“All the smart folks are only talking obstruction because the counterintelligence piece is too big and confusing and the result is that Americans have no sense of the scope of the story.”
–Seth Abramson
Seth Abramson was the first reliable writer I read when I started my personal mission to research the Trump Russia Connection. Aside from some dubious people, no one was saying much about the Connection. Abramson, on the other hand, began digging up the dirt, pioneering what he refers to as curatorial journalism, collecting and organizing public information and putting it into a meaningful context. Abramson’s sources are all public, his based on his background as an attorney. Respect came slowly to him, but it eventually came along with his bestselling book Proof of Collusion.
Abramson was ahead of the curve when he started writing about Trump and collusion. He’s ahead of the curve now as well, trying to refocus the media away from Trump’s obstruction of justice and to Trump’s collusion—past and likely future—with foreign powers. Democrats are inching closer to impeachment over the President’s obstruction of justice, Abramson says, but they and the media we are missing the bigger picture: the President is compromised by multiple foreign powers and carrying out actions that benefit those powers to the detriment of the American people.
The difficult task—too difficult for the mainstream media based on day-to-day stories—is comprehending the totality of Trump, his crimes, and his motivations. This excerpt lays out what may be best described as Abramson’s theory of the case:
Americans should not overlook the fact that turning our policies toward Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (to offer just a few examples) on their head has only made Americans less safe. In the Middle East, our new, melodramatically hostile policy towards Iran substantially increases the odds of a war between a nuclearized Iran and a nuclearized Saudi Arabia and UAE — especially now that the Trump administration has, as we just learned, begun the process of sending nuclear technology to the Middle East, including to countries from which we previously had withheld that technology for very good national-security reasons. And even more strikingly, in the case of Russia, turning our foreign policy completely on its head has endangered the stability of NATO. It has endangered the European Union, and therefore the shared financial fabric of our allies in Europe.
In both the Middle East and Russia, we can trace this dramatically reversed foreign policy back to business investments and payments made by the Russians, the Saudis, and the Emiratis directly to Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. We know what the payments are. We know who made them. We know when they were made. We can trace how US foreign policy changed with these payments. And we know that’s called bribery, again one of our Constitution’s two enumerated impeachable offenses.
To some, Abramson’s theory of the case may seem far-fetched. That’s okay. Theories exist to make sense of disparate events. Theories are meant to be considered and disproven in light of existing and new evidence. There will be more of both to come.
UPDATE: “I proposed to Trump & Putin to form a U.S.-Russia-Israel trilateral committee that will meet in Jerusalem to discuss the security situation in the Middle East & both of them agreed.” -ISRAEL PM, Benjamin Netanyahu
The stable genius let the cat out of the bag when he tweeted today : “I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected.”
This is right on the money.
This is a colossal failure of our much-vaunted news media as well as our government. For whatever reasons, the mainstream media has missed the real story. It is disappointing and not surprising that the American people — especially those in the Fox-News-Watching red-state American hearland — don’t care about any of this.
We are unlikely to ever get hard smoking-gun proof of Mr. Abramson’s theory, because the foreign players — at least Mr. Putin and his associates — are careful to ensure that such proof was never created. Mr. Putin had a long and successful career in the KGB, he knows what he’s doing. Some of us learned a phrase — “plausible deniability” — during the Watergate investigation. That is central to understanding all this.
Our best approach, therefore, is the duck rule — if it walks like a Russian agent, acts like a Russian agent, and talks like a Russian agent, then it IS a Russian agent.
I no longer have any doubt at all that Mr. Trump and his family were turned by the Russians a very long time ago. We already know that they have surrounded themselves with advisers and associates with long, deep, and dirty ties to Russia and Russian organized crime.
It appears to me that what remains to be discovered and revealed is how far the Russian cancer has metastasized to the rest of the GOP and therefore the American government. How many GOP leaders are similarly compromised? We have seen astonishing reversals of several key GOP officials in the past few years (cf Lindsey Graham). Are we seeing political hacks acting out of pure opportunism, or are we seeing officials scrambling to satisfy extortioners with devastating evidence?
It is no accident that the formula used by the Trump family and its close relationship to the National Enquirer was to acquire dirt on targets and then threaten those targets with that dirt if they didn’t tow the line. For those old enough to remember, J. Edgar Hoover was a master of that game. Mr. Trump’s long and close relationship with Roy Cohn — another master of the game — surely contributed to Mr. Trump’s perspective on such matters.
These techniques are how organized crime is so often able to spread its influence and power.
I find it very hard to imagine that Mr. Trump is the only compromised figure in today’s GOP. We know that Mr. Trump has accomplished a nearly complete takeover of the entire GOP. The narrative that this takeover is the result of the exquisitely honed political and media chops of Mr. Trump flies in the face of everything we’ve seen in the past three years.
A much simpler and more believable explanation is that a worldwide network of organized crime, led by Mr. Putin and similar strongmen, compromised both Mr. Trump and key figures within the GOP. Those who have been paying attention know that the GOP was gravely wounded during its internal battles during the Tea Party years. It appears to me that the Russians and international organized crime saw the same wounds — and successfully exploited them.
The question for all Americans today — and especially for we Democrats — is what we are going to DO about it.
