While serving as the under secretary of state for political affairs in the Obama administration, Wendy Sherman was the lead negotiator for the Iran nuclear agreement. In the New York Times today, she lays out why the appointment of John Bolton as President Trump’s national security advisor is a likely disaster of massive proportions, but she frankly doesn’t go far enough in asking us to imagine the consequences. In most ways, she offers a comprehensive account of the predictable fallout from a unilateral abrogating of the nuclear deal by the United States. We, rather than Iran, would find ourselves isolated on the world stage. It will put great strain on the transatlantic partnership and erstwhile allies in Asia will move away from us and into the orbit of Moscow and Beijing. Iranian hardliners will be empowered and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will grow more aggressive in the region, causing increased security problems for our allies there, including Israel. And Iran will most likely begin enriching uranium again as fast as they can, while North Korean will become more disinclined than ever to make a deal on their own nuclear program.
But Sherman soft sells the likelihood of war. She mentions it but she doesn’t explore it.
The destruction of the nuclear deal will also increase the Revolutionary Guards’ malign activities in the Middle East, making the challenge to Israel’s security and to America’s other allies even more difficult. These activities, in turn, will increase American calls for military action against Iran as the only viable option, since no Iranian will be able to enter new negotiations with the United States any time soon.
The march to military conflict will be hard to stop, especially with Mr. Bolton leading the National Security Council.
The single most important factor here is that John Bolton wants regime change in Teheran and Pyongyang, and ripping up the Iranian agreement is his way of making this happen. When Sherman diagnoses what will follow the abrogation of the agreement, she is likely to be correct. When she states that “the march to military conflict will be hard to stop,” she is also correct. But when she spells out the myriad ways that things will begin to go awry, she doesn’t delve into the fact that these misfortunes will be the crucial factors that create a casus belli for war.
When it comes to making war in Asia, the country is exhausted. Bolton knows this. Trump knew it when he was a candidate for the Republican nomination and the presidency. There can be no frontal argument for war. If there are to be wars, first there must be crises and calamities that stir the American public out of their current mood of cynicism and restraint. Given a choice, the American people will demand diplomacy proceed bombings and invasions, so all avenues of diplomacy must be cut off. And conditions must worsen considerably, including our perception of our own vulnerability, before people are frightened enough to once again support the use of extreme violence.
If the Iranians can be provoked into resuming nuclear program activities that are currently in mothballs and to take provocative steps in the asymmetrical war in the Middle East, and if North Korea can likewise be wrong-footed into making menacing moves, then the public will begin to support military action. If all diplomatic alternatives are cut off, America may be conditioned to support another round of mass killing. The more isolated we are, the more dire our condition will appear.
This is how “the march to military conflict” becomes “hard to stop.”
As national security advisor, Bolton will be positioned to orchestrate this even against the wishes of the president, the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence community. If Mike Pompeo is confirmed as Secretary of State, he may even have an ally in the State Department making the failure of diplomacy that much easier to sell to the public.
For Bolton, there can be no other point to taking this position, whether the president realizes it or not. And Bolton is a seasoned bureaucratic infighter in the mold of Dick Cheney who will quickly purge the national security council of anyone who too forcefully resists his war plans.
On Friday, I wrote that we’ve reached the most dangerous moment for humanity since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I meant it. Wendy Sherman wrote a good cautionary piece, but it wasn’t as alarmist as it should have been.
CNN commentator and former Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Rick Santorum on Sunday suggested students protesting for gun control legislation would be better served by taking CPR classes and preparing for active shooter scenarios.
“How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that,” Santorum said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis, starting Holy Week services leading to Easter, urged young people on Sunday to keep shouting and not allow the older generations to silence their voices or anesthetize their idealism…
…Drawing on biblical parallels, Francis urged the young people in the crowd not to let themselves be manipulated.
“The temptation to silence young people has always existed,” Francis said in the homily of a Mass.
“There are many ways to silence young people and make them invisible. Many ways to anesthetize them, to make them keep quiet, ask nothing, question nothing. There are many ways to sedate them, to keep them from getting involved, to make their dreams flat and dreary, petty and plaintive,” he said.
“Dear young people, you have it in you to shout,” he told young people, urging them to be like the people who welcomed Jesus with palms rather than those who shouted for his crucifixion only days later.
“It is up to you not to keep quiet. Even if others keep quiet, if we older people and leaders, some corrupt, keep quiet, if the whole world keeps quiet and loses its joy, I ask you: Will you cry out?”
I don't like attorneys who do free lawyering for guilty people, and that's what Jonathan Turley is engaged in here. And I am being generous, because Turley is doing more than offering free public relations for Michael Flynn. He's using his legal mind and credibility to inject poison into the mind of the public.
I am not going to assume that Andrew McCabe is telling an unvarnished version of the truth when he says that he did not intentionally mislead federal investigators who were looking into his role in authorizing a briefing for a reporter during the last days of the campaign. He claims that when he realized that some of his answers "were not fully accurate or may have been misunderstood" that he "took the initiative to correct them." He blames any inaccuracies on his having been "confused and distracted" at the time he was questioned. He takes full responsibility for his errors and insists it was not a "lack of candor" that led to the misunderstanding. I don't really know what any of that means, and I won't understand it until I see the Inspector General's report. What I feel confident in saying now, however, is that what McCabe did was not equivalent to what Flynn did.
