This could be explained as follows.

For their part, Russia interfered with the election. This is known.

For their part, the Trump Crime Family attempted to coordinate with the Russians, but the Russians are not stupid. They regarded the Trump people as the Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Strait, and while Trump Jr, Flynn, Pence, and the rest of them, kept trying to open back channels and bend over backwards for the Russians, the Kremlin kept them at arms length. Why allow the idiots to get themselves arrested or impeached, thus becoming useless, rather than useful, idiots?

2) The special prosecutor a) chose to not move forward on obstruction but b) it was Barr and the Justice Department that determined that this is not worth pursuing. It is pretty clear that Trump committed obstruction, he is just going to get away with it. We have to see the report itself to consider this further.

3) Since so much of the left, the Democratic, the blue-wavist, momentum was (unwisely) tied up in this report, that is done now. Trump was polled as behind various Democrats in head-to-head comparisons, and his popularity and approval ratings were all down. The next head to head comparisons will likely show Trump as a possible 2020 winner, and his approval ratings will now go abruptly up. Had this report come out in this exact manner last October 1st, there would not have been as strong of a blue wave.

4) That slightly squishy zone, those who are Trump supporters but who we thought could be convinced to turn on him, will now harden and move fully into the Trump camp. This includes voters, the handful of Republican Senators that occassionally pretended to contemplate doing the right thing, and everyone in between. That particular political strategy for Democrats, not very important to begin with, is surely now zero gone.

5) We are probably left with only one option: To vote Trump out of office, and along with him, a bunch of Senators.

6) Now more than ever, infighting among Democrats is dooming our children, our planet, and ourselves.

This is an important perspective:

From WaPo:

This constantly changing boundary has already divided communities and swallowed up homes in Georgia, a country of 3.7 million that hopes to one day join NATO.

Many consider it nothing short of a silent, creeping occupation on the fringes of Europe supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“What should I do? If the Russians come closer I will not be able to do anything,” Vasya, 51, said with a shrug and a waft of a freshly lit cigarette. He wants only his first name used for fear of reprisals by nearby border guards.

The Russians have been trying to Russianize Ossetians living in the nearly island like enclave in Georgia for decades, and eventually issued many Russian passports.

It is the standard Russian move. Make up a situation in which there are people in some territory that say “Hey, we’re Russians. Where’s Russia! Come help us, Russia!” Then, the tanks roll in. In this case, until Putin put Trump in the US White House, the US helped Georgia resist this move in South Ossetia. No more. Trump is screwing over an important ally in the region.

In Georgia, there is a saying. You use it when you are disagreeing with someone. “We can discuss this in the morning. But during the night, I will sneak into your house and cut your throat,” or words to that effect. Well, now it’s Trump cutting the throat of Georgia.

“We can do nothing to protect ourselves … we cannot start war on them,” said Temuri Khuroshvili, 59, a retired police officer whose cinder-block house is in one of the 52 villages on the boundary. His home is surrounded by annexed territory on three sides.

“What can you do against Russia? They do whatever they can,” he said as he sat in the roadside shade while rusty tractors groaning under bales of hay rattled through the dusty lane. “The Russians don’t care at all.”

This is not the kind of mess that an actual US President, when we get one, is going to be able to clean up easily.

Jury selection starts Tuesday

There are zero signs of a plea deal emerging.

But, sometimes that happens right near the end of jury selection when the defense sees what they are up against.

(There will be a delay motion heard on Monday, but there is no good reason to believe it will be ruled in favor of.)

People need to lighten up. Trump needs no agenda for this meeting. Putin has it totally under control. Relax!

Trump has promised to bring up “meddling.” However, I assume he’ll be bringing up to apologize for the witch hunt.

Anyway, here is my short list of things Trump will give Putin within a month of the meeting. Not all these things, and there will be things not on this list. But I think there will be things from this list:

1) Pardon Mueller-indicted Russians
2) The Crimea
3) A presidential finding that oil extraction in Siberia is outside any sanctions by the US, including Congress
4) Alaska
5) Syria

What’s on your list?

