#to putin and is involved in other shady stuff

[riteofashkente]

It’s so chilling to realise how much shit governments and other organisations or people with power get away with just because we’ve become so desensitised to it. It’s not as if all the people are accepting it, not by far, but when you have national tv channels parody prominent politicians in not only in an unflattering light, but also include references to criminal deeds they’ve done, some of the world’s best known celebrities straight-up roasting politicians and stand-up comedians making fun of politicians to their face while on tv, not to mention all the other parody and panel shows I haven’t made a reference to, and nothing actually changes, it truly makes you wonder if anything but time could save us from these bastards, time until they die, of course, and when they finally do, what kind of a world will we have, if we even have one?

[quakerjoe]

For anyone who doesn’t have the time or inclination to read the “Mueller report”...

I noted some highlights from Volume I that you can read in 5 minutes. I couldn’t help myself. 😆

*”The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

*The counter-intelligence investigation was opened because Papadopolous told a foreign diplomat that the Russian government could assist Trump by releasing damaging info on Clinton.

*The Trump campaign “welcomed the potential damage” resulting from Russia’s “information warfare” and “active measures.”

*The IRA (Internet Research Agency), based in Russia and funded by “Putin’s Chef” Yevgeniy Prigozhin, launched an information warfare campaign to undermine the US electoral system.

*Trump, his sons, and many of his minions like Flynn and Kellyanne Conway promoted Russian generated content alleging voter fraud and other Russian propaganda lies.

*An estimated 126 million people saw posts made by the Russians to influence the election.

*The Russians “organized and promoted” dozens of “political rallies inside the US while posing as US grassroots activists,” going so far as to communicate with Trump campaign members to help coordinate the rallies.

*The Russian military hacked the computers and email accounts of hundreds of Clinton campaign employees, advisors, and volunteers, the DNC and the DCCC, releasing documents timed to interfere with the election. They implanted malware on their networks. GRU officers captured their passwords, banking information, sensitive personal information, internal communications, etc.

*GRU military units targeted military, political, governmental, and non-governmental entities in the US.

*Russian military GRU officers targeted and hacked computers belonging to US state and local entities, Secretaries of State, state boards of elections, county governments, and private technology firms that manufacture and administer “election-related hardware and software, such as voter registration software and electronic polling stations. The GRU continued to target these victims through the elections in November 2016.”

*In just one example, the GRU gained access to info on “millions of registered Illinois voters.”

*Russian government officials and prominent businessmen made a concerted effort during the campaign and post-election transition period to make inroads into the Trump camp.

<Kushner just blew that all off as a few FaceBook posts.>

*Trump fired Comey and freaked when the Special Counsel was appointed, saying it was the end of his presidency. He tried repeatedly to get Sessions to “unrecuse” and to curtail the investigation.

*Trump’s cohorts lied to Congress and the SCO, destroyed evidence, and in some cases refused to be interviewed to avoid accountability.

*Amidst many redacted paragraphs, a few words indicate that while Trump and Gates were driving to La Guardia, Trump told Gates that more releases of Clinton emails were forthcoming.

*Trump continued to express frustration that the Clinton emails had not been found. The Trump Campaign planned an entire strategy around their release by WikiLeaks.

*Harm to Ongoing Matter* Looks like Corsi is in very hot “ongoing matter” water, which is redacted. Unless Barr can still save him.

*Podesta e-mails stolen by the GRU are released by WikiLeaks less than an hour after we all watch the video of Trump say disgusting things about women - “I moved on her like a bitch” and if you’re a star you can do anything you want like “grab them by the p*ssy.”

*Trump Jr “colluded” with WikiLeaks by messaging with them and tweeting links they requested he share. However, they did not conclude it was a “coordinated effort” with Russia to disseminate the e-mails.

*Trump repeatedly asked people affiliated with his campaign to find the “deleted Clinton emails.” Flynn took it to heart and sent people looking, like Peter Smith, the man whose suicide note read “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER.” Smith claimed he was in contact with Russian hackers and was coordinating his efforts with Trump campaign members Flynn, Sam Clovis, Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway. The SCO could only verify he communicated with Flynn and Clovis for certain.

*Again, because it’s so much worse than Watergate because it involves a hostile foreign adversary directing a concerted attack on our country, TRUMP DIRECTED his campaign people to find the emails he assumed to have been hacked by the Russian military so he could use them to harm his political rival.

*There are a gazillion (by my count, only 101 per Business Insider) “links” between the Trump campaign and those with ties to the Russian government, but the Office could not prove with the info available to them that it rose to the level of a chargeable criminal conspiracy. Again - none of the players “remember” or “recall” anything damning, or they refused to be interviewed or destroyed evidence. This is an incredibly high bar of proof for a narrowly defined crime, so carry on being traitors.

*Trump Jr. seeks documents and info to incriminate Clinton via Goldstone, who says the Crown Prosecutor of Russia is offering them, prompting the “Trump Tower Meeting.”

*On page 187 there’s a paragraph that I find pretty gross. They are letting the Trump Tower meeting participants like Jr. (who refused to be interviewed) and Kushner off in part because they may have been ignorant of campaign finance law. Also, they can’t prove how much the damaging info the Russians claimed to have was worth monetarily, so they get another pass. President Trump and Jr. went to great lengths to cover up this meeting, which any reasonable observer knows is because they KNEW it was ethically wrong, and that it might also be illegal.

*Trump’s written answers to Mueller’s questions state he doesn’t remember if he was involved with changing the RNC’s platform stance on armed support for Ukraine.

*Manafort had Gates give Kilimnik (ties to Russian Intelligence) Trump Campaign updates and polling data, which per Manafort’s own attorney’s admission in Manafort’s trial was “very detailed” and “focused.” Many of Manafort’s shady dealings were covered up by using encrypted applications.

*Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs fully intended to use Manafort to get Trump to support their plan to control eastern Ukraine.

*Pages and pages of shady stuff about Russians, Erik Prince, Nader, the UAE, a chess tournament, the Seychelles, Libya, etc.

*Bannon and Prince’s phones had no text messages on them prior to March 2017, and neither one of them knows why. What a mystery. Provider records show they exchanged dozens of messages.

*Kushner asks Kislyak if they can communicate “using secure facilities at the Russian Embassy” so that, per Kislyak’s suggestion, Russian generals can talk to the Trump transition team to brief them on Syria. Kislyak says no to the Russian Embassy idea.

*Kushner meets with Gorkov, the head of the Russian-government-owned and US sanctioned VEB bank. Kushner says the meeting was “diplomatic.” VEB bank’s public statement says they met to discuss “business.” Mueller here reminds us that Kushner was about to owe a ton of money on 666 5th Ave.