Turley suggests that one of two things should happen. Either McCabe should be charged with lying to investigators under the same 18 U.S.C. 1001 statute used to charge Michael Flynn or the charges against Flynn should be dropped.
I have admittedly been a longtime critic of the use of 18 U.S.C. 1001 and how it has been used by prosecutors to indict for any statement deemed misleading or false. However, the greatest danger is posed not in the broad scope of this law but its arbitrary enforcement. Two officials are accused of misleading statements in interviews. One is bled financially to the point that he must sell his house and then forced into a criminal plea. The other gets a delay in his pension. Both were very very busy people, but only one is looking at prison.
One part of this is another iteration of something I've seen conservative lawyers do repeatedly in these types of cases, including the Scooter Libby prosecution. They suggest that there is something wrong when a prosecutor uses one statute instead of another or ignores the Justice Department sentencing guidelines when offering a plea deal or decides to charge something other than the underlying crime that led to the investigation in the first place. This is all obfuscation.
Turley is really explicit when he throws this sand in our eyes.
Once again, it is not a sufficient argument to note that Flynn was facing other charges. Prosecutors are under a sworn duty to apply laws faithfully and fairly. They are not allowed to simply charge any crime that is convenient. They must be able to attest to applying the criminal code in a consistent fashion. We do not know how strong the other alleged crimes were against Flynn. We have one crime that the prosecutors maintained was established on the facts in the indictment. Those facts are strikingly similar on that crime to McCabe.
Flynn was charged under the 18 U.S.C. 1001 statute because he had to be held accountable for something. Of the plethora of options available to Mueller, it was the most suitable statute because it carried the appropriate range of punishments considering that Flynn was offering to plead guilty and cooperate with the investigation of the Trump campaign.
I wrote about this almost eleven years ago when I cited prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's explanation for why he didn't charge Scooter Libby or anyone else for the crime of outing Valerie Plame Wilson.
FITZGERALD: When you do a criminal case, if you find a violation, it doesn't really, in the end, matter what statute you use if you vindicate the interest. If Mr. Libby is proven to have done what we've alleged -- convicting him of obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements -- very serious felonies -- will vindicate the interest of the public in making sure he's held accountable.
It's not as if you say, "Well, this person was convicted but under the wrong statute."
Except, for people like Turley, that's exactly what this is like. Anything else is an unequal application of the law and an injustice.
Flynn agreed to cop a plea and cooperate in return for having decades of potential prison time knocked off of his charges. That he was still charged was a way of vindicating "the interest of the public in making sure he's held accountable" for his actions, but in the end it was the end result of a protracted negotiation. You don't look at that and say he was charged with the wrong statute.
For all of these reasons, you also can't compare the situation to the one McCabe finds himself in. He was fired in humiliating fashion which is one way of vindicating the public's interest in holding him accountable. Suggesting that he's getting off easy is dishonorable absent some evidence to support it, and Turley has no more information than the rest of us do, so he's in no position to say if McCabe ought to be charged with a crime.
In the worst case scenario, McCabe deliberately lied to investigators about his role in doing something completely legal. Turley insists this is the worst case scenario for Flynn, too, which is ludicrous on its face. Even on the narrow question of Flynn's conversations and meetings with Russian officials, the suspicion is that he was compromised by the Russians and subject to blackmail. He was being investigated for offering the Russians sanctions relief and other benefits in return for services rendered. Whether he was doing this for himself or on the president's behalf or some combination of both, it would be the most serious of crimes and not at all akin to what McCabe may have been trying to hide. McCabe was within his authority as deputy director of the FBI to sign off on a briefing for a reporter. There's no allegation this briefing was done to cover up a crime. There is no underlying crime. There's nothing other than the misleading statements themselves that needs to be vindicated.
I used to have some respect for Turley, but his willingness to use this kind of rhetoric is totally irresponsible and it's just helping to tear this country apart as the two political sides increasingly cannot agree on even a basic set of facts. Turley provides the right with a high-minded sounding authoritative legal argument to believe that the laws have been unequally applied and that Flynn has been railroaded. And it's the worst kind of bullshit.
Obviously, I am not in an optimistic mood today, but there are still at least theoretical hopes for the future, if there is a future. For example, there are the young people.
Women are more Democratic than men, and younger voters are more Democratic than older ones. The former has been true for decades, and the latter is a trend that’s at least 10 or 15 years old. But a new Pew survey using a huge sample to allow for insight into demographic details shows that the intersection of these two trends is staggeringly large.
Among millennials, which Pew identifies as people born between 1981 and 1996, men lean toward Democrats by 8 percentage points — far and away a bigger tilt toward Democrats than older cohorts of men. But millennial women favor Democrats by a staggeringly large 70-23 margin.
Fewer than one in four women born after 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, prefer the Republicans to the Democrats. And even the men show a significant preference for the Democrats. Now, it’s often said with some justification that people grow more conservative with age. Simple tax aversion would tend to move people in that direction. Studies that show fear is a common component in conservative views probably explain the rest of the drift. People in their teens and twenties often feel invulnerable, especially when compared to people suffering the ravages of middle and old age.
