PROOF THAT PUTIN RUNS DRUGS. Plus: Facebook! Cambridge Analytica! Hope Hicks! Devin Nunes!

Putin's coke jet. Here's an incredibly important story you won't read anywhere else.

Buzzfeed editor Miriam Elder put us on this trail when she offered a notable tweet:

Lol Russia used the same plane implicated in last month’s cocaine scandal to pick up the 23 diplomats kicked out of London today

This blog has not heretofore mentioned that scandal, which you can read about here and here and here. In short and in sum: For a number of years, the Russian embassy in Argentina has been smuggling drugs from South America to Europe in diplomatic luggage. The operation was run by Andrey Kovalchuk, a Russian living in Germany. Many call him Lord K.

According to investigators, he asked Ali Abyanov, a former employee at Russia’s embassy in Buenos Aires, to sneak the cocaine-packed suitcases into the embassy building, so they could later be loaded onto an official Russian plane and sent to Moscow.

Quite a few people connected with this operation have mysteriously died. "Heart attacks" galore.

No fucking way this is going on without approval from Putin. Lord K is said to have ties to "the highest echelons of the Kremlin."

Mironov alleged: 'This is a story about a drugs mafia that can give direct orders to security officers of the Russian embassy.

'This (man) Kovalchuk is connected to the Russian state.

'In one of the conversations he says that he's due to come to Argentina next time at state expense.

'Secondly, he has extremely close contacts with the top of the embassy staff.

'Next, he's been taking suitcases - filled with something - out of the embassy multiple times.

'Lastly, (it is clear from leaked conversations) he can influence appointments of ambassadors, which are always done by the country's president (Putin).

'In other words, Kovalchuk is connected not just to top Russian officials, but to those who put papers right on the president's desk.'

Makes you wonder just how much of the European drug trade has fallen under Putin's control.

This Russian language article offers more info. Google Translate is a wonderful thing, innit?

The government Il-96 aircraft, which appears in the "cocaine case", flew to London on March 20 - the day of the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the UK. This is evidenced by the data of the service for tracking aircraft on-line flightradar24.com.

The aircraft number is also seen in the broadcast, which is conducted by the Ruptly TV channel.

The IL-96 aircraft with the onboard number RA-96023 was noticed on videotapes published by the gendarmerie of Argentina on the "cocaine case". On them, the liner was loaded with suitcases with flour, which the police substituted for cocaine. The aircraft with this number belongs to the management of the affairs of the President of Russia.

A spokeswoman for the President's Administration, Elena Krylova, said that this aircraft had nothing to do with the investigation of the drug trade and suggested that the footage with the fighter number was falsified.

The audacity of these liars...! There's video of the damned jet. Elena may be considered the Russian version of Sarah Sanders.

Cambridge Analytica. Like many others, I've used "CA" as an abbreviation for "Cambridge Analytica," even though "CA" can also mean California or Canada. A Democratic Undergound wit has come up with a new abbreviation: C. Anal. Nice! Although perhaps just Anal will do.

Looks like Anal is in for rough times...

Controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica has been hit with an emergency data seizure order in England following an extraordinary series of events Monday night that revolved around a TV undercover expose.

Shut it down, my British friends. Kill the beast. Cambridge Analytica delenda est. Annihilate Anal.

Facebook. And now it's Facebook's turn. From the WP:

The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into Facebook following reports that a data analytics firm that had worked with the Trump campaign had improperly accessed names, “likes” and other personal information about tens of millions of the social site’s users without their knowledge.

Recently, though, former FTC officials have said that Facebook’s entanglement with Cambridge Analytica may have violated the company's legal agreement with the federal watchdog agency. Whistleblowers in recent days contend that Cambridge Analytica collected information about users and their friends under a since-ceased policy governing third-party apps on Facebook – then kept that data even after Facebook asked that it be deleted.

About 270,000 users downloaded Cambridge Analytica's app. But the firm was able to obtain personal information about their friends, who likely had no knowledge that their data was being collected. Roughly 50 million people may have been affected.

If the FTC ultimately finds that Facebook broke that agreement, it could fine the company $40,000 for each violation.