*The Trump Transition team attempted to undermine the Obama administration regarding a United Nations resolution calling for Israel to “cease settlement activities in Palestinian territory.” There was media speculation that the US would not oppose it. Multiple Trump team members, including Michael Flynn and President-elect Trump, communicated with foreign governments such as Russia and Egypt to undermine or delay the resolution, and thereby the current US administration. It passed 14-0 with the US abstaining.

*In sum, despite all the many contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians, the Trump campaign was receptive to their offers of help only sometimes and it did not rise to the level of conspiring with the Russian government’s election interference campaign. It would be difficult to prove they “willfully violated the law.” Their actions may not be sufficient to sustain criminal charges under FARA or criminal conspiracy law, but several of them blatantly lied and obstructed justice anyway and were charged accordingly, like Papadopolous and Flynn.

*Insufficient evidence to charge Jeff Sessions with perjury because his cagey answers and faulty memories (colloquially known as “lies”) were plausible in the context of the questions.

*Some other characters not charged with perjury/making false statements because of evidentiary hurdles to prove falsity, others because the witnesses were ultimately truthful, and others because of “considerations of culpability, deterrence, and resource-preservation.”

- Elizabeth Renfrow Madison

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

First indictments and guilty plea in Trump-Russia investigation

Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Manafort’s assistant Richard Gates have been indicted on several counts: conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, failure to report foreign assets (ie, had money stashed abroad), failure to register as foreign agents when they were working for a foreign government, and making false statements to the Department of Justice. A couple of points about the charges:

The conspiracy count is actually about the financial charges, not anything directly to do with the campaign. Cheating on taxes is defrauding the government, so when more than one person is involved in a tax evasion scheme it’s technically a conspiracy against the US government. Still, helluva lead.

It’s also a conspiracy against the state government. That means that if Trump tries to pardon Manafort to keep him quiet, New York state can still go for him – and New York prosecutors have been sharpening their knives for Trump all year.

Manafort and/or Gates can be charged with further crimes as we get more information. It looks like the statute of limitations was about to run out on some of the financial charges, so there was a reason to move on what they could now.

The charges relate to the ten years of work Manafort did for Ukrainian president/Putin puppet Viktor Yanukovych. That the special prosecutor chose to put these details out for us suggests they’re important, so a few points that seem key:

Manafort laundered his blood money from Yanukovych through a number of offshore banks. Most notably, millions of dollars flowed to his shell companies from the Bank of Cyprus, which has a lot of shady connections to Trump people, most notably commerce secretary Wilbur Ross. 

Mueller is specifically unimpressed that Manafort ran around DC justifying Yanukovych’s choice to jail his former political opponent. His female, pro-Europe opponent who was popular in large cities but not in rural areas ….stop me if you’ve heard this one before. (Remember, the “lock her up”* chants started after Manafort took over the campaign.)

Allegations go back to 2006 and all the way up to 2017.

Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russian agents during the campaign. We knew a little bit about this guy already, but the details here are new to the public. (Again, think how much we don’t know.) This is arguably the more important development, because Papadopoulos admits to having met with Russian contacts hoping for stolen Clinton emails:

Papadopoulos admits to having had contacts with two different Russian nationals during the 2016 campaign. One was a woman he knew socially who claimed to be a relative of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The other was a London-based professor who claimed substantial contacts to the Russian government. He first met them both after he joined the campaign. In late April of 2016, the professor said that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton – specifically, “thousands of emails.” The DNC was hacked by one group of Russian agents in 2015, and by a second group in April of 2016. 

He tried several times to set up meetings between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The campaign higher-ups don’t seem to have taken him up on it, but they didn’t fire him or report him to the FBI. They did “encourage” him to take an “off the record” trip to Moscow as a representative of the campaign, though the trip apparently never took place.

He actually entered his plea more than three weeks ago, but the office has kept it sealed until today, meaning that they want the charges against Manafort to be read in this context. There’s exactly one charge, which has a maximum sentence of five years. Translation: he rolled. A more in-depth explanation can be found here.

A few Twitter follows that will help you unpack the legal end of this:

@renato_mariotti

@girlsreallyrule

@imillhiser

To read between the lines about the tactical choices the special prosecutor is making – ie, there’s no law saying “you have to put this plea agreement out there along with that indictment,” but he did do it for a reason – keep an eye on @matthewamiller

If you’re really curious about the legal stuff – or you just want to bask in semi-educational schadenfreude for an hour, which, reasonable – and you’re home at 6PM, you might want to check out The Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC. Melber (@AriMelber on Twitter) is the network’s legal correspondent and he’s usually pretty good at explaining the justice system in an accessible way.

*I reference the “lock her up” chants a lot for a couple reasons. One, they should all die in jail. Two, we  cannot let ourselves forget for a minute how hard they tried to pretend Hillary Clinton was a criminal for...uhhh, reasons….while they were taking part in an international criminal conspiracy against her.

[venusdebotticelli]

Okay, gather ‘round, children, ‘tis storytime!

Once upon a time when I’d just recently moved to Manchester, I needed to go do some paperwork in London, so I went and spent a couple of days with my uncle, who’s been living there for quite a few years.

It was a couple of days of sightseeing and eating cool food and basically just ~*¡¡¡London!!!*~, which sounds really nice, in theory. Thing is, it was a couple of days with just my uncle as company. At the time I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that, I thought it was a cool plan.

But here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I heard from him that weekend:

Autism is caused by drinking milk, and the government poisons the food in supermarkets so that only rich people can afford healthy food that won’t slowly kill them.

The government secretly murders all scientists who dare publicly speak out about this horrible truth.

All the abused women in the world deserve the treatment they get, because 100% of women (actual scientific statistic figure provided by him) always go for the assholes and ignore the Nice Guys™ like him.

The gays are horrible monsters who oppress the poor straights, because that one time he went into an Obviously Gay™ Gay Bar to have a drink on his own people gave him weird looks.

“I really don’t like the way you’re looking at me right now” -My uncle, to his queer niece, right after he said that we are horrible monsters who oppress the straights and have all the power in the world, because all the managers at his workplace are gay and very incompetent. (I��m pretty sure that means I was oppressing him with my stare, or something)

Apparently I just have a huge Victim Complex™, I like to victimise myself by seeing issues were there are none---says the aforementioned oppressed-by-the-gays-and-their-meanie-stares uncle.

This was around the time of the winter olympics in sochi, and when all the controversy about the Russian ban on gay propaganda was going strong, and people were actually getting arrested. One of the TVs at the pub we were at was broadcasting the olympics, and he thought it vital to inform me that the whole “gay thing” in Russia was just a ruse, a fake problem invented by the government to distract from the real truth of their shady dealings.

