The obligatory indictment post

 Actually, that title up there may not be truly indicative of how I'm approaching this. I actually have a lot to say and feel that some of it ought to be expressed colorfully. 

Bullet points may be and effective way of systematizing my thoughts. Let's start in.

• Jack Smith has a reputation as a top-notch prosecutor. The seven charges can't be argued as being flimsy, like those brought by Alvin Bragg in New York. Smith's team interviewed everybody who was conceivably in the employ of Mar-a-Lago, and he has alternative jurors lined up for the trial in case any of the first picks starts showing signs of partisanship.
• The audiotape of the Very Stable Genius bragging to dinner guests - a writer and the writer's publisher - about a document he was showing them being classified would need a hell of a lot of context not to be incriminating. Ditto the photos of boxes in out-in-the-open places around the Mar-a-Lago house. 
• The deadly-serious nature of some documents' content - US nuclear capabilities, other countries' nuclear capabilities, a scenario for attacking Iran that Trump had Mark Milley draw up - becoming public knowledge worldwide increases US vulnerability considerably. 
• The Republican Party has confirmed its status as a pathetic and ineffective parody of a major political party, just when we sorely need a viable center-right countervailing force to the Democrats' agenda of identity politics militancy, climate alarmism and wealth redistribution. More than ever, the Pubs are the party of cowards, nuts, and sycophants. Mike Pence, Josh Hawley, Nikki Haley, Kevin McCarthy and Marco Rubio are already on record as having said some variation of "the American people want to move on" or "these politically motivated long knives are the actual threat to our Republic." 
• Mainstream media focus regarding MAGA reaction seems to be focused on the really-out-there nutcase sites and commenters, but more "acceptable" Trumpist sites such as Townhall ("Here's How We Rally Around Donald Trump") and The Federalist ("Latest Trump Indictment Proves Deep State Is Trying To Rig Yet Another Election", "DOJ Declares War on 2024 With Trump Indictment Hours After Biden Bribery News") have already staked out their position. 
• We may well see a situation in which Squirrel-Hair is appearing in a courtroom and then dashing off to rallies of his drool-besotted leg-humpers. 
• His having to deal with this particular legal trouble will surely hurt him in the general election in November 2024. There will not be enough of the drool-besotted leg-humpers, even combined with Republican voters solely motivated by wanting to defeat Democrats, to drag him over the finish line, given what the public will know and have seen by then.

One more thing: Our ability to see two things as true at once (Trump is corrupt; Biden is also corrupt) is badly eroded by oh-look-a-squirrel-ism ("We should solely focus on Biden corruption!"). Those pulling that crap may be able to give themselves talks in the mirror that nearly convince them that they really believe it, but in their unguarded moments when they know their Lord is looking with laser focus at their hearts of hearts, they know they're driven by cynicism. Knowing that, don't fall for what they're peddling. 

This is kind of a big deal

 One of the West's most agenda-driven enemies has upped its presence right here in our hemisphere in an eye-opening way:

Iran's navy is set to station warships for the first time in the Panama Canal, a critical trade route in America's backyard that has never before seen an Iranian military presence.

Rear Admiral Shahram Irani, the commander of Iran's navy, said on Wednesday that his forces will establish a presence in the Panama Canal later this year, marking the first time Iran's military has entered the Pacific Ocean.

Iran in recent years has placed a greater focus on moving its military into Latin American territories as it strengthens relations with anti-American dictators in the region, most notably in Venezuela. Iranian vessels have docked more frequently in Venezuela as Tehran's hardline regime seeks to prop up dictator Nicolás Maduro. These moves are meant to provoke the United States and signal that Tehran has the ability to station its military apparatus a stone's throw from U.S. territory.

Joseph Humire, a national security analyst who focuses on Latin American issues as executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society think tank, said Iran has been laying the groundwork for this type of voyage by holding joint exercises with allies such as Russia and China, two nations that have also been strengthening their ties with Latin American countries.

"This is what Iran has been building in Latin America for the past 30 or 40 years" by establishing embassies and bilateral agreements with a host of nations, Humire said.

Iran's goal "has always been to have a military presence in Latin America, so it's not surprising at all for its navy to announce it's going to make moves on the Panama Canal," Humire said, noting that in addition to Venezuela and Nicaragua, Iran has opened relations with Colombia.

"This is a tremendous escalation if it is to happen," Humire said. "Many people may discount Iran in terms of its capabilities … but I would not discount it because they have been building to this for a very long time."

I know that several camps will have their say as Congress deliberates a defense budget, but let us hope that those who understand the magnitude of the threats characterizing the lay of the land at the outset of 2023 prevail. This is no time for posturing. North Korea tested an unprecedented 95 missiles last year. Russia continues to diminish any chances it has of joining the community of civilized nations that prize international order with its atrocity-driven assault on Ukraine, and the risk of nuclear consequences continues to rise. China continues to breathe down Taiwan's neck.

It would be nice if we had enough of a sense of national unity to seriously understand the stakes, but we'll take what we can get. As I say, a US defense budget based on adult priorities would be a good start.

