#trump russia

In a world where people were trying to do their jobs, this story would not make sense to anyone, now or ever. But because we live in the dumbest fucking timeline, you need to know the shape of the Trump cartel’s latest disinformation campaign against the American democratic process.

Former Vice President Biden is being attacked through his family, which means that his family’s story is the vital context here. Back in the ‘70s, when he was Senator-Elect Biden, his family was in a terrible car crash. His first wife and their young daughter were killed. His sons Beau and Hunter survived, though Hunter suffered a traumatic head injury. The boys went about 80% Parent Trap to convince their dad to marry his current wife Jill, and both grew up and went to law school. Beau became the attorney general of Delaware before dying of cancer in 2015. Hunter went on to a lucrative career in the private sector despite an intermittent struggle with substance abuse, which is a common aftereffect of psychological trauma and brain injuries.

Republicansgenerallybelieve that being a Yale Law grad with a wealthy father and a history of substance abuse qualifies someonefor the Supreme Court, but for some deeply principled and intellectually honest reason, they have decided that Hunter Biden’s employment in the field of transportation and energy can only be a sign of spectacular corruption. So nefarious and sinister was the Biden family’s treachery that they managed to destroy every iota of evidence before multiple investigations by Senate Republicans could find any of it!

Obviously this little tabloid narrative was derailed when Trump went and got his dumb ass impeached over it. But it’s the middle of October, Trump’s down ten points in the polls, and he made the mistake of replacing the wildly unethical FBI director who threw the last election for him with a guy who at least knows to act professional, so he’s looking for a Hail Mary pass. In the wackiest of coincidences, some random Trumper had what he says might be Hunter Biden’s various hard drives, one of which apparently contained a backup of his most sensitive videos and text messages, in his computer repair shop. Of course this man did the only sensible thing and, uh, copied every file in the drives one at a time before bringing it to Trump’s TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and then the FBI.Giuliani, who was a former federal prosecutor before becoming the former mayor of New York City and current new bestie of Random Tech Store Guy, handled this situation with the assistance of someone who has a mere “50/50 chance” of being a Russian agent. (Poor old Rudy does appear to have limited communication skills beyond his personal safe space of a noun, a verb, and 9/11.) It’s unclear to me whether Giuliani or Tech Store Guy was the one who shared the hard drives with Steve Bannon, the white supremacist propagandist and former Trump campaign manager who is currently under indictment for fraud.

As with a lot of Trump trash, it’s impossible to describe without sounding like you’re exaggerating for comedic effect, but the stakes are too high for any of it to be funny. 

Over the weekend, a right wing tabloid published what it said were emails from one of Hunter’s laptops. (Reporters at that particular tabloid do not believe the story.) The emails don’t show any wrongdoing by the vice president and seem fake for a lot of reasons – but never mind, the bullshit laundering worked well enough to get some supposed actual reporter to harass Vice President Biden about it, and then a bunch of other supposed actual reporters to collapse into their fainting couches when Biden responded with appropriate impatience.

That apparently didn’t have the hoped-for effect. The next day, what appeared to be a series of highly emotional text exchanges between the vice president and his son appeared. There was nothing even vaguely scandalous in these, to a point where it’s not immediately obvious why anyone would bother publishing them. My best guess is that it’s meant to throw Biden off his stride by trying to hurt and humiliate his son, though it may also be an attempt to soften the groundforan even more theatrical reveal.

A lot of Very Serious Politics-Knowers have deluded themselves that the But Her Emails debacle of 2016 was the legitimate kernel of a story that was “blown out of proportion.” But Her Emails was about people a) having some degree of misogyny, conscious or unconscious, which led to a bias against Clinton and b) wanting to tell other people and/or themselves that it wasn’t because she was a woman. They understand that the But Her Emails-ing was a) enormously consequential and b) incredibly dumb. They don’t want to think too hard about that tension, because if they did, they’d have to take responsibility for how the dumb thing became so consequential.

Meanwhile, Trump campaign insiders know better than the rest of us how much they cheated in 2016, but they’re still people and therefore susceptible to the cognitive bias that they got what they wanted because they earned it somehow. The closest thing they had to an above-board strategy was yelling “emails!!” a lot, so they expect yelling “emails!!” to be successful again. They’re just desperately throwing pasta to see what sticks – but Joe Biden is a man, so they’re throwing it at the theory of relativity instead of the refrigerator door.

There are differences between 2020 and 2016 which are significantly less depressing. Trump’s co-conspirators are resorting to ridiculous methods because so many of the key players who made the 2016 operation work are actually facing punishment for some of their crimes. Paul Manafort is under house arrest. Wikileaks guy Julian Assange is in jail.  Social media companies,especially Twitter, were prepared to slam the brakes. Some mainstream reporters have refused to learn their lesson from 2016, but others were prepared to be critical. And, I cannot emphasize this last one enough, voters are more prepared for it. So Team Trump isn’t as good at doing the crimes as they were four years ago, even if they were as good at it they wouldn’t be able to use traditional and social media as effectively as they did last time, and even if they could adjust to that they’d have a harder time manipulating us. Maybe it got frustrating and boring for you to hear and talk about the 2016 attack for years on end, but the whole point of that was that we needed to be ready for exactly this scenario. So far, it seems to be working better than I would have hoped.