But, on the other hand, there are studies that show that most people never abandon the political views of their youth, especially if we’re not talking about political views they’ve simply inherited from their parents. There will no doubt be plenty of churn in how individual millennials view the world, but it looks locked in now that this will be a generation that strongly rejects conservative views on a host of issues.
Eventually I think we’ll get to some inflection point, much like we did on gay marriage. The Republican Party is a vehicle that can carry any kind of passengers. For a long time now, it has been kicking moderates out of the doors and taking on more conservative riders, but eventually they’ll stop this practice and reverse it. Either that, or they’ll grow weaker and weaker until they resemble the GOP of the early 1960s.
Just as the GOP made a comeback after Barry Goldwater, largely by sticking with his conservatism and adding a large dose of law and order segregationist racism, the GOP will make a comeback from their next nadir. But I don’t think it will be as a conservative party.
But if any of this is going to happen, we have to survive to get there.
There were two basic responses I noticed on the left last night to the announcement that John Bolton will be taking over for H.R. McMaster as the president’s National Security Adviser. One was that we are all going to die, and the other was rage at anyone who voted for Trump or whom ever suggested that Hillary Clinton was the greater threat to world peace. For anyone familiar with John Bolton’s record of rabid and irresponsible warmongering, the former response is largely self-explanatory. As to the latter complaint, it comes down to people having credited Trump with sincerity when he consistently attacked the Bush administration for launching the war in Iraq.
All former Bush administration officials should have zero standing on Syria. Iraq was a waste of blood & treasure.
It was widely reported during the campaign that the only recording of Trump having an opinion about the Iraq War before it commenced was a statement of tepid, somewhat reluctant support rather than opposition. That places him close to the mainstream of elite public opinion at the time, but he was lying when he said he was against the war from the beginning.
There is also a strain of thinking on the left that is permanently wary of confrontation with Russia as a result of battles that took place long ago during the Cold War. At its most noble, this is a simple concern that the likeliest way to end life as we know it is for the United States and Russia to go to war and start launching nuclear weapons at each other. Therefore, anyone recommending reconciliation and negotiation with Russia is a more prudent choice than someone advocating we take a hardline stance against their foreign policies.
Russia was keen to exploit this preexisting sentiment on the left, so they amplified the concern that Hillary Clinton was a threat to world peace because of her hawkishness on Syria (Trump said the Russians should handle Syria) and her position on the annexation of Crimea (Trump said the Crimeans were happier with Russian overlords). This argument had a lot of resonance and I suppose it had a degree of substance to it, too. But it no longer makes any sense whatsoever now that Trump has hired John Bolton to advise him on foreign policy. Clinton might have inadvertently caused a shooting war with Russia through some miscalculation, but Bolton is guaranteed to make miscalculations of this sort whenever he opens his mouth.
The shooting wars are much more likely to start with North Korea and Iran than with Russia, but that’s no guarantee that nuclear weapons won’t be used by our forces or by our adversaries. Bolton will move to tear up the nuclear agreement with Iran despite the fact that it was co-signed by all the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. Having made us a pariah on the international stage, he will then try to mobilize the nation for preemptive strikes on Iran that will likely require a nuclear component to be effective in destroying their nuclear program. We will still find ourselves in an actual war with Iran, either directly or by asymmetrical means. A ground war to effect their capitulation will be required, and it’s not likely to go as well as the war in Iraq for a whole host of reasons, including our pariah status.
On North Korea, he is likely to argue that we need to attack now while their missiles are still relatively untested, and to disregard any concerns that much of South Korea will be destroyed in the conflict or that North Korea may still find a way to detonate a nuclear weapon on our allies, our foreign bases, or even on the mainland of the United States. Russia and China will not stand still for such provocations, let alone the unimaginable toll in human lives this will cost.
It’s being reported that John Bolton promised the president that he would not start any wars if he was given responsibility for our foreign policy, but John Bolton wouldn’t want the position if he couldn’t steer the nation toward war with Iran and North Korea. Our only hope is that Trump hired him for his lively performances on Fox News but won’t ultimately follow his advice. But I think that hope is ill-founded because it misunderstands the role of the National Security Advisor as well as the power Bolton will have in the vacuum created by Trump’s lack of engagement and understanding of world affairs.
This is the most dangerous moment for humanity since the Cuban Missile Crisis. There’s nothing Congress or the public can do directly to prevent Bolton from taking his post, but all means for resisting his influence must be employed.
If you’d asked me yesterday what the easiest way to kill a hundred million people might be, I wouldn’t have hesitated before saying, “Make John Bolton the national security advisor.”
John Dowd quit as the president’s lead attorney, and that’s another blow to Trump’s credibility.
Trump has repeatedly attacked reports of disarray within his legal team as inaccurate. “The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out,” he said in a March 11 tweet. “I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow.”
The president hired [former U.S. attorney Joe] diGenova eight days later, and Dowd is now off the team.
A similar thing happened with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who was assured he was safe in his position right up until he was fired in a tweet.
People should have figured out long ago that the president’s word is worth nothing, but unfortunately a lot of people still believe him when he accuses of the media of reporting “fake news” that shortly thereafter proves to be completely accurate.
