In a defiant pair of CNN interviews, former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg said Monday he refuses to comply with a grand jury subpoena in the Russia investigation.For chrissakes! It's a freakin' subpoena! I knew that these Trumpers had a complete disdain for the rule of law, but this is outside the realm of the thinkable.
"Screw that," Nunberg told CNN's Gloria Borger. "Why do I have to go? Why? For what?"
"Donald Trump caused this because he's an idiot," Nunberg said.Executive privilege? Naw. This has nothing to do with anything that happened during this administration. Is Nunberg relying on a pardon? Maybe -- but calling Trump an idiot, though accurate, is not the best way to win a ticket to Pardonsville.
Seeming to dare the authorities to challenge him on the refusal, Nunberg told Tapper that he would not appear before a grand jury or spend time reviewing his communications in order to comply with the subpoena.
"I'm not cooperating. Arrest me," Nunberg said. "You want to arrest me? Arrest me."
Nunberg has been all over cable news, and all over the map. He denounces Russiagate as a hoax yet says that Mueller "has something" on Trump. He also said that Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting well ahead of time. Duh. Why wouldn't Donnie Junior have told his dad? As noted in an earlier post (which I'm too lazy to dig up), the room in which the meeting with the Russians took place was bugged, allowing Dad to listen in real time.
Marcy Wheeler thinks Nunberg is protecting his friend Steve Bannon. A direct Nunberg quote: “I’m not interested in handing over all my emails with Steve Bannon or Roger Stone..." Apparently, there's a grand jury targeting Roger Stone (another Nunberg friend). I hope that's true.
I'm not persuaded by Marcy's theory that Nunberg hopes to protect Bannon. Who could possibly love Bannon enough to go to jail for him?
Then again, who can understand Bannon these days? It's clear that the former Breitbart editor has disdain for Trump (and for most of the rest of humanity), yet Bannon opened himself up to contempt charges by refusing to cooperate in any way with the Congressional investigation. Why would Bannon do that? Why hasn't he flipped like a burger?
Palmer's summary is as good as any:
Nunberg also seemed to imply that his friend Roger Stone is guilty, while making clear that he’s refusing to turn over evidence against Stone due to their friendship. Somewhere in there Nunberg revealed that Mueller has a grand jury going against Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Nunberg also claimed that Carter Page was guilty of colluding with Russia, before seeming to contradict himself in the same sentence. Nunberg also made confusing statements that seemed to imply Steve Bannon either has evidence of Trump’s guilt, or that Bannon is guilty of something.Reportedly, Nunberg has been hitting the bottle.
Holy crap Erin Burnett just told him she smells booze on his breath and that rumors from the WH are that he's an indiscreet drunk!!! He keeps repeating himself. This is wild.As for Nunberg's admission that Carter Page colluded with the Russians: What can I say in response? We need a word that expresses two contradictory concepts: DUH and WOW. Of course Page colluded: Duh. But...a Trumper actually admitted it? Wow.
My immediate, provisional theory has no real evidence to back it, but does have the advantage of explaining nearly everything. For a while now, I've been saying that this scandal will soon have a body count. (Some say it already does.) We're talking about Russian spies and mobsters here. We're talking about guys who'll feed you polonium pasta.
The theory that Nunberg is under mortal threat explains the willingness to go to jail, the drinking, the nervousness, the quasi-breakdown, and even the "Trump's an idiot" remark. And it turns out I'm not the only one thinking this way.
Here's a cute reaction:
Sam Nunberg just fucked Donald Trump so badly, that Michael Cohen just wrote him a check for $130,000.Eichenwald:
Can you imagine how nuts @FoxNews would go if: 1. An Obama aide said he would ignore a grand jury subpoena. 2. Obama talked about being president for life. 3. Obama imposed trade tariffs 4. Obama paid off a porn star
...this could keep going for scores of tweets. But I stop here
8 comments:
I think it's safe to say that the Trumpsters are coming undone. Nunberg was perfectly happy with Trump when it was all about happily grifting the days away, talking smack on the cable news shows and chortling away any suggestion that the Trumpster was guilty of . . . anything, not to mention he might be held accountable. Now Trump's a disloyal idiot and Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a big mouth and is a fat slob. But Roger Stone? Stone is a mentor, family and Nunberg will laugh when the FBI clinks the handcuffs into place.
This whole crew is completely insane. And unbelievably dumb!
Peggysue
Nunberg appeared on Ari Melber's MSNBC show, The Beat, then he went on CNN and blabbed some more, including talking about taking psych meds when asked if he was appearing on TV under the influence of alcohol. Maybe he takes more than just anti-depressants. Maybe he's on anti-anxiety meds like benzodiazepines, which are habit forming, easy to take too much of, and which certainly can impair judgment similar to alcohol impairment: disinhibition, grandiose statements/gesturesthat could result in waiving a subpoena around in front of TV cameras and saying he laugh in jail. That's entertainment!
https://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari-melber/watch/watch-ex-trump-aide-defying-mueller-gets-cross-examined-on-live-tv-1177444419960
dataflo
Wow - look at what Craig Murray is saying about Sergei Skripal. He says Skripal was a "traitor" (that's true, but it's true of any foreign citizen recruited by MI6 or any other intelligence agency - unless they are reporting everything back to their home country which this guy almost certainly wasn't), and "he must have known interesting things about his MI6 handlers" (that's absolutely not true - the guy was a joe).