 

The special master to the Very Stable Genius's lawyers: we're not going to go off half-cocked on this

 Judge Dearie apparently intends to be a professional and have his ducks in a row:

 The senior federal judge tasked with reviewing the materials seized by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate sharply questioned the former president’s attorneys Tuesday during their first hearing before his courtroom.

Judge Raymond Dearie pushed Trump’s lawyers repeatedly for refusing to back up the former president’s claim that he declassified the highly sensitive national security-related records discovered in his residence.

But Dearie bristled at the effort by Trump’s lawyers to resist his request for proof that Trump actually attempted to declassify any of the 100 documents that the Justice Department recovered from his estate. Without evidence from Trump, Dearie said his only basis to judge the classification level of the records was the fact that they all bear markings designating them as highly sensitive national security secrets — including some that indicate they contain intelligence derived from human sources and foreign intercepts.

The early tension between Dearie and Trump’s legal team was an ominous sign for the former president, who demanded the special master review the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago and who proposed Dearie — a 1986 appointee of Ronald Reagan — to perform the task. Prosecutors had offered two other names, but acceded to Trump’s choice of Dearie.

The VSG's team is patently treading water. Any reasonable person is going to conclude that Dearie can't proceed with anything without proof.   

 

The nation's always vulnerable during transitions from one administration to the next; it appears to be particularly so this time

 This Russian hack is really serious:

A Trump administration official tells Axios that the cyberattack on the U.S. government and corporate America, apparently by Russia, is looking worse by the day — and secrets may still be being stolen in ways not yet discovered . . .

The hack is known to have breached the departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, Treasury, Commerce, and Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — plus the National Institutes of Health.

In unusually vivid language for a bureaucracy, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of Homeland Security, said yesterday that the intruder "demonstrated sophistication and complex tradecraft."

The agency said the breach "poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations."

Which adds to the urgency with which we need an answer as to why this is happening:

Pentagon officials have been left "stunned" after acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller ordered a "Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation" with President-elect Joe Biden's transition, Axios reports.

Miller, according to the report, on Thursday night ordered officials to cancel transition meetings that had previously been scheduled, "which stunned officials throughout the Pentagon." Officials reportedly were not clear on what led to the decision, and Axios says a top Biden official wasn't aware of the order.

If national security is everyone's first priority, shouldn't the briefings get more frequent and focused the closer we get to January 20, given the circumstances? 

Or is there some element that has something else as its highest priority?

 

 

 

The Krebs firing

 One more conclusive example of how the Very Stable Genius prioritizes his fragile ego over national security:

President Trump took to Twitter late Tuesday to fire his top cybersecurity official via tweet for not toeing the line on his “rigged” election narrative.

“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud - including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more. Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” Trump declared.

Krebs, who had set up a web page to counter disinformation about the security of the election, had reportedly been expecting to be fired after becoming one of the few in Trump’s administration to dispute his claims.

He reacted to his termination with a brief statement on his personal Twitter account: “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.”

His firing comes as more and more of the president’s allegations of voting discrepancies fall apart in court. Just hours before Krebs’ ouster on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against the Trump campaign’s claims that observers were not able to properly monitor absentee vote-counting.

GOP Throws More Crap at the Wall as Trump Legal Losses Pile Up

While the president has repeatedly tried to sound the alarm over supposed voting discrepancies that he claims robbed him of victory in the Nov. 3 election, officials have said there is no evidence to back up his assertions. Even the Trump campaign’s own lawyers, in their legal blitz to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, have struggled to present evidence of a “rigged” election in court; many of their legal challenges alleging voter fraud have collapsed when judges grilled them on their claims. In some cases, the evidence was deemed to be hearsay gathered via a “voter fraud” website. In others, Trump campaign lawyers admitted under questioning that observers were not blocked from monitoring the vote count as the complaint alleged.

Lawmakers responded to news of Krebs’ termination with praise for his work in protecting the election.

“Chris Krebs is a dedicated public servant who has done a remarkable job during a challenging time,” Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) said in a statement. He went on to say the work of Krebs and his CISA team “should serve as a model for other government agencies” and was “essential in protecting the 2020 U.S. presidential election against threats of foreign interference.”

Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) and Lauren Underwood (D-IL) issued a joint statement calling Trump’s firing of Krebs “disturbing” and “antidemocratic.”

“The fact is that, since Election Day, President Trump has sought to delegitimize the election results by engaging in a disinformation campaign that could shatter public confidence in our elections for generations. Director Krebs put national security ahead of politics and refused to use his position to do the President’s bidding, so the President fired him,” they said.

“In firing Director Krebs for refusing to lend credibility to his baseless claims and conspiracy theories about voter fraud, the President is telling officials throughout the Administration to put his political interests ahead of their responsibilities to the American people.”

This, of course, comes on the heels of Trump's firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a move during what should be a transition period, characteristically a time of relative wobbliness. This vulnerability does not go unnoticed in the world:

Even under the best of circumstances, a presidential transition "is a period when we aren't necessarily firing on all cylinders in terms of the people and processes that manage national security issues for the nation, which creates that sense of heightened vulnerability," Nick Rasmussen, a former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, told NBC News.

