Oh, no, in our “Every Other Tuesday Sailor Moon All-Manly He-Men Club” we have lefties and righties, coasties and Hoosiers, crew cuts and turtlenecks…
CNN Exclusive: Top Trump aide’s email draws new scrutiny in Russia inquiry
I hadn’t heard of Rick Dearborn, but CNN reported he was involved in helping to arrange that event at the Mayflower Hotel where Trump delivered an address and Kislyak attended.
He is currently a White House deputy chief of staff and was Jeff Sessions’ (who totally didn’t know what was going on) chief of staff while this was going down. Another really unfortunate coincidence for the Trump camp.
For some reason you left out the fact - reported in your own linked cite - that while Dearborn passed on the message about the possible meeting, he expressed skepticism about it in that same email.
[When I first encountered that story, the article I was reading quoted two sources as saying that Jeff Sessions in particular was emphatic about rejecting any possible meeting with Putin. But I can’t find that in searching just now.]
There was a similar story not too long ago about how he repeatedly pressed the potential meeting, which doesn’t jibe too well with his being skeptical of it.
I think you’re conflating two different people.
Would a government shutdown (the kind that Trump seems to be actively yearning for) affect the Mueller investigation?
That was a different person.
It might, but that would probably backfire. It would be much easier for Trump to suggest immunity from criminal conviction in the form of blanket pardons, which basically says “You can investigate what you want but it won’t mean anything.” Or he could just as easily shut down the investigation itself and test Congress’ resolve.
IMO, the pardoning of Joe Arpaio was a trial balloon. He’s more interested in the reaction of the public to a pardoning than he is in what various pundits and congresspeople say on twitter. Trump has become immune to public criticism, and it seems that for the time being - unless and until the nation is plunged into a real crisis that the average person can longer dismiss - his poll numbers will probably bottom out in the 30s. It’s really a continuation of what we saw in the campaign. Trump outrages people, his poll numbers dip, he runs back to his base for support, the news cycle moves on, and then he regains his footing. And in the meantime, his opponents and nemeses stand around and look at each other and wonder how to tame him and what to do with him.
In any case, it’s very disturbing that the pardoning of Arpaio hasn’t led to more outrage. It seems that the country can get outraged over social issues like racism and sexism, but the president is otherwise free to flaunt the rule of law and basically replace it with the rule of men.
What can anyone do about it? There’s only one option, and it’s not going to happen.
Make no mistake about it, Trump is an autocrat, and he’s protected by the party he’s hijacked.
I’m part of the public, and i am appalled and outraged. Yet somehow i don’t think he is looking for my reaction.
No he’s not looking for your reaction. He has been beyond what people think about him for his whole life. He KNOWS that he is the BEST. No other opinions matter. Never did.
That doesn’t mean that we should ever accept this buffoon. We need to continue to call him out on his mis-deeds. And not forget his past. We CAN’T accept this as the new normal.
Can we make a big enough stink about Arpaio, and run enough news stories on what he’s done, that Trump will have to think “Hmm, maybe I overstepped what I can do with impunity.”
If only we could make enough noise that Fox and Friends would have to metion it…
“I have had dealings over the years where I sold a house to a very wealthy Russian many years ago. I had the Miss Universe pageant — which I owned for quite a while — I had it in Moscow a long time ago. But other than that, I have nothing to do with Russia,” Trump said.
Well, the Washington Post disagrees:
*"While Donald Trump was running for president in late 2015 and early 2016, his company was pursuing a plan to develop a massive Trump Tower in Moscow, according to several people familiar with the proposal and new records reviewed by Trump Organization lawyers.
As part of the discussions, a Russian-born real estate developer urged Trump to come to Moscow to tout the proposal and suggested that he could get President Vladimir Putin to say “great things” about Trump, according to several people who have been briefed on his correspondence."*
The developer in question, one Felix Sater, has recently been telling people that he and Trump are going to prison and that soon he will be "the most colorful character you have ever talked about". Incidentally, Sater has a history of ratting to the intelligence community, so I’m pretty sure his loyalty to Trump is non-existent.
Interesting to note that the White House is referring questions about this to his Trumps’s attorney’s attorney, because his attorney, Michael Cohen, was involved in structuring the deal with Sater.
I understand that we are all outraged, but what I’m getting at is that people will protest by the thousands and CEOs will resign from his advisory councils when there are social issues involved, like winks and nods to racism and neo-Nazism. But when the president actually breaks not just the law but the rule of law, there are no protests. It tells me that he can get away with destroying the system before people realize the system is broken - that’s lethal to a democracy.
Sater’s father is also a boss in the Mogilevich family, the Russian mafia. I can’t wait until this all blows up.
Nothing new here that I can tell.
It’s been widely reported for quite some time that Trump negotiated over possible investments/deals in Russia but that nothing came of them. I don’t know if the prior stories were about this particular deal, but it doesn’t seem to change what’s already known AFAICT.
Trump wants a fight with the media. The more the media criticizes him about Arpaio, the more he gets to demonize the media.
Well, apparently the emails were about more than a Russian deal (which Trump vehemently denied, remember):
“Sater wrote to Trump Organization Executive Vice President Michael Cohen “something to the effect of, ‘Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?’ ” said one person briefed on the email exchange. Sater emigrated from what was then the Soviet Union when he was 6 and grew up in Brooklyn.”
“The developer, Felix Sater, predicted in a November 2015 email that he and Trump Organization leaders would soon be celebrating — both one of the biggest residential projects in real estate history and Donald Trump’s election as president, according to two of the people with knowledge of the exchange.”