Three Things: In the Debris Field After Health Care ‘Freedom’ Act

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I still don’t have enough caffeine in my system and it’s nearly noon here. An entire pot of java may do the trick. As I rouse and read the hot takes after the failure of H.R. 1628 last night, a few thoughts stick with me.

~ 3 ~

All the think pieces — most written by white men lauding John McCain’s maverick move by departing from the party line — are evidence ‘the show’ worked.
McCain called it that when asked before the vote last night which way he was going. “Watch the show,” he said.

Meanwhile, the two women senators who have been firm all along they couldn’t vote for a bill causing damage to their constituents receive far fewer plaudits from the same mostly-white-male pundit class. Murkowski had been threatened by the Interior Secretary at Trump’s request. I haven’t heard for certain, but I’ll bet Collins received threats as well, probably from Trump-supporting constituents.

McCain won’t get those kinds of threats. He made his point last night about the power he wields within GOP Senate caucus as the final A/B switch on legislation. But the GOP Senate already knew this.

What McCain did was give the GOP a face-saving way to vote for a piece of shit they didn’t want to pass, without the repercussions Collins and Murkowski (and at varying times, Heller and Capito) have faced for rejecting a POS bill.

This is why they waited until the last goddamned minute to draft a meager eight-pages, slapping in some egregious stuff to ensure Collins and Murkowski couldn’t vote, adding the 20% annual premium increase as a coup de grace.

Because McCain would do the maverick kabuki for them, slap on his mask and robes, make big gestures and kill the bill for them.

And it worked not only because all the white male pundit class got suckered by their usual privileged blindness, but the white male Tweeter-in-Chief bought it, hook, line, sinker. He blamed all the Democrats and three GOP senators. All the other senators are off the hook.

Bonus: McCain’s legacy is salvaged with the patriarchal punditry.

Great ‘show’, maverick.

~ 2 ~

Scaramucci is nothing more than a highly-animated automaton on a stage; nothing he says is real. Why? Because the real communications are being run out of house by Steve Bannon, and likely in violation of federal law.

What is it and to whom is Bannon really communicating for the White House?
This operation may be in violation of the Antideficiency Act, but is it also in violation of the Presidential Records Act? What about any other regulations regarding FOIA?

Don’t believe me about Scaramucci’s role? Take a look at your news feed and point to any announcement about his firing or resignation. You know damned well had a communications director acted like he has under any other previous administration he’d have been walked out the White House’s fence.

p.s. Some say Scaramucci’s lowering discourse. Come the fuck on. He talks the way all of Wall Street’s white males do. The misogynist crack about Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ appearance? Par for the course.

~ 1 ~

Recommended lunch hour read for you: a book review by Andrew Bacevich in London Review of Books on The General v. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War by H.W. Brands. Bacevich’s background here.

Putting this book on my shopping list after this review, given how much power Trump has given and is likely to give to the military, breaking with civilian control.

~ 0 ~

That’s it for now. I’m stewing on something else but it’ll be dedicated and not an open thread like this one. Hasta pasta.

With Clowns To The Left, And Jokers On The Right, Trump Turns To Scaramucci

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What is up today, you ask?

Well, not much…..oh, holy shit!

On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director. He wasn’t happy. Earlier in the night, I’d tweeted, citing a “senior White House official,” that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with President Trump, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. It was an interesting group, and raised some questions. Was Trump getting strategic advice from Hannity? Was he considering hiring Shine? But Scaramucci had his own question—for me.

“Who leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. “I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,” he said. “You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.”

Ooof. That is pretty psychotic on the part of Scaramouche, glad he didn’t go too batshit…. Yikes, nevermind:

“Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: “ ‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ” (Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.)
Scaramucci was particularly incensed by a Politico report about his financial-disclosure form, which he viewed as an illegal act of retaliation by Priebus. The reporter said Thursday morning that the document was publicly available and she had obtained it from the Export-Import Bank. Scaramucci didn’t know this at the time, and he insisted to me that Priebus had leaked the document, and that the act was “a felony.”

“I’ve called the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice,” he told me.
“Are you serious?” I asked.