"This particular move today creates concern and uncertainty because there are already concerns about the president's decision-making style and what he might do in the remaining days of his presidency," he said.

We also must include as part of the context for the Krebs termination the abrupt drawdown of US troops in Afghanistan. The manner in which that is being proposed has raised concerns:

In a rare rebuke of Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has warned that the outgoing administration’s planned drawdown of troops in Afghanistan would “hand a weakened and scattered al-Qaeda a big, big propaganda victory and a renewed safe haven for plotting attacks against America.”

Mr McConnell couched his warnings about the hazards of an Afghanistan troop withdrawal in a speech on the Senate floor on Monday in more general praise for Mr Trump’s foreign policy achievements over the last four years. But the recently re-elected majority leader’s comments fit a larger pattern of pushing back — gently — against the president’s most anti-interventionist instincts in the Middle East.

“A disorganized retreat would jeopardize the track record of major successes this administration has worked hard to compile” in the region, Mr McConnell said on Monday.

Still, at this late date, this dangerously unfit buffoon has slavish devotees who are perpetuating his delusions and indulging his impulses. Townhall, American Greatness, The Federalist, OANN, Newsmax TV and the wilds of after-8 PM FNC are determined to ride the Trump Train all the way over the cliff.

It's time for actual conservatives to turn around and step back onto solid ground. There's not a moment to lose in beginning the process of rebuilding an understanding among thoughtful Americans as to what the immutable principles informing our positions are.

We'll just have to hope for the best during eight more weeks of winging it in place of coherent policy.  

 

 

 

John Bolton is vindicated

 When impeachment hearings were underway, John Bolton came in for a great deal of castigation for not testifying to the House. Some people I greatly respect and with whom my views align called him a coward and said he was motivated by greed.

I've always had immense admiration for John Bolton. His motivations throughout his career have always been noble. He has served this country well over many decades. 

And now the story of what happened earlier this year is seeing the light of day:

The Trump administration again looks terrible and former national security adviser John Bolton looks significantly better after the delivery of a remarkably informative letter from the senior official who reviewed Bolton’s recent book.

On behalf of Ellen Knight, the former senior director for records access and information security management at the National Security Council, attorney Kenneth Wainstein sent the 18-page letter to lawyers for Bolton and for the Justice Department, which has threatened Bolton with criminal prosecution for allegedly publishing classified information.

The letter makes clear Knight’s contention that no classified information remained in Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened. Its unambiguous subtext is that President Trump’s team again politicized and abused freedom of speech guarantees and national security in a naked bid to avoid embarrassment to the president.

In a passage that has received far less attention, Knight refutes the widespread public impression that Bolton’s greed for profits led him to withhold important information from the Ukraine-related impeachment investigation and the trial of Trump. Instead, Bolton repeatedly tried to get permission to release the information but was denied.

Already, too few people have credited Bolton for essentially begging the Senate to subpoena him so he could testify under oath without risking legal repercussions. Knight’s letter shows that Bolton also tried other means to provide the desired information for the public good.

“On one occasion when [Bolton’s lawyer] requested that Ms. Knight’s staff prioritize the Ukraine chapter in the manuscript for prepublication review to make it publicly available during the impeachment trial, the then-Deputy Legal Advisor [Michael] Ellis instructed her to temporarily withhold any response,” the letter stated.

In other words, Bolton was not trying to withhold the information for purposes of book profiteering but because he did not yet have notice that it was unclassified. He was convinced it was unclassified and wanted permission to discuss it. But without clearance and without a subpoena, he would have put himself in legal jeopardy by setting it before the public.

Considering that the politicized Justice Department is now threatening criminal prosecution for releasing the information six months later, Bolton was right. But he tried, in multiple ways, to provide the relevant material.

Knight, via lawyer Wainstein, also portrays Bolton as acting “in good faith” throughout the process, rather than acting without regard to national security secrets: “Ms. Knight always felt his intention was to cooperate with and complete the review.” 

While the letter largely portrays Bolton in favorable terms (other than being “gruff and demanding,” which is his well-established reputation), it makes the Trump administration look awful. Again and again, it worked to slow down the review process without any explanation or attempt to cooperate with Bolton or consult with Knight. Though Knight was a trained career official who had overseen 135 prior prepublication review requests, the White House assigned Ellis, a newly appointed official with no background in such reviews, to overrule the determinations she and her staff made in the course of many hundreds of hours of painstaking work.

I would hope that this restores Bolton's good standing as a conservative and a national-security asset. I'm not looking for any mea culpas, just acknowledgement of facts now in evidence.  

 

 

Tuesday roundup

Hold on to your wigs, folks. Today's roundup is a thunderous Niagara Falls-level cascade of must-reads. "Doozy" and "humdinger" fall far short of being adequate depictions.

I gave some thought to breaking this into individual posts. There will be some fairly lengthy excerpting to the linked source material. But I think consolidation in one spot is going to work best.