By my calculations, $40,000 times 50 million violations equals $2,000,000,000,000. A two trillion dollar fine would go a long ways toward covering the deficit. Obviously, this is no more than a pleasing fantasy; I mention the number simply to make you smile.

A more interesting possibility would be transforming Facebook into a public utility, democratically accountable to the people. The obvious parallel goes to electric power generation, which began as a private concern in 1882 (in New York), and which became regulated by the states by 1914. In those saner times, Americans understood that natural monopolies gave us all of capitalism's flaws and few of the benefits.

Weirdly enough, Steve Bannon has advocated transforming Facebook into a utility. Although Steverino's approval automatically makes one distrustful, I still believe that the idea has merit.

(Steverino also advocates raising the top tax rate to 44 percent, which I consider a marvelous notion. Here's the deal with white nationalists: They advocate dog-eat-dog libertarianism only as long as our society remains pluralistic. They'll transform the U.S. into Scandinavia just as soon as all U.S. citizens look like Scandinavians.)

A Facebook insider has come out with some important horror stories...

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

Asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied: “Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.”

Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach.

He said one Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?” Parakilas said he interpreted the comment to mean that “Facebook was in a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse that was happening”.

He added: “They felt that it was better not to know. I found that utterly shocking and horrifying.”

Elsewhere...

Joe Conason has compared Devin Nunes to a crooked cop testifying to the essential innocence of Al Capone.

This surrender of Congressional authority to the White House bore a sad resemblance to the behavior of bogus legislatures under authoritarian regimes.

The list of what the committee didn’t do goes on and on. It made no effort to contact “relevant personnel” at Cambridge Analytica or to retrieve documents that would shed light on that firm’s attempts to obtain stolen Democratic National Committee emails from WikiLeaks, which was acting as a “cut-out” for the Kremlin. It didn’t examine the new evidence of connections between the Kremlin and the National Rifle Association, particularly the gun lobby’s generous friend Alexander Torshin, a Russian banker and politician with very close ties to Vladimir Putin. And it never brought back Erik Prince, the spooky security entrepreneur, Trump pal and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos who convened a secret meeting with Kremlin representatives in the Seychelles Islands — and almost certainly didn’t tell the whole truth.

Hope. Remember when the mainstream press -- including many liberals -- routinely told us that Hillary Clinton "lacked transparency"? Yeesh. If she were any more transparent, she'd be a Fortean phenomenon. The Clintons don't make everyone they talk to sign lifelong NDAs -- unlike Trump, who hands out NDA the way most people hand out candies to trick-or-treaters.

Of course, Trump's intimates can (and do) leak the truth -- anonymously. That's why Trump has brainwashed his followers into believing that all stories with anonymous sourcing are frauds and concoctions. (Except when right-wingers like Alex Jones do it -- and they do it all the damned time.)

All of which brings us to Hope Hicks, who no doubt has quite a book to write, if ever she is allowed to write it.

But as time went on, it became clear that the sickness was a feature, that anyone who entered the building became a little sick themselves. And no matter how dead any of the eccentrics or maniacs or divas appeared to be, how far away from the president their status as fired or resigned or never-hired-in-the-first-place should have logically rendered them, nobody was ever truly gone. The people who were problems on the campaign or on the inside continued to be problems. The president’s taste for the other and the new was so established that the most driven among them knew that all they had to do was wait for an opening, or shrewdly create one — a weakened staffer, a particularly demoralizing news cycle — and they could worm their way back in. The madness engulfing the White House, in other words, was not just a matter of staff infighting or factional ideological rivalries, as it was often portrayed in the press, but also, in part, the result of manipulation from the fringes of Trumpworld.

Wonkette has provided the above-linked article with a snarky, MST3K-esque commentary.

Hope’s just a girl in the world. A girl who likes mints, and working out, and bakes cookies at Valentine’s Day with handwritten notes saying, “Believe in Love.” And if her messy personal life led to the unraveling of the White House, well oooopsie! Hey, don’t blame poor Hopey with the good hair.

Was Lewandowski behind the media reports of Porter’s violence towards his ex-wives? Maaaaybe!

Hope is Trump’s TRUE DAUGHTER, unlike Ivanka who, “understands that her father is gonna be dead in ten years.”

And on that cheery thought, I bid you adieu.