Donald Trump keeps saying that he has nothing to do with the Russians. Most recently, he made this claim in his White House press conference last week: “I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia.” He said it at a press conference in early January, too.

Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

He also made the denial in one of the debates with Hillary Clinton.

Given that Trump is pretty consistent in how he words these denials, it could be that he’s carefully parsing. After all, if he has business interests in Azerbaijan, which he does, that’s a former Soviet Socialist Republic that is no longer part of the same nation-state as “Russia.”

Whether Trump is being too clever by half or simply lying is something that reporters, the Intelligence Community, Congress, and maybe the Treasury Department need to figure out. What’s clear for now, though, is that Trump has plenty of connections to Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Hopefully, you’ve already seen the New York Times piece from this weekend detailing how Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen took a dossier to Michael Flynn that had been provided to him by a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician named Andrii V. Artemenko and a Russian mob-connected former employee of the Trump Organization named Felix Sater.

The dossier reportedly contained damaging information about the anti-Russian Ukrainian president, Petro O. Poroshenko, that the Trump administration could conceivably use to oust him. It also contained some kind of Russian-Ukrainian “peace plan” that would facilitate the lifting of sanctions on Russia.

What people are focusing on, quite justifiably, is the involvement of this Felix Sater character. I could write a whole, very long piece dedicated to nothing more than how obviously crazy it is for a personal lawyer to Donald Trump to meet with Sater, let alone carry his information personally to Trump’s national security adviser. Hopefully, however, you can find that argument made elsewhere.

I want to focus on two other characters. One is the man who hired Felix Sater despite his record of violence that landed him in prison and his felony conviction for a pump and dump stock scheme he ran in the 1990’s in league with Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano’s brother-in-law.

Tevfik Arif is originally from the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan. During the Soviet Era, he worked for seventeen years in Moscow for the Ministry of Commerce and Trade. He quit that job in 1991 as the USSR was dissolving and caught quite a break. Somehow he was able to parlay his experience (which focused mainly on hotel management) at the Commerce and Trade Ministry into ownership of the Speciality Chemicals Trading Company, “an export-import business trading in rare metals, chrome, and raw materials.” Shortly thereafter, once Kazakhstan gained it’s independence from Russia, he took over ACCP, a chromium plant in Aktobe.

From there, he took his riches and built a hotel in Antalya, Turkey which was completed in 1999. This was obviously more in line with his career experience than handling rare metals. Then, in 2001, he came to America and created the Bayrock Group, a real-estate development company based in Brooklyn.

It was then that he hired Felix Sater and made him a part-owner and partner, and these two then got involved with Donald Trump.

Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, had recently joined Bayrock at the behest of its founder, Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan. Bayrock, which was developing commercial properties in Brooklyn, proposed that Mr. Trump license his name to hotel projects in Florida, Arizona and New York, including Trump SoHo.

If you know anything about the Yeltsin Era of the 1990s or the rise of Vladimir Putin, you know that that the Russian state was sold off to KGB-connected or approved businessmen and intelligence officers who quickly formed into a ruling oligarchy. Mr. Arif’s rise from a hotel management functionary in the Commerce and Trade Ministry into a rare metals trader is highly, highly suspicious and ought to be looked at very carefully.

The second person I want to focus on is Tamir Sapir (nee Temur Sepiashvili), who died in 2014. An Ashkenazi Jew who was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in the former Soviet Union, he emigrated to Israel just prior to the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. From there, he quickly re-emigrated to Kentucky where he worked as a laborer.

There was a war between Arabs and Israeli in 1973, so Temur decided to leave Israel and head to a small town in Kentucky. “I was ready to accept any job, so I ended up caring for elderly women. Every day I took them to a special facility where they entertained themselves by knitting, singing and other things. They were the ones who taught me English. Right next to me lived a rich man who owned several shops. He had a business selling tools and offered me to work for him.” – remembers the billionaire. He worked as a driver, janitor and a loader, while dedicating his free time to studying English and saving up money.

Before long, he relocated to New York City, becoming a cabbie.

In 10 months, his family came to live in New York and Temur Sepiashvili became a cabbie. “I worked day and night, because I wanted to buy out the car. I slept at the airport, waiting for the first flight to arrive. In six months, the taxi became mine. I made 300-400$ per day and had time to go with my family to the park, to the movies, to the restaurant”, – says Sapir.

What happened next was either the work of Russian intelligence or one of the most surprising and unlikely success stories in history. According to the legend, Mr. Sapir and a fellow USSR emigrant named Sam Kislin pooled their savings and bought an electronics store on Broadway in Manhattan. They hoped to attract business from the Russian emigre community, but they had a different kind of luck.

Former President of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze played an important role in his success. “Once USSR’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eduard Shevardnadze, visited my shop. One of his bodyguards, Murad Kazishvili, turned out to be my childhood friend. Back in the day, an organization existed called “Council for American-Soviet Trade”, in which over a hundred large American companies participated, among them “Occidental Petroleum Hammer” and “Pepsi-Cola”, which also had business ties with the USSR. With Murad’s help, I also joined this organization and went to Moscow with Vice-President Bush, who headed the Council,” Tamir says. According to him, during his stay in Moscow, one of his friends advised him to start exporting carbamide to America. This substance is necessary for oil production and during Soviet times it cost 5 times less than in the US. The Carbamide trade gave Tamir his first million and as he says, whet his appetite.

He exported American clothing, footwear and tech to USSR while importing oil and oil products from there, investing profits into real estate in New York. Prices on real estate were low in 1995-1996: for example, a skyscraper that is now estimated to be worth approximately 1.5 billion dollars cost just 17 million back then. Sapir got incredibly lucky; according to his own words, it was nothing less than divine intervention. In 1997, real estate prices grew and property that Sapir bought for miniscule prices was sold for colossal amounts of money. This is how Sapir got his first billion.

So, supposedly this guy went from sleeping in his cab to being a billionaire because he quickly made enough money selling VCR’s and Walkmans to make major investments in Russian carbamide which he then used to buy a skyscraper for 17 million dollars. In the process, he was invited to join the Council for American-Soviet Trade and meet with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.

You won’t find it in his official biography, but I found the following in write-up on Sapir in a local Georgia news outfit that was profiling native Georgians who had emigrated and made a fortune (emphasis mine):

In order for Tamir Sapir’s biography to be complete, recollections of his classmate, Sergo Davlianidze, must be also mentioned. “We managed to be friends and also fight in the 60’s. My classmate from Tbilisi State School #45 was a boxing enthusiast, just like me. Who could imagine that he would become a businessman? He lived in a communal apartment near an Ashkenazi synagogue in Old Tbilisi, where all neighbors had to use the same water closet. Last time I saw Temur was in 1984 in Moscow, when he studied at Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs’ academy. He already had his own business then and offered to provide me with foreign electronics and tech if I wanted to.

The article goes on to laconically state that “It is noteworthy that the fact of [the] émigré billionaire’s study at Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs isn’t featured in any of his biographies and neither does Sapir himself talk about this in his recollections.”

Now, here is where I tie all these individuals together with Donald Trump. They all were business partners on the Trump SoHo project. The project was a collaboration between the Trump Organization, the Bayrock Group (of Arif and Sater), and the (Tamir) Sapir Organization.

