Courtroom-quality evidence that Trump Sr. KNEW about collusion

Throughout the 2016 campaign, both the right and the left pummeled Hillary Clinton for having a private email server -- even though many of the people who learned to loathe her probably don't know what the word "server" means in Computer-ese. Millions of people still believe that she "bleached" 30,000 emails, a charge which Donald Trump continues to make. In fact, the FBI recovered the majority of those emails and found them to be personal and innocuous, just as her lawyers had maintained.

Isn't it ironic? We now know that the emails sent and received by Team Trump contain the real dirt. An administration born of the email may die by the email.

This post won't dissect each line of that exchange in a search for criminality -- although we should note that Donnie Jr. has given us yet more proof that Jared Kushner deserves prison for lying on his security forms. Right now, I'd like to direct your attention to the same issue that drove the previous post: Where was Trump the elder? What did he know and when did he know it?

First, let us repeat an under-discussed fact mentioned previously: On June 9, 2016, when that Russian lawyer met in Trump Tower with Junior, Jared and Manafort, Donald Trump the elder was in New York City and spent the night in that building. That day, he and Manafort met with a host of Republican bigwigs in the nearby Four Seasons Hotel. In other words, Trump Sr. and Manafort spent much of the day together.

Chronology now becomes very important.

That June 9 meeting grew out of an email exchange with Rob Goldstone. The earliest email in this chain was sent on June 3. I direct your attention to this damning excerpt from Goldstone's letter:

This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump - helped along by Aras and Emin.

What do you think is the best way to handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly?

I can also send this info to your father via Rhona, but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first.

"Emin" is the famous Azerbaini singer managed by Goldstone; "Aras" is Aras Agalarov, the Russian billionaire and Putin crony. Clearly, they were in on this whole thing. "Rhona" is Donald Trump Sr.'s longtime secretary Rhona Graff; anyone hoping to contact him had to go through her.

The letter clearly indicates that the elder Trump was to be made witting. Again: The meeting on the night of June 9 took place in Trump Tower, on a floor directly below Donald Trump's residence, on a night when he was sleeping in his own bed in New York City, after a day he had spent with Paul Manafort.

Back to the chronology: On June 6, Donald Trump Jr. emails his cell phone number to Goldstone; it is arranged for Junior to speak to Emin Agalarov after the latter has completed a concert. It is fair -- very fair -- to presume that the gist of the "sensitive information" about Hillary was conveyed during that telephone conversation. After the call, Don Jr. sends this message: "Rob thanks for the help."

Nothing in the email exchange suggests that the candidate was being kept out of the loop -- in fact, the "Rhona" reference makes clear that he was to be in the loop, despite the unpersuasive contrary claim made by Trump's lawyer. 

The next day, June 7, Junior tersely sets up a meeting with the Russian lawyer. After some wrangling over schedules, they decide to hold the meeting on June 9, 4 pm.

You know what else happened on the night of June 7? Donald Trump the elder made a speech after a big win in New Jersey. In that speech, he made a series of demonstrably false claims about Hillary Clinton accusing her of carrying out "corrupt dealings." (In the video embedded above, the relevant portion starts around the 7 minute mark.)

Secretary Clinton even did all of the work on a totally illegal private server. Something about how she's getting away with this folks nobody understands.

The first sentence is patently false: The server was not illegal and none of the emails recovered by the FBI provide evidence of corrupt "work." The second sentence is garbled in a typically Trumpian fashion. To me, it seems obvious that he felt that he had learned something that "nobody understands."

He went on:

Designed to keep her corrupt dealings out of the public record, putting the security of the entire country at risk and a President in a corrupt system is totally protecting her - not right. I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we're going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you're going to find it very informative and very, very interesting. I wonder if the press will want to attend, who knows.

You may recall wondering about the meaning of that threat. I recall it. I fretted.

On Monday (June 13), there was no major speech. Throughout that week, Trump had nothing new to say about the Clintons beyond his familiar guff.

Let us review:

On June 6, Donald Jr. spoke to one or both of the Agalarovs, who supposedly had major dirt on Hillary Clinton. the "Rhona" reference (earlier in the email chain) clearly indicates that the candidate was also supposed to receive this information.

On June 7, Donald Trump promised to give a "major" speech the next Monday in which the world would learn important new information about Hillary Clinton.

On June 9, Junior, Kushner and Manafort meet with a Kremlin-connected lawyer. We still don't know exactly what went on. (Donald Trump Jr. and the lawyer have told wildly incompatible stories.) But we know that there was some sort of breakdown during that meeting; the Russians did not deliver the promised goods.

On June 13, Donald Trump does not give the promised major speech.

The events of those four dates are damning. I think that we have courtroom-quality evidence that Donald Trump the elder was perfectly witting of his campaign's collusion with the Russians.

By the way: On June 14, the Washington Post published that first, history-making story about the Russian government's hack of the DNC.

Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.

The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.

The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.

Gosh. Could the DNC hack have come up during that meeting at Trump Tower on June 9? Ya think?

Trump knew. He knew.

Added note: When I started writing this post, I thought that I would be the first to note the true meaning of the Trump speech embedded above. Now that I'm ready to post, I find that others have published first, including Josh Marshall. To paraphrase the Good Book: "The race goes not to the swiftest -- but that's the way to bet."

WHERE WAS TRUMP? (Important update!)

Nota bene: A few minutes after I published this post, I discovered that yet another "holy shit" NYT article had hit the internet. Scroll down to the update if you're looking for the absolute latest.

These days, a cutting-edge blog post looks hilariously ancient three hours after publication. I had thought that I was done with this day's work on the tale of Junior, Jared, and that Russian lawyer -- but as the day progressed, a lot of new stuff came out. And by "a lot," I mean A LOT.

(But not "alot." There is no such word.)

Where was Donald Trump Sr. on June 9, 2016? Many people dis the Palmer Report, but give 'em credit: On this occasion, Palmer has made a superb catch.

The New York Times, which broke the story of the Trump Jr meeting, says that it took place on June 9th at Trump Tower in New York. During most days of the election cycle, Donald Trump would have been out on the road campaigning. But on June 9th, he was also at Trump Tower, according to an NBC News article that was published at the time (source). Moreover, Trump Sr held a meeting of his own at Trump Tower that day which included Paul Manafort – who also attended the Russia meeting with Trump Jr.

It’s still not clear which of the two meetings took place first that day.

Keith Olbermann also made a remarkable discovery concerning that date in history.

Hmm...Trump's very 1ST tweet about HRC's "missing 33,000 emails" appears to be from 6/9/16, after Manafort, Kushner, Don Jr met the Russian

Junior offered a similar tweet on that same date. What triggered this dual outburst?

Let us consider Palmer and Olbermann synoptically. What do we have? What kind of narrative emerges?

We have the strong suggestion of a narrative in which Trump Sr. knew full well what his son, his son-in-law and his campaign manager were doing under his roof. We also have reason to believe that the Russians had come up with a serious plan to smear Hillary.

You see, in the real world, Hillary did not delete those emails. Her lawyers did that task because the messages were personal and not connected to the request made by Congress. Most of those emails were recovered by the FBI. (I wish Keith Olbermann had mentioned this crucial fact in the video embedded above.) The Bureau's analysts verified that the messages were indeed of a personal nature, just as the lawyers claimed.

Throughout the campaign, and even unto this very day, Trump has pretended that 33,000 emails were "bleached." Not so. Trump lied about that. So did many other Republicans. So did Bernie and his supporters.

As long-time readers know, I have long argued that either the Russians or Team Trump came up with a plan to concoct a false document which was to be passed off as one of those deleted emails. I now suspect that Junior, Jared and Manafort met with that lawyer on June 9 in order to finalize this plan.

You may now be wondering: If Team Trump and the Russians had come up with such a scheme, why didn't they try to pull it off? Well, they couldn't -- not after it was revealed that the FBI had recovered most of those emails. It would have looked too suspicious if Guccifer or Assange had somehow stumbled across astounding, game-changing emails that escaped the FBI's recovery efforts.