Obviously, this is infuriating. All else aside, putting this enormous, invasive pressure on a private citizen’s mental health and substance abuse problems is abusive and gross and genuinely dangerous. I don’t give a shit who his dad is, it’s fucking evil. We need to be ready to remember everybody involved in pushing this story – not just the con artists behind it, but the “mainstream” reporters who validated it in their behavior toward the Biden campaign or who spread what were (allegedly) entirely personal text messages of no news value.

But first, we need to win next month. On that front, I want to reiterate what I said when they first started cooking up this story late last year: it’s actually encouraging that they’re resorting to something like this, because it means they’re flailing. They haven’t been able to make FBI Director Wray abuse his power in the way former Director Comey did, despite the fact that the only real tool they had to manipulate Comey four years ago was taunting and pressure from conservative media. They don’t have a cutout like Wikileaks to launder the documents for them. Most importantly, they’re trying to influence voters’ opinions of Biden because they think voters’ behavior still matters. The only thing Trump knows in life is how to get away with a scam.If they thought they had it “rigged” they would be trying to act normal, because spending the three weeks before a heist reminding your marks of what fucking criminals you are doesn’t help you get away with it.

One last thing: this is a less obvious reason why it’s important to vote as early as you can. All these other increasingly desperate stunts depend on the ability to overwhelm everyone all at once, without enough time for them to be debunked or brought back into proportion. The more early votes are in the bank, the less effective their next stink bomb can be, and if it can’t be effective, there are a lot of people around Trump who would rather save their own asses from prison than help him throw it.

As ever, I think it’s worth talking about why one particular Trump outrage or another needs a few minutes of your attention. This story is important to understand because it is the worst case scenario that Trump-tolerant commentators right and left have been derisively accusing the “alarmists” of wackily espousing. You need a grip on this story because it is too jarring to absorb casually. It is somehow both entirely predictable and viscerally unbelievable.

And yet.

For at least a year and a half, the GRU (Russian military intelligence) has been offering Taliban fighters in Afghanistan cash rewards to kill American servicemembers. At least some of these bounties have been paid out. For nearly a year and a half, Trump and his entire administration have known that the Kremlin was taking out contracts on American soldiers. And for nearly a year and a half, this entire administration from Trump on down has done nothing about it.

Well. That’s not quite right. Trump had the class of 2020 at America’s most prestigious military college hauled back to campus, insisting that they expose themselves and each other to COVID-19 so they could watch him stumble down a ramp. He ordered a sloppy, shambolic retreat from Afghanistan, leaving a swathe of Taliban violence in his wake. He invited the Taliban – who harbored Osama bin Laden for years – to spend September 11^th at Camp David. He had at least a half dozen chummy chats with Russian president Vladimir Putin. He abruptly made the bizarre decision to pull American troops out of Germany – something Germany and our other European allies do not want, but the Russian government very much does. He tried to get Russia back into the G7, after they were kicked out for their invasion of Ukraine a few years back. Oh, and he cheerfully helped Putin’s ongoing project to corrupt and destabilize the government of Ukraine.

Trump had been tacitly complicit in the Russian military’s contract killings of American soldiers for nearly a year when the clock struck midnight in Washington.

It’s been ringing my head for days, that closing statement.

You can’t trust this President to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change, and you know it.

[The Founders] gave us the tools to do the job, a remedy as powerful as the evil it was meant to constrain: impeachment. They meant it to be used rarely, but they put it in the Constitution for a reason–for a man who would sell out his country for a political favor, for a man who would threaten the integrity of our elections, for a man who would invite foreign interference in our affairs, for a man who would undermine our national security and that of our allies–for a man like Donald J. Trump.

The Trump administration has violated a specific and foundational duty to Americans in uniform, so I don’t think it’s wrong that mainstream press coverage has tended to prioritize the American soldiers who may have been killed or injured due to these bounties. I do think that we should also be aware that American troops aren’t the only people harmed here. The GRU is also putting out hits on British soldiers. It’s also not happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in Afghanistan. Instead of a peaceful American withdrawal from a stable country, which has always been the goal, a bunch of fascist mobsters are being paid handsomely to fill a power vacuum with violent chaos. This is bad for the people of Afghanistan who are just trying to live their lives.

The Trump regime – in all its incompetence, corruption, and treacherousness – has many victims. Some of them, it appears, are American soldiers.

The Traitor-in-Chief was hoping we’d talk about the racist incitement he tried to unleash at his Nuremberg Rally in Tulsa. This was, of course, dangerous and evil despite its pathetic failure, so instead of rewarding him for it, let’s go over this weekend’s reminders of his authoritarian escalations, his gluttonous corruption, and the glaring illegitimacy he is failing to hide.

