Kelly Sadler Validated

Senator John McCain, recuperating from brain surgery at home in Arizona, issued an eloquent statement opposing the nomination of Gina Haspel to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Following that, Kelly Sadler brought upon herself a torrent of outrage when in a cabinet meeting she  quipped "it doesn't matter. He's dying anyway." This included demands that she resign or be fired including from Meghan McCain, who stated "I don't understand what kind of environment you're working in when that would be acceptable and then you can come to work the next day and still have a job and that's all I have to say about it."

The Atlantic's David Frum, accomplished author and even more accomplished Twitter, responded in general:

On what basis does a president who mocked tortured POWs, mocked the mothers of slain soldiers, and mocked reporters living with disabilities fire an aide for mocking terminal cancer?

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 11, 2018

That was the major reason Sadler wasn't fired. On Thursday afternoon we found out the other reason as

The Senate on Thursday confirmed Gina Haspel as the next CIA director despite opposition from most Democrats and a handful of Republicans who blasted her role in the agency’s enhanced interrogation program.

Lawmakers confirmed her in a 54-45 vote. Six Democrats voted in favor of Haspel including several who face tough re-election races in November: Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Bill Nelson of Florida. The other two were Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

Two Republicans voted against Haspel — Jeff Flake of Arizona and Rand Paul of Kentucky.





This is part of the environment in which it is unnecessary to fire a Kelly Sadler. It is working for a president who mocked tortured POW's, mocked the mothers of slain soldiers, and mocked reporters living with disabilities. It's an environment in which despite hand-wringing from GOP colleagues of Senator McCain, 48 of 50 Republican senators present voted in favor of Gina Haspel.

Kentucky's Rand Paul had announced his opposition to the nominee prior to Sadler's controversial remark. Only one US Senator- Arizona's other, Jeff Flake- may have been sufficiently repulsed as to turn his "yes" into a "no." And this was Jeff Flake, who probably would have cast his vote in favor of Haspel had it been needed.

Ultimately, it is an environment in which a member of the Administration can say "it doesn't matter, he's dying anyway"....  and exactly one week later be proven completely correct.



Share |

Donald Trump's FBI Strategy

The unsurprisingly underplayed "Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Seret Origins of the Trump Investigation" by the New York Times' Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, and Nichoas Fandos reveals

Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the F.B.I. dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark.

Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador, who had evidence that one of Donald J. Trump’s advisers knew in advance about Russian election meddling. After tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra, top Australian officials broke with diplomatic protocol and allowed the ambassador, Alexander Downer, to sit for an F.B.I. interview to describe his meeting with the campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos.

The agents summarized their highly unusual interview and sent word to Washington on Aug. 2, 2016, two days after the investigation was opened. Their report helped provide the foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel investigation. But at the time, a small group of F.B.I. officials knew it by its code name: Crossfire Hurricane.

Not only did agents in that case fall back to their typical policy of silence, but interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the F.B.I. was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

Agents considered, then rejected, interviewing key Trump associates, which might have sped up the investigation but risked revealing the existence of the case. Top officials quickly became convinced that they would not solve the case before Election Day, which made them only more hesitant to act. When agents did take bold investigative steps, like interviewing the ambassador, they were shrouded in secrecy.

Fearful of leaks, they kept details from political appointees across the street at the Justice Department. Peter Strzok, a senior F.B.I. agent, explained in a text that Justice Department officials would find it too “tasty” to resist sharing. “I’m not worried about our side,” he wrote.

Yes, yes. That is the same "Peter S." whom President Trump pressed Attorney General Sessions to fire because he was considered disloyal to the Administration.   The efforts of the agency Donald Trump considers his mortal enemy appeared to pay off as

Only about five Justice Department officials knew the full scope of the case, officials said, not the dozen or more who might normally be briefed on a major national security case.

The facts, had they surfaced, might have devastated the Trump campaign: Mr. Trump’s future national security adviser was under investigation, as was his campaign chairman. One adviser appeared to have Russian intelligence contacts. Another was suspected of being a Russian agent himself.

In the Clinton case, Mr. Comey has said he erred on the side of transparency. But in the face of questions from Congress about the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. declined to tip its hand. And when The New York Times tried to assess the state of the investigation in October 2016, law enforcement officials cautioned against drawing any conclusions, resulting in a story that significantly played down the case.

That "transparency" thing doesn't fly, Mr. Comey.  Transparency is (as Comey stated)

In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here. 