Yes, my theory is just that: A theory. But my theory makes a lot more sense than does the guff we're now hearing from the White House.

THAT dossier. We now know the identity of Junior's acquaintance -- the one who hooked Junior up with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The link-man was entertainment impresario Rob Goldstone, a man well-known to Donald Trump the elder; the Moscow beauty pageant brought the two together.

Goldstone manages a Russian (actually, Azerbaijani) pop star named Emin Agalarov -- and Donald Trump Sr. once agreed to appear in an Agalarov video. Hilarity ensued.

Emin's father is Aras Agalarov, one of Russia's richest men. Of course, he is a close Putin crony. In Russia, the billionaires are selected, not self-made. See here:

Donald Trump’s links to the Agalarovs date to the Miss Universe contest in Moscow in 2013, which the father and son had wanted to bring to the Russian capital. Trump, who owned the contest at the time, had long pursued the idea of a Trump Tower in Moscow, though that deal never happened; Trump also had dealings in Azerbaijan, which a story in the New Yorker described as his “worst” ever—though Agalarov says he played no role in that deal.

In March, Forbes reported that Agalarov claimed to have been in touch with the Trump family since last November’s election. He said he exchanged messages with Donald Trump Jr. in January and that the president sent him a handwritten note after the Agalarovs congratulated him on his election victory. The magazine added:

Agalarov knows that maintaining that good favor will require continued contact with Trump's inner circle. To that end, he says he exchanged messages with Donald Jr. around the time of the inauguration, but was told no deals could be pursued until the company’s leadership structure had further settled into place.

And Agalarov has testified to the president’s loyalty. “Now that he ran and was elected, he does not forget his friends,” Agalarov told Forbes.

Agalarov's name came up in the Steele Dossier -- which Republicans pretend has been discredited. (Not true.) As you may recall, I scanned in that dossier on the day it became available as a series of jpgs. The text claims that Agalarov had access to sexual kompromat on Trump:

- Two knowledgeable St Petersburg sources claim Republican candidate TRUMP has paid bribes and engaged in sexual activities there but key witnesses silenced and evidence hard to obtain

- Both believe Azeri business associate of TRUMP, Araz AGALAROV will know the details

1. Speaking to a trusted compatriot in September 2016, two well-placed sources based in St Petersburg, one in the political/business elite and the other involved in the local services and tourist industry, commented on Republican US presidential candidate Donald prior activities in the city.

2. Both knew TRUMP had visited St Petersburg on several occasions in the past and had been interested in doing business deals there involving real estate. The local business/political elite figure reported that TRUMP had paid bribes there to further his interests but very discreetly and only through affiliated companies, making it very hard to prove. The local services industry source reported that TRUMP had participated in sex parties in the city too, but that all direct witnesses to this recently had been "silenced" i.e. bribed or coerced to disappear.

3. The two St Petersburg figures cited believed an Azeri business figure, Araz AGALAROV (with offices in Baku and London) had been closely involved with TRUMP in Russia and would know most of the details of what the Republican presidential candidate had got up to there.

Hmm. So if that part of the dossier is true -- and remember: Other sections have been verified -- then it seems quite possible that Moscow sent a powerful lawyer to Trump Tower in order to make Trump an offer he couldn't refuse.

From the Independent:

Mr Trump's eldest son said he felt obliged to attend the meeting

Oh, I'll just bet.

Speaking of the Steele dossier: There is a concerted effort on the part of GOP propagandists to convince the public that the entire Russiagate story derives from this document. Hardly! If the Steele dossier never existed, we'd still have one hell of a case.

According to the propagandists, the document was a fake compiled by the grand Clinton/Soros/Illuminati conspiracy. A laughable accusation, this: Christopher Steele was not a Clinton toady; he is a respected (and, I'm given to understand, Tory-leaning) former MI6 agent who was the head of the Russia desk. One story identified him as Litvinenko's case officer.

Trump defenders say that the Dossier was commissioned by a firm called Fusion GPS. In the right-wing imagination, Fusion is nothing more than a tentacle of the Great Clinton Conspiracy. In reality, the original sponsors of the Dossier were Republicans opposed to Trump. Any oppo they found would have had no value if it were groundless. (Most people forget that the dossier also contains some oppo material on Clinton herself.)

Rightwingers have identified an extremely tentative Fusion link to the NYT's latest bombshell concerning that infamous meeting in Trump Tower. It's a complicated story. Bottom line: This alleged link has prompted some right-wingers to float the idea that the Evil Clinton Conspiracy somehow forced Jared and Junior to meet with that Russian lawyer.

Want to know more? One of the right-wing outlets pushing this absurd argument is Circa, an arm of the Sinclair network. (As you probably learned from John Oliver, Sinclair is the new Fox. But they're even worse.)

A note about Circa: Circa is run by right-wing "journalist" John Solomon, identified in this superb Josh Marshall piece as a notorious transmitter of Republican smear stories. As it happens, Solomon is also the guy who wrote that recent story in The Hill which claims that Comey's memos contained classified material. So far, we have no other sources to back Solomon's allegation. 

A note about Fusion: Fusion was founded by a couple of Wall Street Journal alumni. Remember when everyone presumed that the WSJ skewed Republican? The editorial page was particularly reactionary.

Here's a bit of Fusion history that the Trumpers won't tell you about -- in fact, it complicates the whole story:

During the course of the case, Browder claimed that Fusion GPS had previously been hired to undertake a pro-Russia campaign to aimed at stopping passage of the Magnitsky Act,[10] named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died while being held without charges in a Russian government prison after he revealed that the Kremlin had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from Hermitage Capital Management.

On March 30, 2017, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa called for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into connections between Fusion GPS and Russia, and an inquiry as to whether Fusion GPS was acting as an unregistered foreign agent.[10] The company has denied the claim that they were engaged in lobbying or violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

That Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, visited Trump Tower because she wanted the Magnitsky Act overturned. Fusion wanted the same thing. In fact, Veselnitskaya was a Fusion client!

Fusion (allegedly) was pro-Russian. So (obviously) is Team Trump.

I'm not sure how to interpret all of this, but one thing is certain: The right-wingers have painted a simplistic picture of Fusion which does not resemble reality.

Is the Steele dossier a fake, as the Trumpists insist? Logic argues otherwise.

1. Trump has not sued Orbis, the company that produced it. (A Russian venture capitalist has mounted a lawsuit. No-one is claiming that Steele got everything right. The document presents raw intelligence and was not intended for publication.)

2. What would be the point of creating an incredibly elaborate forgery and then keeping it secret during the campaign? Propaganda has value only if you propagate it.

3. As noted above, Christopher Steele is the former head of MI6's Russia desk. He is not a dirty trickster of the Roger Stone/Karl Rove school.

4. Important parts of the dossier have been verified. See here and here.

UPDATE: Just when I thought I was finally, finally done with this story -- this hit.

Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign. There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.

But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election.

May I humbly suggest that this brand new story lines up rather nicely with my own theory, as outlined above? I believe that the purpose of that meeting was to outline a plot to smear Hillary.

The day after

Sorry if the preceding post was a bit muddled, despite being rewritten several times. It's hard to discuss such a large story while fact-shards keep hitting you over the course of several hours. I prefer bombshells that give you a single satisfying BOOM and then leave you alone for the rest of the day.

Here are a few "day after" observations.

Dubya's ethics lawyer, Richard Painter -- a man who presumably knows where the line is and how to tiptoe along the edge -- says:

“We do not get our opposition research from spies, we do not collaborate with Russian spies, unless we want to be accused of treason.”

He added, “This is unacceptable. This borders on treason, if it is not itself treason, depending on whether The New York Times story is true.”

Of course we're well into treason territory. Let's drop the reference to "borders." Trump's critics should adopt the ballsy language that comes naturally to Trump's defenders.

That said: The Constitution tells us that a charge of treason -- a death penalty offense -- requires the testimony of two witnesses. Who, in this instance, would be those witnesses? Does an audio recording count as a "witness"?

