March 6, 2017




Inside Trump’s fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations
At the center of the turmoil in the White House is an impatient president frustrated by his administration’s inability to erase the impression that his campaign was engaged with Russia, to stem leaks or to implement any signature achievements. Interviews with 17 insiders offer a look at the tumultuous recent days.

Trump enters week seven of his presidency the same as the six before it: enmeshed in controversy while struggling to make good on his campaign promises. Gnawing at Trump, according to one of his advisers, is the comparison between his early track record and that of Obama in 2009, when amid the Great Recession he enacted an economic stimulus bill and other big-ticket items.


March 5, 2017







U.S. Can’t Effectively Counter Nuclear Threat, Times Finds.



By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
  • Under President Barack Obama, the Pentagon stepped up cyberattacks to disrupt North Korea’s nuclear program.
  • But some experts have grown increasingly skeptical about the tactic.
  • Upon leaving office, Mr. Obama warned President Trump that this threat would likely be his most urgent problem.




Trump’s View of Military: Raw Power as Means and End

By MAX FISHER
President Trump seems fixated on preparing the armed forces for a potential conflict with great powers like China and Russia.






What's behind President Trump's angry tweets that President Obama tapped his phones.







Trump Reportedly Furious over Sessions’ Recusal, Russia Stories, and ‘Everyone Thinking His Presidency Is Screwed Up’



March 3, 2017








The announcement comes a day after The Washington Post revealed that Jeff Sessions twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and did not disclose that fact to Congress during his confirmation hearing. Democrats had been calling for weeks for Sessions to step away from the investigation, though he had resisted pressures to do so.



Exclusive: Two other Trump advisers also spoke with Russian envoy during GOP convention

, USA TODAYPublished 5:00 p.m. ET March 2, 2017 | Updated 2 hours ago

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is not the only member of President Trump’s campaign who spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a diplomacy conference connected to the Republican National Convention in July. At least two more members of the Trump campaign’s national security officials also spoke with Kislyak at the event, and several more Trump national security advisers were in attendance.
It's unknown what the Trump campaign officials who spoke with the ambassador – J.D. Gordon and Carter Page – discussed with him. Those who took part in the events in Cleveland said it is not unusual for presidential campaign teams to interact with diplomats.
However, the newly-revealed communications further contradict months of repeated denials by Trump officials that his campaign had contact with officials representing the Russian government.

 At the time Jeff Sessions met with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the midst of last year's bitter campaign, the Alabama senator was not only serving as a surrogate for candidate Donald Trump but had been named chairman of the campaign's National Security Advisory Committee.


— Michael T. Flynn, then Donald J. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, had a previously undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador in December to “establish a line of communication” between the new administration and the Russian government, the White House said on Thursday.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and now a senior adviser, also participated in the meeting at Trump Tower with Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.

The Russian ambassador who met with then Sen. Jeff Sessions last year has left a path of repeated involvement in the U.S. presidential election campaign.
Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s staff became embroiled in an election monitoring brouhaha last fall, and President Obama expelled 35 members of Kislyak’s team late last year for their alleged interference in the election campaign to help Donald Trump.
Current and former US intelligence officials have described Kislyak as a top spy and recruiter of spies, a notion that Russian officials have dismissed. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said that "nobody has heard a single statement from US intelligence agencies' representatives regarding our ambassador," and attacked the "depersonalized assumptions of the media that are constantly trying to blow this situation out of proportion."



The calls for a special prosecutor will avalanche now. Republicans in the Senate who aren’t from deep-red states are going to join the call for a special prosecutor, as Ohio’s Rob Portman did shortly after Schumer spoke. Sessions will resist, and the White House will resist, but eventually, the untenable nature of their position will show up in the poll numbers, and they’ll relent.
Sessions will have to relent to have a chance of keeping his job. But this just shows why it was so corrupt for Trump to name him in the first place. It’s becoming clearer and clearer why Trump wanted an attorney general he could trust not to investigate him.

March 2, 2017



Sessions met with Russian envoy twice last year, encounters he later did not disclose


WASHINGTON POST


Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice last year while he was still a senator and a prominent surrogate of the Trump campaign, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. During his confirmation hearing for attorney general, Sessions did not disclose these conversations.  “I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions said in response to a question about communications between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.” In a written questionaire, Sessions said "no" to the question of whether he had been in contact with the Russian government regarding the 2016 campaign. (A spokesperson for Sessions said he met with Kislyak in his capaicty as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and that he couldn't remember what exactly they discussed). Sessions now oversees the Justice Department and the FBI that are investigating alleged Russian meddling and potential ties to the Trump camp. Sessions has resisted calls for him to recuse himself from the ongoing investigations.