Last night, at midnight, they released Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, which is a compendium of all we know now. As they noted in a recent interview (see below), this is a good time to bring this all together and summarize it for the American People. The story is far ranging and complex, and we have been exposed to an asynchronous and arbitrarily ordered series of vignettes, making a comprehensive understanding of what happened difficult.

The previously released Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff, served that purpose in its own way, using primarily (mostly) confirmable gossip to frame the Trump campaign, transition, and early white house, and that was quite helpful. Corn and Isikoff’s work is more of the graduate level version, digs deeper, starts earlier in the story, and of course, is more up to date.

From the publisher:

Russian Roulette is a story of political skullduggery unprecedented in American history. It weaves together tales of international intrigue, cyber espionage, and superpower rivalry. After U.S.-Russia relations soured, as Vladimir Putin moved to reassert Russian strength on the global stage, Moscow trained its best hackers and trolls on U.S. political targets and exploited WikiLeaks to disseminate information that could affect the 2016 election.

The Russians were wildly successful and the great break-in of 2016 was no “third-rate burglary.” It was far more sophisticated and sinister — a brazen act of political espionage designed to interfere with American democracy. At the end of the day, Trump, the candidate who pursued business deals in Russia, won. And millions of Americans were left wondering, what the hell happened? This story of high-tech spying and multiple political feuds is told against the backdrop of Trump’s strange relationship with Putin and the curious ties between members of his inner circle — including Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn — and Russia.

Russian Roulette chronicles and explores this bizarre scandal, explains the stakes, and answers one of the biggest questions in American politics: How and why did a foreign government infiltrate the country’s political process and gain influence in Washington?

I’m reading it furiously, and have a lot more to cover but I’ve seen enough to say that at this moment in time, if you are going to read one book on the Trump-Russian scandal, make it this one.

Rachel Maddow says of the book, that this helped her understand better what has been happening. Since Maddow is among the top 10 people on the plant with respect to her understanding of what has happened (probably even understanding much of this more than some of those involved!), that is saying a lot.

I will also add that a major point made by these authors is that to understand Trump and Russia, you need to go back a few years and understand what Trump, Putin, various Oligarchs, Manefort, Page, and others were doing before there was any real solid idea of a Trump for President campaign. This, dear reader, is what I’ve been saying all along. Just sayin’.

Here is an interview with the authors on the Rachel Maddow show:

(At this point you may want to know about this guy, the person running against Nunes for his seat in the House.)

The memo is from the staff of the House Intelligence Committee to the majority (Republican) members of that committee, with the subject line “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

The memo claims that there is a concern about certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the FISC (FISA) court which it troubling. Somehow that concern is listed as two separate items, but really, it is just one long sentence.

The memo complains about the Steele Dosier as well as surveillance of Russian Agent (an American working on behalf of Russia) Carter Page.

It is generally felt that these complaints are absurd, and that on even a moderate reading, this memo will expose Devin Nunes (did I mention this guy, the person running against Nunes for his seat in the House?) as an agent of the Trump-Putin conspiracy centered in the American White House and Kremlin.

Read it over, tell us what you think.

Donald Trump won the 2016 election with 306 votes to Hillary Clinton’s 232 votes. That is a spread of 74 votes.

Clinton was likely to win in several states in which she lost, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, maybe Ohio, etc. In three states that could have gone either way, Jill Stein’s vote count was larger than the difference between Clinton and Trump. In Michigan, Trump won by 10,704 votes, Stein got 51,463 votes. In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 46,765 votes, Stein got 49,678 votes. In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22,177 votes, Stein got 31,006 votes.

If every Jill Stein vote would have been a Clinton Vote, it is likely that Clinton would have had 49 electoral votes more than she did have.

That alone would have put Clinton in the white house.

We now know that Russian hackers worked hard on getting people to vote for Stein. They spread around the idea that it was “safe” to vote for a third party candidate in states where the outcome was obvious anyway.