I mention recordings because Louise Mensch has said that yesterday's revelation proves her contention that damning audio recordings of Donald Trump were made by "the French."

Donald Trump Jr was directly taped by the French before the election, colluding treacherously with the Russians. As with all NATO allies who are not part of the Five Eyes agreement, there is no legal reason why they cannot directly tape Americans abroad.

Mensch's claims have been so varied and numerous one would expect the occasional hit. That said, we can't really count the above-quoted paragraph as an accurate forecast, since nothing in it predicts the current story. If France possesses such evidence, why would Macron sit on it? (We have pretty good reason to suspect that Mensch has been spewing BS -- or "deza," as she likes to call it -- all along.)

Who screwed Junior? Josh Marshall is one of the first writers to publicize a problem that has bugged a lot of people from the start of this business...

What I suspect is the most important detail in this story is the sources. The Times reports that they got the information from “three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.” They apparently talked after the release of the first story. This is highly, highly significant. Needless to say, advisors to the White House are not in the business of taking highly damaging stories and volunteering new information which makes them catastrophically damaging. The only reason a President’s allies ever do something like that is either to get ahead of something much more damaging or get a first crack at shaping the public understanding of something much more damaging. There’s really no other explanation. We don’t know yet what drove them to volunteer such highly damaging information. Five of them did it. It wasn’t a matter of one person going rogue.

So who screwed him over? I have a couple of theories about that.

Theory 1. Maybe Junior and his pals screwed themselves over. Maybe the people in that room on that date are the ones who spoke with the NYT.

My initial presumption was that Junior's statement was meant to prepare the way for a forthcoming smear directed against Hillary Clinton. (For months now, I've been expecting to see a false document which "proves" that Hillary is Putin's plaything.) The Trumpers never stopped running against Hillary; they will always need a Satan, however ersatz. The people who came up with this gambit may not have understood that Junior's statement, even if taken at face value, still reeked of treason.

I compare the Trump family to coke heads whose addiction has made them nutty enough to start doing lines in public. In this case, the addicts have become so hooked on underhanded behavior that they can't comprehend how normal people do things. Junior may be genuinely surprised by the public reaction to the statement he made yesterday: 'They think I did something wrong?'

Theory 2. The mastermind behind that five-person "coup" was Steve Bannon, whose surge back into power is documented in this remarkable article.

Meanwhile, rumors spread that Kushner was trying to force Bannon out, a claim longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone amplified on Alex Jones’s radio show. Bannon griped to a White House colleague that Kushner was trying to “shiv him and push him out the door,” according to the Daily Beast.

Without making any direct accusations, this article offers hints that "Bannon's revenge" is the reason why we know that Kushner lied on his security application. Perhaps Jared, not Junior, was the true target of this latest revelation. Or perhaps Bannon, who considers Kushner a "cuck," has a similar opinion of DJT Jr. It is fair to posit that both Jared and Junior pose obstacles to Bannon's supremacy.

Bannon heads up the war room handling the response to the Russia investigation, and I am quite sure that his team his established contacts with mainstream journalists. Outside the mainstream world, Matt Drudge is an old Bannon friend -- and Drudge surprised many when his headlines publicized Donald Trump Jr.'s statement. (Right now, Drudge wants his readers to believe that Junior is the victim of a dirty trick.)

I'm hardly the first to suggest that Bannon has been leaking material harmful to Kushner. See here:

Scarborough said that he had sources tell him that Bannon was "bragging to journalists" that he would win the war of attrition with Kushner through leaks about Russia.

"Two days after I heard this — two days! — front page New York Times story about the links between Kushner and Russia," Scarborough said. "A coincidence? Absolutely not."

Scarborough added, "Steve Bannon has been leaking — I believe, based on everything I've heard — has been leaking these stories. People very close to Steve Bannon were telling me before these stories were leaked that he was going to be leaking these stories."

Of the latest bombshell, Mark Halperin said the following:

"[Trump Jr.] was forced to change his story by seemingly what The New York Times was able to learn," Halperin said on "Morning Joe" on Monday. "Whoever is helping The New York Times with these stories seems to be doing it in a way like maximum damage on at least Donald Trump Jr."

"Even if you accept his Sunday version. Accept his Sunday version, ask no questions, have no suspicions, he is in a world of hurt," Halperin concluded.

Is Bannon sufficiently skilled in political judo to force Der Donald to turn against his own family? Bannon may believe so. And that belief may take down this rotten administration. (Some liberals have suggested that the NYT relied on information from Michael Flynn. No: Flynn is not a White House source, and he is not five people. The Bannon theory seems much likelier.)

Sad. Today, Donald Trump tweeted:

If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother,as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!

No, they wouldn't. Trump is telling fake stories about mainstream news, which is flawed but not "fake" in the way that Trump himself is fake. Chelsea's response was sublime:

Good morning Mr. President. It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not.

Here's another nutball tweet from our unhinged leader:

James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!

What classified information? And when did he leak it? The memo Comey showed to his law professor friend concerned that meeting with Trump -- a non-classified meeting which makes Trump look bad. If any other memos had classified material, as claimed here, those documents were not leaked.

If Comey really had committed a crime, Trump's Justice Department would have already charged him. I see no indictments; I see tweets and memes and lying propaganda. Trump must be made to understand: He can't talk like an anti-government conspiracy theorist when he is the government.

Of treason, Russian orphans, and a scary cult

Update: I wrote the bulk of the post below a couple of hours before the NYT published its latest bombshell story about Donald Trump Jr. meeting with the Russians after being promised dirt on Hillary. My original post was inspired by an earlier NYT piece, which revealed the meeting but skipped the Clinton connection. After offering a few snarky comments about Jared Kushner and the Russian lawyer he met, I present some new, original, can't-get-it-anywhere-else research into the "Russian orphans" controversy which underlies much of this strange affair.

Before we get to all of that stuff, I would like to say something about the brand-new NYT piece. Bottom line: We have evidence of collusion. Right here; right now. No further proof needed. Of course, the right will never admit that this proof exists. Those guys remind me of that old '60s movie sketch about a husband who wouldn't admit adultery even when caught in the act.

(What was the name of that film again...? Damn. Tip of my tongue.) (Update: Oh, right -- this one.)

UPDATE 2: Donald Trump Jr. has sent out a new statement revising his original response -- and it's a doozy. Now he admits that a Russian "acquaintance" set up the meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. She arrived on the promise that she would deliver Russia-related dirt on Hillary, but (supposedly) what she said made no sense and Team Trump dismissed her.

Obvious codswallop.

But it's very disturbing codswallop. Drudge is linking to the story, far-right sites like Gateway Pundit have fastened upon it, the NYT learned about this matter from unnamed Trump advisers, and the Trumpers tellingly did not react with their usual cry of "Fake News." All of these things tell me that this particular peice of codswallop was concocted to prepare us for a forthcoming bit of buncombe designed to smear Hillary. That's my prediction.

Even if we take the codswallop at face value, Junior and Kushner lied on their security forms. There's no way they can seriously claim an "Oopsie! I forgot!" defense. Even more importantly, the story confirms that the Trumpers were looking to the Russians for campaign help. In other words: Collusion.

Okay, I hope that's the last of the updates for this day. Now let's take a look at the long and meaty post I originally wrote. It's still relevant, despite all that has occurred during the past few hours.

* * *

Sorry I was away. But I'm also a bit sorry to come back. It was nice to spend a day making what I humorously call art.

The big news, which you probably know by now, is this NYT piece: 

Two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.

The previously unreported meeting was also attended by Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.

The Republicans, of course, are pretending that this business is a nothingburger. Whenever you hear them whistling, you know that a very dark shadow has fallen on them. Even if we stipulate for the sake of argument that the meeting was innocent, we still have the fact that Kushner did not mention this meeting on his security application; the current revelation comes from Kushner's "revised" paperwork. (Martha Stewart should have demanded her right to give the FBI a "revised" interview.)

You know damned well that if any Democrat had lied so flagrantly on those forms, the right would scream to have said Democrat jailed. They would never allow any Dem to get away with this "revised" nonsense.