The potential Russian intelligence connections of Arif and Sapir should be obvious considering their unlikely rises to great wealth. Sater is already known for his well-established connections to the Russian mafia, and he was also turned back against the Russian mob and probably Russian intelligence, too, by our FBI.

Recently unsealed federal court records show that Mr. Sater helped the government disrupt an organized crime ring on Wall Street and deal with an unexplained national security matter involving his foreign connections.

And:

[Sater] was not the only F.B.I. informant in Bayrock’s offices. Another was Salvatore Lauria, an associate of Mr. Sater, who sometimes showed up to work wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor.

Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.

Things got hairy at Bayrock when one of their lawyers accidentally let it slip to a major investor that Mr. Sater was in fact a part-owner. Forbes did a deep-dive on that story and devoted a lot of money to investigating Sater. I recommend their piece to you if you want to know more. But, basically, Sater’s ownership was supposed to remain obscured because of his felony record. The Trump SoHo project ran into its own problems as they were sued for fraud and had to return over $3 million in deposits. Those records remain sealed as part of the settlement.

I don’t know what else to do with this information than just throw it out there for you. It’s all highly sketchy, but I do agree with Josh Marshall that it provides the likeliest entry point for getting to the bottom of why Donald Trump acts like Vladimir Putin is holding his children hostage. In fact, it was Donald Jr. and Ivanka who were the contact people for Sater and the Bayrock Group throughout the SoHo project, and the fact that the deal went south may be directly related to every confusing thing we’re seeing from the president. After all, you don’t get in business with the mafia and have it go badly and just walk away.

I'm still taking it easy and ignoring the news as best I can. Good thing, too, or I might have to write about this wee problem.

February 19th, 2017

Dear Mr. Medford,

I read about your opinions in an article in the February 18th New York Times Sunday Review. It seemed like you wanted progressives to understand and respect your point of view, which is understandable, but I think the reverse is true, too. We would like you to better understand and respect our value system.

Let’s start with something we have in common. You say that you felt that you had to choose the Republican in the presidential election. There are many who felt that they had to pick the Democrat. Some things are about more than individual personalities, and whatever misgivings some of us may have had about Hillary Clinton, we didn’t feel like voting for a Republican was an option for us. This may have been particularly true when the alternative was Donald Trump, but it would have been convincing for most of us against any Republican nominee.

Moreover, it’s not unlikely that had Clinton won, some of her early moves as president would have made us uncomfortable.

Jeffrey Medford, a small-business owner in South Carolina, voted reluctantly for Donald Trump. As a conservative, he felt the need to choose the Republican. But some things are making him feel uncomfortable — parts of Mr. Trump’s travel ban, for example, and the recurring theme of his apparent affinity for Russia.

We share your discomfort with the travel ban and Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin, but that’s not why so many of us have trouble believing you’re not a bad person for voting for Donald Trump.

“We’re backed into a corner,” said Mr. Medford, 46, whose business teaches people to be filmmakers. “There are at least some things about Trump I find to be defensible. But they are saying: ‘Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump.’ ”

He added: “I didn’t choose a side. They put me on one.”

In choosing to support Trump, you must admit that you made a decision about your priorities. And the question really is how you want to make a moral defense of your priorities.

In a political sense, prior to becoming a candidate, Donald Trump was most famous for questioning whether President Obama was truly born in Hawaii, and whether he’d actually be eligible to be our president even if he weren’t. If Trump really believed what he was saying, he was too mentally unfit to be the president of the United States. And if he was only saying it to gather political support from some of the dumbest and most hateful people in the country, then what Trump was doing was fanning and exploiting racism for his own personal benefit.

That’s not an attractive alternative. Which one do you believe is true?

And since neither answer was enough to overcome your other priorities, what’s your moral defense in this case? What greater good “backed you into a corner” and allowed you to consider a Birther for president?

We’re not even to first base here, and yet we kind of need your response to go any further. Are there things about Hillary Clinton’s character that are even worse or more risky for our nation? It’s hard for us to even imagine what those things might be, but we’re fairly certain that using an insufficiently secure email server doesn’t suffice.

Now, we think you engaged in a little bit of hyperbole when you said that we think you can’t agree with anything Trump says, ever, even a little bit. Just yesterday, I pointed out that I sympathized with his desire to make our European allies meet their NATO obligations. In any case, none of us are saying that you have to agree with us 100% or you’re morally bankrupt.

But we do want to know why you thought it was not disqualifying that Donald Trump was plausibly accused of making unwelcome sexual advances on women, and even boasted about how he could grab their genitals or do anything he wants to them due to his fame and wealth. I know it’s hard to accept a defeat for your political beliefs, especially with things like the balance of the Supreme Court on the line. Believe me, I sympathize with the agony of that kind of decision. But when you say that you’re willing to overlook Trump’s treatment of women because you have higher priorities, then you shouldn’t be shocked when things like this happen:

Late last year, [you] hit it off with a woman in New York [you] met online. [You] spent hours on the phone. [You] made plans…to visit. But when [you] mentioned [you] had voted for Mr. Trump, she said she was embarrassed and didn’t know if she wanted [you] to come. ([You] eventually did, but she lied to her friends about [you] visiting.)

“It invalidated anything that’s good about me, just because of how I voted. Poof, it’s gone.”

Again, you’ve engaged in a touch of hyperbole. It’s not that your vote invalidated anything that’s good about you. This woman would not have been interested in you if you didn’t have positive qualities. But your vote told her something about your priorities that she really didn’t like. It shouldn’t be a stretch to figure out why a woman might feel that way.

And this isn’t the same kind of thing people experienced when, say, they voted for Bob Dole instead of Bill Clinton. It’s true that some women wouldn’t date someone who’s opposed to them having full reproductive rights. Some people might not want to be friends with a person who disagrees with them about environmental issues or the best way to provide health care. But we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Trump were not different in kind from other Republican presidential candidates.

I think we all, as parents, try to teach our children some of the same basic things about how to treat other people. It’s hard to find a single one of those lessons that Donald Trump doesn’t violate on a regular basis. Whether it’s being honest and respectful, or it’s admitting your mistakes, or it’s having some humility, or it’s being good on your word, or it’s how to treat women, or it’s judging people by the content of their character, Trump sets a bad example in every case.

These things are hard to overlook precisely because there are no known and accepted moral defenses for them.

Since you’re a self-described conservative, we don’t doubt that there are things about progressives and the Democratic Party that you find not just unwise but morally incorrect. In our minds, these must be some very powerful things to overcome the deficits in character that are so easily observable in Donald Trump.

Now, these aren’t your words, but the author of this article said that people like yourself are feeling “assaulted by…a kind of moral Bolshevism — the belief that the liberal vision for the country was the only right one,” and that you’re upset with “being publicly shamed” simply for preferring Trump over Clinton.

We don’t doubt that you feel this way, or something close to it. But this isn’t about you agreeing with a liberal vision of the country. No one made you feel shame like this when you voted for (as I assume you did) Bob Dole or John McCain. It’s about you making the decision that it would be okay to have someone like Donald Trump as our president.

What distinguishes the current cultural environment from previous ones is mainly about character and only secondarily about policy. And the policy part (the Muslim ban, for example, or the affinity for Putin) are things that are opposed by many, many Republicans.

So, again, we know it’s hard to make the choice to vote against the party that best represents your value system. We would struggle mightily to make that kind of decision. But there was no shortage of Republicans who told you to do precisely that because they saw, in Trump, someone who was uniquely unsuited to be president due to flaws in his character and questions about his grip on reality. You didn’t listen to us, or to them, and you chose to prioritize other factors more highly than any concerns about Trump.