Transparency is not (also as he stated)

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.





Even more clearly, "transparency" is not announcing nine days before the election that the bureau is
reopening investigation into the Clinton emails, only to announce a few days later that there is no there there, once the political damage was done.

That damage probably included turning the election.  Comey's decision to be "transparent" about investigating Hillary Clinton while being opaque about investigation Trump was unjustified with probable horrific consequences yet unseen. Nonetheless, it was understandable because

underpinning both cases was one political calculation: that Mrs. Clinton would win and Mr. Trump would lose. Agents feared being seen as withholding information or going too easy on her. And they worried that any overt actions against Mr. Trump’s campaign would only reinforce his claims that the election was being rigged against him.

It was widely accepted during the campaign that Trump's obsession with claiming the election was "rigged" against him was an effort to deligitimize the expected victory of his opponent. However, we have since learned there was an additional reason: to intimidate law enforcement. If  Comey had indicated there was an active investigation into the Trump campaign- or even that there was insufficient evidence evidence to charge Hillary Clinton with a crime, full stop- Trump would have claimed that as proof the election was rigged.

Trump's protestations also reinforced the assumption that he would lose, thereby reassuring Comey, Strzok and others at the FBI that their tilt toward the Republican and against Clinton would not come back to haunt them.

And so ironically, an investigation which yielded no charges was trumped up by the FBI and the media.  And one which- probably far from over- has now led to five guilty pleas and indictments of seventeen other individuals was shoved into the background, stomped upon, and lit on fire.

Donald Trump might be ignorant, uninformed, or as his tweets indicate, barely literate (actually, no maybe about it).  But he isn't stupid, and he played Jim Comey's FBI to the hilt.



Share |

Absolving Donald Trump

With no apparent sense of irony, on July 31, 2006 candidate Donald J. Trump tweeted

"@RealJamesWoods: Without absolutely OWNING the liberal media, HillaryClinton wouldn't stand a chance. #VoterFraud and #MSM her only hope."

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2016

Of course, Hillary Clinton never owned the media or even rented it, and Trump probably confused her with Barack Obama (autumn, 2008) and John McCain (any other time).





Journalist and author John McQuaid notes that the New York Times  "casually drops a kind-of mea culpa for its infamous 10/31/2016 'Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia' story toward the end of a long piece on the early days of the Russia investigation."  Reporters Apuzzo, Goldman, and Fandos (a law firm or brokerage firm?) therein concede

The key fact of the article — that the F.B.I. had opened a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — was published in the 10th paragraph.

A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump’s advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government’s disruptive efforts. But the article’s tone and headline — “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” — gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just beginning.

"Crooked Hillary" is "a world-class liar," Donald Trump argued in 2016. That claim was made harder to refute when America's premier newspaper, The New York Times, gave the guy making the charge a virtual clean bill of health.





It's a little much to say the media was "owned" by any candidate during campaign 2016, But in this and in other important respects, it was rented by Donald J. Trump.

Share |

"New York Is Not Sending Us Its Best People"

On Sunday, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer/Philadelphia Daily News has written that Trump attorney Michael

Cohen — and by extension, Trump — have managed to place a uniquely American stamp on our presidential corruption, by making the whole thing look like the lost episode of The Sopranos. When the FBI recently raided Cohen’s office, home and hotel room, Cohen — who has a long history of family and personal ties to suspected Russian organized-crime figures — put on a wild-patterned sports jacket that looked off the rack from Martin Scorsese’s prop room, and met his associates outside on the street while paparazzi snapped photos that looked like government surveillance shots. It was reported that — in addition to the big-name clients he did land — Cohen was rebuffed by at least one, Ford Motor Co., and one can only imagine his pitch to the executives in Detroit. “Hey, that’s a nice Explorer you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”

That was before (before) the report in the unreliable Daily Mail of London that Donald Trump's fixer

is facing claims he asked a Middle Eastern official for millions of dollars to give to 'Trump family members' in a meeting at Trump Tower weeks after the president's election victory, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Cohen is alleged to have asked Ahmed Al-Rumaihi, a former diplomat in charge of a $100bn Qatari investment fund, to send 'millions' through him to Trump family members. A source told DailyMail.com that the Qatari said he refused....

The claims of a demand for 'millions' were made by a senior Kuwaiti government source close to Al-Rumaihi.