At any rate, the meeting was not innocent.

The Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged Mr. Putin that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

Adoptions of Russian children? Ah! That brings up a fascinating matter -- one which we will discuss in the second half of this post. Stay tuned. Meanwhile...

Ms. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included attempts to discredit its namesake, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison in 2009 after exposing one of the biggest corruption scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule.

A friend tells me that Vladimir Satanovich said not long ago: "We don't have the death penalty in Russia. But...you know..." (Voice trails off; looks at feet.)

Magnitsky was found pummeled and bloody. Everyone knows what happened. Apparently, Jared Kushner doesn't care.

If this story is a nothingburger, then why does it make me want to vomit? The presence of that lawyer clearly indicates that Team Trump and Team Putin were discussing a quid-pro-quo. Kushner did not "forget" -- he was covering up a criminal conspiracy.

Lock him up.

"No evidence" my ass. Personally, I have freakin' had it with the "no evidence of collusion" mantra that we keep hearing, sometimes from non-rightwing sources. The people who spew such nonsense keep moving the evidentiary goalposts: No amount of proof will ever suffice.

This TPM comment has it exactly right:

Honest question: Can anyone think of a more blatant, obvious criminal conspiracy than this one? You've got Russian contacts boiling out of the air vents and swinging from the chandeliers, you've got on-the-record stuff about Russian money, you've got shady deals from Manhattan to Kazakhstan, you've got the motive, means, and opportunity, the quid and the quo, and even the things that are missing like the taxes and the oopsie-forgotten contacts so comprehensively and feloniously missing from the SF 86 docs tend to form a hole that spells out the words "We did it" like a stencil. Boss Tweed was pretty up-front about the corruption, and Al Capone, and the Duvaliers, I guess. But given the scope, consequences, and sheer thumb-suckingly dopey obviousness of it all, I just can't think of a comparison.

Russian adoptions and a creepy cult. If you want more background on Putin's retaliatory action, first go here. That New Yorker piece is terrific, but it leaves out an important matter: The cult connection.

Bear with me, folks: We're going to have to get through a fair amount of backstory before we get to the Russian stuff. But it's interesting backstory.

Last night while making (alleged) art, I kept my ears busy with some goofy podcasts and YouTube videos -- lightweight stuff, nothing too "hurty-brainy" (as we say in this household). I stumbled across this audio piece (embedded below), which recounts the experiences of people who have survived cults.

The first story, taken from an easily-found online source, comes from a victim of a "Christian" cult run by a predatory monster with the delightfully appropos name of Bill Gothard. His main ultra-fundamentalist organization is called Advanced Training Institute, or ATI; he also heads up something called the Institute in Basic Life Principles. You may have learned about him previously due to his links to Mike Huckabee and the Duggars -- not to mention Sonny Perdue, Trump's Agriculture Secretary. For a good introduction to Gothardism, go here, then go here.

Finally, for the political part of the story, go here.

When raised in ATI, political involvement is strongly encouraged as a means to further Gothard's teachings. It was also highly effective. With an army of tens of thousands of homeschooled individuals, indoctrinated to follow Gothard's every command, the potential reach of Gothard's message seems limitless from within. Gothard's annual seminars for the general public, Basic Life Principles, had already amassed millions of attendees, many of whom served and continue to serve in US government in some capacity.

If there's one thing that homeschoolers have, it's a lot of time on their hands. They can devote endless numbers of hours to any given passion: and politics is no exception. In fact, Christian right homeschoolers were directly credited with helping the GOP win 11 senate seats in the the 2016 election. 11 seats. Homeschooling children and adolescents directly contacted over 650,000 prospective voters, working tirelessly to help the GOP win the 2016 election.

Generation Joshua, the organization that trains homeschooling children as young as 11 years old to help influence votes is not directly affiliated with Gothard, but it is known for its extremely conservative views and is considered as part of the same line of beliefs as Gothard's teachings.

Gothard understood the many benefits of making government ties in order to further his mission, and how to use his homeschooling workforce to further the cause. He worked furtively to create connections within government. He did this, in part, by developing a seemingly-harmless program called Character First, which teaches "49 ways to love God and others," promoting character qualities like attentiveness and diligence.

Over the years, this program has been integrated into over 100,000 government and classroom training initiatives, both in the United States and around the globe. (Character First no longer promotes its affiliation with IBLP, and its informational pamphlet directly denies any link to religion and overtly claims that it is not a form of indoctrination.)

The list of Gothard-influenced political leaders is long.

I encourage you to read the rest.

In that sad and horrifying "survivor's story" (as recounted in the video embedded below), one sentence popped out at me: The survivor says that Gothard's cult maintains an institute in Indiana or Illinois where they keep "Russian orphans." I can only presume that these Russian kids are subjected to the same treatment received by other Gothard victims.

Probably much worse. They have no families and no way to escape.

I did more digging. It turns out that Gothard's religious cult had established a surprisingly strong presence in the old USSR not many years before the fall. Call me paranoid if you will, but there is no way -- and I mean NO FUCKING WAY -- Gothard could have done such a thing without coming to the CIA's attention. It's quite likely that he worked closely with CIA; at the very least, Agency personnel would have sought to infiltrate the operation.

(Someone should write a book about spies operating under religious cover. Suggested title: The Father, the Son and the Holy Spook. There's a book which touches on "paramilitary activity" within the Gothard movement. Also see this informative Kos post on Dominionism and its military ties.)

I'd love to know the true story about Bill Gothard's Russian adventures. Undoubtedly, those connected to the cult will tell us that it was all very innocent -- but I'm not sure that I'd feel inclined to believe the blandishments of anyone who comes out of the ATI movement. These guys make the Scientologists seem comparatively groovy.

My questions now: Where in Indiana or Illinois were these Russian orphans kept? (The cult operates a "Verity College" in Indianapolis, but I don't think that those buildings ever saw service as an orphanage.) Under what conditions did those children live? Is the operation ongoing? What happens to these orphans? When Putin laid down his 2009 ban on Russian adoptions, was he specifically targeting Gothard's operation?

Folks -- there's a story here.

I don't yet know what that story might be. Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure that there's a story here. I can feel it. Can't you?

Fakes

Being a student of faked political documents, I was fascinated by the Rachel Maddow segment embedded above. Her team received an alleged highly-classified NSA document which supposedly contained evidence that a member of Team Trump colluded with the Russians.

Although the Maddow crew had no easy time of it, they eventually managed to determine that this document was a fake. The biggest tell: The document names an American citizen, even though (according to intelligence community veterans) such a name would not appear in a document of this sort.

Maddow's people also discovered subtle forensic evidence indicating that the forgers used as a model the real NSA documents which Reality Leigh Winner leaked to the Intercept. The timing is of particular interest. Apparently, the Rachel Maddow Show received this document after Winner was arrested but before the document was published.

The timing suggests that the forger must have obtained a copy of the Winner document from someone at the Intercept. Maddow does not come right and make that should-be-obvious point. However, her report does note that the Intercept's publication of the document conflicted with that publication usual attitude toward the theory of Trump/Putin collusion. (In general, the Intercept has gone to great lengths to pooh-pooh that theory.)

If Maddow won't ask the question, I will. Just who at the Intercept gave the Winner document to a pro-Trump forger?

The obvious suspect. In the past, I was a fan of Glenn Greenwald, co-editor of the Intercept. I changed my stance when the man's anti-Clinton bias became obnoxous and unforgivable.

He shows no sign of changing. The Alex Jonesians have been praising Greenwald and publishing his most deceptive work. Although Greenwald has been quick to use guilt-by-association tactics to damn Democrats, he feels that he has the right to associate with some very dubious characters. Not only has he been showing up on Glenn Beck's program, he has recently touched base with all the superstars of right-wing media:

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, and now Laura Fucking Ingraham for his "Kremlingate is just sore loser warmongering Dems making shit up" World Tour:

I was going to post one of the millions of times Glenn has bashed the #Resist crowd for teaming up with unusual bedfellows, but the coward blocked me so you all can easily find an example yourselves...

