing Americans or allied forces. News of the murky initiative comes as American diplomats attempt to kindle political talks that could put end to America’s longest war, now in its 19th year.

Earlier this year, the administration struck an initial peace deal with the Taliban. The agreement, which outlined the full withdrawal of the U.S. military within 14 months, was supposed to lead to a prompt start to talks between militant representatives and the Afghan government.

But the Afghan parties have failed to reach agreement on interim steps, and with the coronavirus crisis taking hold in Afghanistan, those talks have yet to materialize. Hanging over the process is Trump’s oft-stated desire to remove U.S. forces from the country, where local forces have been unable to secure an edge over the Taliban despite two decades of foreign funding and advising.

The attempt to stoke violence against Americans, if confirmed, would also represent a significant departure from Moscow’s earlier position toward Islamist militants in Afghanistan. Previously, U.S. officials had cited what they characterized as sporadic, low-level Russian support for the Taliban, including the supply of small arms via Afghanistan’s northern neighbors.

After the Soviet Union’s own punishing insurgent war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Moscow remained largely in the background in the years after U.S. and NATO forces entered the country in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But as America’s anxiousness to depart has fueled greater uncertainty, Russia has appeared to attempt to wield greater influence in recent years.

While Moscow’s motives for alleged bounties were not immediately clear, officials said they might include retaliation for the U.S. military’s 2018 killing of Russian mercenary troops working for Yevgeniy Prigozhin, an oligarch with links to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Syria, or simply, as one official put it, an attempt to “muddy the negotiations on Afghanistan by throwing a stick in that.”

During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which ended in 1989, the U.S. government provided weaponry and funds to Afghan mujahideen rebels fighting against Soviet forces.

The unit that officials identified as responsible for allegedly offering the bounties has also been linked to the poisoning and attempted murder of former Russian military spy Sergei Skripal in Britain in 2018.

While that attack — along with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its role in the war in Syria — has generated strong criticism in Europe and from many of Trump’s most senior advisers, the president himself has frequently appeared to have a chummy relationship with Putin, downplaying Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and other Russian transgressions.

Russia is one of a number of issues on which Trump’s instincts have appeared to differ from those of his senior advisers. The United States has imposed sanctions on Russia over a number of issues, including its invasion of Ukraine, cyberattacks, and election meddling, while the Pentagon has identified Russia as second only to China in terms of its “great power” rivals.

Military officials this month spoke out in unusually harsh terms over what they said was Russia’s decision to provide fourth-generation jet fighters to a rogue general in Libya, adding to a spiraling proxy conflict there.

News of the cloaked operation comes as the Pentagon confirms that it has completed an initial drawdown of American forces to about 8,600 servicemembers from Afghanistan, a first step toward a full withdrawal. Officials have said the full withdrawal remains “conditions-based,” suggesting they will seek to keep a sizable force there if the Taliban does not make a political deal with the Afghanistan government.

While Taliban forces have halted attacks against the United States as part of that deal, the militants have continued to assault Afghan troops, making for what one senior Afghan official described this week as the most deadly conditions in 19 years.  

 Update. The denials have started: 

... and the responses: 
























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Friday, February 14, 2020

An Ignominious End For Roger Stone

Writing at Rolling Stone, Rick Wilson has some fun with words as he ponders Roger Stone's future. Apologies for the NSFW language, I cut-and-pasted exactly as written:

It’s not every day that a degenerate former swinger and serial scumbag who built a career based on a single line of bullshit and self-fellation so constant and vigorous that it is practically a yogic art form stands before the bar of justice, but here we are. Roger Stone is, as he loves to be, in the center of a national political scandal, and with his sentencing approaching in just days, Stone hoped the Trump “Justice” Department would save him from a well-deserved sentence of seven to nine years in prison.

Stone earned the recommended sentence not because he is a Trump ally, but because he threatened witnesses, lied to the court and to the House of Representatives, and got caught. Worst of all, he threatened Judge Amy Berman-Jackson online, defied various gag orders, and engaged in his usual rat-fuckery. He made the mistake of thinking that Judge Berman-Jackson is as gullible as the claque of hangers-on, wanna-be catamites, and scumbag errand boys with whom Stone usually surrounds himself.