You are being morally judged for this decision. We believe that you will come to learn that you made a mistake, but what we’re really interested in is making sure you understand where we’re coming from.

We don’t think it is okay that Donald Trump is the president of the United States. We think this should have been obvious when it came time to vote. And we think that it tells us something about the morals of people that they would overlook his Birtherism and his race-baiting and his characteristics that we discourage in our own children and his treatment of women, and still support him because they have other priorities that are more important to them.

Now, if you want to make a moral defense of your decision, we’re all ears. Thank you for listening to our moral defense of our position.

Best regards,

The Judgmental Left

Let’s start with a basic idea that even the crazy drunk guy at the end of the bar can understand. If you have an agreement among a large group of nations that they will share the financial burden of funding a mutual defense organization, then it’s not right for most of those nations not to contribute what they’ve promised. That situation describes NATO, where beside the United States, reportedly only four nations are currently meeting their obligations.

It’s something I’ve complained about it in the past, particularly when Europe was begging President Obama to get involved in Libya. What concerns me isn’t so much the idea of fairness (as I’ll explain) as the desire I have for Europe to develop some more peacekeeping and humanitarian relief capabilities, so that they don’t have to come running to us for the simple reason that they cannot do something themselves. I don’t mind being first among equals, but I also want the ability to say that some foreign policy and military missions are not our problem and shouldn’t be our responsibility.

In this context, I am not reflexively opposed to Trump’s aggression towards NATO if the end result is that our European partners bear their fair share and develop some more capabilities and even a little independence. I think this goal could be accomplished more respectfully and tactfully, and without raising so much unnecessary anxiety about our commitment to mutual defense, but I could live with it if it gets a good result.

One thing that the crazy drunk guy at the end of the bar probably doesn’t understand is what it would mean if these countries actually spent what they’re supposed to spend on defense.

But many European leaders are responding to Trump’s push by agreeing to spend more while also saying that all Western allies — including the United States — must not abandon the basic values that helped create a ­Western security backbone in the years since 1945.

Only four nations apart from the United States meet NATO commitments for defense ­spending. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is among the laggards, and it would need to nearly double its budgetary ­commitments to get there, ­ballooning its military into ­Europe’s most powerful.

If we told people that Trump has his people over in Munich right now demanding that Germany double its defense spending so that they once again are Europe’s most powerful military, that would sound a lot less appealing than saying that they’ll simply start paying what they’ve promised. The veterans of our World Wars are almost all dead now, but for most of the 20th Century, you wouldn’t find any support for a plan that would make Germany the preeminent military on the Continent.

Perhaps that’s nothing more than an old prejudice that dies hard, but it will still make a lot of people nervous, including the Russians who lost 20 million dead to the Germans in the second world war alone.

Another thing the crazy drunk guy at the end of the bar probably won’t understand is that we’ve wanted Europe to be dependent on us, which is part of the reason that we’ve been okay with these countries not meeting their obligations. It keeps them from getting overly militarized and fighting among themselves, and it gives us a lot more influence over their politics.

I’ve grown impatient with this aspect of our relationship, even though I understand the risks of changing it. Those risks should be debated, but there is no debate of that kind taking place in Congress or in the Trump administration.

Now, on the fairness issue, that’s compelling and easy to understand, but I personally don’t care about it. The fairness of the situation should be properly understood as part of the greater debate about roles, capabilities and influence.

What really undermines the fairness issue, though, is taking a cold, hard look at the bottom line. If Europe spending more on defense meant that we could spend less, then the average taxpayer in our country might stand to benefit. But that’s not what Trump is promising us. In his press conference on Thursday, he promised us this:

I’ve ordered a plan to begin building for the massive rebuilding of the United States military. Had great support from the Senate, I’ve had great from Congress, generally.

We’ve pursued this rebuilding in the hopes that we will never have to use this military, and I will tell you that is my — I would be so happy if we never had to use it. But our country will never have had a military like the military we’re about to build and rebuild. We have the greatest people on earth in our military, but they don’t have the right equipment and their equipment is old. I used it; I talked about it at every stop. Depleted, it’s depleted — it won’t be depleted for long. And I think one of the reason I’m standing here instead of other people is that frankly, I talked about we have to have a strong military.

Setting aside how successfully Trump “used” this issue on the campaign trail, on the substance it’s clear that the result of his domestic military buildup combined with his insistence that European countries spend much more on defense is that the West will invest more in war-making capabilities and less on everything else. We won’t save any money in the budget regardless of what Europe does or doesn’t do. If we’re hoping to get a financial boon out of Trump’s tough talk with NATO, that’s a pipe dream.

So, the thing to ask the crazy, drunk guy at the bar is not if he thinks Europe should pay it’s fair share but if he wants to grow the deficit, invest more in guns and less in schools and health, make Germany a military colossus again, and reduce the influence and leadership of America in the bargain.

The truth is, there’s nothing sacred about the status quo and I could support some of these changes. But not the way Trump is doing it. His way is the worst way.

Everyone's been urging me to take some time off, so that was my plan today. The plan got messed up a little due to a family dental emergency, so it turned out to be more like a regular day, only one in which I self-consciously try to avoid the news.

In any case, I'm trying to take a bit of a mental health break. I'm just not very good at it.

Let’s look at some fake news about some fake news:

The Democrats justify their questions [about President Trump’s mental health] by pointing to Trump’s habit of making demonstrably false claims. At a press conference Thursday, he said he’d had the biggest Electoral College win since President Ronald Reagan, for example, when his margin was lower than either of President Obama’s wins.

That’s from The Hill. I’m only going to look at modern history here, so I’ll largely ignore all the elections that occurred before Hawai’i and Alaska joined the union and gave us 538 total Electoral College votes. Ronald Reagan got the largest number of Electoral College votes in history (525) in 1984, which was good for the fifth highest percentage of votes ever. That was an improvement on the 489 votes he received in 1980, which was the ninth highest percentage ever.

Let’s look at the Electoral College tallies of the presidents who came after Reagan.

1988- George H.W. Bush: 426 votes, (22nd place)
1992- Bill Clinton: 370 votes, (30th place)
1996- Bill Clinton: 379 votes, (28th place)
2000- George W. Bush: 271 votes (55th place)
2004- George W. Bush: 286 votes (52nd place)
2008- Barack Obama: 365 votes (32nd place)
2012- Barack Obama: 332 votes (37th place)

Now, Donald Trump received 304 votes, which places him in 46th place. Even if we granted him the 306 votes that he erroneously claims for himself, it wouldn’t change how he compares to the other post-Reagan presidents. He got more Electoral College votes and a greater percentage of Electoral College votes than George W. Bush won in either of his campaigns, but he fell far below Poppy Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

When a reporter (citing Obama’s victories) challenged Trump on his claim that he’d had the biggest Electoral College win since Reagan, Trump initially tried to deflect the criticism by arguing that he meant the biggest Republican win since Reagan, but that wasn’t even close to being true since the biggest Electoral College win since Reagan was enjoyed by Republican George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Given that rebuttal, Trump claimed that someone had given him that information and that he wasn’t responsible if it wasn’t true. Lost in this back and forth, though, was the fact that Bill Clinton had the second and third biggest Electoral College victories since Reagan. It’s true that Clinton won in a race with a strong third party challenger and therefore didn’t get majorities in the popular vote, but that wasn’t the subject under discussion. In any case, Bill Clinton’s 49.2% tally in the three-way 1996 popular vote dwarfs the 45.98% tally Trump received in the largely two-way 2016 election.