Greenwald's strangest bedfellow is an out-and-out fascist. He counts among his friends the notorious neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. Weev, a man who literally has a swastika tattooed on his chest.

From a Bob Cesca piece published in 2014:

iPad Hacker Released From Jail, Parties with Glenn Greenwald, Publishes Neo-Nazi Screeds

Oh, and in addition to his conversion to the neo-Nazi cause as well as his seemingly prolific online hate speech, Weev attended a party in New York soon after getting out of jail. The party was held by none other than Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to coincide with the ceremony in which the duo received the Polk Award for their reporting on Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency.

Further baffling is the idea that hackers like Weev are somehow treated like free speech martyrs, yet television hosts like Bill Maher and author Sam Harris are excoriated by Greenwald and his publication, The Intercept, as racists and bigots merely because they cited empirical evidence critical of Islam -- a far, far cry from Weev's unapologetic Nazism.

Why is the swastika-adorned Weev, who Greenwald hailed as a persecuted "hacktivist," not similarly ripped to shreds for literally being a Nazi who said Jews "made themselves a problem in every nation they occupy, including ours"?

If you are trying to figure out who at the Intercept might have leaked the Reality Winner document to pro-Trump smear artists...

...well, do I really need to name the most obvious suspect?

At this point, I would not rule out the possibility that Weev himself created the document sent to Rachel Maddow, using as a template an actual NSA document sent by someone with alliterative initials. Obviously, I can't prove that theory; it's just a gut reaction, and my gut has been wrong in the past.

Are there more hoaxes out there? In the segment embedded above, Maddow notes a disturbing pattern which may indicate that her fake isn't the only one floating around out there.

CNN recently had to retract a story based on iffy sourcing -- a still-mysterious affair in which the never-welcome name of James O'Keefe cropped up. One need not be Aquaman to detect the smell of fish.

We should also note that Claude Taylor (and others) have spread stories that CNN and other major news organizations have acquired transcripts of incriminating phone conversations involving Trump campaign officials. By this point, most liberals have learned to be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true claims. I'm now wondering: What if such transcripts really are being circulated -- and what if they are fake? Perhaps the role played by Mensch, Taylor and company is to "backstop" these fakes.

Of course, these fakes exist to be exposed as such. Exposure will prove enormously rewarding for Trump's "hate the media" propaganda campaign -- and will cause the public to mistrust real information involving Trump and Russia.

Precedent. In the segment embedded above, Maddow compares the fake document she received to the fake document that undid Dan Rather's career. There are excellent reasons to believe that Rather was targeted by a sting operation.

My own thoughts flashed back to Watergate -- specifically, to an old Jack Anderson story which I discussed in a recent post. Those who recall that column (see here) usually talk about only the first part. The under-appreciated second part of Anderson's scoop involved a plot to discredit the Washington Post's Watergate investigation. The following may seem familiar to you:

Footnote: Colson and Novel also discussed a caper to patch H.R. Haldeman's voice onto a tape along with an actor who would imitate President Nixon and make false confessions. The fake tape would he sent with 'a phony authenticating note from an allegedly disgruntled Secret Service man to the Senate Watergate Committee which, Colson surmised, would leak it. Then he and Novel would' reveal the tape was fraudulent and the hoax would tend to discredit the whole case against Nixon. Colson said it was "true" he discussed this idea. "Wouldn't that be a great gag?"

Rachel Maddow was the intended victim of a similar "gag."

Trump's Nazi

This is a post about someone who may be a criminal mastermind. But before we get to him, we must look at a matter which many of you may consider trivial.

Most of you know that Trump reposted an infantile doctored video in which a kayfabe fight from his wrestling days was transformed into an image of Trump battling CNN personified. This tweet created an instant brouhaha, with people on the left accusing Trump of encouraging violence against journalists. Frankly, the whole "controversy" struck me as overblown.

A CNN writer did some elementary digging and discovered the online history and Facebook page of the man who conjured up this small bit of After Effects tomfoolery. As it turned out, this individual -- who went by the puerile handle of HanAssholeSolo -- had a habit of making anti-Jewish and racist statements. Han (if I may call him that) apologized for his online commentary, which he claimed was just innocent funnin'. In light of this apology, CNN decided to keep the man's identity hidden.

(I can only presume that Han's personal life might be disrupted in some way if his friends or co-workers learned the truth.)

Naturally, the right accused CNN of blackmail -- a hilarious charge, coming so soon after we learned that Trump had tried to blackmail the "Morning Joe" team. For some reason, rightist Jack Posobiec insists that "Han" is 15 years old. We are not told how Posobiec learned this "fact," which CNN denies. CNN says that Han is middle-aged.

So far, this brouhaha strikes me as a silly business, reminiscent of Gamergate or the Straw Hat Riot. What can one say about a massive pillow fight in which all participants imagine themselves to be samurai and janissaries? But just as Gamergate had significance beyond itself, this inane battle over Trump's inane tweet offers an important glimpse into the workings of the far right.

From the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Andrew Auernheimer, the notorious hacker and Internet troll known as ‘Weev,’ rallied the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer’s troll army for its latest campaign this morning, claiming that CNN was blackmailing a “teen shitposter.”

CNN obliged, on the condition that HanAssholeSolo remove his offending posts and cease his trolling, but that didn’t stop the self-proclaimed “real media” at the Daily Stormer from issuing an ultimatum to every staffer at CNN.

“Just like CNN tracked down this child and used media exposure as a bludgeon against him for posting (truthful and funny) things that they don’t like, we are going to begin tracking down their families as a bludgeon against them for publishing (seditiously fraudulent) things that we don’t like,” wrote Auernheimer. “CNN, this is your one singular chance to walk back this behavior of public blackmail. You have one week to fix this.”

Auernheimer’s list of demands includes the public firing of the KFile team, a denouncement of their alleged threats, a $50,000 college scholarship for HanAssholeSolo, and a public assurance that “he and his family will never be harmed by your organization.”

“We are going to track down your parents. We are going to track down your siblings. We are going to track down your spouses. We are going to track down your children. Because hey, that’s what you guys get to do, right? We’re going to see how you like it when our reporters are hunting down your children,” continued Auernheimer.

Auernheimer instructed CNN employees that do not want to be doxed to quit within the week and denounce the organization’s alleged blackmail.

“We didn’t make these rules – you did – and now we’re going to force you to play by them. Hope you enjoy what is coming, you filthy rat kike bastards. Kill yourselves, kike news fakers. You deserve every single bit of what you are about to get,” concluded Auernheimer.

Within hours, personal information for multiple CNN staffers and their family members -- alongside images and gifs of individuals with CNN superimposed over their faces being shot in the head -- appeared in the comments of the posting.

The incident is a rare moment of unity for the far-right with members of r/theDonald, 4chan, the Daily Stormer, and the alt-lite banding together to attack CNN.

The 4chan message board /pol/, which is dedicated to politically incorrect discussion, dubbed the campaign “Operation:Autism Storm” and posted a four part plan of attack that includes banding together with other far right sites, going after CNN’s advertisers, discrediting everyone at CNN, and forming a legal strategy for HanAssholeSolo should he later be doxed.

We can learn much from this insider's view of how the Trumpists organize.

For one thing, it would appear that the voice of an unabashed white supremacist carries far in Trumpworld. Auernheimer, whose previous website was called "Total Fascism," appears to play a "deniable leadership" role in that universe.

By the way: It seems that the term "meme" now has no meaning beyond "propaganda attack." Inevitably, meme has become a verb, the phrase "The Left can't meme" having entered the Urban Dictionary. My response: The left can, but won't. Intelligent people don't meme; they write essays. Meming is for pathetic trolls who couldn't get laid if they walked into a whorehouse carrying a suitcase full of C-notes.

On the same day the SPLC published this expose of "Weev" and his campaign against CNN, this piece by Dave Emory came to my attention. I strongly disagree with part of what he says, particularly the blind eye he turns toward Russia. (One of these days, I'll counter with a long piece about Putin and Alexander Dugin.) Nevertheless, that post offers useful information about Andrew Auerenheimer...