I don’t think Dowd was doing a good job as the president’s attorney so I don’t necessarily think this is a bad development for Trump, but it probably does signal that things are about to take a turn. And I very much doubt that this will be a turn for the better.
If I had to guess, Trump has insisted on his innocence to his attorneys which led them to develop a strategy of cooperation with the investigation on the theory that he’d rather be exonerated sooner rather than later and not risk obstructing justice when it’s unnecessary. The problem is that he is not innocent and Mueller’s probe did not wrap up by Thanksgiving or Christmas or the New Year as Trump promised it would.
Instead, the investigation is getting into the business activities of both the Trump and Kushner families and is threatening to put the lot of them in jail. Even poor Donald Junior and Ivanka are up to their necks in trouble at this point, and I think the president is realizing that the legal strategy he’s been using is a disaster.
His only chance now is to find a way to stop it, but that won’t be easy to do and it won’t come without creating a massive convulsion across the land.
So, I predict things are about to get uglier than we have ever seen them, and I’m including Watergate in my comparison.
The House of Representatives appears to have come to a deal to keep the government operating until September, and also to avoid a government shutdown that still could start this weekend. But if Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are pleased with the compromise, many others are not. Conservative members don’t plan to vote for it, continuing their trend of refusing to act like a governing party and forcing their leadership to rely on Democratic votes just to keep the government’s doors open. Many liberals are displeased with the result, too, but that’s to be expected on any spending bill that is written by Republicans and approved by a Republican White House.
It’s relatively easy to craft these kinds of deals in the House so long as a significant number of Democrats are willing to go along because all that’s needed is a majority and it doesn’t matter how the Speaker gets to one. But, in the Senate, they need unanimous consent from all one hundred members to move to a vote. Even one senator objecting can cause a delay that forces Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to file for cloture and seek sixty votes to overcome a filibuster.
McConnell can probably get sixty votes, but not necessarily in time to avoid at least a brief shutdown of the government. And he may have to make further concessions to get the Democratic votes he will need. Either way, it looks like unanimous consent is highly unlikely.
[Senator Rand] Paul [of Kentucky] said Wednesday that he had not decided how he would handle the new bill, telling reporters that he would wait to read it first. But he made clear that he was unlikely to be pleased by its contents.
“I think it is safe to say that there are many voices in the Senate, including many Republicans, who are not real happy about having a thousand-page bill crammed down our throat at the last minute without time to read it,” he said. “It’s a really terrible, rotten, no-good way to run your government.”
On Thursday morning, Paul tweeted that it had taken more than two hours to print out the bill so he could review it.
Where I come from, 1.6 billion dollars is real money but it’s not really that large of a number in the context of the federal budget. That’s how much money the House Democrats have agree to give the president for his stupid wall.
The bill includes $1.6 billion in funding for construction of a border wall, but that number is far short of the $25 billion in long-term funding that the administration sought. Democrats also won tight restrictions on how that money can be spent.
There’s some significant movement on guns.
Democrats agreed to add bipartisan legislation to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for gun buyers, while Republicans agreed to add language making clear that federal funds can be spent on research into gun violence — clarifying a long-standing restriction that has been interpreted as preventing such research.
I actually think this is a major win. It may not yield much during the Trump administration, but future administrations will be able to do some actual science on the gun problem which I think is badly needed to inform our policy makers and the public.
On taxes, the Republicans were desperate enough to get a fix on a mistake they made in their hastily drafted tax bill that they agreed to give the Democrats Democrats a boost in the low-income housing tax credit in exchange.
Finally, on Russia, the results were mixed by generally positive:
While a Democratic push to win provisions protecting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not succeed, the bill does include hundreds of millions of dollars to combat potential interference from Russia or others in the November midterm elections. The federal Election Assistance Commission will receive $380 million to dole out to states to improve their election-related cybersecurity. And the FBI is set to receive $300 million in counterintelligence funding to combat Russian hacking.
So, first we’ll be interested to see the roll call vote in the House, especially considering how many vulnerable Republicans that are serving there. And then we’ll be looking to see if there is a filibuster in the Senate and, if so, how quickly it can be overcome. The Senate Democrats would extract further concessions, although I don’t think they want a a government shutdown that can be pinned on them, so they can’t push so hard that they blow up the deal in the House. Still, they could probably get a few nibbles at the apple if they are so inclined.
Here are two pieces of news from Tennessee. Check them out and tell me if you think they are in any way contradictory.
“The president is, as you know — you’ve seen his numbers among the Republican base — it’s very strong. It’s more than strong, it’s tribal in nature. People who tell me, who are out on trail, say, look, people don’t ask about issues anymore. They don’t care about issues. They want to know if you’re with Trump or not.”
A new Public Policy Polling survey in Tennessee finds former Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) with a slight edge over Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) in the U.S. Senate race, 46% to 41%, with 13% still undecided.
Maybe these two things are consistent, but if they are then is surely means that Trump’s popularity (or base) isn’t easily transferable to Republican candidates running for office this fall. Rep. Marsha Blackburn is a fairly Trumpy candidate, but she’s trailing the Democrat. And, while Phil Bredesen was a popular two-term governor who served from 2003 to 2011, he’s been out of office for a while and his state has continued to move far to the right. I can remember when people were surprised that Al Gore couldn’t win his home state in 2000, and also when Bill Clinton won in twice, in 1992 and 1996. In 2016, Trump carried the state 61 percent to 35 percent. If what the Republicans in Tennessee really want is someone to serve in the Senate who will do the president’s bidding, then Blackburn should be well ahead in this poll.