With merely one source and reported by the Daily Mail, the veracity of the story is  questionable. However, on Friday night's Real Time, Bill Maher identifies members of the President's operations- Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, Anthony Scaramucci, Steve Mnuchin, and Michael Cohen and maintains "someone from Real America. Citing traditional values of the "heartland," he maintains "someone has to tell me why you like these guys now." Asking "what happened to your  values," he offers

my theory- you didn't like it that the country had been "taken over" by liberals and feminists and elites- whatever. So you were feeling vulnerable and  disrespected. So you brought in some muscle from the East Coast for "protection"- and now you're married to the mob. Because that's what this Administration is- a protection racket....

His being President has been quite a revelation. I always thought he was an egomaniac and a blowhard. But I didn't ralize until this very year that he was a cheap hood all along- a common thug.





"Everything Trump does is modeled on the mob," Maher observed. It worked for him in New York City, and he has moved his act- and his criminal enterprise- down US 95.



Share |

And It Matters To Whom?

Burgess Everett and Eliana Johnson of Politico  report

Everything happens for a reason. And sometimes the reason is you’re stupid and made a bad decision,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “She ought to apologize publicly. If it were my administration, and it’s not, I would also apologize on behalf of the administration.”

Monday marked the fifth day that the White House declined to express regrets publicly to McCain and his family after Sadler joked that the Arizona senator’s opposition to CIA director nominee Gina Haspel “doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway.” Sadler has spoken to the McCain family, but has not issued a public apology. Neither have White House press aides; on Monday, spokesman Raj Shah said the matter was being handled “internally.”

Republicans have donned their sad face. Politico Everett/Johnson note

the morbid joke by communications aide Kelly Sadler last week, delivered at a staff meeting and promptly leaked to the press, made them wonder when the administration is going to start treating McCain with more respect.

“Everything happens for a reason. And sometimes the reason is you’re stupid and made a bad decision,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “She ought to apologize publicly. If it were my administration, and it’s not, I would also apologize on behalf of the administration.”

No one knows whether a President Kennedy would apologize publicly.

He might be so foolish. However, Donald Trump became President in part because he spoke what some voters had been thinking, and never, ever apologized (except for once, belatedly and half-heartedly, over the Access Hollywood Tape, since reneging).

If everything does happen for a reason, Sadler's statement was made for a reason and was leaked for a reason. The conventional wisdom is that it was leaked by an opponent of hers in the Administration.

While that is likely accurate, there was no danger to the President in the leak being made.

Not only will his popularity not suffer, it likely will rise because of it indirectly.   It prevents the public from being focused on turmoil in the Mideast, selling out American security against the Communist Chinese, and the refusal to fire Scott Pruitt.

And there is no downside.  Sadler's remark, pertaining to the impact of John McCain's opposition to CIA nominee Gina Haspel, would better have been worded it "doesn't matter. He's in Arizona rather than on the Senate floor, anyway."  If it had been, the media could better have determined the validity of Sadler's comment, now that the number of senators expected to change their vote following McCain's eloquent statement opposing Haspel's bid to become C.I.A. director has soared to..... zero.








Share |

Not Only Russia

David Frum is psychic. Three days ago, he observed

Trump has done far more to achieve historic Chinese goals in NE Asia than US goals: reduced US presence; SoKo looking to Beijing for protection. Yet imperative to say something positive about Trump for balance pushes us to mis-report danger ahead as success in the here and now

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 11, 2018

Nine days earlier, PC Mag had found

The US government's crackdown on Chinese smartphone makers Huawei and ZTE is intensifying.

The Pentagon has banned the sale of Huawei and ZTE phones in retail stores on US military bases, citing security concerns, The Wall Street Journal reports.

"Huawei and ZTE devices may pose an unacceptable risk to the department's personnel, information and mission," Army Maj. Dave Eastburn, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Journal. "In light of this information, it was not prudent for the department's exchanges to continue selling them."

Members of the military can still buy Huawei and ZTE phones elsewhere, if they so choose, but Eastburn warned them to "be mindful of the security risks," the report notes. Unnamed sources told the newspaper that the Pentagon is worried the devices will allow the Chinese government to track soldiers' locations.

The move comes after the US Commerce Department last month banned US companies from selling components to ZTE for seven years. Meanwhile, that same month, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a measure that would eliminate a government subsidy for any US telecom carrier that buys from Huawei or ZTE; a second vote will make it official.