Guest at Glenn Greenwald’s party; apparent resident of Ukraine; probable author of the phony documents in the Macron hack

In related news, a group of cybersecurity researchers studying the Macron hack has concluded that the modified documents were doctored by someone associated with The Daily Stormer neo-Nazi website and Andrew “the weev” Auernheimer.

Auerenheimer was a guest at Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras’s party celebrating their receipt of the Polk award.

“ ‘We strongly believe that the fake offshore documents were created by someone with control of the Daily Stormer server,” said Tord Lundström, a computer forensics investigator at Virtualroad.org.’ . . .”

The public face, site publisher of The Daily Stormer is Andrew Anglin. But look who the site is registered to: Andrew Auernheimer (the site architect) who apparently resided in Ukraine as of the start of this year.

According to "Weev"'s Wikipedia page, Auernheimer had come to the attention of the FBI when -- as a member of the hacker group Goatse Security -- he helped to expose an iPad security flaw and in the process revealed the data of more than 100,000 users. When his home in Arkansas was raided, police found copious amounts of drugs. All drug charges were dropped when he was charged with "one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization and one count of fraud." (This show of leniency suggests a behind-the-scenes deal, of the sort that the government has often made with hackers.)

Auernheimer's conviction was vacated in 2014 on technical grounds. After his release, he revealed himself to be a neo-Nazi, proudly displaying his swastika tattoo in an online photograph. On his livejournal blog, he writes that he has lived in Ukraine for more than a year, as of January 30, 2017.

To be honest, his advice to the Ukrainians has forced all of my former thoughts on Ukraine to go into rewrite. I'll offer but one paragraph:

Develop support amongst the alternative right. Trump's first political support base was far right Internet commentators and reactionary labor movements. It remains his core political base. Oleksandr Muzychko was the only Ukrainian appreciated by the alt-right and he was murdered. Most in the alt-right think he was silenced for his vocal opposition to so many Jews seizing power in Ukraine. Trump's political base wants to see the kind of spirited resistance to Jewish Communists that Muzychko displayed. Ukraine needs to find more men like him and make sure they adequately communicate their ideals to both Ukrainian and American audiences.

I print these words not to invite a discussion of Ukrainian matters or even Trumpian matters but to offer further insight into the way "Weev" thinks.

So. We have a major neo-Nazi Trump supporter with a background in hacking who has been living in Ukraine since late 2015. Question: Is it possible that Auernheimer, with his demonstrated hatred for the current government of his adopted country, might have had any connections to the December 2015 attack on Ukraine's power grid?

The hackers who struck the power centers in Ukraine—the first confirmed hack to take down a power grid—weren't opportunists who just happened upon the networks and launched an attack to test their abilities; according to new details from an extensive investigation into the hack, they were skilled and stealthy strategists who carefully planned their assault over many months, first doing reconnaissance to study the networks and siphon operator credentials, then launching a synchronized assault in a well-choreographed dance.

Ukraine was quick to point the finger at Russia for the assault. Lee shies away from attributing it to any actor but says there are clear delineations between the various phases of the operation that suggest different levels of actors worked on different parts of the assault. This raises the possibility that the attack might have involved collaboration between completely different parties—possibly cybercriminals and nation-state actors.

“This had to be a well-funded, well-trained team. … [B]ut it didn’t have to be a nation-state,” he says. It could have started out with cybercriminals getting initial access to the network, then handing it off to nation-state attackers who did the rest.

Although the exact chronology is difficult to work out, this incident seems to have taken place just as Weev established residency in Ukraine. Perhaps he was invited/imported into that country for the purpose of conducting this attack.

Six months later, Ukrainians were the major victims of a devastating ransomware attacks.

Significantly, the majority of infections occurred in Ukraine, due to the main attack vector being a compromised version of an accounting program, ME Doc, used to file taxes in the nation. That has led to many, including the Ukrainian government, suspecting Russian involvement as part of the ongoing cyberwar between the two countries.

Hackers offering to decrypt files for money suggests that the cash motivation may be more significant than thought – but that too could be misdirection.

It is widely thought that Russia was responsible for this ransomware assault. While I would not be surprised to learn that Putin had foreknowledge or that he bore ultimate responsibility, I must point out that Ukraine was not an epicenter for cyber attacks before Weev showed up. If the man can be responsible for a cyber-attack in France, why shouldn't he be considered a suspect in the recent Ukrainian attacks?

I don't know why the Ukrainians have not yet subjected Weev to some "extreme vetting." Suppose a Ukrainian former jailbird with extremist political beliefs and a professed hatred of our government decided to make a home in the United States. How would most Americans feel about such an immigrant?

A final note. Despite his ugly references to "Jewish communists" and "kike bastards," Weev has claimed to be of part-Jewish descent. His idolatrous attitude toward Donald Trump was not diminished when Trump gave over many of his duties to son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is Jewish. I am an old dog who will never get used to fascism's new tricks. Nevertheless, we have to understand that modern fascism is not the fascism which America fought in the 1940s. To at least some extent, the old Nazis-vs-Jews paradigm no longer holds. That paradigm has been replaced with -- well, with something, though I'm not sure what that "something" is. Both Nazis and Jews may be as unsure as I am.

Indeed, if you read the whole of Auernheimer's blog entry (plus the comments), one of the themes seems to be the split between Old School Nazism and New School Nazism.

Are there incriminating recordings of Kushner and Bannon?

Since so many people now disdain Louise Mensch -- whose attacks on Joy Reid were seemingly intended to alienate liberals -- adventurous souls in search of "edgy" anti-Trump claims now turn to her occasional partner Claude Taylor. He has said some noteworthy things today (and when I say noteworthy, I do not necessarily mean probable or credible):

Senior CNN Executive: "We have seen and have copies of transcripts of calls between Kushner, Bannon and high level Russian officials".

"At the least, those two committed treason, and it's hard to believe Trump wasn't part of it".

Not many minutes ago, he offered this follow-up:

GOP will soon shift to Trump too cray to actually be a traitor and if he is a #Treasonweasel he's not responsible because it's not illegal.

Why do I question this? Not because I consider Bannon or Kushner incapable of such activity. I simply cannot comprehend why CNN would sit on this kind of evidence. Why would a history-changing bombshell reach the ears of a guy like Claude Taylor and no-one else?

On June 26, Trump tweeted:

...they have zero "tapes" of T people colluding. There is no collusion & no obstruction. I should be given apology!

It is odd that he would reference "tapes." Would he do so if he knew that there were actual tapes floating around out there?

If such evidence exists, the only non-Russian sources would be the NSA or Britain's GCHQ (or maybe the Israelis). Since CNN is based in the United States, I presume that they are likelier to have acquired a leak from the NSA than from the Brits.

If, if, if the claimed transcripts are real.

Mike Rogers. The "edgy" anti-Trump sites -- the ones featuring the work of those eccentric worthies I call "the spooks against Trump" -- have long hinted or stated that damning recorded evidence exists. Such claims has been floating around for months.

Back in May, John Schindler -- who heads up what I prefer to call the Double-Cross Committee -- wrote a piece in which he claimed that NSA Director Mike Rogers gave a remarkable speech to NSA officials worldwide...

As Rogers explained, he informed the commander in chief, “I know you won’t like it, but I have to tell what I have seen”—a probable reference to specific intelligence establishing collusion between the Kremlin and Team Trump.

Rogers then added that such SIGINT exists, and it is damning.

The obvious questions:

1. Why have we learned about this speech only from John Schindler? Other reporters have NSA sources.

2. Why is Schindler's story so difficult to square with Rogers' testimony before Congress?

3. If Mike Rogers really does have damning SIGINT, why has he continued to provide cover for Trump?

We now know -- thanks to the heroism of Reality Leigh Winner -- that the NSA hid proof that Russia hacked American election officials and at least one supplier of voting equipment. Isn't it strange how this story has gone down the memory hole? Perhaps predictably, the argument over Winner's criminality overshadowed the amazing revelations contained within that "liberated" document -- even though Winner's legal fate is a matter of concern only to her and her family, while the information in that document is a matter of grave concern for the entire world. 

