The (new, straight-from-scratch) Trump thread

[Flip Flopped]

]A journalist is now soliciting the opinions of military personnel or veterans as to whether Trump's highlighting of Owen's widow was well-liked. One would think the only person whose opinion matters is that bereaved mother of three young children.

Edited to add: Thanks for putting Gorka's service to the UK into perspective. I'd been wondering how he'd fallen so low. Now I understand it wasn't the toughest CT job in the UK.

The father is not enchanted with Trump, refused to meet him and is demanding an inquiry. The verdict of Twitter is that veterans don't approve of the way Trump exploited the widow.

Not quite sure whether you're being ironic about Gorka or not. I really find him quite repulsive, and actually dangerous, myself.

It will take me some time to familiarize myself with this new software. I've just wasted a lot of my time trying to resize my avatar image within the miserable 9 KB allowed and I've given up on that. Also I can't see how to "like" posts here.

Ah... discovered how to "like"

That's right, Twitter veterans expressed strong disapproval for how Trump used Owen's widow as a "prop," while journalists found the four minute stand ovation and Trump's remarks touching. Journalists doorstep recently bereaved people to fill out stories, so they may want to reflect on that. It's certainly possible that the bereaved father and the widow see things differently. Everybody is entitled their grief. I listened to the speech and looked at parts of it. Trump went with the moment and ad libbed what the widow and audience needed to hear, specifically the vision of Owens in Heaven looking down at them at that moment.

I can't stand Gorka. Here are three hilarious and sobering blog posts dissecting his dissertation from the Lawyers, Guns, & Money blog: one, two, three.

[Flip Flopped]

From today's Lawfare blog post "What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath?" by Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic:

It is that the presidential oath is actually the glue that holds together many of our system’s functional assumptions about the presidency and the institutional reactions to it among actors from judges to bureaucrats to the press. When large enough numbers of people within these systems doubt a president’s oath, those assumptions cease operating. They do so without anyone’s ever announcing, let alone ruling from the bench, that the President didn’t satisfy the Presidential Oath Clause and thus is not really president.

[Strelnikov]

From today's Lawfare blog post "What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath?" by Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic:

It is that the presidential oath is actually the glue that holds together many of our system’s functional assumptions about the presidency and the institutional reactions to it among actors from judges to bureaucrats to the press. When large enough numbers of people within these systems doubt a president’s oath, those assumptions cease operating. They do so without anyone’s ever announcing, let alone ruling from the bench, that the President didn’t satisfy the Presidential Oath Clause and thus is not really president.

Bingo....there has been a crisis of leadership in the Trump administration from before it started, because he is completely untrustworthy.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, in the case of Donald Trump, keep in mind, Donald Trump lies as easily as you and I breathe. He is, by becoming president of the United States, the number one con artist in the history of the world. He has spent his entire adult life deeply in the embrace of violent felons, Russian mobsters, American mobsters, assorted swindlers and crooks. He has cheated his own workers out of their pay. He has cheated small business people out of their fees. He has swindled investors in properties that were branded with the Trump name. And so, it’s absolutely critical to understand that you can’t rely on anything that Donald Trump says as president of the United States, but especially when he knows that he’s got stuff in his closet to hide.

Now, my colleague Jim Henry, who wrote his report for DCReport, my nonprofit news organization, has spent a lot of time digging into the Russian connections here, and they are vast, deep. They go back more than 30 years. And an important element to understand about why this matters with the Russians, who are the Russian oligarchs? They are a state-sponsored network of international criminals. And Donald Trump has had so many involvements with them, involving the Trump SoHo hotel, the sale of property and other things Jim can talk about. And then we get Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, who is in bed with these guys right up to his eyeballs.

- David Cay Johnson being interviewed by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the pressing need to know about Trump's links to Russia.

[Flip Flopped]

Handy chart of Trump family's and Trump associates' ties to Russia: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6CVydmUwAE5sUZ.jpg

[Flip Flopped]

Here's a post from the Just Security blog called "Tapping Trump?" by Julian Sanchez. It explains what's been reported about surveillance related to Trump Tower/Trump associates. It also clarifies the legal options available to a federal investigation prior to undertaking surveillance.

[Flip Flopped]

Here's a great explainer "The Conspiratorial Game of Telephone in Bannon's Rag that Made Left, Right, and POTUS Go Crazy" that Twitter @emptywheel posted on their blog. The piece highlights the inaccurate news reporting that accumulated to make Trump freak out.

Here's the ending:

Based on the assumption there is a FISA order covering at least some of his close associates, but probably not one covering him, understand what has happened here:

1. Trump’s Attorney General, who claims he had already decided to recuse, recused after his nomination lies were exposed, meaning he no longer controls the investigation into his boss

2. A misleading article written in response to that recusal led Trump to claim he was being targeted

3. Based on the claim, Trump sent out his WHCO to find a FISA order probably not targeting him but probably targeting his aides

4. Having just been deprived of visibility and control over the investigation, Trump is forcibly obtaining another way to control it

[Larkin]

Here's a great explainer "The Conspiratorial Game of Telephone in Bannon's Rag that Made Left, Right, and POTUS Go Crazy" that Twitter @emptywheel posted on their blog. The piece highlights the inaccurate news reporting that accumulated to make Trump freak out.