Now, it could be that Bredensen is getting a boost out of his better name recognition, but being well known as a Democrat shouldn’t really be that helpful.
We don’t have that many data points to examine, but the Democrats have been winning some races recently in strong Trump territory, and it could be that Bob Corker is not getting the full picture of what’s going on in the country or in his home state. It wouldn’t be that surprising. In the era of Trump, it seems like it’s easy to misinterpret data and draw bad conclusions from worn out assumptions. It happened to Hillary Clinton when she didn’t anticipate the degree of her collapse in rural areas and small towns. It could be happening again, but this time to Republicans who are overestimating the degree to which their base of support is in thrall to Donald Trump.
I think Trump’s base is unique. First of all, it’s made up of a lot of Democrats who never have supported giant tax cuts for rich people and corporations. Secondly, insofar as rank-and-file longtime Republicans have transferred their allegiance to Trump, that group is shrinking as soft Republicans flee a sinking ship.
If could be that being anti-Trump is still dangerous or even suicidal in a Republican primary, but I think being pro-Trump is probably the surest way to blow your chance at winning a safe Senate seat in places like Tennessee, Alabama, or even Mississippi.
You can watch a video that explains how Vladimir Putin received 76.7 percent of the vote and won another six-year term as president of the Russian Federation with a margin of 65 points over his nearest competitor.
I don’t see why any congratulations are in order, unless someone wants to send some “Job Well Done” cards to that crew of criminals in the video that shoved dozens and dozens of Putin votes into that rectangular ballot box. What I can understand, however, is why our country’s national security officials wrote “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” on the briefing notes they supplied President Trump to prepare him for his telephone call with the Russian president.
Of course, it didn’t work. Despite the fact that the election was rigged six ways to Sunday, including by a ban on Putin’s most plausible challenger having a place on the ballot, the first thing out of Trump’s mouth when he talked to Putin was a word of congratulations on his great victory. And it wasn’t just the clearly fraudulent election that led the national security team to warn Trump off offering congratulations. There’s also a little thing called “attempted murder.”
Although the Trump administration has taken a tougher stance toward Russia recently — including new sanctions last week on some entities for election meddling and cyberattacks — the president has declined to forcefully join London in denouncing Moscow for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, this month. They remain critically ill….
…Trump’s failure to raise Moscow’s alleged poisoning of the former spy in Britain risked angering officials in London, who are trying to rally Britain’s closest allies to condemn the attack. Russia has denied involvement in the March 4 poisoning, but the attack has badly damaged British-Russian relations, and British Prime Minister Theresa May last week announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats in retaliation.
Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia are critically ill but may survive. The murder attempt on Russian dissident Nikolai Glushkov was successful. Vladimir Putin sent a man to break into his southwest London home and strangle him to death. The murder was completed nine days ago. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you just overlook, and the United Kingdom is not comforted to know that the American president has done just that.
There really isn’t anything left to prove. Our president is incapable of standing up to Vladimir Putin and might as well be his vassal. I don’t need to wait for Robert Mueller’s report to know what’s going on.
Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi-American novelist who publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq that was initiated fifteen years ago today. He has a good piece in the New York Times. You should read it. Here is how it concludes:
No one knows for certain how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago. Some credible estimates put the number at more than one million. You can read that sentence again. The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry. (A year ago, I watched Mr. Bush on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” dancing and talking about his paintings.) The pundits and “experts” who sold us the war still go on doing what they do. I never thought that Iraq could ever be worse than it was during Saddam’s reign, but that is what America’s war achieved and bequeathed to Iraqis.
Americans aren’t accustomed to calling their foreign policy blunders “crimes,” nor do they send their failed foreign policy leaders into exile the way the Ancient Greeks used to do. Maybe we should do both of these things. Or maybe we should learn more about the Ancient Greek word “hubris,” which meant “excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods” which leads to a downfall for the protagonist.
In modern usage, “hubris” is better defined as “over-confidence,” which doesn’t quite capture the immorality of invading Iraq based on false premises and bad faith, leading to massive region-wide humanitarian, political and sectarian crises.
I was encourage to see John Cole whip himself like a penitent for being wrong about literally everything in the lead-up to the Iraq War. That’s a man who knows how to act when he’s advocated something that resulted in complete disaster. But John Cole was a cheerleader, not a policymaker. He didn’t make the decisions that led to the downfall of our moral credibility and the entire Middle East.
Today is an anniversary when the people who really were responsible should whip themselves. They should whip themselves in print. And, maybe they should whip themselves with fronds in public, too.
Finally, the people who let these people off the hook cannot complain that they’ve made a comeback.
I am beginning to wonder about something. When I take a look at the following graphic it tells me that a lot of right-leaning voters are beginning to feel like the country might run more smoothly with a Democratic Congress. I’m not sure how else I can look at those numbers.
Jeff Flake has become a cautionary tale. Lawmakers who are not retiring don’t want to draw the president’s ire and the enmity of his core supporters. Most Republicans in Congress, even those facing tough reelection campaigns in places where Trump is not popular, are under intense pressure from their base to wholeheartedly support the president.
