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Throwing H2O on the Pompeo to State Move

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I could be totally wrong, but I don’t think the reported plan for Rex Tillerson to step down, to be replaced by Mike Pompeo, who in turn will be replaced by Tom Cotton (or maybe Admiral Robert Harward because Republicans can’t afford to defend an Arkansas Senate seat), will really happen.

The White House has developed a plan to force out Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, whose relationship with President Trump has been strained, and replace him with Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, perhaps within the next several weeks, senior administration officials said on Thursday.

Mr. Pompeo would be replaced at the C.I.A. by Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas who has been a key ally of the president on national security matters, according to the White House plan. Mr. Cotton has signaled that he would accept the job if offered, said the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations before decisions are announced.

I say that for two reasons.

First, because of all the evidence that Mike Flynn is working on a plea deal. Particularly given that Mueller has decided he doesn’t need any more evidence of Flynn’s corrupt dealings with Turkey, I suspect his leverage over Flynn has gone well beyond just those crimes (which, in turn, is why I suspect Flynn has decided to flip).

I think that when the plea deal against Flynn is rolled out, it will be associated with some fairly alarming allegations against him and others, allegations that will dramatically change how willing Republicans are to run interference for Trump in Congress.

If I’m right about that, it will make it almost impossible for Pompeo to be confirmed as Secretary of State. Already, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Corker, who’d oversee the confirmation, is sending signals he’s not interested in seeing Pompeo replace Tillerson.

“I could barely pick Pompeo out of a lineup” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Thursday morning.

Already, Pompeo’s cheerleading of Wikileaks during the election should have been disqualifying for the position of CIA Director. That’s even more true now that Pompeo himself has deemed them a non-state hostile intelligence service.

Add in the fact that Pompeo met with Bill Binney to hear the skeptics’ version of the DNC hack, and the fact that Pompeo falsely suggested that the Intelligence Community had determined Russia hadn’t affected the election. Finally, add in the evidence that Pompeo has helped Trump obstruct the investigation and his role spying on CIA’s own investigation into it, and there’s just far too much smoke tying Pompeo to the Russian operation.

All that will become toxic once Mike Flynn’s plea deal is rolled out, I believe.

So between Corker and Marco Rubio, who both treat Russia’s hack of the election with real seriousness (remember, too, that Rubio himself was targeted), I don’t see how Pompeo could get out of the committee.

But there’s another reason I don’t think this will happen. I suspect it — like earlier threats to replace Jeff Sessions — is just an attempt to get Tillerson to hew the Administration line on policy. The NYT cites Tillerson’s difference of opinion on both North Korea and Iran.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Tillerson have been at odds over a host of major issues, including the Iran nuclear deal, the confrontation with North Korea and a clash between Arab allies. The secretary was reported to have privately called Mr. Trump a “moron” and the president publicly criticized Mr. Tillerson for “wasting his time” with a diplomatic outreach to North Korea

It’s Iran that’s the big issue, particularly as Jared frantically tries to finish his “peace” “plan” before he gets arrested himself. The fact that Trump has floated Cotton as Pompeo’s replacement is strong support for the notion that this is about forcing Tillerson to accept the Administration lies about Iran and the nuclear deal: because Cotton, more than anyone else, has been willing to lie to oppose the deal.

Trump is basically saying that unless Tillerson will adopt the lies the Administration needs to start a war with Iran, then he will be ousted.

But Tillerson’s claim that he doesn’t need to replace all the people who’ve left state because he thinks a lot of domestic issues will be solved soon seems to reflect that he’s parroting the Administration line now.

Obviously, there’s no telling what will happen, because Trump is completely unpredictable.

But he also likes to use threats to get people to comply.

Update: CNN now reporting I’m correct.

Dear Bob Corker: Trump Has Also Been Starting Wars Here at Home

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There is great delight in the chatter classes about — first — Bob Corker’s quip about the White House serving as an adult day care center caring for old people with dementia.

And then this article with a series of accusations about how unstable Trump is.

Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”

“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

But I want to point to several passages most people aren’t focusing on.

First, Corker claims that he still likes his golfing buddy Trump.

The deeply personal back-and-forth will almost certainly rupture what had been a friendship with a fellow real estate developer turned elected official, one of the few genuine relationships Mr. Trump had developed on Capitol Hill. Still, even as he leveled his stinging accusations, Mr. Corker repeatedly said on Sunday that he liked Mr. Trump, until now an occasional golf partner, and wished him “no harm.”

Then, Corker says he doesn’t regret normalizing Trump during his campaign.

One of the most prominent establishment-aligned Republicans to develop a relationship with Mr. Trump, the senator said he did not regret standing with him during the campaign last year.

“I would compliment him on things that he did well, and I’d criticize things that were inappropriate,” he said. “So it’s been really the same all the way through.”

And ultimately Corker stops short of deeming Trump unfit, in spite of all the comments that make it clear almost all Republicans do view him as unfit (which, indeed, he would be if he required adult day care).

“As long as there are people like that around him who are able to talk him down when he gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work with him before a decision gets made, I think we’ll be fine,” he said.