The truth is that Trump got the second lowest percentage of the popular vote since Reagan, leading only Clinton’s 43.01% in 1992. And he had the third lowest Electoral College vote (out of a total of eight elections), beating only Dubya’s two elections.

What made Trump’s claim so delusional was that he had absolutely no basis for making it.

The Hill tried to point this out, but they completely failed to demonstrate the degree to which Trump was wrong, making it seem like only Obama had done better in the Electoral College.

It actually matters whether Trump is self-consciously lying or just spinning or is perhaps delusional. To assess that, it’s important to be clear just how far his claims are from anything resembling the truth. It’s also key to look at how he responds when challenged.

As I watched President Trump’s news conference today (transcript here), I discovered that I was becoming more and more sick to my stomach. At a certain point, I had to repress the impulse to actually go loiter around my toilet just in case I actually needed to vomit. And I started to think about why it is that the man makes me physically ill.

It really gets to a core value I have about truthfulness. That can seem trite, and it’s hard to explain. I certainly don’t have the expectation that politicians or anyone else will always tell me the truth. Perhaps I can get closer to the feeling Trump gives me by using an analogy.

If you’ve ever witnessed some one, say a child, make a bad mistake that you know will cause them difficulties and you’ve felt a pang of empathetic regret on their behalf, that’s the closest thing I can find to the nauseous feeling I get when listening to Trump lie.

The difference is that we normally get that feeling when we feel like the person has made an innocent error or that we sense that consequences will be far out of proportion to the actual sin. We may feel like wrapping that person in a protective blanket even if we recognize that they are largely responsible for making the bed they will now lie in.

And if we sense that we’re helpless to shield them from the consequences of their actions, we may get the sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach that I’m trying to describe.

Of course, I don’t have any empathy for Trump. I don’t want to shield or protect him. I would relish it if it suffered the appropriate consequences for his actions.

Yet, that sensation is there nonetheless, like seasickness or the early signs of stomach flu.

Part of it, I think, is a deep psychological desire, or need, to purge what I’m hearing from my reality. I want to get rid of of those words. I want to take away their power to do mischief. I want to decontaminate everything they come into contact with.

Because what he’s saying isn’t just untrue. It’s untethered from anything we can hold on to. It does actual violence to not only objective reality but the very idea that there is an objective reality.

What I realized about myself is that while I may have strong political beliefs and that I am incensed when powerful people attack the weak and vulnerable, what really drives my ideological disposition is a belief in the importance of empiricism. The Republicans keep moving farther and farther away from this value system that they derisively refer to as the “judicious study of discernible reality.”

I could go line by line to explain each and every lie and obfuscation in Trump’s press conference, but something is lost when you look at the trees rather than stepping back and beholding the forest. Trump is planting a veritable tree farm of outright bullshit. That it’s in the service of a malevolent and dangerous set of policies is obviously a massive concern for me, but it’s not what makes me want to retch.

For Trump, things got off to a bad start with the intelligence community right from the start. When he received an intelligence briefing on August 17, 2016, he came out afterwards and declared that he could tell from the “body language” of the briefers that they didn’t like President Obama or agree with his policies. It didn’t sit well with the intelligence community, and they sent messengers out to let this be known. For example, the former Executive Assistant to Director of the CIA, Paul Pillar, said:

“Those selected for this task would have been the most professional of an elite corps of intelligence officers. One of the last things they would do is express either verbally or through body language preferences” how they feel about the current administration in Washington.

Former acting Director of Central Intelligence Michael Morell said that Trump’s remarks demonstrated that he has “got zero understanding of how intelligence works.”

“This is the first time that I can remember a candidate for president doing a readout from an intelligence briefing, and it’s the first time a candidate has politicized their intelligence briefing. Both of those are highly inappropriate and crossed a long standing red line respected by both parties. To me this is just the most recent example that underscores that this guy is unfit to be commander in chief.”

Both Pillar and Morrell have extensive experience in creating intelligence reports and briefing the president. Morrell led the team that created the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) for President George W. Bush. To say that they don’t like or agree with Donald Trump is putting it mildly. And it shouldn’t shock you to see Pillar quoted in David Corn’s new piece on a classified memo he’s seen instructing briefers to keep Trump’s PDB short and free of nuance.

“These issues about the overall length of the book as well as whether there are going to be conflicting interpretations—that unfortunately sounds like…bowing to the reality of a president with a short attention span and little ability to deal with ambiguities,” says Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA official who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and Georgetown University.

These leaks and the comments about these leaks are what are known in the business as “the long knives.”

Trump is literally being carved up before our eyes, which makes it unsurprising that he’s got a plan to fight back.

President Trump plans to assign a New York billionaire to lead a broad review of American intelligence agencies, according to administration officials, an effort that members of the intelligence community fear could curtail their independence and reduce the flow of information that contradicts the president’s worldview.

The possible role for Stephen A. Feinberg, a co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, has met fierce resistance among intelligence officials already on edge because of the criticism the intelligence community has received from Mr. Trump during the campaign and since he became president.

It’s unclear how effective Feinberg can be in cleaning house. At least ostensibly, his mission won’t be to purge the intelligence community of critics, and most changes to the way we do intelligence would require sign off from Congress.

Still, Trump has to do something because things have escalated to a point where now the intelligence community is running to the Wall Street Journal to tell the country that they won’t share intelligence with the president because they don’t trust him.

The two salvos Trump is fielding this morning complement each other in an ironic way. On the one hand, the intelligence community is withholding information from him because he may be a Russian agent, and on the other hand they’re mocking him for wanting a very short PDB that contains no conflicting information. It would seem that denying him information would solve itself. He hardly wants any in the first place.

I’ll be honest. I don’t know quite what to make of the bizarre story that’s bubbling about Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, Andrew Puzder, and his ex-wife Lisa Fierstein. Washington Monthly contributing editor Timothy Noah has an excellent piece on the matter in Politico, and I recommend that you read the whole thing.

Here’s a taste:

The ex-wife of President Donald Trump’s labor secretary nominee told “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that he “vowed revenge” when she made public spousal abuse allegations, according to a 1990 tape reviewed by POLITICO on Tuesday night…

…During the episode, titled “High Class Battered Women,” Lisa Fierstein, Puzder’s ex-wife, said he told her, “’I will see you in the gutter. This will never be over. You will pay for this.” Fierstein also said she called the police on him.

Fierstein divorced Puzder in 1987. Eight months after appearing on “Oprah,” she retracted her allegations of domestic abuse as part of a child custody agreement. She said repeatedly thereafter that the allegations were a tactic to gain leverage in her divorce.

I’m not in any position to know the truth here, but it’s definitely troubling information. And I found it curious that in the process of recommending that Puzder not be confirmed, National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry somehow failed to mention even once that members of the Senate HELP committee overseeing the nomination have been viewing a tape of this old Oprah show.

Lowry manages to praise Puzder for his opposition to raising the minimum wage and overall hostility to organized labor but says that alone isn’t enough to support him because of Puzder’s pro-immigration record.