Best Buy in March reportedly cut ties with Huawei, following the lead of US carriers like AT&T and Verizon, which decided not to sell the company's Mate 10 Pro due to pressure from the US government.

The campaign against Huawei and ZTE dates back to 2012 when the House Intelligence Committee issued a report warning that the firms might be using their entrance into the U.S. market as a way to spy for the Chinese government – allegations Huawei and ZTE.

Someone forgot to give the President of the USA the memo- which Donald Trump probably wouldn't have read, anyway- for today we read

President Trump says he will help a China-based cellphone manufacturer save jobs after the Commerce Department said it sold U.S. technology to Iran and North Korea and then failed to live up to the terms of a settlement.

It would be difficult to find a more quintessential example of the kind of troubling trade practices that the president has long highlighted, which makes his sudden pivot in the case of ZTE all the more stunning.

ZTE, the world's fourth-largest maker of cellphones, was found in violation of U.S. rules against selling U.S.-originated technology to certain blacklisted countries. After reaching a more than $1 billion settlement with Commerce as reparation for its Iran and North Korea dealings, ZTE then violated the terms of the agreement by failing to fire some employees and reprimand others who were involved in the illicit technology transfers.

Among other things, Commerce imposed a seven-year ban on the company that prevented it from buying parts from U.S. manufacturers.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross last month called ZTE's behavior "egregious" and said it "cannot be ignored."

That president's tweet on Sunday appears to have undone all that. "President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast," Trump tweeted on Sunday. "Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!"





It seems that the "America First" president really meant "America First, After Russia and Mainland China." However, perhaps that order needs to be reversed. From (h/to investigative reporter Scott Stedman) The Moscow Project (Steele dossier):

5. Commenting on the negative media publicity surrounding alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election campaign in support of Trump, Source E said he understood that the Republican candidate and his team were relatively relaxed about this because it deflected media and the Democrats’ attention away from Trump’s business dealings in China and other emerging markets. Unlike in Russia, these were substantial and involved the payment of large bribes and kickbacks which, were they to become public, would be potentially very damaging to their campaign.

Were there merely a blueprint for a Trump Tower Beijing, this would not be so serious. The considerable attention to the possibility that the President of  the United States of America is being blackmailed by Russia probably has acted as somewhat of a brake on the concessions he otherwise would have given the Kremlin. However, there has been little or no consideration of the possibility that mainland China might have the goods on him, also. That could prove even more damaging to national security.



Share |

Trump Praises His Mother

The first instinct is to consider Nina Golgowski's point in this article in the Huffington Post as picky, trivial, or a distraction from the horrid things said and done by President Trump. But she's also wrong.

Golgowski writes

President Donald Trump praised his late mother as “incredible” in a Mother’s Day video on Sunday but made no mention of his wife, Melania, who’s the mother of his youngest son.

It probably would be picky to point out that it is cruel to refer to one's mother as "incredible," as in "not credible" but ignorance of the English language is the least of Mr. Trump's sins.  The author contrasted Trump's approach to the holiday with that of ex-President Obama, who "expressed his appreciation for his wife, Michelle, and his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, on Sunday, calling them “remarkable” in a message posted on Twitter" (better adjective, there).

Golgowski notes

First lady Melania Trump has made motherhood her primary role in the White House. Along with caring for the couple’s 12-year-old son, Barron, she is focusing on children through her “Be Best” campaign.

Last week, she reflected on the enormous amount of work that goes into being a mom at an event for military mothers at the White House.

“It takes an incredible amount of strength, a lot of time, a generous amount of patience, and all of our love,” she said. “As moms, we are so incredibly privileged to be able to bring children into this world and be a part of helping them grow into adults.”





Melania Trump may be an excellent mother. I don't know, and neither does Golgowski, and I don't care, other than to hope Barron doesn't turn into his father.

Trump is not wrong in singling out his (late) mother for praise on this day.. The occasion is called "Mothers Day." It is not called "Wives Day" or "Mothers/Wives Day." If we as a people wish to change the day, we can petition legislators to change it. Just as most states have converted Lincoln's Birthday and Washington's Birthday into one "Presidents Day," so, too, can the name and purpose of Mothers Day be altered.

For now, however, it is "Mothers Day." Barack Obama and others are free to celebrate their wives on that day while Donald Trump and others may hew to the actual name- "Mothers Day."  And if that choice he and others similarly inclined make upsets greeting card companies or restauranteurs, the Republic will not fall.



Share |