“The swamp will not defeat him,” he said, breaking into the third person. “They’re trying to resist me, but it’s not going to work. I’ve done nothing wrong on my financial disclosures, so they’re going to have to go fuck themselves.”

Just to be clear, this is the rootin tootin slick dick Harvard Law financial genius that Trump brought in to clean up his Presidency’s previous failures, and bring order and success to the West Wing.

A fine tuned machine!

A Sword Never Kills: The Trump Administration’s Increasing Deadliness

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This was absolutely revolting news:

It’s but one example of the increasing mortality under Trump’s administration. A Dreamer — an example of the former magnanimity of U.S. policy who could have been a stellar spokesperson for this country — baked to death in a trailer.

But wait, there’s more. Much more:

… Monitoring group Airwars, in new figures provided to The Daily Beast, estimated that the coalition killed over 2,200 civilians in ISIS-held territory in Iraq and Syria between Trump’s inauguration on January 20 and July 13. This represents more than 360 civilian deaths a month and at least 12 a day since Trump entered the White House.

According to the coalition’s figures, its strikes have killed 603 civilians since the beginning of the airstrike campaign against ISIS in 2014. Of those, Airwars estimates that around 40 percent of them came after Trump’s inauguration, alluding to the possibility of a greater disregard for civilian life at a time when ISIS’s hold on its self-styled caliphate is coming to an end. …

More unnecessary, unwarranted civilian deaths, at least double the rate of the previous administration since Inauguration Day — the utter sloppiness with which the military has now been authorized to operate against ISIS will only increase radicalization as it sows death.

This sloppiness was foreshadowed early in this administration with the January 29 raid in Yemen, resulting in the death of a Navy SEAL and 30 civilians including mothers and children. Whether any truly ‘actionable intelligence’ was obtained is up in the air; Trump, however, obtained public relations material for his first State of the Union address. How fortunate for him.

Yes, how fortunate for Trump that the American public has yet to realize he is not careful and judicious when it comes to human life. He is, instead, cruel, mean, selfish and reckless.

Today the Senate votes on a Motion to Proceed with the next iteration of Trump’s desired Repeal-and-Replace-ACA attempt. If the GOP succeeds in carrying out Trump’s aims to end ACA, people will be forced off health insurance keeping them alive today.

We’re all in the back of an over-warm trailer. We’re all in a house in ISIS-held Syria. But we don’t have to be.

Seneca the Younger said, “A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.”

Take the sword out of the killer’s hand. It’s within our power.

Call your senator and ask them to reject any effort to repeal and replace the ACA, for starters. Millions of Americans will thank you, some of whom you surely know, many of whom we can save from death. We can start there.

Trumpnami 2 by Rayne for Emptywheel.net

Trumpnami: Someone Tsurfed the News Tsunami?

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It’s a Category 5 hurricane of news when the pros can’t keep up. I laughed when I saw this tweet by Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffrey this Friday. It looked and felt like everyone in the news industry was flailing, dog paddling as fast as possible to stay afloat of this tick-tock:

Around noon: the news day erupted when Sean Spicer’s exit and Anthony Scaramucci’s entrance as White House Communications Director is announced. Media blew up the internet with all manner of content related to Spicer including Melissa McCarthy skits on Saturday Night Live and Scaramucci’s climate change tweets.

About 4:00-ish or earlier: some outlets reported on former national security adviser Susan Rice meeting with Senate Intel Committee about the Russia probe; Sen. Richard Burr disclosed it was Rep. Devin Nunes who created the “unmasking thing.” Again, media generated more chatter.

After 4:00 p.m.: all hell broke loose when the Washington Post reported on Attorney General Sessions undisclosed and intercepted conversation with Russia’s Kislyak. WaPo has a really annoying habit of removing the original time stamp on their story and leaving only the last updated time under the hed; the last update was 9:49 p.m.

There was another important story published amid all the hubbub, but it didn’t get anywhere near the same level of attention as the change in White House comms staff or Sessions’ perjury. I can’t find the original time the Wall Street Journal published its piece on Jared Kushner’s latest financial disclosures, but it was neatly sandwiched between Spicer’s hand-off to Scaramucci, and the Washington Post’s report on Sessions’ convo with Kislyak.