We have our disagreements with President Trump’s economics, but the emphasis on the interests of lower-income workers who are in competition with immigrant labor is important. Trump should find a labor secretary who agrees with it and can be trusted to try to vigorously effect policies reflecting it. Surely this is a job that some American besides Andy Puzder is willing to do.

Lowry notes that Puzder has a nanny problem, the familiar one where you hire an undocumented worker to clean your house or look after your kids but you don’t pay their payroll taxes. But he never acknowledges that Puzder’s ex-wife once said he “assaulted and battered me by striking me violently about the face, chest, back, shoulders and neck, without provocation or cause,” leaving “bruises and contusions to the chest, back, shoulders and neck” and “two ruptured discs and two bulging discs,” among other injuries.

Lowry doesn’t wonder why Lisa Fierstein agreed to appear on the Oprah program but did so “in disguise, wearing large sunglasses and a wig and using an assumed name, “Ann.””

I’m pretty sure some of the Republicans on the HELP committee are wondering about these things though, because they’ve watched the program and four of them “have expressed reservations about his nomination.”

Needless to say, Puzder can’t afford to lose four GOP votes on the HELP Committee. He can’t even lose one and still get the committee’s recommendation on the full Senate floor. If he loses two, his nomination is sunk.

Of course, these doubting Republicans could pull the stunt where they personally oppose the nomination but still vote for it in committee in order to give Puzder an “up or down” vote. But Puzder can’t afford to lose more than two Republican votes in the full Senate.

Lowry’s non-endorsement probably doesn’t help him, although the National Review isn’t exactly on the upswing in the influence department after having gone all-in against Trump.

It’s just telling to me that Lowry could simply omit any reference to the spousal abuse claims, even if only to dismiss them as old and disavowed news.

It seems like something that ought to be investigated a little deeper. If the truth can be determined, one way or the other, I think it would be helpful and prudent to find it.

On the other hand, we can all be clear that for Lowry the most important thing is not to blur the very valuable message that Trump pits “the interests of lower-income workers” against “immigrant labor.”

On December 29th, 2016, President Obama made a statement on what he planned to do “in response to Russian malicious cyber-activity and harassment.” You can scroll through the press release below to see what he had in mind.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ll make an itemized list of President Obama’s announced reprisals against Russia:

• Sanctions against the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence).
• Sanctions against the FSB (successor to the KGB).
• Sanctions against four individual officers of the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence).
• Sanctions against three companies that provided material support to the GRU’s cyber operations.
• Sanctions against two Russian individuals (Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev and Aleksey Alekseyevich Belan) designated by the Secretary of the Treasury as being responsible for using cyber-enabled means to cause misappropriation of funds and personal identifying information.
• The State Department will shut down two Russian compounds, in Maryland and New York, used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes.
• The State Department is declaring “persona non grata” 35 Russian intelligence operatives.
• The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are releasing declassified technical information on Russian civilian and military intelligence service cyber activity, to help network defenders in the United States and abroad identify, detect, and disrupt Russia’s global campaign of malicious cyber activities.
• Additional unspecified actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized.

Four hours after Obama made this announcement, Donald Trump issued a written response stating that “It’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.”

At the time, he was still refusing to acknowledge that the Intelligence Community was correct in fingering the Russians as the source of cyberattacks on the Democrats. But he reluctantly announced he would at least meet with them to hear their case firsthand: “Nevertheless, in the interest of our country and its great people, I will meet with leaders of the intelligence community next week in order to be updated on the facts of this situation.”

The meeting took place on Friday, January 6th, the same day that the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report on Russia’s cyber-interference with our election. Trump got the classified version, but even it didn’t much impress him.

After the president-elect was briefed Friday by the heads of the NSA, FBI, CIA, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, he offered an oblique statement that neither confirmed nor denied his belief that Russia hacked Democratic targets…

…Until now, the president-elect has remained doggedly skeptical and even willfully ignorant of the evidence tying Russia’s government to the attacks. He’s blamed the intrusions on everyone from China to a 400-pound hacker in New Jersey to the Democratic party itself. Rather than call for investigations into the hacking, he’s said the country needs to “move on.” At times he has even refused to admit any hacks took place. He continued those assertions even after he began receiving classified briefings on the attacks as the Republican presidential candidate, and then after US intelligence agencies stated that the Kremlin was responsible in early October, and even after he was elected and gained full access to presidential briefings from the intelligence community. As late as Friday morning, ahead of his own personal briefing on the full report, he continued to refer to China as the possible source of the attack and called the investigation into Russia a “political witch hunt.”

It wasn’t until Wednesday, January 11th that Trump publicly admitted that Russia had been responsible. And he seemed happy with Russia’s efforts.

“As far as hacking, I think it was Russia,” Trump said. “Hacking’s bad, and it shouldn’t be done. But look at the things that were hacked, look at what was learned from that hacking.”

After Obama’s announcement on December 29th, there was a response from the Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko. Here’s what he tweeted:

President Obama expels 35 🇷🇺 diplomats in Cold War deja vu. As everybody, incl 🇺🇸 people, will be glad to see the last of this hapless Adm. pic.twitter.com/mleqA16H8D

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 29, 2016

So, that’s an indication of how Russian diplomats stationed in the West were feeling at the time. Obama was a lame duck. He was trying to poison relations with Russia and tie Trump’s hands. Things would be fine once the “hapless” Obama administration was gone.

Coincidentally, that’s exactly what Michael Flynn was saying to the Russian ambassador to the United States. Flynn was urging the Russians not to reciprocate by expelling Americans and promising that his incoming administration would review everything that Obama had announced. The possibility of relaxing preexisting sanctions also appears to have been discussed.

Given Trump’s Pravda-like defenses of Russia, this must have seemed quite plausible to Vladimir Putin which is most likely why he followed Flynn’s advice to the letter and announced that Russia would have no response to Obama.

Donald Trump was so pleased with this that he couldn’t help responding enthusiastically to his Slavic friend’s restraint:

Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016

To review, while President Obama was kicking 35 spies out of the country and placing sanctions on the entities responsible for breaking and entering into the Democratic Party’s headquarters, Trump was denying that Russia was responsible and promising Putin that he need not take any of the announced reprisals seriously.

He was pleased as punch with the work Michael Flynn had done on the phone with the Russian ambassador, which couldn’t be clearer from his tweet. Even yesterday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that Trump “had no problem with the fact that [Flynn] acted in accord with what his job was supposed to be doing” and “part of his job” was to talk to “his counterparts.”

Moreover, even after reviewing the transcripts of the calls Flynn had with the Russian ambassador, Spicer insisted that Trump had no problem with the content of the calls and saw absolutely nothing illegal or improper about them.

“The issue isn’t whether or not– what he discussed,” Spicer continued. “There’s been a complete legal review of that and there’s no issue with that. The issue is whether or not he failed to properly inform the vice president or not be honest with him, or not remember it, but that’s the plain and simple issue."

With the dizzying pace that everything seems to be moving, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Trump was acting like a crazy person all throughout this time period. His refusal to give any credence to the briefings provided by the NSA, FBI, CIA, and the Director of National Intelligence wasn’t seen as normal by anyone, and was obviously of grave concern to our intelligence community.

From their perspective, something was deeply amiss, and when they learned that while they were kicking 35 Russian spies out of the country, Trump’s National Security Adviser was spending all day on the phone with the Russian ambassador, it didn’t exactly sit right.