Matt Taibbi comes at his journalism and opinion writing from a left-of-center perspective, but he's certainly not one who can be pigeonholed. The son of an NBC News reporter, he spent several years in Russia, Uzbekistan (where he played professional baseball) and Mongolia (where he played professional basketball). He's a freelance writer and podcaster, with stints along the way at Rolling Stone and The New York Press. He doesn't mince words, which is probably the source of his appeal for Bill Maher, who had him cover the 2008 presidential election cycle for Real Time.

Lately he's been less inclined to guard his lefty bona fides than ever.

His latest at his Substack site is a righteous takedown of the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Searing stuff:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility(Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. 

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category. 

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.” 

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier. 

Perhaps the most irritating thing about SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts's chiming in with the court's left-leaners in the June Medical Services v. Russo case is the fact that in a nearly identical case about a similar Texas law, he dissented when the majority upheld it. He was right to do so then, of course. His flimsy excuse for voting the other way this time is that, hey, a precedent was set. Stare decisis, you know. That's the kind of logic that would have kept Dredd Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson in place. A National Review editorial today points out that this fealty to precedent is not a consistent thing with him:

He has been perfectly willing to overrule precedents in the past. Some of them were of much longer standing. Janus v. AFSCME (2018), on public-sector unions, overruled Abood v. Detroit (1977). Some of them involved cases that presented nearly identical fact patterns. Gonzales v. Carhart(2007) upheld a ban on partial-birth abortion of a type that had been struck down in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000).

The piece says that Roberts "has reinforced the notion that he is the most politically calculating of the justices."

A die-hard lefty activist who started his path down that road going to Nicaragua in the 1980s to show solidarity with the Sandinistas and later went to Asia to expose working conditions in Nike factories has, at least on the subject of the global climate, had a conversion experience:

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. 

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. 

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction” 
• The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
• Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
• The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s 
• Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level
• We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. 

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies. 

Brace yourself, buddy. Your former associates are going to try to make your life miserable.

I really, really gave consideration to devoting an entire post to this one. We've had the book from Bolton, the letter from Mattis, the remarks from John Kelly, but there's never been anything so comprehensively indicting about what a threat to national security the Very Stable Genius is as this expose by Carl Bernstein at CNN:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations. 

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

Does this surprise you?

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.

In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.

Then-DNI Dan Coats expressed his worry to subordinates that the VSG was "undermining the coherent conduct of foreign relations and American objectives around the globe."

Big-time damage to our most important alliances:

Next to Erdogan, no foreign leader initiated more calls with Trump than Macron, the sources said, with the French President often trying to convince Trump to change course on environmental and security policy matters -- including climate change and US withdrawal from the Iranian multilateral nuclear accord. 

Macron usually got "nowhere" on substantive matters, while Trump became irritated at the French President's stream of requests and subjected him to self-serving harangues and lectures that were described by one source as personalized verbal "whippings," especially about France and other countries not meeting NATO spending targets, their liberal immigration policies or their trade imbalances with the US.

But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as "near-sadistic" by one of the sources and confirmed by others. "Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her 'stupid,' and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians ... He's toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with." 

The calls "are so unusual," confirmed a German official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their contents remained secret. The official described Trump's behavior with Merkel in the calls as "very aggressive" and said that the circle of German officials involved in monitoring Merkel's calls with Trump has shrunk: "It's just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic." 

He thought he was sucking up to adversaries by bragging about himself. Such is his weird assumption bout he way anybody else but himself thinks:

The calls with Putin and Erdogan were particularly egregious in terms of Trump almost never being prepared substantively and thus leaving him susceptible to being taken advantage of in various ways, according to the sources -- in part because those conversations (as with most heads of state), were almost certainly recorded by the security services and other agencies of their countries.

In his phone exchanges with Putin, the sources reported, the President talked mostly about himself, frequently in over-the-top, self-aggrandizing terms: touting his "unprecedented" success in building the US economy; asserting in derisive language how much smarter and "stronger" he is than "the imbeciles" and "weaklings" who came before him in the presidency (especially Obama); reveling in his experience running the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, and obsequiously courting Putin's admiration and approval. Putin "just outplays" him, said a high-level administration official -- comparing the Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to an occasional player of checkers. While Putin "destabilizes the West," said this source, the President of the United States "sits there and thinks he can build himself up enough as a businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect him." (At times, the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like "two guys in a steam bath," a source added.) 

The pullout of US troops from Syria can be directly traced to his phone conversations with Erdogan.

He was far more interested in how Jared and Ivanka thought his phone calls went than in the views of Fiona Hill, Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster. He never read briefing materials to prepare him for calls.

States such as Oregon, Kansas, Texas and Arizona are reversing course on their re-openings in face of COVID-19 case upticks. 

Bolton

For someone who has always been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy, controversy seems to follow John Bolton. His 2005 nomination to be US ambassador to the UN drew opposition not only from Democrats but Republican Senators George Voinovich and Richard Lugar. Bush wound up having to make a recess appointment. And then there was the recent stint as national security advisor to Trump. It seemed to start our well enough. Trump praised Bolton and during that period when there was so much shuffling of personnel in the foreign policy area of the administration, said that he wanted to find a place for Bolton in it.