Mr. Corker would not directly answer when asked whether he thought Mr. Trump was fit for the presidency. But he did say that the commander in chief was not fully aware of the power of his office.

“I don’t think he appreciates that when the president of the United States speaks and says the things that he does, the impact that it has around the world, especially in the region that he’s addressing,” he said. “And so, yeah, it’s concerning to me.”

This is important for several reasons.

For the most part, Corker is focusing on the damage Trump will do internationally. He mentions North Korea, matters on which he fantastically imagines the worst Secretary of State in recent memory, Rex Tillerson, is “negotiating,” and the Iran Deal.

When specifically asked if Trump is unfit, Corker focused on his role as Commander-in-Chief, bracketing all the other parts of being President, as a way to avoid calling the man unfit, which might require action under the 25th Amendment.

And, still, Corker still normalizes the golfing buddy who has spent over two years sowing division in this country and ten months working to dismantle the country internally.

Yes, Corker mentions Trump’s racist comments after Charlottesville, and then confesses he still likes the man who made them.

It’s nice that Corker has finally made it clear his Republican colleagues recognize what the rest of us have too, that Trump is a disaster. But he did so in such a way as to absolve himself and his colleagues from direct action, choosing instead to leave Trump in place to continue his war on America and Americans, even while hoping that Tillerson and his co-babysitters can keep Trump’s fat fingers off the nuclear button.

These are great one-liners from Corker.

But these are not responsible comments. Congress is a co-equal branch of government. And if almost all Republicans in the Senate recognize that Trump is unfit to be president, their constitutional duty is to do something about it, not to continue to normalize him in the hopes he’ll finish dismantling the laws and policies protecting vulnerable Americans.

On Trump’s Impenetrable Cyber Security Unit to Guard Election Hacking

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Man oh man did Vladimir Putin hand Trump his ass in their meeting the other day. While most the focus has been on Trump’s apparent refusal to confront Putin on the election hack (which Trump is now trying to spin — pity for him he excluded his credible aides who could tell us how it really went down or maybe that was precisely the point).

But I was more interested in Putin and Sergei Lavrov’s neat trick to get Trump to agree to a “joint working group on cybersecurity.”

Lavrov says Trump brought up accusations of Russian hacking; Moscow and DC will set up joint working group on cybersecurity.

Here’s how Trump has been talking about this in an [unthreaded] rant this morning.

People who’re just discovering this from Trump’s tweets are suitably outraged.

But I think even there they’re missing what a master stroke this was from Putin and Lavrov.

First, as I noted at the time, this comes at the moment Congress is trying to exclude Kaspersky Lab products from federal networks, accompanied by a more general witch hunt against the security firm. As I have said, I think the latter especially is problematic (and probably would have been designed at least partly to restore some asymmetry on US spying on the world, as Kaspersky is one of the few firms that will consistently ID US spying), even if there are reasons to want to keep Kaspersky out of sensitive networks. Kaspersky would be at the center of any joint cyber security effort, meaning Congress will have a harder time blackballing them.

Then there’s the fact that cooperation has been tried. Notably, the FBI has tried to share information with the part of FSB that does cyber investigations. Often, that ends up serving to tip off the FSB to which hackers the FBI is most interested in, leading to them being induced to spy for the FSB itself. More troubling, information sharing with US authorities is believed to partly explain treason charges against some FSB officers.

Finally, there’s the fact that the Russians asked for proof that they hacked our election.

SECRETARY TILLERSON: The Russians have asked for proof and evidence. I’ll leave that to the intelligence community to address the answer to that question. And again, I think the President, at this point, he pressed him and then felt like at this point let’s talk about how do we go forward. And I think that was the right place to spend our time, rather than spending a lot of time having a disagreement that everybody knows we have a disagreement.

If the US hadn’t been represented by idiots at this meeting, the obvious follow-up would be to point to Russia’s efforts to undermine US extradition of Russians against whom the US has offered proof, at least enough to get a grand jury to indict, most notably of the three Russians involved in the Yahoo hack, as well as Yevgeniy Nikulin. The US would be all too happy to offer proof in those cases, but Russia is resisting the process that will end up in that proof.

But instead, Trump and his oil-soaked sidekick instead agreed to make future hacking of the US easier.

Trump Was Worried HR McMaster or Fiona Hill Would Spy on His Conversation with Putin

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There were two infuriating stories earlier this week in preparation of today’s meeting between President Trump and Vladimir Putin.

The Daily Beast reported that Trump’s aides wanted top NSC Russia expert Fiona Hill in the meeting between the presidents.

According to two White House aides, senior Trump administration officials have pressed for Hill—the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe and Russia and the author of critical psychological biography of Putin—to be in the room during the president’s highly anticipated meeting with Putin.

If Hill is there, these officials believe, it will help the White House avoid the perception that the president is too eager to cozy up to the Kremlin. The hope is to avoid a repeat of Trump’s last meeting with top Russian officials, during which he disclosed classified intelligence to two of the country’s top diplomats—and was pictured by Russian state media looking particularly friendly with them.

But it used linguistic gymnastics to avoid stating who might decide to keep Hill out of the meeting.

Then Axios reported that just Trump, Rex Tillerson, and a translator would represent the US.