But, to be honest, the intelligence community had already red-flagged Michael Flynn and several other close associates of Trump because they’d noticed constant communication during the campaign between them and known Russian intelligence officers.

I’ve seen some people diminish the importance of Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador on December 29th because it isn’t obviously unreasonable for an incoming administration to have policy differences with the outgoing one. And, after all, Flynn merely asked for the Russians to be patient and not to overreact so that they could begin their relationship on a less acrimonious footing. If he dangled some enticing rewards, perhaps that wasn’t the greatest sin in the world.

It’s easy to fall for that or to rely on a contentious analysis that there wasn’t anything illegal about it. But that ignores the context in which it happened. This wasn’t a difference of opinion about how to react to Russian interference in our election. The Trump team was vehemently denying that there was any proof against Russia at all. And it wasn’t just that Michael Flynn was actively undermining the administration. He was a prime suspect in possible collusion with the Russian hacks. From the intelligence community’s point of view, it was an open question whether Flynn was a Russian agent. And here he was giving comfort to the Russians at the very moment that we were expelling their spies.

Meanwhile, they were contending with a president-elect who refused to believe them and who took Putin’s side at every turn, almost as if he was his defense attorney. When Trump did, at long last, relent and admit Russian culpability on January 11th, he also took perhaps his harshest shot at the intelligence community.

Allowing his hostility and contempt toward the U.S. intelligence community to again burst into public view, Trump also reaffirmed his belief — first expressed in a tweet earlier Wednesday morning — that intelligence officials were behaving as though they were in “Nazi Germany” with what he termed “disgraceful” leaks to the media. The Anti-Defamation League asked Trump to apologize for trivializing the Holocaust.

Seen in this light, it was no accident that the next day Washington Post columnist David Ignatius was the first to publicly disclose the Flynn-Kislyak phone calls that occurred on December 29th. Ignatius has long been close to the intelligence community and he sent a strong message to Trump and his transition team.

Being disregarded and disrespected was bad enough, but to get called Nazis by an outfit they suspected of divided loyalties was too much.

From that point on, Trump and Flynn were on notice. Their little game with Kislyak hadn’t gone unnoticed.

Untangling what happened after that point is something that hopefully Congress or an independent investigator can figure out. For some reason, the Trump team didn’t really get the severity of the threat Ignatius was conveying. They appear to have believed that the intelligence community only had the metadata indicating the calls had taken place and not the actual recordings. Why a former Director of Military Intelligence like Michael Flynn would make such a stupid assumption is hard to discern. Maybe he was just going on hope. But then it’s hard to understand why he would make the calls in the first place, given what he should have known about communications with Russian ambassadors.

I watched yesterday as the initially disorganized Trump administration struggled to erect a coherent defense. They’ve largely succeeded by this morning in framing this as a simple matter of Flynn mischaracterizing his conversations and misleading (in particular) Vice-President Mike Pence about them. Supposedly, no one shared the fact that Flynn’s calls were intercepted until after the inauguration and after the FBI had questioned Flynn about them. No one had a clue until the acting attorney general alerted them that Flynn was lying and that the Russians knew he was lying and could conceivably blackmail him if he didn’t come clean.

Of course, I looked at that blackmail story yesterday and found it wanting. If there was a brief period when Flynn might have been blackmailed, it would have been based on the faulty assumption that the Americans didn’t know everything about the calls that the Russians knew. And, once the DOJ told Trump’s counsel about the intercepts, there was no longer any threat that Flynn could be exposed to Trump or Pence as a liar.

The public, on the other hand, was another matter. And since the Trump administration had been too dense to understand the warning sent through Ignatius on the 12th, the intelligence community delivered the blackmail letter to force their hands.

Astonishingly, even this didn’t cause the administration to come clean, so the next step was to leak to the Washington Post about the existence of this blackmail letter.

There’s a whole narrative available now about how the administration deliberated for weeks about what to do about Flynn, all while keeping Pence in the dark. Maybe parts of it are true or partly true. But the overall effort is a giant tapestry of deception.

At the root of it was that the Trump administration didn’t just disagree about what Obama announced on December 29th. They didn’t even accept the premise or justification for what Obama did. They actively worked behind the scenes to reassure the Russians that it could all be unraveled. And they did this all while under suspicion for colluding with the Russians in the robbery and strategic leaking of Democrats’ electronic communications. They refused to accept the conclusions of our intelligence community and called them Nazis. Trump even went to CIA headquarters in the midst of all this and brazenly disrespected their dead.

What they did or did not tell Mike Pence could not be more of a sideshow. The only truly curious thing is why they felt the need to lie about what Flynn discussed. In every other way, they were completely unembarrassed about their opposition to the idea that Russia had hacked the election or that they should be held accountable for it. Why was this one example such an important exception?

What Flynn actually did was completely consistent with Trump’s position at the time. They say that Trump has no problem with what Flynn said and that it wasn’t a crime. So, what’s the real problem?

Well, I’ll tell you.

The problem is that the intelligence community struck back. They caught Flynn in a lie and they used it to get rid of a guy they suspect of being a Russian mole who was, for twenty-five days, our National Security Adviser.

And, as you can see, the war hasn’t ended with Flynn’s resignation (or firing or whatever). It has just begun, because everything they thought about Flynn, they also think about Trump.

When it comes to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, I have long seen him as an informal member of the Intelligence Community who often acts as their mouthpiece. For example, back in April 2012 I wrote the following about what I could learn about the progress of nuclear negotiations with Iran from reading Ignatius’s column:

I always need to read between the lines of any David Ignatius column to see whose agenda he’s pushing. He usually operates as a tool of our intelligence community, and what he says is less important than the interests he’s advancing. I have to say that I am quite relieved to see that the story line Ignatius is pushing this morning is that the nuclear talks with Iran are well-designed, working well, and likely to succeed in a peaceful and mutually acceptable settlement.

I don’t really care what Ignatius thinks about the talks, but it’s a good sign that his “masters” want to send the message that our government is pleased with the progress so far. It’s not a familiar message. Normally, what we hear is bellicose, alarmist, and apocalyptic.

It’s in this basic context that I go back and read Ignatius’s column (and the update to that column) from January 12th. As is his habit, Ignatius buried the lede in the 10th paragraph where he revealed that “According to a senior U.S. government official, [Michael] Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”

As far as I can tell, this was the first public notice that Michael Flynn had spoken with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on December 29th. But it wasn’t the only message that Ignatius was sending. At the top of his piece, he focused on the ongoing investigation of the “dossier about possible Russia-Trump contacts prepared by a former British intelligence officer” and wrote that “In a case where a foreign intelligence service allegedly ran a covert action against the United States’ political system, aborting the inquiry would be scandalous.”

Yet, despite the Flynn-Kislyak call being buried in the piece, it was immediately noticed. Sean Spicer was asked about it the next day and assured people that he had talked to Flynn and that the call had not involved a discussion of sanctions. As for Ignatius, the Trump folks got back to him and buried him an avalanche of obfuscation.

