#like I came up with a frankly more fitting reason in one plotting session than TPC did

[ingo-ingoing-ingone]

Me and Pokemon Black and White and that STUPID desert

when a film or tv show takes place somewhere where you have been, it is your sacred duty as viewer to say “i’ve been there” every time you recognize a place

[arlingtonpark]

The Story of L’Affaire Russe Part 6

Part VI. The Indictment of Paul Manfort to the Present/It’s a Dumb, Dumb, Dumb, Dumb World.

Thus continues my now six part epic saga to document what is currently the biggest political scandal since Iran-Contra over 30 years ago: L’Affaire Russe, Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election and the Trump campaign’s attempted complicity in it.

After a weekend of suspense, the announcement was made that, to no one’s surprise, Paul Manafort was the one who was indicted, along with his right hand man Rick Gates.

The charges allege that Manafort and Gates collectively laundered over $75,000,000 over the course of several years through undisclosed foreign and domestic entities, including bank accounts. It is further alleged that they failed to disclose their work as agents of the Ukrainian government and its then-President, Victor Yanukovych. Finally, it is alleged that they made various false statements related to the above two allegations. Manafort and Gates surrendered themselves to FBI custody.

Mueller’s plan, it seems, is to put pressure on Manafort to flip on Trump and cooperate. Bringing these charges against him accomplishes this because now Manafort can enter in to a plea deal where he offers information in exchange for leniency. Whether or not he does so remains to be seen.

To some extent, this was all expected, which is why it was so shocking when Mueller somehow managed to work in a plot twist: he revealed that he managed to secure the cooperation of George Papadopoulos.

George Papadopoulos had previously played a bit part in the story of the 2016 election, so much so that I did not mention him since he seemed like one of those characters in a sitcom who are prominent for an episode because they interact with the main characters in a funny way, and then they go away never to be seen again. Turns out, he was one of those characters who interact with the main characters in a funny way, and then go away, but come back later because they’re actually very important. This is why people liken the larger Trump presidency to a badly written sitcom.

Papadopoulos’ prior role: during the Summer of 2016, it became obvious that the Trump campaign did not have anyone advising them on foreign policy. Desperate to save face, the campaign half-assedly threw together a list of people who would advise them on FP issues; Papadopoulos was one of the people whose name appeared on that list. Papadopoulos in particular received attention, but for all the wrong reasons. He had listed his participation in the model UN on his LinkedIn resume, a laughable thing to include when you’re supposedly as distinguished in the realm of FP as to be advising a serious contender for the American Presidency.

But it turns out to be even more laughable than that. He actually lied about attending the model UN! So not only did he think that model UN was a high enough distinction for a Presidential foreign policy advisor to put on his resume, he thought it was such a coveted position that he saw fit to lie about it!

Everyone laughed this joker off as a clown, except he turned out to actually be important. That’s right. Model UN guy (model UN guy!) is a key player in the Trump-Russia imbroglio! What the hell!

What happened was that Papadopoulos met Joseph Mifsud, a university professor who was also a spy for the Russian Government. Papadopoulos’s confession can be read here. It details how he came to learn of the existence of the hacked Clinton emails and his attempts to obtain them.

This is another example of the Trump campaign trying to collude with Russia, but never actually succeeding, the first example being the Veselnitskaya meeting at Trump Tower. It’s at this point that I should say that it is entirely possible that Trump and his campaign are not guilty of anything. Incredible as this may sound, it’s conceivable that the Trump campaign merely tried to coordinate with Russia, but ultimately failed to do so.

The various investigations by the House and Senate continued apace. Throughout the Autumn of 2017, Carter Page, Michael Cohn, Rinat Akhmetshin, Jeff Sessions, and various leading figures in Fusion GPS, the firm that contracted Steele, all testified before the House Intel Committee.

Trump’s long time bodyguard, Keith Schiller, was called to testify before the House Intel Committee as well, and during this testimony Schiller dropped a very telling revelation: recall that the Steele Dossier alleges that Trump had a group of Russian hookers piss over the bed in his Moscow hotel room, the same hotel room that Obama had stayed at years earlier. In his testimony, Schiller CONFIRMS that a group of hookers were offered to Trump, but maintains that they were turned down.