I told people this many times. I said, again and again, the logic that you can vote “safely” in a general election for a third party candidate in certain states is flawed for several reasons. One of those reasons, I said, is that you might only think the state is safe, and perhaps it is not.

Using Stein, who is known to have hobnobbed with Putin (which may or may not be relevant here), and I’m sure a few other trick here and there, the Russians may have given their guy Trump the three electoral college wins that put him in the White House.

We’ve learned this as part of the recent expose of Facebook’s blind cooperation with the Russians in the 2016 election. (Or maybe not all blind? We just don’t know yet. How hard might it have been for the Russians to play Zuckerberg?) We are about to find out if Twitter played a similar role.

It is valid, as well as lazy, to argue that, “but but it was other things too you can’t say this etc.” but the truth is that Stein hardly even ran in most states, got overall less than 1% of the vote.

So yes, it is possible to erase the Stein votes in three key states, and manage for Clinton to still lose in those states, but highly unlikely. It is very likely that the Stein vote was a significant contributor to what ultimately happened.

Putin would not be able to control US elections if two things were true. 1) Americans actually showed up to vote and 2) The percentage of gullible special snowflake ignorant voters was about half of what it apparently is.

Watch this:

I’m not going to make a claim in this post as to what happened and who did what. Rather, I’d like to present a hypothesis, a single interpretation of events, that may or may not be correct, but that is based on this long view.

Whatever did actually happen, it did involve, or somehow exclude, Donald Trump and a number of individuals with whom he has had long term relationships, and Vladimir Putin and individuals with whom he has had long term relationships, and of course, an overlapping set of individuals who fit in both categories.

The Trump real estate business, centered mainly on Donald Trump itself, involved Roger Stone, Paul Manafort,and others. There are allegations of connections between Trump and the mob, sufficient to get at least one project denied in 1987. Manafort and Stone had long time connections with Russian interests and individuals, going way back in time, and there were numerous Trump-family-Russian deals over a long period of time, not just recently.

Deutche Bank, which apparently has served as a Russian Oligarch money laundering facility, took on Trump’s business as far back as 1998, when Trump started to run out of places to borrow money. Subsequently, the Russian state owned bank, Putin’s personal facility bailed the troubled Trump enterprise out of at least one financial hole.

Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, and several others are relative newcomers to the drama, and because their involvement and possible activities is both recent and confused, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees.

The short version is this. According to this entirely hypothetical model, Trump was involved with a wide range of shady characters doing shady deals for decades. Putin and his Oligarch friends were involved with a wide range of shady characters doing shady deals for decades. There was significant overlap between the two groups.

Somewhere along the way, Putin, with Manafort’s help, started to become increasingly engaged in messing with the politics of other countries, and at some point developed, or came upon, a method of using emerging social media to hack elections. It was probably not difficult for Putin to make the shift from collecting American billionaires to using one of them specifically, Trump, to develop a US presidential campaign, on the off chance that this could disrupt American politics, back around 2015. It was then not too difficult to take the next step, realizing that Trump might actually win, to hack the election and put a man he had worked with, indirectly and possibly directly, and on whom (we hypothesize) he held considerable Kompromat, in the white house.

While these latter moves are perhaps the most important, and most urgent, they are small steps from what seems to have been going on all along, constituting minor adjustments in a larger over-arching program of money making, money laundering, and manipulation oligarch style.

And the engine that drove this process, the methodology by which Putin ultimately came to own several American operatives including, according to this model,Trump, was something out of a movie based on a Tom Clancy novel. In order to understand that engine, I offer a parable.

The Parable of Mark

Imagine an evil drug dealer named Alexey. He has a customer named Mark. Mark doesn’t think he is an addict, but he is, and that gets worse for him over time. Mark likes to buy 10 bags of product, then he marks them up and sells eight to his friends so that he can do two bags and use the profit on the other eight to cover his costs of each buy. Most of the time. Sometimes he parties with friends Nastia and Sasha, and they go through three or four bags. But that’s OK, because his other friend, Dima always loans Mark money when he needs it, so he can get more drugs from Alexey. And Alexey always has product.