But things went south and reached a nadir with the Ukraine affair. Bolton likened it to a drug deal and summoned his team to his office to express his displeasure at what was going down.

Of course, the Ukraine situation led to Trump's impeachment. There was much hue and cry within the conservative-but-opposed-to-Trump camp - "never Trumpers," if you will (disclosure: that would be my bunch) - that he didn't testify before the House. He did state that he was willing to testify before the Senate, but that body never called any witnesses. The accusation was that he'd refrained from testifying to maximize sales of his upcoming book. Just today, I saw a tweet from a writer I otherwise pretty much agree on everything with that called Bolton a mercenary and a coward.

I think that kind of swift dismissal of a long-time public servant is symptomatic of the current tendency to write people off on the basis of recent moves that may still be explained satisfactorily, to render people one-dimensional figures whose score cards don't pass muster. Such a view doesn't take in the full measure of the person.

I'm more inclined to see Bolton as John Podhoretz does in a September 2019 Commentary piece entitled "Bolton's Integrity":

John Bolton has never trimmed his sails in pursuit of power or authority. He is who he is and always has been. He believes in the efficacy of American power and the need to project it to make America safer and improve its position in the world.

 He was steeped in conservatism from an early age. He ran his high school's Students for Goldwater campaign in 1964. He was law-school friends with Clarence Thomas. The reason for the dustup surrounding the Bush appointment was that Bolton clearly had his head on straight concerning what the United Nations was really all about.

Well, now the book is printed and bound. Copies are stacked in warehouses, awaiting a June 23 release.  Given that it was written so shortly after Bolton's tenure, and that the administration it discusses is still in office, it had to undergo a prepublication review. Bolton's lawyer, Charles Cooper, explains how exhaustive that was in a Wall Street Journal column:

Round one began on Jan. 23, as the impeachment trial was under way. Ms. Knight wrote to me that Mr. Bolton’s manuscript contained “significant amounts of classified information” and that she would provide “detailed guidance regarding next steps that should enable you to revise the manuscript and move forward as expeditiously as possible.”

A few days later Vanity Fair reported that “the president is out for revenge against his adversaries.” The article stated that the president “has an enemies list,” that “Bolton is at the top of the list,” and that the “campaign against Bolton” included Ms. Knight’s Jan. 23 letter. It also reported that the president “wants Bolton to be criminally investigated.”

On Feb. 7, two days after Mr. Trump’s acquittal, Ms. Knight suggested that “to further the iterative process, it would be most efficient for me to meet with [Mr. Bolton] to review each instance of classified information in detail.” Meantime, the White House had acknowledged that NSC staff briefed White House counsel Pat Cipollone about the book while Mr. Cipollone was leading the impeachment defense.

Mr. Bolton and Ms. Knight met on Feb. 21. That same day the Washington Post reported that Mr. Trump had “directly weighed in” on the prepublication review, “telling his staff that he views John Bolton as ‘a traitor,’ that everything he uttered to the departed aide about national security is classified and that he will seek to block the book’s publication.” The Post also reported that Mr. Trump vowed to a group of television news anchors: “We’re going to try and block publication of the book.” The president added, “After I leave office, he can do this.”

Mr. Bolton’s meeting with Ms. Knight lasted four hours. She later wrote that they “reviewed the preliminary results of three chapters in the draft manuscript in detail.” Mr. Bolton took five pages of handwritten notes as they discussed her specific concerns. Three days later, Ms. Knight wrote that the meeting had been “most productive,” and that “it would be most helpful to the process if we hold one or more following meetings . . . to discuss the remaining portions of the draft manuscript.” 

They met three more times in the first week of March for more than 10 additional hours. They meticulously reviewed each of Ms. Knight’s concerns in the remaining 11 chapters, producing 34 more pages of handwritten notes. Following her guidance and his own notes, Mr. Bolton revised his manuscript. By March 9 he had resubmitted all 14 chapters to begin the second round of the iterative review.

Mr. Bolton didn’t hear from Ms. Knight again until Friday, March 27, when she wrote, “I appreciate your efforts to address the classification concerns in the latest draft version you submitted. Many of the changes are satisfactory. However, additional edits are required to ensure the protection of national security information. To assist in making the additional required changes, I will provide a list of required edits and language substitutions to guide you in this next stage of revising the draft.” 

Her list amounted to 17 single-spaced pages of typed comments, questions, suggestions of specific alternative language, and citations to publicly available source material. Mr. Bolton worked through the weekend and responded in full on March 30, accepting the vast majority of Ms. Knight’s suggestions and proposing alternative solutions to others.

The third round of the review occurred in an April 13 phone conversation when Ms. Knight provided a much shorter list of remaining concerns after reviewing Mr. Bolton’s March 30 revisions. They agreed on these language changes, which were delivered to Ms. Knight on April 14.