The Trump transition team did not respond Thursday night to a request for comment. But two team members called with information Friday morning. A first Trump official confirmed that Flynn had spoken with Kislyak by phone, but said the calls were before sanctions were announced and didn’t cover that topic. This official later added that Flynn’s initial call was to express condolences to Kislyak after the terrorist killing of the Russian ambassador to Ankara Dec. 19, and that Flynn made a second call Dec. 28 to express condolences for the shoot-down of a Russian plane carrying a choir to Syria. In that second call, Flynn also discussed plans for a Trump-Putin conversation sometime after the inauguration. In addition, a second Trump official said the Dec. 28 call included an invitation from Kislyak for a Trump administration official to visit Kazakhstan for a conference in late January.

Remember, Ignatius’s reporting was clear: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29.” The initial response from the transition team didn’t even acknowledge a call on the 29th.

Of course, Ignatius didn’t report that the Intelligence Community had a recording of the December 29th call(s), and a transcript, and knew exactly what was discussed. And that could explain why the Trump team lied to him on Friday morning and why Spicer spread lies about it on Friday afternoon and why Vice-President Pence spread lies about it on Sunday morning.

The way that both Spicer and Pence presented their defense of Flynn, it was clear that they had both spoken to him and were relying on his characterizations of the call(s).

At that point, (and it was still five days before the inauguration) it appeared that Flynn had lied to senior members of the transition team and could be exposed by the Russians at any time. That opened him up to potential blackmail, but only so long as his lies remained a secret known only by the Intelligence Community and the Russians.

Now, here is where the story gets very confusing and quite interesting.

It wasn’t until yesterday that the news broke in the Washington Post that the Trump administration had been warned that Flynn was subject to blackmail.

According to the story:

The acting attorney general informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail, current and former U.S. officials said.

There are some clues here. The “acting” attorney general was Sally Q. Yates, and she was only the “acting” attorney general from noon on January 20th, when Trump became president, until January 30th when she was fired for refusing to enforce Trump’s Muslim Ban in court. So, she sent notification that Flynn had lied and could be blackmailed to the Trump administration sometime in the ten days between the 20th and 30th.

That seems a little late for the Trump team to learn about the transcript(s) and it also makes very little sense. After all, the simple act of telling the administration that Flynn had lied and providing them with the evidence would immediately eliminate the possibility of Flynn being blackmailed by the Russians. Why would he do the Russians’ bidding to avoid the administration learning something that the Intelligence Community had already told the administration?

The only way that could work is if both the Russians and Flynn remained ignorant of the fact that the truth had been exposed to Trump and his inner circle.

Nonetheless, that’s the story we’re being told. Ostensibly, the DOJ notified the administration that Flynn had lied and was vulnerable to blackmail and then the Trump administration responded by firing the messenger (for unrelated reasons) and doing absolutely nothing about Flynn.

So, after another two weeks went by with no action, “current and former U.S. officials” went to the Washington Post and leaked about the blackmail angle. Once the news hit, Flynn didn’t last the evening.

But, as I discussed in my last piece, yesterday’s knockout punch was preceded by a bunch of activity coming out of Mike Pence’s office. On Friday the 10th, word leaked out that Pence was angry that Flynn had lied to him and caused him to tell untruths during his January 15th appearance on Face the Nation. And this is still the story the administration is telling as kind of “the last straw.”

WATCH: @MLauer's full interview with @kellyannepolls on departure of #MichaelFlynn https://t.co/PZ1PGtACUY

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) February 14, 2017

As Matt Lauer incredulously noted, it doesn’t make sense that the administration knew for two weeks that Flynn was subject to blackmail but only decided to fire him when Mike Pence belatedly realized that he’d been lied to a month earlier.

It’s very hard to believe that the Trump administration remained ignorant about the transcript(s) prior to getting the DOJ notice in “late January.” But, assuming that is actually true, they knew at least at that point the threat of blackmail was over and that Flynn still had a real problem. In fact, no later than that point, they realized that Spicer and Pence had a problem because they were on the record defending Flynn.

If we read between the lines here, it’s clear that something a little different happened. The DOJ notice wasn’t really about the Russians blackmailing Flynn. It was about the Intelligence Community blackmailing Trump. If they didn’t get rid of Flynn voluntarily, then they’d leak the transcripts and expose them all for lying.

It wasn’t the only message that was fired across the administration’s bow. The CIA denied one of Flynn’s National Security Council appointee’s a security clearance. A senior Defense Intelligence analyst said, “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM [Situation Room],” and “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point.” There were “multiple current and former US law enforcement and intelligence officials” who told CNN that the British dossier was getting corroborated. “Two defense officials” were quoted saying that “the Army has been investigating whether Mr. Flynn received money from the Russian government during a trip he took to Moscow in 2015” in possible violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

It was a barrage aimed at the Trump administration, and it was coming from all quarters: the Army, the DIA, the CIA, the DOJ, the FBI, and the NSA.

Then I noticed that tidbit I mentioned in the last piece about the FBI “examining Mr. Flynn’s phone calls as he came under growing questions about his interactions with Russian officials and his management of the National Security Council.

The FBI was investigating Flynn’s phone calls because of his management of the National Security Council?

Well, he only started managing the National Security Council on January 20th. Mike Pence was getting lied to on the weekend of the 15th. And what does his management in late January have to do with his phone calls in late December? Finally, we already know that they were keyed in on Flynn from at least the 29th of December.

Were the FBI and the DOJ really concerned about impossible blackmail? Or were they concerned that Flynn was a Russian mole and determined to oust him from his position?

Well consider this:

In light of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.

It’s hard to say whether it’s more significant that this has been happening or that it leaked at the particular moment that it leaked. In both cases, though, it shows that the Intelligence Community was absolutely fed up with Flynn’s continued employment as National Security Adviser.

Some questions remain, including what Pence’s role may have been. It could be that he was out of the loop on Flynn’s contacts with the Russians and that he was genuinely deceived by Flynn. He may have worked in coordination with elements in the Intelligence Community to force Flynn out.

Another possibility is that the concern about Flynn lying to Pence became a convenient cover story (a limited hangout). Since Pence was caught in a lie, this was a way to have Flynn fall on his sword and inoculate Pence and the rest of the administration.

But, if this was the case, it wasn’t well thought through because the next question immediately became why the administration left Flynn in place for weeks after learning of his subterfuge, and why he was allowed to resign rather than being fired.

It doesn’t add up because, the way it is being told, the blackmail story doesn’t make any sense.

Of course, the blackmail story could be true in an altered form. If the Intelligence Community developed information we still don’t know about that would subject Flynn to blackmail, then that could indeed have led directly to his demise. It’s just that he couldn’t have been blackmailed over a phone call if everyone already knew the content of that phone call.

A lot of things still aren’t clear, but what I can clearly discern is that the Intelligence Community took down Flynn, and the explanation that he was subject to blackmail over the phone call on the 29th isn’t the real reason he lost his job, even if the revelation that DOJ sent that notification was the nail in his coffin.

If you were a fly on the wall in the White House over the weekend (or on March 22, 1973), you might have heard an exchange that went something like this.

PRESIDENT: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the — let it hang out, so to speak?
McGAHN: Well, it’s, it isn’t really that —
MILLER: It’s a limited hang out.
McGAHN: It’s a limited hang out.
BANNON: It’s a modified limited hang out.
PRESIDENT: Well, it’s only the questions of the thing hanging out publicly or privately.

All I’ve done here is change the names from Dean, Haldeman, and Erlichmann. A limited (modified) hangout is something the intelligence community does when things have gotten out of hand and they can no longer just deny, deny, deny.