”We Will Take America Without Firing a Shot. We Do Not Have to Invade the US. We Will Destroy You From Within.” Nikita Khrushchev
How prophetic…
Again they literally wrote and published their playbook almost a generation ago. It’s all out in the open. Funneling money to anti-EU and anti-NATO parties and players, false flag operations to reconquer the satellite states without drawing in a full scale war, and subverting our open society from within to ensure favorable outcomes.
If this were a real war-a conventional one anyway-the US would eventually defeat Russia. Russia knows this and is playing asymmetrical warfare to its present advantage.
Also I am glad somebody has been paying attention to the Saudi-Russia moneyline. Withdrawing from Paris weakens the west and strengthens the oil cartel. Withdrawing from Iran strengthens Saudi Arabia and weakens Qatar, Oman, and the UAE. Withdrawing from the TPP was a huge gift to China and Russia alike.
We are literally doing the inverse foreign policy of the Obama years, something I strongly doubt President Rubio would be doing, and the media is simply saying its Trump being a moron and doing the opposite of what Obama did. He is a moron when it comes to policy-but he is a successful con artist and knows the long play. No person has ever used a public office so brazenly for self enrichment in our history since the days of Boss Tweed. Another nativist New Yorker.
It’s still MAD.
What does “a few missiles” mean? A half dozen?
Let’s assume these are decrepit and unreliable, so assume a fifty percent fail rate (quite high) — it means three major US cities are destroyed.
Suppose that New York, Chicago, and Washington DC are hit. We’re talking about immediate total massive destruction in a radius of tens of miles (for 10+ megaton bomb) and catastrophic environmental consequences for generations to come. America will certainly answer with a crushing nuclear response.
It would mean the end of civilization as we know it, and perhaps even the end of humanity. We can’t say because nobody knows what will happen after a nuclear storm like we’re talking about.
Military people who talk about a “more robust response” because “they only have a few” remind me of Dr. Strangelove.
It is, literally, madness.
Not sure, but you may be missing my point. This all goes BEYOND Russia to other countries. We need to broaden our focus to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Indeed, it certainly goes beyond that. I wonder if Iran and North Korea should be on the list as well. One of the reasons NK is so reluctant to give up its nuclear program is its desire to sell nuclear weapons technology to Iran and other ME states. So far as I can tell, Mr. Trump is perfectly fine with a nuclearized NK.
I view Mr. Putin as the key player in this constellation of players. It appears to me that he strives to maximize Russian influence among all of them while doing as much damage to American (and western) interests as possible.
A common purpose of each of Mr. Trump’s actions is to create chaos, damage, division and destruction. Whether these are his own choices or those of a foreign puppet-master pulling his strings, these acts are neither random nor insane.
They are instead the work of a person consciously striving to destroy, damage, and defeat America and the American way of life.
Iran is the target, not an ally. If Abramson is right, it’s more like a bunch of self-interested oligarchs who stand to make billions.
I don’t think it’s possible to characterize nations and nation-states as “allies” or “adversaries” in this context. As you suggest, we are instead seeing the actions of individuals acting in their own interests and using whatever power they have to advance those interests.
This is not a top-down power hierarchy with Mr. Putin (or anyone else) at the pinnacle. It is instead a clumpy graph of individuals and small groups richly connected by directed arcs of power (its appearance and behavior is similar to a graph of websites and their references to other websites). When attempting to render such a graph (usually not worth the effort), a common technique is to assign “gravity” to each arc, so that nodes with many arcs are pulled to the center and nodes with only a few migrate to the fringes.
In such a graph, a few nodes have an enormous number of arcs, and an enormous number of nodes have only one or two arcs. Mr. Putin is one of those power centers. America used to be another, and Mr. Trump is intentionally severing as many connections as possible.
The result — and I believe it is intentional by Mr. Putin and perhaps by Mr. Trump — is to move Mr. Putin (and therefore Russia) towards the center of the graph (if the nodes are positioned based on their arc count) and to move America towards the fringes.
Most Americans do not understand how devastating this move to the fringes is to each and every one of us. Americans in 2019 are accustomed to the dollar being the standard international trading currency. We are accustomed to the international exchange rates being pegged to the dollar. We are accustomed to English being the international language of trade. We are accustomed to setting, rather than following, loan rates on international loans. We are accustomed to choosing our national fiscal policy, rather than being directed by a foreign entity.
The impact of Mr. Trump’s absurd trade wars is just the beginning. Even if we avoid nuclear catastrophe, Mr. Trump is intentionally and inexorably moving America towards third-world fringe status. It is no accident that the UK is moving in the same direction with Brexit.
Russia and China have always played a long game. They excel at it, and are currently beating our socks off.
Fun Fact
The dubious painting “Salvatore Mundi” was purchased by a Saudi prince for $450 million dollars. It’s now assumed not be DaVinci’s work.
The seller was Dmitry Rybolovlev, the guy who overpaid (by about $50 million) Donald Trump for Maison de L’Amitie, the mansion that Trump purchased and couldn’t unload. Rybolovlev bought the painting from a dubious art dealer connected to money laundering.
Evidence of Israeli Involvement:
Kids in cages have heartbeats too. My favorite anti-Trump sign at Britain’s protest rally.
A perv, a con artist and a fascist walked into a bar. Bartender says : “What’ll it be, Mr. President.”