The Trump media has been bleating for two days now that the original sentence recommended by the career Justice Department officials that Stone serve his twilight years breaking rocks, stamping out license plates, and working in a prison call center was a massive miscarriage of justice, a horror beyond words and reason, and a grim penalty for a wee, decrepit old dandy barely able to totter to the stand in his own defense.

Horseshit. The sentence Stone faced was appropriate because his actions weren’t simply a criminal — and criminally stupid — defense of the president. They were just one part of a wider assault from the transparently corrupt Trump-Barr kleptocracy on the entire administration of justice in the United States. William Barr, who has taken on the role of Trump’s family attorney, put his greasy thumb on the scale this week, demanding the U.S. attorneys in the case reduce Stone’s recommended sentence.

It led to the withdrawal of all four of the prosecutors, and the resignation of one. Barr’s bull-in-a-china-shop efforts on Stone’s behalf were comically absurd, driven by a Trump tweet, and will no doubt land him in front of congressional committees for a full political rectal exam in the immediate future.

But they were also par for the course in his role as the chief enabler and defender of this president. Barr has been systematically choking out every investigation of the Trump administration since he killed off Bob Mueller, and has no intention of stopping.

Like Trump, Barr is unbound, uncontrolled, and has no fear of congressional power. He doesn’t care about the scummy appearance of his actions; it’s a feature of Trumpism that anyone engaging in any action defending this president will be praised for it on the presidential Twitter feed and on the Presidential News Channel. The shamelessness is a feature, not a bug.

As Trump seeks to settle scores, terrify future witnesses, and generally act out all the fantasies in his authoritarian spank bank, Barr is his chief fluffer. Trump’s fantasy of having another Roy Cohn has come to life, with all of Cohn’s mendacity and amorality, but in a size 54 stout from Men’s Wearhouse.

Stone deserved everything in the first sentencing memo. Every minute. He deserves to be dragged from the courtroom in shackles and issued his itchy, federal-prison poly-cotton orange scrubs. Karmically, he deserves it because he was one of Trump’s lifelong enablers, and because once Trump was elected, Stone trafficked in the most lunatic and corrosive conspiracy theories under the sun. Stone’s gift for sleaze-bag political tactics was always that — tactical. He was great at piling on a wounded victim (see Elliot Spitzer), but it was Trump who kept Stone afloat for decades.

Of course, Stone likely won’t serve his full hitch, because Trump and Barr know that without a pardon Stone will squeal like a rat in a blender, proving that Trump lied to Mueller and about the details of the Trump-Stone-WikiLeaks connections. Stone sure as hell deserves his time in the graybar hotel for reasons of both ordinary and moral justice, and Judge Berman-Jackson has also likely had enough of Stone’s weapons-grade bullshit and may treat the revised DOJ sentencing letter as the political trash it is.

In some ways there’s a terrible and largely unremarked symmetry to the role Barr has played as Trump’s Roy Cohn. In the early days of his career, Stone was a bagman and dogsbody for the infamous Cohn, who served as an early Trump attorney and fixer in New York. Cohn, one of the most repellent and degenerate stains on America’s political landscape, was a perfect role model for both Trump and Stone.

In the late 1990s, I once asked the famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) New York political operator Ray Harding about Stone. Harding was a man who knew where all the bodies — literal and metaphorical — were buried. He looked across his desk from behind a cloud of unfiltered-Camel smoke and said to me, “Roger parlayed one line of bullshit into a career. The only person who buys his bullshit is that moron Trump.”

At least some justice has come for Fort Lauderdale’s most prominent Penguin cosplayer and sleaze-ball boulevardier already. Trump left his former confidant hanging for two years, reducing Stone to penury in a one-bedroom apartment. Even if Trump pardons him, Stone will never work in politics again at any serious level — not that he did anyway.

He’ll never get out from under his legal bills. His speaking circuit appearances at local Republican clubs in Florida often bring in tens of dollars, and it’s gonna take longer than Stone has on this Earth to catch up. His days as a provocateur are over. He may get a hit or two on Infowars or OANN, but he’ll never be in the big green rooms again. His days without having the mark of “felon” — pardoned or not — branding him are over.

