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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 02 februari 2019

A National Security Threat

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

On Tuesday the leaders of the US intelligence community, all appointed by Trump, testified in Congress about their annual ‘Worldwide Threat Assessment,’ and the president didn’t like it.  In summary, the testimony came down to: Iran is still in compliance with the agreement that Trump pulled out of, North Korea has no intention whatsoever to denuclearize, ISIS has not only not been defeated but has morphed into an international terrorist organization, and Russia interfered in the 2016 elections and is preparing to do it again.   Since Trump has pretty much an opposite view on all four issues he tweeted that the assessment was ‘wrong’ and that the Directors of National Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI should go ‘back to school,’ because apparently they had not been taught ‘intelligence.’  A public rift like that between a president and his intelligence professionals has never occurred before, and what was already suspected after Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki became apparent:  Donald Trump is Putin’s instrument in lowering moral and integrity in the US intelligence forces, which makes his presidency America’s number one national security threat.

Adopting Putin’s worldview of course implies that sanctions on Russian enterprises should be lifted, which is why companies controlled by oligarch Oleg Deripaska are free to do business in the US again after some window dressing with the ownership, creating a windfall for Deripaska and for a Russian shareholder who had a previous business relationship with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, the official who lifted the sanctions.  It makes Democrats wonder if Putin has ‘kompromat’ on more members of the administration than just Trump, and in that context Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone is relevant.  Stone is doing his usual song and dance routine, but the expectation is that he’ll start singing about the president when he’s looking at potentially spending the rest of his life in prison.  Acting AG Whitaker meanwhile, in one of his last acts in that position, screwed up by announcing that Mueller would soon issue his final report, violating the rule that the Department of Justice doesn’t talk about ongoing investigations.  And Chris Christie speculated that Trump has much more to fear from the investigations by the Southern District of New York than from Mueller.

In a response to Trump’s criticism of the intelligence leaders Chuck Schumer urged them to ‘educate the president,’ knowing quite well that that is an impossible mission.  Completely missing in their assessment is a reference to a crisis on the southern border and the need for a wall.  The Democrats will never give the president money for that vanity project and at least twenty GOP senators won’t tolerate another shutdown, so that declaring a national emergency becomes Trump’s only option.  He is then guaranteed to lose a legal challenge, after which everybody can move on.

Having demonstrated his profound knowledge of international affairs the president turned to the issue of climate change, and in reference to the current polar temperatures in most of the US tweeted that ‘we could use some global warming,’ redundantly making clear that he doesn’t understand the difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate.’  We may hear more, similar wisdom from Trump when he finally delivers his State of the Union address to Congress next Tuesday.

In one of his spontaneous erratic conversations with reporters yesterday Trump said that the DNI and the CIA Director had told him they were ‘totally misquoted.’  Since their testimony was on live TV they must have misquoted themselves, but that detail eluded the president.  He also called the negotiations in Congress about border security a ‘waste of time,’ and declared that the wall is already being built.

 
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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 26 januari 2019

A Big Fat Defeat

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Donald Trump has one issue and one thing working for him.  The issue is national security, symbolized by keeping terrorists and drugs out of the country with a wall on the southern border, and what’s working for him is a strong economy.  With the partial shutdown he was destroying both.  Apart from the fact that for terrorists points of entry are primarily airports, and for drugs regular border crossings, national security was threatened in a variety of ways.  FBI agents issued a written statement saying that they could no longer effectively battle terrorism, gangs and drug trafficking, and five former Homeland Security Secretaries, including John Kelly, who until recently was Trump’s Chief of Staff, urged the White House and Congress to restore funding for what used to be their department, because otherwise it couldn’t keep the country safe.  Add to this that the TSA agents who check the luggage of airline travelers were not getting paid and therefore more often called in sick, and that air traffic controllers, who already have an extremely stressful job because of the combination of full responsibility and no control, were not getting paid either, which created more stress for them and endangered air traffic nationwide.