Obama Aides Left a Trail of Intelligence on Russian Efforts
In a new report by The New York Times, three former U.S. officials say that American allies, specifically the British and the Dutch, provided information that described meetings between Russian officials and associates of President Trump during the campaign in European cities. Additionally, the report contends that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications of Russian officials discussing contacts with Trump associates. The report also says that the Obama administration scrambled to spread information about Russian contacts with Trump associates prior to Trump's inauguration in order to prevent the president from destroying intelligene or obstructing inestigations. Additionally, over a half-dozen current and former officials said there were efforts to keep and distribute information in an attempt to ensure that there was a proper Congressional investigation. 
READ IT AT THE NEW YORK TIMES


Wilbur Ross Is Another Trump Cabinet Pick With Underexamined Russian Ties

After Ross and his team invested more than $1 billion in the troubled Bank of Cyprus, he became one of its two vice chairmen. Putin appointed the other.


DCREPORT.ORG


DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

02.27.17 2:36 PM ET

A study prepared exclusively for DCReport.org by James S. Henry reveals deep financial ties between Donald Trump’s nominee for Commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, and three Russian oligarchs, whose lives and fortunes depend on staying in the good graces of Vladimir Putin.
These connections raise many new questions about Trump’s reliance on the Putin regime, which all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies say interfered in the presidential election on Trump’s behalf, but which Trump disputes.
These relationships between nominee Ross and the oligarchs involve ownership and management of a European bank with a reputation for laundering Russian money and making bad loans.
The study also compared flight records of Trump’s campaign plane and a plane used by one of the oligarchs. During the campaign, the two planes often were at the same airports at the same time.
Henry, DCReport.org’s senior editor for economics investigations, gathered the information and connected the dots.
Henry is a lawyer and former chief economist for the McKinsey & Co. business consulting firm. He abandoned his executive career to spend more than four decades exposing corrupt international banking. In 1976 Henry became the first person to urge eliminating large denomination bills to thwart drug trafficking and tax evasion. Henry served as a consultant on the massive Panama Papers that revealed a global network of tax evasion and other dubious financial practices of the international elite.
The records Henry combed through shows that Ross and his team invested more than $1 billion in the troubled Bank of Cyprus. Ross became one of two vice chairman of the bank. Putin appointed the other.
Soon Ross named a new chairman, who earlier left under a cloud as chairman of Deutsche Bank. On that chairman’s watch, Deutsche Bank paid $20 billion in fines. Among these was a $650 million fine for helping launder Russian money through Deutsche Bank offices in Moscow, New York City and Cyprus.
Deutsche Bank is Trump’s largest known lender, having extended him more than $300 million of loans that remain outstanding.

Why Ross would appoint anyone with such a poor record of banking conduct, and why he worked with the Russian oligarchs, remains a mystery.
This report first appeared at DCReport.org

FBI once planned to pay former British spy who authored controversial Trump dossier
The agreement to pay Christopher Steele, who compiled a controversial dossier on behalf of Trump’s political opponents, ultimately fell apart but shows that U.S. investigators considered him to be credible on the president’s alleged Russia ties. Trump has derided the dossier as “fake news.”

. Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman scoop: “The agreement to compensate former MI6 agent Christopher Steele came as U.S. intelligence agencies reached a consensus that the Russians had interfered in the presidential election by orchestrating hacks of Democratic Party email accounts.” While Trump derided the dossier as "fake news" – and the agreement eventually fell apart --  the FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that bureau investigators considered him credible on Trump’s alleged Russia ties.

 How it happened: At the time of the October agreement, FBI officials were probing Moscow's activities -- including possible communications with Trump's team -- and were "aware of the information" Steele had been gathering for the Democratic research firm. The firm was due to stop paying Steele in the final weeks before Election Day, but Steele said he felt like his work "was not done." Steele had previously been hired by the FBI and was known for both high work quality and the breadth of knowledge developed over nearly two decades working on Russian-related issues. Ultimately the FBI never paid Steele – and communications between the agency and the former spy were interrupted as the now-famous dossier became the subject of international headlines. Still, the revelations are likely to strain an already-tense relationship between the intelligence community and the White House. Steele is now in hiding.

Key quote: Steele at one point last year suggested that a Putin-orchestrated plan to help Trump may have been in the works for years. “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years,” he wrote last June.
By Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman  •  Read more »







Since 2008, nearly every state moved right in both presidential and state politics.
A look at how each state has shifted over the past decade.
By Philip Bump  •  Read more »
 

TRUMP, PUTIN, AND THE NEW COLD WAR


Sensing Chaos, Russia Takes A 'Wait-And-See' Approach To Trump.