WASHINGTON— Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, on Friday released a revised version of his personal financial disclosure showing his initial filing omitted dozens of assets, including commercial real estate, bonds issued by the New York water and sewer authority, a personal art collection and a New Jersey liquor license.

According to the disclosure, 77 assets were “inadvertently omitted” from Mr. Kushner’s earlier form and were added during what the form’s footnotes describe as the “ordinary review” process with the government ethics office. Some 60 of those were related to one collection of bonds. The updated form also provides additional information about 77 other assets, offering more detail about the structure of Mr. Kushner’s real estate assets. Mr. Kushner’s initial disclosure, released in March, hadn’t then been certified by the Office of Government Ethics.

How interesting — a Kushner-centric story about yet more inadequate and untimely disclosures, published late on a Friday afternoon, closing the window of availability for comment given the impending Sabbath.

And the same story, appearing in WSJ, wouldn’t appear in the print edition until Saturday morning. It’s DOA by the time folks on Wall Street get the story, including the BILLION in loans the WSJ’s analysis team found Kushner had not previously reported — and WSJ itself had been sitting on this information until OGE certified Kushner’s latest report.

Suspicions run high that the White House leaked the intelligence on Sessions’ to WaPo. We know now WaPo had the story a month ago but didn’t run it; they were likely waiting for corroborating source(s). Presto, one just shows up; who had access to that intelligence besides the Gang of Eight?

The White House also had complete control over the announcement of the communications director change-over.

What’s the chances the Kushner story was likewise nudged to fit inside the news storm so that Jared could surf his way out undeterred by the press? Sourcing on the article appears immaculate; perhaps the reporters call the Office of Ethics in Government every day, perhaps they watch a feed, but the timing is so incredibly perfect to assure this particular story doesn’t get a lot of traction.

And dear Crazy-Tweeter-in-Law did his thing from the can the following Saturday morning — tweeting a spume of crazy, ensuring there’s little afterthought given to a gnarly hang-ten off yesterday’s massive wave.

The nifty little kicker is that it wasn’t just Jared Kushner who released belated financial data.

So did Ivanka.

Ms. Trump received $2.5 million in “salary and severance” from her father’s business operations, according to Friday’s disclosure. She also received a $787,500 advance for her book, “Women Who Work.”

[…]

The disclosure also shows Ms. Trump earned $50,000 for her work overseeing a trust for some of the children of Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of both 21st Century Fox and News Corp . Ms. Trump resigned at the end of last year as a trustee. 21st Century Fox and News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, share common ownership.

There was more, but between the limits of Fair Use and just plain disgust, I won’t excerpt it here.

The question remains: by manipulating media, did Daddy give his girl a little push on her own surfboard, too?

Reminder: this is an open thread. Bring your crazy here in comments but behave.

Trumpnami: Good Luck Staying Ahead of That

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‘That‘ — I can’t even come up with a family-friendly term for the tsunami of crap Trump set in motion this week.

The New York Times’ three-reporter interview with Trump had already generated heavy surf Wednesday and Thursday. The amount of insanity packed in one summary article and published excerpts, combined with problematic journalistic methodology, agitated a massive undertow.

Last evening, the Washington Post reported that Trump has asked his attorneys about the limits of presidential pardons while they look for ways to undermine the legitimacy of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

We also learned Mark Corallo left Team Trump.

Ditto attorney Marc Kasowitz, though depending on who you read, he’s either ‘left’ or taken a ‘lesser role’.

That’s just last night.

Sandwiched between NYT’s one-two punch and last night’s WaPo piece are pieces sure to increase pressure.

Like Bloomberg’s report that Mueller is looking into Trump’s business transactions.

(Side note: I have a problem with Bloomberg’s piece in particular as it claims the stock market responded negatively to the reporting about Trump. Really? There’s nothing else going on, like news about Apple, Netflix, Musk’s Boring, skittishness ahead of GE’s earnings, Carrier’s layoffs, so on, which might concern the market? Oh, Exxon‘s little hand slap…right. Nah.)