Apparently anything that affects the gays only is just a fake problem, because it’s not actually affecting anybody, y’kno¿? I’m guessing The Real Issues™ are just those that affect straight white men like him, everything else is just government fabricated distraction.

This is a very big secret, you know, highly classified information that he had confirmed by the obviously very reliable sources of his internet circles, so please read the next point at your own discretion, I don’t want the FBI/CIA/NHS kicking down your door in the middle of the night because you know too much: 

There is a very very very exclusive gay night club, called The Black Rose or something like that iirc, where all the world’s biggest elites gather together in secret, you know, george bush, david cameron, vladimir putin, the clintons, to name a few, and they all partake in super secret initiation rituals that involve gay things that he couldn’t tell me about because they were too dark and perverse for my poor sensible ears to hear. But ovbiously that creates this huge Gay Elite ruling the world behind the scenes and oppresing all the straights globally.

I’m pretty sure there’s more stuff I’m forgetting, after all, this was around three years ago already, but you get the idea. It’s obviously the kind of edifying, fascinating conversation you’d pursue when your queer, autistic, just-turned-19 niece visits you in a foreign city and has no choice but to sleep in your house and to spend the whole two days with you :) 

Perhaps a little unreasonably, my young self thought “Oh my goodness, this person is a little bonkers, maybe being a 50something year old man living on his own with no friends and the internet as his only company for years has slightly perturbed the waters of his mind¿? I feel a little alienated, I’d rather avoid his company in the future, whenever possible”. That is exactly the delicate way I told my friends about it in the next five hours of bus ride back to Manchester, fo’ sho’, no furious whatsapp ranting was involved at all :P

Anyway, as was my intention, I kept ignoring his existence, and only warily skimming through, and affording no response to, his emails full of links to conversation threads about the moral failings of letting beings like Conchita Wurst show their faces on respectable TV and similar topics. 

It’s been a few years now, and every once in a while my grandma mentions that when he talks to him he’s really sad I don’t keep in contact with him, and that he thinks I’m quite ungrateful, and that he’d like to know what’s going on with my life and for us to see each other every now and again, and that he’d like to help me out in this foreign country we’re both living in but that I just don’t give him the chance. My mum also asks me whether I’d like to get in contact with him and go visit, sometimes, though not as often. Today was one of those times, since apparently they’ve been talking lately, and he asked her about me, and my mum sent him some of the assignments I did for class, which I’m quite proud of. 

One of those is my poetry assignment, which includes five poems and an analysis of three of them, and the poems are quite personal pieces treating topics such as queer love, my mental illness and autism, and toxic societal ideals surrounding romantic relationships. His answer to that¿? He told my mum to look up the concept of “Generation Snowflake”, of all bloody things. Lemme just helpfully give you the definition of that here:

Generation Snowflake, or Snowflake Generation, is a term used to characterise young adults of the 2010s as being more prone to taking offence and less resilient than previous generations, or too emotionally vulnerable to cope with views that challenge their own. It is considered derogatory.

So now I ask of you, dear friends, to send me links to posts and articles giving good rebuttals to the utter bullshit that is that bloody baby-boomer concept, because I know I’ve read some very good ones here on tumble dot com, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to even begin finding them. Please help me out here¿?

[drumpfwatch]

The Curious Case of Maria Butina

Alright Ladies, Gentlemen, and Those Who Lie Between, it’s time to talk about Russia.

It is well known on both the right and left that Trump has been accused of collusion with the Russians. Tomorrow, Michael Cohen will be brought in front of congress to testify on that matter, and potentially about how he lied under oath on order of Donald Trump. That should open up a lovely and exciting road.

But let’s focus on how we know that this stuff is going on. Every Trump Supporter I know at this point is willing to admit that Russia meddled in the affairs of the US Government. This is no longer up for debate, and today I’d like to talk about what I think is my favorite case of that insanity. Maria Butina.

It started back in 2015. A woman named Maria Butina came to America from Russia, and got to work. See, she had this weird position of being the head of a movement called “The Right to Bear Arms”. Supposedly, this is a guns right movement in Russia trying to get more people to be able to own and use guns.

That right there is your first clue. See, there is no guns right movement in Russia. We’ll get to that.

She started to stick her nose all over the place. She showed up to ask Donald Trump, at a press conference, on record, what he wanted to do about Russian sanctions. She milled about in NRA meetings, to the point where more than one NRA person admitted to it being very strange how much she was pushing to get herself in the good graces of the people there. It really started getting strange when the leadership itself started to shake up in relation to her will.

That was the second clue.

Then she started getting involved in the politics, too. She was talking to Trump, to the point where she was specifically saying who he should totally invite to his prayer breakfast because they’re high in Russian diplomatic circles and it would be a nice to establish a bond between them.

That’s the third clue.

See, Maria Butina was not just some Russian Guns Right activist. No such thing actually exists. At all. Why the hell would there be, a totalitarian like Putin wouldn’t allow the people to arm themselves. Even if it was some secretive underground movement, its leaders wouldn’t be working for Putin, and not only was she a member of his party, she was one of the deputy governors of the Central Bank of Russia.

That infiltration of the NRA was to screw it up so that it could more easily cooperate with the Russian diplomatic project. Those people she invited to the prayer breakfast, along with her handler, were people she deliberately wanted to have establish a back channel of communication between the Trump team.

Her orders, as given to her Aleksander Torshin, were to try and connect the RNC with the Kremlin. And she came up with this brilliant idea of doing it through the NRA. The NRA is one of the biggest financiers of the Republican Party, and they don’t have to disclose where they get their money from.

Her America-Russia project was approved. Various files from Butina indicate that she was in contact with the Russians and the Americans, that Russia was not only aware of her project but working with her, but there are some...suspicious things in those communications. For instance, more than once they talk about “having reason to believe” that the Republican Party would win the Presidency in 2016.  Who the hell would have thought that? Especially in Russia? There was also the fact that Butina talked about having the “right to negotiate” with that seat. Who gave her the right? Why the hell would she think she had that? On the day Trump won the election, she sent an e-mail to Torshin saying “I await further orders.”

It was at that point the government was like “Okay maybe we need to look into this.” The result was that about 6 months ago, Butina got herself arrested. She was the first Russian involved in this scandal who happened to be in the US and did not manage to flee to Russia before they pinned dirt on her enough to get her in jail.