For Stone, one of the tragedies is that the world of campaigning has moved on from dumb, dirty tricksters like him; Trump will likely never allow him back into even his outer circle because Stone brings nothing of value to a modern campaign. He will never sit at the high table of the Orange King with his old status. Even a man of Stone’s unlimited chutzpah will never be able to wink and nod his way to convincing any but the most slack-jawed Trump fans he still has the confidence of the president.

The attention he craves will, on its best days, come as a form of pity. Stone’s last whisper of power and influence is gone, and no matter what happens next week, he’s going to bear the lifelong stain of a man who spent time in prison for crimes he gleefully committed.

Long sentence or short, everything Trump touches dies — even his most loyal henchman. (This is the article in its entirety.) 
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Thursday, December 19, 2019

"Trump Should Be Removed From Office"--Christianity Today - Updated

Trump Should Be Removed from Office
photo credit: Drew Angerer/[CT] Staff/Getty Images

Wow. Just wow. Christianity Today, described by the Washington Post as "evangelicalism's flagship magazine," has called for Donald Trump's removal from office, not as "a matter of partisan loyalties but as a matter of loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments." Wow. This is the article in its entirety:

In our founding documents, Billy Graham explains that Christianity Today will help evangelical Christians interpret the news in a manner that reflects their faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our republic. It requires comment.

The typical CT approach is to stay above the fray and allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square, to encourage all to pursue justice according to their convictions and treat their political opposition as charitably as possible. We want CT to be a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and reminds everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being. We take pride in the fact, for instance, that politics does not dominate our homepage.

That said, we do feel it necessary from time to time to make our own opinions on political matters clear—always, as Graham encouraged us, doing so with both conviction and love. We love and pray for our president, as we love and pray for leaders (as well as ordinary citizens) on both sides of the political aisle.

Let’s grant this to the president: The Democrats have had it out for him from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion. This has led many to suspect not only motives but facts in these recent impeachment hearings. And, no, Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment.

But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

Trump’s evangelical supporters have pointed to his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy, among other things, as achievements that justify their support of the president. We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath. The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.

This concern for the character of our national leader is not new in CT. In 1998, we wrote this:

The President's failure to tell the truth—even when cornered—rips at the fabric of the nation. This is not a private affair. For above all, social intercourse is built on a presumption of trust: trust that the milk your grocer sells you is wholesome and pure; trust that the money you put in your bank can be taken out of the bank; trust that your babysitter, firefighters, clergy, and ambulance drivers will all do their best. And while politicians are notorious for breaking campaign promises, while in office they have a fundamental obligation to uphold our trust in them and to live by the law.

And this:

Unsavory dealings and immoral acts by the President and those close to him have rendered this administration morally unable to lead.

Unfortunately, the words that we applied to Mr. Clinton 20 years ago apply almost perfectly to our current president. Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?

We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.

 Note: This editorial has gone viral in a big way, so much so that the Christianity Today website crashed from all the traffic and was offline for a couple of hours.

 Update: The Washington Post spoke with the author of editorial, CT's editor-in-chief, Mark Galli: 

Based in the suburbs of Chicago, Christianity Today aims to be the voice of evangelicals, providing news and commentary through its monthly magazine and website. Many evangelical leaders and high-profile pastors are among the magazine’s 80,000 print subscribers, and its advertisements regularly feature major evangelical institutions. In the hours after the editorial was published, “Christianity Today” was trending on Twitter.

Galli said that under his watch, the magazine has received criticism from some who wanted it to be more outspoken against the president. He said initially he thought criticisms of the president were “too panicky and fearful” and that it took him some time to decide to draw a line in the sand.

“I bend over backwards to be charitable and patient with people, including people who support Trump,” he said. “I probably went too far on that.” (Read more here.)