I don’t know how we stay ahead of this wave. But after learning

— Trump wouldn’t have nominated Sen. Jeff Sessions to attorney general if he’d known in advance Sessions would recuse himself;

— Trump thinks Mueller investigating his family’s finances is too far;

— Less than 179 days in office, Trump was already considering the use of presidential pardons for family;

it’s time to ask Congress to revisit the independence of special counsel under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to assure Mueller’s investigation is completely out of reach of the White House and its compromised attorney general. As the law addressing the special counsel currently exists, the role remains under the purview of the attorney general. This is increasingly problematic, given Trump’s statements about Sessions’ recusal, which may be construed as a form of intimidation.

Yeah, yeah, Scalia thought the independent counsel was an overreaching breach between the legislative and executive branches. But Scalia likely never foresaw this level of insanity, stupidity, and criminality in the White House, combined with an utterly flaccid majority party, either complicit or unwilling to perform oversight within its powers and purpose. In his dissent of Morrison v. Olson, Scalia wrote,

It is the proud boast of our democracy that we have “a government of laws and not of men.” …

What happens when the executive office ignores or violates laws, and Congress turns a blind eye? What backstop is there to assure the ‘government of laws’ continues to execute the law in spite of the failure of men charged with creating and upholding the laws?

Commenting on a tweet by former Eric Holder, former Justice Department spokesperson Matthew Miller tweeted last night,

“Yep. These leaks are partially intended to test the boundaries of what he can get away with. Like w/ Comey firing, silence is acquiescence.” [bold mine]

It’s not on Congress alone, though, to hold fast the boundaries on executive power. It’s on citizens to demand Congress demonstrate limits as representatives of the people.

By the way, to reach Congress call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at: 202-224-3121

As mentioned in the blurb, this is an open thread.

Three Things: Shocker, Badger, Vapor

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Summer doldrums are hitting hard here; it’s too steamy today to do much but watch the garden grow and the ‘hot takes’ bloom. Let’s breeze through these.

~ 1 ~

Shocker: The White House had its ass handed to it last night, alongside a serving of vanilla ice cream and peach cobbler. While it was kissing up to some über conservative Senators, Utah’s Mike Lee and Kansas’ Jerry Moran announced they would not support the Motion to Proceed on the latest POS edition of AHCA.

Excellent work on the dual tweets dispatched simultaneously at 8:30 p.m., by the way (see this one and this one). Live by the tweets, die by the tweets, Littlehands.

What I find particularly interesting is the secrecy this announcement revealed. Not just the discreet collaboration between two senators from very red states, taking advantage of the additional time afforded them by John McCain’s personal health care challenge. Apparently Senate Majority Leader Mitch “Yertle” McConnell has had such a tight grip on the legislative process that even his wingman, John Cornyn, doesn’t know what’s going on until McConnell’s office emails his deputies.

Not exactly a way to win friends and influence enemies, that.

(For some reason McConnell’s super-secret hyper control makes me think of the compartments Washington Post wrote about with regard to the Russian election hacks and the subsequent investigation. Why is that?)

~ 2 ~

Badger: Russia is pissed off about its dachas-away-from-home, threatening retaliation if they’re not returned. Uh, right. Like the U.S. suddenly decided to boot Russian occupants out of the Long Island and Maryland digs for no good reason last year. Russian Foreign Ministry “reserves the right to retaliate based on the principle of reciprocity,” forgetting that Obama took a too-measured response to repeated incursions by Russia into U.S. information systems — including hacks of the White House and Defense Department in 2015 — not to mention the ‘Illegals Program‘ spy who worked at Microsoft circa 2010. (Let’s also not forget an ‘Illegals Program’ spy worked their way close to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign co-chair.) The U.S. could and should have been far more aggressive in its response; Russia isn’t entitled to reciprocity.