What followed as a hilarious court trial where the defense tried every possible contortion to make things as difficult and obnoxious as possible. An appeal to get back her immigration papers “Y’know, because her first amendment rights let her have them!” despite those rights going away when you’re a criminal. Interrupting the judge during a meeting to show them a video of Butina and her boyfriend dancing to Beauty and the Beast together as proof that “she has so many nice things here, she’d never leave!” even though her diary said she actually hated the guy and was only dating him as part of her operation.

Of course, Russia vehemently denied have anything to do with any of it while every day the prosecutor presented more and more damning material and Russia quietly buried as much as they possibly could on the matter, including shoving Torshin himself into a retirement hole. The NRA has denied knowing that Butina was using them, and other then that has stayed absolutely quiet on the matter of their own involvement.

Eventually, Butina gave up. She entered a plea agreement with the US Government, and while Russia says she was goaded into it, her own testimony would say otherwise. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. How much of the situation we’re in now is her responsibility? How much damage did she, alone, herself, do.

Either way, when I first heard about this, I thought it was too good to be true. Such a clear and direct link from the Russian Government to the American one that’s so shady. I wish I could link you to the court proceedings, but you can find them.

[boney-king-of-nowhere-blog]

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev

Recently I’ve had quite a few conversations with friends about Putin’s Russia. I realised that I was really not very informed about the subject, but was finding myself annoyed at hearing what I felt was a complacent apology for a corrupt, murderous oligarch.

In one of many memorable sketches from this book Pomerantsev describes his then colleagues at  the state-controlled Ostankino channels. These producers, when asked how they square their liberal private lives with the fact of working at the state-controlled Ostankino Technical Center, reply that ‘everything is PR’ and reject the author’s ‘Western attachment to such vague notions as ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’ as a blunder’. Elsewhere Pomerantsev characterises this type of attitude as ‘easy relativism’, referring to a Western journalist’s justification for taking a job at Russia Today.

The conversation with the Ostankino producers falls within the context of a chapter on Putin’s personal adviser, Vladislav Surkov. I’d first heard of him through an Adam Curtis segment included on Charlie Brooker’s end of year Newswipe. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od4MWs7qTr8) The filmmaker later developed these ideas in Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation, again drawing heavily on Pomerantsev’s work. As Putin’s adviser Surkov has been credited with creating a state of constant confusion in Russian society. By funding the creation of extremist political parties on both the left and right, lending support to conservative and liberal media, and generally stirring up as many competing causes as possible Surkov created an atmosphere in which Putin alone appears as reliable. Moreover, Surkov maintains a similar policy of obfuscation with regard to his own image. Most famously he is thought to have written the satirical novel, Close to Zero, which Pomerantsev describes as ‘the sort of book Surkov’s youth groups burn on Red Square’. Surkov himself teases this dual identity by writing the novel’s preface!

After watching those Adam Curtis documentaries and while browsing follow-up material, I quickly realised that this was a book pitched at my level. (With its 100 page bibliography Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha feels like a step too far at this point). Dizzying and druggy, though held together by a focus on Moscow, the book bounds quickly through its diverse cast of characters. Indeed Pomerantsev gives the shapeshifting Surkov a run for his money in the speed with which his gaze moves from one figure to another. Yet ultimately the book is held together as much by scepticism about Surkov’s brand of unrestrained, postmodern relativism as by its focus on Moscow. This combination of a postmodern style in order to critique postmodernism also underpins Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation, which again takes much of its subject matter from Pomerantsev. (Though Curtis places the origins of this postmodern conception of reality within the Soviet era, whereas Pomerantsev seems to regard states like the USSR and Korea as ‘classic’ (modernist?) totalitarian states.)

Of these several vignettes one which seemed particularly revealing of how power is delegated within Putin’s oligarchy was the story of Yana Yakovleva. The head of a drug company importing diethyl ether, an organic compound commonly used as a laboratory solvent, Yana in 2006 was arrested by the Federal Drug Control Service and detained for 7 months while awaiting trial. She was charged with the illegal sale of the diethyl ether without a license. An absurd charge against the head of a company whose entire business had for years hinged upon the sale of this very drug. More terrifying, however, than the Kafkaesque story of the arrest itself, is Pomerantsev’s account of the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring which led to her release.

One of the key themes of the book is the interplay between the actors of Russia’s “liberal” drama and the super-rich stage managers behind the scenes. In Yakovleva’s case it becomes clear that the most important factor in her acquittal was not the bravery of her industrious lawyer Evgeny Chernousov or the inherent ridiculousness of the prosecution’s attempt to prove that diethyl ether was a narcotic. The real battle was not between prosecution and defence, but between two rival factions on ‘the Olympus of the Kremlin’. On either side were Viktor Cherkesov and Nikolaj Patrushev. It became known as ‘the war of the Chekists’ (the KGB men) and arose after a perceived snub to Cherkesov, a close friend of Putin’s who, expecting to become head of the FSB (successor to the KGB) upon Putin’s inauguration as president, instead found himself appointed to the Federal Drug Control Service (considered the least important security organ). Patrushev was chosen as head of the FSB and in retaliation Cherkesov launched an investigation into illegal smuggling at the Chinese border, overseen by the FSB. This in turn prompted Patrushev to make sure that cases such as Yana’s, part of the FDCS’ wider attempt to take control of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, received intensive media coverage and that the police allowed protests to continue against her unjust detainment. Ultimately both men were fired by Putin, who remained silent and inscrutable throughout the battle, but in the chaos of the conflict her lawyer was able to engineer an acquittal.

I hope what I’ve written so far doesn’t sound completely self-satisfied. I started off convinced that Putin’s Russia was a profoundly alienating post-mafia regime in which human rights abuse goes unchecked whilst true democracy remains elusive and I reached for a book which could confirm all of these preconceived notions. (Of course, there was the added sweetener of its fast-paced, picaresque style and a subject matter of shady political puppetry designed to appeal to the same stoner demographic as that of Adam Curtis*). In fact I think that Pomerantsev gives a very even-handed account of the West’s role (or complicity) in Putin’s Russia without ever veering into an apology. In the book’s penultimate chapter ‘Offshore’, he details the way in which areas such as Mayfair, Belgravia, and Knightsbridge have been bought up by Russian money to the extent that the traditional binary of ‘Russia and the West’ might now seem irrelevant.

In light of recent revelations about the poisoning attempt carried out by GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) agents against their one-time colleague Sergei Skripal the question of how to impose sanctions on Putin takes on greater urgency. Any serious retribution should surely include some kind of check on Russian assets in London. To put it in Pomerantsev’s terms, can we really afford to just ‘keep all that bad stuff up in the spare room of our culture’? Jeremy Corbyn, writing in the Guardian in March, voiced support for sanctions of this sort. It remains baffling, however, that he refuses to condemn the Russian state outright for its involvement in the attack. Whilst France, Germany, Canada and the USA pledged to support Britain and its assessment that Russian officers were behind the attack, Jeremy Corbyn still refused to say anything more than that the ‘evidence points strongly’ to Russian involvement.