I understand not wanting to be singled out by the president, but perhaps there’s something wrong with this picture. Either the base doesn’t want congressional Republicans to wholeheartedly support the president or the base is shrinking so quickly before our eyes that it probably shouldn’t be the first concern of GOP lawmakers who are seeking reelection. How else to explain that the GOP-held districts are now split on whether the GOP should retain their congressional majorities?
Another explanation is that the congressional preference question is too volatile to be meaningful.
We do continue to see polls that indicate both that the base is still with the president and that the president is vastly more popular than Congress, but I’m beginning to suspect that believing in those numbers might be a strategic mistake. Just for one example, Trump is already killing the GOP with swing voters, and the base is already unhappy with Congress, so wouldn’t standing up to Trump be more likely to win a candidate credit than going along with him? I don’t think enthusiasm for Trump is transferable to congressional candidates.
In any case, a lot of this is in the context of whether the GOP Congress should put a bill on Trump’s desk prohibiting him from firing Mueller. They think this would depress turnout. I think the public, even in Republican districts, would approve of the move.
I need a sabbatical from blogging to write a screenplay. And this won’t even be the opening scene:
It was a bold, but effortless heist.
Three men, posing as gemstone buyers for a wealthy client, walked into the Moscow offices of an Indian-owned diamond dealer. They talked their way into the firm’s vault. After all, they needed to inspect the merchandise. Once the steel hatch was opened, one of the men stepped out to call his client. Shortly afterwards, four men draped in camouflage and wielding assault rifles stormed into the building.
The armed men claimed to be officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). They were conducting a raid on illicit gemstone trading, they said. Those present were told to drop to the ground. And the so-called officers went off with some $2.8 million worth of jewelry, and 600,000 euros ($670,000) in cash.
The robbery took place in August 2010. When investigators finally got around to prosecuting two years later, their attention fell on Russian-American businessman Gennady Klotsman. He was eventually sentenced by Moscow’s Lefortovo Court to 10 years in a Russian penal colony.
I won’t even use the Bay Ridge beatdown of Salvatore Lauria as my opening scene:
Three years after accusing his former business partner of endangering his life with “mob tactics,” former Mafia informant Salvatore Lauria has withdrawn a $5 million lawsuit, saying that he wants to “move on with (his) life” and disengage from the media scrutiny brought on by his ties to Donald Trump.
Lauria, who worked at Bayrock Group in the mid-2000s, sued Jody Kriss, now with East River Partners, for allegedly endangering his life with ongoing lawsuits against their former firm. Bayrock worked on a number of Trump projects, including Trump SoHo and Trump International in Fort Lauderdale.
In the suit, Kriss was accused of giving sealed court documents to a lawyer that represented the people that Lauria helped put in jail. This allegedly led to a beating for Lauria. In July 2012, a Mafia member supposedly beat up Lauria in broad daylight at a restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. According to the lawsuit, the Mafia member told Lauria: “You’re dead… I did two years because of you.”
This will be my opening scene, and it will focus on the unluckiest commodities broker in the history of the world.
Mr. [Felix] Sater’s first brush with the law came in 1991. Mr. Sater and Mr. Klotsman were at El Rio Grande, a Midtown watering hole, celebrating with a friend and eventual co-conspirator, Salvatore Lauria, who had just passed his stockbroker’s exam.
Mr. Sater later told a judge that he was in a good mood, having made a quick $3,000 in commissions that day. But he got into an argument with a commodities broker at the bar, and it quickly escalated. According to the trial transcript, Mr. Sater grabbed a large margarita glass, smashed it on the bar and plunged the stem into the right side of the broker’s face. The man suffered nerve damage and required 110 stitches to close the laceration on his face.
“I got into a bar fight over a girl neither he nor I knew,” Mr. Sater said in an interview. “My life spiraled out of control.” Mr. Sater was convicted at trial in 1993, went to prison and was effectively barred from selling securities by the National Association of Securities Dealers.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, this commodity broker walked into the one where Felix Sater, Salvatore Lauria, and Gennady Klotsman were drinking and he got into a fight with them over a girl none of them even knew. I wonder if she’s learned what became of these characters.
All three of them eventually become government informants but not before they were arrested many years later for a pump-and-dump stock trading scam that robbed about $60 million dollars from little old ladies, including several Holocaust survivors.
My movie gets better of course. Much better. After Gennady Klotsman was arrested and sent to a penal colony in Russia, the Kremlin offered him back to the United States in an interesting trade proposal:
…earlier this month [August 2016] Klotsman was thrust from relative anonymity by news that he was one of a list of 13 Americans in Russia that Moscow was looking to exchange for two of its own imprisoned in the United States.
Under normal circumstances, this might be an easy swap: thirteen of yours for just two of ours. But, the two men in question were not easily swappable. According to a Foreign Ministry document cited by Izvestia newspaper on Aug. 3, Russia went straight for the top of its wish-list: the infamous international arms dealer Viktor Bout and a drug-running pilot, Konstantin Yaroshenko. These are men who may or may not have dirt on Russia’s leadership.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow declined to comment on the exchange proposal, but confirmed Klotsman is in Russian custody. The proposal cited by Izvestia was, however, confirmed in part by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
“The details still need to be discussed confidentially,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the RIA Novosti news agency on Aug. 3. “[But] Yaroshenko is one of those we would like to see released under this scheme, as well as Bout.”