The week could have started so well for Trump.  The White House was gloating after Robert Mueller appeared to rebuke Buzzfeed’s assertion that the president had instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, but the celebration only lasted until Rudy Giuliani hit the Sunday morning talk shows and revealed that Trump had pursued a Trump Tower in Moscow right up to the 2016 elections.  The next day Hizzoner did his usual shuffle and tried to walk his erratic statements back, but the damage was done.  The optics of a two minute visit of Trump and Pence to the MLK monument were not good either, especially after the VP declared that Dr. King would have liked Trump’s policies.  The president’s next brilliant move was to inform Nancy Pelosi that he would give his State of the Union address next Tuesday in the House chamber, rain or shine.  The Speaker immediately responded that he would not be welcome as long as the shutdown continued, and after briefly pretending that he would give the speech at a different location Trump acknowledged that he had been outplayed.  He also admitted that he could not find any weakness in Pelosi, by being unable to come up with a nasty nickname and just calling her ‘Nancy.’

Yesterday neither of two Senate bills, one based on a ‘compromise’ Trump offered earlier that came down to his restoring two programs he had tried but so far failed to eliminate and receiving $5.7 billion for ‘The Wall,’ the other a Continuing Resolution that would end the shutdown, offered by the Democrats, gathered the 60 votes needed to pass.  Next, senators started looking for a compromise, but since nobody knew what kind of bill the president would be willing to sign the wait was for Trump, who caved today and reopened the government for three weeks without getting any funding for the wall.

As all this was playing out Michael Cohen issued a statement that he would not voluntarily testify in the House on February 7^th, because his family, in particular his father-in-law, had been threatened by both Trump and Rudy Giuliani.  This appears to be a clear case of witness tampering, for which according to Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, the president should be censured and Giuliani indicted.  To make sure that Cohen’s testimony is heard anyway he has now been subpoenaed by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

To make the president’s total defeat in his battle with Nancy Pelosi even worse his main economic adviser said that economic growth could be as low as 0% in the first quarter of 2019, thanks to the shutdown, taking away Trump’s strongest asset.  Additionally, it was reported that Jared Kushner had received a security clearance he did not qualify for, and this morning Trump adviser and ‘dirty trickster’ Roger Stone was arrested and indicted.

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 19 januari 2019

Rudy’s Marbles

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

In a CNN interview with Chris Cuomo Rudy Giuliani went off the rails.  He acknowledged that members of the Trump campaign probably colluded with the Russians, but maintained that the president knew nothing about it.  So while Paul Manafort shared polling data with a Russian secret agent, Don Jr., Manafort and Jared Kushner met with a lawyer working for the Kremlin, and Kushner tried to set up a back channel with Moscow, Trump was completely in the dark.  Add to that the fact that Michael Flynn had frequent contacts with Russians and lied about them and that Trump had a reputation as a micro-manager involved in every transaction at the Trump organization, and it explains why Hizzoner’s assertion lifted Cuomo’s eyebrows to a level they may not come back from.  It’s Giuliani’s role, as Trump’s TV lawyer, to get out in front of information that is soon to be revealed, but this time he apparently went too far and later tried to walk his words back by saying that neither Trump nor he knew anything about anybody colluding with the Russians at any time.  There were serious questions about Rudy having lost his marbles and the damage was done.

Meanwhile the stalemate in Washington is complete.  Nancy Pelosi asked Trump to delay his State of the Union speech or to mail it in because of security concerns related to the shutdown, and the president made a military plane for a congressional delegation to Afghanistan, led by Pelosi, unavailable, because ‘she should be in DC negotiating with him.’  Knowing that his poll numbers are becoming ever more unfavorable Trump said to his acting Chief of Staff “we’re getting crushed, why cannot we get a deal?,” indicating that he doesn’t realize that he cannot get a deal precisely because he’s getting crushed.  All the cards are in Pelosi’s favor, by cancelling the State of the Union she took his biggest podium away from Trump, while the president took something away from US troops in a war zone, who greatly value visits by politicians informing themselves.  A vote about the administration’s plan to lift sanctions against three companies owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska shows that Trump’s GOP support in Congress, even in the Senate, is crumbling, and that may be the only way out of the current mess, if Mitch McConnell finds his balls.