March 1, 2017

Russia and the West




BOOK FORUM


LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS


3 winners and 2 losers from President Trump’s first address to Congress




VOX


Trump just moved the GOP’s health care consensus permanently to the left




EZRA KLEIN, VOX

BUT JUST WHAT DID HE MEAN?

VOX



3) “Thirdly, we should give our great state governors the resources and flexibility they need with Medicaid to make sure no one is left out.”
This particular point is a bit difficult to decode. The idea of “resources and flexibility” seems to hint at the idea of a block grant, where the federal government would give states a lump sum of money and let them run the entitlement program as they see fit, with less federal oversight. Block grants (including the one proposed in the recently leaked GOP plan) are typically used as a way to cut federal Medicaid spending.
The second part of the sentence is interesting here, too, as Trump promises to “make sure no one is left out.” This sure feels like a nod toward the Republican governors (and some senators) who have pushed to maintain the Medicaid expansion. This would include Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whom Trump met with on Saturday and who has been a vociferous advocate for continuing the Medicaid expansion. The governors are still figuring out their exact position on what they want from Trump on Medicaid, and this seems like a space still subject to significant change in coming weeks and months.

Republicans’ alarming proposal would end Medicaid as we know it





HENRY WAXMAN, WASHINGTON POST


CATHERINE RAMPELL, WASHINGTON POST

February 28, 2017

Trump’s GOP enablers take a page from the fascist-era Vatican




RICHARD COHEN, WASHINGTON POST


MICHAEL GARSON, WASHINGTON POST






Justice Department changes course in high-profile Texas voter-ID case
The federal government filed a motion seeking to drop its claim that the Texas law, one of the strictest in the country, is intentionally racially discriminatory. Lawyers said in Monday’s filing that rather than litigate the question, the administration wants to give state lawmakers an opportunity to adjust the rule.
By Sari Horwitz  •  Read more »

A split has emerged among Trump’s top advisers. It could have major repercussions.
Stephen Bannon is reportedly balking at going too hard at the ACA.
By Greg Sargent  •  The Plum Line  •  Read more »




WASHINGTON POST, GREG SARGENT

the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” 



E.J. DIONNE, JR., WASHINGTON POST



This is a war on a century’s worth of work to keep our air and water clean; our food, drugs and workplaces safe; the rights of employees protected; and the marketplace fair and unrigged. … Trump and Bannon are happy to expand the reach of the state when it comes to policing, immigration enforcement … and the browbeating of individual companies that offend the president in one way or another. The parts of government they want to dismantle are those that stand on the side of citizens against powerful interests.



Michael Kimmel, one of the world’s foremost experts on masculinity, examines its role in men’s adherence to – and departure from – far-right movements





GUARDIAN


Courts can be undermined in these 3 ways. This is how to protect them.



WASHINGTON POST







The Reichstag Warning





TIMOTHY SNYDER, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS



Cabinet members keep scrambling to clean up after Trump speaks
President Trump’s secretaries have found themselves softening, explaining and sometimes outright contradicting him. It adds to the sense of chaos and turmoil emanating from the White House, sending agency heads scrambling to interpret their boss’s exact positions and leaving other nations confused as to who, exactly, speaks on behalf of the administration.
By Ashley Parker  •  Read more »

February 27, 2017



The Unprecedented People’s Revolt to Protect Obamacare From Their Representatives




MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

February 25, 2017




EXCLUSIVE
White House sought to enlist key intelligence officials, lawmakers to counter Russia stories
The calls were orchestrated after unsuccessful attempts by the White House to get senior FBI officials to speak with news organizations and dispute the accuracy of reports of alleged contacts between members of Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives.
By Greg Miller and Adam Entous  •  Read more »




White House blocks CNN, N.Y. Times from news briefing hours after Trump slams media
On Day 36 of the Trump presidency, CNN did not break into regular programming to show the daily media briefing by Sean Spicer. That’s because the cable network and other news outlets — including Politico and the Los Angeles Times — were not invited into the session, where cameras were barred.


Trump-friendly outlets such as Breitbart were allowed in.

By Callum Borchers  •  Read more »
 

The GOP’s zombie orthodoxy on tax cuts fails again but continues nevertheless.




WASHINGTON POST



WASHINGTON POST

How Citizens United gave Republicans a bonanza of seats in U.S. state legislatures




WASHINGTON POST




Trump appears to be losing his war with the media
A poll from Quinnipiac University suggests that while people may be unhappy with the mainstream media, they still think it's more credible than the president.
By Aaron Blake  •  Read more »
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