Over time, if Mark was more smart and less obsessed with meeting his own desires to party and get stoned, he could have kept himself in drugs and made a steady profit over time. After a few years, Mark did manage to stash away about $500 bucks, but not the few thousand bucks he might have made had he made the right moves.

Meanehile,Mark became deeper and deeper in debt to Dima, and by the way, also to Alexey, who also helped Mark out now and then when he was down on cash. There was also that time when Mark got busted because someone claimed to see him dealing on a street corner, and Alexey provided an alibi for him. That court case was still pending, and Mark was hoping Alexey would remember to show up and give his alibi to the judge next month. Oh, and by the way, Nastia and Sasha also loaned Mark some money now and then. Oh, and the person who dropped the dime on Mark? Mark does not know it, but it was Sasha.

So, after a few years, Mark had that 500 bucks stashed away, had been having plenty of fun, and just barely, stayed out of trouble.

But, he also owes Dima about $42,000, and another 15,000 or so to the others. He is in trouble with the law and reliant on Alexey to help him out, and lately Sasha and Nastia had been snubbing him.

Turns out that Dima, Mark’s banker, was Alexey’s brother. Sasha and Nastia were Alexey’s cousins. The judge in that open court case was Alexey’s father. And, they were all members of the same organized criminal gang with Alexey in charge.

Putting this another way, Mark was in the business of buying and selling a product, and financing the deals, and staying out of trouble, by interacting with the same exact person at every level and in every direction. Over time, with every transaction, instead of Mark having the opportunity to make a little money here, and a little product there, and to develop a reasonable if unsavory business model, at every juncture of events, Alexey turned the screw and brought Mark deeper and deeper into debt and dependency. Everybody was in on it, and Mark was the unwitting mark. As it were.

What is to be learned from this parable?

This is what Vladimir Putin and a handful of his associates, according to this hypothetical model, may have done to Donald Trump. Early on, Paul Manafort developed a relationship with Trump, and not long after, with Putin’s gang. His business with Russia was to develop ways for Putin to influence foreign governments, and eventually, elections. As early as 2000, Trump was being looked at by American conservatives as a potential presidential candidate. Over time Trump engaged in a considerable amount of Obama bashing, which served his white supremacist tendencies. Putin must have seen Trump as a potential asset, with the added bonus that they shared a racist view of life.

During this entire time multiple seemingly independent Russian entities engaged in business with Trump and his family, including a wide range of “Trump Tower” like projects, and other land deals. This also included banking and loaning money. Trump and his family were fully engaged in a money making machine much like the fictional Mark’s, buying and selling and borrowing and having fun, and Putin and his oligarch associates, using Manafort and other Americans as professional manipulators, were behind most of it, possibly all of it. Trump was buying and selling and borrowing, and meeting various prurient needs, all with the same guy, Puppet Master Putin. Or, so the theory goes.

So, when mid 2016 came along, Trump looked like a viable candidate. Republicans started to manage their role in the possible Trump presidency. Putin turned on his machine, manufactured and modeled out by Manafort and others, with the hope of electing Trump as President, and even before the election, manipulated the Republican platform. Members of the Trump Team were generally in contact with Russian agents, and various members of Washington’s Republican political elite, including multiple elected officials, became first transition advisers, then cabinet members or senior white house advisers after the election, and were brought into Club Russia to varying degrees. .

Much of the news that has developed over the last several months has focused on this period, from mid 2016 to the present. It has been difficult to understand what it all means. But if one steps back and starts by examining Trump and his associates in the 1980s, and Putin and his associates, some of which were already long time Trump associates, in the 2000’s, much of that confusion seems to melt away. Putin and Trump have both been playing a sort of long game, but with Putin much more in charge and, I would guess, with the much larger vision.