During the April 13 call, Ms. Knight said she would review the full manuscript one more time, to recheck resolved issues and ensure she hadn’t overlooked anything. That final review resulted in two further phone calls, on April 21 and 24, in which she conveyed her final round of edits. Mr. Bolton promptly responded with the revisions by April 24. On April 27, after clarifying one previously discussed edit, Ms. Knight confirmed “that’s the last edit I really have to provide for you.” The lengthy, laborious process was over.
Yet when Mr. Bolton asked when he would receive the letter confirming the book was cleared, Ms. Knight cryptically replied that her “interaction” with unnamed others in the White House about the book had “been very delicate” and that there were “some internal process considerations to work through.” She thought the letter might be ready that afternoon but would “know more by the end of the day.” Six weeks later, Mr. Bolton has yet to receive a clearance letter. He hasn’t heard from Ms. Knight since May 7.
We did hear from the White House on June 8. John A. Eisenberg, the president’s deputy counsel for national security, asserted in a letter that Mr. Bolton’s manuscript contains classified information and that publishing the book would violate his nondisclosure agreements. 

Feeling that all the "i's had been dotted and "t"s crossed, Simon & Schuster let the presses roll.

The Very Stable Genius and his attorney general William Barr - who also had distinguished himself earlier in his career but is now indeed looking like he's had a big gulp of the sycophancy Kool-Aid - are fit to be tied:

Mr. Trump said he considers any conversation he has with another official “highly classified.” Presidents have claimed the authority to classify national security information and direct subordinates to do the same, but no president has claimed the total authority to prevent former employees from speaking about non-national security matters—and typically the First Amendment would protect such speech, experts say.

“Maybe he’s not telling the truth,” Mr. Trump said of his former national security adviser. “He’s been known not to tell the truth a lot.” He didn’t detail what he was referring to.

Attorney General William Barr, speaking alongside the president on Monday, said Mr. Bolton “hasn’t completed the process” of clearing the book. He didn’t respond to questions about why Mr. Bolton’s lawyer said the NSC had told him the process had been completed.

Mr. Bolton’s lawyer and a spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At this late date and with no real grounds for stopping it, I'd say that the book will be in stores next week.

It will be interesting to see how Trump responds once the ship has sailed. His Twitter feed will be lively, no doubt.

His nervousness about book releases is surely compounded by the upcoming publication of a book by his niece, which is not going to be flattering.  

Thursday roundup

It's been 28 years since the United States tested a nuclear weapon. Shay Khatiri at The Bulwark makes a cogent argument that the current contemplation of a resumption of testing is well-founded. The post-Cold War breathing room we enjoyed is no more. We're in another era of great-power competition, and we can ill afford any slop in our nuclear preparedness:

Nuclear tests exist for several reasons. The first is to ensure the safety and reliability of our nuclear weapons. We don’t want our nukes to detonate where they shouldn’t—that’s what we mean by safety. And we want to make sure that they do detonate where we need them to—that’s reliability. There are two main types of nuclear delivery systems: gravity bombs and non-gravity bombs. (For the purposes of simplicity, we can set aside less common delivery systems, such as mines and nuclear munitions.) Gravity bombs are those that you drop out of a plane. Non-gravity bombs are delivered by a missile, mostly cruise and ballistic; these could be launched from air, land, and sea (the “nuclear triad” that candidate Trump was unaware of back in 2015). Different temperatures, altitudes, pressures, speeds, and other conditions risk unintended detonations of nuclear weapons. It is to make sure that both the “physics package”—the nuclear warhead proper, the part of the weapon that detonates—and the delivery system meet our requirements for safety and reliability that we have nuclear testing.

Since Joe Biden has pledged to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court if he's elected president - a guarantee no doubt more pressing for him now, in light of his, um, unfortunate utterance at the end of his interview with Charlemagne Tha God - it behooves us to consider whom he might choose. Kevin Daley at The Washington Examiner looks into some choices that are probably on his radar. It's not an uninteresting group of people. They have some interesting credentials. The extent to which any of them would instinctively lean left in rulings from the bench is not necessarily discernible from their careers to date. He looks at previous judging experience, any clerking they've done, private practicing of law, and where they were educated. Here's the lineup:

There are two broad groups Biden might select from, the first including sitting judges on federal and state courts, the second with more academic backgrounds. The leftwing group Demand Justice, which is pressing Biden to release a shortlist of potential nominees, has released its own list, which is heavy on academics and cause lawyers. A Washington Free Beacon analysis found the most likely candidates are U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, and U.S. District Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, with Stacey Abrams as a possible wildcard pick.

Here's a taste of the kind of detail that doesn't lend itself to stereoptyping:

Jackson had an unlikely ally in former House speaker Paul Ryan when she was nominated for the federal bench. The judge's husband, Patrick Jackson, is the twin brother of Ryan's brother-in-law William Jackson. Ryan introduced Jackson during her 2012 confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji's intellect, for her character, for her integrity, it is unequivocal," Ryan told the committee.

Her confirmation would mark the first time that two African Americans have served together on the Supreme Court. Jackson lunched with Justice Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court clerk and recounted the experience to Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher for their 2007 book, Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas.

"I just sat there the whole time thinking: ‘I don't understand you. You sound like my parents. You sound like the people I grew up with,'" Jackson said. "But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know."