The parallels with Trump are worrying - it seems that for the hard-right and hard-left alike in 2018 Russia and Putin represent an antidote to the corrupt centrist mainstream. But it is an image which surely says more about Corbyn and Trump’s own projection than it does about the actual functioning of Russian society. It is an extreme isolationist response to the Iraq war which runs that ‘because we intervened hastily and unsuccessfully once, we should never intervene anywhere in any form again.’ The all-or-nothing logic of the grumpy adolescent dominates and transforms Putin into a kind of anti-hero, onto whom the hard left and right can project their own sense of nobility.

In this way they start to look very much like Pomerantsev’s cynical colleagues at Ostankino. Easy relativism provides a justification for political apathy and the truth (in this case that Russian agents were sent to carry out an assassination on British soil) becomes lost, hidden in plain sight amongst countless equally valid, though obviously contradictory, versions of reality.

*I don’t mean to sound so down on Adam Curtis. I really like his use of music and archive footage - I think you can see the way that recently this has influenced more traditionally “objective” documentarians like Ken Burns. I also think he is a provocative and assured speaker. But not long ago I listened to his interview with Adam Buxton, whose podcast I follow religiously, and he came across as a bit of a tosser. Normally on that podcast I’m looking to see a different side to people and an ability to relax into a friendly chat, but he sounded like a prerecording, offering long, humourless lectures often only tangentially related to the question asked and generally sounding like a smug Oxbridge student bullshitting his way through a tutorial after one too many glasses of port the night before. I also think that he, like many journalists, is very good at convincing himself and his audience that he is presenting original research, when in fact his “subjective” style is often a means of avoiding references or bringing in voices other than his own.

[thomdunn]

Let’s Think About This From Comey’s Point-of-View For A Second

The storyteller in me is always interested in what goes on in other people’s heads. There are various cliches about how every villain is a hero in their own story, and I generally think that’s true — both in fiction, and in real life.

And as more and more information comes out about the whole Russia-Trump-Comey-Hillary-Email-Clusterfuck, I think it’s important for us all to remember that these are actual human beings, who, like all of us, are often forced to make decisions with limited time and with even more limited information, and that sometimes, they get it wrong.

(Except for Trump, obviously; he’s little more than a spoiled chaos demonbaby in the middle of his greatest tantrum yet.)

So instead of arguing about conspiracies and fake news and hypocritical firings or whatever petty satisfaction the Internet is feeding on right now, put yourself in Comey’s shoes, circa June 2016.

You’re a registered Republican who has always taken pride in your commitment to the Constitution. You’ve never been ashamed to tell leaders of either major party to go screw themselves, if their actions or words don’t align with what you see as your duty. As far as you’re concerned, inspiring a bi-partisan hatred is generally a good thing, because it makes it easier for you to stay objective in your job. You earn respect through hatred and truth.

This is how you inspire loyalty within the Bureau — but lately, that loyalty has come under question. There are a lot of eager FBI agents championing the Trump train, which is bad for objectivity; you’re also in the middle of investigating the other major presidential candidate, which is even worse for objectivity. (Also, you yourself have never been a big of Secretary Clinton, but you’re trying really hard to get past that.)

And yet, the more you dig into Hillary’s emails, the more the answer stays the same: she’s a 68-year-old woman who doesn’t understand technology, but there’s no proof of malicious intent. Regardless of how much you want to punish her, being shady and stupid is not illegal.

Then the Russia shit REALLY hits the fan.

You’re pretty confident that Michael Flynn is up to something. You know that Trump’s campaign manager is knee-deep in questionable dealings, and that Trump’s lawyers have concerning Russian ties, too. Plus there’s that Russian mob hideout sitting right in Trump Tower you’ve been watching for a while, and maybe, just maybe, there’s something going on with Rosneftand the Russian oil industry—just a few of the reasons why you’ve been casually spying on Trump-related things for years.

And then there’s Vladimir Putin, a famously vicious spymaster with a raging hate-boner against America in general, and the Clintons in particular.

You’re also damn sure that DNC-server-hacker Guccifer 2.0 is Russian, though you’re having a hard time figuring out whether he’s acting alone or on behalf of the FSB and/or Russian government. (although you also know that Russian espionage tactics are intentionally designed to be duplicitous and cast layers of aspersions back around upon themselves in order to leave everyone triple- and quadruple-guessing themselves. Questionable links is what the Russians do, and they’re really really good at it.)

That’s when you learn that Russia is intentionally spreading false propaganda about Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s involvement in the Clinton email investigation — which is nearing its conclusion.

And for which you still really don’t have any proof of malicious intent, which would probably be needed (though not 100% required, I guess) to prosecute.

Even though you also know that a good 1/3 of the country is clamoring for Clinton’s public lynching, with their torches and pitchforks ready to go.

To make matters worse, Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch just got caught canoodling on an airport runway.

People are already asking questions about this — and they don’t even know yet that you know that the Russians were spreading Fake News about Loretta Lynch’s collusion in the email investigation anyway.

Damn those Russian spies are good. And you, James Comey? You’re fucked. The Russian propaganda game just forced you into a Catch-22. You have to make a choice, but your choices—and available information—are painfully limited. Meanwhile, the clock is still ticking…

Choice #1: Tell the American public, in the middle of one of the most hostile elections in US history, that Russia has meddled in the process.

You can try to explain that you’re still looking into it and that it may or may not have something to do with Trump’s business dealings, or else maybe just people on his campaign team, you’re not sure yet. But the damage would already be done. This would undermine all remaining public faith in the American Democratic process—and you yourself would be to blame. The anti-Clinton animosity would reach a fever pitch, especially when they found out that you were going to recommend against her prosecution for completely unrelated reasons.

From there, the conspiracy theories of Obama’s secret evil Deep State agenda would spiral even further out of control. Between the religious Right (who really love the Russians) and the recent resurgence of militant white supremacist groups infiltrating law enforcement, this would likely push the country on the edge of a second Civil War.

So much for that carefully-cultivated image of objectivity!

Choice #2: Publicly announce the end of the Clinton investigation—with a lengthy preamble caveat to make it clear how much you hate her—while continuing to investigate Russian interference in secret.