There will likely only be six people in the room when President Trump meets President Putin on Friday at the sidelines of the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

According to an official familiar with the meeting’s planning, it will be Trump, Putin, the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, and translators.

But it, too, remained silent about who decided to keep the attendee list so small (though admittedly, that detail was a less crucial part of their story).

Thankfully, the NYT has finally revealed that it was Trump, not Putin, who chose to limit attendees.

Only six people attended the meeting itself: Mr. Trump and his secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson; Mr. Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov; and two interpreters.

The Russians had agitated to include several more staff members in the meeting, but Mr. Trump’s team had insisted that the meeting be kept small to avoid leaks and competing accounts later, according to an administration official with direct knowledge of the carefully choreographed meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity around the matter.

And he did so specifically to avoid leaks about what would transpire.

This means that Trump (personally, given the NYT portrayal) decided to exclude his National Security Advisor and top Russian advisor. And he did so, again, based on the NYT reporting, because he didn’t want a competing account from coming out. He basically excluded the key staffers who should have been in the meeting, in spite of the wishes of aides, to avoid having Russian critics describing what really happened in his meeting with Putin.

Remember, this is not the first time Trump has excluded McMaster from a key meeting: he also left McMaster sitting outside his meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, after belatedly inviting Tillerson in.

Lefties Learn to Love Leaks Again

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Throughout the presidential campaign, observers have noted with irony that many on the right discovered a new-found love for WikiLeaks. Some of the same people who had earlier decried leaks, even called Chelsea Manning a traitor, were lapping up what Julian Assange was dealing on a daily basis.

There was a similar, though less marked, shift on the left. While many on the left had criticized — or at least cautioned about — WikiLeaks from the start, once Assange started targeting their presidential candidate, such leaks became an unprecedented, unparalleled assault on decency, which no one seemed to say when similar leaks targeted Bashar al-Assad.

Which is why I was so amused by the reception of this story yesterday.

After revealing that Donald Trump’s Secretary of State nominee “was the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, leaked documents show” in the first paragraph, the article admits, in the fourth paragraph that,

Though there is nothing untoward about this directorship, it has not been reported before and is likely to raise fresh questions over Tillerson’s relationship with Russia ahead of a potentially stormy confirmation hearing by the US senate foreign relations committee. Exxon said on Sunday that Tillerson was no longer a director after becoming the company’s CEO in 2006.

The people sharing it on Twitter didn’t seem to notice that (nor did the people RTing my ironic tweet about leaks seem to notice). Effectively, the headline “leaks reveal details I have sensationalized” served its purpose, with few people reading far enough to the caveats that admit this is fairly standard international business practice (indeed, it’s how Trump’s businesses work too). This is a more sober assessment of the import of the document detailing Tillerson’s ties with the Exxon subsidiary doing business in Russia.

This Guardian article worked just like all the articles about DNC and Podesta emails worked, even with — especially with — the people decrying the press for the way it irresponsibly sensationalized those leaks.

The response to this Tillerson document is all the more remarkable given the source of this leak. The Guardian reveals it came from an anonymous source for Süddeutsche Zeitung, which in turn shared the document with the Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The leaked 2001 document comes from the corporate registry in the Bahamas. It was one of 1.3m files given to the Germany newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous source.

[snip]

The documents from the Bahamas corporate registry were shared by Süddeutsche Zeitung with the Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington DC.

That is, this document implicating Vladimir Putin’s buddy Rex Tillerson came via the very same channel that the Panama Papers had, which Putin claimed, back in the time Russia was rifling around the DNC server, was a US intelligence community effort to discredit him and his kleptocratic cronies, largely because that was the initial focus of the US-NGO based consortium that managed the documents adopted, a focus replicated at outlets participating.

See this column for a worthwhile argument that Putin hacked the US as retaliation for the Panama Papers, which makes worthwhile points but would only work chronologically if Putin had advance notice of the Panama Papers (because John Podesta got hacked on March 19, before the first releases from the Panama Papers on April 3).

There really has been a remarkable lack of curiosity about where these files came from. That’s all the more striking in this case, given that the document (barely) implicating Tillerson comes from the Bahamas, where the US at least was collecting every single phone call made.

That’s all the more true given the almost non-existent focus on the Bahamas leaks before — from what I can tell just one story has been done on this stash, though the documents are available in the ICIJ database. Indeed, if the source for the leaks was the same, it would seem to point to an outside hacker rather than an inside leaker. That doesn’t mean the leak was done just to hurt Tillerson. The leak, which became public on September 21, precedes the election of Trump, much less the naming of Tillerson. But it deserves at least some notice.

For what it’s worth, I think it quite possible the US has been involved in such leaks — particularly given how few Americans get named in them. But I don’t think the Panama Papers, which implicated plenty of American friends and even the Saudis, actually did target Putin.

Still, people are going to start believing Putin’s claims that this effort is primarily targeted at him if documents conveniently appear from the leak as if on command.

I am highly interested in who handed off documents allegedly stolen by Russia’s GRU to Wikileaks. But I’m also interested in who the source enabling asymmetric corruption claims, as if on demand, is.