On the legal front Trump’s problems are mounting.  It was revealed that after he fired Comey the FBI started a counter intelligence investigation into the president, which would only be done if there was reasonable suspicion that he was either an agent of or targeted by Russia to act in its favor.  Mueller inherited this probe, and the fact that Trump withheld information about his meetings with Putin from his closest associates and even confiscated the interpreter’s notes from one of those meetings doesn’t help his case.  Neither does his proclaimed intention for the US to leave NATO.

Michael Cohen’s public testimony in Congress on February 7^th could become even more explosive than already expected since it was revealed that Trump’s former fixer hired an IT firm to manipulate on-line polls in Trump’s favor, and that the president ordered him to commit perjury when testifying in the House about the Trump Tower project in Moscow.  The latter, for which Mueller apparently has proof beyond Cohen’s word, is obviously obstruction of justice and as such an impeachable offense.

After Trump made barely veiled threats to his family Cohen now apparently fears for his life, although it is unlikely that the president will have him shot on 5^th Avenue before his testimony.  The latest revelations prompted Giuliani to say “if you believe Michael Cohen I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale,” not realizing that when it comes to believability only Trump scores lower than what was once ‘America’s Mayor.’

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 12 januari 2019

A Rat in the House

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

In business Trump had a reputation for paying off his last debt with his next loan, which most likely put him deeply in debt with Putin’s clique.  In politics the president is trying to do the same thing, taking attention away from the latest scandal by creating a new one.  There is no security crisis on the southern border, illegal crossings are at an 18 year low, but Trump manufactured a humanitarian crisis by making it all but impossible for asylum seekers to be processed and taking thousands of children away from their parents.  The next step would be to declare a national emergency and use his new autocratic powers to try and build his ludicrous wall, by taking money out of the Pentagon budget if an attempt to use emergency funding for victims of hurricanes in Puerto Rico and Texas and of wildfires in California fails.  Holding 800,000 government workers and a growing number of people and businesses depending on their services hostage, Trump now claims he never said Mexico would pay cash for the wall, in spite of videos showing the opposite.  Another video showed the results of a Home Depot saw cutting easily through the president’s preferred wall design.

As a true grifter, in a short speech from the Oval Office that resembled a hostage video but turned out to be a fundraising ploy for his campaign, for which the major networks were abused, Trump made his case to the American people.  The next day he gave candy to Nancy Pelosi and when she didn’t give him $5.7 billion for the wall in return he ran out of a meeting in the Situation Room, making the impasse complete.  Declaring a national emergency now appears to be his only way out of this mess, in spite of the fact that it will be immediately challenged in court and stayed, because even in Trump’s own words the crisis is not on the southern border but in DC.  The president can then tell his base that he tried as hard as he could and keep the wall alive as an issue for the next campaign.  Meanwhile his attempt to push other scandals off the front pages is failing.  It was revealed that Paul Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with a Russian who is still connected with his country’s security services, and on February 7^th Michael Cohen will publicly testify before the House Oversight Committee about the crimes Trump ordered him to commit.

There can be no doubt that the information Manafort provided to the Russians was used to interfere in the US elections, and if Trump knew anything about it it makes a conspiracy charge even more shut than the Trump Tower meeting with Natalia Vesilnitskaya, who last week was proven to be a Russian government agent, already does.   Cohen’s testimony can be even more damaging, because for the whole world to see and hear on live television he will implicate Trump in a campaign finance violation scheme that constitutes a felony he will go to jail for.

The fact that Trump in good mafia boss tradition called Cohen ‘a rat’ indicates how fearful he is of his former fixer’s testimony.  Cohen won’t be able to talk about things prosecutors are still investigating, like the Trump Organization, but he will have enough to say.  Anticipating the fall-out of these developments the White House has added seventeen new lawyers to its staff, and Rudy Giuliani demanded to see the Mueller report before the Department of Justice decides what to do with it.

Meanwhile furloughed government workers and those working without pay are suffering, unable to pay mortgages and the like.  The Coast Guard suggested to its members to hold yard sales or become dog walkers to make ends meet.  Because for Trump the only thing that matters is ‘the tallest’ or ‘the biggest,’ at some point he will boast about being responsible for the longest shutdown, which it will be by tomorrow.

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