Let me repeat a supremely important point which everyone else seems to have missed: The information in that document was known to NSA head Rogers -- and Rogers kept the information under wraps.

What does this fact tell us about Rogers?

In my opinion, he had an incontrovertible moral obligation to make this information known. (Obviously, there were ways to do so without revealing sources and methods.) There are times when silence equals complicity.

That said, Rogers has always been very hard to read. This is from his testimony in March...

CONAWAY: And then finally, Admiral Rogers, that assessment went on to say that president Putin and the Russian government aspired to help president -- I guess he would have been candidate Trump at the time -- but president-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton. You had a lower...

ROGERS: Confidence level.

CONAWAY: ... confidence level. Is that still the case?

ROGERS: Yes, sir.

CONAWAY: Can you tell the group why you were...

ROGERS: I'm not going to get into specifics in an unclassified forum but for me, it boiled down to the level and nature of the sourcing on that one particular judgment was slightly different to me than the others.

COMEY: To be clear, Mr. Conaway, we all agreed with that judgment.

ROGERS: We all agreed with the judgment.

Basically, Rogers agreed that Russia was helping Trump, as opposed to merely undermining the American electoral system, but the NSA had moderate as opposed to high confidence in this assessment. (Almost needless to say, this testimony conflicts with Schindler's dubious report: There's a huge difference between damning evidence of collusion between the Kremlin and Team Trump and moderate confidence that Putin was helping Trump.)

However, in more recent meetings between Rogers and congressfolk, the situation seems rather different.

National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers is frustrated that he has not yet convinced President Trump that U.S. intelligence indicates Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, CNN reported Wednesday.

Rogers vented frustration over his fruitless efforts to lawmakers during a recent closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill, a congressional source familiar with the meeting told the news network.

The NSA director also reportedly said the White House lacked focus about the continued threat of the Kremlin's cyber efforts, especially regarding voting systems in the U.S., another congressional source said.

The intelligence community continues to brief the president on new information on Russia's election involvement as it comes to light.

If we could question Rogers, he'd probably remind us that the NSA exists to serve one primary client: The president. That's the system. The intel community provides information to the president, who makes decisions accordingly.

But what if the president himself has been compromised? If intelligence reveals that the president is a crook, there seems to be little point in sending him a report which says "You're a crook." If intelligence suggests that the president is illegitimate, there seems to be little point in trying to convince him that he is illegitimate.

When I mull over this situation, I keep visualizing a meeting between Al Capone and his lawyer: "Sir, I must inform you that it has come to my attention that certain of your associates have become involved in the illegal distribution of alcohol."

Why is Trump unwilling to act upon, or even pay much attention to, NSA reports of Russian interference in the election? The obvious conclusion is that Trump was always in on the conspiracy. Mike Rogers is a very intelligent man. He must understand this.

So why is he engaged in what appears to be a charade? Looks to me as though his testimony amounts to a CYA paper trail: If Trump falls, Rogers can plausibly claim that he tried his best to do the right thing. In reality, however, he has demonstrated complicity. The Reality Winner document proves the point.

The president may be the NSA's main client, but Rogers took an oath to serve the United States, not to serve Trump.

CNN. Let's return to the claim that CNN has obtained transcripts of "tapes" of Bannon and Kushner engaged in damning conversations with Russians. I'm tempted to dismiss this claim as disinformation -- in fact, the original draft of this post ended with the sounding of that very note.

But on further reflection, it seems possible that Reality Winner may not have been the only NSA leaker. Perhaps a transcript does exist.

A transcript is not a recording. A transcript is easier to fake -- and much harder to verify.

The existence of such a transcript would explain why Team Trump has recently made CNN the focus of such a brutal propaganda barrage -- a campaign which, I've been given to understand, has resulted in CNN reporters receiving numerous death threats. The hyperbolic reaction to that retracted CNN story (which has all the earmarks of an O'Keefian sting operation) is but one part of a demonization campaign reminiscent of the one that destroyed Hillary Clinton. (O'Keefe and Julian Assange are both relentlessly attacking CNN right now -- and it is very interesting to see them, in effect, working together.)

Why are the Trumpers so focused on CNN, as opposed to the NYT or the WP, the two media outlets which (heretofore) have broken most of the important stories about the Russia/Trump connection? This constant bombardment of "CNN=Satan" agitprop insures that, even if the transcripts do exist, the network would sit on the story until it can be irreproachably verified.

The post originally ended with the suggestion that Claude Taylor is either the victim or the propagator of disinformation. That may still be the way to bet.

But...maybe not.

Trump's "voter fraud" claims: A reaction from Maryland

From the Maryland Attorney General, Brian Frosh:

Bravo. But we must emphasize that there is a distinction between voter impersonation fraud -- a Republican propaganda meme which serves as a cover for denying the vote to minorities -- and computerized election fraud, or hacking the vote. Even Josh Marshall, as cautious a blogger as there is, now seems to be open to the latter possibility. Concerning the Department of Homeland Security's refusal to provide a forensic examination of voting equipment, Marshall wrote (a few days ago):

Computer scientists have been critical of that decision. “They have performed computer forensics on no election equipment whatsoever,” said J. Alex Halderman, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about the vulnerability of election systems. “That would be one of the most direct ways of establishing in the equipment whether it’s been penetrated by attackers. We have not taken every step we could.”

Voting machines, especially the electronic machines still used in several states, are so insecure that an attack on them is likely to be successful, according to a report from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice out Thursday morning. David Dill, a voting systems expert and professor of computer science at Stanford University quoted in the report, said hackers can easily breach election systems regardless of whether they’re able to coordinate widely enough to alter a general election result.

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t try to hack voting machines and I don’t know what would stop them,” Dill told TPM. “Any statement that says ‘We haven’t see evidence of X’ also means ‘We haven’t lifted a finger to investigate.’”

DHS told TPM Wednesday afternoon it was confident in “multiple checks and redundancies in US election infrastructure” and referred to the testimony of Liles and Jeannette Manfra, DHS undersecretary for cybersecurity, who said US electoral systems were fortified by “diversity of systems, non-Internet connected voting machines, pre-election testing, and processes for media, campaign, and election officials to check, audit, and validate results.”

The new Brennan Center report, however, details the dangers of voting machines that aren’t properly secured, particularly the effect on public confidence of a very public successful hack, whether or not it managed to swing an election. “In the current hyper-partisan environment,” the authors noted, “evidence of this kind of hack could lead to accusations by each side that the other is rigging the election.”

As I've said often in the past: Examination of election machines (including tabulators and all other devices) for signs of tampering or hacking or malware ought to be routine. Anyone who argues otherwise ought to be viewed with deep suspicion.

I have also said -- many, many times -- that we need a paper trail, counted by human beings. The old-fashioned way is still the best. If computers are to be used at all on election day, they should provide only an unofficial "quick and dirty" tally.

Another point: I am not at all averse to the idea of instituting a new identification card system designed to alleviate fears (whether valid or invalid) of voter impersonation or multiple voting. We should also consider adopting the European practice of staining a voter's finger after a vote, to insure that he or she cannot vote a second time. Any new scheme of this sort would be welcome, as long as the intent is to make voting easier for everyone.

The Republicans do not seek that goal. They've made that fact crystal clear.

I am the very model of a modern Alex Jonesian

I am the very model of a modern paranoia fan
I peddle fear while swilling beer -- so much it could destroy a man.
God help you if you're subject to my infamous loquaciousness
I'll interrupt and interrupt with conscience-free audaciousness.

I batter all my enemies with arguments ad hominous
That's how I proved that rock and roll and Rachel Ray are ominous.
I say the flags are flying false if ever there's a shooting spree
The hypno-programmed killers and the cops all act colludingly.