As for Litvinenko being a "good man", I mean, seriously, just fuck off.
You gotta realise just how much Russian money there is in London, and how "opposition" works in Russia.
Murray's latest piece adds to the suspicion about him that was raised on this blog when he used his "prestige" during the US presidential election campaign to say it wasn't Russia that had put out material about Hillary Clinton. He, the great Craig, knew that for a fact, so he said. He wrote as if he had information that proved it incontrovertibly. He was implying between the lines that it was the Zionists who released the material. He could have said exactly that - he is no friend of the Zionists - but he didn't. Personally I think it's obvious that the world's two strongest psywar forces - the Russians and the Zionists - were acting together to support Trump. Murray is looking awfully nash.
The British media are unlikely to be able to keep to the line that the weapon used against Skripal and his daughter was Fentanyl, the strong synthetic opiate. I imagine a D Notice has been sent out to stop unwanted speculation about what weapon was used, but still, the Fentanyl line is unlikely to hold. You don't need guys in chemical warfare and radiation suits, complete with gas masks over their faces and oxygen tanks on their backs (as the photographs show) for that. Fentanyl is handled by nurses every day.
This could have been a chemical weapon, or it could have been polonium. Just think of the propaganda effect of polonium.
MI6 have taken a major hit. If they can't recruit foreign sources, they are fucked. Never mind that they can tell the British mainstream audience that the guy was a "Russian former spy" etc., which works well with the 90% of the population who can only "take away" one or two phrases from any news item - and in this case the main words they will hear are "Russian" and "spy".
A far more important market for MI6 is comprised of potential and existing recruits from foreign countries. The message to them is that MI6 either could not or would not, and in any case DID not, protect one of its own informants - so why the fuck should any foreigner want to work for the bastards? This is going to play extremely badly among non-British men and women over the world who work for MI6 or who might work for MI6, who dream of the day when things will get too hot for them and their ultra-trustworthy handlers will sort them out a house in the Home Counties and, if they're important enough, a place at a private boarding school and then at Oxford and Cambridge for their brat.
Skripal's family deny he was ever a British asset. They must surely have a view on who jacketed him as one and why.
It seems to be a risky job, being a member of Mr Skripal's family.
"Col Skripal last called his mother, who is very ill, two weeks ago. He reportedly sounded optimistic, though members family say he was very vigilant all the time because after the 2010 spy swap, he believed the Russian special services could come after him at any time."
Why is his address available at 192.com then?
My family members every time say that I am wasting
my time here at net, except I know I am getting knowledge daily by reading such good content.
Well, the chemical (or radiological?) attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, on Sunday may not be off-topic in relation to the Trump story. Here's something...
192.com lists Sergey Skripal and Ana Skripal. And as another occupant at Ana's address, it lists a fellow by the name of Vladimir Gorkov.
Could he by any chance be related to Sergei Gorkov, the Russian banker who famously met with Jared Kushner in March 2017?
What a relief! Luke Harding tells us in the Guardian that
"Skripal was no Litvinenko. He must have assumed that Moscow had forgotten about him. It is understood he had nothing to do with the dossier on Russia and Trump written by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Before Steele went into private business he led MI6’s response to Litvinenko’s murder. Skripal was not a source and whatever he knew about Russian military intelligence was long out of date." (emphasis added)
I was right: British police have now revealed that the weapon used in Salisbury was a nerve agent. As far as I know, they have not been any more specific than that.
I doubt it is a coincidence that the announcement came only hours after the US government stated that the murder of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un's brother in Malaysia was also effected using a nerve agent, specified in that case as VX.
VX, by the way, was a British invention.
I wouldn't be surprised if a North Korean connection develops in connection with Salibury, but we shall see.
By having the British media refer to the "Russian spy case" etc., MI6 are trying to limit the damage to their reputation, even if among potential and actual sources they are surely pissing into the wind. They want to imply that Sergei Skripal was working for Russia all along (a triple agent), somehow betrayed his hosts, was involved in some other dirty business, or was a total fucking nutcase who wouldn't know "security" if it booted him up the arse (which since he worked as a colonel in the GRU is unlikely to be true). Of course there is also the bigger market of the British sheeple here, but MI6 will be most concerned about one of their own major markets, probably the most important of all: sources. If sources can't trust their handlers, then an agency like MI6 is fucked - even among many whom they recruit using blackmail. (And even those whom they do recruit by blackmail, they'll often butter up and wine and dine and "protect" afterwards for obvious reasons.)
In other words, they want the message to go out as follows: "Sure, we didn't protect him, but he turned dirty on us, so we didn't want to. Anybody who doesn't turn dirty on us, we'll protect as if they were our own mother, forever and a day."
Another point: if Yulia Skripal is a Russian citizen and not a British one, she has a right to contact the Russian consulate.
Has she asked to? Is she being allowed to? Has she asked for asylum instead? Is she conscious?
If journalists didn't publish whatever shit they're told to publish, and if they had enquiring minds instead of solid cocaine in their turdy heads, these are some of the questions they would ask.
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