People will accuse you of Clintonian collusion, of course, but sometimes you have to take one for the team. Clinton supporters will breath a sigh of relief, while the rabid Clinton-hating conspiracy theorists will continue being rabid Clinton-hating conspiracy theorists. But at least this way you can keep the illusion of American democracy intact, and let the people believe they’re living in a fair and neutral electoral process in a totally free country full of equal opportunity for all.

This is the least worst option. So you take it, and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and your decision leads straight down.

Because just before Election Day, you receive news that your agents have found another stash of missing Clinton emails. Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

This looks bad. You know this looks bad. Again, you also know that you have a lot of Trumpers in the Bureau, and that if you don’t do anything, they’re going to leak the information anyway. You could wait until you’ve actually gone through this new trove of evidence before making an announcement about it, but that could look really bad—especially if Clinton wins the election, which is looking more and more likely every day.

But your duty is to the public, and to the Constitution, so you bite the bullet and decide to write a letter about this recent discovery. A letter which pretty much decides the fate of the election…even though it turned out there was nothing new to investigate after all.

Oops?

But it all works out in the end, Trump gets elected, you casually mention the Russia thing in public, and everyone lives happily ever after. … Right?

Except for the other 20 members of the Trump cabinet who have lied under oath about Russian communications. Except for the alleged Donald Trump pee tape (which is almost certainly untrue, but still hilarious, none of which discounts the other revelations in that dossier). Except for all that Trump emolument stuff which may-or-may-not tie back to that whole Rosneft thing. Et cetera, et cetera.

Either way, you’re still James Comey, and you’re still doing your job as FBI Director, still investigating Russia’s involvement in the whole election process, and still under the impression that you are acting in the best interests of the American people, because that’s your job. So you don’t even mind it when Trump tries to nudge you into dropping the investigation. Or, again, when he throws a giant public tantrum about “Obama” spying on him, when you know—as well as the rest of the intelligence community—that you are literally spying on everyone in America at any given point in time, just to be safe, and that the rules on unmasking incidental surveillance have always been kinda-wishy-washy. (Except in this case, that system is working exactly as it was intended to all along.)

You don’t bother squealing on Trump for trying to obstruct your investigation because it wasn’t really that bad, and would cause an even bigger headache to report to the Department of Justice, making an even bigger enemy out of the vengeful, unhinged bully the White House.

Then he fires you. He doesn’t directly interfere with the process of justice, of course; but you know that he meant to send a message, because you know that he’s a wildly vindictive man with a malicious sense of loyalty.

But at least now the gloves are off.

To be clear: none of this is meant to excuse Comey’s actions, or anything else the professional liars in the intelligence community have recently said or done.

I’ve always viewed the intelligence community as kind of a necessary evil, who tend to do a lot of explicitly bad things for supposedly-good reasons. This is also true of law enforcement—and the FBI fits right in the center of that Venn diagram, and their history has always been shady.

The only point I hope to make is that no matter how conniving, insidious, or righteous they might seem, even high-ranking government officials are still generally people, and susceptible to the same failings as the rest of us.

(Again, except for Demon-Baby-Trump itself.)

There’s a reason that we have an FBI, of course. Just as there’s a reason for the checks-and-balances of the three government branches, and also an independent press, as well as laws to protect whistleblowers that we repeatedly ignore because we don’t think people deserve to know the truth. But the end of the day, we tend to forget that all of these organizations are run by actual human people who are prone to unconscious biases and errors in judgement. And that’s a serious problem.

The Trumpservative media would have you believe that every single member of the DNC and “Mainstream Media” are working directly together, in collusion with Comey, to take down the Trump administration with completely made-up lies about Russia. But all they can do about it is to mock anyone who isn’t anti-anti-Trump rather than grappling with the very real, and very human complications of this entire issue.

Meanwhile, a large swath of the Left is suddenly head-over-heels about shady government bureaucracy and surveillance, which is, erm, not a good look. (Remember, kids: the FBI and CIA are literally paid to lie to you.)

But like a lot of things in this messed up, crazy world, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in an endless sea of complicated nuance.

James Comey is not “The Hero of the Resistance.” Nor is he the enemy of freedom.

More likely, James Comey is a human being whose former job involved some things that were good, and some things that were bad, and who found himself faced with some difficult decisions that made it even harder for him to stay objective in an increasingly partisan world.

Comey made some bad decisions. The alternatives were even worse.

If you were in the same situation, you probably would have made the same decisions, too. That doesn’t make it right, and doesn’t make it wrong—but it does make it human.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

a road map to what we know and what we are trying to learn about Trump-Russia

Trump and Russia is just a rat king of a story.

It’s hard to grasp how fucked up it is, because it is fucked up in so many ways. If it all blurs together, it’s harder to understand the facts of the case, to hear when it really is getting more serious, or to see how it connects with the other awful things that are happening. And because it’s so complicated, it’s easy to believe everything you read because so much of what we know is so bonkers that you don’t trust the smell test, or to reject everything out of hand because it’s all so implausible.

That doesn’t do any good. You can, and you have to, think critically about this story. This post is intended to be a tool to help you put things into context, so you can absorb new stories as they happen.

Main types of Trump-Russia stories:

Financial

Personal

Compromised Trump associates

Election 2016

Obstruction

Changes to US foreign policy toward Russia

1. Finance:

They really did get Capone on tax evasion.

It’s almost a joke, right? Al Capone, Scarface, actual OG of the Chicago mafia, locked up for paperwork. But it’s not some random technicality. Capone didn’t lie on his taxes just to pay less in taxes, he lied on his taxes because his income was illegal. If he admitted how much money he was making, it could’ve been used to help prove the bad things he was doing to get it.

That is why Trump’s finances are important to the various Russian interference investigations. The theory, and it’s pretty strong, is that there’s a paper trail connecting Donald Trump and his family to various players in Moscow. The connections themselves may or many not be illegal on their own. But the real issue is that if Russian power players invested in Donald Trump, they did so for a reason.

Various strands of this thread include:

loans Trump has gotten from Deutsche Bank, a European bank with links to Russia;

loans Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner has gotten from VEB, a financial firm which handles transactions for the Russian government;

shady financial transactions at the Bank of Cyprus.

2. Personal:

Ways Trump specifically is vulnerable to influence by Putin and his people, such as:

his ideological admiration for Putin’s strongman style government;

blackmail (AKA kompromat). This can be legal trouble or personal embarrassment. If a financial story suggests he can be implicated in money laundering, say. Or, and you’ve probably heard about this one, the supposed pee-pee tape;

-Trump’s general weakness, which makes him putty in the large, manly hands of trained spies.