Both Russians were seized in sting operations far beyond Washington’s traditional territorial jurisdiction. Yaroshenko was arrested in Liberia in 2010 on charges of conspiring to smuggle $100 million of cocaine into the U.S. Bout, the more significant figure, was arrested in Thailand two years earlier.
In my early years of blogging, I used to write about Viktor Bout (pronounced “butt”) a lot because I considered him the most dangerous man in the world. In 2002, PBS did an entire series on him and how his business activities were fueling civil wars all around the world. It says a lot about Russia that they are so concerned to see him a free man. But it also says a lot about Felix Sater’s drinking buddy that the Russians think our government is still interested in freeing him after he pulled off a giant and elaborate diamond heist using FSB officers (or impersonators).
Allegiances in the world of espionage can be fleeting, but these three gentlemen take the cake.
Obviously, the most interesting of them is Felix Sater because of his long and close association with Donald Trump. When BuzzFeed reporters Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold caught up with him recently in Los Angeles, they discovered a man who “had his Porsche shipped over from Long Island” and “gets the good table at Delilah, a see-and-be-seen West Hollywood nightclub.”
They also discovered a man who claims, with significant governmental corroboration, to have betrayed the Five Families of La Cosa Nostra in New York City and the Russian mafia, while also penetrating both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Not only that, but he has enough dirt on the president of the United States to single-handedly take down his administration. Yet, he has the good table at a see-and-be-seen West Hollywood nightclub and doesn’t appear to have a care in the world.
By way of comparison, Paul Manafort’s business partner Rick Gates recently cancelled a planned trip to Boston that he had convinced a judge to approve because he was sensibly fearful that someone would kill him or harm his family. Gates’s only enemies are Russians and maybe an unhinged Trump supporter or two. Sater’s list of lethal enemies is comprehensive.
Yet, he struts around without an entourage of bodyguards and makes planned appearances like his segment on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show on Friday night that was well publicized ahead of time. This is truly inexplicable. Maybe Salvatore Lauria was just unlucky when a mobster he’d fingered found him at a Bay Ridge restaurant and savagely beat him, but anyone looking for Sater knows which table he has reserved at Delilah’s.
If we’re to believe the official story on Sater, he’s been spying against Russia for the United States for twenty years now, but the Russians have known about this at least 2010 when his role was inadvertently unsealed (briefly) by a federal court. Yet, the Russians certainly don’t seem to care. Sater has been traveling and doing business in Moscow so freely that the Trump organization hired him in 2010 to help them build a tower there. And, if Russia cared that Sater was an American spy, then how was this possible?
A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.
The associate, Felix Sater, wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin. He predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
On Chris Hayes’ show Friday, Sater was still claiming to have lined up funding for a Moscow Trump Tower from a sanctioned-Russian bank, arguing that this was the only possible way to make the project happen.
Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow.
“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Mr. Sater wrote.
It would be one thing if the Russians didn’t know that Sater was a spy and an informant, but they were aware the entire time. So, in my movie where I am allowed to take some poetic license, Felix Sater is possibly a double agent who was turned against the Russians and then turned back against the Americans. And then, in a final twist, he is turned one last time, but this time against the president of the United States.
But, first, his reputation has to be rehabilitated, which means he will become the most patriotic, daring, spy of all time. So, BuzzFeed gets some access and here is what they report:
He obtained five of the personal satellite telephone numbers for Osama bin Laden before 9/11 and he helped flip the personal secretary to Mullah Omar, then the head of the Taliban and an ally of bin Laden, into a source who provided the location of al-Qaeda training camps and weapons caches.
In 2004, he persuaded a source in Russia’s foreign military intelligence to hand over the name and photographs of a North Korean military operative who was purchasing equipment to build the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Sater provided US intelligence with details about possible assassination threats against former president George W. Bush and secretary of state Colin Powell. Sater reported that jihadists were hiding in a hut outside Bagram Air Base and planned to shoot down Powell’s plane during a January 2002 visit. He later told his handlers that two female al-Qaeda members were trying to recruit an Afghan woman working in the Senate barbershop to poison President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney.
He went undercover in Cyprus and Istanbul to catch Russian and Ukrainian cybercriminals around 2005. After the FBI set him up with a fake name and background, Sater posed as a money launderer to help nab the suspects for washing funds stolen from US financial institutions.
And then he goes on Chris Hayes and tells the same story, complete with a charming anecdote about how he was initially recruited by a U.S. arms merchant named Milton Blane who was secretly working for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
[In 1996], he went to Russia to work on telecommunications deals with AT&T and others. One night, Sater was at dinner with a group of Russians in Moscow when he was introduced to an American defense contractor named Milton Blane. Sater said Blane, who died last year, followed him into the restroom that night and asked for his phone number to set up a meeting the following day.
“I want you to understand: If you’re caught, the USA is going to disavow you and, at best, you get a bullet in the head.”