In spy jargon, it’s a tactic used when “they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

Nancy has already ably described some of the basics related to the resignation of Michael Flynn, so I won’t replicate her efforts here. It’s important to keep in mind that everything that came to light in the last week was already known or knowable before the inauguration.

The immediate dispute was about a phone call between Flynn and the Russian ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak that took place on December 29th, the same day that President Obama announced new unilateral sanctions against Russia and the expulsion of “35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives” in retaliation for their interference in our presidential election. Russia’s first response was belligerent, as Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov vowed retaliation and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced reciprocal plans to expel American diplomats.

But then something surprising happened. Vladimir Putin announced that there would be no response and that they’d simply wait to deal with Trump. What happened next looks very interesting in retrospect.

Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016

At the time, it was jarring to see President Obama blister Putin on the 29th only to see Trump praise him on the 30th. So, what had Michael Flynn said on the phone call? Did it cause Russia to back off the threats made by Peskov and Lavrov?

Once the intelligence community located the recording and transcribed it, it was clear that Flynn had asked Russia not to retaliate and held out the promise of softer treatment and better relations once he and Trump took office. It didn’t take long for news to get out about the phone call itself, if not immediately the content of the call. By January 13th, Sean Spicer told the press that “I can confirm having spoken to [Flynn] about it is those conversations that happened to occur around the time that the United States took action to expel diplomats had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.” The official story was that the call was about scheduling a post-inaugural call between Putin and Trump.

Two days later, on Sunday the 15th, Mike Pence appeared on Face the Nation and said, “[Flynn and Kislyak] did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”

The Intelligence Community and the Obama administration noticed these lies and realized immediately that if Michael Flynn had indeed misled Spicer and Pence that he had just opened himself up to blackmail.

Sometime in late January, the Justice Department notified the Trump administration that Flynn was subject to blackmail, but nothing appears to have been done about it until that news broke in the Washington Post yesterday.

The blackmail risk envisioned by the Justice Department would have stemmed directly from Mr. Flynn’s attempt to cover his tracks with his bosses. The Russians knew what had been said on the call; thus, if they wanted Mr. Flynn to do something, they could have threatened to expose the lie if he refused.

There’s a juicy tidbit in the New York Times’ story on this: “The F.B.I. had been examining Mr. Flynn’s phone calls as he came under growing questions about his interactions with Russian officials and his management of the National Security Council.” That makes it sound like the Intelligence Community was so unhappy about Flynn’s work at the NSC that they took him out by sending the blackmail notification and then leaking about it to the Post when no action was taken by Trump.

But, of course, long before that happened, Pence learned what was actually on the transcript of the call. He knew that he’d been lied to and that he had gone on national television and repeated those lies. At that point, Pence and the Intelligence Community had a common cause, and they seemed to have worked in tandem, with Pence taking the lead on the 10th and the IC delivering the death blow on the 13th.

An administration official told POLITICO that Pence’s remarks came after a conversation with Flynn and were guided by that conversation — leaving open the possibility that Flynn misled the Vice President just as he repeatedly denied the allegations to the Washington Post before acknowledging the topic may have been discussed.

Privately, Pence aides expressed frustration at their boss being placed in such a position.

We were talking about limited (modified) hangouts, and this could be an example of that. Everyone focuses on Flynn having lied to Pence rather than asking what Pence knew about Flynn’s plans to call the Russian ambassador on the 29th.

More likely, though, Pence wasn’t part of that strategy. Given Trump’s tweet on December 30th, it’s much harder to believe that he was out of the loop. And I believe that protecting that information is the real hangout here.

To see the hangout in action, consider the case of the Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah. He’s supposed to be the watchdog of the administration. He should be issuing subpoenas like hotcakes.

Rep Jason Chaffetz R-UT tells reporters there's no need to further probe Flynn. "It’s taking care of itself"

— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) February 14, 2017

By giving up Flynn as a scalp, the administration hopes to stop all the investigations and questions about their connections to Russia and possible coordination in hacking into the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta’s emails. Their allies in Congress are ready to play ball.

But it’s important to remember that neither the media nor congressional oversight took Flynn down. Flynn was taken down from within. He was taken down by the Intelligence Community with Pence as a seeming co-conspirator. All the fatal reporting came from those two sources.

So, it appears that this won’t be the end unless those two parties are satisfied that taking Flynn down solved the problem.

But the problem isn’t and never was Flynn. The problem is the president.

Thank god Michael Flynn resigned (or got fired) or whatever. I hope Hillary shows up in his driveway and chants “Lock him up!”

I especially enjoyed the part about him violating the Emoluments clause because only political geeks will get the irony.

Of course, Flynn is not the end. He’s blood in the water and the sharks are beginning to swarm in search of fresh meat.

If you were wondering if Pence and the Intelligence Community could team up to take down a pillar of the government, now you have your answer.

On the one hand, who cares what Joe Scarborough has to say? On the other hand, he was so alarmed and appalled by Trump aide Stephen Miller’s performance on the Sunday morning talk shows that he’s talking about impeachment.

Scarborough said the White House is “embarrassing themselves by putting this guy up,” describing Miller’s “performance” as “horrendous” and “an embarrassment.” “That is the talk of a dictator, not somebody who is president of the United States,” Scarborough said. If Trump’s administration were to actually act based on Miller’s suggestions, “we could have impeachment proceedings within the next six months,” Scarborough warned.

Meanwhile, Univision has tracked down some of Miller’s childhood friends, and the stories are a little unsettling. For example:

Stephen Miller and Jason Islas grew up in sunny southern California in the late 1990s, united by their passion for Star Trek. But Miller stopped talking to his friend as they prepared to jump from Lincoln Middle School to Santa Monica High School.

Miller only returned Islas’ phone calls at the end of the summer, to coldly explain the reason for his estrangement. “I can’t be your friend any more because you are Latino,” Islas remembers him saying.

That’s cold. And it only got worse.

Univision Noticias spoke with several classmates who said Miller had few friends, none of them non-white. They said he used to make fun of the children of Latino and Asian immigrants who did not speak English well.

Early on, Miller began to write opinion columns in conservative blogs, the local press and the high school’s own newspaper, The Samohi. He also contributed at times to the national radio show of Larry Elder, a conservative African American, and once invited him to speak at the school.

Displaying his hostility toward minorities, Miller complained to school administrators about announcements in Spanish and festivals that celebrated diversity.

In his third year at the school, the 16-year-old Miller wrote a letter to The Lookout, a local publication, about his negative impression of Hispanic students and the use of Spanish in the United States.

“When I entered Santa Monica High School in ninth grade, I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills. There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school,” Miller wrote.

“Even so, pursuant to district policy, all announcements are written in both Spanish and English. By providing a crutch now, we are preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own,” he added. “As politically correct as this may be, it demeans the immigrant population as incompetent, and makes a mockery of the American ideal of personal accomplishment.”

In that article, Miller also complained about his school’s celebration of Cinco de Mayo, the existence of a gay club and a visit by a Muslim leader.

I guess it’s not surprising that Miller wound up working for Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama.

Star Trek is notable for its vision of a future in which people from different countries and racial backgrounds work together harmoniously. It’s a shame that Miller couldn’t embrace that vision or continue his friendship with Jason Islas.

Now he’s the right-hand of the president of the United States and he’s promising us that their “opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Is it a surprise that the way Miller and Trump want to protect our country is to keep us safe from Muslims and Latinos?