Here's the ending:

Based on the assumption there is a FISA order covering at least some of his close associates, but probably not one covering him, understand what has happened here:

1. Trump’s Attorney General, who claims he had already decided to recuse, recused after his nomination lies were exposed, meaning he no longer controls the investigation into his boss

2. A misleading article written in response to that recusal led Trump to claim he was being targeted

3. Based on the claim, Trump sent out his WHCO to find a FISA order probably not targeting him but probably targeting his aides

4. Having just been deprived of visibility and control over the investigation, Trump is forcibly obtaining another way to control it

Presidents don't have the power to order wiretaps, but they do have the power to inquire into them. Trump could simply ask for an intel briefing (added: but I see Sara Azari contradicting me on CNN on that - not sure now). Instead he's relying on Breitbart and apparently about to ask Congress for an investigation.

The real issue here is how long Trump can count on the loyalty of his support base. The pro-Trump demonstrations on Saturday were demonstrably a failure, but I fancy it's still a long road ahead. Those of us who remember Watergate will know that Nixon kept it together right up to the release of the Oval Office tapes. Likely Trump will as well so long as his tax returns remain unpublished.

As I write, we've been cheering on Laura Muir securing her Belgrade double. Bugger Trump.

Added: New Yorker is out with an interesting analysis of the new cold war

[Strelnikov]

The counter-view to that New Yorker piece is The Politics behind 'Russia-gate' by Robert Parry of Consortium News.

Some quotes:

....But there is a grave danger in playing partisan “gotcha” over U.S. relations with the world’s other major nuclear superpower. If, for instance, President Trump finds himself having to demonstrate how tough he can be on Russia — to save his political skin — he could easily make a miscalculation that could push the two countries into a war that could truly be the war to end all wars – along with ending human civilization. But Democrats, liberals and the mainstream news media seem to hate Trump so much they will take that risk....

....Before this madness goes any further, doesn’t anyone think that the U.S. intelligence community should lay its cards on the table regarding exactly what the evidence is that Russian intelligence purloined Democratic emails and then slipped them to WikiLeaks for publication? President Obama’s intelligence officials apparently went to great lengths to spread these allegations around – even passing the secrets around overseas – but they never told the American people what the evidence is. The two official reports dealing with the issue were laughably short on anything approaching evidence. They amounted to “trust us.”

Further, WikiLeaks representatives have indicated that the two batches of emails – one from the Democratic National Committee and the other from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta – did not come from the Russians but rather from two different American insiders. That could be wrong – it is possible that Russian intelligence laundered the material through some American cutouts or used some other method to conceal Moscow’s hand – but Obama’s intelligence officials apparently don’t know how WikiLeaks obtained the emails. So, the entire “scandal” may rest upon a foundation of sand.

(Full disclosure: Consortium News was one of the sites listed by the anonymous PropOrNot site as spreading "Russian propaganda" discussed here.)

[Flip Flopped]

<snip>

But as I stressed in the old forum (thanks admins for helping me back in this one), I'm a Brit and it's not really for me to sound off how the US deal with their affairs. It does worry me how Trump's base so uncritically accept our far-right wierdos. There's Farage, where I have to concede his support but he's the only UKIP member (other than Douglas Carswell) who has any real credibility: it's not a plus that the KKK's David Duke recently puffed him as a future PM, but we Brits have consistently rejected Farage's several attempts to get himself elected as an MP. Then there's that Milo character, a narcissistic piece of fluff who's had his just desserts. And finally that self-aggrandizing fraud Sebastian Gorka (brought up in the UK): his miliitary service he puffs is three years as an intelligence analyst in the UK's Territorial Army, but that's a volunteer reserve force involving a month's commitment a year and while I don't want to belittle it any Brit will candidly admit its members are typically wannabe military fantasists (indeed our most popular sitcom of all time, Dad's Army, lampoons what was essentially its wartime equivalent). All three of these characters have plum 'toff' accents we Brits are very alert to (Gorka's in particular is nauseating) but which seem to go down well over the pond.

<snip>

More on Gorka's embellished military credentials from a blog post, "Sebastian Gorka and his distinguished military career," on Adrian Weale's blog.

[Larkin]

<snip>

But as I stressed in the old forum (thanks admins for helping me back in this one), I'm a Brit and it's not really for me to sound off how the US deal with their affairs. It does worry me how Trump's base so uncritically accept our far-right wierdos. There's Farage, where I have to concede his support but he's the only UKIP member (other than Douglas Carswell) who has any real credibility: it's not a plus that the KKK's David Duke recently puffed him as a future PM, but we Brits have consistently rejected Farage's several attempts to get himself elected as an MP. Then there's that Milo character, a narcissistic piece of fluff who's had his just desserts. And finally that self-aggrandizing fraud Sebastian Gorka (brought up in the UK): his miliitary service he puffs is three years as an intelligence analyst in the UK's Territorial Army, but that's a volunteer reserve force involving a month's commitment a year and while I don't want to belittle it any Brit will candidly admit its members are typically wannabe military fantasists (indeed our most popular sitcom of all time, Dad's Army, lampoons what was essentially its wartime equivalent). All three of these characters have plum 'toff' accents we Brits are very alert to (Gorka's in particular is nauseating) but which seem to go down well over the pond.

<snip>

More on Gorka's embellished military credentials from a blog post, "Sebastian Gorka and his distinguished military career," on Adrian Weale's blog.

Thanks very much indeed for this Flip. I've taken the liberty to link to it in a couple of tweets on our top secret feed . The first we pin and notify Michael Smith (a twitter critic) and Emily Maitlis at Newsnight (he was abominably rude to her in an interview) https://twitter.com/MarinkaVanDam/statu ... 9473012736. The second is a courtesy share from his blog sourced to your thread here https://twitter.com/MarinkaVanDam/statu ... 0949625856.