The Moral of the Story
One of the two major United States parties nominated a candidate in spite of the fact that he was clearly compromised by and enamored of an authoritarian oligarchy that has been actively working against not only our country but Western Europe and democracy itself to advance its own interests through the narrow interests of the very rich. Those of us on the Left recognized the pernicious effects of globalization as a bottom-up phenomena with low-wage workers displacing our working class. The Trump-Russia Scandal represents the reverse: the top-down capture of our executive branch by a would-be oligarch, and aided and abetted by other would-be oligarchs, who not only adopted the methods and ideology of Russia, but enlisted its help to win the presidential election. The existence of our country may not be at stake, but the preservation of our democracy certainly is.
Lawfare on Today’s Indictments
I was expecting Michael Flynn to be indicted today, but today’s indictment’s are good enough for today.
On George Papdopoulos, LawFare’s Susan Hennessy writes:
The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team now admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some them….
The stipulation also contains some rather damaging information about President Trump himself. Papadopoulos says he attended a “national security” meeting on March 31, 2016 with Trump personally in attendance, along with his other foreign policy advisors. In that meeting, Papadopoulos told the group that he had connections to arrange a meeting between Trump and President Putin. This means that Trump either knew or should have known about his campaign’s effort to interface with Russia, even as news of various criminal hacking and attempts to interfere with the US election were becoming public.
On Paul Manafort:
The President of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department….
The amount of money allegedly at issue in breathtaking. According to paragraph 6 of the indictment, “more than $75,000,000 flowed through the offshore accounts” that Manafort and Gates controlled. Eighteen million of these dollars are specifically alleged to have been laundered. This money laundering “to hide Ukraine payments from United States authorities” allegedly took place through the entire period of Manafort’s service in the Trump campaign….
On Mueller’s Investigation:
We will say this: Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting.
Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished this morning. Things are only going to get worse from here.
On Twitter, Seth Abramson has been good at explaining Trump Russia from a former defense lawyer’s perspective.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/924988111880417280
If, hopefully not when, the President fires Mueller it will be incumbent on ALL of us to take to the streets as my in laws did in the 1980s Philippines to restore the rule of law and balance of power to our government. This is not the time to have fratricides over minutiae.