This is a test for Congressional Republicans. Either cement sanctions against Russia including the ‘foreclosure’ on these two compounds, or admit complicity in the undermining of democratic process last year. The GOP needs to revisit a CRS report on U.S.-Russia relations and Executive Orders 13660, 13661, and 13662 before they give any ground. [EDIT: See also EO 13964, issued April 1, 2016 in response to “malicious cyberactivity” — this EO the GOP will probably ignore just as it has all signs of Team Trump collusion as well as Russian interference in the 2016 general election.]

If there are truly compelling reasons in the nation’s interest for conceding these compounds, give them back — but only after the buildings have been razed and permits for reconstruction are denied under sanctions. The Russian government can work out of trailers on the property, or on boats from the dock. They do not need to be any more comfortable than they have been.

~ 3 ~

Vapor: No longer a ghost — we  now know who the eighth attendee was at Donnie Junior’s June 9th meeting at Trump Tower last year. Lucky number seven is believed to be a translator — and wow, so is number eight!

Which seems kind of odd — in the information Junior dumped online, there was no mention that Veselnitskaya didn’t speak English and needed a translator, or who would be the translator. Doesn’t it seem strange that there would be no concerns about security clearance into Trump Tower or a meeting with a presidential candidate’s son and/or campaign team given the meeting requester was a foreign national?

Perhaps because there was little concern, Body Number Eight, Ike Kaveladze, purportedly showed up as Veselnitskaya’s translator only to learn she had brought her own, Body Number Seven, Anatoli Samochornov. It’s not clear from USA Today’s reporting who asked Kaveladze to attend; did Junior just let any Russian in the neighborhood attend the meeting? Aras Agalarov sent Kaveladze “just to make sure it happened and to serve as an interpreter if necessary,” Kaveladze’s lawyer told NYT. Why so many witnesses?

The room must have been a little crowded with Junior, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rob Goldstone, Veselnitskaya and two translators as well as Rinat Akhmetshin.

Given the two translators, Akhmetshin’s presence seems even more curious. Why was he there if there were two translators?

~ ~ ~

That’s that. I could go on but it’s too damned hot here. Refresh your iced tea and settle yourself in front of the fan. This is an open thread — behave.

Three Things: Lawyer Dumps Kushner, Hot at Fox, Dimon’s Douchery

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Can’t keep up with the amount of crap in the news today. It’s a Friday smack in the middle of summer, for god’s sake; can’t the news-making weasels give the treadmill a rest? Go to the beach already. Chris Christie can give you directions. Sheesh.

– 1 –

Jamie Gorelick put on her boots made for walking. She’s “wrapping up,” they say. Yeah, like rotting fish in news paper, wrapping up. The ~100 names added to Kushner’s SF-86 must have been the last straw — or perhaps the baloney fib about a staffer hitting Enter too soon on a correction to the SF-86 (which is supposed to be a paper form?).

With Team Trump, watch the women. When they leave it’s a sign, just like with The Donald’s ex-wives

– 2 –

Fox News’ too-few journalists are struggling with the crap Team Trump is shoveling. Check out Shepard Smith’s southern accent unleashed while talking with Chris Wallace about all the lies from the White House. Wallace is nearly without words at one point.

– 3 –

JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon went off on a rant about the U.S. today. Depending on which outlet you read you’ll find completely different takes on what he said. Sadly, it’s more of the same crap which both caused the 2008 crash and put us in this lie-filled quagmire today (too much litigation, complex non-competitive taxes, blah-blah-blah). The jerk-offs on Wall Street don’t realize that regulations they bitch about are what makes the U.S. a safe place to live and do business. China has envied our clean skies and our banking system assures businesses will see their money all their money at the end of the day.

If anything is fucked up with the U.S. it’s that its workers don’t make a living wage and are sandwiched between outrageous college tuition payments and rising rents — and guys like Dimon (who should have been perp walked) think coastal real estate is pricey?

– 4 –

Okay, a fourth thing: Corey Lewandowski tried to give Donald Trump cover for his whereabouts on June 9th last year. WHY? We know now there were EIGHT people in the meeting room though it’s not clear who the last person was. Paul Manafort? Or Donald Trump?

Treat this like an open thread — and treat each other gently, you’ve only just started the weekend!