It turns out Christianity Today also published an editorial about Donald in October, 2016, shortly after the "grab 'em by the pussy" tape came out:

Indeed, there is hardly any public person in America today who has more exemplified the “earthly nature” (“flesh” in the King James and the literal Greek) that Paul urges the Colossians to shed: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry” (3:5). This is an incredibly apt summary of Trump’s life to date. Idolatry, greed, and sexual immorality are intertwined in individual lives and whole societies. Sexuality is designed to be properly ordered within marriage, a relationship marked by covenant faithfulness and profound self-giving and sacrifice. To indulge in sexual immorality is to make oneself and one’s desires an idol. That Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater of this sort, and a singularly unrepentant one, should have been clear to everyone.

And therefore it is completely consistent that Trump is an idolater in many other ways. He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool. (Read more here.) 

 Update #2 on Monday, December 23. Yesterday, Timothy Dalrymple, president and CEO of Christianity Today, published a lengthy follow-up to Thursday's article. These are the ideas that stood out to me: 

While the Trump administration may be well regarded in some countries, in many more the perception of wholesale evangelical support for the administration has made toxic the reputation of the Bride of Christ.

... Jesus said we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. With profound love and respect, we ask our brothers and sisters in Christ to consider whether they have given to Caesar what belongs only to God: their unconditional loyalty.

... The problem is that we as evangelicals are also associated with President Trump’s rampant immorality, greed, and corruption; his divisiveness and race-baiting; his cruelty and hostility to immigrants and refugees; and more. In other words, the problem is the wholeheartedness of the embrace. It is one thing to praise his accomplishments; it is another to excuse and deny his obvious misuses of power.

... Countless men and women we hold in the highest regard voted for President Trump, some wholeheartedly and some reluctantly. Friends we love and respect have also counseled and worked within the Trump administration. We believe they are doing their best to serve wisely in a fallen world.

We nevertheless believe the evangelical alliance with this presidency has done damage to our witness here and abroad. The cost has been too high.

... and this is the article, titled "The Flag in the Whirlwind: An Update from CT's President," in its entirety: 

Reader responses to Mark Galli’s recent editorial have spanned the spectrum. We have received countless notes of encouragement from readers who were profoundly moved. They no longer feel alone. They have hope again. Many have told us of reading the editorial with tears in their eyes, sharing it with children who have wandered from the faith, rejoicing that at last someone was articulating what they felt in their hearts. They felt this was a watershed moment in the history of the American church—or they hoped it would prove to be. Stay strong, they told us, knowing we were about to reap the whirlwind.

On the other hand, we have heard from many readers who felt incensed and insulted. These readers felt the editorial engaged in character assassination, or maligned a broad swath of our fellow evangelicals, or revealed that we prefer the Democrats to a President who has done a lot of good for causes we all care about.

Of course, we appreciate the support and listen humbly to the criticisms. But at the end of the day, we write for a readership of One. God is our Tower. Let the whirlwind come.

President Donald Trump would have you believe we are “far left.” Others have said we are not Bible-believing Christians. Neither is true. Christianity Today is theologically conservative. We are pro-life and pro-family. We are firm supporters of religious liberties and economic opportunity for men and women to exercise their gifts and create value in the world. We believe in the authority of Scripture.

We are also a global ministry. We travel the world and see the breadth and depth of what God is doing through his people all around the planet. It is beautiful, and breathtaking, and immense. The global Body of Christ—and the community of evangelicals—is vastly larger than our domestic political squabbles. But partly on behalf of that global body, we can no longer stay silent.

American evangelicals have always been a loose coalition of tribes. We have fought one another as often as we have fought together. We at Christianity Today believe we need to relearn the art of balancing two things: having a firm opinion and inviting free discussion. We need, in other words, both a flag and a table.

First, then, the flag. Numerous reporters have asked whether the ministry supports what was stated in the editorial. Was Mark Galli speaking on behalf of the institution? CT does not have an editorial board. Editors publish under their own names. Yet Galli has stood in the trenches for men and women of faith for over three decades. He has been an outstanding editor in chief. While he does not speak for everyone in the ministry—our board and our staff hold a range of opinions—he carries the editorial voice of the magazine. We support CT’s editorial independence and believe it’s vital to our mission for the editor in chief to speak out on the issues of the day.