For Marvel comics are a plot to topple Christianity
And global warming is a hoax; I saw it all on Hannity.
All scientists are socialists and murderous Malthusians.
As Lovecraft tried to warn us, they are really Cuh-thul-HOOsians

And Hillary's the bloody queen of her Masonic ritual
Her ceremonies sanguinistic have become habitual.
And when the witch is finally dead, no-one will know a hotter fate --
Except perhaps for Johnny Dean, who bears ALL blame for Watergate.

The flying saucers really come from bases antepodean
Which Hitler built deep underground, of which he's still custodian.
They went to Mars in '62, but kept it from the knavery
and now they've made the place a home for pederastic slavery.

The water flowing to your home will gay-ify amphibians
The Queen's a lizard pushing drugs and working for the Libiyans.
The plot to murder JFK was really quite a tangle, son
So blame Fidel or LBJ or anyone but Angleton.

They deify a massive owl inside a Grove Palladian.
Their power is unfettered and their ego is Arcadian.
And only I have eyes to see a plot so Skull and Bonesian --
I am the very model of a modern Alex Jonesian.

Pedos on Mars!

Gizmodo, The Washington Post and other mainstream sites are having fun with the latest outlandish claim heard on the Alex Jones radio show. Donald Trump's favorite radio broadcaster offered airtime to former CIA man Robert David Steele, who says that abused children are being kidnapped and taken to Mars.

“We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,” Robert David Steele said Thursday during a winding, conspiratorial dialogue with Jones about child victims of sex crimes. “So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.”

Steele has also proclaimed Donald Trump to be a "potential savior of the Republic." Then why hasn't Trump exposed this Martian perfidy? Answer that, Mr. Steele!

Steele is offering the latest paranoid variation of the Alternative Three hoax. A long time ago, I wrote what is probably the longest, most in-depth expose of Alternative Three, which began life as a fake documentary broadcast in the UK. This pseudo-documentary (starring actors recognizable from other work) gave rise to a book written by Leslie Watkins. Many Americans who did not see the program read the book -- which went through many printings, despite the frequently-heard claims that it was "banned."

At one point in my research, I telephoned Watkins, inadvertently waking him because I had miscalculated the time zone of his country. (If memory serves, he then lived in New Zealand.) He drowsily admitted that the book was a fake, which should have been apparent to any rational person. In its final section, the book comes right out and declares "I am a novel," telling its story in the third person and past tense. Apparently, our nation's many paranoia-addicts lack the ability to read a slim paperback book all the way through to the end.

Circa 1990, an audacious, vino-fueled fear-peddler named Milton William Cooper picked up on the Alternative Three meme. Cooper claimed to be a former Naval intelligence officer -- a claim that was just barely true, in the sense that he was a look-out on a small boat during the Vietnam War. In that lowly position, he supposedly was granted access to a trove of highly-classified documents containing the Secrets of the Universe. Even though his story mutated over the years, his loyal audience of right-wing freakazoids never deserted him. He was eventually killed by return fire after he shot a cop in the head.

Cooper may have been the first person to link the "colony on Mars" mythos to the then-current Satanic panic. I'm not sure if he makes that claim in the lectures available on YouTube, but I recall hearing "through the grapevine" that he had made this conceptual leap circa 1993 or so.

Let us pause to savor certain ironies:

1. Cooper eventually retracted everything he had said about Alternative Three. In later years, he decided that space travel was impossible due to a radiation field surrounding the Earth -- hence, the faked moon landings.

2. Alex Jones claims that he has always despised Cooper, despite the fact that Jones basically stole Cooper's act. And by "despite," I mean "probably due to."

3. The original Alternative Three pseudo-documentary (embedded at the foot of this very post) is predicated on the presumption that global warming is real. Although that term is not used, the concept of man-made climate change underlies the story. Of course, Alex Jones and his pal Donald Trump believe that global warming is a hoax

(Although I had forgotten the name, Robert David Steele has appeared in these pages before, after he had made some interesting claims about Google's links to the CIA. What he said on that occasion did not sound crazy. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have written a very different post.)

Cooper's version of the Alternative Three hoax inspired another series of bizarre claims made by an alleged former DARPA scientist named Andrew Basiago, who insists that he was himself a "child participant" in the Mars project.

Since not much is beneath my notice, I've dealt with this man's wild tales before. If you are searching for a smile on this otherwise-grim day, you may find what you seek in a 2009 Cannonfire post titled "But did he meet the incomparable Dejah Thoris?" In that piece, the following words appear...

This training, he said, culminated in 1981, when, as a 19-year-old, he teleported to Mars, first by himself after being prepared for the trip by CIA officer Courtney M. Hunt, and then a second time in the company of Hunt. Both trips, Mr. Basiago said, were made via a “jump room” located at a CIA facility in El Segundo, CA. The apparent purpose of the trips to Mars was to familiarize him with Mars because the CIA knew of his destiny as the discoverer of life on Mars and deemed it important that he visit Mars and experience it first-hand.

Basiago isn't the only one engaged this exercise in absurdity. Believe it or not, he has a number of confederates, all pushing weird stories about jump rooms and Mars and God-knows-what-else. Basiago's partners-in-paranoia include a "Livermore physicist" named Henry Deacon, an alleged NSA employee named Arthur Newman, "CIA whistleblowers William Stillings and Bernard Mendez" and one Michael Relfe, described as a DoD whistleblower.

Is it possible that these worthies have also been the "sources" on which Louise Mensch, Claude Taylor and John Schindler have relied? Perhaps; perhaps not. One thing's for sure: This tale of Martian madness proves that a source should not be considered credible simply because he or she offers a resume containing the initials "CIA" or "NSA." 

My earlier post noted that Basiago and company managed to drag Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo into the narrative. She is a real person of political importance: As some of you will recall, she made headlines after testifying that members of the American Psychological Association took part in brutal interrogations at Gitmo. The mention of Dr. Arrigo's name is the reason why this silly Mars story first came to my attention back in 2009. At that time, I flirted with the theory that a gang of spooks -- "Team Deza," as dear Louise might put it -- had decided to smear an important whistleblower by linking her to an obviously absurd narrative.

After that post appeared, readers informed me that Dr. Arrigo's sister Sue has made bizarre claims about CIA mind control. (One reader stated a third Arrigo sister has described Sue as schizophrenic.) I'm not sure how -- or if -- the wild assertions made by Sue Arrigo link up with the wild assertions made by Andrew Basiago.

That's the bottom line. We don't know how all of these people link up or what their motives are -- but something is going on.

For years, in that shadowy fringe realm which mainstream reporters rarely explore, Basiago and his compatriots have crafted an elaborate Martian mythology. This lore has found a degree of acceptance among the kind of people who consider George Noory a deep thinker.

Why are these people saying these things? I see no obvious source of financial gain. So...why?

I suspect that anyone who devotes a month or two to investigating this bunch will uncover a fascinating tale of intrigue -- and perhaps of chicanery. Feel free to conduct that research yourself, if such pursuits amuse you. Although I don't know if these people really did work for the NSA and other government agencies, I'm quite sure that there are no "jump rooms" in El Segundo (unless you count the VIP rooms at certain strip clubs).

Similarly, I am quite confident that there are no pedophile colonies on Mars. Nor are there any non-pedophile colonies.

It's very possible that Steele, if interviewed, would insist that his story has no link to Cooper or to the earlier book by Leslie Watkins. However: Steele's claims have an obvious relationship to the yarns spun by Basiago and his merry band -- and the Basiago inanity derived from Cooper's inanity, as this page proves. Cooper made no secret of his reliance on Alternative Three, which originated as a fake documentary originally intended for broadcast on April 1. Thus, we can state with confidence that all current variants of the "colony on Mars" myth trace back to a British television hoax of the 1970s. Whether folklore or fakelore, this legend has an indisputable lineage, even if modern conspiracy salesmen disguise that lineage when addressing their audience of very gullible people.

Alas, we live in a country in which "an audience of very gullible people" is large enough to propel a con artist into the Oval Office. During Cooper's heyday, I feared that we might come to this sorry state. Trumpism is the natural outgrowth of Cooper-ism.

Remember: According to Donald Trump, the New York Times is fake news -- and Alex Jones isn't.