And Now Akmetshin, or Why the Hell *Didn’t* Obama ‘Tapp’ Team Trump?

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A couple days ago Marcy pointed out that Donnie Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9, 2016, offered proof the Obama administration didn’t ‘wiretapp’ the Trump campaign.

Which is all fine and dandy until today’s revelation that a former-GRU-agent-cum-campaign-hacker-now-lobbyist present at the same meeting.

What. The. Actual. Fuck?

It’s bad enough contacts with foreign nationals have to be teased out one by one from Team Trump, but to appear to hide multiple Russian contacts attending one meeting, particularly those with background in military and/or intelligence, is utterly ridiculous.

If this meeting was completely on the up-and-up, wouldn’t Junior have included the names of ALL the attendees in his online spill-fest?

It’s almost as if Junior and the rest of Team Trump knew that the presence of more than one Russian, particularly Rinat Akhmetshin, wasn’t a good thing.

It’s almost as if Natalia Veselnitskaya knew Akhmetshin’s presence wasn’t a good thing, either, since the communications Junior dumped online don’t indicate her intention to bring Akhmetshin with her to the June 9th meeting.

Read the AP’s reporting and see if you don’t come away with a bunch of new questions about Junior’s meeting. I sure did…

— Did Veselnitskaya leave documents with Junior and the rest of Team Trump? Akhmetsin is very sketchy on this point.

— Did any U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agency have any indication that Akhmetshin as well as Veselnitskaya were in NYC let alone at Trump Tower? Keep in mind the Evgeny Buryakov case and the “others known and unknown” who had been supporting Buryakov and two other Russian spies in 2013.

— Were members of the Gang of Eight, including Mitch McConnell and Devin Nunes, told last summer before the election of the multiple Russians meeting with Junior and Team Trump, even without any ‘wiretapp’ used on foreign national attendees? Is this one of the issues which riled up former Sen. Harry Reid, encouraging him to send a letter to former FBI Director Jim Comey to ask for an investigation?

— Are U.S. intelligence agencies not following Akhmetsin because he was believed to be a registered lobbyist, in spite of the fact he’s accused of being a hacker AND the U.S. government had been repeatedly hacked by Russia in 2015-2016?

— Has Team Trump been in contact with DHS’ Mike Kelly at all about Akhmetsin, especially since Sen. Chuck Grassley sent a letter to Kelly [pdf] in April this year asking for more information about Akhmetsin?

If I think about this much longer, I’m sure I’ll come up with a few more questions. I don’t know how there wasn’t some form of ‘tapp’ following so many Russians in one spot, considering the Prevezon money laundering case was still open in the background. I get it — wiretapping defense lawyers is a no-no. But a meeting at which Rinat Akhmetsin was present, in a building where Russian money laundering had been conducted?

The whole situation stinks like a week-old kulebyáka left in the sun.

Curiouser: The Blindsiding of Sally Yates

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Remember back in early May I noted the curious timing of events leading up to former Lt. General Michael Flynn’s departure from the Trump administration and the launch of Trump’s ‘travel ban’?

It looks like former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates was completely blindsided by the travel ban, according to The New Yorker.

Yates told McGahn that she would have the Flynn materials for him by Monday morning. She left the White House, stopped at the Justice Department to pick up some documents, and continued on to the airport. She was returning to Atlanta for a dinner honoring a camp for children with serious illnesses and disabilities, which her husband has supported for years. On the way to the airport, she received a call from her deputy, Matt Axelrod. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just read online that the President has executed this travel ban,” he said.

It was the first Yates had heard of the order. “I had been sitting in Don McGahn’s office an hour before that,” she said. “He didn’t tell me.” She later learned that lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, at the Justice Department, had reviewed the order, and that they had been instructed not to share it with her. A source familiar with the process said that even the most senior Trump aide assigned to Yates’s office didn’t know about the order until he saw the news on CNN.

Yates was in the White House meeting with the White House Counsel and the administration couldn’t bother to flag her and tell her, “By the way, we have something new for you to enforce”?

They couldn’t brief her on the order in advance?

The Office of Legal Counsel was  “instructed not to share it with her”?