3. Compromised Trump associates:

Since entering political life less than two years ago, Trump has managed to hire an awful lot of people with unusual relationships to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, such as:

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn

Former campaign chair Paul Manafort

Campaign foreign affairs adviser Carter Page

Also, a lot of powerful Republicans, whether or not they have their own connections with Russia, are in a politically compromising position because they’ve known that Trump’s ties to Russia are a national security threat but have stuck with him anyway.

Pence knew that Flynn was compromised, covered it up, and is still lying about it.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, AFAIK, wasn’t in the web until he met with spymaster/former ambassador Kislyak several times during the campaign, then lied about it at his confirmation hearings.

House Republican leadership are on tape laughing about Russia’s influence on Trump.

4. Election 2016:

Okay. Pause. This is intense and abstract and kind of existentially terrifying. Look away from the screen and relax your eyes for a few seconds.

You back? You with me? Alright.

There’s an honestly startling solid consensus on some aspects of the Russian election meddling. There’s no argument that Russian operatives enacted a massive disinformation and harassment campaign online, stole communications from various political groups and released the emails they stole from the DNC and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and that they specifically intended to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. They also stole documents and released documents from various Democratic congressional candidates. It’s still worth trying to understand those parts of the story, but they’re less likely to be news.

Most news revolves around one of two major open questions.

What else did Russian operatives do? We know from a lot of expert testimony, strong reporting, and courageous whistleblowing that Russian hackers had some success breaking into the voter rolls in at least 21 states. We do not have any evidence that they successfully altered the voting rolls or that they actually changed the tallies of votes that have been cast. That may be because it didn’t happen, or because nobody has actually tried to find out if it happened.

What, if any, help did they have from Americans? We know that during the campaign, Trump advisers claimed to be in touch with Wikileaks. We know that at least one right-wing activist was in touch with Michael Flynn while attempting to help people he believed to be Russian operatives.

Those two stories aren’t necessarily the same thing. You can imagine a situation where the tech guys are good enough that they don’t need any help at all. Or you can imagine a situation where there are lots of Republican traitors who want to sell themselves to a white nationalist big daddy like Putin but for whatever reason they aren’t efficiently used. What we do know suggests that both of those things happened to some extent, but most developments in this story come from one angle or the other, so it’s worth being able to put them in context.

Those are the things that we’re aware we don’t know. There are also unknown unknowns – questions that we don’t know enough to be asking yet. Don’t drive yourself up a wall dwelling on that, just be aware that we might get a curveball.

5. Obstruction:

Trump and his people have pulled lots of unethical and some most likely illegal crap to keep the public from learning more about all this.

Remember, we don’t know why Trump might try to cover this stuff up. He sure is acting guilty of some degree of participation in Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But it’s entirely possible that he’s trying to hide other sleazy behavior, or even that his all-consuming narcissism forces him to try and squash any suggestion that he couldn’t have legitimately won an election on his own (especially since deep down even he must know that’s true).

Still, it does look pretty bad. Developing obstruction stories include:

potential obstruction of justice in having fired former FBI Director James Comey;

refusal to comply with congressional oversight;

disinformation coming out of the White House on a massive scale;

demonization of the “fake news,” which has a tendency to spike around the time a credible news outlet publishes a Russ-a-lago story.

6. Foreign Policy:

You can get into the weeds with this if you want but mostly what you need to know is that American foreign policy has swiftly started catering to Russian interests.

How it all fits (maybe):

On top of all the complicated subplots, it’s tricky to read about a Trump-Russia development because you have to do two important things at once: a) put the story in context with what you already know and b) remember that most of the people involved only had some of that context, and that nobody could predict how it would all work out.

Those things are important for your own understanding as this story unfolds. They’re also important to help you sidestep the strawman deflections. The issue is about what happened, not whether it was a perfect execution of Dr. Evil’s Master Plan.

Here’s a possibility. Again, this is something that strikes me as plausible, not an expert analysis or anything.

The Russian power elite is dominated by old-school KGB guys and oligarchs. (Their money in politics problem is exponentially worse than ours, and ours is bad.) Imagine you’re someone operating in that power structure and think about Donald Trump before he came down that escalator two years ago, say, as of his 2013 Miss America pageant in Moscow, or his 2005 loan from the Russia-linked Deutsche Bank. From their perspective, he is an American oligarch, so cultivating some sort of relationship with him would pay off. At the very least, his real estate empire is going to be useful as a place to stash their money. And once you invest in an asset, you want to get as much out of it as possible. So you have Trump who’s deft with the media and who has this racist hostility toward Obama, who Putin dislikes. If you egg him on to become a political nuisance: good. If you egg him on and he decides to run for office: better, because he has a bigger megaphone. But if you can actually get him into office: best.

At the same time as the American division is cultivating that relationship with Trump, the cyber division is developing its capabilities, and the European division is flexing its muscles with interventions into the elections of neighboring countries. All it takes is one apocalyptically-inclined influence to see how it can all fit together……

This story isn’t necessarily complex because it’s some top-down fourteen-dimensional chess strategy. It’s possible that it’s complicated because it was always an open-ended scheme to milk this tool for all he was worth, and it had been chugging along and picking up steam for years before the White House became the target.

Or, in TV Tropes terms, the story of Putin’s Puppet might well be less Batman Gambit and more Gone Horribly Right.

The important point here is, we don’t know. You don’t need to get too wrapped up in speculation or mind-reading. Just check your sources and get what you can out of the facts as they’re responsibly reported, and that’ll let you hear if/when there’s more you can do.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

investigations: an investigation

Having trouble keeping the different Trump investigations straight? TRICK QUESTION, everyone is! So here’s a primer.

The federal government, like the different state governments, is divided into three branches: the executive (the president, or the governor at the state level, and the various agencies), the legislative (Congress), and the courts. There are (tragically belated) investigations into Trump at each level.

There are two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Both of those houses are divided up into committees which focus on different aspects of running the government. All committees contain members of both parties, but the chair of the committee and a majority of its members are controlled by the majority party. When you hear about the “ranking members” of a committee, it’s referring to the chairperson and the senior member of the minority party.

Among other powers, committees have broad powers of investigation. These investigations are not criminal. Law enforcement can open up a case based on something a congressional committee discovers, but the purpose is to learn more so that the government can serve the public better.