At an Irish pub, Blane explained that he worked for the DIA and that some of the people Sater had been dining with were high-level Russian intelligence agents. “‘You’re in with a group who could deliver,’” Sater recalls Blane telling him. Blane, Sater said, asked him to work as an asset, intelligence lingo for a confidential source, but warned, “‘I want you to understand: If you’re caught, the USA is going to disavow you and, at best, you get a bullet in the head.’”
This provides me another interesting angle for my screenplay. It seems odd that an important Defense Intelligence Agency spy would find himself in this type of situation.
On September 1, 2006, Blane moved to have his criminal record expunged, arguing that the record is “misleading” and that it has had a detrimental effect on his ability to run his business.1 In his motion, Blane summarizes the facts surrounding his conviction as follows: He had purchased some jewelry from a pawnshop, but he was unable to pay for the jewelry at the time of purchase because he was “all out of checks.” Blane promised to send a check by mail, but he “forgot to pay for the jewelry.” He argued in his motion to the circuit court that his actions did not constitute theft of property because, he argued, he lacked the requisite mental state necessary to commit the crime. Instead, he argued, his actions constituted civil fraud. Therefore, he argued in his motion to expunge, “the charge of theft of property is misleading in that it is more accurately characterized as fraud, and should be purged from Mr. Blane’s record.”
He wanted to get his record quashed, apparently, because it was causing problems for his business in its efforts to win government contracts. And, even today, two years after Blane died, his business is supplying the Ukrainian border guards through the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. As for the Defense Intelligence Agency, in 1999 they gave Blane a no-bid non-itemized contract for $1.2 million. But what really ought to make it into my movie is this conflict that Blane had with Boeing.
An international arms dealer won a jury verdict against Boeing after saying the aerospace behemoth stiffed him on a purchase, then tried to trash his reputation, a newspaper reported Saturday.
Boeing was ordered by a jury in Georgia to pay $3.6 million in punitive damages and compensatory costs to Milton Blane, who claimed the military contractor backed out of pact to buy two missile launchers and caused him to lose million of dollars, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said in its Saturday edition.
A Gwinett County Superior Court jury ordered Boeing to pay BA, +0.23% Milton Blane $3.5 million in punitive damages and $100,000 in compensation for the Russian-made launchers that the company allegedly intended to resell to the U.S. Navy, according to the Journal-Constitution.
Blane, who owns Cumming, Ga.-based Blane International Group, said he approached Boeing about some combat missiles that were available. Blane’s attorney said weapons and technology were available after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Boeing allegedly asked Blane to buy two Russian-made missile launchers, said attorney Lawrence Newlin, characterizing the deal as a way for Blane to “prove what he could do” before asking for a larger order.
Blane alleged that Boeing reneged on the deal to pay $80,000 for the launchers, then tried to discredit him after he filed a lawsuit in 2002.
To recap, Blane supposedly recruited Sater in a Moscow restaurant bathroom and Irish Pub in 1996. Shortly thereafter, this happened:
One of Sater’s early operations involved the pursuit in 1998 of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The CIA had originally given the missiles to the mujahideen to oust the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan — but now the agency wanted to prevent them from falling into the hands of radicalized jihadists. Sater managed to find some, complete with their serial numbers.
Sater’s attorney, Robert Wolf, said he acted as his conduit to the CIA. As Wolf tells it, he called someone he had long known: David Kendall, Bill Clinton’s lawyer, telling him that he had serial numbers for the Stinger missiles that the Clinton administration had been trying to obtain. Kendall, Wolf said, called back and said he had spoken with President Clinton and that Wolf should call Robert M. McNamara Jr., the CIA’s general counsel. During the phone call with McNamara, Wolf read out the serial numbers for the Stinger missiles.
But, intelligence sources told BuzzFeed News, CIA officials were skeptical. So Sater provided photographs of the missiles — with their serial numbers and a copy of a daily newspaper to prove the photo was current. Two former intelligence officers and an FBI agent confirmed that Sater had provided the photographs, an incident they said bolstered his credibility.
Meanwhile, Wolf recalled, McNamara brokered a meeting at a restaurant near the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, which was attended by Wolf and two employees of the CIA’s clandestine division: an operations officer and an attorney named Steve Hermes. For the next year or so, Wolf said, he talked regularly with Hermes by pay phone or landline when Sater wanted to pass on new information — or when the CIA wanted more intelligence. “We just went back and forth for months and months about al-Qaeda, bin Laden, and the return of the Stingers,” Wolf said.
In my movie, the CIA was correct to be skeptical because the Stingers came from Sater’s handler, Milton Blane who had secured them from the same Russian sources that would later provide him with missile launchers to sell to Boeing.
In the end, my movie ends with unanswered questions. Did Blane get arrested for stiffing an Alabama pawn shop as a way of maintaining his cover? Did the Russians ever suspect that he worked for the DIA before Felix Sater told the world about it? Did he get turned by the Russians?
As for Sater, I still can’t figure out how to make his story work. I have the strong feeling that he’s been playing the Americans for suckers, but I also think he’s come in from the cold now and U.S. intelligence is rehabilitating him so can serve as a witness. To bolster this theory, one of his handlers in the Brooklyn attorney’s office was Andrew Weismann who now serves on Robert Mueller’s investigative team. In fact, it was Weismann who signed Sater’s cooperation agreement in 1998.
So, if I write this script, will you come see my movie?