Jackson's time in private practice could complicate her prospects. Her résumé—which runs a wide range of law practice—includes experiences liberals will admire, like a three-year tour in the federal public defender's office and a clerkship for Justice Stephen Breyer. Yet she also advised corporate clients for nearly a decade, first for a Washington arbitration boutique, then at such "BigLaw" standbys as Goodwin Procter and Morrison & Foerster. 

And I wasn't aware that Stacey Abrams had a sister on the federal bench. That sister's marriage is a pretty interesting footnote:

Abrams's personal life is particularly compelling. Her husband, Jimmie Gardner, was falsely imprisoned in a West Virginia penitentiary for 26 years, following wrongful convictions for sexual assault and robbery. Gardner was a victim of the notorious laboratory technician Fred Zain, who fabricated or manipulated evidence in dozens of cases to help state prosecutors obtain convictions. Gardner was released in 2016 and married Abrams two years later.

John Hinderaker at Power Line shares the coverage of last night's Minneapolis riot from Kyle Hooten of Alpha News, which is kind of a citizen-journalism outfit based in the Twin Cities.  Hooten got right in there and shot some pretty graphic documentation of the mayhem.

The Imaginative Conservative offers a lot of book reviews that are really more than just examinations of one particular book. They are contemplations of the entire subjects of the books in question. There's a really good one up right now. It's a review by Cicero Bruce of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin by Tracey Lee Simmons.

The review - we should really think of it as an essay on the general topic of classical languages - gets one thinking about why these languages were considered so important to the notion of a proper education in the early days of our nation:

The last century heard from other apologists for Greek and Latin besides those recollected above. Most, though, were among what Mr. Simmons describes as the last group of writers, reared and educated between 1870 and 1920, “whose early exposure to classical rigors at school allowed them as adults to be literary masters and gourmands.” This band of cultivated men consisted of W. Somerset Maugham, R.W. Livingstone, Rupert Brooke, Ronald Knox, C.S. Lewis, Albert Jay Nock, Robert Graves, and Louis MacNeice. It also included W.H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh, in whom Mr. Simmons finds especial inspiration.

In a utilitarian age like ours, wrote the former, “the modern revolt against centering the school curriculum around the study of Latin and Greek is understandable,” although it is “deplorably mistaken.” Auden avowed that few persons of his generation ever “kept up” their Greek and Latin after leaving school, but he was certain that something of real value abided nonetheless: “Anybody who has spent many hours in his youth translating into and out of two languages so syntactically and rhetorically different from his own learns something about his mother tongue which I do not think can be learned in any other way.” Such effort, he added, “inculcates the habit, whenever one uses a word, of automatically asking, ‘what is its exact meaning?’ ”

Waugh agreed. Although in later life he admitted to remembering no Greek and to having never read Latin for pleasure, he expressed no regrets for having devoted countless hours of his boyhood to the supposed dead languages: “I believe that the conventional defense of them is valid; that only by them can a boy fully understand that a sentence is a logical construction and that words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.”

Both Waugh and Auden thought that persons never schooled in Greek and Latin suffer a most unfortunate deprivation, a sentiment shared wholeheartedly by Mr. Simmons. Those who have been most deprived ever “since classical education became ‘undemocratic,’ ” Auden observed, “are not the novelists and poets—their natural love of language sees them through—but all those, like politicians, journalists, lawyers, the man-in-the-street, etc., who use language for everyday and nonliterary purposes.”

The White House is going to take a pass on issuing a midyear economic update.  

Michael Flynn

I think John Yoo's take is pretty spot on:

Attorney General William Barr’s decision to drop the prosecution of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is an ugly, but necessary element of the cleanup of the Justice Department and FBI in the wake of their failures in the Russian collusion probe.

While Flynn had pled guilty to lying to federal investigators, the revelations of FBI shenanigans by people whom the Trump administration has since fired or have resigned justified the extraordinary step of letting Flynn go.

Dropping the charges against the former national security adviser, like the firing of James Comey as FBI director and the removal of his circle of aides, is an important step in restoring control over a law enforcement agency that believed it had a right to pick and choose who were acceptable leaders for our nation rather than respecting the electoral process.

That's borne out by the fact that Peter Strzok re-opened the case as soon as it had been closed:

The FBI had closed its investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in early January 2017, but now-disgraced anti-Trump FBI official Peter Strzok reopened it the same day, new court documents unsealed Thursday revealed.

The documents were made public one day after a handwritten note in Flynn’s criminal case was also unsealed. That note — thought to have been written by former FBI head of counterintelligence Bill Priestap ­— discussed whether the goal of interviewing Flynn was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

In his first day on his new job, FBI agents came to Flynn's office. They kept everything as low-key as possible, leading him to believe that they were just dropping by to touch base. Hell, what they were doing was sounding him out, looking for anything with which to amass a file of dirt.