Russiagate has enough different angles that there are a few committees which could investigate it. Because both houses are run by Republicans, all the relevant committees are run by Republicans. That means some of the committees have formally taken a pass, and the committees which are ostensibly investigating it are mostly whiffing. Here are the ones you want to keep an eye on:

House Intelligence Committee: oversees the various spy agencies and other national security matters. This committee was responsible for the public hearing where the FBI director publicly confirmed that there was an investigation into whether the Trump campaign participated in the Russian attack on the 2016 election. That investigation came to a screeching halt when the Chairman Devin Nunes clowned himself over the “wiretapp” tweet. Nunes, who was also a part of the Trump transition clusterfuck, has stepped aside from this investigation. It is now, supposedly, back on track, under the leadership of the similarly boneheaded Trumper Representative Mike Conaway. The ranking Democrat is Adam Schiff, and I recommend paying attention if you get a chance to listen to an interview with him. He’s very precise, level-headed, and good at explaining this stuff.

Senate Intelligence Committee (abbreviated SSCI, jsyk): put on a charming little bipartisan cabaret last month. However, it’s recently been reported that Chairman Dick Richard Burr, also of the Trump transition team, has been starving it out behind the scenes.

Senate Judiciary Committee: oversees the justice system, including the Department of Justice and specifically the FBI. Its Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism says it will interview former acting attorney general Sally Yates on May 8th, though who knows.

Committees which could get off their asses on this but haven’t yet include the House and Senate Armed Forces Committees and the House Oversight Committee.

Democrats, and a (very small) handful of Republicans, have called for an independent commission modeled after the 9/11 commission. It hasn’t happened because an independent commission has to be created by a law, meaning it would have to be passed by the Republicans who are obstructing any investigation and then signed into law by the person whose campaign they are investigating, or with 2/3 of both houses overruling his veto. 

BTW, this is why anyone currently pushing the “primary the imperfectly progressive Democrats!!” line is garbage. A frustrating red state Dem is still a vote to get the Democratic Party some real power to put the brakes on Trump, so we need to lay off and let them maximize their incumbency advantage in 2018.

In the executive branch, the FBI is investigating Russiagate. Right off the bat, this is of questionable value, given that FBI Director Comey threw the election to the person he’s investigating because he was afraid the intellectual luminaries at Red State would be mean to him. We just have to hope the ego trip of being the cop who brought down a president will appeal to Comey’s insatiable self-regard.

There are two tracks of investigation at the FBI. One is criminal. The other is counterintelligence – spyhunters. (That might sound like CIA stuff, but they work abroad. The FBI has to do the investigations into American citizens.) They don’t usually work together, but both are represented on a Trump-Russia task force.

Officially, the most we know about this investigation is what Director Comey told the House Intelligence Committee in March: this is a counterintelligence investigation which may uncover criminal activity. That said, a lot of commentary about this topic takes it for granted that crimes have been committed. Some terms you might see referenced occasionally:

The Logan Act prevents citizens from undermining American foreign policy by negotiating with foreign governments without authorization from the US government. This comes up in reference to General Michael Flynn’s attempt last December to undermine the sanctions the Obama Administration placed on Russia. You may also see the Logan Act referenced in regards to Junior having met with representatives of the Putin-backed Syrian dictator Assad during the campaign or a “back channel” meeting in early January between shadowy Trump associate Erik Prince and equally shadowy Russian representatives; however, as far as we know, these weren’t explicit negotiations with officials, so the Logan Act wouldn’t seem to apply. Nobody has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act.

RICO is the racketeering law that was used to round up the mafia. People can be prosecuted or sued for RICO violations. Trump U was also a RICO case, with the victims suing for damages.

Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA): Americans who do political work for foreign governments have to register that job with the DOJ. Flynn and Manafort have “retroactively registered,” ie, are in hot water on this one. 

Collusion is not a legal term or a term that the intelligence community uses. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it! IMO it’s actually better to stay away from more technical terms until a legal case or authoritative report makes it official.

Treason is a legal term. It’s actually the only crime specified in the US Constitution. As fair as it is as a moral term, it’s hard to see how it would apply here, because we’re not at war with Russia.

Espionage is a crime which may or may not apply.

The Hatch Act forbids government employees from using their position to interfere with elections. Okay, not directly related to Trump-Russia, but worth remembering that we’re here because the person with ultimate authority over this investigation plays fast and loose with the law if it looks like Sean Hannity might hurt his fee-fees. (Snowflake.)

Who would bring a case to court is unclear. The Department of Justice is supposed to represent the people in these cases, but right now it’s run by racist cartoon villain Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who’s deep in this himself. Sessions (then senator from Alabama) was an early and important supporter of Trump, back to the primaries. On its own, that would just be evidence that he’s a rotten person. But – after his confirmation was forced through the Senate – it came out that he’d met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, which he had explicitly denied during his confirmation hearing. That testimony is given under oath, which means that he committed perjury in front of the Senate, which is a violation of the federal laws he’s supposed to be enforcing. The meeting itself wouldn’t matter – it’s unusual for foreign ambassadors to meet with campaign staff, but not illegal – except Kislyak is also someone the CIA thinks is a spy. (Because there’s an open-and-shut case about a crime he committed on live television, Sessions has to realize that he’s first one in the dock if this house of cards does fall.)

There also isn’t anyone at the DOJ who can go over his head, because on March 10, all of the US district attorneys were told to pack their things. This is seriously abnormal, but it’s not illegal – unless it happened because someone was getting too close to a crime committed by someone high up the ladder, in which case, it’s obstruction of justice.

This is, arguably, why we have more than one set of authorities in the US. The Trumps are all New York residents. Trump Tower is in Manhattan, and the Trump companies are incorporated in New York.  And New York hates Trump. He got walloped there in November by 20 points. He hasn’t been back to Trump Tower since Inauguration Day. New York also loves Hillary Clinton: after sending her to the Senate twice, they voted for her for president three times by a double digit margin. Nobody wants payback for last year more than New Yorkers.

New Yorkers also get to elect their state attorney general. Their current AG, Eric Schneiderman, has been hounding Trump for years. Days after Sessions cleared out the US attorneys, Schneiderman hired a New York assistant district attorney who specialized in corruption cases. 

There’s a limit to what the state can do. National security is the federal government’s area, and Orange Julius himself can’t be brought up on state criminal charges. But Javanka, Junior, and Buster can, as can Manafort and the whole crew. Whatever seediness they’ve been up to is leverage to make them turn on each other. More importantly to Trump, all of his assets are in New York State. Money laundering, tax fraud, shady real estate deals ….all of these can get roped into NY’s state equivalent of RICO. (If you’re interested in these cases, @Khanoisseur on Twitter does some impressive open-source reporting.)

The courts don’t get involved until someone is arrested or files a lawsuit. There are plenty of lawsuits that are what you’d expect. An additional thing that’s new to a lot of people is the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution, which says that the president can’t accept payments from foreign governments. Ethics watchdog groups have a pretty good case that Trump Hotels, which foreign diplomats can use as a way to curry favor, is a violation of this.