As an institution, Christianity Today has no interest in partisan politics. It does not endorse candidates. We aim to bring biblical wisdom and beautiful storytelling both to the church and from the church to the world. Politics matter, but they do not bring the dead back to life. We are far more committed to the glory of God, the witness of the church, and the life of the world than we care about the fortunes of any party. Political parties come and go, but the witness of the church is the hope of the world, and the integrity of that witness is paramount.

Out of love for Jesus and his church, not for political partisanship or intellectual elitism, this is why we feel compelled to say that the alliance of American evangelicalism with this presidency has wrought enormous damage to Christian witness. It has alienated many of our children and grandchildren. It has harmed African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American brothers and sisters. And it has undercut the efforts of countless missionaries who labor in the far fields of the Lord. While the Trump administration may be well regarded in some countries, in many more the perception of wholesale evangelical support for the administration has made toxic the reputation of the Bride of Christ.

Galli’s editorial focused on the impeachment, but it was clear the issues are deeper and broader. Reasonable people can differ when it comes to the flagrantly partisan impeachment process. But this is not merely about impeachment, or even merely about President Trump. He is not the sickness. He is a symptom of a sickness that began before him, which is the hyper-politicization of the American church. This is a danger for all of us, wherever we fall on the political spectrum. Jesus said we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. With profound love and respect, we ask our brothers and sisters in Christ to consider whether they have given to Caesar what belongs only to God: their unconditional loyalty.

Let me protect against two misunderstandings. The problem is not that we as evangelicals are associated with the Trump administration’s judicial appointments or its advocacy of life, family, and religious liberty. We are happy to celebrate the positive things the administration has accomplished. The problem is that we as evangelicals are also associated with President Trump’s rampant immorality, greed, and corruption; his divisiveness and race-baiting; his cruelty and hostility to immigrants and refugees; and more. In other words, the problem is the wholeheartedness of the embrace. It is one thing to praise his accomplishments; it is another to excuse and deny his obvious misuses of power.

Similarly, this is neither a criticism of the evangelical Trump voter nor an endorsement of the Democrats. The 2016 election confronted evangelical voters with an impossible dilemma: Vote for a pro-choice candidate whose policies would advance so much of what we oppose, or vote for an extravagantly immoral candidate who could well damage the standing of the republic and the witness of the church. Countless men and women we hold in the highest regard voted for President Trump, some wholeheartedly and some reluctantly. Friends we love and respect have also counseled and worked within the Trump administration. We believe they are doing their best to serve wisely in a fallen world.

We nevertheless believe the evangelical alliance with this presidency has done damage to our witness here and abroad. The cost has been too high. American evangelicalism is not a Republican PAC. We are a diverse movement that should collaborate with political parties when prudent but always standing apart, at a prophetic distance, to be what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the conscience of the state.” That is what we believe. This is where we plant our flag. We know we are not alone.

Now, to the table. A table is a place of welcome, a place where bread is broken and friendships are forged. In a political landscape dominated by polarization, hostility, and misunderstanding, we believe it’s critical for Christians to model how to have a firm opinion and host free discussion at the same time. Evangelicals of different stripes cannot continue to shout one another down, bully those who disagree, or exclude one another and refuse to listen.

We hold fast to our view that the wholehearted evangelical embrace of Trump has been enormously costly—but we are committed to irenic conversation with men and women of good faith who believe otherwise. (And since an open letter was published even as we were preparing to publish this statement, let me simply say that I appreciate the thoughts it expresses, and I hope this statement too can be the beginning of a dialogue.)

In the words of Proverbs 27:6, “faithful are the wounds of a friend” (ESV). Deeply aware of our own sinfulness and limitations, we are going to invite supporters and critics alike to produce essays agreeing or disagreeing with our stated views. It is time for evangelicals to have a serious discussion about how our identity as Christians shapes our activity as citizens. We will invite authors who represent a variety of viewpoints in a thoughtful and charitable manner. We will publish those essays in mid-January. We hope we can come together in convicted humility and learn from one another.

Now it is time for Christmas. Christ is still the light that shines upon a people living in darkness. We look forward to resuming the conversation soon.

The flag is planted. The table is set. We invite you to join us at either one.

 I'm still wondering what Mike Pence thinks about all this. So far, his silence is deafening.
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