So as far as I’m concerned, the pee tape is real, Putin’s got it, and he’s probably using it to blackmail the Leader of the Free World right now. Great.

Information regarding contact between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks, one of the groups involved in disseminating the hacked Clinton emails, came to light in November. Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that worked for the Trump campaign, apparently tried to make contact with Wikileaks after they began working for the Trump campaign.

Not only that, but Wikileaks also sent various Twitter DMs to Trump, Jr. Wikileaks asked for various things. They floated the idea of Wikileaks head Julian Assange being appointed Ambassador to Australia. They encouraged the Trump campaign to contest the outcome of the election if they lost. They even asked for Trump’s tax returns. Jr. did not always respond to these messages, but he did at times. Most notably, Wikileaks sent Jr. a link with the recommendation that they publicize it since using the link would take you to a compendium of Wikileaks emails. Trump himself gave the link a shout out just 15 minutes later. Jr. also gave the link a shout out on his Twitter page two days later.

Tangentially, we were also treated to something of a side show courtesy of Michael Flynn and his dealings with the Turkish government. Recall that Robert Mueller’s mandate is to investigate Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election and any crimes uncovered over the course of that investigation. Flynn could be sitting on useful information involving possible Trump collusion with Russia, so Mueller is trying to nail Flynn on unrelated crimes in order to flip him. Not only that, but Mueller is apparently also targeting Flynn’s son too, since he was apparently also involved in the same shady activities as his father. Mueller’s calculation is that Flynn loves his son enough that he’d be willing to surrender to the investigation in return for leniency for his son. (He was right)

With that said, oooh boy, has Flynn and co. been up to some nefarious, and quite frankly incredible, s!@t.

In 2016, a coup was launched against the rule of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan is a dictator; for years now, he has worked to undermine democracy in Turkey and consolidate his own power. The coup was led by Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who apparently masterminded the coup from his mountain top fortress in the Poconos. (Yes, that Poconos) The coup not only failed, it backfired. Erdogan survived and used it as an excuse to accelerate his consolidation of power.

This is where Flynn comes in. Flynn had previously worked as a lobbyist for the Turkish government, and it has been reported that he and his son were offered $15 million by the government of Turkey to use his power as the then-National Security Advisor to facilitate Gulen’s extradition to Turkey. Either that, or the offer was $15 million to flat out kidnap him!

Unfortunately for Flynn, that’s not the end of the problems for him. Remember what I said earlier about Flynn doing lobbying work for the Turkish government? Well, it turns out he didn’t notify the US government of his lobbying work, which he is legally required to do. He’s also been found to have made various false statements to the FBI.

It should come as no surprise then that Flynn entered in to a plea deal with Mueller, both for his own sake and for the sake of his son. Flynn is now cooperating with the investigation.

Recall that after the Obama administration announced sanctions against Russia for interfering in the election, Russia did not escalate the situation by retaliating. Flynn admits to having been the one who told Ambassador Kislyak to tell Putin to not retaliate. This confirms the reporting of the Washington Post, which reported, based on leaks from the Intelligence Community, that Flynn had done just that. Flynn also admits to having discussed the issue of what to tell Kislyak with other senior officials in Trump’s orbit, but it is not known if Trump himself knew of this.

In other words, Flynn, on behalf of the Trump team, worked to undermine US foreign policy towards Russia.

The next item on the agenda here is a raft of revelations regarding the Steele Dossier, AKA the Pee Tape Dossier.

During this time, important details about how the dossier was compiled came to light. It was already known that the dossier was compiled by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, who was hired by Fusion GPS, an opposition research company. Fusion GPS, in turn, was hired by an anonymous GOP donor to perform oppo research during the 2016 GOP primary.

That last part about Fusion GPS being paid by a GOP donor, which turned out to be the libertarian leaning online news website the Washington Free Beacon, is actually irrelevant. Steele was only brought on board to create the dossier after the Free Beacon stopped funding Fusion GPS. But someone did pay Fusion GPS to do their oppo research on Trump, so who was it?

It was none other than Hillary Clinton!