Trump looks like a chump through much of this, and he probably is. But he has had his own objectives mainly having to do with making money and being a bully, which Putin was able to garner into deep debt and probably blackmail. According to this hypothesis.

So in sum, three elements make up the model:

1) Trump plus American mob plus Russian mob plus Real Estate

2) Putin plus foreign political hacking and eventually election hacking

3) Decades old overlap between these two groups.

And, not entirely by chance but with a little luck for Putin, Trump rides the racist post Obama wave and becomes a viable candidate, then Putin puts him in.

If you want to go into the weeds on this, and you should, aside from watching every edition of the Rachel Maddow show for the last year or so, check out this handy dandy timeline.

The special counsel investigating Russian election meddling has requested extensive records and email correspondence from the White House, covering everything from the president’s private discussions about firing his FBI director to his White House’s handling of a warning that President Trump’s then-national security adviser was under investigation, according to two people briefed on the requests.

White House lawyers are now working to turn over internal documents that span 13 categories investigators for the special counsel have identified as critical to their probe…

The requests broadly ask for any document or email related to a series of highly publicized incidents since Trump became president, including the firing of national security adviser Michael Flynn and Comey…

…

Mueller also asked for any email or document the White House holds that relates to Manafort…

Mueller has requested that the White House turn over all internal communications and documents related to the FBI interview of Flynn in January, days after he took office, as well as any document that discusses Flynn’s conversations with Russia’s then-ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, in December. Mueller has also asked for records about meetings then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates held with White House counsel Don McGahn in late January …

Sources also stated that Mueller is moving very quickly and is vigorously engaging a grand jury to carry out this aggressive phase of the investigation.

Meanwhile, also from the Washington Post, Manafort is said to have offered a Russian Oligarch and Aluminum Magnate Oleg Deripaska, who has been discussed at length before, private briefings pertaining to the 2016 presidential campaign. The Associated Press reported some time ago that prior to

… signing up with Donald Trump, former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly worked for a Russian billionaire with a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin Government,”…

Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government, even as U.S.-Russia relations under Republican President George W. Bush grew worse.

Manafort pitched the plans to aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally with whom Manafort eventually signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006, according to interviews with several people familiar with payments to Manafort and business records obtained by the AP. Manafort and Deripaska maintained a business relationship until at least 2009, according to one person familiar with the work.

“We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success,” Manafort wrote in the 2005 memo to Deripaska. The effort, Manafort wrote, “will be offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government.”

It has been looking for a long time like Manafort is behind much of what we see. It is even conceivable that Trump and his clan have been idiot-puppets either under the threat of extortion or out for the money. One could even suspect that Trump et al would have been essentially broke were it not for Faustian deals organized by the Russians, as prelude to Putin’s bloodless coup. Of sorts.

Looks like this is going to happen any time now:

In the segment below, she makes the point that there are two “clear through lines” in the whole Trump thing. One is the love of Russia and Putin by Trump, his unwavering stance that Russia and Putin can do no wrong. The other is the consistent “vehement antipathy towards immigrants”, clearly part of a white supremacists strategy, with respect to who has been appointed to various positions, the things Trump has said, and the policies attempted. The difference, Rachel notes, between these two separate through lines is the apparent novelty and strangeness of the Russia theme, while the racist trope has deep roots with Trump.

Here, I think, is what she missed: They are not two separate through lines. They are two faces of the same coin. The Russian oligarchs are white supremacists too.

This is underscored by the news that just came out that Russian entities had purchased ads on Facebook during the last election, described this way: “Most of the ads focused on pumping politically divisive issues such as gun rights and immigration fears, as well as gay rights and racial discrimination.”

There are all sorts of reasons Russia wants to control the US presidency and state department. There seem to be some great economic benefits to Trump for selling the government to Putin, something we will be forced to assume happened if even a small number of the accusations emerging are true. But, there is also the potential of the two main actors and their associates having a common philosophy about race. This would not be the first time dictators or would be dictators bonded over such things.

I could be wrong. Am I wrong? I suppose time will tell.