They couldn’t call her directly and tell her about the order even after they signed and implemented it?

She had to look up the text of the order on the internet and read it. It doesn’t look as if the Trump administration ever bothered to contact Yates directly about the order, yet they expected her and the rest of federal law enforcement to blindly defend it.

Come Monday evening — after she told the Justice Department that afternoon it cannot enforce the travel ban — she was summarily fired. Trump called her “weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration” in her dismissal letter.

Either this administration was (is) completely out of its depth, unable to read organizational charts, understand how to administer operations changes, and muster basic team management skills, relying instead on media across the internet and television to disseminate information about executive orders throughout the executive branch…

Or they wanted to completely derail and swamp Yates from pulling together “underlying evidence” describing Flynn’s conduct for the following Monday morning after she left the White House on Friday evening, January 27.

Nor did they have any intention of successfully rolling out a legitimate ban on travel to thwart credible terrorist threats.

Curiouser and curiouser.

From Long Island and Maryland with Love

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Yet another Trump-Russia-related story dropped after regular business hours, this time in a holiday news dump zone. But after weeks of big stories dropping later in the day, we’re all conditioned to hold off our cocktails.

The Washington Post article had two tidbits I found interesting (Marcy tackles the anonymous letter at the root of the story). First, Russian Ambassador Kislyak’s reaction to Trump son-in-law and transition team member Jared Kushner’s proposal to establish a backchannel between Trump’s team and Russia.

Kislyak reportedly was taken aback by the suggestion of allowing an American to use Russian communications gear at its embassy or consulate — a proposal that would have carried security risks for Moscow as well as the Trump team.

Yeah. Not the first time Russia agents found American behavior sketchy. Recall the 2015 arrest of three Russian spies in New York? Evgeny Buryakov was really skeptical about his American contact’s insistence on casino business, and with good reason. Kislyak sounds just as skeptical about Kushner’s request in today’s WaPo piece.

And then this bit:

Russia would also have had reasons of its own to reject such an overture from Kushner. Doing so would require Moscow to expose its most sophisticated communications capabilities — which are likely housed in highly secure locations at diplomatic compounds — to an American.

Remember Obama’s last sanctions on Russia, ordered December 29? They included evicting two diplomatic compounds — one in Long Island, another in Maryland (back to this Maryland compound in a moment). What’s the chances these evictions were not only punitive but as a deterrent to their use for backchannel communications?

I’ve wondered for a while now about the communications methods Russian spies have used in the U.S., pondering about them in my post about 2015’s three-man spy ring. What might have been left behind after the last Obama administration sanctions?

Now back to Maryland and that storied Pioneer Point estate on the water, used by putative Russian diplomats as their dacha away from the hubbub of Washington D.C. It’s a lovely place, conveniently located near Annapolis, not an overly long drive from D.C., delightful waterfront for boating.

And only a hop-skip-jump across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge or a boat ride over the bay from Strategic Campaign Group (SCG) at 191 Main St #310, Annapolis — an address about a block from docks and waterfront restaurants. You may recall SCG was raided earlier this month in relation to reported conservative fundraising scams. Just so happens SCG has ties to Paul Manafort and to the Trump organization by former employee James Perry. At the time of the raid, the FBI said SCG was under investigation for fundraising related to a 2013 race.

I’m sure the proximity of SCG to the Russian’s Pioneer Point dacha is just a coincidence. But squirrel away the location for future reference.

Off to have the first holiday weekend cocktail — and no, it’s not a White Russian or a Moscow Mule. Have a good one!

UPDATE — 9:50 p.m. EDT —
Reuters dropped another one about a half-hour ago. Really, Jared? You can’t recall three additional contacts with Russian ambassador Kislyak? You’re really going to make Jamie Gorelick torch her reputation with this “dog ate my homework” prevarication? Are you really so clueless about communications collection? Because if you are, that’s as big a reason for your security clearance to be yanked as your lying has been. Somebody terminate his clearance immediately, please, whether he’s a target of the investigation or not.

I need another cocktail. Race you to the bar. If only we could make Jared buy us all a round.