DUN DUN DUU-

(Indirectly)

…

This is what actually happened: after being dumped by the Free Beacon, Fusion was hired by Perkins Coie, the law firm of Marc Elias, a very well connected Democratic Party-aligned campaign lawyer. Fusion, in turn, subcontracted the research work out to Steele, who has many contacts and sources in Russia and so was considered to be well positioned to do this sort of work.

Perkins Coie was acting on behalf of the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which ultimately paid for the dossier’s creation. Note, though, that Clinton herself was unaware of the details of Fusion or Steele’s work.

The fact that the dossier’s creation was paid for by Clinton led to many conservative commentators to raise a stink about the validity of Bob Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Everyone in the propaganda-sphere from Sean Hannity to even members of Congress was attempting to spin this yarn about how the dossier’s being paid for by Clinton money made the entire Russia investigation illegitimate because, in their telling, the dossier was the reason the investigation was started in the first place.

This is all nonsense.

The Dossier was not the investigation’s catalyst. The investigation actually got started when, and I swear I’m not making this up, George Papadopoulos got drunk at a bar in London and spilled to Australia’s ambassador to the UK that the Trump campaign was seeking to obtain the emails the Russian government pilfered from Clinton.

But in spite of the admittedly too-stupid-to-believe reason for the investigation was out there and public, Trump-aligned forces still pushed the narrative that the Dossier was politically biased and that this somehow made the investigation illegitimate, even though it had resulted in multiple indictments and even a couple guilty pleas by that point.

Chief among them was Devin Nunes, a Republican representative from Fresno, California.

You may remember Nunes from part 3, in which he obtained intel in a secret midnight rendezvous with a contact from within the federal government like a character in a f!@#ing spy movie (and on the White House lawn no less!) and potentially spilled classified information live on national tv, all in the hopes of clearing Trump’s name, which he failed to do because he had no idea what he was doing.

Well, in early 2018, the prodigal son returned.

In that time period, Nunes began talking up a memo he had his staff prepare. He claimed that this memo would prove that there was a deep state conspiracy to undermine President Trump.

The FBI had been spying on Carter page for months, Carter Page being a Trump campaign advisor who, according to Trump himself, was not a Trump campaign advisor. Devin Nunes claimed his memo (which, he kept telling everyone, would be a Big Deal upon release) would show that the FBI started its Trump-Russia investigation with their surveillance of Page. This surveillance was done on authority granted by a warrant issued by the FISA Court. To obtain the warrant, the FBI had to submit an application to the Court detailing the evidence that there was criminal wrongdoing.

Nunes claimed his Big Deal Memo would show that the evidence the FBI relied on to get the warrant was from the Steele Dossier and that the FBI did not disclose to the FISA Court that the Dossier was created by politically biased people. Thus, the FBI withheld pertinent information in the name of getting their warrant and this proves they have it in for Trump.

Nunes said, flat out, that his Big Deal Memo (which apparently turned anything it rested upon into gold) would single-handedly expose the biggest government conspiracy since Watergate.

Even before the memo was released to the public, Trump defenders the world over latched on to this to attack the credibility of the Mueller investigation. (The Mueller investigation is just a continuation of the FBI’s investigation.)

They were outraged (outraged, I tells ya!) that the FBI would act so underhandedly and spy on a high-ranking Trump advisor. (Who was somehow simultaneously not a Trump advisor)

Fact check: even if the Dossier was the basis for the investigation’s start, the bias of its creators wouldn’t have mattered. The FBI relies on biased sources for evidence all the time in its applications to the FISA Court. This is well known and the judges know to account for this.

But wait! It gets even dumber then that! Nunes finally pulled his Big Deal Memo out of his ass and presented it to the public.

It literally refutes itself. I’m not even kidding. The memo lays out the case Nunes was arguing for this whole time, (the investigation is biased because it has its roots in a biased document) and then in literally the last paragraph it says that the biased document (the Dossier) was not the root of the investigation!

Big Deal!

And to top it off, Nunes claimed throughout this whole mess that the FBI didn’t disclose the Dossier’s biases. But as Nunes himself would later be forced to admit, they did! The disclosure was made in a footnote to the main body of the application, which Nunes argued was still an obvious attempt at deceitfulness.

Because footnotes apparently don’t exist to be read. Or something.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5