Now, longtime LITD readers know I am no fan of Barack Obama, a.k.a. the Most Equal Comrade. I know him to be a lifelong hard leftist who was chomping at the bit to fundamentally transform America. But I also am aware that he's no dummy, and that he'd garnered eight years of experience in a job only 43 other people had ever held. He understood the seriousness of his private conversation with the person who would be taking over his office in a little over two months. For instance, he was genuinely spooked enough about North Korea to tell Trump that that would be the most immediately pressing foreign policy issue on his plate right off the bat. And he took the occasion to offer this advice to his successor:

Former President Obama warned President Donald Trump against hiring Mike Flynn as his national security adviser, three former Obama administration officials tell NBC News.

The warning, which has not been previously reported, came less than 48 hours after the November election when the two sat down for a 90-minute conversation in the Oval Office.

A senior Trump administration official acknowledged Monday that Obama raised the issue of Flynn, saying the former president made clear he was "not a fan of Michael Flynn." Another official said Obama’s remark seemed like it was made in jest.

According to all three former officials, Obama warned Trump against hiring Flynn. The Obama administration fired Flynn in 2014 from his position as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, largely because of mismanagement and temperament issues.

Obama’s warning pre-dated the concerns inside the government about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, one of the officials said. Obama passed along a general caution that he believed Flynn was not suitable for such a high level post, the official added.

And then there's the pesky foreign-agent-for-Turkey matter:

Scrutiny on Flynn’s ties to Turkey first stemmed from an op-ed he wrote for The Hill on Election Day 2016.

In the op-ed, Flynn defended Erdogan from criticism of his crackdown on dissidents and labeled Gulen a “shady Islamic mullah” who “portrays himself as a moderate, but he is in fact a radical Islamist.”

It was later revealed that his now-defunct Flynn Intel Group had been paid $530,000 by Dutch-based company called Inovo BV, which in turn had ties to the Turkish government.

The bulk of the $530,000 contract was to produce a documentary to boost Turkey’s image, as well as to conduct research on Gulen.

In March 2017, Flynn and his consulting firm retroactively registered as foreign agents working on behalf Turkey.

In a Dec. 2017 legal filing, though, Flynn admitted lying in the March filings to the Justice Department, including by falsely stating that the Flynn Intel Group did not know to what extent the Turkish government was involved in the project and that the op-ed was written on his own initiative.

The charges unsealed Monday were against two Flynn associates: Bijan Kian and Kamil Ekim Alptekin.

Kian, also known by Bijan Rafiekian, co-founded the consulting firm with Flynn and served as its vice chairman, director, secretary and treasurer. He also worked on Trump's national security transition team.Kian was charged with conspiracy and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the Turkish government. He appeared in court Monday in Alexandria, Va., and was released on a personal recognizance bond.

Alptekin, meanwhile, ran Inovo. He is a Turkish national currently believed to be in Istanbul.

Alptekin was charged with conspiracy, acting as an unregistered foreign agent and four counts of making false statements to the FBI.
The Dec. 12 indictment unsealed Monday alleges that Kian and Alptekin “conspired covertly and unlawfully to influence U.S. politicians and public opinion concerning a Turkish citizen living in the United States whose extradition was then being sought by the Government of Turkey.”

The indictment does not specifically name Gulen. But it describes the Turkish citizen as an “imam, writer and political figure” who “runs a network of schools and charitable organizations,” lives in the United States and has been blamed by Turkey for the 2016 coup attempt — a description that perfectly fits Gulen. 

The narrative the indictment lays out starts on July 27, 2016. On or about that date, Kian told Alptekin that he and Flynn are “ready to engage on what needs to be done,” according to the document.
By Aug. 10, 2016, the indictment says, Alptekin told Kian that he had a “green light” to discuss the confidentiality, budget and scope of a contract after meetings with two Turkish government ministers.

In September 2016, a contract was drawn up for $600,000 for the Flynn Intel Group to “deliver findings and results including but not limited to making criminal referrals” against Gulen, according to the indictment. 
The indictment alleges Kian and Alptekin hid the covert effort, first branded the “Truth Campaign” and later “Operation Confidence,” by listing Alptekin’s company as the Flynn Intel Group’s client rather than the Turkish government.

On Sept. 19, 2016, Flynn, Kian and Alptekin met with two Turkish government officials in New York City to discuss Gulen, the indictment says. Throughout September and October that year, Kian and others met with a member of Congress, a congressional staffer and a state government official to “depict [Gulen] as a threat who should be returned to Turkey,” the indictment adds.

On Nov. 2, 2016, according to the filing, Alptekin complained to Kian that Flynn’s firm had “not publicized enough negative information” about Gulen. That day, Kian sent Alptekin a draft of the op-ed, telling him that “a promise made is a promise kept.”

Two days before the op-ed ran, Kian emailed Aptekin that “The arrow has left the bow!” and shared another draft.
“This is a very high profile exposure one day before the election,” Kian added.

After the op-ed was published, the Justice Department began investigating, the indictment says.

I realize we are all fallible human beings, and that General Flynn has made undeniable contributions to our country. Still, it seems that he did not consider as thoroughly as he should have the taint of crumminess that his various dealings were imprinting on his career trajectory.

Bottom line: This is not a clear-cut victory for any kind of immutable principle. It's just a sad drag-this-one-over-the-finish-line development in a post-America that is so toxic that one wonders how it makes it through each day.