The Advisor’s Book

John Bolton, the mustacioed Dr. Strangelove who served as Trump’s third national security advisor, has started leaking copies of his book, out this week. Unsurprisingly, the book contains a lot of damning evidence of Trump’s attempts to extort foreign countries into helping him steal the 2020 election, which Bolton pompously refused to provide during Trump’s impeachment. This included the shakedown of the Ukrainian president which got Trump impeached. It turns out Trump was also desperately trying to get Chinese President Xi to help him, either by announcing bullshit investigations into former Vice President Biden’s family (we knew about this) or by dramatically increasing American imports to kind of goose the economy in a way that might help Trump in the election.

Trump, naturally, has responded by having the Department of Justice sue to stop the book’s publication and threatening to have Bolton thrown in jail.

We shouldn’t get numb to the existential small-d democratic nightmare of Trump’s sabotaging American foreign policy interests for his own political benefit. Yes, we’ve been living with it all along, and you’re probably tired of hearing or saying how bad it is. It’s still really bad! But the China piece of it is, you know, relevant to current events. Bolton left the administration in the fall of 2019, so he wouldn’t have any information on the COVID crisis, but there’s no reason to believe that Trump stopped trying to get on Xi’s good side. All those spectacular failures to get the pandemic under control when we had a chance six months ago, and even some of the more bizarre decisions since then, have to be reconsidered in light of this:

• The virus made it out of Wuhan to terrorize the world in large part because the Chinese Communist Party blew its early response.
• Trump was trying to butter up President Xi because Trump wants to use the CCP to make himself look good.
• While underplaying the virus, Trump praised the CCP’s response with a bunch of lies.

Break out your red string and corkboard if you want, but I think we’ve cracked the shit out of this case.

The Fixer’s Confession

Remembersix thousand years ago when the Mueller report about the joint Trump campaign-Russian government’s criminal sabotage of the 2016 election came out? And there was SO MUCH stuff that was SO BAD, it was hard for people to remember that it wasn’t even close to the whole story? Well, we just got another look under the redactions, and WOOOO it is as bad as you already knew it was! When they agreed to plead guilty and cooperate, Trump campaign staffer Rick Gates, campaign manager Paul Manafort, and attorney Michael Cohen confirmed that former Trump campaign official and current convicted felon Roger Stone helped Wikileaks plan the strategic releases of emails stolen by Russian intelligence and then called Donald Trump and told him all about it.

Again, this is and always has been the opposite of complicated. HE DID IT AT A PRESS CONFERENCE. HE ASKED RUSSIA FOR MORE EMAILS AND MORE EMAILS APPEARED.

THIS WAS LITERALLY ON C-SPAN.

The excuse that the Very Serious People in the Republican party, political press, and cosplay-leftist-contrarian industrial complex  is that nobody knew about some secret communication where known Russian assets plotted out some aspect of the attack with the Trump campaign. There hadn’t been one particular phone call where Trump and whoever was on speakerphone with him heard about what the FSB was planning to do before they did it. EXCEPT THAT DEFINITELY HAPPENED. The issue, for the 132513798415^th time, is not that we are unsure what happened, but that we are unsure what to do about it. The Mueller team, despite being cautious to a fault, were so sure it happened that they put it in their final report. Apply Occam’s razor to Trump-Russia and the rational conclusion is the worst case scenario.

Of course, the reason that this didn’t come out earlier is that Attorney General William Barr has turned the Department of Justice into a fully-owned Trump subsidiary, so that he could hide exactly this kind of smoking gun for Donald Trump.

The Lawyer’s Firing

Around ten PM on a Friday night, the attorney general’s office announced that United States attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman – that’s the lead federal prosecutor in Manhattan – had resigned, and his duties would be taken over by a reliable Trump flunky who already has a different government job. By midnight, Berman announced that he had done no such thing, he had no intention of leaving his job, and that the SDNY would continue to work on its cases as usual. (That last one is supposed to go without saying.)

You can get into the weeds on the back-and-forth of the following 48 hours, but the upshot of it is that Berman will be replaced by an SDNY career professional who …. seems reliably skeptical of Barr.

We don’t necessarily know why this sloppy, panicked attempt to decapitate the SDNY went down when it did. But OH MY GOD, we know why the fuck it happened.

These three headlines from the past few days are all part of the same story. Trump is actively trying to get foreign autocrats to help him cheat his way through the 2020 election, because he does not believe he can win a free and fair election. This is, unusually for him, a completely reasonable belief based on empirical evidence: he knows how much cheating he had to do last time. Whether it’s because of that cheating specifically or the general mobster bullshit he’s been into for his entire adult life, he’s desperate to gut legal oversight of his crimes and cheating, which is why he’s hired an attorney general who will help him cheatandcover up crimes.

All of this can only work if we agree to get distracted by nonsense. They are going to try absolutely everything they can think of to delegitimize their opponents and hide their own malevolence. You do not have to help them.